People say USDT is not backed, therefore a time bomb waiting to explode. I don’t think so. There are many things Tether can do to protect its peg, even if underlining fiat assets are not fully liquid, or not there at all. What are those things?👇 1. Grow user base as fast as possible. More users, bigger volumes, more dispersed ownership help with price volatility. When you have so many people trading in and out…
Tether has a $60 billion market cap. Everyone thinks it takes a lot of money to start something like that. The truth is you need very little to start a Tether. Let’s walk through how to make a Tether-like stablecoin w/ $500, and learn how stablecoin works along the way👇 Step 1. Deploy your own ERC20 token. This is the easiest part. Let’s say you want to make a stablecoin called “Sether”. (That’s so imaginative,…
There’s a lot of hype around CBDCs.But after a closer look at some CBDC pilots, I think we’re NOT going to see a lot of CBDCs except from a few big countries. Here’s why 👇 1. Building one from scratch is hard. A CBDC is essentially a stablecoin backed by the central bank. Seeing it from that perspective you may think it’s easy. You can deploy a ERC20 token in half an hour. Now just…
I lived half my life in China, half in US. The US media coverage about China is stuck in the cold war and laughable at best. Yet people eat it up. Here’re 10 myths about China you often hear that are patently false👇 Note: I’m not interested in value judgments. Reality doesn’t care about what you think how things should be. Read this only if you want to expand your horizon and understand other versions…
There’s no investment alpha in the average. You are NGMI by being middle of the pack. I read the June 2020 investor briefing by James Anderson of Scottish Mortgage AGM— one of the best performing investment funds in Europe. It’s one of the most powerful presentations on investment philosophy that I’ve found recently. I got so much out of it that I re-read several times and also watched the matching Youtube video. Here’re some notes…
In fact, not only ethereum, other newer smart contract chains will also outgrow bitcoin in market cap overtime. This will be obvious to you if you compare the return history of stocks v.s. gold👇 The chart below compares the long-run investment returns* per annum of US stocks vs gold for the past 200 years. Note this is “real returns”, i.e. effect of inflation taken out. (* Data from Deutsche Bank, 2020) Two things stand out:…
Crypto pundits: “Short-term price doesn’t matter. Just buy & hodl forever!” If you follow that blindly, you will get rekt. Not convinced? Look at these shocking lessons from the dot-com bubble👇 1. Yes, the tech was exponential. The number of internet users grew at a compound rate of over 20% a year since 1995. Now reaching half of world population. Since the 1990s there hasn’t a single year where the growth rate was not positive.…
A whopping 40% of my newsletter subscribers said they want to find their life purpose. I understand the sentiment. I was there once, too. But we’re really barking up the wrong tree here. When you think you need life purpose, what you actually need is something else. You’re a personified version of universal consciousness, whose nature is creative. Creating meaning and purpose is what we humans do. There is no such thing called “purpose” that…
Here’s the hilarious story of how I got my first job working for a US senator, 5 months after arriving in America, with no skill, no connection, and terrible English 🤪 It was my first semester in grad school. I had landed in Washington DC for the first time a few months earlier with two suitcases. I was 23, had no friends, and knew nothing about America. School was boring. I hated Taco Bell burritos…
A few months ago I took a deep dive into investing in DeFi. Won some, lost some, learned a ton. Here are 10 lessons learned that I wish I knew 6 months ago 👇 1. Don’t overpay The #1 risk in DeFi and crypto overall is overpaying for your investment. This is an exciting industry promising exponential growth. But there is a perennial tendency for market to get way ahead of actual development, even though…
Unpopular opinion: If humans procreate less and live longer, the world would be a better place. I don’t have kids and don’t want any. But I intend to live to 120. My lifestyle is better for humanity. Here’s why 👇 If you ask an investor to give you $20,000 a year to invest in asset X for 30 years. After 30 years, X will start to pay back. You also tell the investor this is…
If you are new to crypto, here is a list to help you think about if you should invest in ETH. Everyone can see the upside. But what’s the downside? Baggages! Oh they are heavy. ETH infrastructure now is not set up to scale. Upgrade to ETH2 is supposed to boost transactions per sec from 25 to 100k. This is expected to happen end 2021 to early 2022. This is no small task. If major…
No I’m not exiting blockchain investments. The industry will 20x in the next decade and more. I’m only exiting bitcoin. Before the maxies dunk on me, I’m not saying bitcoin would go to zero. It won’t. It would probably go up, a lot. But that doesn’t change what I’m saying below. If you’re a farmer, you 1) collect this year’s harvest —> 2) use that money to buy seeds, fertilizers, machines —> 3) plant more…
When I was in kindergarten, life felt meaningless. “Is this all there is?” I asked myself, sadly. My parents didn’t understand. “We bought you (another) pretty dress! Why are you still not happy?” I became a philosopher at the ripe old age of Nine– the beginning of a quest for meaning that lasted 20+ years. Nietzsche and Kant were my besties, Indian gurus and Peruvian shamans my go-to guides. Did I become more profound? Yes.…
Was reading the excellent memo on value vs growth by @howardmarksbook, and thought abt how his insights may apply to crypto, and investing in exponential trends in general 👇 (Texts in images from Howard Marks. Comments mine.) 1) First, low price tag doesn’t mean something is a bargain. High valuation doesn’t automatically equal a bubble. All depend on how you expect future growth path to play out. Don’t dismiss the entire crypto market off hand…
…That is, after spending $10,000 on supplements. Your nerve cells need to send information to one another. Neurotransmitters like serotonin are the delivery guys that make it happen. When Doordash has a labor shortage, nobody delivers your pizza. Same thing happens when your brain is short of neurotransmitters. The information deliveries fail. You get depressed. What many depression meds do is to increase the labor pool of neurotransmitters. So you sleep better, have better mood…
Last year I had a painful surgery. Lost 5 lbs. Felt tired and depressed. I decided to overhaul my health, tried a wild amount of supplements. Some were probably dangerous 🤪☠️ But I feel happier & more energetic than ever. A list of what worked for me and what didn’t👇 Worked: High quality nootropic blends Qualia Mind by @theneurohacker and TianChi by @herbworks are both freaking amazing. They keep your mind calm and focused,…
On my last birthday, I made an intention to live to 120. No I’m really not kidding. I fully expect to make it happen. In fact, I’m undershooting there. Recent researches on ageing estimate the natural lifespan of humans to be 120-150 years old. That’s how many years your body can carry on, without external stressors, like cancer, heart attack, or being hit by a bus. In other words, if you take care of the…
Some smart people are really good at “critical thinking”. You bring an idea to them, they tell you 103 reasons why it wouldn’t work and all of them sound super legit. If you talk to someone like that for half an hour, you’d walk away feeling sheepish and ashamed of your own naive optimism. More often, that someone is the intelligent voice in your head. There’s nothing wrong with being discerning. Critical thinking is an…
Raise your hand if you feel like you’re occupying a different consciousness compared to a year ago. I do. When large disruptions in the external environment happen, it triggers shifts in consciousness to reassess reality. That’s what happened in the past year. And we’re going to see a lot of such disruptions in coming years. That’s a reason why I think we’re on the verge of a quantum leap in consciousness evolution. Yesterday as I…