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/Privacy Is a Feature, Not a Product
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Privacy is a feature of valuable cryptocurrencies, not a product offering in and of itself. Users should not have to take balance sheet risk (e.g. by selling some BTC or ETH for ZEC) on less valuable and less secure cryptocurrencies in order to achieve financial privacy. This essay will argue that general platforms like Bitcoin and Ethereum already offer sufficient privacy guarantees for most users to never need niche privacy-focused blockchains.
I’m extremely excited to announce that Multicoin Capital co-led a $15M financing in Helium with our friends at Union Square Ventures. The Helium vision is the most ambitious we have seen in the blockchain space since the advent of smart contracts on Ethereum: Helium represents a fundamentally new approach—one with a radically reduced cost structure—to deploying and managing wireless networks at scale.
/Crypto Mega Theses
Open, distributed ledgers and permissionless, censorship-resistant, trust-minimized computation are going to reshape massive sectors of the global economy. This belief led us to found Multicoin Capital in 2017, and after spending two years with entrepreneurs, business leaders, and investors in this space, we’ve developed more conviction in this thesis than ever before.
The best way to capture alpha as an investor is to create it. Private equity firms have practiced this for decades: groups like TPG acquire businesses and devote significant management resources to improving the business prior to selling.
On October 5, 2018, Yale, the iconic long-term investor that other endowments look to for guidance, made a historic investment in two funds dedicated to crypto, signaling to many that institutional floodgates are officially open.
This post is a spiritual successor to The Smart Contract Network Effect Fallacy. Bitcoin has a network effect. Many crypto evangelists assert that the network effect of Bitcoin is so strong that hyperbitcoinization is inevitable.
There are three types of cryptoassets: stores of value, security tokens, and utility tokens. General-purpose stores of value should be valued using the equation of exchange because these currencies are independent monetary bases. Examples include Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Zcash, Dash, Monero, and Decred.
Basically, all token pitches include a line that goes something like this: “There is a fixed supply of tokens. As demand for the token increases, so must the price.” This logic fails to take into account the velocity problem. In this post, I’ll explain the velocity problem by providing an in-depth example. Then I’ll examine mechanisms that reduce velocity.
Basically, all token pitches include a line that goes something like this: “There is a fixed supply of tokens. As demand for the token increases, so must the price.”