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Fidelity CEO Abigail Johnson says the company is mining cryptocurrencies

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

#141

Post by pyvpx »

LoSboccacc wrote: post #119
xiphias wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's an easy way to not be frustrated: just buy Bitcoin independently from what you're working on. If you understand what that means to own BTC 10 years from now, you know that malinvestments won't get you frustrated.

Most of the future btc value is already inflating the current currency value. And there’s still the risk of a crash and switch in that long of a timeframe. I bet there’s more money to be had at cryptocurrency arbitrage

there sure is. but the marketplaces are so slow and fragile it's essentially impossible (aka too indeterministic/risky)

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

#142

Post by lojack »

z2210558 wrote: post #82
lojack wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pro…

Yes, but is there something that Ripple is doing here that could not be done by any non-blockchain distributed system? The chief value in blockchain seems to be in getting people to agree to do something at all.

> Yes, but is there something that Ripple is doing here that could not be done by any non-blockchain distributed system?

Yes... as far as I'm aware, most (all?) other non-blockchain distributed ledgers require complete trust between parties. Its hard enough for two banks to trust each other completely, let alone all banks to trust all other banks. The old way of doing things is to either trust a central bank completely, which is easier to do, but far from distributed, or to trust a third party with a days worth of transfers and settling at the end of the day. Still not distributed, but requires less trust.

> The chief value in blockchain seems to be in getting people to agree to do something at all.

Exactly!

Blockchain technology is essentially nothing more than a cryptographically secure distributed ledger. There's probably other ways of having a secured distributed ledger without technically being a blockchain, and I'd be interested in hearing about them, but I'm not aware of their existence at the moment. Either way, I'm not sure why there's so much pushback on blockchains?

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

#143

Post by np_tedious »

csomar wrote: post #33
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.

Eh, I don't really know where to start to explain how wrong this is. The crypto market is still niche. There are stocks that make 100-1000% performance. But the stock market is "saturated" for representing assets, equities and companies. So its growth is limited.

You can say it's not the whole purveyor, or even misleading, but it certainly isn't "wrong"

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

#144

Post by np_tedious »

np_tedious wrote: post #143
csomar wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, I don't really know where to start to explain how wrong this is. The crypto market is still niche. There are stocks that make 100-1000% performance. But the stock market is "saturated" for representing assets, equities and companies. So its growth is limited.

You can say it's not the whole purveyor, or even misleading, but it certainly isn't "wrong"

*picture

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

#145

Post by Angostura »

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…

If you don't mind expanding a bit, could you give some examples of areas where you think it has potential - I'm not really clued in enough at the moment to distinguish between real possibilities and snake-oil.

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

#146

Post by Angostura »

puranjay wrote: post #109
ballenf wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The tech media (and tech startups) has this bad habit of hyping up technologies before they're ready for prime time. They did it with 3D printing, they did it with VR, and now they're doing it with blockchain.

They did appending 'Cloud' to everything too.

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

#147

Post by dx034 »

desdiv wrote: post #92
srtjstjsj wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

>So? Loss leaders are by their nature unprofitable and thus will go away as soon as they're not required. Suppose if Vanguard disappears, then Fidelity will hike their rates up. On the other hand, if Fidelity disappears, Vanguard won't hike their rates up because they won't bite the hand that feeds them since it's their own hand .

You can trade daily, why not keep the Fidelity ETF until they hike prices?

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

#148

Post by bpicolo »

lojack wrote: post #142
z2210558 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but is there something that Ripple is doing here that could not be done by any non-blockchain distributed system? The chief value in blockchain seems to be in getting people to agree to do something at all.

> Yes, but is there something that Ripple is doing here that could not be done by any non-blockchain distributed system? Yes... as far as I'm aware, most (all?) other non-blockchain distributed ledgers require complete trust between parties. Its hard enough for two banks to trust each other completely, let alone all banks to trust all other banks. The old way of doing things is to either trust a central bank complete…

> require complete trust between parties

Doesn't it just require trust of a single party for settlements (or any number of independent settlements parties)? Which you still sort of require in the ripple model because ripple owns a crap ton of it's own coinage (60% of the pot).

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

#149

Post by alien_at_work »

slyfocks wrote: post #80
ballenf wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>it’s sad to see a promising technology (in limited use cases) turn into a buzzword

The same thing happened to REST. Every "web interface" is supposedly REST now, yet the client and server are even more coupled than they would have been if the interface were implemented in SOAP!

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

#150

Post by dx034 »

dmoy wrote: post #87
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.

I mean the specific two funds that I had in Fidelity and transferred to vanguard mostly have a difference of 0.5 basis points. 0.04% vs 0.045

Did you compare performance before you changed? Differences that small can easily be offset by the replication strategy and lending. Comparing the tracking error of net performance vs. the index is more relevant.
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