Good morning! If the Skype gods are willing I'll be appearing this morning on @cnbctechcheck to talk about cryptocurrency. This is probably one of those signs that you should sell, sell, sell. Segment starts a few minutes after 11 EST.
The fun part of a cryptocurrency TV segment is that you have to check prices two minutes before airtime, so you can know whether you're going to be explaining the 20% loss or 30% rise for the day
Cryptocurrency is the only stable store of value; it's the fiat currencies that fluctuate wildly against it as part of a transnational conspiracy
Key take home point about crypto: there are so many of these coins right now and it's such a confusing space that you really need a solid bookmarking tool
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Man, that had to be a satisfying project to work on. All the late nights, the missed dinners with the kids, but through it all the satisfaction of knowing you worked on something so embarrassing in its futility you can never speak of it again
I guess now they renamed Libra to Diem and it's going to be pegged to the US dollar? The masterminds at Facebook have reinvented the Cuban Convertible Peso cnbc.com/2021/04/20/fac…
A quarter of WeWork's loss came from paying Adam Neumann half a BILLION dollars to stay away from the place for a year. They also paid him $50 million on top of that to not work anywhere else. That's puzzling. You'd think they'd want the guy hired sequentially by every competitor
No word on the fate of WeLive, the subsidiary that will rent you this magnificent New York apartment for $4,178 a month
The whole thread is great. Criminal activity is what keeps the cryptocurrency bubble inflating (with money laundering the principal use case). The basic critique of crypto is that if it doesn't work, there's no point to it, and if it works as advertised, it attracts all the crime
There's parallels here to the E2E debate. If you build unbreakable anonymous messaging, criminals will use that. Conversely, there are sympathetic people who use cryptocurrency to evade oppressive governments. The difference is in the tradeoff.
For E2E, the benefit of thwarting mass surveillance so far outweighs the costs that we accept them. But there's no benefit from cryptocurrency that balances out being able to shut down Atlanta and get anonymously paid, or launder hundreds of millions of dollars across borders.
This is a good thread about trying to think through the implications of the Pentagon UFO disclosures. There's several things about this mystery that make it difficult to reason about.
One is that over the last few centuries, we have gotten a lot of mileage out of always favoring mundane explanations over supernatural (or in this case extraterrestrial) ones. But we also learned it is wrong to dismiss evidence that contradicts your beliefs.
To me, the big question in the forthcoming UFO report will be exactly what the observations have shown. If small objects are accelerating at 20G with no visible means of propulsion, you could imagine that there's a military lab in China or Botswana where people are high-fiving.
Thank you to @cnbctechcheck for having me on! I realize that "cryptocurrency is a gambling token and pyramid scheme" is a simplistic argument, but... pyramid schemes are not that complicated, and I think it's useful to say it on TV for all those intimidated by blockchain woo
Let me tweet a little longer for people who want more than a sound bite. By its own criteria, crypto was supposed to be a decentralized currency that no one person or government could control, a safe store of value compared to fiat money. By all those criteria it has failed.
Instead of having no points of control, cryptocurrency is run like middle school—everything is determined by what the popular kids like or don't like that day. If Elon Musk has a double espresso this morning, the price will go up, if he tweets after bong rips, it will go down.
Having to move on from the January 6 riot will be a blessing in disguise for Democrats. The problem is a bifurcated public sphere where half the electorate inhabits a disjoint reality. The idea that elaborate hearings will get through to them has been repeatedly discredited
There's an elitist undercurrent, too. If only the ignorant were finally shown the facts, they would repent and listen to us for a change. We need to reach these angry, disaffected voters who resent the highly educated by schooling them
Finally, there was a strong element of the ridiculous in both the January 6 riot and the overreaction to it, that shines through all attempts to dress it up as a formal "insurrection". Let's not make this another Mueller report; move on, pass popular laws, win elections