Come and hear the views of Fred Wilson, founder of Silicon Valley’s famous venture capital USV, Anthony Pompliano, co-founder of Morgan Creek, and Ryan Selkis, co-founder of Messari.
Original title: The “GME Incident” in the eyes of the old crypto gunners: The revenge of retail investors, the cryptocurrency ushered in Netscape Moment Written: Deep Tide TechFlow Hash$Lee
The Game Stop incident became more and more popular, and the anger from retail investors swallowed Wall Street.
When Robinhood, the American online brokerage firm, has closed the stock trading of Game Station (GME), AMC Cinemas (AMC) and Nokia (NOK), it is ushered in more violent anger and new capital battles.
This wave has also swept the cryptocurrency circle.
Under the orders of WSB Chairman, the imitation account with 600,000 followers and Satoshistreetbets, the WSB imitation community, Dogecoin soared 10 times overnight, and its market value was close to tens of billions of dollars, making it into the top ten.
How do the veterans of the cryptocurrency circle view this incident and what impact will it have on cryptocurrency?
Come and hear the views of Fred Wilson, founder of Silicon Valley’s famous venture capital USV, Anthony Pompliano, co-founder of Morgan Creek, and Ryan Selkis, co-founder of Messari:
USV founder Fred Wilson: Revenge of retail investors
Many people have asked me what I think about the Game Stop incident. This is actually not my field. I don’t trade stocks, I only hold them. I don’t use Robinhood, although I have an account. I don’t hang out on Reddit, although I visit it often.
So I don’t pay enough attention to this, but it is really attractive. Young people spontaneously organized in social media overwhelmed the safe haven of the baby boom era. It feels like a moment when you realize that the power structure has changed and the situation will be different.
The financial system of the United States and other developed countries is a manipulated system and has been for a long time. Only large institutions can enter popular IPOs, and only rich people can invest in startups. Many of these rules are designed to protect “widows and orphans”, but what they really do is to make the rich richer and keep those who don’t have money away.
It’s different now. Whether it is encryption technology (Coinbase) or day trading (Robinhood), retail investors now have the tools to enter and win the game.
New venture capital is buying Ethereum crowdfunding. If you did this in the summer of 2014, you would now get about 1,000 times the return on capital.
The crowdfunding was initiated by a team led by a 20-year-old young man. Although the US Securities and Exchange Commission and other institutions hope to implement the same rules on cryptocurrencies to protect the wealthy and prevent others from entering, this has not happened, and I pray that it will not happen.
The new hedge fund is self-organized by the Robinhood army on Reddit, and they can change the price of a stock more easily than the largest hedge fund.
Some people will call for the regulation of this “crazy”, but this is our madness all the time, but the people responsible are different.
I do worry that the outcome of this Game Stop short squeeze will be terrible. It’s not just hedge funds that hurt, but the market may be cruel. However, regulating the market in order to protect small investors is not the solution. We can see that small investors are often much smarter than large investors.
What we need to do is to stop printing money to stabilize the economy and begin to solve the real economic problems that exist on the “Main Street” rather than Wall Street. Monetary policy is not the answer, fiscal policy is. This will not prevent more Game Stop events from happening, they are a by-product of the market. However, it transfers money to where it is needed, not just for games.
Ryan Selkis, Co-founder of Messari: Netscape Moments of Cryptocurrency
Note: Netscape (Netscape browser) was born in 1994 and is an epoch-making product of the Internet. Since then, the Internet has been widely used and has entered thousands of households. Netscape always refers to the turning point of large-scale applications.
GameStop and the Melvin hedge fund manager’s juggling, at least it’s interesting to watch, but I saw that wallstreetcbets were blocked on Discord; Robinhood banned retail investors from buying corresponding stocks; technology opinion leaders (Chamath, Elon) stirred up populist anger, the story Become twists and turns. The bonus will be paid in cryptocurrency.
In marketing, when you sell new things to people, you generally want to attract people’s vices: desire (mating game), greed (financial game), pride (status game), etc. If you can attract multiple vices at the same time, you There is a kind of fire to do big things.
From the first day of encryption, the attraction is mostly about greed (speculation). Of course, there are some cool emerging applications and fringe political elements of “saving the world”, but the real topic is: most people enter the cryptocurrency field to make money. Some people, in high-inflation countries or under oppression, out of fear, in order to keep their original money, but this is a minority. The rise in numbers is the point.
Efforts to curb “retail market manipulation”, suspending free trade in only one direction (benefiting shorts), and suspending speech and gatherings (reducing potential legal liabilities) provide us with a new vice to dig: anger.
Buying Bitcoin is to hedge against inflation, potentially making a lot of money, and also to tell your government to go away. Buying Ethereum to protect the security of the nascent decentralized financial system may make a lot of money, but you must also tell your bank to go away. Buying DeFi assets to increase liquidity, additional investment in better financial infrastructure, and the possibility of making a lot of money, but also tell your brokerage company, lender or asset manager to get out.
I think the best thing today is to (ironically) hand it over to Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian, who said, “In the United States, we vote with two things: votes and dollars. The Internet clearly has a huge impact on our democratic process. Now, , We saw its impact, when the Internet completely changed the dollar vote, so did.”
Any media (technology or other), financial institution or politician will not be safe if they continue to deprive the “unbaptized masses” of their voting rights in US dollars.
I think this kind of anger will have a certain endurance, because you will not care about other people’s money.
Morgan Creek founder Anthony Pompliano: The game has changed
The world now knows what many of us have known for a while-the rules of the game have changed.
This is the enlightenment I got from the events surrounding Wall Street gambling and Game Stop. This is not something that happened overnight, but the crystallization of some trends that have been developing and accelerating for ten years.
First, we start with psychology. Western society hates hedge funds and banks that continue to profit at the expense of small people. Whether it was the housing crisis in 2008, naked short selling, or the early transactions of hedge funds, ordinary people felt that they were always at a disadvantage. Many times, they were hurt and did not even realize that they were involved in the game.
Read an open letter from a user of wallstreetcbets (WSB):
When I was a teenager, I was catching up with the 2008 financial crisis. I clearly remember how the unscrupulous actions of those Wall Street people had an impact on me personally and the lives of those around me. I am lucky. My parents are cautious and a little suspicious. They keep some food. When the crisis hit, our family kept their little room and lived on muffin powder, milk powder, beans and rice for a year. Since then, my parents have been in the habit of storing food, and they have updated their inventory to ensure that they store fresh food.
But those relatives and friends around me are not so lucky. My aunt moved over to live with us and paid a little rent for my house. At that time, she was desperately looking for all possible work outside. Does anyone know the taste of tomato soup made with tomato sauce in the school cafeteria? My friends were forced to taste it. Nearly a year after the worst of the crisis, my father stabilized our family’s source of income and had time to help others through the storm. He asked my friend’s father to do odd jobs to help with housework. One of them made a new closet for my living room, and another one took care of the flowers and plants in my yard. I will always be proud of having such parents, because even when I suspect that my family’s money is still tight, they can pay attention to those who are most in need of help and enthusiastically lend a helping hand.
For the hedge fund Melvin Capital, I would say: You represent everything I hate during the financial crisis. You are a company that makes money by exploiting other companies and manipulating the market and the media. Your continued existence is tantamount to a deep reminder to those who are responsible for the suffering caused by the 2008 crisis, that they were not punished for what they did that year. Your blatant disregard of the law, whether it was a naked illegal short sale a few months ago (tell your lawyer that this is an accusation) or recent shameless market manipulation, it shows that you haven’t learned any lessons since 2008. Why is it against you? Because you guys on Wall Street made terrible illegal financial decisions that changed the lives of millions of people and brought bad consequences, but were rescued and rewarded.
A few days ago, I bought stocks. I took out my savings and bought GME stocks. I paid this month’s rent with a credit card. I used the money originally paid to buy more GME stocks (I don’t Users of WSB are advised to do so). I now hold these stocks. This is my personal decision and also the decision of millions of other people. You can suppress GME’s stock price to $120 within a few hours, and I will not run away. You can spend money to buy thousands of reddit forum robots, but I just want to hold them. You can let all the mainstream media demonize us (retail investors) into monsters, I don’t care. I will do everything I can to make you miserable.
This painful feeling was manifested in the “Occupy Wall Street” movement in Zukoti Park in 2008. Although people have dispersed from the park, the feeling of being crushed by Wall Street has never disappeared.
This feeling is actually caused by the anger of the Fed and our elected officials. They continue to intervene in the market through quantitative easing policies and conduct market manipulation.
The dollar is depreciating at an incredible rate, but no one seems to care about this issue. This punishes 45% of Americans who have no investable assets. They feel that they cannot make progress, they feel that everything is becoming more and more expensive, but they are not making more money.
This is what is happening. People are fooled in a system that rewards investors and punishes savers. All these market manipulations and interventions drive up asset prices and devalue savings.
Therefore, millions of people have suffered psychological trauma in the past and continue to feel left behind by the times. But the intervention of the Internet has created a lifeline-in the past ten years, access to information, communication tools, and financial markets have suddenly increased dramatically. You can play capital games without a Bloomberg terminal and a traditional brokerage account.
You don’t need to go to Harvard University or Wharton School to be invited to a hedge fund creative dinner. You don’t need to wear a suit or tie, someone will listen to you. Instead, you can live anywhere in the world, research and study on the Internet. You can communicate freely with like-minded people, and the barriers to entry into the financial market are almost zero.
When you arm every ordinary person with information, communication tools, and opportunities to enter the market, you create a scene: let everyone fight against these institutions that have been playing with each other for a long time. There was just one problem-the game was shut down the moment the trend started to change.
Obviously, hedge funds and financial institutions are crying because they are losing money. What a joke. They describe themselves as the genius butlers of capital, but they are currently exposed by people with usernames “DeepFuckingValue” and “Roaring Kitty” on the Internet. You absolutely love to see it.
This morning, things got worse. Not only is the traditional financial community fighting all this, Robinhood also disabled the ability of most of their users to trade and get into stocks. Discord kicked wallstreetcbets off their platform last night. Please forgive my language, but what’s the matter with TM?
As I always say, pirates either die or live long enough to become an establishment. Those companies that claim to be anti-establishment systems fall behind when they really want to prove their courage and conviction.
They are not on the side of retail investors, they are on either side of protecting their business. This is their right and we must respect it. But we don’t have to like it, we don’t have to continue to give them our business.
So, where should we go?
This is the best marketing activity for the digital and decentralized financial system in the future, and Bitcoin is raising the middle finger to the central bank.
Decentralized exchanges are kicking stones against their centralized counterparts. Digital assets that are traded 24 hours a day, 365 days a day, free from manipulation and interference are the direction of all of us. Whether you are rich/poor, American/Chinese, smart/stupid, or knowing/unknowing, you will Be allowed to participate in the market.
We will no longer use wealth as a representative of intelligence. We will have a free market where people will bet capital on the future outcome of asset prices. If you are right, you win. If you are wrong, you lose, that’s it.
Forget all these market manipulations and interventions. Traditional institutions will not like it, but they have no say in the new world. Welcome to the decentralized future.
To realize this vision, there is still a lot of work to be done, but we are already on the way.
Robinhood can stop trading in various stocks, the market can trigger a circuit breaker, but no one can close Bitcoin.
No one can stop decentralized exchanges. This is not to hope that people and companies do the right things, but to build a technology that can do nothing but the right things-100% right things.
In the United States, free markets have been a thing of the past. The little people have no way to fight back. As they get information, communication tools and investment opportunities, they are increasingly disadvantaged. However, this situation will not last long, and the new decentralized world will be a hell of a sight.
Sit back and enjoy today, the Internet is doing its thing, there is nothing better than this.
*Shenchao TechFLow reminds investors to guard against the risk of chasing highs, and the views in this article do not constitute any investment advice.
