Everything in life is hard. It’s never going to be easy. You’re gonna have battle scars if you’re out in the world trying to cure world hunger or start a sports betting company or a VC fund, you’re gonna have battle scars, you’re also gonna have battle scars if you have no ambition in life, and you just sit on the couch everyday, cause your battle scars are just gonna be sadness and loneliness. So your battle scars are always gonna be there, while you’re trying to accomplish everything, or you’re just lazy and sitting there every day. Both are hard, so which one will you choose?
Put up the BitSignal – pay $1M to 1000 contributors for memes and stories
Made public bet that BTC will be worth $1M USD in 90 days times
“This is the crisis Bitcoin was built for”
Sounding covid alarm in January 2020, covid hit (the US) in March
On covid
Mental chessboard in his head, if X happens, then Y, Z, etc will happen
Viruses are exponential
Background in genomics
Same frame of mind now – “we’re in the fiat crisis”
All the centralization and opacity of fiat – it’s all blowing up
Will have wrenching transition to crypto economy
RSA: “fiat fire alarm that you’re pulling”, “the all at once moment”
Exact state of world in 90 days will be very different Not bet on Bitcoin price but on falling value of US dollar
Today USD is no longer too big to fail – there’s RMB, there’s bitcoin
Financial engineering led to house of cards, “the money is gone”
If today, all depositors withdrew money, banks can’t liquidate assets to give them enough dollars
Time bomb was growing, regulators were aware of it
“Uncle Sam Bankman Fried”
Reality: Fed Reserve gave guidance to banks to buy certain assets that then dropped in value (due to rate hikes)
Fed gets lagging data, changes single parameter, highly political process
“Fed bankrupted the banks”
“There are 333 banks where the money is gone”
Also foreign banks who bought US treasuries – global Central Banks using emergency USD swap lines
These banks’ insolvency intentionally hidden in a footnote
Now the can can’t be kicked
Holding a flaming bag of dog poop
Every crisis powers them up – failures mean they get bigger – “more failure more funding”
Do you have an alternative regulator? Don’t you want one that will tell you if your money is still there?
New era, final era – can’t hike rates anymore – printing tons of money to give to banks through BTFP, swap lines
Initially said $25B injection, now it’s up to $2T, it will effectively be infinite
All the small banks, tech banks, will get wrecked
Big banks w/ Fed help positioned as saviors – “both arsonists and firefighter” At end, will only have 4 giant banks in US, govt rolls out CBDC – now “too big to fail banks” become “too big to escape banks” – government now has control
On other side of this – bitcoin is gold, ethereum is the financial system
Lot of people will be converted overnight into bitcoin maximalism, will be bitcoin jurisdictions
Bitcoin is ONLY thing that Fed does not directly or indirectly administer
Tradfi – Fed has root access – can stop or delist any financial product (except bitcoin / crypto)
One honest signal that they can’t fully fake is Bitcoin – which is an expression of peoples’ desire to exit the (existing financial) system
Thus Operation Chokepoint / fog of war – kill the crypto connected banks like Signature, Silvergate
Lot of fiat banks will go to zero, or become like fiat flytraps
2008 Financial crisis
Rest of world paid for it through inflation, food price spikes Democrats effectively taxed Republicans, and foreign dollar holders, to pay for the bailout
“Cost was shunted to the invisible”
Foundational macro view is a little inflation is good, deflation is very bad
Bitcoin’s view is deflation is good if caused by Moore’s Law (technology making things cheaper), even a little inflation is bad
American Keynesianism is bad, just like Soviet economics, but it’s just less bad
David: “Bitcoin during times of war, Ethereum during times of peace”
Bitcoin will be protected by enough governments, bitcoin is well understood
“Final digital devaluation of the dollar is coming”
This is not the make money time – everyone will be a lot poorer soon “America is new Argentina” is not a bad mental model
Dollar holder is bag holder
Many countries (like India) will become gold backed after this
David: Ray Dalio’s macro cycles, 4th turning, all lining up There are only two banks – Fed Reserve, and Bitcoin
Bitcoin is Schelling point
Hyperbitcoinization is collapse of all fiat currencies against bitcoin
Speed of transition will be shocking, even to Bitcoin maximalists
Most empire transitions happen gradually – eg, Britain > America Internet is next America
Powell has turned America into Argentina
People will learn you can’t trust the state
Important to understand severity of situation, take calm conscious steps to insure yourself against it
Americans are running old scripts – Powell is doing 80s formula of Volcker hiking rates
Lot of countries that trusted Fed – holding a lot of Treasuries, US dollars – the money is gone
(US citizens) paid for all the regulation but got none of the protection
Hiding bank insolvency in a footnote – it’s a corrupt regime, it’s a betrayal
Russia and China will be unleashed
Taiwan could be captured without a shot
Nietzsche was worried about this instinct suppression that slave morality enabled. He feared it would lead to the rise of the most despicable kind of person — the /last man/. The last man seeks comfort above all else. The last man no longer understands the value of suffering and chaos and so avoids them. This makes him weak and ineffectual, but the last man calls this “happiness”.
But Nietsche also believed that something was gained in this transition to Slave Morality: /A rich inner-life/. The inner conflict created by the tension between group-beneficial social norms and self-serving instincts drove us to create great art in an attempt to reconcile those tensions. This inner conflict led us to become philosophers, psychologists, novelists, etc. There’s no Woody Allen or Larry David or Dave Sedaris in Master Morality.
Loved this Kevin Simler essay on the concept of crony beliefs. And if you like this kind of writing, I also recommend his book Elephant in the Brain (I shared some favorite highlights here).
I contend that the best way to understand all the crazy beliefs out there — aliens, conspiracies, and all the rest — is to analyze them as crony beliefs. Beliefs that have been “hired” not for the legitimate purpose of accurately modeling the world, but rather for social and political kickbacks.
And so we can roughly (with caveats we’ll discuss in a moment) divide our beliefs into merit beliefs and crony beliefs. Both contribute to our bottom line — survival and reproduction — but they do so in different ways: merit beliefs by helping us navigate the world, crony beliefs by helping us look good.
At work, we’re rewarded for believing good things about the company. At church, we earn trust in exchange for faith, while facing severe sanctions for heresy. In politics, our allies support us when we toe the party line, and withdraw support when we refuse.
Going further, crony beliefs actually need to be protected from criticism. It’s not that they’re necessarily false, just that they’re more likely to be false — but either way, they’re unlikely to withstand serious criticism. Thus we should expect our brains to take an overall protective or defensive stance toward our crony beliefs.
As a solid defi middle curver, I had a hard time wrapping my head around these products. But it was immensely educational for me and great to meet such nice and passionate builders.
Evie on unicorn startup investing (including Grab in the early days!) and building Diamond Protocol 💎 which allows you to leverage up your LP positions on Uniswap V3.
TN on the Kyber crew, being a serial entrepreneur, and building Pendle Finance which lets you separate a yield bearing asset into two tokens, financial wizardry 🧙🏼♂️.