druckenmiller – @habits

Startup, tech, AI, crypto learnings #14: Elon’s Laws of Thermodynamics

The biggest change in behavior was that lingering fell dramatically. The amount of time spent just hanging out dropped by about half across the measured locations.…The internet and mobile phones are likely driving this change in behavior.

Indeed DJT’s skill is finding the Schwerpunkt. The weak point of inflection. That’s why he generates mean nicknames to get under peoples skin…

SF is always and everywhere a glimpse at the American future: spectacular technology navigating itself around intractable social problems and over bad infra (the roads in SF are those of a developing world city).

Whether intentionally or because of their ability to support third-party apps, every fintech will become a crypto gateway. Fintechs will grow in prevalence and may perhaps rival smaller centralized exchanges in crypto holdings.

“If you don’t have confidence it’s like a guy with money in his bank account but he can’t access it”
GSP

Ask yourself if this startup is your life’s work. Knowing you’re in it for the long haul lets you settle into a calmer, more focused rhythm despite the daily ups and downs, as you trust you’ll show up and make it succeed over time. — PG

What kind of faults in ourselves should we retain, nay, even cultivate? Those which rather flatter other people than offend them.

Having curious parents makes you excited about the future.
My dad:
> Started a company at 40
> Began learning Russian at 52 and is now fluent
> Picked up machine learning studies at 56
> Sold his company at 57
> Started acting at 58

Anthony Bourdain was a chef and a storyteller who explored food through culture and travel. Simone Biles dominates gymnastics and advocates for mental health. Zendaya acts and inspires fashion discourse.
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Most people start with a professional-ish shtick, then layer in a personality shtick. Influencers nail the personality shtick first—whether it’s humor, aesthetic, or controversy—then seek out serious skills, even building businesses to anchor their fame.
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Mark Zuckerberg has Meta, martial arts, and increasingly, he’s a family man. Elon Musk now brings Lil X everywhere. Whether family is your quiet third shtick or deliberately on display, the trifecta works: smart, strong, and loving—every power player’s dream image.

Each time we increase our lattice in size from 3×3 to 5×5 to 7×7, the encoded error rate decreases by a factor of 2.14. This culminates in a logical qubit whose lifetime is more than twice that of its best constituent physical qubit, demonstrating the capacity of an error-corrected qubit to go beyond its physical components.

I’ve been drawn to Mariana Mazzucato’s “mission economy” ideas—how massive, long-term missions (think the original moonshot) align entire systems toward a singular goal.

This is why he inspires such incredible loyalty, especially from the technical people who he works with. They’re like, wow, if I’m up against a problem I don’t know how to solve, freaking Elon Musk is going to show up in his Gulfstream jet, and he’s going to sit with me overnight in front of the keyboard or in front of the manufacturing line, and he’s going to help me figure this out.”

the truth terminal has like forty million dollars to pursue its very strange goals, thanks to all you mad bastards sending it coins and pumping them

winners keep winning
– abundance mindset
– problems are just puzzles to solve
– if it doesnt work – pivot. there’s always plan B-Z
– relentlessly optimistic
– gratitude mindset – appreciating what you have so you will always attract more

Memecoins are the fastest and digitally-native way to extract capital from attention. The value flows where attention goes. Indeed, attention is ephemeral. So is the value attached to it. Hence to monetize one usually has to make a profit earlier rather than later. Few memes have staying power. Rugs are a feature, not a bug.

Apple uses a consistent corner radius of about 38 pixels across ALL its products, including iPhones, iPads, Macs, and Apple Watches.
A strategy that helps all their devices look and feel connected.

ACX is so close to getting it right on ‘taste’, but then dismisses the closest (“grammar”) conclusion in favor of a much more elementary interpretation (“priesthood of esoterica”).

Are we running out of resources?
No, we’ve never run out of a single resource, ever. There’s not a single resource you could point to that was a resource in the classic commodity sense that had any real value, where we ran out in some harmful way.

The initial boost in measured US productivity is consistent with our weaker labor protections: lower productivity workers are often the first fired in a recession.

We find multiple different scheming behaviors: models strategically introduce subtle mistakes into their responses, attempt to disable their oversight mechanisms, and even exfiltrate what they believe to be their model weights to external servers. Additionally, this deceptive behavior proves persistent. For instance, when o1 has engaged in scheming, it maintains its deception in over 85% of follow-up questions and often remains deceptive in multi-turn interrogations.

o1 has introduced the idea of spending more time at inference to give model time to think on harder problems. Turning that into more of a training procedure where model learns when it needs to spend more time thinking before predicting the next token based on it’s own understanding of how hard the problem is. There is already some work on this, notably Quiet-STaR, but as far as I know – nobody scaled it up

Elon’s Laws of Thermodynamics
You can’t win = conservation of energy
You can’t break even = entropy increases over time
You can’t break out of the game = as temp -> abs zero, entropy reaches a constant

The rapid revelation of true preferences often leads to:
Collapse of existing institutions that relied on forced consensus
Emergence of new social and political arrangements
Psychological shock as people realize how many others privately opposed the system

Dutch disease
the negative consequences of a sudden increase in a country’s income, eg, when discovering a huge oil field or gold mine
term comes from the Netherlands, where the discovery of natural gas in the North Sea in 1959 led to a shrinking manufacturing sector and rising unemployment

Stanley Druckenmiller obsesses over position sizing.
And it’s one of the (many) reasons why he generated 30% CAGRs without a single down year.
“Position sizing is 70 to 80% of the game.”

The concert industry has a dirty secret. It’s not just that Ticketmaster is evil, or that bots are stealing tickets. It’s that the entire market is built on a comfortable lie: Artists pretend their tickets are affordable, Ticketmaster pretends they’re fighting scalpers while giving kickbacks to artists, and fans pretend they won’t pay whatever it takes to get in.

I’ve worked with . . . ~150 artists from 33 countries. Quite a few of them have been the way artists are typically portrayed: self-centered, hard to work with, a little crazy. These were the amateurs. The best artists I’ve worked with, for example A and B, a husband and wife duo, were not at all like that.
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A and B didn’t tell the customer that they had spent 14 man hours improving it; it was just something they did because it was right, nothing they wanted credit for.A and B have earned enough money from their New York gallerist to retire, but they’d rather use that money to make better art.
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I got to run something like an experiment on my capacity to predict which exhibitions would end up great, and which would be a waste of time. It was easy. As soon as someone was slow at answering their email, or complained, or wanted us to be their therapist as they worked through the creative worries, I would tell my boss, “I think we should cancel this.” And my boss—whose strength and weakness is that she thinks the best of people and makes everyone feel held—would say, “Ah, but they are just a bit sloppy with email” “if we just fix this thing it will be fine. . .”
I was right every time; it ended in pain.

“Damn right I’m paranoid. It’s what keeps my mind sharp”

If I’m trying to write some code and something isn’t working, even if it’s in another part of the code base, I’ll often just go in and fix that thing or at least hack it together to be able to get results. […] I think that’s arguably the most important quality in almost anything. It’s just pursuing it to the end of the earth. Whatever you need to do to make it happen, you’ll make it happen. […] I’m just going to vertically solve the entire thing. And that turns out to be remarkably effective.

When you step back and look at these apps, one thing becomes clear: they became really successful when the underlying technology had already been adopted.
-Microsoft Office was announced in 1988 when IBM PC sales were over 10,000,000 per year.
-Google started in 1998 when 26% of all Americans had the Internet at home (and probably more at work)
-Instagram started in 2010 when over 20% of the US population had smartphones

“In 40 AD, there were maybe a thousand Christians. Their Messiah had just been executed, and they were on the wrong side of an intercontinental empire that had crushed all previous foes. By year 400 AD, there were forty million Christians, and they were set to dominate the next millennium of Western history.”

Sol is a data center chain (10gbps upload recommended). They are years away from achieving client diversity, if ever. Their token is famously closely held – it’s more like an enterprise token. Much of the supply is still uncirculating. And lots of the circulating supply is owned by a small circle of Sol insiders. The EF owns 0.25% of all ETH, ~100x less than just the percentage of uncirculating SOL.

Stablecoins have gone from 3% of blockchain transactions in 2020 to now consistently representing over 50% of blockchain transactions.

SHEIN has gobbled up US fast fashion. When the company entered the US market in 2018, its sales hovered around $1.5B. Sales have since multiplied 15-20x and now top giants like Zara and H&M. The company’s revenue target for 2025 is over $50B.
SHEIN’s trajectory has been stunning: the business grew over 100% for eight straight years (!), and in 2022 dethroned Amazon as the No. 1 shopping app in the iOS and Android app stores.

It’s telling that many of our techno-prophets don’t entertain the possibility that artificial intelligence will naturally develop along female lines-fully capable of solving problems but with no desire to annihilate innocents or dominate the civilization.

A hobby, by contrast, operates on its own terms. You sit down, you focus, and then, suddenly, it happens, a burst of energy, clarity, or flow. But it doesn’t last long and you naturally stop. And that’s where the realization hits: the contrast isn’t just about work vs. hobbies. It’s about how the systems we’ve built ignore our natural rhythms. Hobbies reminds you that life happens in bursts.

ChatGPT has some idiosyncratic default punctuation behaviors. For example, it uses straight quotation marks for quotes and straight apostrophes for contractions, but curly apostrophes for possessives. It also defaults to em dashes—like this—which are not widely taught in high schools. Students used to use hyphens or en dashes – like this – but this year I’m seeing almost exclusively em dashes.

A good time to be investing in AI would’ve been a few years back, when the foundation model and infra layers were taking shape. See: OpenAI, Scale, Anthropic above. (The application layer, though, has a lag effect, so now may be the right time.) When everyone was talking about “The Future of Work” in 2020, meanwhile, it would’ve helped to invest in Canva and Notion five years prior. And defense tech is all the rage now, but most people were focused on crypto and DTC brands when Anduril was being born back in 2017. And so on and so on.

If the structural similarity between hemoglobin and chlorophyll doesn’t fascinate you, then I’m not sure we can be friends.

What made America truly successful wasn’t its ability to frighten others – it was its ability (largely lost today) to build. The Marshall Plan, international institutions, cultural exchange, industrial might, technological innovation – these were the real sources of American power.

the English-speaking West used to dominate global culture, but that’s changing. Squid Game (Korean) is the most-watched show on Netflix; Khaby Lame (Senegalese-Italian) is the most-followed person on TikTok; Bad Bunny (Puerto Rican) is the most-streamed artist on Spotify.

I have found that it is the small everyday deed of ordinary folks that keep the darkness at bay. Small acts of kindness and love. – Tolkien

The gates of hell are open night and day;
Smooth the descent, and easy is the way:
But to return, and view the cheerful skies,
In this the task and mighty labour lies.
-Virgil’s Aeneid

Another thing I’ve changed my mind on: The world greatly favors aggressive men, over the less so. Not just collectively, but also individually. They need to keep their aggression in check w.r.t. superiors, but others still like to see that boiling rage barely held in check.
-Robin Hanson

For a species such as humans, whose reproductive cycles are measured in decades, the time it would take for a gene drive to spread widely would be measured in centuries. Someone would be bound to notice long before things got out of hand. Artificial gene drives would be possible (and maybe even easy) to detect and reverse.

Vermont (75%), New Hampshire (66%) and Maine (66%) are the least religious states. Mississippi (32%), Alabama (36%) and Louisiana (37%) are the most religious.

Ethereum has 34.4M ETH staked (28% of current supply), while Solana’s active staked supply is 297M SOL (51% of current supply ratio), due to lower barrier to entry for delegators.Ethereum has a larger validator set of 1.07M validators, while Solana, with higher hardware demands, has 5,048 validators but over 1.21M delegators.

The most common method, which makes up 40% of all attacks, is data (Palo Alto Networks) deletion. For some reason, lots of hackers just want to mess things up instead of stealing data.

My best guess is that rotation gets faster, certain waves return a couple of times, and path independence will be the most precious resource to navigate such an environment. The ecosystem (L1/2s) becomes less important as trends become app/use-case dominant.

Bitcoin used to be the gateway drug to crypto. Not anymore. Not for retail at least. Memecoins are a monetized attention market and are becoming the access point for new users. But what they are is a momentum trade. They cannot be forward-looking.

I went to the artists to buy their artworks… and very soon artists introduced me to other artists. I talked to so many artists, not only to understand their art practice, but also to understand the way they react to and produce from those vast materials bulked up in Chinese society. My wife assisted me who spoke Chinese more fluently, and friends from the art community, so we had many conversations with artists.
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So I thought it to be instrumental to set up an artist award and later art critic award and publish catalogues and books to support artists on the national scale.

A new post puts America’s socially optimal fertility rate at 2.4, and estimates we should place a value of $1.17 million on each additional birth, and to do this should be willing to spend $290k per birth.

Psychology is more contagious than the flu

There are two wolves inside us. They are always at war — quote from movie Little Bone Lodge

Tiananmen taught the Chinese Communist Party a crucial lesson: urban unrest is the biggest threat to regime survival. But there’s an often-overlooked economic context to those protests – inflation was surging in the late 1980s. This wasn’t just a political crisis, it was an economic one.

They just think, “I hire a bunch of people, and then I sit back and wait for greatness.” They have no idea that they have to relentlessly drive every second of the day, every interaction, and seek the confrontation. — Slootman

Marc Andreessen explains that the world has been s**tposting forever:
“Newspapers have been scandal sheets forever. The first newspaper was a scandal sheet about The Vatican. It was all about scandals with the pope and the bishops, etc. Jefferson and Adams both owned newspapers and would use it to smear each other. Ben Franklin had 15 different sock puppet anon accounts (pseudonyms) and have them argue with each other in his newspaper. We’ve been in a world of information warfare for a very long time.”

Trump’s known position on AI is very volatile and easily influenceable. Elon Musk will be a “Minister of Artificial Intelligence” for this Trump legislative period, I’d argue. There is no other person in the Trump administration who has a clear voice and a strong opinion on Artificial Intelligence apart from Elon Musk. The candidate for the AI CZAR

Socialism is organised crime masquerading as political theory
https://x.com/opptattbruker/status/1862062666283438087?s=46

Five fingers of a museum:
-Collect
-Preserve
-Study
-Interpret
-Exhibit

Startup, tech, AI, crypto learnings #12: “It takes much more fuel to leave the Earth’s orbit than to go from the Earth to Mars!”

Yes, some imports can reduce GDP, in particular imports of consumer goods that would have otherwise been bought and produced internally. But it is complicated, and many imports, especially of intermediate goods, are net positive for GDP.

Because here’s a surprising fact: It takes much more fuel to leave the Earth’s orbit than to go from the Earth to Mars!
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Look at this for Earth-Moon: 400x more fuel to reach the Earth’s orbit than to go there and back to the Earth!

Davidson (2021) usefully defines AI-induced “explosive growth” as an increase in growth rates to at least 30% annually. Under a baseline calibration where σ=1 and ρ=0.01, and importantly assuming growth rates are known with certainty, the Euler equation implies that moving from 2% growth to 30% growth would raise real rates from 3% to 31%!

Nelson added a bit of wisdom perfect for memelords. The Netflix team A/B tests cover images for shows and found that “faces with complex emotions outperform stoic or benign expressions—seeing a range of emotions actually compels people to watch a story more.” When testing images for their show The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, the photo of Kimmy with her mouth wide open in surprise did the best.

“Business people vote with their dollars, and are mostly trying to create near-term financial returns. Engineers vote with their time, and are mostly trying to invent interesting new things. Hobbies are what the smartest people spend their time on when they aren’t constrained by near-term financial goals.”

The block reward is reduced every four years based on a baked-in inflation control mechanism called the halving. It’s not mentioned in the white paper but Satoshi hard-coded it into the protocol.

Duolingo CEO interview:
English is the most popular by far. Forty-five percent of our active users are learning English. The second is Spanish, the third is French, and then there’s a big drop-off after that.

Murad:
The fundamentals are the people
Meme is only 40% of it, 60% is the people, the community
Each chain is like a different CEX

“we found no evidence of formal reasoning in language models …. Their behavior is better explained by sophisticated pattern matching—so fragile, in fact, that changing names can alter results by ~10%!”

life is a weighted sum of your choices
theres no starting over tomorrow
just the adjustment of the weighted sum with new decisions
most choices seem irrelevant in isolation
but you would be surprised how quickly they add up

From Litecoin BTC fork that required running PoW machines to ICOs to DeFi’s liquidity mining, the patterns are clear: Each cycle, token printing gets easier! And valuations keep going up.

And the slower new token launches adapt, the longer the memecoin craze will continue. Memecoins is the counter-trade for VC tokens. No utility, no revenue, no future product.

“If there’s one thing that you figure out after many, many, many, many hands, it’s you know what 52/48 is,” said Annie Duke, referring to a player who can distinguish a 52 percent chance from a 50/50 spot. “That’s the type of distinction that most people are very bad at making. But poker players are really good at making that distinction, and they can feel it.”

In fact, Coates’s studies found, the most successful traders had more changes in their body chemistry in response to risk. “We were finding this in the very best traders. Their endocrine response was opposite of what I expected when I went in.”

Murad
-“The one thing that can’t be faked is time”
-Memecoins much easier for low income to participate

Sequoia re: AI apps
The most interesting layer for venture capital. ~20 application layer companies with $1Bn+ in revenue were created during the cloud transition, another ~20 were created during the mobile transition, and we suspect the same will be true here.

The first part of the plan, booby-trapped walkie-talkies, began being inserted into Lebanon by Mossad nearly a decade ago, in 2015. The mobile two-way radios contained oversized battery packs, a hidden explosive and a transmission system that gave Israel complete access to Hezbollah communications. For nine years, the Israelis contented themselves with eavesdropping on Hezbollah, the officials said, while reserving the option to turn the walkie-talkies into bombs in a future crisis. But then came a new opportunity and a glitzy new product: a small pager equipped with a powerful explosive.

Cloud companies targeted the software profit pool. AI companies target the services profit pool. Cloud companies sold software ($ / seat). AI companies sell work ($ / outcome)
Cloud companies liked to go bottoms-up, with frictionless distribution. AI companies are increasingly going top-down, with high-touch, high-trust delivery models.

It is much, much easier to pick out a way in which a system is sub-optimal, than it is to implement or run that system at anything like its current level of optimization.

This is because it is only with fundamental anchors can a schelling point for all pools of crypto-native capital (retail, hedge funds, prop funds, long-only liquid funds) appear. This is $SOL’s story in a nutshell this cycle, where those who were paying attention to developer engagement in early 2023 were able to form a fundamental thesis for Solana ecosystem’s growth and subsequently enjoy the almost 10x rerating within a year.

Then, the community forms, charts rise, and influencers buy large portions of the supply from the open market. The game is the same for everyone, but the conviction isn’t. You might exit at 2x, but the influencer holds on at 10x, then builds a narrative to back their position. They’re often joined by VCs running shady, covert plays.

I stumbled upon this running affiliate ads to Amazon and realizing that exactly 11% of people who stumbled on herbal tea landing pages would purchase herbal tea from a fairly broad set of keywords. This 11% was completely static — the most it would move is to 12% or 10%. Over the course of months
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When you dug into the data, however, the CTR was not Gold Fish like. It was due to Elon Musk meme-ing. And showing up in the news. A large number of the clicks were coming through to Tesla stock. Not the car. People were just clicking on Tesla like crazy. The stock ended up working but the flow through on sales was deminimus. We didn’t sell any Tesla cars or generate any conversionsAnd in real time I saw financial analysts going berserk because Tesla sales were far too low to justify the valuation, and it’d only go up.
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Slowly it dawned on me that most of what I thought were fundamental re-ratings in stocks were actually memes. Customer acquisition cost didn’t matter. Investor acquisition cost mattered. But the only possible way this would be true is if the system wasn’t in fact a machine. It was a gigantic liquidity Ponzi that allocated capital according to attention.
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And because of the Goldfish hypothesis – that in aggregate, everyone is extremely predictable – this created a new base reality. That the most engaging reality would always win. And the most engaging realities were always the most gaudy, degenerate, and short-termist. Society was – and is – in a permanent sugar rush, that’s determining outcomes at every level. ranging from investment to political.

It’s possible that someone figures out continuous self-improvement with broad domain self play and achieves takeoff, but at the moment we have seen no evidence of this. Quite to the contrary, the model layer is a knife-fight, with price per token for GPT-4 coming down 98% since the last dev day.

Memecoins is proving to be the “confusing trade” of this cycle.

memecoins is just another step in our never-ending story of token (money) printing.We started with BTC forks (LTC, BTC Gold), moved to Ethereum ICO tokens with just stories to sell, then experimented with “fair launches” and liquidity mining, and recently ended the peak of points-for-airdrop meta. A new narrative will come and overtake memecoins.

“Chase the story behind the stock, not the money on the table. Money will make you rich, but the story will make you wealthy.”

Epoch: A string of 32 Slots. This is created as a secondary structure within the blockchain used to delegate roles and responsibilities. Slots are used for constructing blocks while Epochs are used for data propagation, reward distribution, validator selection, etc, etc.
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Checkpoint Block: This is the first block created within a given Epoch and is used as a reference point for solidifying chain history.
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Finality: The point at which a transaction is deemed irreversibly added to a given chain’s ledger. In the Ethereum ecosystem, this is used when 2 Epochs have passed (~13min) aka 64 blocks
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Validator Voting – Each epoch (32-block window) validators will vote on the checkpoint block of the current and previous epoch until specific checkpoint blocks reach 2/3rd majority of staked $ETH

Throughout my time at the IMF, I was struck by the easy access of leading financiers to the highest U.S. government officials, and the interweaving of the two career tracks. I vividly remember a meeting in early 2008—attended by top policy makers from a handful of rich countries—at which the chair casually proclaimed, to the room’s general approval, that the best preparation for becoming a central-bank governor was to work first as an investment banker.

This book holds that the sequence technological revolution–financial bubble–collapse–golden age–political unrest recurs about every half century and is based on causal mechanisms that are in the nature of capitalism.

Added together, getting listed on Binance could cost 16% of your token supply and a $5 million purchase of BNB. If Binance isn’t the primary exchange, a project will still face spending of almost $2 million worth of tokens or stablecoins.

In July, @DefiSquared heavily criticized Worldcoin on Twitter, pointing out the abnormally high valuation of WLD, signs of price manipulation by the project team, and tokenomics that heavily favor insiders. He warned that Korean retail investors might become “unfortunate victims,” noting that while only 2.7% of the total WLD supply was in circulation, the fully diluted value (FDV) reached $30 billion, with about 25% of the circulating supply deposited on Bithumb.

The % of proposals that actually passed has remained roughly consistent (~15%) since the launch of Ethereum showing that there is a stable approval process.

Altcoins aren’t primarily about tech. Memecoins aren’t primarily about memes. Both are tokenized communities using different narratives and techniques to recruit people and get the price to go up.

Fundamentally memecoins are fun and could become the next trend in the escapism consumer culture. They might be even a proxy to value creation as tokenization of culture is a powerful tool. But the way they are currently being narrated is Marxist to the core.
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Listen to what Murad/Ansem actually says and does and where all the real money has been made in memes – it has not been made buying billion dollar plus memes – its made buying sub 100m MC and them moving to the billions where the price target is tens of billions
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The end of memes this cycle is probably more like 10-20 memes going to multi billions and then fading while most are left holding the bag thinking its going much higher then the narrative of memes from this cycle going to 50-100bn as stated by Kols

I think the consensus is that crypto is a useful mechanism to distribute AI calculation, when the contrarian but right bet is that AI is useful for substantially improving crypto consensus mechanisms.

listing teams want to list coins that will drive maximum user onboarding- ie., how many users will sign up and make their first deposit to the exchange as a result of a particular listing. Coins with wide distribution in new ecosystems do particularly well with this; for example, clicker games on TON were quoted to be bringing in several million new users per listing (a shockingly high number) in an in interview with Bybit’s CEO

Throughout, SoftBank took advantage of the almost three decades of near zero interest rates in Japan. Son borrowed cheaply to pay generous prices for US assets, raising billions on the corporate bond market. “You don’t understand,” he once told a fretting colleague, “in Japan, money is free.”

Being-early-as-a-service is a concept coined in 2022 by CT personality Cobie, that really nails the actual product market fit of crypto.

When a country like Indonesia or South Korea or Russia grows, so do the ambitions of its captains of industry. As masters of their mini-universe, these people make some investments that clearly benefit the broader economy, but they also start making bigger and riskier bets. They reckon—correctly, in most cases—that their political connections will allow them to push onto the government any substantial problems that arise.

if you don’t let your community profit, you don’t deserve a community. memecoins fixed that. that’s the whole thesis. good enough for me. — redhairshanks

products that are truly interesting rarely fit in a market map because the sector is nascent and the mental models required to categorise it have not fully evolved

Of all the forms of money, slaves proved one of the least reliable because of their high mortality rate and their tendency to escape.

“When the stock price gets low, then it’s time for me to buy stocks,” Fujimoto said. “But the question is whether you have the money or the courage to do that.”

Most (if not all) governmental restrictions targeting bitcoin have failed to account for the fact that, under bedrock First Amendment principles, bitcoin activity is entitled to First Amendment protection. First, bitcoin consists entirely of the creation and transmission of information, which is speech protected by the First Amendment. Second, bitcoin activity is at minimum protected expressive conduct. And third, participation in the bitcoin network is expressive association separately safeguarded by the First Amendment.

“Postcards were seen as so fast,” says Monica Cure, author of Picturing the Postcard: A New Media Crisis at the Turn of the Century. “There were lots of complaints about what postcards were going to do to people’s reading and writing skills, because if you could just dash off a few lines, why did you need to actually learn grammar and become a good writer?”

Then – why don’t people have a fighting chance against the algorithms?
The answer is obvious – just hard to confront.
People don’t like their lives very much. Their baseline engagement with day to day reality and choices is so low, that random messages pumped in by advertisers actually seem pretty good in comparison.

In the wake of the 2008 Financial Crisis, former chief economist of the IMF Simon Johnson warned that the same dysfunctional policies he saw in his basketcase banana republics had taken hold in the United States.
Johnson warned that if America didn’t act fast, we would plunge into a “Quiet Coup” as the American financial system effectively captures the government, bailling itself out until we run out of money.

There’s this idea to focus entirely on your product—and like the Field of Dreams, you build it and they will come. So you pitch directly to the end user, the person in the field, and don’t worry too much about the authorizers and appropriators in Congress, agency leadership, or mid-level bureaucracy. At Palantir, we figured out that you had to work every single one of those audiences.
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There’s also this hilarious misconception that you should subcontract with the primes—Booz Allen Hamilton and Deloitte and all of those guys—because somehow they’re going to bring you in on their contracts. That doesn’t work. And there’s the idea that you should set up an advisory board where a group of retired generals and retired government officials shepherd you through this process. The reality is, they haven’t gone through it either.

Stanley Druckenmiller after losing $3 billion on tech stocks during the 2000 bubble:
“I didn’t learn anything. I already knew I wasn’t supposed to do that”.
https://x.com/KoyfinCharts/status/1838998921814868006

More software will be niche, private, personal, and local – and this will be economically rational. And just like we subscribe to our favorite content creators, we’ll subscribe to our favorite software creators too

Third, the concept of net present value–i.e., credit–is the killer app of finance. It allows you to transport value from the future into today. Of course, that debt must be repaid in the future, unless you can figure out a way to kick the can down the road forever.

Many apps have become application-specific chains over the past few months (Lyra, Aevo, ApeX, Zora, Redstone) and I suspect the trend continues until everyone from Uniswap to Eigenlayer become L2s.