Most writing around crypto is black and white. There’s the pro voices predicting $1M Bitcoin and there’s the skeptics dismissing crypto as a ponzi scam and predicting BTC at $0 shortly.
Most people on both sides have a vested interests. The proponents bought crypto low and now need more people to buy in so their number can go up. The skeptics are shilling their books and their consulting services. Most of the time it makes sense to ignore both and follow the few precious voices out there that do actual research.
But having a few skeptics in your briefing routine is essential. One I follow is David Gerrard. He wrote a couple of critical books on crypto and has regular updates about things like the El Salvador Bitcoin disaster or the regulatory trouble of Tether. There are many similar voices out there. They’re single-minded, with an agenda and usually without hands-on experience. But they are smart and their opinions are well-researched.
If you dismiss crypto critics then you better have a reason. Say, read this excellent post questioning whether crypto solves any problems at all. You must have an opinion about thing like that. Good attitudes are things like:
The critic is question is factually wrong for reasons XYZ.
The critic is currently right but things will change in at point A in the future because of B and C.
I’m not interested in the underlying value/utility of crypto and I don’t care about its future. People currently like crypto and I like taking money from those people. I’m a trader.
When I come across valuable critical opinions, I tend to write down my counter-arguments. That’s how I realize how flimsy my positions may be. I find this extremely difficult and ego-reducing but necessary. As a startup founder, as an investor, you want to be your own thesis’s enemy. You want to beat it up and battle-test it before you expose it to the world. The best startup founders I meet have thought about the pitfalls of their ideas so much that they have ready answers when those questions are posed, answers that demonstrate a consistent worldview. If all you have is hope that you are right then those with an actual strategy will clean you up.
Ernest Becker famously said that the narrative that wins isn’t the one that contradicts others but the one that incorporates them. I once listened to Jim Simons, the legendary founder of Renaissance Capital, say that with all their math and models his team still needs a “story” to take positions, and even then hedges their bets heavily. The lessons 1) stories are ok, but your narrative needs to be written by you and encompass all others 2) your stop-loss orders should still be in place.