unknown_apostle

Well, it'll be hard to let you know when that happens.

I can tell you this. We have multiple sources of news. Much more than ever existed before the internet came to our homes. I don't see how the EC can improve on this situation.

"a signal of intent to keep a degree of openness". How about a simple statement "the EC is not well-suited to determine whether fake news is a problem and, if so, how to deal with it". But I guess you'd need an ancient and strong tradition of popular democracy and hard-won constitutionalism to make such statements.

No, it's worse: I doubt the existence of reliable journalism :)

Reading 20-year old "quality" news magazines makes me think so. Numerous personal experiences make me think so. Ads in quality newspapers and their subtle or not so subtle political affiliations make me think so.

Reality is extremely complex. Journalists, even when they are honest, neutral, capable and of good will, struggle with it. Especially when they try to come up with a polished story. I know this is the case for unimportant events happening nearby, so I assume it's especially true for complex, confusing situations in very different parts of the world.

Getting confused by reading totally different accounts of the same event, is what makes me smarter. Because this confusion accurately reflects reality. Getting confused happens to me way more often while reading the internet (or when talking to real people) than when reading The Economist.

For the record: I'm not condoning intentional disinformation. And I do want to know about important events.

"[balance] fundamental principles such as freedom of expression, media pluralism, and the right of citizens to diverse and reliable information"

Typical EU-style communication. The word "balance" conjures up images of health, reason, yoga classes and whole grain breakfasts.

But in the end, it still represents a worldview of enlightened apparatchiks vs idiotic plebes. Why does there need to be a "balancing act" between freedom of information and anything else? When is something reliable or diverse or pluralistic?

So is this really fundamentally different from the plans in EU and Germany?

https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/news/call-appl...

It's a dangerous illusion of modernity that you can just pick up a "high quality" newspaper or watch the news and understand what is happening in the world. Or even in your own region.

One possible advantage of the total chaos of internet news is that the noise becomes so strong that we can't even receive the signal of traditional news sources with their "expert opinion" anymore.

What's interesting about Hussman these days is that he always claims that he started using a revised method for market timing since 2014. (Yes it somehow took him ~5 or 6 years to "revise his method", all the while his customers were paying. Must have been some spectacular calculations...)

Now we're 3 years into the new period, and he's still loosing money hand over fist. Not even breakeven due to being early and putting on costly hedges. But really loosing money.

I know how hard timing is. And I agree that we're in uncharted waters wrt to central banks buying bonds and the ridiculous complexity of modern finance.

But it's hard to imagine exactly who his customers are. Just staying in cash would have performed much better than going with Hussman.

http://stockcharts.com/h-sc/ui?s=hsgfx

Is it me, or does cursorcolumn really give Vim a bit of a sluggish feel?

Having a free day, it's cold and rainy, but this actually made me come out of bed to crank up vim :-)

Btw Steve, do you see a role for Rust in web development?

Too bad, there's bobkes even on that site :-)

But thanks, I'll keep an eye on it.

I'm studying Rust as we speak, took 3 weeks off for it. The documentation is absolutely top notch, thank you Steve & team!

It won't be easy to find a project in Rust or to get a customer to start a project in it, but I sure would like to.

What do you mean with backdoored for the x86 family?

Yes it's true, you can send bitcoin wallets through email. But only if you really must, which is never.

I'm not entirely sure how sending bitcoin wallets through email would solve liquidity issues though.

But again, you're right. The barbarous relic of forlorn ages can't be emailed. It must rely on the tentative lack of duplicator ray technology to avoid double spending problems.

Yes I mean 11 as in Spinal Tap 11.

To clarify: by this, Taleb means simply that there are no options on bitcoin (there aren't any, right?)

With options you'd buy OTM puts. You could maybe even succeed purely on rising vol if they crank up the volatility even higher to 11 :-)

Lack of skin in the game is killing capitalism.

We've had 20-30 years of ever escalating bailouts. Heads: you win. Tails: the public looses.

"Capitalism", or rather the free market, works by moving from failure to failure. Without "Tails: you get taken to the woodshed", failure doesn't lead to learning and improvement. No amount of regulation will change that.

Quite the opposite: most modern regulation is so complex that lawyers can't get enough of it. Not to mention the revolving doors between regulators and their targets.

Same thing put differently: we already have socialism. It's just socialism for the rich.

Welcome to the real world. It's not "efficient".

I agree, unlikely but not quite zero. As is the general rule with complex things.

But again, until a show stopper is found, I would say that bitcoin will never be popular as a means of payment. People would increasingly use it as a vehicle of savings.

Once it has reached some point of "maximum adoption", it would start behaving exactly like post-1973 gold. It would still go through periods of speculative enthusiasm in which allocation to bitcoin increases, followed by periods of aimless grinding in which it drops again.

It wouldn't follow CPI tick-for-tick, but over very long term periods, it would be nicely mean reverting vs cycles of general price levels and financial market prices. And as such, in terms of bad forms of money like government currencies, it would ultimately just keep rising forever. Or at least never go to zero.

So people who say "bitcoin is a bubble because it's not used much for payments" would be wrong. It's going places exactly because it's not being used much as transaction money.

And so, as Nobel prize winners would move up from the step of calling it a dangerous bubble to the step of decrying it as a deflationary threat, I predict no end to their criticisms.

I'm not going to get dragged into a discussion on "efficient markets". You win by forfeit.

Why would the same principle not apply to any situation where a person owns two kinds of money (both fungible, liquid, universally accepted), regardless of exchange rate rules? People will always prefer to hoard ("save") the better of the two and pay ("get rid of") using the worse of the two.

Whenever a person owns two kinds of things which are money-like (fungible, liquid, universal) they will prefer to pay using the bad money. Bad means things like "diluted gold content", reckless behaviour of the emitting central bank, etc.

In the case of a widely adopted blockchain like bitcoin, "bad" could mean something like "technically inferior". Or in terms of tail risk: "hacked" or "major bug discovered" or "encryption broken".

These tail risks caused by blockchain's complexity would be a sudden event. Unlike e.g. USD or EUR becoming bad money, which is something that unfolds slowly and publicly over many years.

The obvious speculation aside, Bitcoin's behaviour is revolving more and more about good vs bad money, aka Gresham's law. "Good money" (bitcoin) is being hoarded because people are starting to trust it as a long term store of value, while elastic moneys like USD/EUR/JPY are being used for paying and playing.

Most modern economists just instinctively hate good money because they believe saving is evil.

"It doesn’t serve any socially useful function."

They use the exact same phrasing when discussing gold.

(My only beef with bitcoin and blockchain is that it can become bad money in a matter of milliseconds, without any heads up. E.g. when a major bug is found. Bitcoin may ultimately just be too complex to be good savings money. Its "badness" can be hidden in a massive, single occurence tail risk.)

I would think Apple would have released an update by now... but nothing yet. Can tell us something about the complexity of the code they need to change. Anybody an idea about how quickly they could release security updates?

So this bunch of idiots can't access the legal system or expect justice, unless they fully accept the inevitability of currency debasement or the revolving-door system between banks and government?

That's exactly why I love bitcoin threads like this. Because of the sour grapes who stood by the sidelines over the past 8 years.

Btw, applying "plain" justice or bankruptcy to insolvent financial institutions was exactly what they didn't do in 2008. Listen to the recordings of Irish bankers how they would approach regulators. "If they say, if they saw the enormity of it up front, they might decide, they might decide they have a choice."

Instead of putting skin in the game of people like this, they socialized the losses, suspended mark-to-market and papered it over with ridiculous amounts of legislation that was written with the help of the same people who were bailed out. Almost nobody went to jail. That's probably why we have blockchain to begin with and why 10 years later we'll have to go through something similar or worse.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2013/jun/24/anglo-irish...

Explain to me how getting back some 5% of what you're owed, when they recovered 80% of it, is "socialized losses"?

Also explain to me how this is similar to 2008.

Yes because bitcoin is all about not having courts. /sarc

So legal system and monetary system are a package deal now? We can't sue a criminal unless we cease the search for alternatives to currency debasement, bailouts and finance cartels?

Has this guy ever done anything else but be vague?

It's not just and it won't happen. I requested my bitcoins back in the paperwork. If I understand correctly, they're holding 80% of those bitcoins. Give them back.

Mtgox owes me bitcoins. My claim on mtgox was fully validated. They have recovered like 80% of those bitcoins. I explicitly requested in the Japanese legal paperwork to be paid back in bitcoins.

So, now, please give me back my fucking bitcoins.

Instead, an incompetent piece of shit, the guy who caused this mess will now supposedly walk away with the majority of those bitcoins.

It's not just and it won't happen. We'll sue him to the end of the universe and back until he pays up. There are other forms of litigation besides Japanese bankruptcy law. And there is funding too. The entire sum I will supposedly get back now, plus a huge bitcoin-denominated bonus will be fully committed to this purpose.

No I checked the "I/We would prefer to receive distributions in Bitcoin" on their form. I made a claim on bitcoins, I wanted the bitcoins back from day 1 of the theft.