Being good at something doesn't mean you should do it.

Runes Protocol Launches on Bitcoin, Sending Fees Soaring as Users Rush to Mint Tokens via CoinDesk

coindesk.com/markets/2024/0…

1/6

The deficit as a % of GDP (bottom), now 5.93%, is higher than in any period except the Great Recession (2007 - 2009) and the 2020 COVID shutdown (dotted line).

The government is borrowing to spend money like the economy is trying to recover from a recession.

A small team pulling in one direction

A large team pulling in different directions

Your pick

Burn the boats, anon

There is no way back

Meta Llama 3 Initial Reactions:

1) Is fast!

You no longer have to wait like GPT

2) Human like responses, no AI voice as in GPT.

This is a big deal for me as the GPT voice feels synthetic and I can’t use the output as is.

3) Better than Gemini at image generation

4) Evals

Striking graphic.

Industry outperforming academia in AI models

h/t Richard Turrin

As we head into 2024, here are some of our favorite podcasts we did to end the year on the Fintech Blueprint:

Advancing Bitcoin with Lightning, Inscriptions, and L2s, with Blockstream's Chief Product Officer Jeff Boortz

How Animoca Brands built an empire at the intersection

Does this count as a person?

What if it has a utility function and a wallet?

What if it makes political contributions?

What are the overlaps between generative AI and Web3?

To paraphrase @lexsokolin as he explores its future potential.

Custody and control of AI agents could be a core value prop of Web3.

👉 Wallets + DIDs to control use of our personal data
👉 ZK proofs to verify we're interacting with the right 'black box'

Top read👇

Mecury, a business banking startup established in 2017, has recentnly launched a new consumer banking division.

With a client base of over 100,000 businesses, primarily startups, Mercury is expanding its offerings to include personal banking services.

Immad Akhund, co-founder

Medium and Substack seeing Web3 competition with t2.world built over Lens Protocol

These 2 guys became Estonia’s first-ever billionaires.

Kristo & Taavet founded WISE to make international fund transfers cheap and easy.

In 12 years, WISE has/is:

- 10M+ users with $1.1B revenue
- London's biggest tech IPO

The Breakdown of how they did it 🧵

Alternative Layer-1 Monad (evm/acc) raises $225MM before launching its testnet

There continues to be a gold rush for performant computational blockchains. And why not?

The payoff could be hundreds of billions of dollars.

What makes them performant? Speed, scalability, and the

The feeling of being productive

and actually producing things of value

is not the same

Excited to see 0L Network getting liquidity

JPMorgan is developing a ChatGPT-like A.I. service that gives investment advice

cnbc.com/2023/05/25/jpm…

This alchemy of Web AI has become clear to the careful observer

And yet so many of the projects in the space are opportunistic meme grabs with no substance

Investors have to be profoundly careful or burn money, time, and reputation on Ponzi games

I worry the real stuff is