The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 5,121 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 43 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Goldberg: STEPN sneakers will lose value without a burning mechanism
“Steppen has this Runaway sneaker breeding problem because there's no burn mechanism in place for getting rid of all of the excess sneakers. Like people are minting and minting and minting. And so eventually they're all going to become worthless, or you're goin…”
Bloom: Buying rental properties is mostly vanity and underperforms REITs
“Personally, I think that most people that buy rental properties, maybe this is a hot take, it's like a vanity thing, where they want to be able to flex and say that they own rental properties. Because the vast majority of my friends that have done that, it is …”
Wilkinson: Raising from Sequoia brings intense pressure that ruins founders' lives
“Like Sequoia who are like the most intense MFers in the world just joined the board. They're going to hold a gun to that person's head and say, you need to grow your company, 300% a year. You need to spend as much money as possible to go there, and that CEO's …”
Bloom: Fed Will Pivot on Q2 Weakness, Fueling Growth Stock Rally
“My gut tells me that we're going to see like a pretty bad Q two from an economy standpoint. Like I wouldn't be shocked if we actually saw a negative growth and people panic. I think the fed will just like reverse course very quickly. Cause they've shown an unw…”
Krishnan: Twitter Needs Decentralization With Open Protocols and Pluggable Algorithms
“Twitter needs to be decentralized, one, into a protocol so people can use a different client. The second is they can use their algorithms of choice, right?”
Bloom: Top Creators Generate More Value for Twitter Than Billionaire Shareholders
“I have contributed more value to Twitter and like probably more innovation to Twitter than some random billionaire that owns a hundred million dollars of Twitter stock, like just full stop. I understand the product probably better. I understand the puts and ta…”
Isenberg: On-chain resumes will enable hiring within 60 seconds
“I believe that in the future you'll have your resume on chain, and you'll be able to apply at a job, and then within 60 seconds get that job, because, you know, those people know that you are great at Uniswap, or you understand how to code in Rust, or Solidity…”
Wyatt: Current Web3 gaming product offerings are pretty underwhelming
“I would say the product offering that we have out in the market for gamers right now is pretty underwhelming, right? It's like, here's version 0.5, and that's okay. You gotta start somewhere.”
Wyatt: Gatekeeping gaming against blockchain technology is unjustified
“I just really hate the gatekeeping of the gaming category, because it offers so much to so many people, and I don't know, like, why any of us have any, like, any right to stand on and be like, this has no place in gaming when it is technology, right?”
Mullenweg: Competing for SF Talent Was Fishing in a Small Pond
“Like I'm a big believer in in-person and physical space. A big part of automatic culture is actually meetups where we would bring either the whole company or teams together a few times a year. But it just felt like the best, most talent in the world was not in…”
Mullenweg: Automattic pays identical salaries regardless of employee geography
“So something we didn't do when we started, but we switched in like, was paying the same salaries regardless of geography, right? It's the same work. It's the same job. You're creating the same value for the company and the and the customers. So you should make…”
Sanchez: Tech workers' voting records caused San Francisco's decline
“I know that if I looked up the voting record of you guys, most of the people in tech are the reason why it is where it is today.”
Sanchez: Allowing hacks is better than centralized blockchain rollbacks
“I'm not sure that I would want if what I want is decentralization and not having, you know Autocratic tendencies an individual to be able to do that either. And I know there's this critique already about Ethereum and I don't know if it delved from this origina…”
Martocci: Founders can stack local bank credit lines to secure cheap debt.
“Local banks you can actually go to, and they'll have You know, very loose, easy terms for small amounts, like 50,000, a 100,000, a 150,000, and there'll be maybe no personal guarantee, they won't want the first position on the debt, and you can stack them, you…”
Friedberg: Sustainability requires advancing technology, not cutting consumption
“Sustainability is not about cutting back and doing less and eating less and so on. Sustainability is about driving technology forward. Meaning, can you make the same products that everyone wants more of, And can you make them cheaper, but can you make them wit…”
Friedberg: Most commercial wine from Gallo and Constellation contains added flavorings
“In fact, people don't realize this, but most of the commercial wine you buy today is actually flavored. It's not just the grapes. So everyone from Constellation Brands to Gallo, they take grapes, they turn it into ethanol and water and flavor, and then they ad…”
Friedberg: Beverage market will expand from 100 brands to 100,000 brands
“I don't think that there is, you know, like maybe there's a hundred brands that make up 99% of beverage sales in any category today.
I think in the future, hopefully it's a 100,000 brands
and, you know, any individual can find a perfect brand for them.”
Friedberg: Earth will deplete its phosphorus reserves in about 100 years
“We're gonna run out of phosphorus in about a hundred years. That's how much we're mining out of the ground, and how little there is left.”
Personality-Market Fit Is the Prerequisite for Going Viral
“I think there is such a thing called personality market fit. There are just some personalities that literally cannot go viral, that literally cannot be relatable. And there are some personalities that are just make one video and you'll be immediately in love, …”
Content Creators Have a Shelf Life of 5 to 6 Years
“You have a shelf life that either the market dictates or your mental health dictates, which is basically like say five, six years, you know, even the algorithm on Facebook and YouTube does not like you forever, right? At some point, the algorithm's best intere…”
The First YouTuber Billionaire Will Emerge From India by 2027
“I don't think it's gonna be Mr. Beast, by the way. I think. SPEAKER_02: Why is that? Nuseir Yassin (Nas Daily): I think they'll come from India. I think a lot of people In India are like killing it, but the mainstream media in the United States does not listen…”
Demirors: Crypto wealthy prioritize digital assets over traditional luxury status symbols
“Who have made money, but they're not motivated by the same status symbols as prior generations. They don't want to buy yachts. They don't want to buy private jets. They don't want to buy, you know, houses. They want to buy digital rocks. They want to buy Uniso…”
Demirors: My 10-year vision is to mint one million new billionaires
“So I think what's been really cool to see and what I'm excited about, like my vision is in the next decade, I want to mint a million new billionaires. Who have a radically different view of what we should value as a society.”
Demirors plans to legally establish a tax-exempt Bitcoin-centric church
“One of the things I'm going to try to do over the next few years is build a church. So when I say a church, it's a religious organization which enjoys certain tax benefits under U.S. Tax code.”
Demirors: The government system will inevitably collapse under its own weight
“It's gotten so large and so cumbersome, like, it will collapse under its own weight. It's inevitable.”
Demirors: Play-to-earn games like Axie just offer diminishing clicker yields
“This is actually my big issue with play to earn games. Like literally play to earn games. Like Axie doesn't need to have anything in the game. All they need is just a box that you click thousands of times and the box just gets smaller and smaller and yields go…”
Demirors: Early-stage TAM calculations are just performance art for VCs
“VCs do a lot of performance art, right? Or they do this weird, like, power flex with other stage entrepreneurs, where they're like, oh, show me a business plan, like, calculate your TAM. I'm like, I don't fucking know what their TAM is, because nobody's ever b…”
Demirors: Every crypto protocol other than Bitcoin has centralized leadership
“Every other protocol has a central organizing entity. It has leaders, it has rulers, it has kings, it has monarchs, right? And they're all men. It has monarchs. Bitcoin is the only thing that doesn't have that structure, right?”
Demirors: Ethereum has been rolled back and is not truly immutable
“The Ethereum network has been rolled back. Ethereum's not immutable. These other chains are not immutable, right?”
Bier: FTC will block Meta from acquiring competitors to fix growth
“The regulators the FTC they won't re they won't sign off on any sort of large acquisition of a user base. So They're losing users from an engagement from these two other competitors. And at the same time, they can't really buy their way out of it like they did…”
Bier: Big tech takes over two years to clone startups
“After being on the inside, it takes about a year of collecting data for them to even think about building something like this or building something they see happening in the market. And then it takes three months of like a framing process where you do research…”
Bloom: TikTok is de facto controlled by Chinese government
“TikTok, which is Chinese owned, and de facto controlled by the Chinese government, by the way, and owns the data of literally every single teenager in the United States.”
Bier: Meta has the world's best misinformation systems
“They have some of the best integrity systems, the best Spam the best misinformation detection systems out of any, probably any company in the world.”
Bier: Big tech companies exist for founder egos, not profit
“Companies exist for like big tech companies exist for the egos of the founders. And at the end of the day, he just wants to be liked. He just wants to build something that helps people.”
Bloom: Mobile internet gives Indian youth Ivy League-level opportunity access
“A kid on the streets in India that has access to his phone because of what Reliance Geo has done has a lot of the same opportunities today, and hopefully will continue to have even more as the kid who grew up in Greenwich and went to the Ivy League.”
Billy Markus: Dogecoin on-boarded more users to crypto than Bitcoin alone
“So it actually, this is true in my opinion is that Dogecoin has done an amazing, Service to the cryptocurrency community of like getting more people into cryptocurrency than ever would have if Bitcoin was just Bitcoin and like those people that were really int…”
Billy Markus: Gaming NFTs Will Gain Adoption Rebranded as 'Digital Goods'
“The gamers tend to hate NFTs. So I think they're just gonna be rebranded to like digital goods, and then people decide that they like them not knowing that behind the scenes is blockchain tech and NFT tech and stuff.”
Belsky predicts centralized and hybrid services will ultimately win in Web3
“In, in many cases, centralized services will win or hybrid, you know, decentralized by ethos, but centralized to some extent by like certain aspects of the user experience, you know, I think are maybe going to ultimately win”
Bloom: Consumers do not care about privacy enough to sacrifice functionality
“One of my like general hot takes is that people don't actually care that much about privacy or like the average person doesn't really care that much about privacy and won't be willing to actually pay for it with worse functionality.”
Belsky: AI recommendations will cause consumers to abandon the concept of favorites
“And so, you know, that for music, that for travel, that for restaurants, that for whatever, like, maybe we're all gonna vastly increase the surface area of our exposure to stuff we like, and in some ways, like, abandon the concept of favorites altogether.”
Belsky: Creativity is the new productivity as automation commoditizes mere speed
“Creativity is the new productivity. You know, we're going to stand out increasingly in our work. And on social media and on any other thing that's, you know, amplifying our opportunity stream through our creativity, you know, it's not about doing things faster…”
Belsky predicts 3D creation will democratize and go mainstream like mobile photography
“Same exact thing's gonna happen for three D. I'm like wholly convinced that that's the case.”
Vaynerchuk: 99% of the top 200 OpenSea NFT projects are vulnerable
“99% of the projects on the OpenSea top rankings, top 200 right now, are incredibly vulnerable against their valuation.”
Vaynerchuk: Most NFT Projects Cannot Maintain Value Due to Supply Flood
“The far majority of projects in this gold rush cannot maintain their value because the supply of NFTs that are coming into the market is extraordinary.”
Vaynerchuk: NFTs are an easier bet than layer-1 tokens via bridging
“The reason I went into NFTs more than currency is my theory is if Ethereum loses, I can bridge over my crypto punks, right? So to me, the NFT asset class feels in a lot of ways, like an easier bet. If you feel like you really know which NFTs you want to invest…”
Ohanian: 'Minimum Viable Community' will become the new standard
“The minimum viable community is going to become the new standard and you're already seeing it in PFP projects.”
Ohanian: Bored Ape owners will borrow against NFTs and never sell
“It is inevitable and on the order of months and lots of years, if not months for all those Bored Ape owners, To never have to actually sell.”
Ohanian: VCs must accept pseudonymous token holders on cap tables
“Not only will VCs have to get comfortable having other folks on the cap table who are, let's say, individual investors, they'll have to get comfortable with, like, a bunch of random strangers on the internet who have just bought into the token. Who are totally…”