A huge week for crypto
A recap of one the most news-filled weeks in Crypto's history, with a little extra context in case people only recently started paying attention again.
Upside
Finding positive-sum ways to look for asymmetric upside
Latest episodes
Liefste Noëmi
Liefste Noëmi
The potential Upside of the Education Bubble
Duolingo’s Earnings Report coming out last week led me to dust off the ol’ keyboard and write this blog.
'Never gonna happen'
In September 2022, I was celebrating a friends’ birthday in Diani, at the Indian Ocean in Kenya. We were hanging out at the Nomad Beach Bar when we met a lawyer, who was working for the UN. He was very confident, quite brazen, had many very strongly held opinions, and was overall a fun guy to talk to on an evening like that.
"No such thing as writer's block"
“There is no such thing as writer's block, only holding yourself to too high a standard. You can *always* put words down on a page, if you're willing to accept a sufficiently awful first draft.” - Eliezer Yudkowski When I read that, it really spoke to me. So I started retracing my steps.
What I'm watching in the markets
These are some rather rough, perhaps unprecedented, times.
New kinds of problems, Part II
Speaking about forecasts, the Ruble is trading higher than before the sanctions. This example was unfortunately an easy one when looking at energy markets and import/export but it serves as a great example for why it’s a non starter to use ‘new insight’ as a defense when something turns out to be wrong, while calling it hindsight when a past decision is criticized.
New kinds of problems, Part I
The Edelman Trust Barometer 2022 is out.
'False cause'
As I am genuinely grateful for the feedback I received on my last blog entry about Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter (and also read some poorly constructed mainstream reporting on the subject in the meantime), I figured I’d write one more post on the topic of the censorship /free speech /fake news debate. Besides, I am injured and at home, what else am I going to do?
Je Suis Charlie?
I often think about the fact that there are people that changed their profile picture to support #jesuischarlie, only to jump on the Cancel Culture bandwagon a few years later.
Up & to the right
Thousands of art works, poems, songs and books have addressed the concept of money at length. Depending on who you ask, speaking about it in too much detail can be considered taboo. Whatever words I choose to either serenade or criticize the concept of money today, I wouldn’t quite be able to do its historical significance enough justice. So let’s just say that money can be important and examine…
The trend is your friend
On identifying trends and managing risk.
Hunger Games
I have never felt more convinced of the fact that if one doesn’t at least learn the basics of trading, they -unfortunately- won’t truly be in control of their own standard of living anymore for the decades to come.
Custody Battle
Holding your own money is not a crime. We can't meet in the middle on that one.
Right-click save
Why it's pretty easy to defend that even so-called 'artistic' NFTs will not just turn out to be a bubbly fad, despite not knowing anything about art.
Stop-loss
Why 'UDP' is probably a better name for 'NFT', accompanied by a well-intended tangent about the need for stop-losses.
Secrets are lies - Part 2
In Dave Egger's amazing sci-fi novel 'The Every', a central theme is that citizens of the world have completely lost their privacy. All life experiences are shared, all habits get tracked and honed, all data is saved on the app of a megacompany (think Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft and your bank
Secrets are lies - Part 1
Statement: 'Cryptocurrency is used for illicit purposes.' Sigh. I'm going to choose to quote Forbes, the United Nations and SWIFT here: “The majority of cryptocurrency is not used for criminal activity. According to an excerpt from Chainalysis’ 2021 report
A generational opportunity (but it's not what you think.)
After elaborating on the deeply entrenched concepts of Gell-Mann amnesia and Russell conjugation as a part of our legacy media's mostly regrettable customs, I believe the time has come to dissect the most common misconceptions in their reporting on one of their seemingly least favorite topics. Cryptocurrency. My aspiration is to do this concisely, but with sufficient granularity nonetheless.
Russell's Compass
Let’s focus for a minute on how things are said, rather than on actual content.