"What gives Aggregators their power is not their control of supply: they are not the only way to find websites, or to post your opinions online; rather, it is their control of demand."
This seems like the Achilles heel of decentralization maximalism.
- People go where other people go.
- Most people go where things are safe, easy and comfortable.
- So the aggregators who win will do all the moderation and custody and yes censorship that crypto-anarchists hate.
I'd love to hear counterarguments to this conclusion which accept the above fact about demand aggregation.
It also explains why FTX, Crypto dot com, etc are spending *so* much money on random branding.
There's a land-grab in the US collective mind to become the default crypto on-ramp. Win that, and you just win.
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Let’s start the year off right by trying to improve #fintwit.
My humble contribution today is a small thread on how to identify (and then roundly ignore) finance Twitter grifters…
🧵👉👉
2/ 1⃣ Grifters talk a lot about specific trades and (post-facto) outcomes.
Good follows talk about process, principles, and about how they might be wrong. Not as sexy but much more useful.
3/ 2⃣ Grifters make “predictions” that are hard to falsify. Even worse are the ones that tell you about predictions they made before. Even if accompanied by a timestamp, this is nearly worthless.
1/ In the spirit of end-of-year housecleaning, here are some things I believe about the crypto world as we close 2021.
Reasoned disagreements *very* welcome!
👉👉👉
2/ Self-custodying of important things (wallets, etc) is not a viable long-term solution if 100x'ing crypto is a goal.
My mom can't be trusted to have the necessary opsec to handle her $ in irrecoverable ways.
3/ Relatedly, code-is-law also isn't viable long-term. There will need to be mechanisms akin to our legal system to be able to "sue" to get your stuff back, adjudicate disputes, etc.
1/ So I’ve been thinking a lot recently about arguments we see on the Twitter.
One case in point is the “crypto is the future” people vs the “crypto is a scam” people.
But what follows applies broadly. 👉👉👉
2/ Yes, there are people out there who just want to argue.
But I assume we all block them already.
I want to talk about (and to) those of us who want honest truth-seeking conversations, but sometimes get bogged down in pointless debates.
3/ I offer a mental model to help frame both our own thoughts and those of others.
This model is mine, but it’s also not mine in the sense that it’s an amalgamation of all the things I’ve learned and read and half-forgotten over the years. Here goes…
1/ A Sunday question thread: why do American parents care so much about their kids' sports?
👉👉👉
2/ Numbers vary but from a cursory look, somewhere between 55% and 65% of American children between 6-17 play some form of organized team sports (i.e. with instructors and coaches).
Add in the tennis, golf, running, and other individual sports and you're surely around 70%.
3/ The time investment is big, and the financial investment too. A lot of high schools are oriented around their sports teams (Friday Night Lights, etc). But why!?!?
I think I've discovered a common cognitive error which I'm going to label the Physical Embodiment Fallacy.
In this and many other superhero movies, the bad guy creates/steals some horrifying new piece of technology which is going to kill millions, enslave the world, etc.
The solution in every movie is simple: kill the bad guy and destroy his evil lair.
I.e. eliminate the physical embodiment of the problem, and the problem is solved.
1/ The key to understanding "news" is to think about probabilities and incentives. A thread... 👉👉👉
2/ Let's say you're trying to estimate the chances of some future event happening.
As an example, let's take P(Trump runs for President in 2024).
3/ So you read the news about such an event. CNN, FoxNews, Politico, whatever. And it feels like a steady drip of "news" about tiny events which could affect that probability.
So how do we integrate all these pieces of information into a prediction?