Back in the bad old days of crypto trading, when there were hardly enough buyers and sellers out there to repopulate an American ghost town, a once major exchange called Poloniex had a feature called the “troll box.” In the troll box, users could discuss their trades and their perspectives on trading with each other.

As one redditor described it, “It looks like pack of ranting teenagers on steroids.”

The wisdom of crowds!

A new paper has evaluated Polymarket, the world’s largest prediction market, and found that it their accuracy does not come from lots of users. Their accuracy comes from a few highly informed traders (just 3% of them).

The authors don’t offer an upshot for their research, but I think it’s implied that people participating in prediction markets are suckers. Or, as the authors put it:

“Prediction markets are remarkably accurate, but the source of this accuracy is not the crowd.”

Does playing prediction markets and losing money actually make bettors losers, though?

Could people losing money there be playing a different game?

The game

First of all, how prediction markets work. These applications get written about a lot but the real world mechanics seldom get broken down.

On Polymarket, people can create a market around any outcome that can be objectively measured. Like: Will Brady Dale be named king of Britain in 2026? In a just universe, that should clearly be a “YES,” but even I would bet against it. (I would love to meet the person who would take the other side of that bet.)

The cool thing about these markets is that the sides have prices and they are always less than a dollar. Buying a “YES” on the market above would probably show up at less than 1¢. “NO,” by contrast, would sell for more than 99¢, but less than $1.

At the start of 2027, the market would resolve, and all the people who bought “NO” would get $1 for each “NO” they bought. That wouldn’t be much of a profit of course, but the idealists buying “YES” would get nothing. A total loss!

The appeal of a market like this is: hey, maybe 2026 is really crazy and somehow I do become king? Like in that 1991 John Goodman vehicle, King Ralph (which, for some reason, I really did see in the theater).

If the outcome of a market ends up being ambiguous, it gets turned over to UMA, another crypto product. It doesn’t really matter for our purposes though, but there do tend to be a lot of ambiguous endings in markets. Language is hard.

Losers

The paper uses a lot of math and sophisticated analysis to show that a small handful of people make money on the site. A few people get lucky. A few other people look like insider traders.

Most people stink and lose.

The researchers write:

“The persistence of skill and anti-skill in prediction markets is unusually high.”

Translation, people are fooling themselves. And just in case that’s not bleak enough, it says in the next paragraph:

“Luck is not persistent.”

However, here’s what I’d like to see: How much are individual traders actually losing?

I expect it’s not very much. In fact, according to TRM Labs, the typical bet is about $12.

Other games

I’m not a prediction market trader. I have taken out less than $100 worth of trades ever — all on politics. I’ve only had one market resolve (I lost all my $7 — or whatever it was).

But I suspect people trade on Polymarket (and Kalshi) for other reasons.

First, to sharpen thinking. It’s one thing to spout an opinion, but it’s another thing to refine that into an objective bet?

Like, you can say that you believe that it’s good to reduce regulation, for example. It’s another thing to make some kind of call about what will happen in an industry when regulation gets reduced. Do you think employment will go up? Do you think it’s market cap will increase?

Look through the markets. Place a bet. Even if you lose money, you’ll learn something by deciding which one to choose and then watching the result unfold.

Second, to put skin in the game. Many of us are prone to spouting prognostications all the time. It’s easy to forget your old opinions or predictions though. How are you ever going to know if you are any good at predictions if you don’t keep track.

Prediction markets give you an actual scoreboard for your predictions. Even if you never bet more than $1 at a time, you have this record you can look at to see how your worldview holds up.

Lastly, it’s fun. I think journalists really underestimate how important this is in markets. Prediction markets are social media with better bragging rights. When you get a call right, you can brag.

(And when you get it wrong… you don’t need to talk about that one.)

To that point: If you haven’t taken a look at these sites, they basically all have their own built in troll boxes. Look at this one for the market, FBI Director “Kash Patel out by…”:

Are you telling me this doesn’t look kinda fun?

Fun is a good coin. I pay good money for fun all the time, at zero dollar-denominated profit. I bet the authors of this paper do, too.

It was Earth Day this week. Earth Day is personally important to me, for reasons I might talk about another time.

Once upon a time I used to send out a comic to people I knew every Earth Day. It was a lot of work so I haven’t done it for years, but here’s an excerpt from one of those old comics.

This week I started a new feature on Front Stage Exit: Backstage. Backstage will be roughly daily (Mon - Fri), with quick takes on topics in crypto, media, health and the news.

They won’t go out over email till Saturday, like today, when I run a roundup.

This is the part where the writer usually comes up with a grand statement about how this offering fits into the grander scheme of media or a needed bit of commentary in the broader market. I don’t have that. I just had this idea IDK.

The first two Backstages were not brief. They are product ideas for Substack proper that I’ve been sitting on for a while. Fridays is brief, though, and it’s about the news that an actual U.S. army soldier allegedly bet on an operation using Polymarket. Which feels bad.

Week of April 20

💰 News doesn’t have a business model. Platforms have a business model, though, and social media platforms needs news so that users have something to start talking about. So social media platforms should open news desks. It actually aligns.

∞ Substack subscriptions cost too much for most people to subscribe to that many. But what if every writer could make more if there were a price for unlimited access?

It has worked before.

🔮 I’ve been going around whispering in the ears of reporters for a year or so now about what I suspect to be a very big story in Washington. This week’s news suggests my guess was wrong, though. What’s really going on looks much more depressing than what I expected.

Prediction markets put corruption just a click away for everyone.

Help I’m Alive

In other news, Metric has a new album, Romanticize the Dive. Emily Haines has been living right at that edge of smart indie and rock pop for 25 years now. She’s been on heavy rotation for me going back to the mid-2000s.

This one is probably on my list of personal anthems, along with “Autoclave” and “Gimme Back My Bullets.”

Maybe you’re not that into music and Metric doesn’t mean anything to you. Do you like movies? Remember that epic song in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, the one performed by his legendary ex-girlfriend, Envy Adams (Brie Larson), the front for the band, The Clash at Demonhead? That was a Metric song!

So I watch this video about ten times a year, because I love the movie and I love Metric:

This new album has an incredible new track on it called “Time Is A Bomb.” I can’t even really tell you how I feel about that track. It’s not germane to this publication.

Till next Saturday.

I apologize to staff of the White House.

For a while now, I’ve intimated that prediction markets inevitably engender public corruption. I have suggested that members of the White House staff might use insider knowledge to make bets on huge events, thereby earning a profit to make up for their lackluster public salaries.

We have no actual indication that any of them have done this! It’s just — y’know — believable. What with everything.

After all, it has sure looked like people with privileged information have been placing bets.

But it never occurred to me that it might maybe be members of the U.S. military that could be making bets on globally significant events. We expect soldiers to be honorable public servants with enormous discretion, but something in the system that inculcates honor among our warriors might have broken down.

The Department of Justice alleges that a member of Army special forces made bets on Polymarket ahead of the ouster of Nicolás Maduro in Argentina.

Someone made over $400,000 on that latest little enforcement of the Monroe Doctrine. U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton1 now thinks he knows who, and he’s not happy about it.

One prediction down

Obviously, the accused is innocent until proven guilty.

But let’s just discuss this as if Clayton did really get the right guy, as the Southern District usually does.

One of my predictions for the year was that we’d all feel weird about prediction markets before we got to the end of the year. Here we are!

If it is really true that a member of the military was placing bets on prediction markets, that’s unsettling. We expect politicians and political employees to be a little corrupt. Political folks tend to be driven by narcissism and hubris.

Public servants are meant to be different, though. They are the ballast on the ship. We may or may not have crazy people captaining from time to time, but they come and go. It’s the career public servants we hope will balance their depredations.

Janus-face

The Greek god Janus didn’t just have two faces. They looked in two different directions.

Prediction markets may surface crucial information that would otherwise stay hidden. They may offer signals to people that would have otherwise stay hidden. This is one face.

But there’s another face. The money. The biggest problem of prediction markets is always their greatest asset: if you’ve got tea, the tea is much more tempting to sell than it is to tell.

And that’s why it’s far too facile to simply say prediction markets must be an unqualified good.

Here’s what’s tricky about this case: I’m not sure I really care about insider trading, as a rule. My personal ethical jury remains out on that question.

But here’s something I am sure about: I am sure I don’t want soldiers trading bets on military operations. That heuristic sits on solid ethical and pragmatic grounds.

Prediction markets might have been beneficial and, ultimately, inevitably, but let’s not put blinders on. Prediction markets also put corruption nothing but a click or two away.

Jeff Bezos has already shown how could bring in more revenue for writers — he’s just gotta take the leap.

Amazon, the online store that started with books but almost seems to have forgotten about them, actually created a massive platform for independent writers that most folks on here would probably disdain to even think about.

But those proletarian scriveners are getting paid, my friends, and Substack could easily follow where Amazon led.

Substack already solved our problem of scaling email and payment management. That was very nice of them. Now let’s see it innovate to grow the pie.

Friends: Let’s talk about Substack Unlimited.

Lies, damn lies and big 5 publishers

Back in 2016 and 2017, writing for the New York Observer, I got a bit obsessed with the Amazon Kindle as a reporting topic. E-readers, cheap publishing and e-ink all looked very good to me.

Yes, there are trade-offs. I get that and I got that then, but Kindles extended the reach of literature, lowered the barrier to entry and kicked-off an indie book subculture.

But back then, mainstream reporters were doing stories every year or so that said, basically, “No one actually buys ebooks.” Which was weird, because Amazon kept putting out new versions of the Kindle and it didn’t seem like that was slowing down — which indicated that it was probably working out.

Something was up!

So, I dug into it, and I figured it out. All those reports were — well — basically lies. At least, they weren’t telling the full story. When the headline read: “People aren’t buying ebooks” what it actually meant was “people aren’t buying ebooks from Big 5 publishers.”

This was a very important distinction!

It wasn’t hard to work out why they weren’t buying those books! Publishers were jacking up the prices on ebooks! Amazon wanted to sell ebooks for $9.99 each but the Big 5 didn’t. After a long court fight, they upped the price, sometimes to the point that an ebook cost more than a paperback.

So the fact that these books weren’t selling that well was just basic economics. Nevermind the fact that — all things being equal — lots of people like a physical object. It was actually even simpler even than that. People Discriminate By Price: News at 11.

Indie in the Amazon

But what those reports didn’t tell you was that there was this buzzing world of independent publishing enabled by Amazon Kindles, through its Kindle Direct Publishing program, that was totally popping off.

Now us smart Substack people have probably never read anything from KDP because we are all much too brilliant for it and we haven’t quite finished Infinite Jest. The kind of writing that moves on there is mostly romance, but also other genre stuff: such as sci-fi, LitRPG, and etc.

Back when I was reporting on it, authors confessed to me off the record that they were making millions of dollars writing on there. I’d ask them if they needed to take jobs teaching writing at Universities like all the New York Times bestselling authors you’ve heard of. They would laugh.

No, the best use of time for them was always going up into the attic, opening the laptop, and banging out the next chapter. Every time.

And what was the secret of all that money being made? It was: Kindle Unlimited.

Unlimit my bags

Now this might sound counter-intuitive, and that’s precisely why I suspect that if Substack tried to follow Amazon’s lead, they’d get rebellion from the big guns on this site. But hear me out.

Kindle Unlimited is a Netflix for books. Readers pay a flat amount each month (right now it is $11.99, in the US) and they get unlimited access to books in the program. Precisely how authors get paid out of this is a bit arcane (because: scammers), but basically it comes out to pages read in their books. It’s not enough for someone to download your tentacle porn urban detective story — they need to actually move through the pages. The more pages they move, the more your share of that $11.99/month is.

Amazon is spreading around more than $60 million per month these days among authors. We don’t really know how much Substack is spreading around, but I’m confident saying it’s significantly smaller.

Here’s the thing: You can still sell your books one-by-one on Amazon Kindle. That’s no problem. That gets you access to the light readers out there, and it works great.

But there’s also hardcore crazy readers out there. These are people who will find one of your books and, if they like it, they will crank through everything else you have written. This has a way of kicking your earnings into gear fast. These folks are all in on Kindle Unlimited.

Have you seen Silo on Apple TV+? That’s based on a self-published novel by Hugh Howey. Howey was one of my sources back when I was working this beat. Back in 2017, Howey told me over repeated conversations that going exclusive with Kindle Unlimited cranked his revenue into very, very high gear.

It seems risky? Why would you go into a shared pool when people are already buying your stuff directly at a pretty nice clip?

Why? Because price-elasticity-of-demand, baby. When it works, it feels so good.

Into the breach, dear friends

There’s a lot of talk about bundling on Substack. That’s fine. I’m all for it, but it seems like amateur hour to me.

Better idea: Mega-bundle. Substack Unlimited.

Substack Unlimited could be an opt-in program that any writer on here could join. You can offer people to subscribe directly to your paid content (like buying one book at a time on an Amazon Kindle) or they can get it if you’re in the Substack Unlimited program.

This could easily work the same way. There’s a big pot of money from all the Unlimited users each month and that gets shared out to everyone via pageviews.

LFG.

Leave a comment

Would this undercut the earnings of the big guns?

We can’t know for sure, but Howey was a big gun on Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing already when he decided to join Kindle Unlimited, and it didn’t undercut him.

But, also, they don’t have to join it if they are nervous. They can keep getting paid directly by users.

How can we know it would grow the pie?

We can’t until Substack tries it, but it worked for ebooks already.

Wouldn’t enabling bundles work better because it’s more thematic?

They aren’t mutually exclusive. I’m all for bundles, but, I submit, that the desire for coherent themes is one of those OCD impulses that makes sense in our heads, with their need for structure and order, but actually doesn’t really help that much.

As the great Jane Jacobs showed: Zoning parts of city as “industrial” or “commercial” seems logical, but by and large, letting chaos reign works out better over time.

Wouldn’t all the big shots eschew Substack Unlimited so it would just fill up with all the lesser writers?

That’s exactly what happened on Kindle Unlimited, yes. Stephen King is not in there. But Stephen King was already rich.

Of the hundreds of writers making mad bank on Kindle Unlimited, those of us who aren’t using may hear about one of them every couple of years. There are many more.

Thousands of minnows swimming around the phat lake of Amazon KDP yielded some... whale-like minnows. Sounds pretty good to me.

But, but... if Substack created an Unlimited program, wouldn’t that mean I’d be in the same pool as people I disagree with?

Buy a helmet, kiddo.

Look. A lot of us spend a bunch monthly on here, and, while we are glad to support people, comparing the quantity of content our dollars get us access to compared to, say, one subscription to The Atlantic, it’s no contest.

A lot of people out there are more price sensitive than I was when I got into this site. Basic economics says that if there’s a lower cost overall price entry point, more people will come in.

My means are more limited now than they have been for a while. I’m dying to upgrade my subscription to to paid, but I just can’t justify it at the moment. If we had Substack Unlimited, though and she joined? I’d be all over her archive.

At the end of the day, I think more people want Substack’s core product than they want Kindle’s product. There are more readers of topical blogs than there are of indie genre books.

Substack Unlimited could be even bigger than the half-billion dollar behemoth that is Kindle Unlimited.

Substack Unlimited would grow the pool for everyone.

Jeff Bezos showed the way, and he did all right. Have faith.

Tech platforms wrecked the business model for news. Ironically, though, tech platforms also rely on the news industry to keep their attention-based model chugging.

That’s why tech platforms should open their own independent news desks. By mining the data spit off by platforms, managing editors guide the editorial direction of reporters toward topics that interested platform users. And news would actually have a business model again.

Platforms might not quite be the new nations, but they are the land masses of the internet. It’s time to just deal with it.

• What I’m about to propose here will annoy just about everyone. Just ask yourself please about whether or your irritation compares it to the hypothetical ideal of a long lost era or to the present, extremely bleak and far from perfect reality, please.

How platforms wrecked news

Everyone knows the story about how Craigslist came along and yoinked classifieds from newspapers.

Then Google and Facebook came along with a wildly better way of targeting other kinds of advertising directly to the kind of consumers a given advertiser wants.

The can say: “Our users are broadly 35- to 55-year old, high net-worth coastal professionals” (or whatever they say — they aren’t pitching me), but Facebook could say, “Do you want a 35 to 39 year-old divorced guy in Columbus, Ohio, who loves Anime and no college education? Yeah. We know who every single one of those guys are, and we can show your ad to all of them.”

It wasn’t even close!

Everyone knows that Facebook and Google have become an advertising duopoly, and the only companies cutting into their duopolistic status are other platforms, such as Apple and Amazon. Media sites have no chance.

So you know that story. What’s talked about less, though, is how much the platforms crushed the other advantage news once had. News used to drive a lot of attention. People watched the news on TV. They read the paper. They listened to news radio.

None of that is really true any longer. Now they scroll and they stream. This is how media gets consumed. They don’t watch the 6 o’clock news because that’s what’s on TV. They watch whatever they want. And that’s not usually news.

• There’s some research out there backing this up that I’ll point to in an upcoming essay.

So now in this era when news attempts to pivot to a subscription-based model, it’s coming really, really late. People already very much like the infinite candy of social. The habit of the news is long lost.

If you can’t beat ‘em

But here’s the problem for the platforms: People like to talk about the news.

The News and the Media are often conflated. The Media is just about anything that holds your attention.

But the News is the business of going out and witnessing the world, then coming back and telling an audience what was seen. (It’s also talking to people doing interesting things, like writing laws and building robots, that aren’t conducive to photos).

News is telling the masses about the world, in short. On platforms, people want to talk about the world and what’s going on in it, but they need to know what’s going on.

But there’s fewer and fewer people out there going out and having a look, and those that remain are all going out and looking at the same things, too, because those are the things that are most likely to drive enough attention for them to keep going.

As people get frustrated with the quality of the information available, they also get frustrated with the platforms.

The platforms benefit from high quality information gathering. So the platforms should open news desks and hire reporters who establish beats that are responsive to the interests of platform users.

Substack News

The first concern I can imagine substackers having about Substack News would be that it would compete with them for attention and subscriptions.

But, wait!

Structured correctly, Substack News would drive more subscriptions for everyone.

What does Substack want? More paid subscribers. So here’s my idea: Make Substack News a premium feature that’s offered to anyone who pays to subscribe to literally any existing substack.

I suspect the toughest conversion for every user here is making that first paid subscription. Like, I’m a free user. I’ve never paid to see anyone. But I really really want to get access to every delicious thing that posts, however I’m just on the margin about subbing.

Is it quite worth it? I’m on a budget.

But ‘lo! Then you hear that every subscriber also gets access to this high quality newsroom that’s covering tech updates, foreign policy, climate change, economic development. All the big things.

All you have to do is buy one subscription to get access to all of it. You can have your cake (recipes) and (r)ea(d) (the news), too!

And others

Any platform that’s attempting to launch any sort of paid subscription should do the same thing: open newsrooms responsive to the main interests of its users.

X is the obvious other example of a platform that should open a news desk. It would probably take about 45 minutes before good reporters at X irritated Elon Musk, of course, but it’s a good concept in theory. People on X talk about the news constantly.

More reporting on more topics could drive more interesting engagement there. And obviously you’d only have full access if you bought an X premium account.

Netflix should obviously open a news desk. It’s the world’s new CBS. It should give its viewers an option to watch a new kind of nightly news.

Snapchat should add news to Snapchat+. Reddit has tried doing a publication before, and it failed, but it didn’t try News. Reddit Premium with News, focusing on reporting, not culture or criticism, could do better. It aligns rather than competes.

Some objections

Won’t these news desks be biased on behalf of the platforms?

Probably, but narrowly. The blind spots would be predictable. It wouldn’t take much media savvy to know which reports to give side eye and which ones are probably reliable.

• And it’s not like reporting isn’t crazily biased now.

But, okay, to deal with that skepticism, jobs on platform newsdesks should be contract-based, not at will. The Editor-in-chief should have a contract for multiple years with clear performance indicators and clear editorial independence. All of this can be made public.

To me, the bandwidth of bias here is important but it’s narrow. Reporters in these rooms might be biased on behalf of the platform or even tech. It’s a much bigger world out there, though with much to discuss.

If, for example, Substack realized it had a ton of readers in Chicago and it opened a Chicago desk, would I worry about the Substack-bias corrupting Chicago coverage? Not really.

Objectivity should be a north star, but it is largely a fiction. I’d rather have more truth seeking in the world, even if I have to be a little skeptical about some of the truth-seekers’ coverage, than less.

And if Substack News covers soft, count on X News to make up for it.

Idealism about this dying industry has a way of letting perfect oppose the good. Being biased toward Substack (or X or Reddit or whatever) doesn't matter, it seems to me, when you're covering trade policy or baseball contracts or the conflict in Argentina, but what do I know?

Won’t readers get mad at the reporters covering the platforms they love when their reporting contradicts users’ priors?

Yes. Hopefully! That still gives users something to talk about! And that’s what keeps users on the platforms.

Shouldn’t we want people to get off the platforms?

I’m just trying to deal with the world as it is, friend, not the world as I’d like it to be. If I were writing about the world as I’d like it to be, I’d just describe the 70s all day.

At the end of the day, News doesn’t have a business model any longer. Everything you dislike about “the media” is downstream from that.

• The New York Times business model is being the New York Times (+Wordle). No one else can replicate that.

But platforms have a business model, but it’s one that needs good news gathering to really prosper. And if that news gathering can also help a platform deliver on what it promises its strongest users, revenue, then even better.

There’s a lot of talk about whether news can be decentralized. So far, I see media being decentralized, but I don’t see news decentralizing yet.

People are reading and watching stuff, for sure, but just because it’s on a screen, that doesn’t make it news. Substack has proven it can give writers a way to make money off their expertise, but there’s not much news gathering happening on here.

There’s research. There’s analysis. There’s opinion. God is there ever opinion.

But not many people are going out, having a look and just telling you what they saw. And if they do it sometimes, they aren’t doing it in a particularly structured way, by and large.

Tech platforms wrecked the news gathering business. I don’t fault them for it. Everyone’s gotta eat. But they are going to realize before long that they also depend on a continuous flow of good reporting.

Just as tech destroyed this industry, the platforms may soon realize that it’s also in their interest to build it back up.

Come back to Backstage tomorrow for my take on Substack Unlimited.

Even scumbags should be able to get a checking account.

Let me back up.

When I was at Axios, there was a low grade byline battle between me and the much more famous writer, Felix Salmon, over whether or not the crypto business had any place in the civilized business world.

Felix pretty much felt it didn’t. I thought it did.

In fact, our debate started before I ever got there. He had written that NFTs had no aesthetic merit and I countered him in the first op-ed that I ever wrote at CoinDesk. At Axios, he would write “The crypto dream has died” after the crypto exchange, FTX, fell, and I wrote that “crypto will be fine.” He would write that a pro-crypto president would undermine dollar dominance. I would write that it would preserve it.

And so on.

But there was one Salmon salvo in which he was wrong even as he wrote it, and — worse! — it looked to me that he had written it mainly because he disliked so much the person that had said it, the person he said it to and the third person that amplified it later.

And his wrongness matters, because by telling readers “there’s nothing to see here” he put a combover on an instance in which the United States’ commitment to the rule of law really did breakdown.

After a16z’s Marc Andreessen went on Joe Rogan and talked about crypto firms losing banking services1, Elon Musk amplified the allegations and so Salmon wrote that debanking wasn’t real. Even though I had already covered how it was demonstrably real. And, after that, the stories just kept piling up.2

Pirate Wires

Operation Choke Point 2.0 Is Underway, And Crypto Is In Its Crosshairs

Editor's Note: The Biden Administration is quietly trying to ban crypto. Nic Carter explains in an explosive guest post for Pirate Wires…

Read more

3 years ago · 2 likes · Nic Carter

A regulated industry like banking doesn’t need direct orders from its regulator. It’s happy to take a hint. They took that one. After all, the joint statement wasn’t very subtle.

Reputational risk

(I’m getting to the scumbags.)

We would learn, through hearings in Congress after Trump took office, just how banks had justified denying services to the legal businesses in the crypto industry that had not been accused of wrongdoing. A part of banks supervisor model included a concept called “reputational risk.”

After Congressional scrutiny made it clear that some real shenanigans had been going on between supervisors and their charges, the joint statement got rescinded, the concept of “reputational risk” started coming out of manuals given to bank supervisors, and, as ’s points out, the OCC and FDIC would, this month, explicitly forbid supervisors from instructing banks under its supervision “to close an account, to refrain from providing an account, product, or service, or to modify or terminate any product or service on the basis … of politically disfavored but lawful business activities.”

Case closed.

wrote in retrospect at Vox that he’d been wrong about inflation back when “transitory,” “lumber” and “used cars” were getting thrown around. I always respected him for admitting that in hindsight.

If Salmon has corrected his own record, I wouldn’t know because he’s been behind the Bloomberg paywall. I doubt it though.

Long story short: Debanking was real. It was arbitrary. It was not a conspiracy theory. And is cringe.

But the unfortunate crypto debanking arc raises a really important larger issue.

On scumbags

A person can’t really live in modern society without banking, and a business certainly can’t operate without banking.

Banking has been made existential.3

So, in a free society, there should be a right to banking enshrined in law. If you can’t, in practicality, live as a free person without banking, then your right to access those services should be guaranteed.

The ability to bank effectively becomes the ability to transact, and the ability to transact enables your freedom of movement, your freedom to speak and your freedom to protect your own privacy.

If you can’t bank, you can’t exercise your rights.

If banks want to deny you services because you seem like a scumbag, that’s probably going to push you to be more of a scumbag. We don’t want systems that make scumbags scummier! We want to nudge scumbags to engage in socially productive behavior! We want them to accede to the sweet embrace of honest commerce!

And so. I think.

It should never be impossible for a person to get access to a bank account. Savings and checking should be a basic financial service accessible to everyone.

It should also never be impossible for a company that has not been found guilty of any crimes or broken any explicit financial rules to access basic banking services, including payroll, merchant services for point-of-sale, cash management, business credit cards and fraud services.

So it’s good, I think, that the prudential regulators are banning the use of reputational risk as a concept in their oversight of banks. That’s a start. Reputational risk had no basis in objective risk management.

Your financial institution is no less trustworthy because it banks porn stars. It’s less trustworthy if its executives extend porn stars more credit than they can reasonably manage in exchange for lap dances. But it’s also less trustworthy if it does that for anyone else, as well, for any reason, no matter how they make their money.

Risk is probabilistic. It’s not optical.

Solutions

Money is movement, but we’ve built it completely privatized roads (or at least privatized on-ramps). Banks are private, and, under capitalism, one would think a bank should have discretion over its customers.

But, on the other hand, our regulatory system goes pretty far to protect banks’ place in the economy, so the sector does have some public obligation.

I see two options:

1. Require banks to accept anyone who lives within a certain distance from the bank, but allow them to have a reasonably priced paid tier for its least desirable customers. If it really doesn’t want to serve someone, it could create a fee-based tier. Call it the high risk tier. Regulators would guarantee the fees were appropriate.

2. There could be a national, public, super barebones bank. Just checking, debit cards, deposits and withdrawals. All online. No branches. It would have a crappy government website. It would be hard to reach a person. But you can deposit a paycheck and pay your water bill and it won’t deny anyone. But it might charge fees.

   1. Do it with the post office.

The principle here is simple: You can be effectively shut out of society if you can’t bank. But you shouldn’t be shut out of society unless a jury of your peers have found you so guilty of something that they also shut you away.

Even if you look and act like you probably are guilty of all kinds of things, you are still entitled to participate in society until you’ve been convicted of something.

And, so, scumbags should be guaranteed the right to bank. Sketchy companies, too.

If it’s legal, it’s not enough to assume someone will bank it. We already know that’s not a reliable heuristic! Biden (and Obama) showed us that. So, the right should be guaranteed.

The rule of law isn’t just this big idea that everyone should be punished for breaking the law equally, that if the mayor gets caught speeding, the mayor should still get a ticket. The rule of law is also about preventing the state from punishing people willy nilly, without allegations of violations and appropriate due process.

Members of the Biden administration had (and have) a fetishistic disdain for the cryptocurrency industry. So the former White House used its powers to arbitrarily and capriciously obstruct its ability to conduct business and build wealth. That wasn’t right.

It’s good that this administration has rolled back its predecessor’s misguided policies, but policymakers should go further. They should guarantee every person and every company has the right to access financial services, at least until a court of law actually finds them guilty of wrongdoing.

The power of Federalism always has been about different parts of the country experimenting with ways of running their hunk of freedom-loving land.

The FDA recently sent letters1 out to multiple providers of peptides in the U.S. warning them that further action could be taken if they don’t quit offering what they call ““new drugs””2 in every letter. Three things jump out at me about all of these:

1. All the letters focus strictly on peptides that exist in the regulated market (knock-offs of Ozempic and Zepbound) or are on the way (retatrutide).

2. All the letters invoke interstate commerce, as in the interstate commerce clause, the tiny little passage of the Constitution from which nearly all federal domestic power derives.

The peptide business is very big. Based on estimates, it is already around the size that video games reached in 2018 and 2019, when journalists noticed that games had gotten to be bigger than movies.

• Background: Peptides are short chains of amino acids. Amino acids are the building blocks of proteins. Proteins and peptides work as chemical signals to other parts of your body. Some folks who want more of one kind of signal or another have been using synthetic peptides with strong results.

• Editorialization: Peptides also generate more demand via lifestyle enhancement rather than curing diagnosed medical conditions — and this seems to make many people uneasy.

OK, but chill out

These letters from the FDA to compounding pharmacies might indicate a limited campaign.

On the surface, it looks reasonable that the FDA has taken these actions at the behest of the pharmaceutical industry, which wants to protect its intellectual property.

Getting a pharmaceutical approved for sale in the United States is a lengthy and massively expensive process (the has started making the case for reigning this in, but for now this is real life). It’s understandable that Big Pharma would want to undermine companies popping up that eat into their market share.

Is it weird that the FDA has a side hustle as an IP enforcement agency for the industry? Seems weird to me.

But there is (arguably) a public health justification here. Patients can feel confident that name-brand Ozempic and Zepbound have been made in regulated labs, have the kind of dose they expect and won’t have garbage in the vial.

(but there is always some kind of justification)

But it remains to be seen whether or not the FDA starts going after other peptides. All the signs suggest that they will not, but we’re still waiting for that big announcement about the recategorization of some of podcast-nation’s favorite “peppers.”

BacteriostaticWTF

But the Feds also seem to be cracking down on the peptide scene indirectly, which could indicate that more moves are afoot.

For the uninitiated: Grey market peptides require more work than getting stuff through a pharmacy, and more ways to go wrong. If you played around with a chemistry set as a kid, though, you’re going to be good to go.

The key point here, though, is most of the time people get peptides in a powder form and they need to add bacteriostatic water in order to make it injectable.

• Does this sound daunting to you? Me too! I haven’t done it.

Bacteriostatic water is sterilized water that has an additive that will keep it sterile for longer after the seal has been broken on a bottle.

Bacteriostatic water is the bandwidth of the peptide business. It’s like: No fiber internet = no Netflix, just as no bacteriostatic water = no home peptide business.

Getting this crucial ingredient has been tougher lately. The FDA has been cracking down on it (several of the letters this week mention it), or providers are getting nervous.

And Amazon has also moved to sell a little less of everything. Earlier this year, the company said it needed to see third-party current good manufacturing practices certification for providers of supplements. I don’t know if that’s the cause of the crackdown or not, but it might be.

If folks can’t get bacteriostatic water, they can’t safely use peptides. If the Feds make that difficult or impossible, it’s very much like saying: “You can sell cars but you can’t sell them with tires.”

Pair of dimes

I think I have a unique perspective on this peptide story. I’m confident that I’m the only veteran cryptocurrency reporter who has gotten interested in covering peptides. It’s too early to say for sure, but it looks to me like some very similar forces are in play in peptides.

I have some guesses about how this story is going to play out that might not look obvious to new arrivals or to journalists coming at the story from a purely healthcare oriented framework.

Obviously, peptides are about as analog as it gets, and crypto has always been about hopping on a blockchain Kawasaki, popping the throttle and gunning it straight into Lawnmower Man.

But here’s how it’s similar: There’s just a massive gap between those who get it and don’t get it.

• For those who don’t get it, the ones who “get it” are suckers.

• For the ones that “get it,” the ones who don’t have blinders on.

You can make a strong case for either side, but which one is right, I submit, doesn’t actually matter.

If crypto is peptides’ prologue, then more and more people are going to start putting the weight of their disposable income into this controversial intervention, and entrepreneurs will find ever more creative ways to get them to them and to assure them that what they are getting is safe.

For example, I have one source now who has explained to me how peptide users are already entering into informal testing cooperatives. It’s not at all hard to see how someone turns that into a startup.

If more and more people use them because they feel convinced that they are doing some good, it’s going to be harder for politicians to justify regulatory blockages. Some official will come to power by promising to provide a legal pathway for these products.

• The Amazon Basics peptide collection is just a matter of time.

By then, one or two companies will have arisen that will be de facto unicorns of the peptide space (the Coinbase, Uniswap and Tether of short amino acid chains). And it won’t be bro-science anymore. It will be on NASDAQ.

I might be wrong! (But I’m not wrong.)

Dr. Governator

If I were an ambitious governor of a state, I might give a long look at throwing down with the Feds over peptides, like Wyoming semi-threw down over cryptocurrency.

The peptide gambit could go a lot farther.

Texas is already looking at funding and running clinical trials into the psychedelic, ibogaine, for mental conditions.

• Texas or another state could put its foot down and do something similar on peptides, particularly because pharmaceutical companies are not.

A state could offer its own lab certifications for compounding pharmacies focused on peptides.

It could even go further and try to contend that while it’s a grey area nationally, in its state the legality could be made clear.

• If states can pull this off with marijuana (roughly) why couldn’t they with peptides? It already looks like the peptide industry might already be on par with legal weed, or close enough.

If history comes down on the side of peptide treatment, this could be a win for the state. That’s a big ‘if,’ but the road is made by walking.

Remember, it is no accident that the various parts of the USA are called “states” and not “provinces.” The core idea embedded in the Constitution, much muddled and muddied since as it may have been, was that these regions would be largely self governing, an amalgamation of real-life laboratories in running the nation, with programs and priorities that reflected their populations.

• There’s a reason, after all, that every single state operates its own pharmacy board.

What we know is that clinical trials and regulatory approval under the existing regime will take a very long time, and no one has even started.

A state that might like to make some money might decide it doesn’t want to wait quite so long.

If you look at Google’s Ngram Viewer, the word “bro” took off in 2010.

2010 now feels like about seven different eras of cultural evolution ago, but I’ve been watching this word metastasize into something like a discursive cancer, one that went from a perfectly reasonable slang for a certain kind of guy to a very lazy form of rhetorical dismissal deployed by the most vacuous members of the keyboard class and finally into something so pervasive that even I have a hard time not using it any time I talk about dudes.

“Bro” is an old, old piece of slang. It may even be several hundred years old, according to Oxford University Press.

It has certainly been around my whole life.

I had a friend in elementary school that we called Jamie at the time. Of course he would eventually become “James.” James was a bro in gestation, as we know it today. Even way back in the 80s, before the word had any particularly emotional valence, Jamie liked to call people “bro.”

We all know what a “bro” is, right? It’s short for “brother” but it tended, once, to be used in that more expansive sense of the “brotherhood” of men rather than naming someone as your literal brother.

And for the last couple decades, at least, “bros” have been synonymous with a certain kind of guy. We know that kind. They tend to be guys who enjoy physical activity, being outside, hanging out with other guys and they like “guy things.” Beer. Sports. Tools. Sports. Cars. Also: Sports.

In my head, fraternities are the natural bro habitat, but there are other kinds of bros. There’s bro culture on the beach or on the black asphalt basketball court or in the machine shop or on the fishing boat. Being a bro does not require going to college, but the frat bro was archetypal in my particular coming of age.

For a long time, it didn’t bother me at all when someone would name a group as “bros” or “bro’y.” I saw bros as men who enjoy simple pleasures, and the key to every pleasure has always been money, the more the better. That is why the apex bros have always been so eager to join Wall Street. When their days of catching passes and stealing bases came to an end, many bros turned their natural aggression to the most logical vocation: trading.

That was fine. It was easy for the rest of us to stay out of FiDi.

But then something remarkable happened in the broader culture. As the tech world boomed and geeks ascended, bros adapted.

Who knew bros could do that?!?

Tech-bros

A subset of bros changed course sometime around when Facebook went public in 2012.

So in 2014 Nick Parish named what had changed. He wrote the book, Cool Code, Bro: Brogrammers, Geek Anxiety and the New Tech Elite.

Bros, chasing money, were invading nerd turf. They were learning to code and engineer software systems and suddenly that chest bumping, beer-swilling culture of Wall Street was showing up in the pizza and Red Bull strewn temples of progress built by our priest class of tech visionaries.

It was weird. At least for the techies it was weird. What were the jocks doing in the clubhouse?

And at this point you can see a useful distinction and even useful critiques. And of course there’s nothing wrong with commenting on a particular kind of guy or particular ways of being. But in this era, types were still broken out, and Parish noticed that one type was encroaching quickly on another.

We thought of the DotCom boom as a Revenge of the Nerds story arc, but after a while the coders stopped being entirely nerds.

“Tech-bros” had become a thing, though being in tech did not make one a “tech-bro.” Not yet. This is what Parish’s book made legible. At first, “tech-bro” acknowledged the people in tech who were bros. It was new. It was surprising. It was something worth talking about.

That book — or at least the phenomena it describes — is the patient zero of “-bro” not as group, but as a suffix.

Before that time, “bro” was still mostly just a term of endearment between men. It was also, secondarily, a way of describing a category of men, without precisely “problematizing” them.

So in 2014, when the first season of HBO’s Silicon Valley came out, they included a couple brogrammers as minor characters in the early episodes of the show, so we could see them picking on Richard, the star and main character. These were frat guys who had traded Excel for Vim.

While Richard was the classic nerd we all pictured when we thought of the prototypical progenitors of the tech renaissance, his tormentors were cut from the same cloth of everyone who has forever tormented his kind, from the middle school locker rooms to the later life cubicles.

Alas, 2016

The type distinction of the Parish era wouldn’t last though.

As in everything else that turned mendacious and overwrought, the inflection can probably be traced back to the 2016 presidential election, when polite America was divided about who should bear the standard for the Democratic Party.

Many took the field. Only two proved to matter: Hillary Clinton, the most traveled Secretary of State in history and wife of some has-been, and Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Vermont legislator whose grumpy-old-man version of hard leftism somehow captured the youth’s imagination.

The trouble was that Hillary was the presumptive nominee, and Bernie would not cooperatively step down. He had ignobly touched the hearts of young partisans by refusing to speak like a living focus group. This did not sit well with the thinkfluencers-that-be.

So they deployed a gendered critique against Bernie’s supporters. Enter: “Bernie-bro.”

The story was that Bernie had an unofficial Army of supporters and defenders on the internet, and these supporters — who, we were told, were all guys — would digitally brigade anyone who expressed a preference for Clinton over Sanders.

Were they all so aggro? Were his young supporters all men? No and no. But it didn’t matter.

Once named, they became easier to dismiss. No one actually needed to engage with the argument or even the behavior of a “Bernie bro.” Naming him as such was an exorcistic incantation... bernian broium begonus!

Since the naming of the Bernie-bro, the suffix “-bro” has metastasized from something that names a type to something that dismisses a trajectory.

From tech-bros to gym-bros to podcast-bros to influencer-bros to film-bros.

I asked myself: What’s a very not bro-coded interest? How about... theater? Theater has largely been the domain of women, sensitive guys and gay men.

But could there really be someone out there talking about “theater bros”?

Yes, there actually is.

Cancer of ‘bro’

This use of “bro” as a way to dismiss an idea really hit me in the pandemic.

For a long time, I was a superfan of John Darnielle, the leader of the band The Mountain Goats, an indie rock band that works like a lovechild of Bob Dylan and They Might Be Giants.

Since 2008, though, he’s also been an author. He put out his first book that year, the slim 33 1/3 novella, Master of Reality, a meditation on young men once institutionalized over wrongthink.

He wrote a couple more books over the next few years, but the book that matters for our story came out in 2022. That’s the year he released Devil House. I was there for a Devil House release event at St. Ann & the Holy Trinity Church in Brooklyn to see him read from it a bit and talk about writing books with the author Grady Hendrix, and that’s when it hit me that the suffix had become poisonous.

At some point in the Q&A this author and musician who had written so much about outcast nonconformists used the phrase “free speech-bros” and I thought to myself: “What the actual fuck is going on?”

Musicians are -bro’ing free speech now?

It hasn’t stopped, either. For example, Bloomberg’s Joe Weisenthal wrote an incomprehensible tweet, shortly after Trump’s ouster of Nicolas Maduro in Argentina, “I can’t exactly explain it, but ‘international law is fake’ bros are the cousins of people who like to observe that correlation isn’t causation.”

Spoken like a true conventional wisdom-bro, Joe.

And then in a recent Wall Street Journal headline, “Finance Bros to Tech Bros: Don’t Mess With My Bloomberg Terminal.” It’s hard to say what the word “Bros” is doing — twice! — in this headline, other than to signal the paper’s dim view of both sides.

The idea seems to be that if a thing, a space or an interest is dominated by males, then it can be dismissed out of hand. AI-bros, longevity bros, crypto-bros, hustle-bros. And on and on and on.

And if there’s any remaining doubt about its pejorative connotation, note the default way of describing the most widely disliked non-politician on the internet, Martin Shkreli, the “pharma bro.”

Even the FTC uses that appellation at this point.

What it all means

[Insert Bernie meme here]: I’m once again asking what you think you mean by using “-bro”?

Because from where I sit, the suffix has stopped doing anything useful or clarifying.

It’s funny: As I was writing this, I typed into Google “who were the bro characters on Silicon Valley?” The answer it spit back: Erhlich, Gavin, Russ, Dinesh, Gilfoyle and Wajeed. Wrong, wrong, sure(?), way wrong, also wrong and mostly-wrong.

That list is made up of actual geeks, not the bros. Even Russ is debatable because he’s more the geek who got lucky and now acts like a bro out of his own insecurity. None of those were the characters I was looking for. I was thinking of Hooli’s Jason and Aly, the aforementioned bullies.

And it’s funny because this exemplifies how the use of -bro has been emptied out. In Cool Code, Bro, Parish had correctly named the rise of the “brogrammer,” the software engineer who didn’t at all fit within the pocket protecting code monkey mold we picture when we think of techies. The brogrammer was a new type of engineer, with different motivations.

Now here in 2026, a “tech-bro” has become anyone male who codes. Which is exactly my point.

“Bro” no longer denotes a kind of guy. It just denotes men, and it indicates the distaste that many people in the discourse (including tons who are male) have for anyone who had the temerity to be born that way.

Whenever some big change hits the world, the conversation goes the same way:

• People on the frontier dive in and pat each other on the back for seeing the future (mistakes get made).

• The mainstream rolls its eyes, clutches its pearls, wrings its hands and says “tsk, tsk, tsk” (opportunities get missed).

• Eventually and write very long posts about them. No one reads both.

Diamond Rhino, the inimitable podcast, sits in the middle of all that. It puts the frontier and the mainstream together on one show and asks if there aren’t some good points made on both sides.

So, here we are in week two of our coverage of peptides, the industry that’s already bigger than video games were when everyone got surprised that video games were bigger than Hollywood about a decade ago.

The only people who aren’t behind on this issue are in too deep.

So, this week, I dig into claims focus have made about BPC-157 (mostly) and also TB-500, the two grey market peptides that often get combined into what’s known as “The Wolverine Stack” — because they are each thought to help people heal.

It’s just that they don’t help everyone heal! And when they do help, results vary! And also people keep making themselves sick, but not because of what was put in the vials.

More on all of this on today’s episode. Are you hyped? (we’re against hype about everything except this newsletter).

But here’s the part you’re not going to expect but is actually going to really help ground you through the conversation: We’re going to start with some really modest claims from people you have never heard of.

Anecdotes aren’t data, but they are information.

🖤 To subscribe to Diamond Rhino in a pod player, click on any of these links:

• Spotify

• Apple Podcasts

• Pocket Casts

• Overcast

Sources

Joe Rogan Experience #1683 - Andrew Huberman
June 27, 2024

BPC-157: Everything You Need to Know—Benefits, Risks, Dosing, & Delivery Methods
Quinn Stilson MD
June 12, 2025

Why I Stopped BPC-157 and TB-500 Peptides
April 26, 2024
Bill Maeda

I Took The Wolverine Stack & My Thoughts On BPC-157 & TB-500
Dr. Josh Jagoda
October 19, 2025

My Experience with BPC-157 | Peptides That ENHANCE HEALING?
Stephanie Wolff, PA
July 15, 2022

My BPC-157 story
Jake Watkins
Aug 20, 2025

How BPC157 and TB500 Changed My Life A Personal Account (Peptide Therapy)
Gabriel Picado
June 23, 2024

I Analyzed the Wolverine Stack Evidence—Here's What I Found (BPC-157 & TB500 Peptides)
Dr. Chris Raynor | Not Your Everyday Ortho
March 14, 2026

Doctor Admits — I Was WRONG About The Wolverine Stack
Dr. Ashley Froese
Mar 10, 2026

Notes

Jake Watkins follow up video, Jan 6, 2026

14 Peptides Are About to Become Legal Again — What This Means for Your Health, Meto, March 12, 2026

Nevada Regulators Fine Peptide Providers at Anti-Aging Festival Where Two Women Became Critically Ill, Propublica, March 13, 2026

A Las Vegas Festival Promised Ways to Cheat Death. Two Attendees Left Fighting for Their Lives, Propublica, July 29, 2025

Music in the episode:

“Data Breach” by FASSounds

“Fortnite Roblox Minecraft Video Game Music,” by MFCC

“Abstract Glitch Hop” by The Mountain

“Bitcoins going up” by SunoMusicShowYouTube

All from Pixabay Music

The irony of skeptics is that, as much as they like to point out when claims don’t have sufficient evidence, skeptics often don’t have any evidence of their own to counter those claims.

Get ready for wall-to-wall skepticis…

Read more

I’m calling it: Peptide self-experimentation will be the next gigantic story. In fact, it already is.

Ozempic and the GLP-1 weight-loss drugs have been the biggest development in health of my lifetime — they are basically the artificial intelligence of medicine. The New York Times reported yesterday…

Read more

Correction (March 30, 2026, 12:26 PM CST): At one point in the episode, I compare Ozempic to Wegovy. I should have compared it to Zepbound, instead.

If you had a coworker who seemed to transform one month, what would you do?

What if she seemed to have more pep in her step, a glow in her skin, more focus and more charm? Would you ask her what was going on?

You might assume she had found a fresh romance, but what if she reached into her bag, pulled out a little pouch and opened it up to show you a bunch of nasal sprays and said: “I’ve been shooting these on the reg and I feel like I’m 17 again.”

If she swore to you that she knows a dozen other people doing the same thing and that they all report similar results, with no noticeable downsides, what would you do?

Would you order a few bottles?

That’s roughly a conversation that’s taking place on the West coast quite a bit right now. I am willing to bet it’s coming to your backyard sooner than you think. The driver of the conversation: synthetic peptides. Sprays and injections that enter our body and imitate little proteins that have always been good at telling our bodies to do the things we need them to do.

Peptides have been an ambient topic for me over the last three or four years. It all started with Ozempic, of course, but I’ve come across people experimenting with other peptides as well, for things like healthy skin.

It felt like one of those frontier topics that I should have a look into, but once I started poking around YouTube videos and podcasts exploring the topic, I realized how exciting this new kind of hacking really looks to be.

Here’s a heuristic about technology that has never let me down: If lots of smart people and smart money moves into a sector, it can’t lose. Something valuable will come out of it.

Subscribe now

We are in the rebel phase of peptide experimentation and entrepreneurship. It’s a point at which it makes sense to look directly at the rhetoric around peptides in order to see whether or not it sounds similar to (perhaps misguided) rhetoric we have heard about other topics in other times.

This is not a peptides explainer. This is an exploration of the explanations. All I want to convince you of is this: an important conversation about healthcare, health hacking and health sovereignty is underway in this country.

And, of course, there are major vested interests naysaying the whole conversation. Also, Martin Shkreli naysays it.

🖤 To subscribe to Diamond Rhino in a pod player, click on any of these links:

• Spotify

• Apple Podcasts

• Pocket Casts

• Overcast

Sources

Silicon Valley's new miracle drug
March 6, 2026
Good Work

How Peptides Conquered the Internet
Feb 13, 2026
Search Engine

The Booming Business of Chinese Peptides
Dec 19, 2025
Odd Lots

The Great Peptide Debate, Musk Driving on the Moon, AI Coming for Zuck’s Job, Unitree S1
TBPN
March 23, 2026
Martin Shkreli v. Max Marchione

The Truth About Popular Peptides (What Works, What’s Overhyped) | Peptide Tier List pt.1
Dec 22, 2025
Dr. Alex Tatem

Dr. Josh Axe: On Mitochondrial Health, Peptide Therapy and Parasite Infections | TUH #205
The Ultimate Human
Gary Brecka
Sept 30, 2025

Before You Start Peptides: A Doctor Answers Your Biggest Questions
Nov 29, 2025
Dr. Ashley Froese

Joe Rogan Experience #2376 - Brigham Buhler
Sept 9, 2025

Leave a comment

Narrative note

I’m super skeptical of personal stories from founders and influencers. I included one tiny one. The low trustworthiness of personal storytelling at this point obviously complicates this narrative, and something I will work to remain mindful of going forward.

Notes

The Peptide Craze, Ground Truths

Life on Peptides Fees Amazing, NY Mag

People are buying unregulated, injectable peptides from Chinese factories. Are they safe?**

I Talked to 100 People on PEPTIDES - Here’s What They Said, Feb 10, 2026, Dr. Ashley Froese

They Went on Ozempic—and Gave Up on Life, by Evan Gardner, The Free Press, March 26, 2026

The Ozempicization of the Economy, Kyla Scanlon, March 26, 2026

Certain Bulk Drug Substances for Use in Compounding that May Present Significant Safety Risks, FDA

Which 14 of the 19 Peptides Are Becoming Legal Again?, OpenLoop, March 13, 2026

Music in the episode:

“Data Breach” by FASSounds

“Fortnite Roblox Minecraft Video Game Music,” by MFCC

“Abstract Glitch Hop” by The Mountain

“Bitcoins going up” by SunoMusicShowYouTube

All from Pixabay Music

Ladies.

Read more

I feel weird about prediction markets. I think a lot of us do?

Those of us who feel weird about them call it gambling. Those of us who think they are great prefer “gaming.” Our whole country is in the middle of a big conversation about whether or not prediction markets are on balance good or on balance bad.

So, I invited someone who made her beat gaming — the kind of gaming where people try to have fun more than they try to make money (though she was covering crypto gaming, so that line got blurry too, in all fairness), the great Kate Irwin.

You know her from Decrypt, PCMag and Blockworks. Now she’s leading content at the vault company Veda.

• She broke the fall of a major crypto gaming operation, Neon Shrapnel.

• And GameStop bagging on NFTs.

• She made some waves last last year with her big take on the industry, “Extraction Isn’t the Only End Game.”

In this episode, we hear from a number of proponents of prediction markets, from key moments in the history of this sector: before they were legal here, amid the election of 2024 and afterward, as they started to settle in as a clear industry in the United States.

As I edited this episode, I realized that I don’t represent my views on this topic as well as I should. As usual, my general approach is: “Let’s wait and see.”

However. Most use on prediction markets now is sports betting.

Sports betting is bad.1 As a great man once said: “That’s a judgement call and I’m making it.”

You can see it in the fact that we have more and more scandals in sports.

I don’t even care about sports. I don’t watch them. I don’t follow them, but it’s clear to anyone who cares to look that gambling not only corrupts the game but also hurts enough of the bettors to make it not actually worth it societally.

The big idea of prediction markets is that people would bet on things that would help societally. Like, could we set up markets on, for example, which presidential candidate is likely to yield a better overall employment rate? Or a lower national deficit?

As explains in a quote (admittedly, from quite a few years ago) that I clipped from an old episode of Epicenter (linked below), you usually can’t get a lot of liquidity into questions like that. People just don’t find them that interesting.

The tough question that Irwin speaks to a lot in this episode is insiders.

• Is society better off if prediction markets give them a profit motive to reveal privileged information by making a bet on something that they are more informed about than anyone else?

• Or is society worse off, because those insiders hover up all the money from retail traders who are making bets on public information and vibes?

On that one, I’m a little bit sympathetic to the Hanson view that it’s good to get that information out there, albeit indirectly. But there will be weird edge cases. For example, the Israeli reservist charged for placing bets using privileged military information.

has a good post up today about people betting on the war in Iran. We can’t know for sure that insiders were placing bets, but the sudden rush of wagers just before the attack looks suspicious. And that’s not the only event that looks suspicious.

As Racket reports, Democrats have prepared legislation to forbid Federal employees from placing bets, but I would not bet on that legislation going anywhere. At least not in this session.

Even in crypto, some influential folks are starting to raise their eyebrows. I’m a regular listener to Castle Island Ventures’ weekly news roundup podcast. is starting to give the markets side eye. He suspects retail will get out of the game, soon, as they realize how outclassed they are in most markets.

On the other hand, prediction markets offer some good features for bettors. First of all, their odds are just much more legible.

Second, sports books also stack the deck against bettors. If you are any good at placing wagers, sports books will just kick you off. and his producer Lidia Jean Kott broke all this down in season 4 of their podcast, Against the Rules.

Prediction markets won’t do this because you aren’t betting against Polymarket or Kalshi. You’re betting against another user (you don’t know which one, but you are). So they don’t care if you’re good or bad. They just like your liquidity.

So it is fair to say that prediction markets are different in kind from sports books. OK. But are they different in consequence?

If we were getting lots of compelling insights about the fate of companies or the fate of policy in the U.S. out of these things, I might feel differently. But we mainly seem to be getting a new way for corrupt politicians to max extract and for nobodies to lose money.

These are some of the topics Irwin and I explore in today’s pod. In this post, I wrote more of what I actually think about prediction markets, because I don’t think I say it very well in the episode.

• That’s okay though! Kate does a great job making her take clear! So listen for Kate!

One last thing: As I was researching clips to make for this episode, I stumbled on this video about not making rookie mistakes:

I thought I might make a clip from it as something orthogonal for Kate and I to discuss, but, to be honest, I didn’t even understand it. It made me feel like even dumber money. Buy markets on the future at your own risk, friends. Looks pretty rough out there.

Sources

The Folly of Prediction
Steven Levitt
Freakonomics
2011

Robin Hanson: Futarchy, Prediction Markets And The Challenge Of Disruptive Technology
Epicenter
2015

Polymarket CEO says his prediction market is “the most accurate thing we have as mankind right now.”
Anderson Cooper and Shayne Coplan
2025

Why the Media Got the 2024 Election Wrong
Tom Schmidt, Robert Leshner and Haseeb Qureshi
The Chopping Block
2024

Prediction Markets and the “Suckerifcation” Crisis
Charlie Warzel and
2025

Show notes

Meta layoffs — this was weird. We discussed this as a hypothetical market on the show and then it happened, right after we taped.

Male suckerification crisis

Kalshi beats CFTC ahead of 2024 election

Polymarket comes back to USA

FBI raids Shayne Coplan’s home after 2024 election

Rain Protocol

Variant post on Melee

Disclosure

I have made a few bets on a few markets. I don’t trade. I let ‘em ride.

I threw in about $50 and spread it across several of the Democrats who were favorites to get the Democratic Party’s nomination for President. I don’t actually care about this race, I just noticed that the prices for all of them were so low that if any of the ones I bet on won, it would more than make up for my losses on the other.

Of course a dark horse could easily hit and I’ll lose it all. So it goes.

I also have roughly $20 in on whether or not we will learn aliens exist this year. I bought that more as hopium than because I actually think it will work out. I did it right after Trump announced he was asking Hegseth to reveal what the military really knows (looking at your Air Force — you guys have been so sketch).

As we know, I love this topic.

Kate and I actually discussed this but as I was editing I decided to cut it for time as one of the weaker bits. So the same info is now here in the post.

There was one good part in the tape I was sad to cut. After saying which bets I’d made, Kate basically says, “Congratulations, Brady. You’re exit liquidity.”

Not wrong.

You hardly ever see a movie with a giant robot fighting a gorilla.

When you come across a scene like that in an old sci-fi story, you can imagine how it might have caught on and become a trope. It might have been like the action star turning his back before the explosion.

It could have been a whole thi…

Read more

How many novels have we seen so far about some numbnuts taking a job at a Silicon Valley startup? Lots.

But what we haven’t seen nearly so much of, proportionally, have been books that deal with the world of blockchains. That despite the fact that nonces, hashrates and memes have powered a whole hell of a lot of real-world drama. From scams to billionaires to nation-state meltdowns to cyber-robbery, crypto has veered wildly into the edgy zones where fiction breathes.

A part of the problem may be that, as pointed out in 2022, the only books that can get a deal in American publishing focus on the sort of subjects that make an NPR listener say “so important” and “thank you” in that hushed tone of the yes-very-concerned.

I think that’s part of the story. “Crypto” is definitely poisonous among that set. (I may or may not know something about trying to get bookstores — which have the same sensibility — to give the author of a book about cryptocurrency some attention.)

But there’s another problem: The crypto world barely cares about reading books about itself.

This is something that Molly J. Zuckerman and I have been discussing, privately, for some time. Molly is a long time crypto journalist, and she used it in a very real and daily way before she ever started writing about this technology.

So I asked Molly to come talk to me about a new crypto novel that has hit the virtual shelves of Amazon, Blood of the Bourgeoisie, by Michael Sullivan.

One problem with crypto fiction might be the fact that, as Molly points out in our conversation, most of the drama on chain, at the end of the day, is about pushing buttons on a laptop.

A lot of inanity has gone down in crypto, but I can’t think of any swordfights. And everyone knows that swordfights are crucial for good fiction.

But, there is this new novel. It’s about Bitcoin. In the world of this book, there is only Bitcoin. So Molly and I both read it (I confess that I was skimming pretty hard by the end) and we talk about it on today’s episode.

We also talk about some other books, too, so here is the complete list of the crypto books discussed in what follows, in the order that we give them appreciable attention:

• Blood of the Bourgeoisie, by Michael Sullivan (the star of our show),

• REKT: A Crypto Hallucination , by Chris Furlong (best supporting actor),

• The Oracle: A Novel, by Ari Juels,

• Number Go Up: Inside Crypto’s Wild Rise and Staggering Fall, by Zeke Faux,

• American Kingpin: The Epic Hunt for the Criminal Mastermind Behind the Silk Road, by Nick Bilton and

• Bitcoin Billionaires, by Ben Mezrich.

(Molly also namechecks some fiction books that bring up blockchain topics, but you’ll have to listen for those)

🖤 To subscribe to Diamond Rhino in a pod player, click on any of these links:

• Spotify

• Apple Podcasts

• Pocket Casts

• Overcast

Next week…

Kate Irwin and I will discuss prediction markets, what folks have said about them and what we think.

This will be the second time Kate and I have talked about this weird world of ours. The first time was here:

Sources

#25 Michael Sullivan - Blood of the Bourgeoise | The Best Fiction Novel About Bitcoin
The Bitcoin Broadcast
Nov 2025

Show notes

How to Send Money to the Wrong Side of the War
CoinDesk

How Tyler Winklevoss Converted His Biographer Into a Bitcoin Believer
CoinTelegraph

Dear Crypto: Read a Book Already
Blockworks

Net Society #65: Exit through the Grift Shop
February 2026

Victor Pelevin
Wikipedia

Tana French
Wikipedia

Origin story of this episode:

While bitcoiners fight over whether or not quantum technology will break the cryptography securing the asset they love, two researchers work on how to make an all-new kind of internet money that really would work just like cash.

“Now we know how to build it in theory,” Fabrizio Rom…

Read more

This newsletter is going to pivot.

The podcast, Diamond Rhino, will keep coming out every week, but, …

Read more

I’ve never been one to throw around the word “trauma.” I’m Gen X. We suck it up. But I spent the last week or so working with ChatGPT to set up a Lightning node and I might need counseling.

Lightning is the permissionless layer on Bitcoin th…

Read more

Joyride will launch soon on Solana (but not the U.S.). It’s a bet from veterans of the ICO-era of blockchains that perps will not be the only way for retail to place a directional bet about a coin’s future price — one of these days. Joyride’s founders think they can finally crack selling options on-chain and that a certain category of traders will like …

Read more