Three Delusions: Paper Wealth, a Booming Economy, and Bitcoin

Post by BadCookie » Sat, Dec 23, 2017, 5:12 AM UTC

jjeaff wrote: post #133

sdy wrote: post #84

I believe the man is essentially saying that past performance does not indicate future performance. Ironically, most of the comments here are saying he is wrong, because of his past performance. Can we instead talk about his specific points and why they are wrong instead of just focusing on his past performance? Also, it looks to me that his performance was good during the great recession. So if another recession is…

Seeing as the market always recovers and then some, you are going to need to make very, very good returns in the downturns to make up for all the list potential on the upside. In other words, the overall return of the markets over their entire lifetime is positive, not negative. It would be great to ride the bull and then switch to the bear in a down market. But that would require timing the market.

Post by joejerryronnie » Sat, Dec 23, 2017, 4:00 PM UTC

neumann wrote: post #150

oblio wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The common theme is that the majority of people were not starving. That's how revolutions are fueled. None of the countries you listed were facing actual famines.

So, for the rich to keep (and make) their wealth, they just need to ensure that the serfs/plebs don't starve. Low bar for success!

Post by perl4ever » Sat, Dec 23, 2017, 7:44 PM UTC

icedchai wrote: post #154

perl4ever wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems to me whether that is good depends on what you conceive of as counterfactuals. If you truly believe that the investments would have made you a zillion dollars in a worst case scenario for the economy, then the fact that they've made almost nothing when the market has gone up & up & up doesn't seem that bad.

This fund's performance is objectively bad because there are alternatives with less risk that provide much better returns for much lower fees. Also, since the markets, long term, generally go up, investing in something that expects the opposite is foolish.

Post by wallacoloo » Sat, Dec 23, 2017, 10:40 PM UTC

Klathmon wrote: post #117

wallacoloo wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Difficulty can't actually correspond to the number of leading zeros required in the hash, can it? Then there would only be 256 levels of difficulty, and the average block time would have to double whenever difficulty increases. Yet I see this "leading zeros" explanation everywhere. So maybe it is the case, but if so, why was this way chosen rather than just requiring that the hash be less than some value, with that v…

The "number of leading 0's" is just a gross oversimplification of the actual difficulty mechanism. It's a lot easier to explain, and it's somewhat correct (it's easy to look at the hash for a block and see that it has a bunch of zeros at the front) The reality is closer to what you say at the end there, it is calculated so that the resulting hash must be under a given value, and is pretty damn granular. Sadly many pe…

Post by fallingfrog » Sun, Dec 24, 2017, 2:34 AM UTC

philiphodgen wrote: post #24

I look beyond the “there’s a crash coming” sentiment. In that opinion, he is like all other pundits yammering on CNBC: entertaining rather than enlightening. What I like about his article is the insight — new to me — about the nature of paper wealth vs real wealth. He described it in a way that is useful and enlightening to me. The assertion that a security (stock, bond) is not an addition to net wealth — just a zero…