Found my way to the AIBC Conference in Dubai, which is a crypto-centric tech conference. It's not focused on crypto, but that's their main selling point right now, so there are a lot of crypto people there.

There are also a lot of old, fat fucky traditional business types there. I went in expecting this, but it was still a shock to distill after months of lockdown. I don't give a fuck. I'm looking for inside baseball, and I'll even take it from my enemies.

The first day consisted of a dinner and pitch deck headed by Sheesha Finance. You can find them online. Their website isn't much to look at, but I thought I might gain some insights being in the room with the people behind it. They have a bit of money. I didn't get the feeling that there was much more behind the idea. But there really doesn't have to be. The entire point of sites like this is to provide a liquid virtual space to bring together funding from people who already know each other — with the added bonus of funding from apes who just drop by and want to try to make a quick buck.

I can tell you that the cabals of people behind these websites know exactly what they are doing. Most of defi these days is not really defi. It's a money grab with a defi front put up for marketing. There are centralized beneficiaries, obviously, and if you're not on the inside, you can forget about democracy or decentralization or whatever. This is fine if you are trading. It's not fine if you think that just because something says "defi" that it's actually decentralized automatically.

Another gentlemen who claimed to know the founder of Chiliz said kind of the same thing. He said the Chiliz founder told him not to invest in the team tokens. The team tokens were absolutely worthless, he said, and so are the Chiliz governance tokens. They don't represent any equity in the company, and their governance properties are limited. I believe it. The "defi" in Chiliz is a functional scam, kind of like a functional drunk. It works ok generally when there's no pressure on, but you wouldn't trust it to drive your 6-year-old to soccer practice in traffic.

Much of defi is like this. The majority, perhaps. Maybe I'm just talking to the wrong people — it's only day 1. I'm not attending this conference to find the most profitable venture or the next tokenized 100x. You can get those from launchpads. I'm here to find the people who share my philosophy of a truly decentralized, borderless system of exchange. I feel like I need to completely excuse myself from discussions that teeter off into traditional business of how we can milk the unwashed plebs, because I found myself in plenty of those. If you ape into this shit blindly thinking you're an investor, you're really just food for the legions of "founders" producing fake defi to take your cash and the lawyers you'll need to protect any gains from the taxman in your country.

I also realized that I really don't need these conferences to meet the right people. I think the right people come to me through my blog posts and Telegram. But there is still that need for human contact, which is a good thing to have. I can also judge the state of the market more clearly when I see the people behind it. Looking at the crowd and seeing that fat bald guys had girlfriends, I'd say we're still in a bull market.

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