Let's talk about and analyze the SEC vs. Binance lawsuit. Because I've never seen anything like this before. This is 136 pages of pure madness. One for the history books. 🧵
bloomberg.com/news/articles/… Binance is a vertically integrated stack of conflicts of interest built around regulatory avoidance.

🧵 I adore the clarity of writing in this article, but there's a logical contradiction in the conclusion. For the tokens to "mean something" —as Matt concludes— they need to have both:

1) Ties to the real-world economy
2) Subordination to the rule of law

bloomberg.com/features/2022-… 1) For tokens to "have meaning," they must represent a legal claim on either future cashflows, physical goods, or people's labor. At which point they definitely become securities.

The only reason tokens exist is that people want to gamble on volatile claims with no underlying.

How many of these projects have to topple over before we just admit the "underlying technology" politicians love to wax lyrical about is just rubbish, and a distraction for not enforcing regulation on crypto scams.
risk.net/derivatives/79… IBM shut down its some 2000-person division for "supply chain" applications. This was widely heralded as the killer application, and it never worked.
theregister.com/2022/11/30/ibm…

Happy to announce that the Crypto Policy Symposium will have two exceptional keynotes. 🧵

Day 1: Honourable Brad Sherman from the United States House of Representatives, and Chairman of the House Financial Services Subcommittee on Investor Protections
crypto-policy.tech And on the subsequent day, from the other side of the pond, we are very privileged to hear from:

Day 2: Alex Sobel, MP for Leeds North West, and member of House of Commons of the United Kingdom.

After months of hard work, happy to say 'Popping the Crypto Bubble' is now out in print and just in time for the crypto meltdown. This book represents our effort to write the first rough draft of history of one of the craziest bubbles in human history. 🧵
amazon.com/dp/B0B4B9J4RK/… This text is a complete and total intellectual deconstruction of the entire cryptocurrency narrative. A narrative that rests on both technical, legal, social and economic absurdities which unfortunately require quite a bit of background knowledge to refute.

Today the global community of technologists sent a letter to Congress urging them to resist the crypto industry’s lobbying influence. The letter was signed by some of the most respected scholars and technologists in our field. And now we need your help. 🧵
ft.com/content/f4b2fa… Crypto fraud is spiraling out of control. So-called "web3" is not going great. Regulators are paralyzed and people are getting hurt left and right. It's on us as citizens and responsible engineers to help fix the problem we created by our inaction.

web3isgoinggreat.com

Guess the younger generation is really into these YouTube video essays rather than the written word. Fortunately there are some really good crypto critical ones. (1/) Web3.0: A Libertarian Dystopia (2/)

The Tech Won't Save Us podcast by @parismarx has had a profound influence on shaping crypto criticism across the world. I highly recommend listening to all the wonderful critics he's brought on. Bursting the NFT Bubble w/ Jacob Silverman
podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/bur…

I was completely wrong about crypto and NFTs. I realized that the only problem with artificial scarcity is that we aren't financializing enough of the conceptual universe. So today (and today only) I’m announcing my new NFT collection. 🧵 (1/) Previous NFT projects have attempted to Tinkerbell into existence a new asset class of non-physical fictitious pseudo-commodities whose artificial demand is purely narrative-driven. Now that sounds insane … until you realize a way you can profit. Then it makes total sense. (2/)

One of the most important projects I contributed to recently is an
thorough analysis of crypto from multiple ideologies and perspectives. Trying to steelman the strongest form of their view. (1/) 🧵 The neo-metallist perspective on Bitcoin and the concept of "digital" gold and a possible rebirth of the gold standards of the 19th century. (2/)
web3.lifeitself.us/notes/neo-meta…

Let's talk about what type of financial products crypto tokens are most comparable to in traditional markets. (1/)🧵 As most people have notied crypto"currencies" aren't currencies for very obvious reasons. They economics are deflationary, the transaction throughput doesn't scale, are too volatile to conduct commerce in and there's no mechanism for the volatility to ever subside. (2/)

Let's talk about the crypto bubble bath "economy" and spawns new speculative bubbles out of nothing. (1/) 🧵 The essence of the first order crypto token scam is you create a form of digital monopoly money and then wrap it in some bullshit narrative (technolibertarianism, financial liberation, get rich quick, etc) to attract suckers. (2/)

DHSR talk is really good, but minor nitpick is that he makes a distinction between "permissioned blockchains" and "permissionless blockchains".

Permissionless blockchains are things like Bitcoin, Dogecoin. These are the predatory scams. (1/)

blog.dshr.org/2022/02/ee380-… Permissioned blockchains is a very new and entirely made up marketing word that companies like IBM have retroactively fit on top of technology that's 30 years old. Intrinsically there's nothing harmful with the tech here, except that it lends credibility to the scams. (2/)

Jon is very clever but this argument is way too reductive. The reason retail traders generally lose money isn't so much that they're losing a few basis point on execution when using free brokers. It's mostly because they're DAY TRADING in stupid ways.

None of this a particular excuse for some of the legitimately unfair things that sometimes happen in market infrastructure. But this whole argument seems like a non-sequitur even if it is talking about important issues.

I have a couple of working theories on why there's so much journalistic self-censorship in reporting about the crypto bubble. But a pretty explanatory model why this is that it's just so damn stupid to even understand it all or write about. Would you as an aspiring reporter with a degree from Yale want to cover the big stories about massive geopolitical shifts or a bunch of kids gambling on fart coins and talking dogs?

The absurdity and low-brow childish aspects of it really do push serious thoughtful people away.

People ask which descriptor you should use to describe crypto, either a 'pyramid scheme' or a 'Ponzi scheme'. The answer is either because it depends on what facet of the ecosystem you're looking at because it's a multi-layered fraud. (1/) 🧵 These type of digital investment frauds are all quite new, and for some definitions they don't match the classical scams exactly.

Law hasn't invented a proper term of art for what time of scam Dogecoin is yet, just like there wasn't a term for a Ponzi scheme before 1922. (2/)

The crypto industry has a PR problem not that dissimilar from what the cigarette industry had back in the 1970s. It's perceived by the general public as being a corrosive vice. Let's talk about their media strategy and reputation laundering programs. (1/) 🧵 The only real coin of the realm in cryptocoin is credibility. Crypto schemes are predatory investment products that pay out old investors from new investors by attracting fools to invest in delusions of futurism and internet memes. (2/)

Let's talk about the spectrum of harm related to crypto and blockchain. There is a level of specificity and nuance that that some of us crypto skeptics don't necessarily communicate well as to what we actually see as harmful. 🧵 (1/) Some crypto projects are simply more harmful than others based on the type of damage they can cause, who is in the blast radius, capacity for systemic risk, and their malign impact on the world. There's a spectrum of blockchain harm (1 - 9) from most to least harmful. (2/)

Since I'm old enough to remember the so-called Web 2.0 phenomenon, I think we need to remember what it was really based on. I see three things:

1. AJAX requests
2. JQuery and dynamic DOM rendering
3. Low-barrier to entry server-side scripting via (PHP, Perl, etc) All three of which were quite real advances in web technologies that really did work and opened up new forms of user interactions and new ways of building internet infrastructure.

One model that I do like, that has some historical precedent in the history of science, is that computer science is going through it's "alchemy" adolescence. Basically flirtation with pseudoscience for economic ends. Were plenty of medieval scholars that earnestly believed they could transmute base metals into noble metals. Sir Issac Newton was among them funny enough.

Just like there are folks today that believe in transmuting technology into trust, and the production of "digital gold".

This is a really thoughtful article about the farce that is crypto. I suppose I only disagree (and it is a nit pick) about the analogy of blockchain to XML. Because XML, for all its flaws, actually worked and solved a real problem. Blockchains don't. (1/)

apenwarr.ca/log/20211117 The argument is still sound, and I've heard clever folks high up inside of large financial institutions make this case, that blockchain is just a useless technical catalyst that will burns off only as a reaction to get C-level buyin to update existing infrastructure. (2/)