My point re: fungibility was rather that BTC's value does not come from the specific block assignment, whereas art's generally does (though I guess limited-series prints and similar might be a case where "any one of the series" has the same value).
2,063 karma · joined June 28, 2016
Like, if you want to post about BTC more than five times an hour, you first have to take an undergraduate class in cryptography and economics.
Ten times an hour? You can't use "crypto" to mean "cryptocurrency."
I'm in many ways an art fan, but art pricing is totally irrational:
1. Prints cost substantially less than paintings since they're less limited
2. Prints price based on lots of intangibles (how limited the series is, what series it was, what the artist's role was in it, etc)
3. Fundamentally, I don't think buyers get that much more pleasure from an original than from a print or authorized reproduction
4. Many buyers loan their purchases to a museum (which has tax advantages) or keep them in free ports or similar, where they can't visit them in person
The really high end market (i.e. million dollar+ art market) is really clearly speculative a lot of the time. Or the pleasure is "I like owning this", not "I like looking at this', which is itself hard to sever from the speculative value.
Presumably a big chunk of this is permanently lost due to lost keys, etc.
While these risks clearly _do_ apply to traditional currencies, I do think, as an investor, it's worth considering market cap (as a proxy for "social belief in") and history of stability.
Bitcoin's market cap is probably (factoring in permanently lost coins) something like $750B, which makes it a bit smaller than, say, the Swiss franc, and its history of stability is much, much shorter.
One is technical: e2ee, implementation transparency, and similar.
The other is social: have fewer institutions.
I have never understood people who think the latter is a good approach. Like, "I don't trust these people who use their real names and are registered in a jurisdiction that has strong privacy obligations, so I'm gonna trust some randos on an abandoned oil rig instead."
More to the earlier point, though, this is really not how most lending works, so the idea that this somehow means that "absent central bankers, we'd all make 2% APY risk-free on bank deposits" is just silly. The global equity market is $50T, the global corporate bond market something like $100T. Total cash-equivalents (M2) in the US is $21T.
Even if "pledging shitcoins as collateral for speculating on coinbase" were zero-risk--which of course it isn't--the market for such loans is, unfortunately, too small for all of us to retire risk-free.
Protonmail doesn't have to "log" messages; they have them already. If I were Protonmail and I had to comply with lawful intercept requirements, I'd just:
a) make sure that message content isn't deleted from the mailbox when the user thinks it is
b) make sure I retain access to server-managed PGP keys (by logging key material and user-supplied passphrases)
But I sure as hell would not call some Java logger.trace() on every goddamn email! That's totally nonscalable and just silly.
I've yet to understand where you got that idea from, or what it has to do with all of your nonsensical followup comments.
However, I suspect the market for such loans is rather small.
Per https://docs.anchorprotocol.com/protocol/money-market#borrow..., it seems like there'd be zero risk as long as the LTV is >= 1.0, but that sort of defeats the point of loans. ;)
Hmm. How would that work?
Gold bugs like to say that “value” is what gold is worth, but if you look at the real value of gold over time—in terms of its ability to be exchanged for things that you might, you know, want—it’s anything but: https://www.macrotrends.net/1333/historical-gold-prices-100-.... Over a number of multi-decade ranges in the last century, a purchase of gold at the start of the period would leave the buyer the poorer at the end of it.
In reality, there just isn’t such a thing as a single “real” definition of “value.” Prices—of commodities, of securities, and, yes, of both fiat and cryptocurrencies fluctuate. A saver who wants to put money away to spend in the future must, unfortunately, make some sort of bet. (Even if such a magical instrument existed, savers who bought it would still be making a bet that the opportunity cost of avoiding growth investments does not outweigh the value of stability!)
Keeping all your savings in crypto—or in fiat, or in gold, or in your employer’s stock—isn’t a fantastic idea. But that’s not because someone is scamming you; it’s because there just isn’t such a thing as “the one true value”, and no asset that allows you to safely track it. That’s life.
Ultimately, though, the goal from a climate change perspective isn't "lower unit cost" or "energy innovation" per se; it's "reduced GHG emissions."
If Bitcoin mining were, say, +50% net demand, I could buy the argument that it will lead to innovations in supply. But it's more like +0.5% demand, so it seems much more likely that it's just driving up prices a small amount, keeping some production sources alive which would otherwise not be. And in at least some cases, those sources are going to be high carbon impact.
It's not clear to me that this is how supply and demand work. While increasing demand may increase investment in new capacity, it also should drive up the price of electricity. And since in some markets renewables are cheaper than carbon sources, one would expect that increasing the price per KWH will increase the production of the costlier, more polluting carbon sources.
More speculatively, due to the high volatility of cryptocurrency, I'm skeptical that major power infrastructure investments would be driven by the (presumably) extremely elastic demand of cryptocurrency mining. If I'm investing in energy infra, I'm going to invest in markets of increased consumer and industrial demand, which have fairly inelastic demand curves. Investing more to supply electricity to Bitcoin miners requires me to effectively take a bet on the future price of Bitcoin.
I think there is a solid argument that cryptocurrency mining provides high demand for excess capacity, and thus might provide a sort of credible floor for infrastructure investment returns, but that only makes sense if traditional demand are unreliable.
No, it wasn’t: https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/government-spendi...
So, you’re both right? ;)
I didn’t read the blog post closely enough to figure out if he was talking about pre-vest gains or post-vest gains, but certainly caveats apply.
On the other hand, similar caveats apply to, say, hedge fund traders whose comp is subject to market conditions.
Prior to Novalpina, it was Francisco Partners.
Point being, NSO has received huge amounts of money from the kind of people who, well, YCombinator founders seek out.
Just sayin'.
The analogy, of course, goes further. Though unlike most ransomware companies, NSO has British and American VC funding.
Surgical masks are thought to have a relatively limited benefit for the wearer, so this isn't surprising. However, https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02457-y demonstrates clearly that in a randomized controlled trial where surgical masks are distributed to a whole community, there was a statistically significant reduction in cases:
"The decrease was a modest 9%, but the researchers suggest that the true risk reduction is probably much greater, in part because they did no SARS-CoV-2 testing of people without symptoms or whose symptoms did not meet the World Health Organization’s definition of the disease."
There's certainly more to learn here, of course.
I'm not trying to be a dick, but maybe this demonstrates the flaws in a lot of our casual reasoning about public health measures.
"NFTs need standard, legally enforceable licenses. In the same way open source and creative commons are underpinned by the law, NFT-based licences should be underpinned by a legal foundation. Developing and issuing standard licenses for NFTs shouldn’t be particularly difficult and both platforms like OpenSea and artist groups should collaborate to release these licenses as soon as possible."
NFTs--as a technology--have absolutely nothing to do with what the author is proposing. What's really proposed here is to replace intellectual property law--which, to be sure, has flaws, but which is the result of a public, democratic process--with private contracts and licensing.
Nevermind that creating legally enforceable licenses which transfer with the change in ownership of an NFT is quite probably (legally) difficult; were it to be done, we would have successfully replaced an area of public law with private contracts in which--as with private arbitration agreements supplanting public courts--the powerful and the lawyered win out.
"Web3.0" is so much bullshit, of course, but this is one of the more egregious cases of masking a lawyer-heavy play to empower the already empowered as "revolutionary technology".
Obviously this discussion has varying credibility depending on how serious you are about switching jobs, so a competing offer helps--but it also helps to know your manager's range of options.
My general advice is to try to understand the range of options first. For example, you can ask your manager, "Can you tell me where I stand in the comp range for my level?" That will let you know how much base salary growth you can likely expect or negotiate for without a promo. Similarly, "If I have a competing offer, do you have leeway to make a retention RSU grant?" would be good to know.
The key point is a) this isn't your manager's money, so they shouldn't be too personally invested in it, but b) they also don't have a huge amount of discretion and there's a lot of formula behind it, so understanding how the formula relates to you is a good start.
Does it leave a bad taste in your manager's mouth? I don't know. That depends on your manager. ;)
On the one hand, there's absolutely nothing wrong with demanding a fair price for your labor. You only have one life, and you're choosing to give a big chunk of it to your employer! And if you're underpaid, competing offers are great evidence to rectify that!
On the other hand, don't make a threat you can't back up. If you told me your plan was to get competing offers that you actually find attractive and then take them if your present employer can't match them, I'd say that's a great plan.
If you like your job and your team and don't want to switch, however, then I think presenting competing offers on a yearly frequency presents two potential challenges:
1. Your manager at some point may say, "Can't help you." They're not gonna fire you, but they may realize you're bluffing, so you won't be able to use this tactic in the future!
2. It way detract from talking about other, ultimately more important facets of workplace satisfaction, like working on projects you like, working with teams you like, etc.
Hmm, maybe I’m ignorant, but in practice, don’t miners (socially, not technically) have substantial say in issues like the block size debate?
If you want to create a hard fork of the chain for any reason, whether people accept your fork as legitimate will in part reflect the total hashing power of that forked chain, right? So in practice what miners choose to follow will have a big impact.
Maybe not quite the same as PoS in-chain voting, but it still seems to give large miners outsized power, no?
Fundamentally, if there are off-chain incentives to destroy the value of a given blockchain, much of our reasoning about the game theory doesn’t hold up.