DISTRUST YIELDS

“It is a tragedy in a sense, though, that Sam really was a generational investor. Right place, right time, right access—deep in the EA community, that's where a lot of this AI stuff came out of. And I think his portfolio would have been worth something like $120 billion. I think it does reflect badly on the trustees; they sold these things at fire sale prices.”

“MicroStrategy had another big week. $2.5 billion worth of Bitcoin purchases since the last time we recorded this podcast. This STRC product is just on fire for these guys. This is the largest preferred out there, period, in all of capital markets. If the price of Bitcoin goes up, they're going to be in a lot better spot.”

“Arbitrum was able to freeze about 70 million worth of ETH here and rescue it, causing people to yell at them for not being decentralized. And DeFi as a whole has taken a massive hit. People are basically deciding that the tail risks here are so material that the rates they're being paid to lock on DeFi are not worth it. Huge mess.”

“The combo is something I'd never thought of before, but it is very compelling. Satoshi did have this unusual combination of certainly academic chops plus the engineering chops, which it's kind of like very rare that one person would have that. The case for Len is very good; he cited a very rare symposium paper from a conference in Belgium that was not distributed online.”

“The board's view is straightforward: the time to start preparing is now, not when it's urgent. They completely understand the point that me and many others have been making. You don't have the luxury of waiting until one of these things is imminent because the transition takes a long time. I thought this was really the most thoughtful paper on this that I've read so far.”

“Are these yields that are attracting people to DeFi actually worth it? Are you getting paid enough for the risk? I think very clearly the answer is no. The vulnerabilities here would warrant you getting compensated a lot more than what you're getting compensated. When you can have a socialized loss on Aave due to no fault of your own, that's a bad position to be in.”

“There was an oracle attack where they were using a single sensor near the Charles de Gaulle Airport. The guy bought the 22 degree option, which was trading at basically zero, took a hair dryer, heated it up, the sensor triggers, the market closes, he wins, and then gets arrested. Kind of makes the case that these markets need to be a little better designed.”