1/ Long Reads Sunday #4. This week was all about that bitcoin price bump, which brought with it a significant number of fundamental questions about the crypto asset class as a whole. Prep your pour-overs and crank your Keurigs, it's long reads time.
2/ @cburniske shared a @DAR_crypto report highlighting that small caps were performing much worse than large caps in the bear market - a reminder that you can’t hunt diamonds-in-the-rough in good times and expect it not to get ruff in bad times.
3/ Related, even as BTC nudged up @Crypto_Macro pointed out that the alts were still down, showing the beginnings of an asset class price uncoupling. A big Q for the next bull run is whether it will be everything going up or concentrated at the top.
4/ One implication of this question is how funds construct their portfolios (and what the market identifies as beta vs. alpha returns). @AriannaSimpson asked who was writing about this and the thread that followed now serves as a bibliography on the topic.
5/ A subtext of these convos is whether the crypto projects funded in 2017 can perform. @HoffProf and his team looked at the top 50 ICOs and found that investors took an extraordinary number of promises about things like vesting and burning on faith
6/ The top of the market is not without controversy as well. The question of Bitcoin developer incentives has been a main theme recently, with @dksf wading into it below. The convo between @_jillruth & @starkness in the comments is particularly interesting
7/ As the market conversations about top assets were ongoing, others were diving deep in other areas. @Mosaic_io wrote a great piece about plutocracy that doubles as a primer on the concepts surrounding on- vs. off-chain governance medium.com/mosaic-network…
8/ @jinglanW meanwhile wrote a brief on Plasma, "a design pattern that allows for off-chain messages to dictate the transfer of on-chain assets” that is at the heart of Ethereum scaling discussions medium.com/@jinglan/what-…
9/ In a world of forkable, open source software, “community” takes on a whole new dimension. @SpencerNoon wrote an in-depth, step-by-step start guide for community on @TokenDaily. One interesting emphasis: grants & community-run orgs. tokendaily.co/blog/the-playb…
10/ Speaking of communities that put the “doing real shit” in “community,” the NFT crowd hums merrily along. This week, @toddg777 announce @NIFTYgallery, an app for discovery and displaying collections of digital collectibles
11/ In another killer piece on @TokenDaily @nic__carter writes about the words we use. This especially matters as we move toward a more comprehensive, complicated, uncoupled understanding of what we now call “blockchain” or “Crypto” tokendaily.co/blog/on-labels…
12/ If you don’t follow @backus yet, I recommend it. He is overflowing with historical analogies that can help us understand the perils of history repeating. Case in point: this thread around p2p file sharing and just how decentralized people want things
13/ Anyone watching my Twitter for the past few days will know that I’ve been extremely interested in the role of network effects in crypto and how decentralized network effects solve market power problems that come when for profit businesses own networks.
14/ While the thread is a rabbit hole, I highly recommend @kjer’s piece which argues that networks in which the participants are the owners and incentivized by tokens have immense potential to remake the current business landscape medium.com/public-market/…
15/ And lastly, let’s finish up in Podcast corner. @stefanobernardi with @laurashin is a must listen, and goes deep into a security token future that’s about much more than digital representations of existing company shares. Automated cash flows, yo. unconfirmed.libsyn.com/token-economys…
16/ Finally, for those going extra thoughful, it doesn’t get much more interesting than @simondlr and @trentmc0 conversation with @eriktorenberg about meme trading, self-owning cars and all the other ways things are going to get real, real weird. breaker.audio/venture-storie…
17/ What other great content and conversations did I miss? What should we add to the story of this week?
