I've been thinking a lot about what is actually happening in these markets since getting to NY.
Some new things have clicked and become really undeniable with being here, it has just been fas...
How do you spot a fake in culture, in tech, and in markets of all kinds?
A great place to start is corporate simpdom and the symptoms of central control.
Before the hea...
Tech Bros suck.
There is just no other way around it. Sorry to be so blunt.
But seriously, it seems that for the past 10-20 years, give or take, complaining about ...
TLDR; probably not. You can go home now.
But, for those still here, let’s see what the prospects are.
High yield arbitrage is so much cooler and tastier than just swapping seeds for other seeds forever.
If you think seed 2 s...
Who benefits most from timing the right moment, right from the start, to race for the exits?
The hint is in the title of this Letters to a Young VC series. Of course, i...
I just watched Rounders for the first time, catching up to the insider linguistic tricks feels long overdue. Like how loan shark copycat financiers saving so much fictional wealth for the s...
…You seem to have confused the value of liquidity in an artificially scarce market with the work founders, creators, engineers and others who take on the majority of the risk do to actua...
With real web3 in full effect, founders no longer ...
Why do VCs do VC?
Get bags, have fun, be savvy.
So, why does being a gardener of CC0 ecosystems give VCs a better path out of VC?
Better bags, mo...
Amplifying the delta between load and effort for more savvy cash.
At some point on every journey towards the hope of more savvy bags, one has to put aside the theatrics...
What are we talking about when we talk about security?
A family of four walks alone along what they are told is ...
Money is a self perpetuating social convention.
It's no more than a token that we trust will hold value in future exchanges. If buyers and sellers, ports and authorities accept textil...
This letter zeroes in on cryptography and economics.
In the late 80s to early 90s a group of hacktivists, hobbyists, mathematicians, computer scientists and m...
In order to communicate securely the...
From how much appetite you have for uncovering unique opportunities that others don’t d...
It’s actually quite hard to do, given our experiences over the past two decades, where we’ve become conditioned to assum...
We’re now on letter nineteen, and it’s about time that we talked about what actually differentiates assets built for and in web3.
The thing is, we have to be honest with ourse...
Fresh off all the drama and clearly intentionally engineered gas wastage of the behemoth Otherside drop, continued inflation anxiety, Fed basis point jum...
A different medium for this message. Go to chromadin.xyz....
Dear YC Founders,
This letter is a special edition, just for you.
You may not all be VCs yet, but you are certainly in training— conditioned to look for the exits at all times...
…You seem to have confused the value of liquidity in an artificially scarce market with the work founders, creators, engineers and others who take on the majority of the risk do to actually create wealth at its source.
It’s great that a handful of VCs provide life support during the years when cold start capital was tight and scarce in high risk crypto markets in the broader context of continuous debasing of traditional markets, even while most VCs take credit for the work of a very few. But we have to ask ourselves why the industry needed life support in the first place.
Some VCs have sometimes played an important role when capital has been choked off by a lack of primary production in the market and other artificial factors, but don’t confuse the luck of a bull market when everyone looks like a genius with you taking personal credit for creating the industry by lending money.
Almost everyone has missed the biggest story of the last five years. The breakaway from dependence on money lending and speculative bets to self sovereign networks building wealth at its source through primary production.
They don’t deal in capital, but rather in “paper” that’s meant to represent increasingly obtuse abstractions far away from the capital. They don’t make investments either. Roll that one around in your mind for a bit.
They counterfeit Collateralized Debt Obligations under a variety of flavors, instruments, and names, stack them in complex squares and the like, and swap them as if they were the same as real capital. But really –– almost exactly in the same way as neural net bot swarms and high frequency automation algorithms are near total black boxes –– they aren’t real capital at all.
In fact, this is what has built the entire US and global economy for the past seven decades or more. Financial instruments like CDOs, CDO2, other debt swaps and perpetual financing mechanisms remain stuck within infinite loops, abstracting away from principal capital as they squeeze just enough positional asymmetry from the gaps between space-time-interest and light speed delay to keep systemic collapse at bay.
The problem with these unchecked financial contraptions is that they are being used by co-opted institutions and regulators to run might as well be translucent mass counterfeiting operations that then are over leveraged as false collateral to a scale where they make up the majority of financial assets in the market and underpin the goldilocks illusion that their flimsy fine tuning will always keep conditions just right to avoid catastrophe. And of course, only they are fit to balance the bears.
As tensions build in these braided strands and the market continues to debase from any fundamentals, decay rates accelerate frayed agreements until carrying capacity snaps.
Halting errors and local buffer overflows breed rampant, long detached from any memory of original value.
They continue to excuse and get away with these theatrics, pretending the open secret of fake capital placed in ever more complicated three card monte buckets is simply the only realistic option. They claim that fake capital simply has no choice but to be the closest thing to real capital that we have, fake investment that just stretches out multilateral debt agreements over time, chips placed on a number or colour for a roulette wheel are the only kind of investment that pays out in the paper money of this macroeconomic model. They insist that they are not going to be the only one left holding the bag, naive enough to walk out on the insincere debauchery that all of their buddies and bros continue to burn paper on.
But, as real capital, real investment and real liquidity are unleashed into a long thirsty market they need to ask themselves who the fuck is going to believe them anymore. We all have better options, not at some future point, but now, and have for a while.
This primary capital is produced from direct peer 2 peer increases in innovation between creators, outproducing any secondary market hype. Token records of interaction make liquidity abundant at every point of production.
Side note: to any VCs out there, the nature of the deals have changed and this is the alpha on where to source the most liquid, groundbreaking and abundant deal flow in primary markets— seek out the places, happenings, communities and projects that are being sought after by other totally genuine primary creators, engineers, artists, models, fashion designers, musicians and more. If you think of it like exquisite culinary experiences, you want to go to the places where the chef’s eat. It might not look anything like what you expect from the usual no reservations theatrics.
As for a good a place to start as any, there is always demand for the most robust drivers of culture.
I moved around a lot, I’m used to rame...
Prospecting drilling between the liquidity and lack of substance for some life giving thing— liquid gold, fresh water, magic...
There’s no kind of right way to do what I do. Feeling out of place, like a live in outer ...
Intellectual curiosity for this midtown magic.
The liminal watercolor of magic that happens between those two. They are showing t...
I can’t be sure.
Freestyle is an art form. Beyond coming prepared and spitting pre-written verses.
No ...
A written appropriation of videos, visual insights and anchors for how to make it in web3, not lose your shoes, your shirt, your soul.
...
Synthetic Futures
Time to help others with the outbreak. Not out of danger yet.
Emancipa
And there’s no point raising problems with people who don't learn how to understand them, in a system that wasn’t built for you, and still isn’t..
Dhäwu
A fragment of languages that shouldn’t have survived— but did.
Cuntism
Strayan Social Disease: Whinging, Advanced Wankerism, Cuntishness and some good old Terminal Tall Poppy.