Investor John Pfeffer discusses his early crypto research and portfolio decisions with Ted Seides.
Opinion
Pfeffer argues venture capital on average underperforms buyouts or loses money.
“So I figure that, I think that probably the asset class is somewhere between, on average, money losing to simply underperforming relative to, say, buyouts or whatever, as an asset class.”
Insight
Pfeffer compares crypto diversification to playing slots on the way to poker.
“And I, the analogy I use is that, to me, diversifying inside crypto is like, A champion, a world champion poker player trying to smooth out her earnings by playing slots on the way to the table. You know, you're actually increasing risk and decreasing expected…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Pfeffer predicts utility protocols will disrupt industries but tokens won't capture value.
“I think they're going to be successful. I think they're going to get a lot of users. I think they're going to be very disruptive. I think they're going to destroy, they'll create a lot of user surplus and destroy a lot of equity value. I just don't think the n…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Pfeffer predicts most native utility crypto tokens will eventually go to zero.
“They wouldn't just stop using it, but they might switch to a fee model where basically you're paying miners to maintain the network, but maybe you're paying them in digital fiat or a store value protocol that might be Bitcoin or something else. So I think that…”
Insight
Pfeffer argues Bitcoin entry price is immaterial due to its binary payoff.
“Whether you're buying Bitcoin at 700 dollars or 7000 dollars or 17,000 dollars is frankly less material because you're either going to lose all your money or make a big multiple. There's no way it's going to be worth if whatever it is, 9000 dollars today, four…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Pfeffer predicts software agents will manage utility tokens, hiding them from consumers.
“So I just don't see you and I or anyone else in 10 years dealing with inventories of dozens of protocol crypto assets on our own to do whatever we want to do in our daily lives. We're just not. We're going to, you know, there's going to be some software that's…”