1/ Long Reads Sunday #22. Bitcoin under $4k. Ethereum hovering near double digits. The coldest Thanksgiving in more than a century seems, in retrospect, an inauspicious sign as we settle into what might be the first of many cold crypto winter long reads.
2/ Kicking off the new mood, @Melt_Dem wrote this tome about what she calls the crypto crisis. This is a detailed look that incorporates the macro perspective and is a must-read to understand the current investor mindset. medium.com/coinshares/the…
3/ Earlier in the week, @APompliano dug into yet another reason that crypto hedge funds were likely to capitulate the longer crypto winter goes: high water mark clauses that make it unlikely that most fund managers will receive performance fees. offthechain.substack.com/p/icos-and-cry…
4/ Adding a bit of theatrical flair, @CryptoHayes dramatized the probably-not-so-fun conversations happening between crypto hedge fund managers and LPs everywhere. H/T to @twobitidiot
5/ On the other end of the opinion-data spectrum, there were a couple more analytic reports out on funds this week as well. @MerschMax_ surfaced this crypto fund landscape report from @fmoulin7
6/ @jamie247 and @OVioHQ were back with another quarterly research report. Q3 this year showed the transition from the boom - with annual crypto VC investments up 316% from 2017 - to the bust - with total ICO capital raised down 74% in Q3. outlierventures.io/research/state…
7/ One temptation in brutal markets is to adjust every narrative to match the doom and gloom. But sometimes the data doesn’t match. @TheBlock__’s @lawmaster takes to task the narrative that ETH price drop is being driven by ICO selloff.
8/ Over in the world of Ethereum-beyond-the-price, core dev @lrettig discussed the challenge of finding the balance of transparency and efficiency in the context of an open governance model.
9/ Governance was also the subject of this long read from @Steven_McKie and @m_t_prewitt, exploring both the ideas of legitimacy and authority within blockchain communities as well as comparing the relative conservatism of BTC, Zcash and Ethereum medium.com/amentum/blockc…
10/ Part of the reason we’re seeing more conversations around governance is that the mentality of “governance-by-fork” has been damaged. For example, @Alistairmilne pointed out how value destructive the BCH fork has been.
11/ Speaking of value destruction, check out this thread from @DoveyWan on Chinese miners shutting down mining capacity as it becomes more economical to reduce the costs than to continue.
12/ Of course, the context for the shutdowns is Bitcoins falling price. But the price reason for that fall continues to be the subject of debate, exemplified by this exchange between @nathanielpopper and @real_vijay
13/ Of course, even in the midst of winter there are pockets of invincible summer (yes, I just stole every emo band’s favorite Camus line). Check out @Tuurdemeester’s thread on uplifting Bitcoin stories from Thanksgiving Day.
14/ There are more true allies emerging all the time. Check out @PeterMcCormack’s interview with SEC Commissioner @HesterPierce, author of the recent dissenting opinion about a Bitcoin ETF
15/ Also, for real, can we get a big set of 👏👏👏 for @PeterMcCormack’s @WhatBitcoinDid which is consistently one of the best researched and most thoughtful podcasts available and is just celebrating its one year anniversary? TY for all the work, Peter!
16/ Despite his caution around inevitable crypto winter features like fund shut downs, @APompliano is a prototype for the short-term-bear(or at least, realist?)-long-term-bull, as witness by his interview on @cnni
17/ Speaking of long horizon thinking, @hasufl and @zhusu have teamed up once again for a new series for Bitcoin skeptics. This piece is a spiritual successor to their piece earlier in the year on evangelizing bitcoin & I’m excited to read the full series medium.com/swlh/why-bitco…
18/ @udiWertheimer sparked an amazing thread by pointing out the role of ICO trading in increasing Bitcoin’s prominence last year and asking what people believed the next catalyst might be.
19/ On the topic of ICOs, after the SEC actions a couple weeks ago, many declared the ICO party dead once and for all. @KyleSamani argued that it had, in fact, it had been dead for all of this year, and there is a new compliant ICO party soon to begin
20/ For those who still want to be inspired amidst the gloom, @SarahJamieLewis just came straight for it with this thread on “actually interesting cryptocurrency things.” Lots of privacy tech highlights here.
21/ Last week, I posted @mikeBithell’s thoughtful thread poking holes in the NFT/blockchains for games narrative. @AriDavidPaul responds, basically, that sunk costs in today’s games are an attack vector for tomorrow’s new titles to add more value.
22/ When it comes to the global landscape, there are also reasons to be buoyed by progress. In a new essay for @TheBlock__, @iamjosephyoung writes about the improvements in South Korea’s exchange market and regulatory environment
23/ Of course, one of the most bullish long term indicators comes from focusing strictly on the top executing projects exploring opportunities simply unavailable in previous paradigms. Case in point, @frothcity and @foamspace blog.foam.space/foam-the-impor…
24/ I’ve also been keeping an eye on the Moloch DAO project - an open source approach to communal funding for shared protocol infrastructure. @austingriffith shared a 🦃 day screencast playing around and explaining the game theory that drives it.
25/ That category of exciting blockchain projects doesn’t necessarily just mean new tokens, either. @La__Cuen wrote on @coindesk about how @alexbosworth’s yalls.org has process 20,000 micropayments with Lightning in the last 7 months
26/ It’s hard to remember around all of the urgency around price that we’re still exploring the most basic fundamentals of new ways to organize and transact value. @cburniske makes that point in his latest: Cryptonetworks are not companies. medium.com/@cburniske/cry…
27/ Taken together, these pieces tell the story of an industry that may be struggling around the implications of price, but a mind space that is still flourishing & developing. If you find the right way to stay warm, you might even find the winter to be its own type of beautiful.
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Another good thread from this morning on the "hashwar"
