We desperately need more objective data on crypto ownership and usage. Most of the data out there is from surveys conducted by crypto companies or advocacy organizations and it is embarrassingly bad. These surveys suggest that the total number of Americans who own crypto is roughly 50-70 million. The FDIC's annual SHED survey suggests the number is closer to 18-20 million. That's a BIG difference! If you're a founder and you are thinking about different problems to solve and different markets to attack, you might make a very different decision depending on which of those two numbers you see.

I'd have more respect for white collar criminals if they spent their ill-gotten gains on cooler stuff. For the most part, it's all fancy cars, vacation homes, and country club memberships. Boring.

If I wanted to get smarter on the benefits and drawbacks of digitizing bearer instruments on distributed ledgers, where would I start? Any good articles or papers on this topic?

Absolutely wild to criticize anyone else for spending too much time on social media.

Everyone’s excited about agentic commerce. What if we aimed higher? In this clip from Not Fintech Investment Advice from the @FintechTakes Takes podcast, I floated a (slightly ranty) idea: Before we build agents that help consumers spend more efficiently ... can we build agents that help them make better financial decisions? E-commerce doesn’t need more optimization. But banking? Budgeting? Wealth management? That’s where real agency could matter. So here’s my modest proposal. Let’s get agentic private banking before we get agentic checkout flows. And tune into the full episode here:

Literally everyone disagreed with this prediction, but I still have eight years to go and I'm feeling good about it.

Bankers everywhere buying these for meeting with their delinquent borrowers

It’s crazy to me that any Democrats voted for this.

Who would be the best person to talk to about how LLMs are changing customer acquisition in financial services? The focus is on B2C rather than B2B, so perhaps someone sharp at a big fintech company noted for its marketing prowess, like Credit Karma? LMK!

Have not seen any evidence of waste, fraud, or abuse!