[ad_1]
Hello friends, and welcome to Week in Review!
Last week I wrote about tech against Disney. This week, I’m talking to you about finding a new crypto messiah.
If you are reading this on the TechCrunch site, you can get it in your inbox from the newsletter page and follow my @lucasmtny tweets.
The big thing
Elon has exhausted his welcome among the Illuminati crypto, and Bitcoin’s sidekicks are on the hunt for a new Emperor God King.
This weekend, thousands of crypto sidekicks and investors attended a Bitcoin themed conference in Miami, a very real and very produced conference featuring crypto celebrities and real celebrities. , all with a mission to make waves.
Even though I’m not in person at the conference (its main stage panels were broadcast live online), I have a lot of invitations in my emails for afterparties featuring celebrities, bars open and endless conversations about the dangers of fiat. The cryptocurrency community has never been bigger or richer thanks to its most fervent bull run to date, and despite a pretty noticeable correction in recent weeks, people think the best is yet to come. come.
Despite having so much, what they still lack is a patron saint.
For the longest fight, it was SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk who bolstered the currency by pushing Tesla to invest money from its balance sheet in bitcoin, while also pushing Tesla to accept payments. in bitcoin for its vehicles. As I have noted in this newsletter in the past, Musk struggled to reconcile the mere power consumption of Bitcoin’s global network with his eco-warrior bravado, which seemed to lead to his gentle excommunication and uneven (although I’m sure it’s welcome anytime).
Goods and services are the real economy, all money is just accounting
– Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 5, 2021
There are a lot of celebrities looking to fill their shoes – the recent approval gone bad by Soulja Boy was one of the more comedic cases.
Crypto is no stranger to scam – of that even the most hardcore crypto scammers can probably agree – and I think there has been some agreement that the only leader who can truly preach is he gospel is someone who is already so rich that he does not need more money. This is one of the reasons the community has given Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin so much respect, who really doesn’t seem to care too much about getting richer – he donated around $ 1 billion. of crypto to COVID relief efforts in India. A Musk-like cheerleader serves a different purpose, however, so the community is looking for a good billionaire.
The top runner-up at the moment appears to be a certain Jack Dorsey, and although – like Musk – he’s also another double CEO, he’s quite different from him in his demeanor and desire to be in the spotlight. He was, however, one of the keynote speakers at the Miami Bitcoin conference.
Dorsey collects the most headlines for his work on Twitter, but it’s Square where he grows most of his crypto enthusiasm. Users can already use Square’s Cash app to purchase bitcoin. Minutes before taking the stage on Friday, Dorsey tweeted a thread detailing that Square was interested in creating its own hardware wallet on which users could store cryptocurrencies like bitcoin outside the boundaries of an exchange.
Square plans to create a hardware wallet for #bitcoin. If we did, we would build it entirely in the open, from software design to hardware design, and in collaboration with the community. We want to start this reflection in the right way: by sharing some of our guiding principles.
– jack (@jack) June 4, 2021
Bitcoin changes absolutely everything, Dorsey said on stage. I don’t think there is anything more important in my life to work on.
While billionaire Dorsey seems like a good choice on paper, he often tweets about bitcoin, but only good tweets. It defends its effects on the environment. He shows up at House disinformation hearings with a clearly visible bitcoin tracker in the background. He is also sadly the CEO of Twitter, where the company’s desire to rule over its most troublesome users – including one very troublesome user – caused a rift between him and the very vocal libertarian sect of the crypto community.
Dorsey didn’t get very far in his speech before a rowdy made a scene calling him a hypocrite over all of this with a few others, but as any good potential crypto king would know, he just quietly waited for the noise to die down.
Image credits: BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI / AFP / Getty Images
Other things
Here is the TechCrunch news that particularly caught my attention this week:
Trump’s Facebook ban will last at least 2 years In response to recommendations from the Facebook Oversight Board that the company offer more specificity around its ban on former President Trump, the company announced on Friday that it would ban Trump from its platforms until at least January 2023, although the company has essentially given itself the option of extending that deadline if it wishes.
Nigeria Suspends Twitter Nigeria is shutting down access to Twitter inside the country with a government official citing “the use of the platform for activities that could undermine the existence of the Nigerian company.” Twitter called the shutdown “deeply concerning.”
Stack Overflow acquired for $ 1.8 billionStack Overflow, one of the most visited developer sites in the tech industry, has been acquired by Prosus. The heavyweight investment company is best known for owning a huge portion of Tencent. The founders of Stack Overflow say the site will continue to operate independently under the new management.
Spotify is improving its personalization The music service Spotify this week launched a dedicated section called Only You, which aims to capture some of the personalization it served up in its annual Spotify Wrapped review. Highlights of the new feature include mixed playlists with friends and mid-year reviewers.
Supreme Court limits US hacking law in landmark case Judges from the Conservative and Liberal wings have joined in landmark ruling that limits the type of conduct that can be prosecuted under the controversial Computer Fraud and Abuse Act .
This email explains Apple. Here is a funny email, the email exchange that gave birth to the App Store between the late Steve Jobs and the Senior Vice President of Software Engineering, Bertrand Serlet, as my boss Matthew noted. Panzarino.
Image credits: Bryce Durbin / TechCrunch
Additional things
Some of my favorite reads from our Extra Crunch subscription service this week:
For SaaS startups, differentiation is an iterative process “The more you know about the weak points of your target customers with current solutions, the easier it will be for you to stand out. Take every opportunity to learn more about the people you want to serve and the problems they most want to solve. Analyst reports on specific industries can be helpful, but there is no better source of information than the people who will hopefully pay to use your solution.
3 lessons we learned after raising $ 6 million from 50 investors ”being a pre-product at the time, we had to rely on our experience and our vision to generate conviction and urgency among investors . Unfortunately, that was not enough. Investors felt that our experience was ill-suited to the space we were entering (productivity / planning) or that our vision was not convincing enough to merit an investment on the terms we wanted. “
The existential cost of sluggish growth “Just because a tech startup has a hot start doesn’t mean it’s going to grow rapidly forever. Most will end up somewhere in the middle or worse. Simply put, there are more tech companies that are doing well or a little less well after reaching scale.
Again, if you’re reading this on the TechCrunch site, you can get it in your inbox from the newsletter page and follow my @lucasmtny tweets.
[ad_2]
picture credit