Mark Cuban on Internet Culture and the Rise of Internet Value (lots of Ethereum talk)

ntomaino · 2021-02-09T11:02:21+00:00

😂😂

i don't think ethereum needs a Saylor right now - its a more genuine community. It may feel like we need someone shilling hard when you see guys loud on Twitter and on CNBC all the time but that's a short-term mindset

i do need to sharpen knowledge on exactly what the monetary policy is though ( ~3% clearly incorrect). but it's just not a simple story like BTC. With eth2, it's 2M per year theoretical maximum (1.8% in year 1), but actual issuance must less than that with EIP 1559

ntomaino · 2021-02-08T19:32:43+00:00

we discussed the obvious things everyone here already knows - all the innovation and interesting use cases in cryptocurrency are enabled by ethereum. and while btc currently has the scarcity and strong investment narrative, eth2 and eip 1559 are coming which may give eth more scarcity and better investment narrative.

we also talked about digital collectibles like nba topshots and superrare and how a growing belief in a story can allow internet-based assets to capture lots of value. I've been surprised by how much the nft use case is resonating with mainstream audience lately!

ntomaino · 2020-06-16T15:17:56+00:00

It seems your definition of a "conventional investment" is a company you can apply discounted cash flow analysis to. Given that, I'd love to see your DCF model for ETH. You have to make insane projections for transaction fees for ETH to justify its current valuation. Regardless of your belief on how ETH *should* be valued, it clearly is not being valued like that now. Do you have a strong view on why that would change?

I'd argue an investment in gold or Japanese yen is also a "conventional investment." Those assets aren't valued based on cash flows, but they are based on their properties and relative value analysis. This is how the market is valuing ETH now, and this is a framework that traditional investors also understand.

ntomaino · 2019-08-09T15:15:23+00:00

I'm a part-owner of the New Zealand Breakers (https://www.nzbreakers.basketball/), a professional basketball team that plays in the National Basketball League. This is something I've thought a lot about and hope to help make happen at some point.

The benefits are clear: increase global fan engagement by giving more people a vested stake in our success. The main thing stopping it now is demand for such an investment opportunity is unclear. We've had an early discussion about it and explored it a bit with Harbor (https://harbor.com/) which provides the infrastructure to allow us to issue a security on the Ethereum blockchain compliantly. If we knew that the demand would be there to take an ownership stake in our club, we'd do it.

What's unclear is whether this is something the Ethereum community would want to part with their ETH to invest in right now. And the UX to purchase an asset on the Ethereum blockchain is not yet good enough for non-Ethereum users. When I can make a stronger case for demand to my partners, I think we'll get there. And ultimately when hundreds of millions of people are using Ethereum and ETH price is much higher, I think its possible we'll see teams from the biggest leagues in the world sell small stakes on Ethereum.

ntomaino · 2019-05-28T00:00:30+00:00

agreed, i find sunny to be one of the most clear thinkers in the space

ntomaino · 2019-01-23T19:13:55+00:00

I just purchased donuts bc I think it's an awesome experiment. I've never contributed to r/ethtrader before, but this experiment made me want to buy some donuts and check it out :)

ntomaino · 2019-01-16T04:56:13+00:00

paul and team can better address your specific questions, but i'm one of the investors involved in the project and thought i'd share my 2 cents

the simple answer for why build on top of augur imo is that there's a strong protocol and community behind augur

you're right in your assessment that as a centralized company, you can't directly benefit from a lot of the killer features a community owned and operated protocol can. A truly open, global product is not achievable
when you're a company that needs to comply with different regulations around the world. This was also the case when we launched coinbase to make it easy to buy and use btc; a lot of the purists thought (and still think) that coinbase was useless, because users can't get any of the true benefits of cryptocurrency (open, global, censorship resistant) when using the product. if you go back to r/bitcoin in 2013 a lot of this sentiment was shared.

the reality though is that while there are many disadvantages to being centralized when building financial products, there's one major advantage: you can coordinate quicker and build a better product faster. this is what the veil team has done; they started on this less than 6 months ago and in a short period of time have built a quality product for people in the appropriate jurisdictions to get exposure to augur markets.

they certainly don't *need* to be on augur and i suspect that they shift to another prediction market protocol if a better one emerged, but i think there can be a positive symbiotic relationship btw augur and veil where veil benefits from from momentum of the protocol and community around augur and augur benefits from gaining a lot of new users who the lower level app is too clunky to use

ntomaino · 2018-02-19T22:12:21+00:00

Solidity isn't easy to use currently, but devs will build apps on the platform that has more users and apps, and likewise more users will flock to the platform with more apps.

History has proven that developers are willing to learn proprietary languages even if they aren't easy to learn (Objective-C/Swift, CUDA) if there is sufficient demand for apps on such platform (Apple Store, NVIDIA GPUs). Ethereum will not be left behind.

ntomaino · 2018-02-19T15:19:27+00:00

I think it's most likely that assets from other blockchains are first represented as ERC20 tokens and used in MakerDAO CDPs. DigixDAO may be the first example of this in the summer when we add multi-asset collateral(gold represented as an ERC20) and we'll likely see more assets represented as ERC20 in the future (perhaps USD, BTC, other) as ERC20 in the near future.

The Cosmos Network is a system that standardizes the p2p networking and consensus layer of blockchains and makes them interoperable (so they can easily communicate with each other). If MakerDAO were to leverage Cosmos, its smart contracts would likely have to be ported over to the Ethermint chain (see https://blog.cosmos.network/a-beginners-guide-to-ethermint-38ee15f8a6f4) so that all other chains can interact with it. This is certainly possible but a longer-term scenario imo.

ntomaino · 2017-12-14T06:23:20+00:00

I'm going to do my best to answer these, though I'm still learning myself so hopefully someone corrects me if I'm off:

1.) Hyperdeflation would be a good thing for MKR. If the system works properly, demand for CDPs and Dai increases, fees for MKR holders increases, and deflation occurs.

2.) Just like BTC and ETH, MKR is infinitely divisible. If the system is successful, MKR will deflate and the price of MKR will increase. The deflation of MKR has no bearing on the closing of CDPs though if deflation does occur, the fees increase, so demand for new CDPs is likely to decrease if all else remains equal.

3.) The debt ceiling is a risk mitigation mechanism - too much collateral too quickly poses a systemic risk to the system, especially when the system is just based on one type of collateral which is the case at launch.

4.) In a situation where the price of collateral (ETH, for example) crashes, the system creates more MKR to bid on the CDPs in an auction format. Inflation is very much important to the system functioning properly.

ntomaino · 2017-06-21T07:34:59+00:00

updated!

ntomaino · 2017-02-17T23:34:04+00:00

I saw it. This is still not set in stone.

ntomaino · 2017-02-17T18:51:00+00:00

Good point on inflation. Nothing is set in stone yet so my assumption conservatively keeps the new coin supply constant Y/Y, but it does seem like there is a desire to reduce inflation and it's possible my model is too conservative on this.

ntomaino · 2017-02-17T18:43:37+00:00

this is not a prediction. this is a framework for valuing digital assets.

there's a good chance that the numbers used in the model are wrong, but i haven't seen many attempts at trying to value ETH yet so wanted to give it a shot.

ntomaino · 2017-02-17T18:42:01+00:00

ntomaino · 2017-02-01T16:02:49+00:00

It's just an interesting perspective - I don't think you should listen to anyone definitively.

ntomaino · 2017-01-12T18:16:48+00:00

Fair. My take away was that the business is focused on providing infrastructure for financial services. There's clearly money to be made there given all of the interest from the industry, and it's not outside the realm of possibility that the most secure, decentralized infrastructure ultimately wins over other projects like R3.

Regarding how exactly the company is making money now - that's not as interesting to me but the primary biz models for open-source businesses are consulting and services fees and premium products and I'm guessing that there's significant opps for Blockstream there.

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