We could save time with these sorts of Bitcoin analyses if authors disclosed up front whether they have a financial interest in Bitcoin.
It's fine for a VC to conclude "I believe the properties of Bitcoin’s battery are powerful and profound, and will lead to the kinds of solutions I point to here."
But when the author's firm invests in Bitcoin companies, that's not exactly a surprising conclusion.
I don't think it would help. I could see ownership being interpreted either way:
- the author owns this asset type and they publicly support it - they would benefit from the price going up; maybe they just want to feed the hype. Therefore the author can't be trusted.
- the author doesn't own the asset type and they publicly support it - their actions contradict their public opinion. Therefore the author can't be trusted.
I would rather look into how good of an argument someone is making than trying to guess the reasoning behind their portfolio.
Can't you just assume that anyone who is pro-bitcoin owns it, and anyone who is anti-bitcoin does not? Anyone who doesn't fit into those categories would (I guess) be unconvinced of their own analysis, but publishing it anyway?
I bought BTC and ETH when I thought they were a good idea. I no longer think they are useful, but I still hodl my coins because why not profit from the hype machine. The hard part is knowing when the cycle is near the top, I suspect we still have some ways to go, but that BTC will again lose 80% of it's price to USD.
The tech is not that interesting and I would never want to build with or on blockchain. If I had to, I'd probably use Hyperledger. This is from someone who tried out all of the main ones. Blockchain does not replace anything in my stack, rather it adds a highly risky component and makes me a target of higher interest to the malicious.
I won't go into the group think and egos that are pervasive in the ecosystem, other than to day they are a huge turnoff.
I'm not a fan of many of google's practices, but still use their traffic data a few times per month because there isn't really any alternative.
Similarly, I bought some bitcoin to donate money to sci-hub, because I believe the good that they do is greater than the negative effects of a single additional bitcoin transaction, and sci-hub doesn't offer any alternative methods. I don't have to like bitcoin to weigh pros and cons and make an educated decision to use it for a specific purpose.
Then as for holding it, I was paid out in bitcoin for a short time and waited a while before converting to fiat in order to not pay miners multiple times. During that time I was both holding bitcoin as well as being of the opinion that this blockchain+PoW tech has lost the novel factor and we should get over the hype rather than spend more and more energy on it when we're already consuming a hundredfold more energy than we can currently produce without direct CO2 emissions.
It's not as simple as: you use it, therefore you must love it (or conversely, if you don't use it you must hate it; some people might be interested in the tech but still not believe it's an investment vessel befitting of their risk profile).
I disagree. You can be pro something and not have it or anti something and have it anyway. But the people who are most likely to lie or spin the truth for personal benefit will be those who own it and want to see it succeed, unless you can short Bitcoin. Even so, I think it's less likely that people will short something they think is legitimate than to buy something they think is illegitimate.
> But the people who are most likely to lie or spin the truth for personal benefit will be those who own it and want to see it succeed
Does it matter why they are lying or spinning the truth? The only thing we should care about is that they were lying, so we need to look at the arguments themselves, otherwise we risk loosing impartialness because of our own feelings about cryptocurrencies.
It's fine for a VC to conclude "I believe the properties of Bitcoin’s battery are powerful and profound, and will lead to the kinds of solutions I point to here."
But when the author's firm invests in Bitcoin companies, that's not exactly a surprising conclusion.