February 17, 2022

Charlie Munger calls crypto a disease & the top crypto games 🕹ī¸

GM, this is the Milk Road. The email that tells you what's going on in crypto, in plain jane english.

In Today's Email:

  • đŸĻ  Charlie Munger calls crypto a disease

  • 💰 How much crypto do criminals hold?

  • 🎮 The top crypto games in Q1

  • 🗒ī¸ Five Nuggets

Charlie Munger Calls Crypto a Disease

In 2018, Warren Buffett called Bitcoin, "rat poison squared." 

And now, his partner in crime, Charlie Munger is calling crypto "a venereal disease.”

But why do they hate crypto?

Because it’s too useful to “kidnappers” and “extortionists” and they don’t like people piling money into a new financial product invented out of thin air.

They say that you can learn a lot from looking at history.

And the history we have here is how Munger reacted to another biiiiig idea – Elon Musk inventing a car company out of thin air.

While I  don’t always agree with Elon, he's right on this one. 

Just because something is probably going to fail, doesn’t mean it’s not worth trying.

I see people make this mistake all the time – they only focus on why something isn't gonna work.

The real truth is that when something is early, we don’t know if it’s gonna work, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth trying.

In the case of crypto, there’s a lot of reasons why it’s worth trying.

Because, If it works, we'll have a completely different financial system worldwide

Criminals and Crypto

The OG project that put crypto on the map was the Silk Road (no relation to the Milk Road 😂).

If you haven’t heard about it, it was essentially eBay for drugs. 

The story of Silk Road is wild and there’s a great book about itâ€ĻI read it one sitting and highly recommend it.  

(P.S. If you’ve got 10 minutes watch Sam (from the MFM pod) tell this great story about Silk Road.)

Ever since the Silk Road takedown, the public perception has been that the best use case for crypto is criminal activity.

I mean, what’s better than these headlines over the years:

  • “TrillIon Dollar Mt. Gox Demise as Told by Bitcoin Insider”

  • “Accused Bitcoin Mega Crook Made Rap Videos. And Dear God, are they cringey”

  • “End Of The Silk Road: FBI Says It's Busted The Web's Biggest Anonymous Drug Black Market”

Chainalysis just released a report that highlighted the crypto holdings of cybercriminals, which is nearly $11B (primarily growing because of the value of each coin).

These wallets are tracked closely by the government though, which is how the BitFinex hackers were caught last week.

As more and more of these wallets get seized, the mainstream narrative that crypto is for criminals will slowly get killed and new narratives will form!

The Top Play-To-Earn Games 

Every quarter our friends at Passive run a competition to see who can get the best returns investing and participating in play-to-earn crypto games.

There’s one goal: turn $1,500 (0.5e)  into as much as possible in 90 days.

We use this competition as a way to keep up with most interesting games in the space and how they're performing.

Halfway through the first quarter, here's where we stand:

There's three games that are clearly outpacing the rest:

If you wanna check out the strategies being deployed in each game, here's the full spreadsheet

Five Nuggets

Nuggets so good you should dip them in honey bbq sauce

And one chart for good measureâ€Ļthe adoption in the past year is wild

That's all for today, see ya at the same time tomorrow!

– Shaan “Cashew Milk” Puri + Ben "Strawberry Milk" Levy

What'd you think of today's email?

Will Ferrell was wrong on this one…(reading the) Milk (Road) was a good choice today