Narrative over Numbers: Andreessen Horowitz's State of Crypto Report
newsletter.mollywhite.net
newsletter.mollywhite.net
I hope she gets her whistleblower reward. This is the sort of trivial yet concrete lying regulators love.
Unsure. Statute doesn’t seem to require being an insider, just providing “the Commission with information in writing that relates to a possible violation of the federal securities laws” [1]. (This may not count as independent knowledge, i.e. “factual information in [her] possession that is not derived from publicly available sources” [2].)
[1] https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-17/chapter-II/part-240/su...
[2] https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-17/chapter-II/part-240/su...
What it is going to take to turn a generation permanently away from crypto is a serious drop in prices and that hasn’t really happened yet. I mean, Bitcoin has fluctuated, not in any particular direction. Bored Apes are down from the peak but it hasn’t been a bloodbath.
So blockheads are starting to spam the Bitcoin blockchain with shitcoins and Pepecoin is getting talked up (how is it we didn’t have Pepecoin three years ago?) but now most people just don’t care. In my pod we are taking bets on if Pepecoin or BRC-20 are going to get mentioned at all in Bloomberg Businessweek at all.
Yeah, and Worldcoin is still scanning eye-balls for proof-of-personhood [0] whilst AI bros here are AI generating everything in front of your screen all for the sake of this 'AGI' nonsense. None of it can be stopped and there is nothing to trust since it can be easily faked with AI.
> What it is going to take to turn a generation permanently away from crypto is a serious drop in prices and that hasn’t really happened yet.
Believing that there is something to 'turn a generation permanently away from crypto' is just as delusional and naïve as believing that there is something out there to stop the influx of deepfakes and faked AI generated content.
In both cases, and especially public blockchains and AI projects, the cat is out of the bag and it cannot be stopped and both will continue to be used.
[0] https://worldcoin.org/blog/engineering/humanness-in-the-age-...
Anything short of that will simply lead to crypto being replaced by some other craze: meme stock, MLM products, forex derivatives and what have you.
There are no such limits for venture capital and private equity or state-backed wealth funds. That's why Softbank and Saudi Arabia can flood SV startups with money, even as the companies themselves use that money to somehow deepen their losses further.
The market has moved from speculative to mature. The prices will always fluctuate but it'll remain a 1-3 Trillion market for the time being and for the use cases that it enables.
Fraud exists. (You should know. The cryptocurrency universe is mostly that.) But more importantly, judges exist, and they do not give a single sweet damn that you say it "cannot be reversed".
(And a hearty LOL at "costs pennies". Ethereum gas fees yesterday, on the say you posted this, averaged eight bucks in actual-money terms. I can send a wire cheaper than that.)
Failure rates: https://www.swift.com/news-events/news/settlement-fails-gett...
Finality: https://www.swift.com/our-solutions/swift-gpi/stop-and-recal...
High fees and days/weeks wait times for international wire transfers are common knowledge - check at almost any bank.
The above links partly explain why this situation exists in a world where all money is basically already "digital".
It's kind of not. And the only system making radical inroads to actually improving the status quo (which has been deeply entrenched for decades) is crypto, which right now offers real solutions adopted by consumers and institutions.
Doesn't mean its perfect or that there's no dark side, just as with everything. But the media - and HN largely, on this topic - loves to play up such things, so good luck finding much accurate information there, or here.
Because the fundamental task at hand is only partially about transferring money.
In reality, it's mostly about precisely what crypto payments seek to circumvent: fraud prevention and KYC.
Just because the news typically only reports the murders that happen in a given city, doesn't mean that the only thing that's going to happen to someone in that city is to get murdered. Crypto reporting is much the same.
But yeah, technically you are still more likely to get murdered there, so only go if you're really into the other things it offers.
Just don't assume that with hundreds of billions invested, from all kinds of participants large and small, that the entire city is a fraud or otherwise nefarious. It's a major city - it has a lot going on, much under-reported.
Unless you live there, and you read the local news, attend local events, etc. Then you might have a better idea of what it's really like, and which alleys not to walk down alone at night, and where you can get the best bagels.
So this is why Ransomware peddlers and North Korea use bank transfers to move their money around, and why dark market users mail checks to each other? Or do they use crypto coins instead?
Crypto is money. Checks are money. Bank transfers are money. Cash is money.
It's all money, and it all "facilitates" crime.
Unfortunately, I assumed you knew a slight more about the topic you're discussing than you evidently do.
My reply's intended to suggest that the privacy coins you are referring to - unknowingly, or otherwise - are simply another form of money. Bracketing them with regular crypto, something I did only in keeping with how you initiated, isn't the best.
In practice, privacy coins are a small subset of crypto, some of the least-used of all types available. And again there are also legitimate use-cases with them that reduces this further to the point it's a bit silly. A subset, of a subset, of a...
But, you're welcome to succumb to the endless brainwash of BS and biased media reporting for crypto and think whatever will make you happy. Reality lay in waiting, for whenever you wish to join it and the complicated world that doesn't get clicks.
Meanwhile what you've done is failed to read my comments properly and then attempt to insult me. Read them until you understand, and if you don't, ask questions. That's the spirit of discussion and learning I'm engaged in.
If you aren't, good luck with that, and I wish you the best.
I would re-evaluate your methods.
Money laundering alone is estimated in the trillions per year according to the UN. This is significantly greater than the entire value of all privacy coins combined:
https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/money-laundering/overview.htm...
Eg, even if the entirety of Monero was purchased only for money laundering, it could only account for 0.1-0.2% of the total that occurs. Where is the other 99.8-99.9% being conducted? What systems are "facilitating" that?
Well, everything that isn't crypto... banks, cash, checks, etc.
As I pointed out at the beginning.
For some of those systems, it would be a stretch to call them blockchains (there's no comparable data structure, sometimes not even consensus), but the important thing is that they come with peer-reviewed BFT security guarantees. So I do wonder, if you can have BFT guarantees for such a system, and still more capacity than you'll likely ever need, why wouldn't you?
Mastercoin IIRC was further tweaked into something called Counterparty, on top of which ERC-20 -like tokens can be created that exist on the Bitcoin blockchain. I'm pretty sure there are special wallets that still trade them floating around somewhere, because it's not on its own separate blockchain. That said it was like all crypto spaces, a sock puppet filled ghost town as there are vanishingly few people who are interested in collecting obnoxious self-centered tech libertarian brolet memes.
I mean everything has been done before in crypto, often multiple times, with no success that lasts, because the people in charge are almost universally incapable of cooperating with one another in the public's best interest. The same public they want to lure into their little feudal utopian experiment.
They can go pound sand, or even better get publicly mocked and despised as accomplices to a thinly disguised confidence game aiming to enrich themselves at everyone else's expense. Anyone pushing back on this is doing the lord's work.
I support people spending their lives and money validating this claim. But they shouldn’t lie. This article cites specific lies that Andreessen told to sell crypto. At the very least, that should result in fines and sanctions.
Makes things sound more definitive, and since they're just statements detached from actual reasoning, they're difficult to contradict with anything other than "no" or "why though", which sounds like a much worse argument than it is, and is certainly less punchy than the original claim.
Crypto is like the Segway, launched with breathless fanfare, yet in the end it won't revolutionize a thing.
The worst that will happen is a slap on the wrist, give the regulators parts of the money and that is it.
For decades, there is always a regulatory loop hole that is exploited by opportunists and the regulators will fix it up later. Either way, the rich players get away with it before the rules are in place or pay a small fine after netting massive returns.
This is no different to the lies and the grifts already happening in AI. Both crypto and AI will have their regulatory loop holes patched up and will increasingly get harder to get away with it.
Assuming 1% annual management fees, Andreessen Horowitz has made over $120mm on its crypto funds [1]. It prints at least $75mm a year irrespective of performance.
Marc is fine.
[1] ($350mm x 5y + $515mm x 3y + $2.2bn x 2y + $4.5bn) x 1%