Monday, March 21, 2022

News: March 21



Keeping It Simple . Investing is humbling. At 60, with 35 years of venture investing experience, I still get most things wrong. ........ how I bumped into Rikki Tahta walking through the garment district in NYC in the spring of 2011 and Rikki told me he was working on a Bitcoin startup. I replied, “a what coin startup?”. And Rikki told me to read the Bitcoin White Paper. I did and I was hooked. ........ I didn’t even understand parts of the white paper. ....... I understand how important permissionless servers and applications (web 1.0) turned out to be and so I understood how important permissionless money was going to be. ......... I bought Bitcoin and went about finding a Bitcoin investment to make.

That was Coinbase.

........ I met Mena Trott at a Nick Denton party in NYC in 2003 and she explained blogging to me. I was struck by the idea that anyone could be a publisher. ........ That led me to Twitter a few years later when I saw that most people would prefer to write a text message to the world over a long-form blog post. ........... aha moments come around every so often and you just need to let them grab you and take you a foundational investment. You don’t need to do much due diligence on these. I did none on Twitter, Coinbase, or Dapper. What I did do is use the products, get in the game, feel the power, and get conviction. .



How to Think about the "Current Thing" Deciding in which direction you want people to be sheep ........ Let’s say you’re an intelligent person who in late February knew nothing about Russia, Ukraine, or American foreign policy. Which websites should you read to become informed? You notice that many sources seem to always take the “current thing” perspective, while others have the opposite bias. There are only so many hours in a day, and the judgment calls one must make in researching an issue are too numerous to list. Are those whose first instinct is to trust and promulgate the dominant narrative the most or least reliable sources of information? Given enough familiarity with an issue, an individual should be able to calibrate his views on it, but priors have a role in telling him where to start, and can determine which conclusions he reaches in situations where there isn’t enough time to thoroughly study a topic. .......

The current current thing is of course the war in Ukraine.

........ COVID-19 and the war in Ukraine are pretty important. But terrorism, white supremacy, and police shootings of black men are such tiny problems in modern America that if we were a logical society we would all but ignore them. Something like the process of aging, a major tragedy every human is experiencing every moment of their life, isn’t even considered a problem that policy should try to solve. ........ Parents who never thought twice about the flu but are worried about their healthy toddlers dropping dead of COVID are now able to find one another, along with credentialed influencers who appeal to their worst fears. Politicians, journalists, and others that are part of the discourse are radicalized by and responsive to such influences.

Those that never thought about Yemen want to start a nuclear war over Ukraine.

Emotions are getting more extreme, and the more an issue happens to engage a disproportionate share of the attention of neurotics the less we are able to approach it in a rational way. .......... If your model of the world says that modern society has a strong tendency to overreact to the issue of the day, you might prefer your leaders to have purely reactive instincts if such figures are the only alternative to the side associated with the establishment that decides what the current thing is in the first place through what is clearly an extremely flawed process. I’m not saying this is the high-IQ case for Trumpism, but it does point in the direction of what it might look like. .

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The Blockchain Challenges Assumptions

The Blockchain is nothing but the Internet gone deeper. The user interface looks no different to the end user and should get even easier. It is early innings. It is being built. Heck, the Internet is still being built. When we went mobile, it was still the Internet. Now it was mobile. The Internet is an added intelligence layer. The air around you now has intelligence. It always did. But now it is physical. It is in the four dimensions you are aware of. It is limited. It is spotty. But it is there.

The Internet challenged assumptions. The Blockchain is challenging deeper assumptions. It is challenging money. Money is pretty basic. It is said money might be the most mentioned word in the Gospels. Money seems to be fundamental to how human societies get organized. Money used to be conch shells. Money has been digital for a while now. But we still have had to think paper money, or gold. It seems money is just trust. It can be conjured out of think air. If we can just learn to trust each other more, we can have more money. The Blockchain is the vehicle we are building to load up on that trust.

If we could add intelligence to paper money, say if every bit of cash were connected somehow to the Internet Of Things, we might not even need to get rid of it. With purely digital money, bookkeeping is baked in, it moves at the speed of light. It is here, suddenly it is on the other side of the earth where it is night time. It is teleportation, not of us, but of money. We have no need for teleportation, but money does. There are too many poor people on the other side of the world.

The promise is that fundmental problems will be solved. I grew up in the Third World. The fundamental problem is that of identity. Vicious political battles are fought in countries that primarily export people as to who is and who is not a citizen. The truth is, everyone is. It is a fundamental human right to be a citizen. Every single person has a right to be a citizen of some country. I ask, why not every country? The Blockchain could add 10 trillion dollars to the global GDP overnight by simply making every single human being a citizen of every country and it could do that. Without asking for permission.

After identity, there is the problem of the bank account. Banks shush shush most people. With the Blockchain, your bank account is automatic.

And then credit and pay. In a knowledge economy we are now in, it makes sense to simply pay every single person a basic living wage, and then build a robust economy on top of that. Not having to worry about your next meal does not make you lazy, or 99% of the people, over 99, in the rich countries would be lazy.

And theft. Poor countries are poor primarily because the local corrupt loot and move their money to rich countries, and rich countries are hand over fist. The Blockchain could make all that transparent. And then regulations could kick in. As in, maybe you belong in jail not in the Swiss Alps.

Cisco was one of the companies that built the Internet. And it made money. Everybody who buys a portion of a Bitcoin is helping pay to buid the Blockchain, and is investing in it to reap rewards. The Blockchain went IPO a long time ago.

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