So the cryptocurrency industry has basically two products, one which is relatively benign and doesn't have product market fit, and one which is malignant and does. The industry has a weird superposition of understanding this fact and (strategically?) not understanding it.

My friends @robwalling and @einarvollset just launched TinySeed, an accelerator for software companies where a successful outcome is a healthy, sustainable business rather than attempting to ride the rocketship trajectory. https://t.co/LSHqZNcVid

I have some thoughts:

As somebody who bootstrapped ~4 companies, I feel like I had to make some clearly suboptimal decisions early in them for lack of what is, in hindsight, not all that much money. But there's a huge gap in the product space for investment options.

It's weird: you can get $25k from Amex trivially, and angels are very willing to write a check for that much, but you have to make representations about your goals/ambitions/market/etc which don't really apply to everyone.

And so you see the traditional angel/VC ecosystem fund companies where honestly the returns are probably not there, and this is knowable pretty early, but the chase of them will wreck what could have been a perfectly happy business.

(To make the math work for traditional VCs the company has to at least have a market-appropriate shot of $100 million a year. There are a lot more $10 million a year companies than $100 million a year companies. That is *not* a bad terminal outcome for founders/employees.)

This lunch is 500 yen ($4.80) at Sukiya, a Japanese fast food restaurant which belongs to a category with about three big competitors.

I love the aesthetics of this category and they’re under remarked upon.

I think people underestimate QSRs in terms of social utility, but Sukiya et al describe themselves as mission-oriented enterprises. I believe this is largely sincere, and goes back to the 60s and 70s, when the clientele was primarily manual laborers who had migrated to work.

Japan was not a rich nation at the time, and day laborers in particular were both unlikely to be able to cook for themselves and unlikely to have much of a food budget, and so the chains sprung up offering an honest-to-goodness cooked meal delivered in under a minute for cheap.

This heritage continued over the years, even after Japan became a much more wealthy nation, and these chains function as social support and dignity for folks in diminished circumstances.

They also are a wee bit of a cartel, and I appreciate the aesthetics of the cartel:

Back when I was first in Japan, in the mid 2000s, there was an increase in the price of beef.

And the heads of the three chains got together, and decided that the price of the basic beef bowl needed to increase, but given the economic circumstances how could they hold the line.

Some people really benefit from hearing advice that everyone knows, for the same reason we keep schools open despite every subject in them having been taught before.

In that spirit, here's some quick Things Many People Find Too Obvious To Have Told You Already.

Your idea is not valuable, at all. All value is in the execution. You think you are an exception; you are not. You should not insist on an NDA to talk about it; nobody serious will engage in contract review over an idea, and this will mark you as clueless.

Technologists tend to severely underestimate the difficulty and expense of creating software, especially at companies which do not have fully staffed industry leading engineering teams ("because software is so easy there, amirite guys?")

Charge more. Charge more still. Go on.

The press is a lossy and biased compression of events in the actual world, and is singularly consumed with its own rituals, status games, and incentives. The news necessarily fails to capture almost everything which happened yesterday. What it says is important usually isn't.

Companies find it incredibly hard to reliably staff positions with hard-working generalists who operate autonomously and have high risk tolerances. This is not the modal employee, including at places which are justifiably proud of the skill/diligence/etc of their employees.

Bitfinex files discovery in "Yo bro, where did our $800 million go?" action and it is every bit as interesting as you'd expect it to

Here's their CFO describing their agreement (which we know from other litigation was never contractualized because, presumably because money launderers hate paper trails):

Bitfinex's CFO was shocked, shocked to learn that the money launderer they engaged to provide money laundering services while I-swear-to-God-this-is-an-actual-quote "we learned to bank like criminals" may have from time to time lied to banks.

"Institutional constraints" means, here, "We were attempting to avoid velocity checks placed by our banking partners to detect fraud and money laundering, which would have detected our fraud and money laundering."

Money at the speed of code, yadda yadda yadda, the Bitcoin economy is surprisingly blasé when several hundred million dollars is in an interstitial state for months.

In a situation never before encountered by a financial institution: the check was not, in fact, in the mail.

1/  We've reached a critical inflection point in bitcoin's adoption curve.

A moment wholly unique in the history of markets.

Are you ready for what comes next? 👇

#Bitcoin

2/ A perfect storm of demand dynamics is driving #Bitcoin price.

I think something shifted in the market -- and active investors & traders would do well to adjust their mindset.

3/ After years asleep at the wheel, institutional leaders are now jarred awake, en masse.

If they want this asset: they'll have to hustle, compete with the masses and FOMO in above ATH's.

Against a backdrop of scarcity unlike anything they've ever seen.

4/ They will buy *all* dips.

Their bots will not stop buying.

There isn't enough supply for all of them, and they know it.

5/ And the whales who accumulated much lower?

How much appetite will strong hands have to market sell, just to run stops?

In the opening hours of the greatest bull market of their lives.

In a liquidity crisis.

Unlike #ETH and #BTC $ Algo uses delegated proof of stake (DPOS) #AlgorandandFriends

Under the DPOS mechanism, the community will empower a number of users the delegates to choose the next block. This is a mechanism that is used by blockchains such as EOS etc. $Algo

There is a fixed number of delegates & these delegates can be viewed as having centralized control. In the adipose blockchain, the delegates may own a tiny fraction of the total money in the system. Yet, the whole blockchain is secure. $Algo

The Algorand consensus mechanism is called pure proof of stake. And it operates on this simple principle. It makes cheating by a minority of the money impossible and cheating by the majority stupid. $Algo

$Algo developed a mechanism so that those with small stakes cannot cheat, those that have a large stake in the network won’t cheat. It will completely devalue their holdings & make no economic sense. As long as 2/3 of the majority are honest, the protocol will work just fine. $

How to Trade without Fear, Stress or Anxiety. 💯

Trading should bring wealth, happiness and peace.
Not stress and sleepless nights.

Here is how to trade without dying faster.

Please share to de-stress the world.

A Thread.

The reasons for feeling anxious and Stressed.

1. Too high Position Size.
2. No Exit Plan.
3. Almost no Entry strategy.

We will learn about them below and try to find a solution.

1. POSITION SIZE.
Position size should be equal to what you're willing to lose and not cry over.

Eg. If your position size is 10K, you should be able to lose 10K without it making you depressed.

It doesn't mean you throw away 10K as a random experiment.

If you're stressed? Reduce your Position size, Now!

But If I trade with such a small position size, it won't be much Profitable?

-Profits and wealth are built slowly, trade with small amounts, built your system, profits will accumulate.

Small Position size. Low Stress. Better life.

Remember, you don't need a lot to become big.

1% gain per day compounds to 3700% Return per year.

- If Stressed or anxious, reduce your position size.

Switch to smaller position which doesn't make you feel sleepless.

1. IMP ANNOUNCEMENT

I want to let you know when I made the decision to launch @StrikePac & directly get into electioneering I realized I wasn't going to continue issuing "race ratings" & "forecasts" each cycle- OBV that's a conflict of interest!

The hostility & sexism of

2. that world, I have to be honest, makes it very easy to walk away- the misogyny in the top tier of the election analysis community outside of @Center4Politics folks who are awesome & also more accurate than anyone else is intolerable. I'll still analyze politics, political

3. events, issue commentary, write articles, run the pod, go on TV, and generally succeed in ways that drive those men nuts but no, I won't be putting out ratings or "forecasts" anymore. Now, lots of people are asking me "what's going to happen in 2022?" The Midterm Effect, the

4. the long standing pattern of the president's party losing seats in the Midterm happens virtually every single cycle. I believe there are 2 recent exceptions: post-9/11 in the 2022 midterms and 1998 post-Lewinski gate. What I'm trying to do in building @StrikePac is completely

5. redesign/overhaul/modernize & reshape the way that Dems currently approach electioneering. I want to build a new organization with the funds capable of coming into cycle's like VA's 2021 cycle and the 2022 midterm cycle and start to deploy these new methodologies into the