A deep dive on Andreessen Horowitz's latest "State of Crypto" report. In short: they want people to keep buying crypto, and are not above publishing blatant falsehoods to convince them to do so.
The report itself is 60 pages long, so this is a long one.
https://newsletter.mollywhite.net/p/andreessen-horowitzs-state-of-crypto
If you found this critical analysis of their report valuable, consider signing up for a pay-what-you-want subscription. My writing is never paywalled, and your support goes long way towards helping me continue doing this kind of work.
All content is free and available to all readers, and will continue to be that way. Paywalls suck and you won’t find them here. What you receive will be exactly the same regardless of whether you choose to pay for a subscription or not. That said, paid subscribers are crucial to allowing me to continue doing this kind of research and writing, and so if you are able to support my work I would be immensely grateful. You will also get access to additional features including commenting.
The worst slide in the deck is the one that claims Ethereum now uses 94,000x less electricity than YouTube, a comparison they pick to avoid impugning Bitcoin.
However, this data is based on some incredibly shabby math and bad sourcing by a low-quality popsci blog.
Finally, the "State of Crypto Index" that they've released invites visitors to "adjust" it to "form your own view" (though limited only to a16z's selected data). https://a16zcrypto.com/stateofcrypto/
Its "threshold" parameter seems solely included to prevent the chart from coming out like so:
@molly0xfff Fantastic teardown. If I were in any way associated with this “report”, I would change my name and crawl under a rock.
Apropos of one of your comments about confirming data sources, if you ever need some data from Pitchbook, I may know a guy…
@molly0xfff
Also, YouTube is, ahem, useful*.
(*qualifications, yes, I know)
@molly0xfff The relevant metric also isn't total energy usage but energy use per unit of compute.
That is, no one seriously thinks Ethereum to do video transcoding and streaming, do they?
Molly White
Dr. Fancypants, Esq.
Promethean 🎶🌿🍄💊
Bill, organizer of stuff
Hugo Slabbert ⚠️
Tallawk
Olav
Andrew F