Long Reads Sunday #21. What an absurdly brilliant week. Featuring:
The End Of ICOs?
The Return Of Volatility
Hashwar
Metrics Meltdown
CT Great Debates
+essays on: generalized mining, surveillance capitalism, digital identity panopticons & more.
☕️ It's Long Reads Time! 👇
The End Of ICOs?
The Return Of Volatility
Hashwar
Metrics Meltdown
CT Great Debates
+essays on: generalized mining, surveillance capitalism, digital identity panopticons & more.
☕️ It's Long Reads Time! 👇
2/
BCH: “We lost our ticker, splintered our community and are hemorrhaging money trying to compete, but at least we were the loudest conversation in crypto this week!”
SEC: “Hold my beer.”
BCH: “We lost our ticker, splintered our community and are hemorrhaging money trying to compete, but at least we were the loudest conversation in crypto this week!”
SEC: “Hold my beer.”
3/ In all seriousness, the SEC action against Paragon and Airfox is a big deal.
Some of the best reaction threads from crypto Twitter’s legal/regulatory crew:
+@awrigh01 +@bullyesq +@prestonjbyrne
Some of the best reaction threads from crypto Twitter’s legal/regulatory crew:
+@awrigh01 +@bullyesq +@prestonjbyrne
4/ Writing on @TheBlock__ @stephendpalley breaks down the action further. One important note is that these ICOs were targeted NOT for fraud, but for the failure to register as securities. In other words, the news has much broader implications theblockcrypto.com/2018/11/17/the…
5/ Not done yet, the SEC then dropped its promised “plain English guidance” about ICOs & crypto, although @messaricrypto's @katherineykwu noted that it sort of didn’t offer much guidance. theblockcrypto.com/2018/11/17/the…
6/ @jchervinsky argues that the lack of clarity is an intentional strategy, and that the game is “guidance by enforcement.” In fact, Jake argues that we’ve left the Phase 1 guidance phase and are in for a long slog of SEC cleanup, one settlement at a time.
7/ Still, if SEC action isn’t interesting enough, maybe the WWE sideshow err.. BCash “Hashwar" had enough to keep you interested. Best resources:
+Background @bitcoinmagazine bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/when-…
+Skeptical view
+recap
+Background @bitcoinmagazine bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/when-…
+Skeptical view
+recap
8/ One random media note surrounding the Hashwar…at one point, more than 4,000 people were concurrently watching a live conversation with 8+ prominent Bitcoiners. Livestreaming is going to be the crypto industry’s native version of cable TV news
9/ As @hasufl and others noted, any “victory” in the hashwar was phyrric at best. Indeed, the costs of the war reinforce the emerging belief, supported by research from @placeholdervc and others, that forks have extreme social costs
10/ The other other big news this week was the return of volatility as the Bitcoin stablecoin finally broke its $6400 peg. @skew_markets recaps the action here while @muststopmurad cautions against thinking the worst is over
11/ @BreakerMag did a quick feature asking @TimDraper @jalak @nic__carter @APompliano @prestonjbyrne about their perspective on the price drop. Many salutes to Preston for use of the word “scuttlebutt." breakermag.com/unpacking-the-…
12/ Complete with understated headline, meanwhile, @Melt_Dem puts the action in the larger market context across not only this year, but the phase of development of the emergent industry as a whole. TL;DR. It’s early and value flows are anything but clear.
13/ One entity that's been a bit battered, let’s say, by 2018 crypto are the plethora of hedge funds that raised during ICOtour2017. @danzuller and the teams at @VisionHill_ have been doing great quarterly deep dives on HFs medium.com/@visionhill_/v…
14/ Family Office investor @DavidJN79 also wrote re:crypto HFs, arguing that 90% are destined to fail: "The resulting flood of money..created demand for which there is no natural supply — managers who deliver repeatable, above-market returns after fees.” medium.com/@david_55389/w…
15/ The ability of price action to shape headlines brings up an important question: if the metrics we focuse on drive the actions we take, how good are our metrics? @ClayCollins and I argued that the dominant metric of Market Cap has some serious problems blog.nomics.com/essays/crypto-…
16/ One of the thinkers we featured prominently in that essay is @nic__carter, whose “Realized Capital” addresses a key problem with Market Cap. This week, Nic wrote another great essay about the problems with TX count as a metric medium.com/@nic__carter/t…
17/ @Coindesk released a new way to visualize & compare metrics across assets. While there was some blowback, it’s important to differentiate critique of CD’s implementation vs a broader recognition that most of the metrics we use are gameable trash
18/ Another metric that we use all the time despite broad recognition of just how manipulable it is is volume. @Travis_Kling has been beating the drum of our need to look past fake volume, and got an assist from @BitMEXResearch
19/ One of crypto’s most cogent thinkers when it comes to exploring and articulating valuation metrics @cburniske also wrote about how much more exploration we have to do, nothing that we’re still arguing about both models and inputs medium.com/@cburniske/the…
20/ @cburniske also highlighted @HASHCIB work to define a rational utility value for crypto networks. Another example of something @ClayCollins and I saw while researching market cap - innovation in valuation/metric thinking is incredibly promising
21/ Valuation metrics aren’t the only area where crypto is still grasping to catch up with itself. One of the most shared & most valuable essays this week came from @iam_preethi. You’re just 27 minutes away from understanding distributed consensus.
22/ "Generalized Mining” - network building activities around cryptoassets - is one of the most discussed topics in crypto. @CambrialCapital dives into the key question which of these activities are and aren’t appropriate for crypto funds to engage in tokeneconomy.co/generalized-mi…
23/ Another phenomenal post published on Token Economy was @Felipether’s “Visions of Ethereum,” a historical treatment of how the Ethereum narrative has evolved over time in the spirit of @nic__carter and @hasufl’s “Visions of Bitcoin”
24/ Not wanting to leave all the action to us renegades, the IMF’s Christine Lagarde spoke extensively about “the case for new digital currency.” imf.org/en/News/Articl… @APompliano put her remarks in context offthechain.substack.com/p/central-bank…
25/ Whatever you think of @cz_binance & crew, they represent one of the most fascinating business case studies in the crypto era. @lawmaster gives them the deep dive treatment, Twitter-summarized here
26/ Crypto Twitter also saw some great debates this week. In the “are blockchains/NFTs valuable to games” you had @GodsUnchained showing off gameplay while @mikeBithell wrote this scathing dismissal of the game-blockchain argument
27/ One way to look at the BCH fork debate was as a crisis of stakeholder management. This post from @KevinNielsen94 goes deep on how cryptoasset networks can understand, organize and address the needs of different stakeholders medium.com/@kevinnielsen/…
28/ A post from @martyBent meanwhile kicked off a sprawling, multi-day convo with @AriDavidPaul and @MustStopMurad at the center of it discussing the real impacts of inflation, Cantillon effects, and so much more. Crypto Twitter at its absolute finest:
29/ @AriDavidPaul actually extended some of the ideas from that conversation around sound money into their own thread, which, by the magical power of ideas 💡 to spark more ideas, generated its own great conversation
30/ If you’re at all interested in any sort of economic theory, I can’t recommend @AlpenSheth piece exploring the tragedy of the ‘anticommons’ - the places where too well defined ownership rights thwart robust economic activity - enough. blog.goodaudience.com/blockchain-own…
31/ Speaking of tragedy, @AABerwick’s incredible investigation on the link between Venezuelan “fatherland card” - used to monitor citizen behavior - and Chinese telecoms is an absolute must read
32/ That wasn’t the only massive read on surveillance this week. @MarechalPhD connected the dots between targeted advertising, data collection, and the potential for massive abuse of the collected data motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/…
33/ The macro context of Web 2.0 monopolies isn’t lost on the crypto community. @arjunblj highlighted this essay on Facebook’s sovereign-level power
34/ On a similar bent, @melt_dem shared @superwuster’s piece and wondered about whether populist reaction against mega corps could lead to demand for decentralized models
35/ Personalizing the macro context @ljxie shared this story about how her parents came to understand the value of cryptocurrencies in the context of real problems of currency controls & potentials for asset seizure
36/ Finally, for peak long read, two great @naval features. @eriktorenberg released a recent @cwclub live conversation as podcast and @CantHardyWait did this bomb recap of the Naval-@nntaleb convo at Blockcon
37/ This week was the epitome of why I started Long Reads Sunday. In the long run, the news will fade. The strength of crypto is in the people who pour their hearts and minds into big ideas and big opportunities each week.
38/ And that's that! As always, let me know what I missed. Get LRS wherever you are:
+email: getrevue.co/profile/nlw
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+LRL Podcast home: nlwcrypto.libsyn.com
+email: getrevue.co/profile/nlw
+Long Reads Live - 7pm EST Mondays: youtube.com/c/nathanielwhi…
+LRL on iTunes: itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/lon…
+LRL Podcast home: nlwcrypto.libsyn.com
Appendix/ one more in the positive news column
Appendix 2/ Let's make this a cool 40-tweet LRS shall we? Would be absolutely remiss to not include @morganhousel's "How This All Happened" in the macro section collaborativefund.com/blog/how-this-…
OY wrong link! This was supposed to be this by @katherineykwu. Have it right in the email!
