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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

#161

Post by nwah1 »

lojack wrote: post #72
nwah1 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pro…

I participated in writing a money transfer service. There's a number of steps, and the actual transfer is just one of them. There can be multiple identity verification checks, and bank authorizations. Each bank has their own internal API, etc. Sometimes their API is just randomly down, if it is some terrible foreign bank.

I know for a fact that Bitcoin's transaction time is not "real time," so why would Ripple's be?

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

#162

Post by Ajedi32 »

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

The US Dollar has the penny, nickle, dime, and quarter, and Bitcoin has the satoshi. It's not really that hard to understand.

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

#163

Post by alien_at_work »

lr4444lr wrote: post #159
alien_at_work wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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!

And here I thought I was the lone voice in the wilderness. From Roy Fielding's original paper: The client-stateless-server style derives from client-server with the additional constraint that no session state is allowed on the server component. Each request from client to server must contain all of the information necessary to understand the request, and cannot take advantage of any stored context on the server. Sess…

Not alone. I find the problem most people have is no suitable example they can think of. The examples we have online are "starbucks as REST", etc. A better example is the greatest REST client ever made: the web browser. When Facebook updates their "app", I don't even need to restart my "client" to get the updated features. These days I start all "REST: you're doing it wrong" conversations with this.

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

#164

Post by DennisP »

kondro wrote: post #123
pfisch wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm the owner.

Fair enough then! :-) Surprised it’s cost effective to mine with commodity desktops and retail power though. ;-)

Commercial rates are generally lower than home retail rates, night-time rates are also on the low side, and your hardware is effectively free if you're using idle time.

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

#165

Post by keymone »

cm2187 wrote: post #133
kobeya wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You think they aren't? Mining is a multi billion dollar industry.

The term "industry" suggests they produce something, which in the case of bitcoin mining is questionable.

they produce security of distributed decentralized database and continued operation of payment platform on top of it.

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

#167

Post by DennisP »

cshenton wrote: post #98
mrb wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

« 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

Being able to sell one cryptocurrency for another doesn't mean the first cryptocurrency is liquid.

From a quick check at coinmarketcap, the daily bitcoin/dollar volume on BitMEX alone is $455 million. Next up is Bitfinex with $182 million.

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

#168

Post by toomuchtodo »

astura wrote: post #97
toomuchtodo wrote: post #71

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

If low cost index funds are unprofitable then please explain how BlackRock is making so much money off of them? https://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2015/01/13/re...

They're not unprofitable in general. They are for Fidelity, which is using it as a loss leader to keep their customer base from fleeing (Fidelity has a lot of overhead as a financial services firm).

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

#169

Post by DennisP »

gnaritas wrote: post #126
mrb wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

« 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

That's a very very small amount, real currency markets do trillions a day, bitcoin is the size of a large company. He's totally right, that's a small liquid market when compared to the real markets. If you tried to dump 10 million in bitcoin all at once, there's a good chance you're going to crash the market; 10 million wouldn't even move the price in the EURUSD.

Large cap stocks are not generally considered to be illiquid investments, even though they're much smaller than major currency markets.

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

#170

Post by DennisP »

shimon wrote: post #42
proofofstake wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with: > 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. so I do not see how my post was wrong. These are the numbers. With such numbers, it would be foolish to discard the crypto market as "too volatile" and stick with stocks. There are crypto coins that did way be…

No, these numbers do in fact suggest the crypto market is extremely volatile. Many, many people who invest regularly in stocks should not invest in cryptocurrency because it is too volatile. People/companies that are able to understand and accept the risk that comes from speculating on cryptocurrencies should consider doing so, because it is possible to make a profit, perhaps a significant one. But if you're looking…

They're volatile, but they have low correlation with other asset classes. You can put a small portion of your assets in crypto and lower the overall risk of your portfolio.

They also have very high Sharpe ratios (the ratio between returns and volatility), though given crypto's short history we shouldn't trust that too much.

https://www.bletchleyindexes.com/blog/idx_perf_post

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