Dear cryptokin, we adore ya!  We love the bones of ya.  We'd marry ye in the morning!! Thank you for high five-ing at the non denominational church of the Publish0x.   Are we Web3?  Maybe web2.35 anyway, right? lol. And rising.

Writing love letters everyday helps to understand what fools we mortals be.   The mistakes, the damage, the... the... the FUNNIES!!!  Researching  the rancid All Points South   crypto character assassination agitprop led us to an awesome funny.  Dear readers know we love thousand yard stare erm Long View Katie.  With her fixed income brains, she has to poke fun at some "technical" analysts sometimes.  Katie claimed senior management status in "Vomiting Camel Capital" ah ha ha ha people took her seriously!!!???!! .  And now her camels have entered the, admittedly memestonk,  tech analysis hall of fame.  Respect for all time.  Vomiting camels will never die, just smell that way lol

That said, we may move to Today's FT!!! YAY!!! 

Crypto news that don't say crypto:  Student loans were/are  a horrible touchstone of TradFi corruption.  Hyperinflation in tuition costs, funded by increasingly predatory loans.  Now Harvard & Yale have ~100 billion in endowments, but taxpayers are pouring a third of a trillion dollars onto the inflationary fire.   Good news if you owe it & have a Pell grant, but boy howdy print that fiat.  Same cost as the amount the stop inflation bill was supposed to stop inflation, THAT's funny.  

Inside baseball Jackson Hole col on all the fed bankers talking how much inflation, how much job losses, how much recession & rate increases. Arruggh.  At least no one says the insulting "transitory" anymore. 

Ooohh we love space stories.  Here's a beauty:  the end of cost plus Nasa subcontracting.  Nasa built one last giant Saturn V style rocket to fly four times and hit the moon.  It's costing 10x  SpaceX every step of the way.  We were lucky enough to have consulted on the Space Shuttle for NASA / Martian Marietta.  We got sweet cost plus gummint money to program cheezy spray paint robots to automate production of the giant external tank.  We would spin the tank on a turntable in the VAB, the vertical assembly building left from Saturn V, so large it had weather formations inside.  Ran the bots up n down to spray on SOFI (sprayed on foam insulation) and SLA (superlight ablation material) in competition with the hardware guys to not screw up.   Before Saturn V, the building was a tank factory.  It's where they lost the Saturn V blueprints - we had some in the rental for a while lol.  We noticed that every employee of the month there quit.  When a new EoM was announced, we searched him out (he was about to quit lmao!!)  We passed by a room knee deep in crumpled blueprints with a gorgeous, opened, blueprint cabinet.   

THAT"S old school NASA!! the NASA workers gift shop photos and patches were the BEST (had to pay for but subsidied) schwag.   Our co-worker stole a battered NASA certified triple beam scale, lol. When the solid fuel external boosters o-rings blew, at first it looked like the part we touched (the tank) had failed, & we were crying. 

Sorry, CRYPTO in the FT!!!  Yay, NO All Points South hatchet job!!??!  Ohhhh, it's an op ed slamming Web3.... again.... well ok. Heat up the SOFI and SLA!! Spin the turntable!! Run till the sensors trip & shut us down, baby here we goTLDR: It's all spin that a17z will bet billions on Web3 giving more money and power to the people.  Chris wants much more decentralized power.  FaceBook and Instagram take all the content AND all the money. 

The FT finds this bemusing: a17z's made and still own Web2 multi millions.  Can't a VC just say we want to make money?? 

Chris sez "can't be evil instead of don't be evil is a very very important concept!" 

FT sez this is FARCICAL:  why Worldcoin, giving crypto for collecting biometrics, has been accused of deceptive marketing???  Coinbase was "extractive" making almost 4 billion in 2021!!  a16z is all have yer cake and eat it too, a culture we all created!  We hated on the Goldman "Vampire Squids"  making bank, but thought Big Tech made a difference and also gave free stuff. Now we know free stuff builds monopolies.   ESG wants to pretend to be good as well -  but is it true!!??!! 

Companies blow resources on optics, there are six PR flacks for every journalist.  Activist shareholders make companies better liars, which leads to less good.  From giants of the valley to grifters of the crypto casino, tech should be more honest.  We should value truth, and keep the line between reality and fakery clear. 

The REAL story:  We thought we would be foul but hard to argue here, a pretty good quixotic jousting at crypto as forever evil, class act.   It is true that PR staffers are beneath journalists, though most PR jobs get MUCH more free stuff, lol!!!   Can't complain about a WORD of the socko ending, preach sister preach!!

So NO FU's, but let's unpack a bit, and try not to lose our @(*&$!@#(*!!!  temper.   When Brits argue they argue HARD.   Observe the classic whipsaw technique:  from one side, Chris is bad because a17z made bank.  On the other side, Chris is bad because he's  lying saying he wants to do good. And he SHOULD just say he wants to make money!!  ouchie.  Plus judges are itching to sent FU dust over that "grifters of the crypto casino" bias. 

Worldcoin is weird AF, but who cares?  We checked, of course, the FT's bible, Web 3 is going just great.  Molly of course detailed buzzfeed and an MIT tech review ragging worldcoin.  Buzzfeed looks bad, but MIT sez Worldcoin was for a while paying $20 in BTC in a new wallet to be allowed to scan, plus 3$ a pop to the scanners.  So who cares?  Lord knows our eyes have been scanned loads, we know the data has been sold, and noone even offered a future baloney sandwich in script, so it's all good.    Worldcoin, on the other hand, is trying to create iris hashes, where your identity is secure and undisclosed.  Maybe??? Chris thought maybe yeah?? 

We don't think Coinbase was extractive.  #$#@$(& man, ICE, the owners of NYSE, make over SEVEN billion EVERY year, rising by double digits percentage  annually, does that make them TWICE as extractive???    Of course free stuff comes with a hook, everyone knows if it's free, y'all ARE the product!!

It IS farcical, the FT totally missed the big point.  Chris wants to make money by enabling and offering distributed tech that treats the people better.  It's that simple, of course it will work.  We know many think (google &)  FB is the deeeevil, but we hate the rent seekers like Ebay even more.  Like FB, Ebay offers a marketplace.  Evilly linked with marketing rent seeking crushing forces, can y'all say semi-monopolistic predatory pricing?  Oh, y'all wanted your product to be SEEN when searched for, of course that costs EXTRA.   Anti-trust enforcement has FAILED.  Would people switch to a ad/marketing/exchange platform that in SOME way forced SOMETHING to be given to the little people participants?  Of COURSE HELL YES!! Dear Publish0xers know AdShares is rocking (first interactive 3D ads)  OUT!!  Plus hello good morning there is STILL over seventy BILLION dollars locked in DeFI, isn't that the POINT!!??!!  Web THREE n all??

The a16z whitepaper is linked below.  The exec summary is glorious. Decentralized competition was THE key to American and world success, and will succeed again.   Private sector should lead, reghammers should not crush everything.

That's it for crypto in the print version!  Online, Alphaville weighs in again, negatively, on crypto. One Alphaville crypto dig links to that failed Haskell  programmer turned btc hater attention wh-re, Steven Diehl.   Dear readers know WE don't care what he says. Also,  Chris is right, it's the same few idiots over and over.  This time Stevie sez crypto is a zero sum bigger fool game worse than sports betting.  OK, hater, the hardest money ever created, plus smart contracts, may seem like nothing to you, but that just makes you wrong, bucko.  The crypto market is still well over 10x the size of the sports betting market, so  a trillion dollars points out your cheezy lie. 

The MAIN Alphaville whinge is boot-licking on OFAC.  TLDR: Tether did NOT lock all secondary assets at wallets linked to Tornado cash.  Tether pointed out they talk to the feds every day about specific targets, and no-one asked Tether to freeze secondary Tornado cash linked addresses. 

This infuriates Alphaville:  What what ?  Just because the OFAC did not ASK them to freeze addresses, Tether DARED to, not freeze assets??? 

Tether does not operate in the US (HK) but they do stay compliant with OFAC sanctions.  Alphaville huffs n puffs, sanctions are modern war, the treasury took down Al Capone, they won't ask nicely!!  

The REAL story:  FU again, Alphaville. #($*#(* Tether is NOT Al Capone, machine gunning innocents, OK?  STFU.  Vitalek sending private funds to the Ukraine may have actually paid for machine guns, but HE's not Al Capone EITHER.    In truth, Tether sees cash fleeing from USDC maybe to Tether since USDC acted like a CBDC locking Tornado privacy.  But who cares!!??   It is NOT too much  for reghammer swingers to ask companies to do stuff, that way the ask is clear.  Maybe legal or not, but clear.   The OFAC can freaking specify what actions should be taken against which addresses are baddies, and let the courts play it out.  What, tether should lock stablecoins in a wallet Vitalek once used for privacy?  Without being given a legal order to do so?? Really WTF alphaville.  Force HK to join in licking the jackboots of the US reghammer  before being asked??  We know y’all don’t have a proper constitutional view on free speech, which covers distributed code AND the right to speak anonymously.  So maybe STFU?? Or at least mention the other side as IF without fear or favour lol!!! 

That's TWO out of FIVE FU's for this classic FT crypto hating narrative, even the Judges agree.  One for Stevie and one for threatening a company that has not obeyed an order it never received.   Clearly the forty pounds of bad meat flat roof pub prize for the best FT crypto hatchet job each month must still be a real, valued thing. 

OK, people, we love ya, we need your help, thanks for giving it!!  Mind yourselves!! 

Peace, 

Love

Dave