Thanksgiving Crypto Cheatsheet!

How to Win Friends and Influence People

"You can't win an argument. If you lose it, you lose it; and if you win it, you lose it." 

— Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People

Thanksgiving Crypto Cheatsheet

Legend has it that if you ordered fugu (blowfish) at a restaurant in Japan, it used to be that the chef would come out from the kitchen and check how big you were so as to know how much of the poisonous part of the fish he could leave in for flavor without killing you.

I’m not sure it’s true, but I think it’s a good analogy for yesterday’s big news:

The DOJ eyed up Binance and decided that $4 billion was the maximum fine they could extract from the world’s biggest crypto exchange without killing it.

If so, it might be the best crypto news of the year. In a year full of surprisingly good news, it suggests that the US government will tolerate the existence of crypto as long as the crypto industry plays by the rules.

We don’t yet know exactly what those rules are, but the Binance settlement suggests they might be less infinitely hostile than we’ve been expecting. 

Less than infinitely hostile may also be the best you can hope for in your crypto conversations with extended family at Thanksgiving tomorrow — they’re probably not up-to-date on all the good crypto news of 2023.

You’re unlikely, however, to win any converts by telling everyone you made 120% in Bitcoin, 360% in Solana, or 1,000% in BONK this year.

They probably won’t want to hear about how layer-2s are scaling Ethereum, either, or how local fee markets are solving blockspace bottlenecks.

Nor will they be impressed to hear how all of crypto’s highest-profile bad actors are now in or on their way to prison.

The only way to win an argument about crypto (to the extent any argument is ever winnable), is to tell them what it’s good for.

Fortunately, there’s good news on that front, too.

So, for those of you who celebrate, here’s a cheat sheet for your Thanksgiving dinner crypto debates.

What’s the point?

The best explanation is always the simplest one: Crypto is internet money.

Crypto allows for borderless, instant, irreversible, permissionless, low-cost transactions — which is sure to win you a lot of blank stares.

Tell them instead that if crypto existed when the web was invented they’d never have to get up off the sofa to look for their credit card while internet shopping and they’d never have to see any ads (they’d be paying some tiny fraction of a fraction of a cent per page instead).

Crypto is non-sovereign money: You don’t have to be celebrating Thanksgiving in Argentina, Venezuela, or Zimbabwe to appreciate this one — even Americans are getting antsy about how freely their government is spending their money.

Bitcoin is better gold: Weightless, highly divisible, costless to store, cheap to send, easier to hide, and — new to this year — a “flight to quality” asset, in the words of Larry Fink. 

Stablecoins are better eurodollars. It’s unlikely anyone who celebrates Thanksgiving will know what eurodollars are (hardly anyone does), but say it anyway because it’ll make you sound smart (also, you’ll be right).

A US bank account in your pocket. If you consider turkey an edible bird, this one won’t mean much to you — but it means a lot to a lot of people who have never heard of cranberry sauce.

Banking for robots. You’ll have to read the room on this one, but if your extended family is full of e/acc types (ie, they want more AI, faster), tell them that crypto will provide the banking rails for all of the autonomous AI agents that won’t be allowed to open bank accounts. 

Proof of humanity. If your audience tends towards AI doomerism, explain instead that crypto is the only known way to distinguish humans from robots on the internet — captchas are not going to save us from the Terminator. 

Proof of attendance. I attend every UNC home basketball game and I’m certain if Coach Hubert Davis was aware of my loyalty he’d let me sub in for a couple of minutes of garbage time in the next blowout win. Only crypto could make that happen.

NFTs. Start by conceding that paying for jpegs is silly and then explain that, in the world of deep fakes, NFTs are a way to prove authenticity. Depending on your audience, you can sell them on NFT sneakers, magic mushroom NFTs, or NFTs at MoMA.

Law enforcement’s new best friend. Despite recent headlines, crypto may be the worst money to steal, as evidenced by the US government becoming one of the largest holders of bitcoin.

DePin. Decentralized physical infrastructure is an all-new business model that empowers individuals to contribute their physical resources, like solar panels or 5G hotspots, to a network in exchange for cryptocurrency — it’s a new way of creating new businesses that were previously not feasible.

Cheap mobile plans. If “DePin” is too theoretical, as it surely will be, just say “$5 mobile plans.”

Programmable equity. If you’re headed to Scarsdale, Greenwich, or East Hampton tomorrow, tell them that tokenization is coming and ask them to imagine 24/7 trading, getting extra dividends for locking up their Apple shares, selling a fraction of their beach house, and buying equity in their nephew’s future earnings.  

Ethereum sign-in. Ask them to put a dollar value on no one ever having to remember a login ID or password ever again. Then tell them the entire crypto market cap is only about $1 trillion.

Speculation as a use case. I told you not to at the start, but if all else fails, tell them they could have made 1000% by buying BONK just before Halloween.

And if even that fails to land, here’s the one use case that no one can possibly, well, argue with: Crypto is something to argue about at Thanksgiving when you’re done arguing about sports and don’t want to argue about politics.

Just don’t expect to win.

And stay away from the fugu.

*(quotes excerpted from Blockworks Daily. You should subscribe!)

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Bonus:

If you’re a Jimychanga subscriber, you already knew all this!

Here’s how we started 2023, with some tax housekeeping (defense) before going on full offense (hint, the tax stuff still applies) and here’s how it went..:

THEN, in January, we began to smell a baby bull…

Again in LATE JANUARY:

Then we got sidetracked by missing pets…

Then we got RIGHT BACK on track… MARCH

JUNE

JULY…ish

SEPTEMBER (before the big rocket launch!)

OCTOBER 23, RIGHT BEFORE CRYPTOS BEGAN THEIR MOON SHOT

And NOVEMBER 11th..

RESULTS?

If you took action early, you are having the best ThanksGiving of your life.

If you missed out, don’t waste time googling where the charts are nonw. It’ll make you sicker than eating a whole turkey, and you’ll feel like one too.

Just keep following (or better yet, become a paid sub!) and with any luck we’ll do it again sooner or later, in one asset class or another.

(Did you see CRESY and IRS? Argentina stocks unleashed after a free market dude took the helm. There is always a bull market somewhere)

HAPPY THANKSGIVING!!