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Feb 18 • 27 tweets • 9 min read
One fringe benefit of leaving the NYT is that I have been able to play around w/ owning and trading crypto for the first time.

I’ve still got plenty of unanswered questions, but the big thing I hadn’t anticipated was just how compelling and fun NFTs would be.

A thread:
2/I remember reading @fredwilson talk about his discovery of NFTs back in 2017 and it seemed like a silly, expensive online card game – at best, a bro-ish Keynsian beauty contest. Once I bought a few, though, it suddenly became clear why so many people are into this.
3/Yes, the space is rife with scams and I assume 95-99% will go to zero.

A good thread from an insider on the fakery and scamming tactics that have become widespread:

4/But at the most simple level, NFTs have given me, for the first time, a visceral understanding of the most basic innovation of crypto: What it means to digitally own a unique digital object.
5/With NFT’s you can own a digital item, carry it around between different online ecosystems and do interesting things with the item when you prove you own it. No company can deny me access to the item.
6/That is something I never quite experienced owning fungible cryptocurrencies, in which every token is equal to every other token, rather than a unique object like an NFT.
7/NFTs, in their current form, almost force you to use your own wallet -- and hold them directly -- rather than just leaving them in the custody of the sort of third parties that most people use in crypto trading.
8/I have seen the questions from people like @moxie about all the centralized infrastructure underlying the NFT industry. But the more innovative on-chain projects seem to be confronting that head on.

moxie.org/2022/01/07/web…
9/Sometimes an NFT is indeed just a JPEG, but it turns out a JPEG is a lot easier to get attached to, and care about, than a stock ticker that you can easily buy back if you sell (even if the ticker is backed by an actual company).
10/Some of the communities that have grown up around certain NFTs are toxic, but other collections have developed weird and interesting communities on Discord that actually give people a sense of belonging and bring people together with similar interests.
11/I still see all the big unanswered legal questions around what digital ownership actually means— right click save, yadda yadda.

Then there is the bigger question: is this the best thing for smart young people to be pouring their time and money into?
12/To quote a friend who has spent more time trading crypto than he meant to: “I’m pretty sure time spent on this stuff and crypto has been bad for my soul.”
13/NFTs certainly have a way of focusing your mind on the pursuit of riches – to an addictive degree – and pushing out many other potentially more rewarding interests.
14/If nothing else, it is amazing how much easier it is to spend vast sums when it isn’t denominated in $ – what casinos figured out with chips.

That friend again: “I spent $7000 tonight on a picture of a guy with a sword. I’ve never spent that much on an object in my life.”
15/In NFT land, though, there are plenty of projects that aren’t only about getting rich and that are trying to do innovative things using the concept of digital identity and digital ownership to test out novel ways of building digital games, brands, communities and economies.
16/It feels like a better and more fun version of the ICO boom of 2017. Most of those projects disappeared – and it often seemed like the raison d'être of decentralization was to incentivize new forms of fraud. But a few of those ICOs became multi-billion $ ventures.
17/All the same elements are here with NFTs. But because NFTs are easier to immediately understand, and can actually be used today – unlike most tokens created in 2017 – people can learn about and judge the underlying technology more quickly and get a sense of what is trash.
18/I myself got scammed along the way when I signed on a fake mint and had my wallet emptied.

But I also scored a few early wins when I picked up some @doodles and an @AzukiZen.
19/I parted with both but the winnings have allowed me to experiment with more strange and innovative projects like @nftworldsNFT, a Minecraft-like metaverse where all the big NFT communities are already building their own mini enclaves.
20/I’ve gotten introduced to a lot of the most interesting stuff through the @EtherOrcs, which seems to be one of the most serious and well-respected NFT projects around.

21/The @EtherOrcs soon led me to @AnonymiceNFT, @LootRealms and finally the @Treasure_DAO. This last one has become an obsession of mine over the last few weeks, thanks to this tweet from @bramk

22/ @Treasure_DAO is trying to bootstrap a new gaming ecosystem. It is starting with this weird and very lucrative strategy game — Bridgeworld — to test out the system and distribute resources, most of all the in-house currency $MAGIC.

23/ The whole thing is based on all kinds of crazy game theory, but this is game theory you get to take part in and make money from.

drive.google.com/file/d/1VA01N-…
24/ The initial returns to Bridgeworld have been huge because lots of the serious developers in the NFT world are lining up to get their future games on @Treasure_DAO.

25/One nice development is that all the teams creating games for @Treasure_DAO are making the initial NFTs free, if you can get a hold of them at the minting stage, making it harder for creators to cash in and run off.
26/It may totally fail. I have to assume most of these experiments will -- and right now the market is feeling particularly frothy. But is it fun to watch what happens in the meantime.
27/Along the way, I’ve been looking for the NFT experts who see some promise but also try to call out the bullshit. I’ve learned a lot from @0xBender, @NFTAlphaBeta, @Nate_Rivers and @NFTethics. Let me know if you have suggestions on anyone else I should be following.

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More from @nathanielpopper

Nathaniel Popper Profile picture
Dec 29, 2020
A few examples from the internal Coinbase data we received that show how women and Black employees were underrepresented, concentrated in lower-paying roles and paid less than colleagues in those same roles.
Among the 36 employees in the two highest levels of engineers at Coinbase — some of the most respected and well-paid jobs at the company — there was just one woman. Her base pay was $20,000 less than the average man in the group.
In the top two levels of engineers there were no Black employees. At the third level down, only two of the 58 engineers were Black. One of those was the lowest paid employee in the group, by a wide margin. He made $19k less than the next lowest paid engineer at the same level.
Read 4 tweets
Nathaniel Popper Profile picture
Dec 29, 2020
NEW: We were sent a trove of inside data on what Coinbase pays its employees.

We had an economist crunch the numbers.

The upshot: women and Black employees across the company earned far less than their colleagues in similar jobs.

nytimes.com/2020/12/29/tec…
Women at Coinbase were paid 8% - or $13,000 - less than male colleagues in similar jobs. The few Black salaried employees were paid 7% less than similarly-placed white colleagues, a number that went up when bonuses were included.
The data is a reminder of the continuing pay gaps in Silicon Valley. But the disparities at Coinbase appear to be significantly larger than what has been seen at the few other companies that have been forced to release data (companies that were sued).
Read 9 tweets
Nathaniel Popper Profile picture
Dec 18, 2020
The new SEC complaint against Robinhood gives one of the first inside views of a shadowy practice known as 'payment for order flow' that sits at the base of how retail investors trade stocks

The details show how RH used the system to make money at the expense of customers/1
With payment for order flow, retail brokers like Robinhood let Wall Street firms trade again their customers in exchange for a fee.

These firms, like Citadel and Virtu, have long said they can give small investors the best prices for their stocks/2
But the SEC says it found records of a conversation where one Wall Street firm told Robinhood that it could choose between getting higher fees for itself or better deals for its customers (a higher price when a customer is selling, and a lower price when they are buying)/3
Read 10 tweets
Nathaniel Popper Profile picture
Dec 18, 2020
Back-to-back regulatory complaints this week point to problems with the distinctive business practices that have made @RobinhoodApp a success story.

The regulators suggest that the success has sometimes come at the expense of its customers.

nytimes.com/2020/12/17/bus…
An SEC complaint on Thurs put a spotlight on how @RobinhoodApp chose to make money at the expense of its customers when selling customer trades to Wall Street.

Robinhood's own employees found evidence this was happening and raised concerns with senior executives.
An internal Robinhood report from 2019 “concluded that Robinhood customers would be better off trading at another broker-dealer” for any trade of more than 100 shares.

sec.gov/litigation/adm…
Read 5 tweets
Nathaniel Popper Profile picture
Dec 7, 2020
New detail on how the turmoil at Coinbase has hit the company's efforts to secure its Bitcoins.

Among the people who resigned this fall - to protest new internal policies - were 4 of the 7 people on the most critical security team, the "key management team," sources told me.
The "key management team" is responsible for securing the cryptographic keys to Coinbase's cold wallets, where most of the company's crypto tokens are held -- somewhere in the neighborhood of $30 billion I was told.

No job is more fundamental to the company's success.
These jobs require incredibly specialized expertise and are not easy to replace. I was told that losing more than half the team has set back new projects and required lots of internal scrambling to backfill roles.
Read 6 tweets
Nathaniel Popper Profile picture
Nov 27, 2020
Bonus material thread.

This was only briefly mentioned in today's story about Coinbase, but managers surveyed Black employees at the end of a summer of turmoil to see how they were feeling

The resulting report did not paint a pretty picture.

nytimes.com/2020/11/27/tec…
"Why hasn't anyone in leadership engaged with black employees?" one employee quoted in the survey said. "It feels like a slap in the face."
Some other quotes from the report:

"Employees feel unsupported and unsafe."

"None of my family members think I should stay here."

"I can't leave my skin color at the door."

"This isn't about politics: it's about the well being of employees who work for you."
Read 4 tweets

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