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Today’s missive is a request for human help with upcoming newsletters

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Byron Gilliam
November 26, 2024

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“AI won't replace humans, but humans using AI will.”

— Fei-Fei Li

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When ChatGPT was released, I immediately hoped there'd be a sweet spot of time in which AI could write this newsletter for me and my employer did not yet know that AI could write this newsletter for me.

I imagined myself pushing a button in the morning and then spending the rest of my day lollygagging around, trading memecoins and such.

It hasn't happened and I’ve started to give up hope that it ever will — AI stinks at writing newsletters.

It is good for a few, limited things, like brainstorming (typing ideas into a chatbot is like talking to a therapist, it helps to just think things through). 

And Google’s NotebookLM is a genuine time saver — upload a PDF, long-form article or legal document and NotebookLM will answer your questions on it without hallucinating anything.

But AI is still a long way from being able to cover for me when I have a day off (like today).

So, today’s missive is a request for human help with upcoming newsletters — since asking AI hasn't offered much, I thought I'd try asking you humans.

Below are some of the things I'm thinking about — if you have thoughts on any of them, please hit reply and share.

Whaddya think?

Does Ross Ulbricht deserve his crypto-hero status? He ran a market for guns and drugs and reportedly ordered hits on his enemies (unsuccessfully). 

But he did it with crypto, so I guess that makes it all good?

Are we sure Tornado Cash developers should have no legal liability? I can't help but be sympathetic to Roman Storm, the person (especially after listening to this Bankless podcast), but I wonder about the precedent being set here. If crypto mixers are exempt from banking rules, then there are no banking rules — banks could just fire their expensive compliance departments and become frontends for peer-to-peer software. Do we want to live in a world with no banking rules at all?

Relatedly, should financial privacy be absolute? Privacy-preserving blockchains are coming, so we need an answer to that.

Should memecoins be regulated, or even banned? Gambling has negative externalities and memecoins are obviously gambling (a particularly nefarious kind in which people mistakenly think they're investing). You probably wouldn't want your local government to approve a casino in your community, but memecoins put a casino in every community. Are we good with that?

Is the US entering a golden age of “fiscal dominance” in which the Fed will surrender to political pressure and let inflation run wild? The Fed has a history of surrendering to political pressure. 

Is the opposite also possible? What if the political and economic stars align like they did in the 1990s and the US government suddenly balances its budget? Does bitcoin collapse in that scenario?

Could MicroStrategy be the GBTC or Olympus DAO of this cycle? Every cycle has something that looks utterly ridiculous in hindsight and MicroStrategy’s valuation (3x NAV) seems like the natural candidate this time around.

More specifically, at what bitcoin price does Michael Saylor get a margin call? The average price on MicroStrategy’s horde of bitcoin is rapidly rising, which means the price at which he'd have to sell bitcoin to pay back debt is rising, too. Someone do the math for me.

Is crypto being used for aid payments in disaster zones or for refugees? This has always been one of my favorite potential use cases for crypto — getting money directly to people who need it immediately — but I’ve yet to hear a detailed example of it happening at any scale. 

How can we quantify the monetary premium embedded in bitcoin or ether? In other words, to what degree are people actually using bitcoin and ether as a medium of exchange or unit of account? (Using it as a store of value doesn’t count — that’s a speculative premium.)

Is crypto contrarian? Or consensus? Crypto remains a niche interest, which makes it seem contrarian. But making money in crypto requires going along with the consensus thinking. So which is it?

Is Powell the GOAT central banker? He held his nerve with inflation at 9% and restored the Fed’s credibility without causing a recession, so I’m leaning towards yes.

What books should I review? Or, ideally, movies (books are so long)?

Finally, what else should I be thinking about?

Thank you in advance for your thoughts, ideas, feedback and feed-forward.

Most importantly, though, thank you for reading! 

We’ll always need humans for that.

— Byron Gilliam

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