puranjay

After the massive ramp up we had, it can very well take years, even a decade before we hit another new all time high.

Makes me wonder about the fate of all these unprofitable startups

If you couldn’t turn a profit during practically the best time for tech startups in 2020-21, I can’t see how you can turn a profit when money is much tighter.

I had planned a vacation 2 years ago before the pandemic. Obviously had to shelve that. Now the price for the same ticket has increased by 2.5x

I still paid for it and justified it in my head that this is the first time I’ll be traveling in two and a half years.

But if I had to do it again, I can’t justify it at all. There has to be some level of “spite spending” from two years of pandemic as well - people who know that they’re overpaying but they do it anyway because they’ve been locked up for two years.

Man, I've been in the crypto hole for two years straight. There's not a protocol that I haven't tried yet. And there's not a protocol that I now use outside of speculation.

Even ENS domain usage has been going up because of the speculative frenzy around valuable domain names (look up the race to register all 3-letter ENS names).

You can start off by naming three projects that you actually use regularly outside of speculative investments. Because for the life of me, I can't.

Don't disagree with that, but does banking the unbanked require hundreds of billions of dollars in funding? Do the unbanked need algostables, five-figure APY yield farming, sophisticated options protocols like Ribbon, and memecoins valued at $20B?

The core ideas behind crypto remain solid. Unfortunately that has been hijacked completely by speculators.

No crypto project has managed to solve the trilemma problem so far. Decentralized chains are way too expensive and the cheap chains are heavily centralized.

I'm in this rationalization camp since I actually did make insane returns from cryptocurrency. Even then, I can't bring myself to defend this space because of the sheer a) amount of scams, and b) lack of utility.

The scams wouldn't even be a problem - every fledgling platform has them - but the fact that the crypto community embraces scams and even encourages them. Scammers can rug a project for millions and turn around and launch another project within a week and everyone will still buy it because of greed.

And this is the crypto dilemma: the crypto community has utterly failed at self-regulation. Ergo, it has to be regulated by the government. However, a cryptocurrency that's beholden to government rules is antithetical to the core crypto ideas of self-ownership, privacy, and freedom.

> and real utility is commonplace

I'm not trolling, but I really don't know what this real utility is. I've been extremely active in crypto for two years (as a user, not a trader) and I still don't know if there is any real utility, outside of gated access to communities and/or voting on DAO proposals. Whatever utility there is either very minor or refers to something in the future.

In two years, everything in crypto has largely been the same. Transactions on Metamask run the same way. Mobile experience is uniformly awful. Buying shitcoins is still using the same old crummy Uniswap interface. The only difference is that there are a bunch of new chains VCs can pump and dump on.

Most projects in crypto are deeply involved in navel gazing. All these bridge projects are a good example - they all hail it as "revolutionary" if you can transfer funds from Sol to ETH. Outside of crypto, people ask "but why?"

Crypto usage is entirely tied to the market. If the market is doing well, dApp usage collapses.

Google search volume doesn't collapse if the stock market isn't doing well. You still send emails even in a recession.

No one uses crypto outside of speculation. Even the dApp with the most "mainstream" use case, OpenSea, has collapses in usage as soon as the market turns bearish. Why? Because no one wants to buy "digital art" when there is no bigger fool to sell it to.

I haven't even logged into my Metamask for weeks now.

if the iPhone was released in 2007 but in 2022, you couldn't use it to make calls, browse the web, and chat with friends. Instead, it could only run a bunch of Candy Crush clones, but with real money.

Would you call that a successful product?

In crypto, they just call insider trading "Alpha" and get away with it.

Interestingly, AAVE, Curve, Maker, and Compound - all old school, plain vanilla DeFi projects - still have the highest value locked by a big margin.

Once you go beyond these functional but boring DeFi projects, you run into a ton of scams, wild "experiments for the sake of experiments", and projects that are just trying to extend the ponzis built on top of established protocols.

Take all the forks. One algostable becomes successful and suddenly there are hundreds of forks that collapse within days, sometimes hours (TOMB is an example).

Most of the promises of DeFi are absolutely nothing but pure ponzis that collapse once new money stops coming in. OHM chart is the best example. "Reserve currency" that dropped 99% because new money stopped coming in.

What it essentially boils down to is the simple question: what's the use of these projects besides making money? Don't get me wrong - speculation can be a use case. But I've never heard of speculators take the holier-than-thou, "we'll change the world" tone that crypto proponents seem to take.

if every single crypto dApp was erased from the world overnight, absolutely nothing about how you live your life would change.

That's how much impact crypto has had on the world in 15 years.

I understand and appreciate the philosophy behind crypto. Self-ownership and privacy are core values to me.

But I've spent two years in this space and I've come out thoroughly disillusioned. The vast majority don't even care about privacy or ownership or decentralization - they just want to know "wen pump?"

Haven't been to one in nearly three years now, but when they launched in Delhi, they had a really weird ambience. The lighting was dark and dingy, not bright and inviting like most fast food restaurants. And the kicker: they served beer. Alcohol is hard to find in most restaurants here, let alone a fast food one. Just made the entire thing weird as hell - was it a fast food restaurant? A bar that only sold tacos and burritos?

How many months ago was it that they were predicting a 1920s style gilded age?

Boy would they get mad when they learn about the gulags

Aren't most mortgages in the US fixed rate?

I'm sure CPI calculations include the frequency of consumption too. You eat a kebab every day, but buy glasses maybe once in two years.

A lot of it had to do with the really weird demand patterns that developed over the last two years. We went from 100 demand to 20 as lockdowns happened, then 200 demand as economies opened, then back to 20 again as a new wave of lockdowns took hold.

If you were a manufacturer, you had no real way to deal with this unpredictability. Do you add capacity to cater to the post-lockdown 200 demand? If you do, you might end up with too much inventory as demand goes back to the usual 100.

Throw in the clogged up ports and higher input costs due to Russia-Ukraine war and we have this strange period where everyone is confused and no one really knows what to do

Most institutions are very slow to react by and large since there is a big lag between on-ground reality and financial data. This is why you'll often see experienced investors and fund managers often defer to their "gut instincts" and talk a lot about subjective experiences ("I feel") vs just hard data.

I'm also seeing very bloated headcounts for startups. Startups that haven't even hit product-market fit now have 500+ people.

I've been out of touch with the startup world the last few years, but something seems to have changed where otherwise mature companies with low-mid four-digit employee counts still work as "startups" (complete with the lack of profitability).

Two years deep in the web3 hole and after using practically every single protocol, I can't think of any "need to have" use cases either.

Everything is either completely unnecessary or a "nice to have". Like, say, trading video game assets. Or digital art. All nice to haves, but nothing that would even remotely warrant the kind of valuations the segment commands.

Seeing layoffs like these everywhere, including from companies that were hiring as recently as two weeks ago.

How did these companies overestimate demand so much? Surely they could have seen that the demand from the pandemic years was an anomaly and not a sustainable "new normal"?

its very rare that I find Airbnbs cheaper than hotel rooms.

Airbnbs are now exclusively for the rare trip that lasts longer than a week where I largely intend to stay inside.

In tourist places, I've also found that hotels are much better located

I don’t think we’re going to a regime of low prices and suppressed wages. That phase of the world’s economic cycle is on its last legs. Demographics are collapsing across the world and the most prosperous, numerically largest baby boomer generation are entering their non-productive, fiscally conservative retirement years.

This just might be the “new normal”. The lack of readily available products might be a problem, but there’s also a good chance we see much higher wages across the board

To be fair, you're not meant to denominate the value of your Bitcoin in dollar terms.

1 BTC is always equal to 1 BTC.

One of the highlights of 2021 for me was watching him lose millions as one of the "stablecoins" he promoted dumped from $1 to 0, and then going on Twitter to rant about crypto.

Small things add up. Freezing a track in Ableton, for instance, is substantially faster. This makes a huge difference to the workflow. When you're in a creative state of flow, stopping several seconds just for a track to freeze can take you completely out of your zone.

Half the traders I know who were sitting on 3000% gains in 2021 are down to 300-500% gains by 2022.

Crypto markets fall apart as quickly as they go up. Most who entered the market in late 2021 are down and will be down for years (forever if they're holding some dead altcoin).