1.What a crazy irony that Bitcoin, a technology aimed at striking a blow against inflationary monetary policy now appears to have thrived in no small part because of the very policies that ended up causing inflation. 2.Maybe I'm buying too much into the argument that Bitcoin was the ultimate risk-on asset purchased in a world awash with too much money.

I still hear a lot of people who assume NFTs are just expensive JPEGs with no use - other than speculative frenzy.

This critique came up a lot after my last 🧵about NFTs.

It made me want to do a new🧵on what NFTs can do today. So...

https://twitter.com/nathanielpopper/status/1494772144634404866?s=20&t=UYzw2VkXovJ7TJnmz7msvw

2/The first wave of popular NFTs were often just JPEG profile pictures, or pfp's that didn't "do" anything.

But there are many projects today making interesting use of the way NFTs let you own and digitally verify ownership of a digital item.

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.

TIL all Ashkenazi Jews todays are descended from around 300 people who made it through a bottleneck of death in northern Europe around 1250AD.

That is according to the genetics findings summarized by @razibkhan in his (subscription) Substack.

razib.substack.com/p/ashkenazi-je… Razib's Substack and a few others have become the very nerdy escapist reading I've allowed myself when I need to get my mind off WallStreetBets and the book I need to finish.

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.

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 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

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.

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.

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."

NEW: Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong has long styled himself as a Silicon Valley thought leader on management and culture.

The culture he built, however, led to a history of complaints about discrimination and racism from Black employees, buried until now.

nytimes.com/2020/11/27/tec… In one period -- in late 18, early 19 -- almost all of the company’s Black employees left in a short period of time, with nearly a dozen of them making complaints to managers and HR before leaving.

Just got this slide from a confidential Circle presentation. It does more to explain Circle's acquisition of Poloniex than anything I have seen today. Takeaway: the SEC did indeed informally indicate to Circle that regulators would "not pursue any enforcement action for prior activity" at Poloniex as long as Circle cleans up Poloniex and turns it into a regulated exchange.