I Drank Some Red Bull

I love Red Bull. My childhood hero was sponsored by Red Bull. I painted my racing helmets to feel like I, too, was sponsored by Red Bull.

As far as I’m concerned, Red Bull can do no wrong. Someone could find a severed gonad in a can and that wouldn’t decrease my brand loyalty one bit. If Red Bull had an IPO, I would paint myself red and run across the trading floor.

There are new Red Bulls now. I was originally going to score and rank each new flavor, but then I realized that to do so would be like a mother writing yelp reviews for each of her offspring. I love Red Bull too much do that.

Instead, I will say something nice about each one. Except for the Orange Red Bull, which tastes like something Monster would make. In fact, they did make it, and they called it Khaos Juice Monster. Orange Red Bull tastes like something you might drink if you lived in a trailer, is what I’m trying to say. Disclosure: I am long $MNST

Yellow Red Bull. Dericious like a sweet trip to Aruba, or a can of pineapple juice. But like an island vacation, it’s not something you should indulge in every day.

Cherry Red Bull. Fresh and primary nose with a refined mouthfeel. A clean and nonintrusive variation on the original, but with more thrust and minerality and a sweet tannin finish.

Red Red Bull. Cranberry flavored. The perfect deliverance to a rough day, just like the cans of cran-apple juice we get on airplanes.

Blue Red Bull. The Belvedere of Red Bulls, this is what you would get if you distilled the finest essence of all other Red Bulls and captured it in a can.

Original Red Bull. Can’t beat the real thing. As much as I enjoy the new flavors, I will always return to the familiar. Red Bull, you don’t need colorful gimmicks to get my attention. At the end of the day you’re selling sugar water, I know that, and I pay for that sugar water because your brand has transcended the product. It’s not about you, it’s about me. As a human in a disconnected world I want to distinguish myself, and I drink your brand because the brand is evidence of my identity, because deep down inside we all feel a little bit inadequate and maybe if we associate with a cultural icon then everything will be all right and life will somehow just work.

May 20, 2015

The Art of Learning

A woman wearing headphones was waiting to cross a busy street in Manhattan. As soon as she stepped off the sidewalk, a bicyclist bumped her and continued riding. She turned to scream a bad word at the cyclist. And that’s when a taxi hit her. And now she’s dead.

A much younger version of the author was standing next to that woman, and he learned something that day.

Setbacks happen. If you make a mistake and get frozen in what was, time goes on and you stop. And you’re living life with your eyes closed in memory. And then you get run over by a taxicab.

The Art of Learning is about the mastery of chess. It’s also about Tai Chi. But it’s really about presence of mind.

May 19, 2015September 12, 2015

Australia Takes Quarantine Laws Very Seriously

https://youtu.be/ucA2VM4ghw0

May 13, 2015

Free Food!

What’s with all these food-delivery startups inviting users to try their stuff for free? Plated, Instacart, Blue Apron, Sprig… This isn’t shareware, man.

People in the office have been passing around Munchery referral codes, so I gave it a whirl. My first order was free! And the person who gave me the referral got $20!

But my order was messed up. Now, the mess-up wasn’t bad, certainly not on the level of I FOUND A SEVERED APPENDAGE IN MY FOOD bad. But I politely informed customer service, and they immediately apologized and gave me another $30 credit.

That is very nice of them, but I wonder — Do customer acquisition costs even matter anymore, or is that just a balance sheet smudge?

Delivery startups are increasingly adopting the heroin-pusher model, where the first hit is free. The rationale is that their food service is SO GOOD that once you try it, you’ll be hooked and eager to pay full price.

That works with heroin because when you want heroin, THERE IS NO SUBSTITUTE. But when you want food delivery, there’s, like, all these guys:

…and also Uber.

Food delivery is a commodity. Sure, Munchery claims to offer locally-sourced artisanal (have you ever noticed that artisanal ends in “anal”?) meals, but if they go away, one of the other fifty bespoke delivery services could easily fill that void.

If you’re an early-stage company and your growth metrics don’t look like a hockey stick, you should kill yourself. That’s more or less what I’ve learned from talking to investors out here. And when delivery startups report their key metrics to investors, what are they using as a proxy for growth? Users. Not profits, because if you’re profitable that means you’re not spending enough on GROWING.

I personally appreciate the venture-backed free food subsidy, but growth-at-all-costs rarely leads to customer loyalty. Didn’t Groupon already demonstrate this by screwing over small businesses all around the world?

Click on my referral link! I get free food for inviting people. The people I invite get free food too. And the people THEY invite get free food too! This is a pyramid scheme, but the hapless investors are VCs in Silicon Valley so I don’t have a lot of sympathy here.

May 12, 2015June 19, 2015

Hello. I am a bitcoin.

Hello. I am a bitcoin. This is the story of my journey.

I was born on September 17, 2013 at 7:53 am. I came to life in a BTC Guild mining pool, a reward for mining block #258798 in the blockchain. Bitcoin was trading at $126 on my birthday, and 25 of us bitcoins were generated that moment.

In a mining pool, multiple clients contribute computing power to generate a block in a group-copulation sort of way. That meant that ten minutes after birth, all of us were separated and distributed amongst the miners.

I was actually just 0.1 bitcoin. Well really, I’m not a bitcoin, because a bitcoin is not a tangible thing like those Federal Reserve Notes you call money. I’m more like a bank account balance, where each transaction confers the right to transfer that balance to a new receiver. This story is a trace of transactions.

I sat in the miner’s wallet for ten days. On September 29, I was thrown into a mixer for 6 hours.

Bitcoin mixing is the process of combining a user’s funds with that of many others so it becomes impossible to tell where a transaction originated. It looks something like this:

This is money-laundering, of course. But there are plenty of legitimate reasons for seeking anonymity! Many people simply don’t want their spending history on public display*.

Virgin bitcoins like myself are particularly valuable for mixers – virgin meaning fresh from the coinbase, with no transaction history.

How effective is the mixing service? A taint analysis measures the strength of association between different bitcoin addresses. Prior to tumbling, the analysis looked like this:

After 6 hours of tumbling, it became this:

We rinsed and repeated for the next two days, lending my clean name to what were possibly tainted funds.

Finally, I was put up for sale on Mt Gox on October 2, 04:33 am. I was purchased 20 minutes later, and transferred into the Silk Road Marketplace.

Six hours after entering the Marketplace, at 10:12 am, I was seized along with 29,657 of my comrades. Later that day, Ross Ulbricht was arrested at a library in San Francisco.

The FBI or whatever transferred us to an address for Silkroad Seized Coins. And there we sat and waited for a really long time. Lots of people sent micropayments to our address, with words of encouragement and spam and phishing attempts attached.

The following June, we were moved to a new location for the US Marshals auction and divided into 3000-BTC blocks.

That was a rough few weeks as I envisioned a future providing liquidity for SecondMarket or some such. The price of bitcoin was over $600 by then; who else would want a $1.8M auction block?

As it turns out, Tim Draper wanted all ten auction blocks. On July 1, we moved to Tim’s account on Vaurum (now called Mirror).

And here I am today. I don’t know what comes next, but I feel in my heart that fate includes a trip to Elaine’s bitcoin wallet. You see, I was always disappointed in the timing of the Silk Road seizure. I had only just arrived in the marketplace! I didn’t even have the opportunity to partake in a trade for cocaine or murder-for-hire or even just some damn porn. But now, maybe I will.

*It is easy to trace bitcoin transactions, but difficult to determine if they actually reflect real-world dealings.
By the way, if you use bitcoin, you should really generate a new address for each transaction. I would know, because I am a bitcoin.

Elaine's Idle Mind

and Devil's Workshop

I Drank Some Red Bull

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The Art of Learning

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Australia Takes Quarantine Laws Very Seriously

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Free Food!

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Hello. I am a bitcoin.

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