Merry Christmas, Elon wrong on crypto, Sam Altman psychoanalyzed, George Michael & Wham! top the charts, Narcro Subs cruise the Amazon, and more tidbits...

The Cryptonite Weekly Rap and Anthony Perkins Dec 26

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Peace on Earth and goodwill toward all

Merry Christmas and blessed holidays to you🎅🏽🙏🏼.

Not being one to get caught up in the commercial side of Christmas, I relish the quiet of the end-of-the-year break and try to use it as a time to stand above all the noise and re-assess the ‘noble cause.’ One data point I discovered when responding to Marc Andreessen’s The Techno-Optimist Manifesto last month is the fact that the poverty rate dropped most dramatically right alongside the development of the World Wide Web and commercialization of the Internet, and it turned out not to be a coincidence. It is called the benefits of increased transaction velocity.

AI—Good or bad? Marc Andreessen has an opinion on that and a few other things The Cryptonite Weekly Rap and Anthony Perkins · Oct 19 Read full story

The World Wide Web (WWW) was developed by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN, Switzerland, in 1989, which marked the beginning of a huge downward spike in the global poverty rate.

For those of us who rode bustin’ broncos during the Web1 and Web2 rodeos, this is something to feel good about. It was a noble cause, and we didn’t even know it ;)

Speaking of increasing the velocity of transactions, the 260 million Chinese participating in the pilot program for the most successful government-backed digital currency on the planet—the CCP’s e-CNY—are doing just swimmingly using the e-CNY as a payment source for over 200 designated services. It is beyond words why the US is so crypto tone-deaf, and this subject has not been a subject of the US Presidential debates. I sincerely hope South America takes off and lights a fire under our ass.

"Right now, the balance of e-CNY is tiny, but this small balance supported a big number of transactions, which means that the velocity of digital currencies is significantly higher and more efficient than fiat by orders of magnitude.’ 

—Yi Gang, Governor of the Peoples Bank of China

The Bitcoin founders did it, and China's doing it. Where is the USD global digital currency? Anthony Perkins · Aug 7 Read full story

The CCP's digital currency success so far does help prove the promise of Web3. At a minimum, we can continue to step up transaction velocity and drive the poverty rate into the ground—basically eliminate world hunger. We have no doubt we will accomplish this. Our further fantasy is for individuals to be able to buy groceries and supplies for validated single mothers and others in need on a direct giver-to-receiver blockchain dApp, that offers transparency and traceability, and issues givers a token to easily deduct donations on their tax returns. Now, that is a noble cause!

What question would you ask the US Presidential candidates in 2024? The Cryptonite Weekly Rap · Oct 11 Read full story

At Cryptonite, our noble cause is to do our best to chronicle the entrepreneurs and enterprises driving Web3, as well as Greentech and the Life Sciences. In 2024, we plan to support the Weekly Rap with a web and mobile app-based Daily Rap and start producing insider interviews and Founder Pitches on our Cryptonite Live! webcasts. We are also set to introduce AI-enhanced indexes with proprietary analytics for private companies, altcoins, and VCs.

British humor.

As always, we will live by the editorial approach that presumes reader intelligence, strives to speak simply and to the point, and be upfront about our worldview. And, like the old Red Herring and the 180-year-old Economist magazine, we will win trust by being straight up, doing our homework, and driven by critical thinking. Media brands today are shallow sycophants to the fashionably elite and try to hide their biases, which is why they are now rapidly losing trust and failing. 

Cryptonite is also about the American dream, which is simply supporting the freedom of an individual to be whomever they wish to be as long as they respect others—and believe this dream is our country’s greatest advantage. This is why one in five potential migrants—about 158 million adults worldwide—name the US as their desired future residence. This is not something to fear; this is a great compliment!

Cryptonite is also about the American dream, which is simply supporting the freedom of an individual to be whomever they wish to be as long as they respect others—and believe this dream is our country’s greatest advantage. This is why one in five potential migrants—about 158 million adults worldwide—name the US as their desired future residence. This is not something to fear; this is a great compliment!

But in America, we know in our hearts we are not living up to this dream. The social network and corporate media honchos and politicians have chopped us up into little groups of shallow stereotypes and successfully pitted us against each other for their own survival (so they fantasize). 

Part of our noble cause is to try to help bring people back together around the American dream to live and let live. 

To achieve this, Cryptonite promises to never utter political labels or partisan talking points. We will focus on innovation and its impact and opportunities. We will stick to facts-based journalism and well-reasoned opinions. Our nature is to challenge convention, spark debate, and teach but also learn. It’s an honest job if we do it right—and the kind of duty the world needs right now to keep the powers that be honest and at bay.

This month marks our 6th month of publishing, and as noted, we have big plans ahead. If you are feeling generous this Holiday Season, we would appreciate your support by becoming a paid member of our community below. We like to keep most of our content free, as we calculate we are gaining 30 to 50 new young subscribers a day. But we do aspire to grow in 2024 and bring on more talent to serve you better, and that will require new investments.

We thank you for every time you land on one of our pages and look forward to being with you on the brilliant journey in store for us in 2024 and beyond. 

—Anthony Perkins, founder & editor, Cryptonite, Christmas Day 2023

Pay for annual subscription with Crypto!

George Michael & Wham! top Christmas song chart for 2023

The late George Michael and Wham!’ Christmas tune, Last Christmas, is the No 1 this season, 39 years after the song was written. The hit was streamed 13.3 million times this week and was helped along by special vinyl and CD editions. The song’s official YouTube video has over 862 million views.

“George would be beside himself that we’ve finally obtained a No. 1 Christmas song. George said he wrote Last Christmas with the intention of it being the No 1. Christmas song in 1984, and it was a huge disappointment to us both when it didn’t reach No. 1 in 1984. Over recent years, it seems it’s become part of the fabric of Christmas for a lot of people, and so here we are in 2023—Mission accomplished!”

—Wham! ’s Andrew Ridgeley

Last Christmas was denied the festive top spot back in 1984 by the release that same year of Band-Aid’s Christmas song, Do They Know It’s Christmas?, which also featured George Michael. We prefer the latter song of the two and posted it below—How many 1980s icons in the music video can you recognize? (Hints—Bono, Sting, Boy George, Phil on the drums…).

Did you know? 

(Overheard on the streets of the global Silicon Valley. Got any hot insider tips? Email us editor@cryptoniteventures.com)

Billionaire Boys & Girls Club

The Washington Post has written a longer gossipy piece about OpenAI’s Sam Altman’s rise within a cabal of Silicon Valley top investors, including his mentors: Peter Theil, Vinod Khosla, and Y-Combinator founder Paul Graham. Typical of an article of this nature, the Post’s authors also play a game of ‘palm journalism’ in the absence of critical analysis or conclusion. On the one hand, Sam is positioned as the ‘strategy genius’ who sees trillion-dollar opportunities before everyone. Yet, on the other hand, he is an aloof, manipulative, and sometimes revengeful manager.

Our observation (we have yet to meet the man) is Sam Altman has proven himself as a modestly successful entrepreneur (he made $5M for selling his first company, Loopt, for $43M, after raising $21M in VC) to a successful connector and early-stage investor as the young President of Y-Combinator. Still, it is way too early to claim victory at OpenAI.

An analogy to where the AI business is today. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak only made 200 Apple-Is back in 1976 and sold them for $666.66.. This one was sold for $400,000 at an auction in 2021.

Despite our respect for the genius and success of Sam’s three mentors, we see several red flags in Mr. Altman’s story that cause some pause. First, Sam showed a lack of savvy by structuring OpenAI to report to a non-profit board, which was clearly a flawed and unworkable idea from the beginning and ironically led to his temporary ouster.

OpenAI's Sam Altman out—maybe Anthony Perkins · Nov 19 Read full story

Second, Sam is said to operate ‘more as an investor, rather than a CEO.’ This is a problem because investors are always looking for the next deal, whereby CEOs must maniacally focus on their company’s handful of top risks and solve them. Two completely different mentalities.

And finally, as an extension of the last point, Sam seems scattered literally all over the map, while his only real job of claiming the generative AI throne is very far from achieved. OpenAI is living in a highly competitive, overheated marketplace that is very competitive. Using ChatGPT today is like playing Pong on an Apple I with a wooden keyboard back in 1976—It was insanely cool then but still a $666.66 toy. Sam still has a huge mountain to climb.

Top AI & ML private companies nominated to the Cryptonite 300 competition for 2024 The Cryptonite Weekly Rap · Nov 4 Read full story

Sam is literally scattered all over the map trying to create a Worldcoin, hop-scotching the Middle East seeking money to build AI chips, a giganticly expensive endeavor, and schmoozing politicians. Sam demonstrates a clear sense of urgency about OpenAI’s ‘ever-expanding capabilities to make huge profits,’ yet he lacks the Steve Jobs-like focus. 

Sam posted this advice to entrepreneurs back in 2019, ‘You also want to be an exponential curve yourself - you should aim for your life to follow an ever-increasing up-and-to-the-right trajectory.’ That sounds lovely, but the law of physics also states that given today's technology, if you are flying much faster than Mach 3, your aircraft is likely to blow up in mid-air.

Sam Altman's plan for Worldcoin domination Anthony Perkins · Jun 16 Read full story

UnSocial Networking

In an interview on X last Thursday, Elon told ARK Invest Boss Lady and Tesla bull Cathie Wood he wants to grow X by turning it into a ‘giant brain’ and adding financial services to the platform. Elon has the AI pedigree to build the brain, but is he right enough about where payment services are trending to pull from the financial services platform?

“‘I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about cryptocurrency—hardly any at all. I have thought for a long time about money and the nature of money, and it’s really a database for resource allocation. Fiat currency is actually fine as a database for resource allocation, provided that it’s rules-based and there’s not much abuse from the government. You want to minimize noise, minimize latency, and minimize packet loss. Inflation adds noise to the system.”

—Elon’s response when he was asked about Bitcoin

We have no doubt that in spite of losing nearly half its value since Elon bought the network, he and X Boss Lady Linda Yaccarino will diversify and grow X’s paid services business and get back into growth mode. Most of the loss in X’s value had to do with being overvalued in the first place by bot traffic and an industry-wide advertising slump. 

From the very beginning, Elon always said he wanted to be the WeChat of the West. [WeChat is a Chinese social network app that combines instant messaging and mobile payments developed by Tencent with 1.3 billion users vs. X at 556 million.] Twitter has primarily operated as a one-trick pony with a group chat supported by advertising.

The Facebook/Whatsapp/Instagram cabal still dominates social.

Elon's weak position on Bitcoin and his resolve to trust Fiat currencies are definitely anti-trends. If Elon wants to be a payments platform, we suggest