Davidzmorris

@davidzmorris

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232 Followers

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As much as I'd love a break after finishing my book draft, there's no rest for the wicked. Immediately to work on deep dives on Perp Swaps and Memecoins for a big new PRINT crypto media project that I'm not sure is public yet but is going to be super exciting.

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One of the bone-deep pleasures of writing a book is making connections that slip past daily reporting. Example: Sam Bankman-Fried was a high schooler in Palo Alto during a decade-long surge of local teen suicides to five times the national rate. #FTX https://tinyurl.com/3e9znxxr

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Vitalik Buterin

No. And I'm also not a capitalist. Both are 20th century ideologies. (And they are words that have been stretched and abused to the point of meaninglessness: remember, in the 1990s, Microsoft called Linux "communist": https://www.theregister.com/2000/07/31/ms_ballmer_linux_is_communism/ ) I support freedom, global equality of opportunity, kindness and cooperation, human welfare and progress. These are timeless principles. The question is how to use the tools we have available to achieve these values in the context of the 21st century. I've written at length about the kinds of mechanisms I personally support, but I definitely do not think that I am the only source of good ideas, I think figuring out the best approach is a shared project of both thinking and also increasingly real world experimentation.

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I had to dive into the Hayden Davis/Coffeezilla interview, and ... Hayden may be the dumbest man alive? Favorite quote from Hayden: "Bitcoin is literally valuable because a shitload of people said it’s valuable, and because it quote-unquote isn’t controlled by anybody, that we know of.” Bro doesn't know how Bitcoin works, but he's somehow working with both Trump and Milei on tokens. Impeccable. More highlights here: https://tinyurl.com/598bjkxj

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Check on the weather in Okinawa in May, I think it's still pretty decent. If so, and it's your first trip, just keep it simple: Tokyo-kyoto, then some beach time in Okinawa. Shibuya, akihabara, Temple of the Golden pavilion, hit the highlights. Save Osaka for a future trip so you can draw interesting contrasts. (Source: lived there about four years)

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Probably not so many people on here who need this explained, but with #FTX repayments starting, it seemed worth reiterating: The idea that FTX victims are getting a "full recovery" IS COMPLETE BULLSHIT. This post contains some simple math explaining why. MSM is swallowing the "full recovery" whole. Feel free to spread this around to those who don't get it. https://davidzmorris.substack.com/p/ftxs-full-recovery-is-utter-bullshit

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Yeah, this is something I am working through. SBF was pretty clearly a sociopath apart from EA, for instance. But I do think these ideas attract and cater to people with narrow experience of the world, who find the idea of 'first principles' appealing because they're unused to real complexity and nuance.

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After reading @davidzmorris ‘s lovely Substack—on AGI as messianic snakeoil—I can’t help but notice the resonance of ‘Claude’ and ‘God’ If Samuel Beckett called it ‘Waiting for Claude’ the title would have been too on the nose. https://open.substack.com/pub/davidzmorris/p/trump-dump-stumps-chumps?r=j2r&utm_medium=ios

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Only six hours later am I realizing that today's essay ran to 2,300 words (~10 pages). Humbly, it's a good one. https://tinyurl.com/9kyy6c66

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The more I find out about the thought and movement, the more convinced I become that the suicides, murders, sub-cults, and psychotic breaks that beset Yudkowskyite Rationalism are direct consequences of the ideology. Excerpt from today's Dark Markets: https://tinyurl.com/9kyy6c66

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ChatGPT is incredibly dangerous to the very people whose limited skills entice them to use it. An output that sounds vaguely credible will be mistaken for *actual* credibility right up to the moment an expert lays eyes on. You're being sold an automated Dunning-Kruger trap.

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Tomorrow morning for Dark Markets, some thoughts on NYC congestion pricing and why everyone, everywhere seems to care so much about it.

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Nick Tomaino🎩

An AI agent that takes the other side of the All In pod is $1B+ FDV easy

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@aaronrferguson

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Happy New Year! I find myself at the start of 2025 having accomplished a huge number of long term goals, and living the life I've always dreamed of. Here are seven guidelines that helped me get there. https://davidzmorris.substack.com/p/seven-ways-to-live-different

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The best single account of the events leading up to FTX's collapse is probably Brady Dale's "SBF: How The FTX Bankruptcy Unwound Crypto's Very Bad Good Guy." Particularly grateful for this detail on how Alameda wound up with so much FTT, an asset that rightly belonged to FTX: Sam gave them all the tokens. It's emblematic of Sam's apparently *complete* ignorance of accounting rules - in a few ways. This was, he said, nominally in return for the fact that Alameda execs had been deputized to start FTX - itself fraud against Alameda investors, as noted by @dragonfly_xyz . There's no evidence there was any calculation or projection of the values behind that purported swap - hard to imagine the Alameda team's work was worth the ultimately ~$4 billion of $FTT they got.

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Today was a bad day. Bullish, the new owners of my former employer CoinDesk were found to have violated the newsroom's basic editorial independence, and punitively fired three top editors who objected. Sadly I saw this coming when the sale went through last year, because Bullish itself is an extremely suspect firm built in part on a fraudulent securities offering in 2017. I've written a summary of recent events, and of that dark history. Unfortunately, while there are still good people working there, the unavoidable conclusion is that CoinDesk, as it once was, is well and truly dead. https://davidzmorris.substack.com/p/breaking-coindesk-is-dead-heres-who

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