This week, Cobie & Ledger are joined by Hasu, a veteran poker player, crypto researcher, and perpetual learner. Hasu hosts Uncommon Core and knows a ton about crypto fundamentals. He shares his thoughts with us on many subjects.
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Show Notes
Hasu Twitter Day
– Everyone has become a Hasu on twitter today
– pplpleasr became Hasupleasr lol
Hasu’s Day to Day
– Basically thinks about stuff and writes it down
– Has been getting back into the dating scene
– Uses his actual photo, not Hasu anime pfp
– It’s been 18 years since Ledger has been dating
Background
– Joined crypto January 2018 at the absolute top
– Played pro poker for a decade
– So many people who used to play poker are now in crypto
– Gambling addicts?
– Not very competitive anymore because bad players lose interest, good players keep getting better
– Fully dove into crypto in peak bear market
Starting Crypto
– Everyone always feels behind when they start
– Doesn’t take very long to actually catch up
– Hasu worked on himself to keep learning for 2 years
– Bear market best time to learn – only people who really care are studying then
– Su Zhu and Hasu started talking and writing together every day
– Now they run Uncommon Core Podcast together
Bear Market
– Developed 2 strong beliefs: Bitcoin & DeFi
– Had a thesis written out like 1.5 years before DeFi summer but still didn’t recognize DeFi summer as DeFi for awhile
New Guys
– Cobie: “What would you recommend new guys do in this market?”
– If Hasu had derisked every time his gut said to he’d be worse off
– Ledger: “Santiago says time in the market, not timing the market”
– Cobie: “For 95% of people, just holding and forgetting is the best strategy”
Leverage
– Hasu’s 2 pieces of advice for the 100 IQers – pay attention to fees and taxes & don’t use leverage
– Cobie: “Everyone who comes on this show that made it said don’t use leverage”
– Hasu: “If you use leverage, trade on a platform with sub accounts and one that has partial liquidations”
Interesting Problems in Crypto
– The security of public blockchains
– MEV and protecting people from leaking money to miners if they don’t intend to
MEV (Miner Extractable Value)
– Common example of MEV is a sandwich attack: miner sees order with 5% slippage, sneaks in trade before to frontrun, cause max slippage then sell right at the end
– Locked in guaranteed profit for miner and loss for trader
*Hasu connection rug followed by OOOOOR meme breakdown by Cobie and Ledge*
MEV pt. 2
– Ledger: “Does MEV really exist for other chains?”
– Hasu (in short): “Yes but it takes on a different form”
– If there is value to being behind or before orders in a block, people will always spend up to that amount to extract it
– Actually isn’t always bad – resembles mining to a certain extent and makes the market efficient
Moar MEV
– Flashbots/ Eden kinda like the infrastructure
– Flashbots is like a soft fork of ETH with a new transaction time where transactions go into a private pool
– These transactions are private until they land on chain
– Then it doesn’t matter until what your slippage is set it
– Punk floor got swept with MiningDAO, executed all at once without allowing anyone to frontrun
Guest Question
– I’m not going to pretend to be able to take notes on this answer
MOOOOOAR MEV
– Eden is faster than flashbots since they forked
– Flashbots required much more technical knowledge to be able to submit a transaction to them
– Eden is much easier to use
– Chainlink is in the position to extract a lot of value
– Lending markets could do a better job
– Wallets are in the best position to protect users from MEV
– Could run local simulations to see if it would create MEV, and if it would, you could bundle the transaction with the MEV and give the V back to the user
Bitcoin Security
– Udi said it’s 100 years away, false moral panic
– It’s so cheap to reorg ETC that it takes like 2 weeks to get finality
– If Bitcoin security drops too low, you need to increase the amount of wait time for finality
– It’s agreed that there is some amount of security fee we should pay to miners
– But how much that is is still up for debate
– Lightning network liquidity is tough
Game Theory of the Future of Bitcoin
– Looking at the long-term is important
– Always struck Hasu as very obvious that Bitcoin would run into problems
– Miners making less fundamentally weakens Bitcoins security and will need to be solved to get and keep a bitcoin standard
– Bitcoin on exchanges might be the play in the future (per Gavin’s article) even though it goes against the HODL meme
– Ledger: “If Hasu wants to debate Udi CMS holdings will likely pay 6 figures for you to do it”
– Hasu: “I think Bitcoin is going to get hardcore greenwashed over the next 5 years”
Alternative L1s
– Hasu mostly out on them
– Feels like they release incentive programs, create coins and pull in money
– Environmental critique of Bitcoin is more legit than it is against Ethereum
– Tezos had a potential value add there, but now Ledger is not impressed
– Hasu sees Avalanche potentially falling over a bit like BSC
Young People in Crypto
– Crypto is full of very young people
– They should use their time to do things that they won’t be able to do later
Regulations & Stablecoins
– Feeling some afterglow after recent events
– Thinks its one of the biggest events in crypto in 2021
– Crypto having a real impact in politics is very positive
– Hasu: “It seems like Gensler does not have a lot of power”
– Hasu: “I hate ripple but I’m hoping they win their case because it will be very important for crypto… it is such an obvious security”
Final Alpha
– Hasu: “There are a lot of important skills out there but the most important is learning how to learn. There are a lot of really good mental models for how to learn well. Check out “The Art of Learning”. You learn it once then everything else will come easier to you”
Notes by Kevin
Music by GiovanniPickle