Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Fidelity CEO Abigail Johnson says the company is mining cryptocurrencies

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 222 posts

Re: Fidelity CEO Abigail Johnson says the company is mining cryptocurrencies

#71

Post by toomuchtodo »

astura wrote: post #37
dankohn1 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vanguard sells the very best ETFs (that are simply additional share classes of their mutual funds) exactly because they are so focused on indexing.

Schwab has the lowest cost index funds ETFs: https://www.schwab.com/public/schwab/investing/accounts_prod... Additionally, Fidelity offers index funds at a lower cost than Vanguard: https://www.fidelity.com/mutual-funds/investing-ideas/index-...

Vanguard is a mutual company. Whatever savings that they can extract from efficiency gains they pass along to their customer base.

Also, Fidelity's index funds are loss leaders to retain funds that were flowing out to Vanguard.

Re: Fidelity CEO Abigail Johnson says the company is mining cryptocurrencies

#72

Post by lojack »

nwah1 wrote: post #63
shimon wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facilitating inter-bank transfers is one promising application that's already operational: https://ripple.com/

Are there any actual benefits to this over current methods of interbank transfers?

Have you ever submitted a payment or received a payment and seen it marked as "pending". That's likely the result of a delay due to interbank transfers. Real time settlement is something theoretically possible with central banking using something like Fedwire, but in practice most banks use a third party clearinghouse like CHIPS. Additionally, if you have funds in USD and you need to make a payment in EUR, you'll probably need to work through a third party bank that deals with forex settlement. This all adds delays and costs.

With Ripple, realtime clearing and settlement happens automatically even between currencies. If my bank and the vendors bank both use ripple, I can use USD to pay the vendor EUR in real time, and the transaction completes in seconds.

Re: Fidelity CEO Abigail Johnson says the company is mining cryptocurrencies

#73

Post by mrb »

zghst wrote: post #47
zaptheimpaler wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1 Satoshi = 0.00000001 BTC (10^-8 BTC) It represents the smallest fraction of 1 bitcoin you can use as an amount in a transaction, so they are the smallest (indivisible) units.

Very interesting name for a decimal. What an intricate community

Wait until you see the nomenclature used for Ethereum units: Wei, Kwei, Szabo, etc https://etherconverter.online

Buterin couldn't possibly have made it more complicated.

Re: Fidelity CEO Abigail Johnson says the company is mining cryptocurrencies

#75

Post by Top19 »

ballenf wrote: post #65
almostApatriot1 wrote: post #43

> Johnson said that the company had made several venture investments in bitcoin-related businesses and that the company was looking at applications of blockchain technologies alongside several leading universities. Every crypto article makes the same vague claims about the potential of non-specific blockchain technology. I'm surprised there was no mention of replacing Visa in this one as well.

I got removed from a project because I was raining on everyone's blockchain fantasy. Later they begrudgingly admitted that blockchain wasn't going to solve the hard interoperability problem we were facing (bog standard need to pull & analyze data from multiple incompatible data stores held by multiple independent parties). I can forgive all the business guys for that thinking given articles like these, but the tech g…

Thank you for your comment. What you said is the best balance I’ve found of how bitcoin (and in my opinion also AI) is a really really really cool technology with a lot of potential, but also a complete scam.

Re: Fidelity CEO Abigail Johnson says the company is mining cryptocurrencies

#76

Post by mrb »

partiallypro wrote: post #68
proofofstake wrote: post #30

ROI of creating an investment portfolio 1 year ago, and selling today: - All Bitcoin: ~500% - Mix of top market: ~2800% - All Strat: ~13500% Meanwhile, stock investors call 12% a good year.

Now compare total market capitalization of equity markets to Bitcoin. I doubt you could liquidate millions of dollars of bitcoin in a day and not make the market plummet. You can do that in the last 30 minutes of the stock trading day with no very little price fluctuation. There are equities that are up triple digits, including Nvidia...who is realistically the biggest winner in crypto mining.

«I doubt you could liquidate millions of dollars of bitcoin in a day and not make the market plummet.»

Wrong. 1.5+ BILLION dollars' worth of bitcoins are sold and bought in aggregate daily on 100+ exchanges: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin/#markets

Re: Fidelity CEO Abigail Johnson says the company is mining cryptocurrencies

#77

Post by srtjstjsj »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #71
astura wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Schwab has the lowest cost index funds ETFs: https://www.schwab.com/public/schwab/investing/accounts_prod... Additionally, Fidelity offers index funds at a lower cost than Vanguard: https://www.fidelity.com/mutual-funds/investing-ideas/index-...

Vanguard is a mutual company. Whatever savings that they can extract from efficiency gains they pass along to their customer base. Also, Fidelity's index funds are loss leaders to retain funds that were flowing out to Vanguard.

> Vanguard is a mutual company. Whatever savings that they can extract from efficiency gains they pass along to their customer base.

That's irrelevant if they those gains are less than a competitor's discounts.

> Also, Fidelity's index funds are loss leaders to retain funds that were flowing out to Vanguard.

So?

Re: Fidelity CEO Abigail Johnson says the company is mining cryptocurrencies

#78

Post by polishTar »

proofofstake wrote: post #30

ROI of creating an investment portfolio 1 year ago, and selling today: - All Bitcoin: ~500% - Mix of top market: ~2800% - All Strat: ~13500% Meanwhile, stock investors call 12% a good year.

I can do you one better because I made 200x ROI investing in the roulette wheel in just a single day.

Some people told me that I'm confusing good investment decisions with high volatility ones, but what do they know? They're just stupid investors! /s

Re: Fidelity CEO Abigail Johnson says the company is mining cryptocurrencies

#79

Post by lyrrad »

pgwhalen wrote: post #64
sokoloff wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference in fees is probably closer to 0.5% (50 basis points), not 0.5 basis points.

This is not actually true anymore, Fidelity has responded. Their pure index funds are extremely competitive with Vanguard.

Most of the major players have funds with expense ratios within a couple basis points of each other. When they're that close, picking the fund with the lowest expense ratio may not result in the best performance and other factors can dominate:

- How well the fund is run, and how representative it is of the index. A fund with high trading costs may underperform.

- Securities Lending policy, how risky it is and how much of the income is returned to the fund

- (In taxable accounts) Tax efficiency. Some funds from some vendors return a significant amount of capital gains and short-term dividends, which can cost several basis points in taxes a year.

In general, the first two elements can be approximated by comparing the performance of the fund to its benchmark over the same time period, and tax efficiency can be estimated by looking at details of past distributions.

In most cases, it wouldn't make sense to switch existing funds to another provider in a taxable account if switching would result in a large capital gain.

I'd expect all providers to get better at indexing over time and their performance after taxes to converge.

Re: Fidelity CEO Abigail Johnson says the company is mining cryptocurrencies

#80

Post by slyfocks »

ballenf wrote: post #65
almostApatriot1 wrote: post #43

> Johnson said that the company had made several venture investments in bitcoin-related businesses and that the company was looking at applications of blockchain technologies alongside several leading universities. Every crypto article makes the same vague claims about the potential of non-specific blockchain technology. I'm surprised there was no mention of replacing Visa in this one as well.

I got removed from a project because I was raining on everyone's blockchain fantasy. Later they begrudgingly admitted that blockchain wasn't going to solve the hard interoperability problem we were facing (bog standard need to pull & analyze data from multiple incompatible data stores held by multiple independent parties). I can forgive all the business guys for that thinking given articles like these, but the tech g…

Thank you for being a voice of reason in a domain that has increasingly become overrun by frauds and zealots.

As someone who has been involved in blockchain research since 2011, it’s sad to see a promising technology (in limited use cases) turn into a buzzword thrown around by the many speculators and scam artists peddling vaporware and pumping crypto prices.

Post reply on HN