Where All-In Alpha stands — 1 live idea
| idea | call | play | conviction | contributes | moved yet? | scored in |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 🪙 OpenAI's withheld cryptography results put public-key crypto wallets at risk | ▼ SHORT | adjacent ×0.5 | 17.0 | -8.5 | — | 337d |
Where the winds are blowing
Who's pushing which way
each voice's net push ON THIS TICKER — their most recent stance per idea × that idea's direction ON THIS TICKER × strength, so supporting a bearish idea pushes down, unless this ticker is listed as the other side of it. Not conviction (that lives on the idea); this is direction of travel per person. what w= means
What resolves next
scoring dates for the live ideas holding this ticker — each one turns into a scored result on that date, whether it flatters anyone or not
Track record on cg:ethereum
As a PRIMARY play the besties are 2 hit / 0 partial / 3 miss over 5 closed windows — credit 0.4, average vs SPY -18.6. Adjacent plays are listed but never scored.
The tape — what was actually said
every capture on any idea holding cg:ethereum, newest first · quotes verbatim, timestamps deep-link into the episode
So the absence of evidence suggests that maybe there were some pretty major breakthroughs made in cryptography. And then there were a number of people that posted that cryptographic wallets with public keys are now very seriously at risk. So there's a bit of a panic under way in the crypto community about what do we do now? And if this ends up having a set of mathematical solves for number factorization that could lead to breaking public key cryptography before quantum computers come around, which is what everyone assumed would be the thing that would break public key cryptography, then we have a real problem.
In fact, the chairman of the Senate Bank Committee, Tim Scott, has said that he wants to finish with the market structure legislation by the end of September. So if all goes well, then we could be looking at a second bill signing in, say, October.
But Genius is unique because it really updates the payment rails inside of our current financial system. I mean, the payment rails have been archaic, and I've likened it to the fact of the ways in which we've communicated have changed quite dramatically over the course of the last several decades. The ways in which we move money really haven't, and we have the technology there in blockchain technology. So what we're doing here is we're fixing the plumbing of our financial system
And to pivot to market structure really briefly, this provides the rules of the road for the exchanges, the brokers, everyone in the space. They desperately need it so that we can break down the wall between traditional financial institutions and these digital asset players. I think that's well underway. Obviously, getting a vote as strong as they did in the House is indicative of what can happen in the Senate.
I do think Stripe's main business could be, if we're sitting here in five years, Chamath, could be sitting on $300 billion and getting whatever it is, three, four, five percent on some coupon, right? They could be making $10, $20 billion in pure profit if they have a stable coin out there that gets widely adopted.
I think stablecoins are going to be a big part of the solution. I actually don't think that's going to supplant all the consumer-facing networks. I think we're going to see consumer-facing networks built upon and substantially leverage these things.
Card programs are not actually big profit pools for most of the major banks... And maybe other points in that space are viable, but it is a set of trade-offs, and it's not as simple as this enormous rent extraction happening.
Is there a moment guys where is it a regulatory event where you'll say the Visa Mastercard duopoly can get challenged?
So the stable coin being the intermediary for that in the future makes total sense if you could get everybody to kind of coordinate against that.
So the idea that you can take that 300 basis points you pay to these companies and crush it to zero would be a boon to global GDP, because that's 3% on many tens of trillions of dollars.
You got the crypto guys who just want a framework. They just want the government to tell them how to operate and they can't get that.
You just had Biden veto a bill that would have finally given crypto a regulatory framework in the US. It passed with 60 votes in the Senate, including Democrats like Chuck Schumer, and it still wasn't good enough.
People are now speculating that there's going to be an Ethereum ETF that gets approved as well, because if you approve one, there's probably legitimate cause to approve a few others. So these things are becoming part of the financial fabric, and I think that that should not be underestimated.
It's a judgment that seems to indicate for a lot of folks that these are not going to be treated as securities.
And it really handcuffs the SEC. What are they going to do about Coinbase and every other exchange? I mean, if they're not selling securities, I think Coinbase and everybody else has always maintained they're selling tokens.
However, the case against Coinbase, they're alleging a completely different set of facts, which is effectively what Gensler and the SEC are saying is that it is not legal to operate a crypto exchange in the United States.
But as the retail market took their hits, the SEC has to step in and Congress steps in and everyone starts to say it's time to act, we should have acted sooner.
Their function is to protect investors. Investors lost a bunch of money. Therefore, they are going to retroactively inflict pain and hold people accountable for their mandate, which is to protect investors.
And so they're coming down hard, and they're going to go and systematically dismantle the largest actors, and they're going to go through the value chain. So I think the obvious place that they're looking now are the exchanges, they'll look at the custodial services, they will not approve any ETFs.
Because it looks like that this anonymity has effectively been reverse engineered and there's no anonymity at all. And so what Bitcoin is quickly becoming is like the most singular honeypot of transactional information that's complete and available in public.
And if anything, it's cleaned up the Bitcoin community tremendously. And I think it's dispelled this idea that the only thing you'd use Bitcoin for is black market transactions.
So I think Gensler had to pivot very hard from at a minimum being very pro FTX and there's all kinds of stories about his interrelatedness with Sam and his family to very anti-BIT or anti-crypto in general. That's clearly happened.
So I think it's hard to argue that there isn't a concerted effort now to crack down on crypto by a wide variety of government agencies and authorities, starting with Gensler at the SEC, who seems incredibly hostile to crypto.
And I think there will be a subsequent domino to fall, which is now that Gary G, head of the SEC, has FTX and the FTT tokens as the grift, he's going to go down the list of other tokens.
As I understand it, based on just what I've read, that there's a 90-day rule around contributions, meaning that if, I think this has to do with the bankruptcy, that if he donated money within 90 days, then that can be unwound.