You might recall the name Michael Burry, even if you don’t know his face. He’s the hedge fund investor behind Scion Capital — Christian Bale immortalized his role in the 2008 economic crisis on screen in the “Big Short.” He recently tweeted the below. 

Mike Burry @michaeljburry

$TSLA at ~65% of the value of all other auto companies in the world, combined, & addition to the S&P 500 Dec 21 sets the top in motion. What do $TSLA, $BTC, option gamma traders have in common? Rhymes with Rubble. wsj.com/articles/tesla…

Bitcoin has always attracted its fair share of proponents and detractors, and quite honestly I have fallen in and out of love with the ‘magic internet money’ meme several times myself. I do think a negative critique, nonetheless by a legendary trader, of $tsla and $btc with their respective ‘armies’ who continue to buy the dip, warrants some analysis 🧐. Full disclosure: I’m still not selling, and have no plans to. 

My bitcoin thesis has wavered in the years since I first invested. In 2015, it was simple:

• Bitcoin had an incredible name that could easily resonate across cultures

• As a digital native, the internet did not have a ‘currency’ - and deserved one

  • Early video games I loved (queue Spryo the Dragon, and definitely Runescape) had in-game currency (i.e. Gems, Coins) that were redeemable for other digital assets

  • Even my favorite board game was Monopoly, and it never made sense that the bank 🏦 always had more money than the players.. 

• The Silk Road, online gambling, and other nefarious uses of bitcoin in my mind exemplified its value as a true medium of exchange… and while still disputed, proved that ‘free markets’ could regulate themselves better than the regulators

• Personal banking issues (proving my identity when I was under 18, the slow speed of transfers, wires, and ridiculous wait times on mostly-automated telephone calls) generally made me wary of the system and question if there was a better way. On the surface to me, was it actually possible to create a worse financial system than the one that had just levied the Great Depression?

• After Mt. Gox had crashed, the resiliency of the market, and new entrants (Circle, Coinbase, Kraken, etc.) showed steady interest and a somewhat ‘maturing’ moment that made me feel more comfortable to dabble in the mystery

While much of the narrative is the same, it’s really a different playing-field.

So my 2020 bitcoin thesis…at least that is, for now 😉 

• I would kind of liken the current state of the market to a global game of poker. You would think that means its a gamble - and in many ways, it is gambling - but poker is also a past-time, a community, and a psychological thriller that tests motivation and incentives in a series of high-stakes scenarios

  • Las Vegas, while #rekt during the pandemic, is fun for many reasons. Community can be built around fortunes built and burned, won and lost. And that is exactly what I have experienced with #bitcoin. 

  • Unlike Vegas, one does not need to be in Nevada (or Macau) to participate. You don’t need an airplane ticket, a car, or a fancy hotel room suite to be welcomed into the high-stakes room. The global nature, the game-theoretical economic assumptions, cast a far wider net of participants, with way less barriers to entry. 

  • And while we’re on the subject of Las Vegas, I’ve been thinking about Tony Hsieh a lot this weekend - and if you’re reading this, I hope you know how thankful I am to have a presence in your life. Rest in Paradise, Tony.

  
  

• Institutions and individuals are rapidly losing trust in the socio-economic and government structures that have been omniscient in our lives. While one could comfortably ignore bitcoin at $200, $1000, it becomes less easy to ignore at $20K. Number go up is more than a meme - it’s a form of validation. 

  • Investments in forward looking frontiers such as Tesla and Bitcoin are less about discounted cash flows and total expected returns, and more about hedging for doomsday / preservation of wealth if you’re pessimistic, or investing for a better tomorrow (even if it’s on Mars) if optimistic

    • The fact that bitcoin can occupy both an optimist and pessimist perspective (in addition to that of the neutral speculator) exemplifies the beauty of its principles and mystery of its origins

  • Bitcoin is truly the purest form of ‘fuck you’ money ever invented - see clip 😈

    

  • Watching that clip amps me up. But bitcoin is not about having a “fuck you” amount of money - it’s about a “fuck you” to the system that continues to fuck up, and working collectively to build something better. The best form of “Fuck you money” is not ever needing to cash out to fiat, and leaving your chips on the table.

• Previously, I used bitcoin in daily life - seriously - buying random things was proof to me that it worked. Instant transfers, viewing transactions on the blockchain, self-custody of assets - were all breakthrough features of what I felt was a new paradigm.

  • I no longer see those as the serendipitous reasons I fell in love with the space… though I remain impressed by the new innovations in the space

  • I see the fact that I’m buying more bitcoin each and every day, with the price per coin up ~100x since my first investment, despite losing my career (and certainly selling 90% of my early holdings way too early) as the best metric at all. Though I know deep down it is still the same gamble, it feels like an even bigger gamble to not have enough exposure now.

I ran into the Winklevoss twins (I can’t remember which one, though both were there) in 2012 in Eataly NYC’s men’s bathroom, and couldn’t help but ask them about the “Social Network” which was still making some waves. I know, this is a weird reflection, and even more odd I still recall that moment when I was 17. 

Their response - along the lines of “don’t believe everything you saw on the screen” showed there was an inherent truth to both sides of the narrative espoused. We like to think of life in black and white terms, but the truth is reality is far more grey. The same is true of bitcoin, the role it plays in our society and how that may pivot and change shape. It’s okay to recognize the narrative has taken new forms over time, but ‘bubble’ is an oversimplification of a game that has a lot of players, both good and bad. 

We don’t know how the future of bitcoin will manifest itself into our economic or social systems, but I’m pretty sure poker is not a bubble.

https://go123.substack.com/p/eth-at-500-lessons-from-the-last?s=w

A blanket wish that this time around, the community has learned the same lessons that took me too long to reconcile, so that we can actually go to the moon this time.

Crypto is all about building in public. As ether crosses $500, I’m reflecting back at the last time it hit this milestone, which forever stays ingrained not only in my mind, but also on this bottle of scotch (that I still have yet to finish.) 

The personal significance to #eth hitting $500 - commuting back from my marketing job at Pepsi (see: carbonated bubbles) in upstate NY to Manhattan, I saw a special deal in Grand Central Station’s Market for engraved Johnnie Walker bottles. Never the whiskey guy myself, but recognizing the ability to commemorate the moment in true CPG fashion, **I had to pull trigger on the meme. **I also decided at that moment it was time to fall down the rabbit hole, professionally - crypto was calling.

It sure did feel like a bubble - but I was already in the bubbles business, literally, and as I saw it, $500 eth proved something to the external world that had proved us ‘contrarians’ right…

• bitcoin was the future of money 

• smart contracts were going to change the world

• we were all going to have lambo’s on the moon (ok, i didn’t really believe that, but there was literally an eth-to-lambo website converter, and gosh, i definitely checked it more than once.)

Let me start by saying I was wrong. So. Fucking. Wrong. Technological change alone does not evolve the world, people who harness its capabilities do. And despite a ‘new paradigm’ - the truth was we were just scratching the surface. We were early.

If there’s a picture that could summarize everything going on at this time, it has to be fleeing the states with some crypto friends to Nicaragua, where we recognized we were in over our heads and didn’t know WTF was truly happening. I mean, the juxtaposition of the charts, the infinity pool… we were in over our heads.

We wanted to ‘bank the unbanked’ and not a single person in the country we talked to recognized that little orange symbol. In hindsight, everything about who we were and where we were was an absolute sell signal, and as much reflective of ‘the top’ for me personally as that NYTimes article has been for so many others.

So, what’s the point? 

• The herd is actually here this time. I guess we have made it now?! Those who have stuck around, for the memes, for the critical infrastructure, for building genuinely interesting products and services - y’all deserve a victory lap. 

• The fascinating aspect of this ‘industry’ ‘space’ ‘community’ or whatever we can label us is not in price inherently, but behind what the price denotes. Celebrating prices over users, utility, and adoption gives a false sense of security. Recognize that prices bring more interest and awareness, but not sustainability - which comes from building superior systems compared to that which exists today.

• Crypto-economic ideals = changing incentives of the status quo that are flawed. As the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed, there is so much work to be done. Stay weird, stay happy, stay healthy - but remember inequality runs rampant, and if we cannot help solve for it in the crypto world, we fall flat on our ideals.

As Thanksgiving comes around, let us remember the values Satoshi had set not through their actions, but through the lack thereof. 

In the next leg up, let’s show the world how we, the community, matured. That way, we can have a proper and deserving seat at the table, instead of being the crazy uncle. 

Of all the innovations to hit the crypto space, Unisocks holds a unique place. Originally an experiment, it's now an undeniable flex that somehow sits at the intersection of art, game theory, and always-on-liquidity.

https://twitter.com/Uniswap/status/1126506339075641344?s=20&t=osPKoRpGCcpelm5Hz9bTjA

Some very quick, tl;dr background – Uniswap's launch popularized the automated market maker (AMM), and very much changed the fate of the Ethereum network through offering frictionless, decentralized trading. If all of these words don't resonate, travel back in time to check out an OG Dec 2018 post on Uniswap from Cyrus Younessi on the launch and its core innovations.

https://medium.com/scalar-capital/uniswap-a-unique-exchange-f4ef44f807bf

To me, Unisocks were the first true bridge connecting somewhat abstract concepts of the blockchain world (tokens, bonding curves, AMMs, and of course, memes) to tangible, real-world assets.

Several years later, as whatever the "metaverse" is takes new shape and form, Unisocks are a true testament to that original creativity and inspiration that manifested in the crypto space – create cool things that resonate with your most loyal users. If you do that, you'll have the potential to change the world and make history, just as Unisocks have done.

As soon as DAOs start curating art galleries IRL, we’ll see Unisocks displayed in a museum. One day, I would bet even a "mockumentary" will outline the craziness that they brought to the world – most folks don't even realize $SOCKS holders got airdropped $1000s in UNI tokens just for owning and redeeming their blockchain socks.

Lol, how epic. In crypto, owning a pair of socks might just be the best investment you ever make. You can ask why, but you’re not likely to get a super academic answer. It probably is best you just recognize that in this space, we like the socks.

The proliferation of $SOCKS history will happen in time, but for now, there is a separate "holy grail" in the blockchain space that I'm passionate about solving – bringing physical assets on-chain – through which Unisocks is the perfect canvas for ripe experimentation.

One of the core tenets of blockchain protocols is interoperability. You can build on top of anything, practically. Those same building blocks are difficult to recreate outside of software. That's why Unisocks are so revolutionary – we can bring provable scarcity to physical assets in the same way that the blockchain brings that scarcity to tokens.

https://twitter.com/mikedemarais/status/1307495232108363777?s=20&t=uyXid_T8Skm1ei5VdbAmgg

Whatever happened to this awesome idea? Well, it's really hard to build a trustless custodial protocol for physical assets. Uncertainty and ambiguity abound our world, in stark contrast to the finality that exists in crypto. While it has been an idea for a while, it was not until the confluence of certain trends collided, such as DeFi and NFTs, that this idea was actually plausible.

At 4K, the intersection of the physical and digital world excites us. Typically, the relationship between these worlds has been a one way street, with the digital world adding value to our physical world. We use the web (aka, digital) to make our lives (aka, physical) more convenient. Almost anything you might need IRL can be reached not at the corner general store, but rather with a couple taps of your phone to source anything you need, from well, anywhere.

What if our physical, IRL world was able to add even more value to our digital presence? It is time this one-way street acts more like a bridge. That's what we're building at 4K with our trustless custodial protocol.

Unisocks are an amazing place to start and say "hello" to the ways in which our protocol can be interoperable with the Web 3 world. Their legacy, design (both socks and token), and impact on the broader crypto ecosystem are truly unparalleled. Plus... you get a "Redeemed" Unisocks NFT when you exchange your ERC-20 for the pair of real socks.

So, there's literally no way you can forge a real pair of Unisocks. The history is there, after all, just check etherscan :).

4K is now in possession of three pairs of mint-condition, yet-to-be unboxed Unisocks, and their corresponding “Redeemed” NFTs authenticating their legitimacy.

Our “re-tokenized” Unisocks of course no longer live in the original pool, however one of the pairs is being offered at a serious discount to the original ERC-20 token that is still tradable. So, if you've been on the fence about acquiring $SOCKS, but have always loved the actual Unisocks, perhaps now is the time to “arb” this market that was once solely digital, and now is physical, too.

https://4k.com/v1/collectible/65

@mikedemarais, if you somehow end up reading this, the marketplace for after-market physical Unisocks is finally here. Thanks for being such an inspiration to us all.

I snagged an iconic sub-domain on substack in November, 2020 - "go.substack.com" - and found out a few weeks ago, it re-directs to a new program the substack team has launched for writers.

I always predicted this day would come, but even so, have contrasting emotions of violation and vindication by how it played out in real time.

Just recently, I found out my personal Substack has a new sub-domain, and better yet, that it was my fault as a writer for not being consistently on the platform.

https://twitter.com/griff_owens/status/1481300611538858002?s=20&t=G1fTVXk0ch8wy0XokK-d-A

When I thought about getting off Medium in 2020, I didn’t want to be just another one of those guys starting a Substack. At the time, it felt like everyone was starting one, yet I had just taken a leap of faith as an entrepreneur and wanted a way to keep people in touch and gather their emails in one place. Of course, it became clear why Substack was the perfect solution, and I grabbed what I knew at the time was a catch - a two letter subdomain, my initials, GO, and the topic of my early-stage writing.

Given my history with Web 3, this experience served as a reminder that we sacrifice true ownership at the sake of convenience.

Substack did end up getting in touch with me, stating that those who are not active on the platform for only six months can be reassigned a domain. It doesn’t matter that you may be going through a serious life event preventing you from sharing and writing publicly, which I was.

Whether I am to trust and dig up web archives that this was a part of the terms of service a year ago when I signed up doesn’t really matter. The truth is, I gave up any sense of “ownership” when I signed up. The “GO” subdomain is now theirs, forever, because it is Substacks creation and ecosystem - not mine. I’ve always accepted this, I’m just now on the wrong receiving end.

The best thing to do to move forward is to simply double down on Web 3. It’s not to go back and argue about where I might have felt I was wronged, but to use this experience as compelling proof that more equitable digital ecosystems, where contributors can have true ownership and share upside in the value they create, are not just the future, they are here today.

And this experience, for me, is a very rude nudge that we are in control of our own destiny and our own words, and we have to do everything to protect that.

I’m so grateful to the Mirror team (@rafathebuilder and @veronicasaron) for helping me laugh as I was getting rugged and look forward to seeing all the ways in which the protocol will evolve.