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“I like things that make sense to me, to keep it as simple as possible — whether that’s food, basketball, investing, whatever it is — I like things that make sense,” Dinwiddie said last week.

“The quick and skinny of how I got into it — beyond the friends that referred me to it in 2014, and I actually got into it in 2017 — (was) just looking at money, the way it moves, the way it flows,” he continued. “I’m a man that would love to be a billionaire one day, right? Investing in a traditional fashion won’t get me there. If I get seven, even 15 percent return, and I’m fortunate enough to make, let’s call it $150 million (gross), in my NBA career, the likelihood that I get there in any reasonable time frame is very low. Because you’re not accounting for taxes, fees, agents, expenses, whatever. I’ll still probably walk away with maybe $50 million saved, $100 million saved, whatever it is, but not on that type of level. So you look at things that have an asymmetrical kind of yield curve.”

“What we’re talking about in terms of intellectual property and monetizing themselves, we’ve all seen the shift in the internet doing the same thing,” Dinwiddie said. “Now we’re seeing the rise of the Patreons, the Reddits, the OnlyFans, Cameos, all that stuff, where people are trying to figure out, how I can get paid just to be me? Social media has started to dictate who’s famous, who’s not. The only caveat of that is, the problem with it — Drake actually has a line; he says, ‘These days, fame is disconnected from excellence.’ The problem with being famous but not having excellence attached to it is that it’s very hard to extract value at the moment.

“So you have this following, you have this influence, but you’re still broke,” he continued. “How my company was born was kind of sitting at the intersection of (being), I would say, B-List celebrity in term of fame, but excellent in terms of basketball. So it’s made me a ton of money. Fame — eh, debatable. Famous-ish. Where there are some people on Instagram with five million followers. They can walk in a room and — ahhhhh! But can’t make no money. So how can you sit at the intersection of that, understand the pain points in these industries, and solve for that?”

But Dinwiddie is smart enough to know not to proselytize crypto or Calaxy to teammates.

“He explains it every so often,” guard Aaron Holiday said during training camp, “but I’m not really into that. … I’m, for sure, asking him about it probably here shortly, so he can explain it again. But, yeah, that’s not my thing.”

Dinwiddie prefers people do their own research before coming to him, anyway.

“I never want to be the guy that said, ‘Throw a million dollars in Ethereum,’ or whatever, and it goes down, and they’re like, ‘Spencer made me broke,'” he said. “You never know what somebody’s situation is, how they’re investing, what they’re investing, all that other stuff. A lot of people want to get rich quick. If they think they can (get) a 3x (three times their investment) or a 5x or a 10x, they might put their life savings in it, and the timeframe just might be off. I could say ‘I think Ethereum is going to go to 10,000 per token in the next two months,’ but it takes four months to get there, and you only had two months of run time, now you’re screwed, and you’re looking at me like I’m crazy. And I’m like, ‘Well, it did what I said it was going to do; it’s just a little bit late.’ You never want to be in those situations, especially with people you play basketball with. So I’m just kind of like, when you’ve kind of dove in a little bit, if you really want to chop it up, like really chop it, I’m down.”

But again, Dinwiddie’s playing the long game. He knows he is speaking a language a lot of people still don’t understand. So he has the patience to wait, both for the payoff and for people catching up to him and understanding the concepts he espouses. It is, as he has explained many times, part of why he chose going to Colorado rather than Harvard, which was his second choice of school. He wanted to go to the NBA in two years; it took three. He was a first-round talent who went in the second after tearing his ACL during his junior season in 2014.

“I remember from the very beginning, I was the guy who was a little too nerdy for basketball, a little bit too basketball for nerds, didn’t really fit in,” he said. “So you end up being to yourself a little bit. Like, you’re used to not really clicking on the same wave as everybody else, so you end up just kind of end up being yourself. And you learn patience through those conversations. You can be right. There’s sometimes, now, where I’m right, and it’s not worth the headache, or somebody saying that you’re wrong. I used to, when I was younger, I used to do it for the ‘I told you so’ moments. Because I felt like it validated me in a sense. But now, some of that stuff doesn’t matter. The delayed gratification in just about everything.”

payitforward wrote:I'm sure Ted, Raul (whom I met a couple of times in the mid-90s), & Laurene are all smart people -- but I've got Dinwiddie a level or two or more above any of them.

Ruzious wrote:I'm not really impressed with his cryptic crypto views, but I like having him on the team. I think he deserves some credit for the defensive turnaround of the team, and even though he hasn't been the scorer I expected, I trust him in crunch time - and he seems to do better when the team needs him to.

doclinkin wrote:

Ruzious wrote:I'm not really impressed with his cryptic crypto views, but I like having him on the team. I think he deserves some credit for the defensive turnaround of the team, and even though he hasn't been the scorer I expected, I trust him in crunch time - and he seems to do better when the team needs him to.

Alright, but here at the intersection of nerds and basketball I'm saying it is easier for me to cheer for a smart savvy insightful cat than, I dunno, pick a knucklehead from the Ernie era.

Ruzious wrote:

doclinkin wrote:

Ruzious wrote:I'm not really impressed with his cryptic crypto views, but I like having him on the team. I think he deserves some credit for the defensive turnaround of the team, and even though he hasn't been the scorer I expected, I trust him in crunch time - and he seems to do better when the team needs him to.

Alright, but here at the intersection of nerds and basketball I'm saying it is easier for me to cheer for a smart savvy insightful cat than, I dunno, pick a knucklehead from the Ernie era.

Absolutely, and I'd love to hear more about that side of him and how he grew up - especially having a name like that - maybe there's a movie there in the future. Otoh, sometimes the knuckleheads will surprise you - i expect there's a lot more to Javale McGee than his testing of the mystical powers of cinnamon. And sometimes the deep thinkers turn out to be at the Kyrie Irving level of annoying. But yeah, he's at the other end of the likes of Andray Blatche and Nick Young - that's a very good thing.

Remember when Dinwiddie wanted to get his $34 million deal with the Nets in 2019 tokenized? The league shot that idea down. But Nets owner Joe Tsai said last month that the league is now looking into allowing fans to buy tokens of their teams, potentially raising billions of dollars in revenue. The seeming change of heart makes Dinwiddie smile.

“I wasn’t — still wouldn’t — sacrifice my entire NBA career just to prove a point,” he said. “Would I sacrifice my NBA career for an ‘I told you so’ moment? No. Could I possibly win (legally)? Possibly, depending on if I had enough money to outlast them. … History will tell who is right. Fortunately, if you look at things that have happened, for example, the NBA coming back and then partnering with Dapper Labs, and doing NBA Top Shot, I’m an investor in Dapper Labs. And I think, on that investment, I’m like at 180x – in part, because of the NBA partnering with Top Shot.

“So I’m like, ‘Yeah, y’all stopped me from doing my contract, but you’re a partner with one of my partners, and I’m doing like 180x return.’ So there’s things to be mad about, and there’s things like, ‘Thanks, boss. Appreciate it.'”

Wizardspride wrote:Dinwiddie's play or lack thereof, is becoming a real issue.

He's slow, can't penetrate, finish or defend.

TGW wrote:I simply didn't understand the justification in giving him $20M/year given his injury history. I think what we're seeing is a player that is never going to be what he was pre-injury. Still a decent player, but not a guy you pay that type of coin for.