Nuggies: Crypto is More than a Meme?
Thursday, May 6th, 2021
Welcome to the 46th edition of Nuggies, an email newsletter that aggregates articles and commentary on business, economics, startups, and more, in bite-sized nuggets sent right to your email weekly. Created by and for college students.
Our quote of the week comes from Charlie Munger, "Knowing what you don’t know is more useful than being brilliant."
This Week’s Articles:
Headless Brands, Other Internet Web3
This article expands decentralization and crypto trends to the idea of a brand. Traditional brands are centralized, delivering a controlled message to end consumers. More recently, some brands have become less centralized as social media creates the potential for anyone to add a message to a brand.
Headless brands are distinct in that there is no central actor managing the brand. Bitcoin was named and given an initial visual identity by a pseudonymous founder, but more recent brand assets came from a decentralized network of stakeholders. This allows headless brands such at Bitcoin to be self-enforcing, self-incentivized, and contagious.
Read it here
PayPal CEO Dan Schulman: Cryptocurrency Is the Real Deal. And the Superapps Are Coming., Time
This is a short interview in which PayPal CEO Dan Schulman offers his insights and long-term thinking on the trajectory of fintech and currencies. His ideas include the eventual decline of cash, central bank-issued digital currencies, and more. Schulman sees the rate of change in the space accelerating over the next ten years.
Read it here
The Scarcity of Money Myth, Pragmatic Capitalism
This blogpost from an investment manager walks through why money isn’t actually scarce and gives some context for why increasing the money supply does not need to be inflationary. There aren’t any grand takeaways, but it’s a good, quick run through of the thinkings on both sides from someone with a good amount of Twitter followers. Can’t lead you wrong, right?
Read it here
This Week’s Tweets:
This Week’s Wildcard (an extra, interesting nugget):
Check out this chart of Apple’s revenue for AirPods, ALONE, compared to top tech companies’ entire revenue.
This Week’s Question:
Is Dogecoin a good reserve currency?
What are we listening to this week?:
This week Exhibit C is on repeat. This is Jay Electronica’s 2009 breakout single, and catapulted him to hip hop stardom. Despite that, he wouldn’t release an album until 2020. While that album is pretty good, nothing comes close to Exhibit C. The flow is one of the best and the sampling is top tier. Definitely worth a few listens.
Thank you for reading! Nuggies is created by Thomas Pero and Spencer Koehl, two undergraduate students at the University of Notre Dame.
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