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This isn’t culture war for today. It was between roughly 1918-1930’s. It’s short and about why he quit drinking alcohol. In my opinion he hit all the key points on the subject, his logic is correct, and wrote it in a very concise way.
He does seem to miss drinking alcohol. I have to agree as a mild alcoholic he’s correct. I think he’s also correct that cannabis isn’t the great substitute society now claims it is. Shrooms I am far less sure on.
It’s not culture war today but I’ve grown a lot of respect for the prohibitionists as being basically correct. I also wanted to post this as I felt like it’s a good example of fantastic writing.
https://pmarca.substack.com/p/on-pausing-alcohol?r=h8x
Edit: should we either more explicitly allow less culture war subjects or have another thread. Sitting on an Afghanistan article I found that was good journalism but it’s not heavily culture war
Funny how pmarca is pivoting to punditry , trying to memory-hole those awful crypto recommendations from 2020-2022. Today the Nasdaq up 2%, Bitcoin down 5% on Silvergate fallout. Way to go, man. High-five! As usual, VCs make money, regular investors, late adopters generally lose.
This is a silly analysis, crypto regularly swings up and down much more than giant index funds. It's been holding around 20k for nearly a year now and is significantly up from it's bottom in November. It's down 5% but went up 8% on the 15th.
It looks like it is doing more swinging down than swinging up. Given that it's highly correlated with S&P 500 to the downside and less on the upside does not portend well because it means it captures the downside of the market and not the upside (I have realized a significant windfall over the past 4 months by exploiting this recurring pattern).
Yeah, but that is after a 77% decline. still 67% off highs. If something drops 99% and doubles, it's still 98% off the highs.
My point though is that he is pretending or acting like his firm was not hyping one of the worst performing assets of 2021-2022, at the very top. Which will likely not recover, but of course I could be wrong. This strikes me as as unconvincing at least.
https://archive.is/orIcB#selection-291.0-314.0
Sure, his earlier funds were a success as mentioned in the article, but ,imho, crypto is not at all like 'the early web' or 'the next Facebook'. His early success is like winning at roulette and then saying that playing roulette is a good business model. The world wide web and social networks saw rapid adoption, huge profits, and are convenient, but crypto is none of those. Crypto is more like Linux, less like Microsoft: great for coding enthusiasts or tinkerers, not so great for investors.
This is just a game of where you draw the lines. If you instead of picking the 2021 point pick 2020 then it's either doubled or quadrupled. Here is a log graph of all time data. You can make quality arguments against crypto valuation but isolating the drops from the rises is not an honest way to talk about risk.
/images/16779004002893846.webp
You can see how starting in early 2018 returns become much worse even if still positive. 22k/15k is just an 8% annual return since early 2018. If history is any guide and if you believe the people on twitter and youtube, November was the bottom BTC will go up 10-20x (or more) to $100k or whatever. I think it will not recover.
I mean here you go picking another peak. 2017 is a 20x and 2019 is a 5-6x but you, for not very mysterious reasons, picked 2018 and not just 2018 but a period of roughly 3 months that it was over $10k.
Do you do all of your market sentiment analysis based off of the activities of random sketchy 'influencers'? This is like feeling bearish on cosmetics because of the unrealistic ramblings of Mary Kay stay at home moms, there is no signal where you are pointing.
Pre-2018 is where all the easy money was made. 100x returns from mid 2015 to late 2017. That will never happen again. At best, maybe $40-60k. Andreessen creating a crypto fund in 2020-2021 is too late. It's like creating a gold mining company in California in 1884 instead 1848. But since its not his money anyway, it's not like he is going to lose , unlike his followers who bought at the top.
I said "I think it will not recover." so obviously not.
Of course people were saying this in 2019, and of course you could be right it may never go back up. But you could also be wrong and your confidence seems unfounded. I would also point out that a crypto fund isn't necessarily just buying bitcoin and sitting on it. Smaller and newer projects have different growth potential, making the right choice on the various bitcoin forks could have doubled or tripled the amount of bitcoin you were sitting on at certain points not to mention making the right bets on the various other happenings over the years, polygon/matic in 2021 could have done quite well for you and people plugged in could probably have seen the scaling benefits, I know I saw a great return on it.
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