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philosophy

DAOs decentralized finance philosophy venture capital

·Sep. 30, 2019

You don’t get to cheat just because you like to win — on WeWork, Politics, and Fintech

Feelings and emotions at industry events matter. The narrative at the more traditional conferences is that Fintech innovation is just incremental improvement, and that blockchain has struggled to bring production-level quality software and stand up new networks. This isn't strictly true -- see komgo, SIX, or any of the public chains themselves -- but the overall observation does stand. Much of Fintech has been channeled into corporate venture arms, and much of blockchain has been trapped in the proof-of-concept stage, disallowed from causing economic damage to existing business.

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China civilization and politics Crypto ICO / IEO philosophy

·Oct. 14, 2019

The political limits of commerce — Telegram’s $1.7B US offering and NBA’s $1.5B China deal

I look at the boundaries that Telegram and EOS have crashed into in the US with recent SEC actions and lawsuits, and the melting of Facebook Libra. There have been a number of interesting regulatory moves recently, and the positive headlines of 2017 have become the negative headlines of 2019. How does SEC jurisdiction reach foreign institutional investors? We also touch on the $1.5 billion NBA distribution deal now on the fence in China, and how US companies are under the speech jurisdiction of a foreign nation. How does China reach American protected speech? Through pressure, boycott, and economics.

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artificial intelligence civilization and politics exchanges / cap mkts philosophy

·Oct. 26, 2020

The AI cluster running on top of the Internet has data mined you, and has some deep fakes to sell you

This week, we look at:

Deep Fakes behind South Park creators' new parody, Sassy Justice
The AI-created author of the fake Hunter Biden intelligence report
GPT-3 winning the love and attention of people on Hacker News
How should we react to these robots and their desire to mess with our minds

Unlike equities, the crypto markets were born from machines, and are constructed from code. Hold dear the tokens in which you believe, and stay away from the stories of easy money. Nothing is easy. To win Russian roulette is not good fortune. It is, instead, a grave mistake to play a lethal game. Have you nothing to lose?

And then Brexit. And then Taiwan and China. And then Covid, again. And then, who knows.

From now on and forever, your counterparty is the data center running an AI cluster on top of the Internet. The data center that has already profiled you and knows everything about you. Bring the tinfoil hat.

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China covid pandemic decentralized finance macroeconomics philosophy

·Aug. 3, 2020

The symbolic battle over TikTok, intellectual property, and blockchain-based finance

This week, we look at:

The 10% collapse in GDP across the US & Eurozone, and how it compares with China's second quarter

The geopolitical battle over TikTok, its alleged spying, and understanding the winners and losers of the Microsoft deal

A framework for how to win in open source competition, explaining both Shenzhen manufacturing success and decentralized finance growth to $4 billion

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big tech marketing paytech philosophy

·Jun. 24, 2019

Lessons from Uber’s JUMP bikes on evolution in capitalism, Facebook’s crypto money monopoly

Jump is an electric bike that is being distributed by Uber, and it just happened to be launching 350 of them in the London borough of Islington. You can rent a bike for 5 minutes at £1, and pay £0.12 per minute thereafter. That's generally cheaper than a taxi, on average more expensive than a public bike subscription. So why am I going on an on about these bikes? Two things come to mind as jumping off points for deeper discussion: (1) the incentives and tactics of economic organisms under capitalism to gather and retain attention, and (2) the monopoly powers of Uber and Facebook, leading to the impact of Libra's cryptocurrency on open competition, as well as the public responsibilities of supra national corporations.

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Crypto exchanges / cap mkts macroeconomics philosophy venture capital

·May. 24, 2021

Bitcoin price falling doesn’t mean what Paul Krugman claims

This week, we cover these ideas:

That absurd Paul Krugman article about Bitcoin. Also Jim Cramer has things to say about financial regulation.
If all the prices are down, which they are, does that mean that everything is bad and wrong?
How timing is a personal financial planning problem, not a market value problem

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cybersecurity microeconomics philosophy

·Aug. 5, 2019

Losing our Sacred Data – how to make sense of Capital One, Equifax, and Facebook

Capital One recently suffered a data breach resulting from poor security practices that exposed 100 million credit card applications and accounts. They expect the breach to cost the company $150 million. Two years back, Equifax lost 140 million identities, again from poor security practices. At the time, I said that according to GDPR this should cost them $150 million. They have since settled for about $600 million -- though some of that seems to be in-kind services coverage like free credit monitoring (lol!). Separately, Facebook has settled for a $5 billion fine associated with the Cambridge Analytica privacy "breach".

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decentralized finance Embedded Finance philosophy

·Aug. 24, 2020

The absurdity of how the Internet is both beautiful and awful, and the memetic infection of Finance

This week, we get philosophical and look at:

Embedded finance and how it will be woven into the fabric of the Internet
Applying the philosophies of existentialism, nihilism, and absurdism to Finance
Parsing symptoms in decentralized finance (Based Protocol) as artistic protest
Finding Dadaist beauty in chaos

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decentralized finance NFTs and digital objects philosophy supply chain / trade visual art

·Feb. 8, 2021

Non-fungible tokens and crypto art (like Hashmasks) will create multi-billion markets for digital objects with financial features

This week, we look at:

Hashmasks, CryptoPunks, and other large NFT / crypto art projects generating tens of millions of USD trading volume
Perceptions of financial value, as well as whether it matters to have an “original” digital art piece relative to its digital copy
The intersection of collectibles with decentralized finance, and its collateralization, tranching, lending, and trading, as well as a view on 2021

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central bank / CBDC China decentralized finance digital lending identity and privacy philosophy

·Jun. 7, 2021

Purpose of Identity, its connection to finance, and implementations in the Euro digital wallet and DeFi protocols

This week, we cover these ideas:

The nature of digital identity, and the difference between a representation at some moment of time vs. a record of your being
The launch of the DeFi Passport by Arcx and how it can be useful for underwriting
The European Digital Wallet, and the implication of such a development for CBDCs and government services
China’s CBDC, Sweden’s BankID, and other existential crises

If you want to go deeper on this topic, we strongly recommend our conversation with Michael Cena of the Ceramic Network here. Whereas Michael started working on the identity problem by trying to add labels to people, where he ended up is creating a protocol that tracks historic software activity and interactions between actors. In thinking about the Ship of Theseus, this is the solution that says — your identity is your journey through the river of time itself, and not any particular stop you make along the way.

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