Keep the faith
Joined September 2018
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The Fourth Wave retweeted
MAYBE I WAS WRONG ABOUT BLOCKCHAIN TECHNOLOGY
I wrote about how I always used to make fun of the guys who said things like "Bitcoin is speculative, but the underlying blockchain technology is interesting." And now I think maybe they kinda had a point.
The Fourth Wave retweeted
In times like this, if you're a long term investor, you don't want to be waffling about being in or out, you want to be stacking units systematically. Don't get confused by the traders, it's a separate game.
On unit accumulation, depending on how long you've been in the game, it's helpful to think in "relative units" of the investment you did best with. I'll use $ETH because the math is easy and relates well to younger networks.
ETH has ~120M units. Let's say I once held 10 ETH.
Now I'm looking to stack $SOL, but SOL has ~636M units, or ~5.3x the # of units. Therefore, to have an equivalent position size in network terms, I'd need 53 SOL. If I want to own double the network % of SOL, that I owned of ETH, I'd need 106 SOL.
Or, perhaps I'm considering $TIA, which has ~1.16B total supply, or ~9.7x the # of units of ETH. In that case, I'd need 97 units of TIA to have a network equivalent. If I want to place a bigger network bet on TIA, because the network value is lower than when I entered ETH, then 10x the % ownership would require me to accumulate 970 TIA. 100x the % ownership = 9,700 TIA. Going for significantly more ownership, at cheap prices, if you're right, can lead to asymmetric outcomes.
$ZEC is another good example of this, since its supply mirrors $BTC's. And so it's easy to think of your "dream # of BTC," and aim to accumulate that in ZEC, if you're so inclined.
Pick your networks of choice, and do the math. I have always found thinking in unit terms keeps me grounded, optimistic, and goal oriented in dreary times. I can then dream about future upside in the thick of the bull, but the important thing is to systematically stack the units with a high conviction methodology in the bear or early-bull pullbacks.
In terms of where we are now, which is probably why most of you are still reading :) BTC has been bleeding out the long-tail while remaining resilient, with many names 20-40%+ down from the highs while BTC is down just shy of 10%. You can either say BTC has already bled the risk appetite out of the market and so most of the work is done, or you can say BTC hasn't dropped much so it'll be really terrible if it goes cliff diving. I'm sympathetic to the former view.
I read this as an early-bull opportunity rather than a warning sign that this move was a "bull trap," and so I'm inclined to be a buyer. You have to respect the possibility of lower levels, and so tranche out any dry powder that remains with % cash used corresponding to % probability those levels are the local bottom - yes, you likely end up with some excess cash if not all levels are hit, but that's okay. And don't forget, there's already opportunity in front of you.
The Fourth Wave retweeted
In 2017 a wise man told me: “When you think it’s over, it’ll just be getting started.”
I think we’ll reflect upon 2026 as such a period for blockchains.
The Fourth Wave retweeted
$ETH
Eth has been rangebound for the last several years...
I'd like to believe this goes past the previous ath's in terms of a cyclical play...
The play for me is simple - I'll keep adding if theres anything meaningful correction... and hedge spot exposure at key macro levels...
Bankless sends its regards...
$ETH
Offloading my spot at the high 4k and switching into swing shorts was not a popular take…
Here we are several months later and we’re starting to see eth doing the rounds again…
Fascinating behaviour - everybody wanted it at the highs and here we are several months later…
Save the long form thesis bs - put on a pair of momentum oscillators and moving averages - there will be a time to buy eth and momentum again - it’s honestly not that complicated
The Fourth Wave retweeted
A few thoughts on ZCash (disclosure: Paradigm is an investor in ZEC and ZODL):
- All blockchain ecosystems struggle with long-term funding, especially of public goods, and an inflation-funded developer fund is an elegant mechanism to do so. How this fund is allocated is a fair debate, and we should strive to improve it. But, we believe the dev fund is important, particularly in this age of AI cyber capabilities, rate of quantum progress, etc.
- As ZCash grows in acceptance and adoption as a private complement to Bitcoin, we think pure coinvoting governance introduces unpredictability that could limit long-term trust as a monetary asset, and it is better for the project to combine coinvoting with other forms of governance.
The Fourth Wave retweeted
Dario has written that we need to “pace the frontier,” and Sam has agreed. People may be surprised by my response: go ahead.
You guys are the frontier. By any reasonable metric — market share, revenue growth, model capability — the two of you have a duopoly on frontier intelligence. You’ve also claimed the lead is widening because of recursive self-improvement.
I don’t see what you see in the lab. If the unreleased models are scary enough that you think you should slow down, I support your decision to be responsible.
But stop pretending you need anyone else’s permission. Stop pretending antitrust law has to be suspended so you can form a cartel. Stop pretending you need a regulatory approval process that supersedes product liability. Stop pretending METR is independent when it is intertwined with Anthropic’s investors and staff. Stop pretending you need those same evaluators to police competitors who aren’t even at the frontier.
Most of all, stop pretending the motivation to slow down is purely altruistic. You face massive product-liability exposure if your products enable a truly damaging cyberattack. The market already punishes models that behave in unpredictable or unauthorized ways. After the Hugging Face episode, it is simply good business for OpenAI and Anthropic to trade some raw power for reliability and predictability. Call it alignment if you want. It is also just giving customers what they want.
Pacing the frontier would also create breathing room for a more intelligent conversation about regulation than Bernie Sanders’ “shut it all down.” China is very unlikely to join a global agreement, as you know, and that has to be taken into account as well.
So go ahead and pace the frontier. You are the ones setting it. The easiest way not to build superintelligence is for you to agree not to build it. Demanding your preferred regulatory framework as the price of that will look like blackmail of the public and the political system. So just do it.
If you do, you’ll buy goodwill for the next conversation. If you don’t, we’ll know this was just another bid for regulatory capture — or an election-season psyop.
The Fourth Wave retweeted
I’m a retired brain surgeon and I wanna tell you why you feel like life is passing by. I just need one minute to explain this to you so hang in there.
Repetitive daily routines stop the brain from recording clear detailed memories. When every day looks the same, your brain does not track time the same as a clock does. It tracks change. If nothing new happens then days, months, and years start to blur together.
This is know as Time compression. When life lacks variety, your brain compresses past days together, making it feel like time is sped up.
To stop feeling like life is passing you by, add new experiences to your life. Break routine habits, like changing your daily home routine, taking a different route to work, or trying a new hobby.
Schedule small trips or plan new adventures so your days do not blend together.
Practice mindfulness by staying fully focused on what you are doing right now and not trying to race off to the next task.
Keep a journal and write down happy memories or memorable parts of the day before you go to sleep.
Take deep, calm breaths when you feel anxious or rushed to return your focus to the moment.
You can and you will retrain your brain to not feel like life is passing you by by following these few simple measures.
The Fourth Wave retweeted
Gavin Baker: Anthropic Believes They Could Be the ONLY Company Left in the World
“I would certainly discourage Dario from saying that ever again to anyone.”
@GavinSBaker:
“Internally, Anthropic is very confident. I have been told by multiple people I trust that Dario has said that Anthropic might be the only private company in the world at some point.
Think about that. In this vision, an Anthropic maximalist vision, there's Anthropic, and then there are governments, and that's it.
So there's a lot of confidence. I'm sure they have more advanced checkpoints than Fable up their sleeve. They've executed really, really well.
I would probably take the under on them being the only private company in the world. Yeah, I think it's gonna be a long time before they land a rocket.”
@Jason:
“Or they deliver your lunch. I don't know. There might be other businesses in the world. Zipline might want to bring you a burrito. Uber might want to take you somewhere. Waymo might want to drive you home. But sure, Dario.”
@DavidSacks:
“I might interpret that as a negative signal because it's so hubristic. This is getting into SBF land a little bit.”
Gavin:
“I would certainly discourage Dario from saying that ever again to anyone.”
The Fourth Wave retweeted
going to add my two cents here
i believe ppl are generally upset with base because you guys pick & choose what you want to support onchain, because you never know what is going to work and what isnt going to work so it isnt as simple as objectively determining what is positive sum beforehand
for example, base did a big push on creator coins, you even directly bought balaji's coin, but base was not as supportive of memecoins, especially the ones that were doing a lot of volume onchain and could have benefitted from exchange listings earlier, but the creator coin & memecoin charts ended up looking near identical, with most of the creator coin charts not doing nearly as well as a lot of the largest memes on base - i personally think there are some unique reasons for why they didnt work and will work in the future but thats for another post
from my pov there are two different ways to value crypto assets, one is based on the fundamentals of the underlying business, and the other is more intangible value determined by the community of users of the network and driven by attention/momentum/belief etc
hyperliquid is a great business that makes real revenues and is valued in part because of those revenues, but it also trades at a premium because of the collective belief that their users have in the network and their future plans to execute on that vision
bitcoin on the other hand, makes no revenue, but is the largest crypto asset by market cap because it trades purely on the collective belief that it is a better store of value than depreciating fiat currencies and the network grew so large that it became a self-fulfilling prophecy
ethereum is somewhere in between in that it does make real revenues but if you simply valued it purely off of those revenues as you would a tech stock it would trade 95% lower, ethereum also has some intangible value determined by the network of cypherpunks who are majority stakeholders of the network, and they believe that its value as an asset is more than what you would come to conclude on based off of purely p/e ratios
tokenization, stablecoins, perpetuals, and prediction markets have been crypto's greatest success stories to date, tokenization in particular has been so successful because it is one of the only ways to accurately put a dollar value on this intangible value of culture and attention
memecoins are denigrated by a lot of the corporate entities in crypto, but i think what a lot of people fail to realize is that the same intangible value that drove bitcoin and ethereum to be the #1 & #2 largest assets in crypto is the same intangible value that attracts retail to speculating on memecoins, doge sits at $11B and has outlasted a majority of coins over the past decade, its value is purely derived from how internet natives value culture and memetics on the internet
do i think its important to uplift and support protocols in defi/rwas/consumer etc etc? yes, but its just as important to recognize what your users are interested in trading, the best analogy i can make is that if you are a mayor of a city and you have patrons who want to go to nightclubs or go to the casino or go to bars, you would not exclude this activity because you only want people to build businesses like banks, restaurants, corner stores, bookstores etc etc. - for an L1 to thrive it needs to have a diverse ecosystem of all things, and it is clear from the data that onchain trading volumes directly positively impact the native blockchain, whether thats in bringing more attention to the chain, or increasing fee revenues, or increasing revenues of underlying infra providers, or attracting new builders to create new products - best example of this is how bonk revitalized solana at the lows & was a very core reason that trading activity came back onchain + the main reason the first set of solana mobile phones sold out
all L1s & L2s are social networks with their own ecosystems and their own culture, with permissionless networks you cannot control what people build or trade, but you can find ways to provide support across the board and contribute to ideating on how to make trends more sustainable
The Fourth Wave retweeted
Compute will become worthless.
The GPU barons spending billions on compute farms today are akin to the carriage barons of the 1900s that spent building out infrastructure for horse carriages, lengthening the bottleneck, blind to the machine that’s coming to widen it.
Trade: the DuPont family started buying General Motors stock in 1914, when the auto industry was still young and one that was treated as a niche.
I.e., compute becoming valuable because AI feeds on it is not a moat, but a bounty, an incentive for engineers to solve its scarcity.
1. AI demand makes compute scarce.
2. Scarcity makes compute extremely profitable.
3. Profit attracts capital into photonics, neuromorphic chips, wafer-scale chips, better memory, better cooling, better networking, better algorithms.
4. Compute gets cheaper per unit.
As better ways to compute, better means to produce compute, or better ways to use compute arise, all the capex we burnt on traditional compute will go to waste, leaving dead assets in the books of several corporations.
In the 1800s, agriculture depended heavily on natural nitrogen sources like Peruvian guano and Chilean nitrates. These were scarce, and inconveniently located making them geopolitically strategic. Then, two german chemists, Haber and Bosch, developed a way to fix nitrogen from the air into ammonia, with lab success in 1909 and industrial scale by 1913. The previous scarcity, “where do we find enough nitrogen?” (Akin to “where do we find enough GPUs”), was attacked by an advancement: Industrial chemistry.
The Fourth Wave retweeted
My Full @pacifica_fi Review, Why I Almost Never Gave It a Second Chance & Results
"If a tool improves your profitability and your quality of life, you should use that tool."
I've written lately about the phenomenon of products going to market and getting hyped too soon, and how that is a disservice to everyone involved.
I've tested and written about countless protocols, so when Pacifica first hit the scene, I naturally tested it.
And I almost never came back.
At that time, individual deposits were capped at a really low amount. That caused one of the few liquidations I have had in my life, because I was unable to deposit more money into my account to survive an unexpected temporary drawdown.
After that experience I believed I had written it off for good.
Just a few more dollars in the account and that temporary drawdown would have turned into a profitable trade.
Because of that bias from being an early tester, I never imagined myself coming back to it. I held a grudge.
But when all of the Phoenix hype was going around - another product that got the spotlight before it was ready to receive it - one of my followers mentioned Pacifica again.
I honestly came back to it expecting to write a scathing review. I expected to confidently and aggressively explain why it was just another cookie-cutter perp venue that was not special in any meaningful way. Because in the great "perp dex" bubble we find ourselves in most of them are not.
With the last thing I liked suffering an exploit, the popular move for me right now would be to simply hate everything that is not Hyperliquid. So for the sake of my social capital, I did not want to like it.
But not only did I like it, I have started to fall in love.
Anyone who has been hurt in the past knows falling in love the next time is much harder. You are more cautious. You scrutinize harder. You look for red flags in places they do not typically exist.
Look, it is not a true DEX.
But none of them are. Not from a decentralization purist point of view.
It is more like a permissionless CEX working toward becoming a DEX. So while I will pick on this point, it is also basically the entire perps landscape.
The first thing I scrutinized hard was security. These are the questions we all should be asking in a post-Drift world.
Pacifica solved the Drift vulnerability even before Drift was exploited.
I actually have a lot of respect for that. It is one thing for the industry to be reactionary and solve something after the fact. It is another thing for a team to be forward-thinking and solve problems before they arise. That is a good sign.
The second thing I studied was liquidity.
Surprisingly thick on all of the assets I typically trade.
No one will ever compare to the liquidity of Hyperliquid. But what matters to me is not some astronomical amount of liquidity. What matters is whether the exchange has enough liquidity to support my trading sizes without getting wrecked by slippage.
And they do.
I also pushed the team to tell me more about their market makers. All too often, these exchanges only run with one or two primary market makers.
While the team would not disclose the exact number to me, they did give me a ballpark, and it is definitely more generous than a lot of “perp DEXs” carry.
That matters, because if your venue only runs on one or two primary market makers, things can go sideways real quick.
As I have highlighted recently during my testing, I absolutely love their scale limit order feature.
There does not exist a venue-native scale order feature this advanced.
Typically, you would have to pay a third-party terminal to get advanced order features like this, which is something I am against doing at my core.
But when I first started testing the feature, it only allowed you to scale into positions, not out of them.
It seemed like a common sense oversight.
I brought this up to the team, and they pushed it live in less than two weeks.
I told them their vault page experience was less than desirable. Even though I do not use vaults, when I test something, I test every aspect of it.
Once again, in less than two weeks, they pushed an update.
Having the features I dream of using native to the venue is so important to me. I have written about this multiple times over the past year. I have begged other protocols that I love to continue to make front-end improvements. But most teams are satisfied with status-quo for user experience and that satisfaction with the lack of continuous improvement is something that really irks me.
Having those features presented in a sexy format that is intuitive and easy to use makes the trading experience exponentially better for me.
It quite literally improves the quality of my life.
And any time a tool can improve the quality of your life in some way, it is a tool worth using.
I can accomplish anything I want to do on Hyperliquid. I am not going to pretend those things cannot be accomplished almost anywhere perps are traded.
But the experience can take more time, friction, or in some cases offline calculations that impede the workflow.
That time and energy matter to me. The reduction of annoyance and friction matters to me. A lot.
Maybe it's just from my many years as CEO of a B2C company. Maybe as a result I've inherited a giant pet peeve against friction because I understand the path to on-going to success is to always reduce friction and to never stop obsessing about the customer experience.
So while on one hand we have a team that has never stopped shipping - jobs not finished - there do, in fact, remain some unfinished pieces of the puzzle.
For most of my trading life, I have never paid much attention to funding rates. 10.95% annualized as a standard is just the cost of doing business, assuming you are betting with the majority.
But I noticed on Pacifica that the standard rate was higher and swung more widely, even on some of the majors.
I brought this up to the team and suggested they focus on smoothing out and reducing the base funding rate. They said they were working on it.
While they have not officially confirmed it has been smoothed yet, my personal observation over the last 24 hours is that the base funding rate, at least on majors, seems to now be industry standard at 10.95%, with far fewer swings outside of standard.
That is good, because for a little while there I was seriously concerned about some of the funding rates I was seeing.
I suspect the funding rate smoothing process is not fully complete yet, but I can already see visible results.
The other areas where I think they need continued improvement are the tradable asset list and advanced reporting & analytics.
The asset list is broader than a lot of venues, but not nearly broad enough. ONDO is missing, as one example.
I also want to see better reporting.
This is something I am a stickler on.
Stop lumping realized and unrealized profit together, which is the HL standard.
Give people more insight into their trades from an analytics perspective. The more traders can study their own patterns and history using readily available data, the better traders they can become.
I am told by the team that both of these outstanding items are being worked on, but they have yet to be realized.
I came here wanting to write a negative review because I had developed a premature early-release negative bias.
Instead I found myself having a trading experience that was fun and rewarding.
If a tool improves your profitability and your quality of life, you should use that tool.
I am NOT here to tell you that you should use Pacifica. That is up to you.
If you enjoy a good quality of life and profitability using Aster, then by all means use Aster - even though it is my most hated of all.
Because your profit and your quality of life are what matter most.
I am not ready to leave Hyperliquid just yet. But as I continue on my Pacifica journey, I do find myself starting to shift more and more volume to the venue.
I truly enjoy the trading experience and profiting on Pacifica.
I only enjoy the act of profiting on Hyperliquid.
Those two experiences are not the same.
It is my belief that I should be able to enjoy the experience of doing my job. And trading is my job.
Now, as an account with followers, every time I either love something or hate something, some jackoff has to ask, “How much were you paid to say this?”
And as has been true since the creation of my account on X, the answer will always be zero.
I do not sell my voice.
And quite frankly, I do not even care if you use things I like or not. It makes zero impact on my life or my PnL.
The only thing I have received from the team, other than attentive listening to feedback - which they do with all users - was a temporary discount tier.
That is something anyone with established volume on other platforms can be given. I am not special in that regard.
After the temporary grace period ends, I will have to earn my discounts like everyone else.
So that is my review: not paid, not sponsored, not blindly bullish, and not pretending the product is finished.
Pacifica still has things to improve. But the direction of travel matters, and right now I see a team listening, shipping, fixing, and building with a mindset of constant improvement.
I came back looking for reasons to hate it.
Instead, I found a venue that made trading feel enjoyable again.
🫡 From the depths —
The White Whale 🐋
The Fourth Wave retweeted
The vibes in SF feel pretty frenetic right now. The divide in outcomes is the worst I've ever seen.
Over the last 5yrs, a group of ~10k people - employees at Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, Nvidia, Meta TBD, founders - have hit retirement wealth of well above $20M (back of the envelope AI estimation).
Everyone outside that group feels like they can work their well-paying (but <$500k) job for their whole life and never get there.
Worse yet, layoffs are in full swing. Many software engineers feel like their life's skill is no longer useful. The day to day role of most jobs has changed overnight with AI.
As a result,
1. The corporate ladder looks like the wrong building to climb.
Everyone's trying to align with a new set of career "paths": should I be a founder? Is it too late to join Anthropic / OpenAI? should I get into AI? what company stock will 10x next? People are demanding higher salaries and switching jobs more and more.
2. There’s a deep malaise about work (and its future).
Why even work at all for “peanuts”? Will my job even exist in a few years? Many feel helpless. You hear the “permanent underclass” conversation a lot, esp from young people. It's hard to focus on doing good work when you think "man, if I joined Anthropic 2yrs ago, I could retire"
3. The mid to late middle managers feel paralyzed.
Many have families and don't feel like they have the energy or network to just "start a company". They don't particularly have any AI skills. They see the writing on the wall: middle management is being hollowed out in many companies.
4. The rich aren’t particularly happy either.
No one is shedding tears for them (and rightfully so). But those who have "made it" experience a profound lack of purpose too. Some have gone from <$150k to >$50M in a few years with no ramp. It flips your life plans upside down. For some, comparison is the thief of joy. For some, they escape to NYC to "live life". For others still, they start companies "just cuz", often to win status points. They never imagined that by age 30, they'd be set. I once asked a post-economic founder friend why they didn't just sell the co and they said "and do what? right now, everyone wants to talk to me. if i sell, I will only have money."
I understand that many reading this scoff at the champagne problems of the valley. Society is warped in this tech bubble. What is often well-off anywhere else in the world is bang average here.
Unlike many other places, tenure, intelligence and hard work can be loosely correlated with outcomes in the Bay. Living through a societally transformative gold rush in that environment can be paralyzing. "Am I in the right place? Should I move? Is there time still left? Am I gonna make it?" It psychologically torments many who have moved here in search of "success".
Ironically, a frequent side effect of this torment is to spin up the very products making everyone rich in hopes that you too can vibecode your path to economic enlightenment.
The Fourth Wave retweeted
There’s an unprecedented fervent energy in the world around entrepreneurial pursuit
Some of it is driven by all the opportunities AI is opening up
But some of it is a quieter sense underneath. That our window to build things that matter, as humans, is shorter than we thought
The Fourth Wave retweeted
The biggest opportunity for would-be startup founders is AI. But the most underpriced opportunity is probably non-AI ideas. So if you have a good non-AI idea, go for it, because everyone else is going to overlook it.
