E68
E68: Trudeau invokes emergency powers, Bitcoin vs. government, Tiger Global's new fund
2022-02-19 spoken.md · speaker-labeled ▶ watch ← E67 all episodes E70 →
0
ideas born
10
ideas moved
17
captures · 4 voices
1
dissenting
+113.3
conviction added
-106.0
decay · 102 silent
Every number here is replayed from score_events — the same ledger the pool ranks on. Decay is what the 102 ideas nobody mentioned gave up this week; it applies only when an episode is processed.
Tier crossings
conviction thresholds crossed by this episode — 65 / 45 / 15 · ideas born here show where they landed. why 65 isn't always green
▲ +7.3
🪙 Crypto bubble bursts in 2022 — 90% of projects blow up
watch
→
green threshold
62.1 → 69.4
still watch — green gate not met
Kill dates that landed since E67
1 hit · 0 partial · 2 miss — windows that closed after 2022-02-12 and up to 2022-02-19, auto-scored against price data and never hand-set. verdict · R · α
| idea | verdict | R | α | closed |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 🌍 More market volatility, not less | MISS | -63.3% | -77.1 | 2022-02-13 |
| 📈 Opaque payment fee pools get competed to zero | MISS | -8.8% | -22.5 | 2022-02-13 |
| 📈 Payment for order flow and market making survive the GameStop backlash | HIT | +26.8% | +13.1 | 2022-02-13 |
Who moved the board
each voice's force on conviction this episode — supports and opposes, weighted exactly as the replay applied them · share = % of this episode's movement
What got argued (10 ideas)
ordered by how hard each idea moved · quotes are verbatim from the transcript, timestamps deep-link into the episode
▲ cg:bitcoin
🪙 Crypto survives the May 2021 regulatory correction
closed 37
CONTESTED
▲ +37.6
12.6 → 50.2
mile marker on the road towards the state versus crypto, given the actions that were taken against Bitcoin wallets? Because that seems to be like a big trend that's going to play out over the next decade or two. ... Bitcoin seems to be the resolution to that. And now you're seeing the ultimate challenge to Bitcoin and the challenge to decentralized systems like Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies and so on.
the reason why Bitcoin is necessary is because the tactics that Trudeau is using is essentially to starve these truckers out ... And that's the reason why Bitcoin is potentially helpful, is it allows people using non-custodial wallets to make an end run around that and donate and help these people who are being persecuted, essentially.
▼ PYPL
🏛️ Financial deplatforming becomes the next big political fight
closed 35
▲ +22.6
37.8 → 60.4
wrote a piece for Barry Weiss' substack talking about how financial de-platforming would be the next wave of online censorship ... What I could not have predicted is that it would occur in our mild-mannered neighbor to the north and that the reprisals would be directed by the government itself, not just a consortium of private actors.
The idea that you can deep platform one or the other or fire them from their job or prevent them from having access to the money that they've earned or preventing other people from donating money, that's really, it's a really low bar. ... And I think when you normalize this kind of behavior, it's a very slippery slope.
▼ HPP
📈 California / San Francisco governance decline drives an exodus
closed 50
▲ +10.7
45.1 → 55.8
what we're realizing in San Francisco is non-prosecution of criminals, as the DA has undertaken over the past couple of years, leads to really heinous crime and rampant crime. ... But it doesn't mean that the movement is over. It doesn't mean that quote unquote wokeism is over.
And there are a lot of therapies that are underway right now to actually use gene editing to induce that mutation in people's blood cells and in their bone marrow without needing to give them a whole transplant. ... there are hundreds of cell-based therapies coming to market over the next few years, they're all in late stage clinical trials as well as gene editing.
▲ QQQ
📈 Tech drawdown is in the eighth inning - the bottom is close
closed 13
CONTESTED
▲ +7.4
41.4 → 48.7
In the.com bubble, it took somewhere between three to five years for most stocks to bottom. ... So it took three to five years to go basically minus 80%. We did that in three months, you know, maybe four months. And so the markets have become a lot more efficient over time. So now that we have that reset, it's pretty natural that there's going to be a very quick reset on the private market side.
the overwhelming misvaluation of late stage private companies ... But I think the reality is that at some point in the next year or two, these other companies have to get public. ... The problem is if you're high burn and you were counting on yet another successive round or you're at a point in your life cycle where you need to go public, in the next two years, if you go public, you will get taken to the woodshed.
Tiger's model was, let's just get the multiples up. There's multiple expansion and growth, so we'll make money two ways when the company goes public in 18 to 24 months. Obviously, when the markets end up tanking and all those multiples compress, no growth rate is going to solve that problem for you.
this will do more than McDonald's accepting Bitcoin because this is the first time like a western democratic state is seizing people's funds like in an incredibly unfair, unnecessary way, which is just going to have more people say, you know what, maybe I should keep some of my net worth out of the government's purview if they're going to seize it anyway.
▲ BX
📈 Private capital concentrates in a few mega-GPs that take themselves public
closed 41
CONTESTED
▲ +0.1
39.3 → 39.4
Episode digest
written during extraction and stored in data/extractions/ep068.json — the auditable source of truth, including everything market-adjacent that did not earn a capture
The Trudeau/Emergencies Act episode, and it is the single best real-world test this backfill has of the debanking and censorship-resistance theses. Trudeau invoked the Emergencies Act on Feb 14 and directed banks — plus, per The Counter Signal, 34 crypto wallets — to freeze accounts of truckers and of anyone who donated $25 or more. Sacks opens by collecting on his own E43 call with receipts: he wrote the Bari Weiss piece last summer predicting financial de-platforming would be the next wave of online censorship, 'and here we are, it's actually happened,' with the twist that the reprisals came from a government rather than a private consortium; he predicts a chilling effect that creates 'a cast of untouchables.' Chamath (as a Canadian) does the historical work — the Act has been invoked three times before, WWI, WWII and the FLQ crisis — and argues the normal body of law (RICO, protest law) was never exhausted, so normalizing this is 'a very slippery slope.' Friedberg plays devil's advocate hard on the civil-liberties question (BLM, Jan 6, SF looting: is the standard universal?) but then delivers the episode's most important market thought unprompted: this is 'a mile marker on the road towards the state versus crypto ... a big trend that's going to play out over the next decade or two,' framed by a 60-year argument that the digitization of capital handed the state reach into every asset, and 'Bitcoin seems to be the resolution to that.' Sacks says non-custodial wallets are how you make an end run around a state that is starving people out; Jason says the freeze 'will do more than McDonald's accepting Bitcoin' because people will now park net worth outside the government's purview; Chamath's counterpart point is that the digital yuan is the fully-centralized dystopia (one keystroke from Xi and your assets are gone) — that aside was dropped in favour of his stronger same-idea capture. All the Bitcoin-as-answer claims were routed to crypto-regulatory-correction-survives-2021 on mechanism ('governments cannot stop a censorship-resistant network' is verbatim in that thesis), while Jason's allocation claim — money moves into BTC to escape seizure — took the final possible mention on bitcoin-reserve-currency-hedge-2021, which dies the day after this episode airs. Chamath also discloses his two biggest private positions, DCG (Grayscale's parent, i.e. levered crypto exposure) and 'MetScope,' at roughly $2B combined — logged as positioning on the same crypto idea. The SF Board of Education recall passed 72-79%; Sacks discloses he was the second-largest donor (behind 95-year-old Arthur Rock at $400K) but that is political money, not a market position, so it wasn't captured as positioning. Chamath cites Tyler Cowen's 'wokeism has peaked' op-ed; Friedberg is the only one making a mechanism claim with an instrument behind it, confirming that non-prosecution produced rampant crime and warning the movement is not over — a soft reinforcement of the bearish-SF-real-estate thesis rather than the rebound call Jason was fishing for. The Tiger Global segment is the venture-overhang thesis in full: note there is no $11B fund discussed anywhere despite the title, only The Information's report that Tiger and D1 are abandoning late-stage pre-IPO deals for Series A/B and beaten-down public tech. Chamath's is the table-pounding capture — the dot-com drawdown took three to five years to reach -80% and 'we did that in three months,' so the public reset is done (reinforcing his own eighth-inning call from E64) but the private side hasn't marked yet, and any high-burn company forced public in the next year or two 'will get taken to the woodshed.' Sacks agrees late-stage valuations come down but takes the other side of the mega-GP thesis, saying passive Tiger capital is a bad fit for hands-on Series A; Chamath explicitly says 'I think it's going to work, but not for the right reasons' — there are more entrepreneurs than great ones, founders will take money that can't fire them, and it is the same unbundling Yuri Milner ran at DST — so the E62 mega-GP idea now has a genuine two-sided debate on it. Friedberg supplies the autopsy: Tiger wrote $250-300M into companies that needed $70-100M purely to buy growth rate and multiple expansion ahead of an 18-24 month IPO, and no growth rate saves that when multiples compress. Two throwaway lines are real signal and were captured at strength 1 on E61's crypto-bubble-shakeout prediction: Chamath on passive no-governance money, 'that's all of crypto now anyways,' and Jason, 'no governance in crypto is leading to a lot of weird stuff, I can tell you' — the same room that is bullish Bitcoin-versus-the-state is openly contemptuous of crypto as an asset class. Science corner: three HIV patients cured via CCR5-mutant bone-marrow transplants, with Friedberg pointing at gene editing to induce the mutation without a transplant and 'hundreds of cell-based therapies coming to market over the next few years' in late-stage trials — reinforcement of the programmable-biology thesis; his autologous induced-stem-cell claim carried an explicit '15 years out' and cancer/aging '30, 40 years from now' framing, both too distant to score and left uncaptured. Sacks' Fauci-was-wrong-on-AIDS-too tangent and the Paul Graham mask beef are ignored — no instrument. No Fed, QE, inflation, Ukraine or energy content at all this week, so four of E61's six annual predictions go untouched. Labels are clean: content-verified, no merge, swap or rotation.