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Envy

When you see someone do well, and emotions trigger for you to do well yourself, there’s often a thin line between what’s driving it.

Were you inspired or envious?

Seemingly difficult to know what it is, but not as hard to identify. If the changes you’ve made to get closer to the end game make you more disciplined towards your goal, you were inspired.

If your actions become more erratic e.g. taking bigger risks, breaking rules to get to the point, etc then envy drives you.

And of the 7 deadly sins, envy is the one that is no fun at all.

2022 – My Year In Review

As we come to the end of 2022, it’s time for me to look back and reflect on the past year. I have had plenty of highs and lows across the year. But that is not specific to 2022. It’s specific to life – which is full of highs and lows. As long as the highs outnumber the lows, it is a life well spent.

The year started with my younger brother’s wedding. He has been an introvert all his life so I really didn’t know what to expect. However, it gives me great joy as I look back and see how they have evolved together as a couple.

My daughter took the opportunity to practice her photography ideas

2022, unfortunately, also had a difficult health scare for my family. In February, my father suffered from subarachnoid hemorrhage. It is nothing short of a miracle that not only did he recover, he recovered well. We feel grateful that he has been given another life. It has reinforced my belief that life is fragile and true happiness stems from spending moments with family & friends. My friends & family took this opportunity to put together a small fund to help brain hemorrhage patients in Pakistan.

Later in the year, my father in law was involved in a hit and run accident in Lahore. He sustained brain injuries and unfortunately didn’t live. In addition to lessons on life’s fragility, it was a reminder of a sustained failing law & justice system in Pakistan.

Mid year, I travelled to three countries including Qatar, Turkey & Georgia and ended up moving to Georgia to give a shot to digital nomad lifestyle that I’ve written about several times on this blog.

Doha – Museum of Islamic Art

Some parts of this lifestyle are great; e.g higher standard of living for a low cost. And some parts just outright suck; being alone in a city with very little Pakistani expat community. Moreover it is hard for friends & family to visit me here as the visa policies are somewhat non-existent for Pakistanis. Despite that, a few of my friends did come to see me here from Pakistan and hence I’m bullish on friendships.

Zhinvali Reservoir: Musa, Hamad, Taimur, Irtiza

As I wasn’t as social in Georgia as I was in Pakistan, I had more time available. I took some short courses on financial markets. I’m really excited to have learnt more about the things I’m passionate about. I also had a wonderful time home-schooling and bonding with my children. My daughter has really connected with me during this period and has worked on several projects that she wouldn’t have had in a traditional school environment.

Financially, the year started off very lucratively for me. I had big crypto wins, mostly out of luck. A fund delayed my withdrawal due to liquidity issues, and paid a few months later at the market top instead. If you don’t believe in luck or randomness, you should start doing that.

Everything is usually random. Those who know this have learnt to spread their wings wide enough to provide themselves with a higher probability of catching something out of sheer luck.

It was a tough year for financial markets with S&P500 closing ~20% below where it started the year from. Private markets, crypto etc have done even worse. Naturally my portfolio is affected also just as much as everyone else’s. But I’m a long-term optimist in these assets and continue to average in as the discounts get deeper. I plan to continue to deploy more funds over 2023. I have acquired more SaaS businesses along-side Saad. I have continued to write more micro-checks in a large number of startups. My plan with startups is similar to my understanding of concept of randomness i-e to write equal-sized micro-checks to a large number of companies spread over several years to capture the luck & randomness that the life offers.

I’m very close to my plan of achieving a financial state where my assets grow just enough to a) pay for my life b) and still not decrease in value after adjusting for inflation. I’m not there yet, but I see more and more signs that a self-sustainable flywheel can be a possibility.

While spending some time in Kazbegi, I learnt how to start a campfire just with an axe and a lighter which seemed really simple on YouTube but was a lot of work in real life especially in a freezing weather. As I was learning how to light a campfire, SBF was pulling the rug underneath me and others. FTX scammed customers out of $8 billion dollars and I lost some funds too which were held at the platform. Saad kept calling me to tell me how grave the situation was, but it was too late to do anything, so I enjoyed the fire instead.

My wife always wanted to spend a full winter holiday season in a country that celebrates it to the fullest. As orthodox Christians, Georgians really celebrate the season quite unlike anyone else. And she had the blast of her life doing that.

I end this year as well as this blog with gratefulness. For the opportunity to do more things. For the luck. For family. For friends.

Scorecard

It’s been over 4 years since I transitioned out of my digital marketing career and I’ve spent a lot of time asking myself why I’ve done the things I’ve done which included being less involved & less excited about a well paying well established business and letting it gradually slip away.

While I was doing it, I didn’t know exactly why I was doing it, I just knew it had to be done. After years of introspection, trying to collect my thoughts to understand myself better, I think I’ve a little bit idea of why I chose that path.

My business and everything I was building felt like a game to me. The income/profits were points and I loved seeing my scorecard grow. As I got good at the game, setting a newer high score became more accessible, and less exciting. So I probably ended up changing the difficulty mode to hard i-e a painful career switch leaving most my leverage behind and starting over again.

I think I’m excited to try to rebuild. I’m earning much smaller game-points but excited to see the scorecard go up again from 0. I think I will be very excited when I break my previous high score on this new difficulty level.

The Two Ends

There are things that you need. Without those, you’d likely be in a miserable shape. You need a roof over you. Being homeless would likely make you extremely unhappy. You need a way to keep yourself warm when it’s cold, and cool when it’s hot. You need to eat a minimum amount of calories everyday. It’s almost always a good idea to spend money on whatever you need. I am willing to bet that the majority of the happiness you feel stems from fulfilling your needs.

There are things that you want. May be it’s a new phone. May be you want two cars instead of one. But there are certainly somethings that you want, but not really need. These could act as short-term happiness boosters. But usually these wants will not make a significant contribution towards your long-term happiness.

There are things that you like. May be you would really like a new carpet in your living room. Or a more pleasing work-station. Your likes probably also make contributions towards your short-term happiness. But probably not so much towards the long-term one.

There are things that you love. These are the things that you’d love to do if you had a large amount of resources whether time or money. May be you love travelling so much that for the ease of travel you’re willing to throw $100,000 on a better travel document. May be you really wanted to see the northern lights. May be, you want to travel twice every year for as long as you’re alive.

I’ve come to a realization that the kind of happiness that money can buy is often found in two things that are farthest from each other on our quadrant; need & love. Your happiness is either stemmed in the basics, or probably in the extravaganza. Everything in between is probably not worth your money.

Home

A few weeks ago I (temporarily) moved outside of Pakistan for professional reasons. I will likely not be back in Pakistan for the next few months. My initial feelings after spending first 30 days here is that even though this place may classify as having better standards of living, there’s more to life than that. And even though being here is financially better for me, which is why I’m here, it doesn’t translate into me being happier.

Better savings today may mean more financial freedom in the future – which is all very great – but my happiness stems from people. My home is where my family and friends are and hence I can not wait to go back.

Picks & Shovels of the Metaverse

I ventured into financial markets in the most millennial way possible. In Pakistan, there’s no culture of investing in equity markets and since interest is frowned upon, not many investors dabble with money markets, saving accounts, or term deposits either. Hence, with lack of knowledge on equity markets, my first investment happened to be in Bitcoin.

In the next few years I started investing in many other cryptoassets and lost a lot of money. I learnt some expensive and painful lessons. My number one lesson being; the first and foremost goal of any investment is preservation of capital. The secondary goal is the return on investment.

After learning that lesson, I started analyzing most investments from the “picks and shovels” point of view, especially in up and coming technologies and disruptive innovations.

Instead of buying Cardano, or Stellar Luman, or Dogecoin, I realized I could be investing in $BNB, or most recently $COIN. This way I wouldn’t have to worry about which asset would do well as all trading activity on all cryptoassets generates a fee for Binance & Coinbase. Sure my return could be lower, but so is my risk. $BNB ended up generating a 60x return for me despite being a “safe bet” which is an order of magnitude larger than most unsafe bets in the cryptospace.

Most recently, NFTs have shook the world by the storm. But they are extremely difficult to value. They are also quite illiquid as they are non-fungible in nature. Part of illiquidity is solved by fractionalized art platforms like Fractional.Art as you can now buy small fungible pieces of a non-fungible art. The most recent example being Feisty Doge NFT (NFD) which is fractionalized ownership of photo of a Shiba dog and is trading at $51 million dollars at the time of writing, thanks to fractionalization and liquidity.

NFT space, for now, has fewer bluechip pick-and-shovel style opportunities. The largest NFT marketplace OpenSea doesn’t have a governance token, hence it’s not possible to get exposure to it. It’s also not a public company yet so you can not get exposure via equity market either. Smaller NFT platforms have governance tokens, but are priced way higher than the market share that they have e.g $RARE or $RARI.

There are also play-to-earn games in the NFT space. Since P2E games require players to buy NFTs in order to play the game, there’s a barrier to entry especially for those who can’t afford to buy at all. To solve this, guilds have been formed which lend their NFTs to scholar gamers who then play the games to earn, and share revenues with the guild. In this case, by betting on the guilds, you can also bet on the entire P2E gaming industry pick-and-shovel style. The largest guild right now is $YGG, but that also seems to be over-valued to me on current FDV relative to the number of scholars they have at the moment.

NFTs have also already spread across sports. With $CHZ powering sports fan tokens and collectibles for clubs like Paris Saint-Germain ($PSG) or Barcelona ($BAR), it can also serve as a pick-and-shovel bet on the sports NFT space.

For now, I’m merely observing the pick-and-shovels of this space as I’m confident there will be multi-bagger winners in the NFT space.

Disclaimer: The information provided is for informational purposes only. It should not be considered legal or financial advice. To the maximum extent permitted by law, I disclaim any and all liability in the event any information, commentary, analysis, opinions, advice and/or recommendations prove to be inaccurate, incomplete or unreliable, or result in any investment or other losses.

My Draft Crypto Portfolio Outperformed The Markets By A Lot

Two weeks ago I wrote about 10 crypto assets that are in my watchlist or portoflio. I wanted to see how they have performed since I’ve written that blog post.

Here’s the two week performance below.

AssetPrice on 28th JulyPrice on 11th Aug% Gains
BTC$39,851$45,64414.53%
ETH$2,307$3,16036.97%
SOL$28.33$41.1245.14%
AXS$47.75$74.8956.83%
FTT$31.32$49.5058.05%
PERP$9.96$15.6457.02%
RUNE$4.10$7.1373.90%
MKR$2,705$3,41826.36%
LUNA$9.55$16.5673.40%
STX$1.16$1.4726.72%

If you allocated $1,000 to this draft portfolio on 28th July and allocated $100 to each of the listed assets, your returns would have looked like this

AssetValue on 28th JulyValue on 11th Aug
BTC$100$114.54
ETH$100$136.97
SOL$100$145.15
AXS$100$156.84
FTT$100$158.05
PERP$100$157.03
RUNE$100$173.90
MKR$100$126.36
LUNA$100$173.40
STX$100$126.72
Total$1000$1,468

This would have yielded a cumulative return of 46.80% on your entire portfolio in 2 weeks. If you had a Bitcoin only portfolio you would have generated 14.53% return while if you had an ETH only portfolio your return would have been 36.97%. If you had a 50/50 BTC/ETH portfolio, your returns would have been 25.70%.

In addition, if you had a way of mirroring the entire market, the crypto market has grown from 1.527 trillion dollars to 1.885 trillion dollars. This index would have yielded you 23.44% returns.

Luckily, my draft portfolio above outperformed BTC, ETH, BTC&ETH as well as CMC Index portfolio.

User Equity

Mercury – a bank built for startups, recently published their crowdfund campaign primarily with a goal to allow the customers of the bank to own equity and financial upside in the success of the bank.

Mercury acquires >60% of their customers with word of mouth or referral from their existing customers. As customers become owners of the bank, they are far more likely to refer other startups to bank with Mercury. Hence it is fair to say that Mercury has, in a way, delegated part of the job of customer acquisition to their customers which is very fascinating for me.

I’ve previously seen this model a lot in the crypto & DeFi space. For example anyone who ever traded even once on a decentralized exchange Uniswap was airdropped the Uniswap governance token.

Or if you’re a market maker or liquidity provider on PancakeSwap, you are rewarded with the CAKE governance/equity token.

While any business is only successful as long as it has customers or users, yet for centuries, we hadn’t seen an economic model which rewarded the customers with the financial upside of the success of the business.

We started to see a little bit of it in the past few years. For example content creators on YouTube have an economic incentive to create content and publish on YouTube. However, their financial upside is limited to the revenue generated by their content alone. In addition, the viewers of the content have no financial upside. Even though, both are users of the platform and make it successful.

On the contrary, with Uniswap, even the traders and not just market makers earned governance tokens for simply trading on the platform.

With this new customer/user equity model, users can have financial upside across the entire product and hence they have an economic incentive to work towards the success of the business.

Crypto Assets That I’m Keeping An Eye On

There are several crypto assets that I’m either holding, or watching and I wanted to write one-liner on each one of them. I may be holding some of them for the short-term and some for the long-haul. Others, I may just be observing from the sidelines. Also as fundamentals change, some of these projects will no longer be in my portfolio or watchlist.

Please do your own research and do not consider this to be a financial advice as I’m not qualified to give any financial advice.

$BTC – best monetary policy, no pre-mine, largest, most-secure, simplest, best, deserves largest allocation in each portfolio.

$ETH – most popular infra-layer. Attracting most innovation. Dapps built on ETH will likely replace banks, financial institutions and many fintech apps and neobanks.

$SOL – the most likely contender to compete with ETH. Fastest, cheapest, a little bit more centralized. Supported by the best institutional investors in the crytpo space.

$AXS – play to earn game. Gaming is no longer a pastime activity but a job. Crazy fundamentals. Axie earns $150 million dollars per month and AXS is trading at PE ratio of only 7.

$FTT – native token of the best derivates exchange. Can go wild like BNB (but not as much).

$PERP – largest DEX for perpetual contracts.

$RUNE – one of its kind decentralized exchange that enables trading of non-synthetic assets. All other dexes e.g Uniswap, Pancakeswap use synthetic tokens for assets from other chains.

$MKR – DAO behind largest (partially) decentralized stablecoin DAI

$LUNA – Powering largest (fully) decentralized stablecoin UST

$STX – Just in case, Bitcoin wins DeFi infra layer too. Smart-contract platform secured by Bitcoin’s hashpower.

How Realistic Is Elon’s Dogecoin As A Replacement For Bitcoin

I do not own any Dogecoins. I have never had held any. I didn’t see the premise of buying into it. But Elon has taken it too far and hence I thought to finally write about my thoughts on the situation.

Yesterday, Elon Musk tweeted that he no longer supports Bitcoin due to it’s massive carbon footprint.

Later that day, he expressed his plans that Dogecoin could be that alternate cryptocurrency which also happens to use <1% of Bitcoin’s energy.

Let’s dive into this to see if this could realistically be an alternate to Bitcoin or not.

Bitcoin

A few weeks ago I recorded an impromptu podcast with my friend ZSM to share my views on the biggest benefits of Bitcoin. Full podcast can be heard here. But the TL;DR was that Bitcoin’s limited supply vs infinite fiat money is what makes it a potentially attractive store of value. In order for Bitcoin to deliver on this promise, it needs to be really safe and temper proof. This is where Bitcoin’s 150 TWh energy consumption comes in. Bitcoin network has no ceiling to how much energy it can consume. The miners are incentivized to provide hash power (security) to the network to earn/mine bitcoins. So as long as the cost of mining bitcoins is lesser than the price of bitcoins mined, they can continue to add hash rate profitably, infinitely. Since Bitcoin price has no ceiling due to its limited supply and high demand, you can not predictably say what would be the maximum amount of energy bitcoin needs to operate.

Bitcoin consumes a lot of energy but also provides an opportunity to billions of people. An opportunity for them to protect their wealth and be free from the state-run money. An opportunity at a better life.

Bitcoin also incentivizes renewable energy. For maximum profitability, miners are encouraged to secure bitcoin by incurring the least amount of cost. Renewable energy is usually the cheapest form of energy source with least amount of carbon emissions and hence >75% of the miners and ~50% of the hash rate comes from renewable energy sources.

Bitcoin is not just money, it’s also a payments network. Hence to compare Bitcoin to traditional fiat money on the basis of energy consumption, you wouldn’t just look into the number of trees that need to be cut to print paper money, but would also need to look at energy consumed by millions of banks and financial institutions that act as payment networks for the fiat money.

Doge

Unfortunately, like Bitcoin, Dogecoin is also a proof of work cryptocurrency. Which means it is also secured by energy and not through another consensus mechanism (more on this later). Since Doge has had a massive price appreciation this year, miners are incentivized to provide more energy to Dogecoin in order to mine/earn Dogecoins. This is a perfect opportunity for more and more miners to flock in and profitably mine Dogecoins. This translates into higher energy consumption by Dogecoin as compared to before.

So a lot of critics would suggest that Dogecoin has the same reward-loop as Bitcoin and hence even if it consumes lesser energy today, it would consume the same amount of energy as Bitcoin (or more) as long as the price continues to appreciate.

But there’s a catch. Dogecoin price can not appreciate infinitely. Dogecoin has infinite supply and infinite new issuance, hence Dogecoin can never have a sustainable price appreciation. Since there’s a cap to how much it can grow, there will also be a cap for miners’ interest in the network. Hence, IMO, dogecoin will always continue to be less energy-intensive than bitcoin, just as Elon has pointed out.

Does that make dogecoin better than bitcoin? I don’t think so. It is just like fiat-money. But worse. Dogecoin comes with many of the cons of Bitcoin (energy consumption, price instability) and also many of the cons of fiat (inflationary, infinite supply, bad store of value etc). Hence any amount of energy needed to protect dogecoin network is a wasted energy. The lower carbon emissions are not going to give billions of people a chance at a better life. A chance to be inflation-free. A chance to store their wealth reliably.

Dogecoin is infinitely worse than Bitcoin, at least in my opinion.

Ethereum (or other Proof-of-Stake alternates)

Ethereum is having a fantastic year. Thousands of decentralized finance (Defi) apps are being built on Ethereum. It is programmable money unlike Bitcoin. It does consume energy since it’s also a POW asset, but will soon be a proof of stake asset with ETH2.0 (beaconchain for which is already live). Hence, in the future Ethereum will be consuming <1% of the Bitcoin’s energy. It will also have a deflationary/reducing supply after EIP1559 which will be implemented in the next quarter this year. In short, Ethereum has a fantastic narrative going on right now. It is often dubbed as “ultra-sound money” these days.

ETH2.0 will come with many of the pros of Bitcoin (store of value, deflationary, limited supply) and will also be consuming less than 1% of Bitcoin’s energy.

However, POS is still a lesser-proven alternate to POW. There is a lot of criticism on it by POW-proponents. One of which is that Bitcoin is protected by “external costs” in the form of energy. Ethereum 2.0 will be protected by staked Ethers hence the protection will come from within the network which is akin to a snake eating it’s own tail.

I like Ethereum. And I like Bitcoin. But I don’t understand Doge. It offers no value and it solves none of the problems. If Elon had to pick a crypto that was envoirment friendly, he could have just gone ahead with Ethereum. He seems to like it anyway.