I love Stephen Johnson, the author. His show on Prime/PBS "How we got to now" was an incredible series about how small innovations with glass, sound, and light made the modern world possible, and he does it with a lot of charm. Highly recommended for the HN audience!
Beyond the Bitcoin bubble
51–60 of 244 posts
Re: Beyond the Bitcoin bubble
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
The SEC is warning people so they don't get scammed. Good for them. Their actions aren't unwarranted because there's been a lot of scams. You're asking for an open market so that people can be defrauded.
Not really, first of all when SEC warns it is usually when people already actually get scammed. Second - if my father kept telling me "son, don't go there" I wouldn't know why, and how to distinguish safe places from unsafe. All I mean is that by scarring you don't protect people from being defrauded. And I wouldn't care if I'd like to see people being defrauded, but in fact I do care, and don't find the "scarring/wa…
Since you made the same mistake twice:
scarring ~ creating scars; scaring ~ frightening.
Re: Beyond the Bitcoin bubble
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hmmm. Good point, I too hope ten years down the line we laugh at the ICO era. But the 'coin' part is actually more than a moniker. It has provided a PoC that value can be proved and transferred digitally. I hope governments actually continue research in this space, while effectively regulating this speculative fad.
The 'coin part' already has a name and it's not a new innovation. Large part of financial innovation in the last century is based on the idea that is now called coin. It's called derivative. If you have something valuable that can be traded, it can be made into derivative and traded in existing markets. Practically anything, physical things, electricity, indexes, future events or prices, insurances, storage capacity,…
> If you have something valuable that can be traded, it can be made into derivative and traded in existing markets
Nitpick, though an interesting one. What you are describing is "securitization" more so than a derivative.
There are essentially five things you can do in finance: move cash flows in time (e.g. lending), move them between holders (e.g. buying and selling shares), chop them up into securities (e.g. an IPO), assemble them into portfolios (e.g. CDOs) and write derivatives against them (e.g. insurance). The newcomer is securitization. It first arose in 900 CE in the Song Dynasty in common memory through the 1602 Dutch East India Company public share offering.
ICOs look like a combination of the first (buy a token now, redeem it for services later) and third (they look like shares, though what exactly we're chopping up continues to evade me). Bitcoin itself looks like number two minus any cash flows. Or, more simply, gambling.
Re: Beyond the Bitcoin bubble
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nobody fails to grasp the possibilities of these currencies, what they disagree with is utility to hype value. When people throw out "you don't get this" as an argument against skepticism, it sounds naive and a little insulting. This quote was in that NYT "Everyone's Getting Rich.." article: The tone turns somber. “Sometimes I think about what would happen to the future if a bomb went off at one of our meetings,” Mr.…
I don't mean to sound insulting or naive but maybe I am doing so by accident. Let me try in another way, what is the motivation for hobbyists and companies like Fidelity to buy mining hardware to secure a public blockchain?
I don't understand the nature of your question, but I'd say: to make money. That is the primary overriding incentive in this discussion. People will lie, cheat, and steal for a dollar, they'll definitely do it for 1 million.
Re: Beyond the Bitcoin bubble
#55Is anyone else tired of hearing the word 'bubble' applied to everything? Whether we're talking about tech stocks, chicken futures, tulips, or Bitcoin, it's become a really tired and meaningless term. You can't know if an asset is in a 'bubble' until long after the bubble has burst. Bitcoin is far from having burst, so this article and all those that came before it offer nothing new or insightful. Please, let's move p…
A 40% drop in any other asset price would already be considered a deflated bubble.
Re: Beyond the Bitcoin bubble
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right, this. I think cryptocurrencies are here to stay. I'm not convinced that's actually going to "positively affect the industry in the upcoming future". I don't think cryptocurrencies are going to remove the need for some big middleman like Visa to sit between individual consumers and their partners. Things like reversible transactions and on-demand small loans are too attractive to the median consumer, so someone…
>Central banks have their issues, to be sure, but I'm pretty sure they're better than the huge boom & bust cycles they replaced. Are you implying central banks are not cyclically prone to "booms and busts"?
Not in the "all the depositors discover all of their money is worthless because it actually can't be redeemed for gold like the bank note said" sense, no.
Re: Beyond the Bitcoin bubble
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hmmm. Good point, I too hope ten years down the line we laugh at the ICO era. But the 'coin' part is actually more than a moniker. It has provided a PoC that value can be proved and transferred digitally. I hope governments actually continue research in this space, while effectively regulating this speculative fad.
The 'coin part' already has a name and it's not a new innovation. Large part of financial innovation in the last century is based on the idea that is now called coin. It's called derivative. If you have something valuable that can be traded, it can be made into derivative and traded in existing markets. Practically anything, physical things, electricity, indexes, future events or prices, insurances, storage capacity,…
Derivatives are just instruments to bet against or for market trends of assets. There are futures contract, options, swaps and other derivative vehicles for every market, be it cryptocurrency or forex. What makes you think the coin part represents that derivative?
Re: Beyond the Bitcoin bubble
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
EdX has a course on hyperledger https://www.edx.org/course/blockchain-business-introduction-...
And how does it relate to cryptocurrency tokens? If I take the course would I understand most of the tokens being sold?
I have heard some good things about Stanford video lectures on Cryptocurrency https://crypto.stanford.edu/cs251/
Re: Beyond the Bitcoin bubble
#59Is anyone else tired of hearing the word 'bubble' applied to everything? Whether we're talking about tech stocks, chicken futures, tulips, or Bitcoin, it's become a really tired and meaningless term. You can't know if an asset is in a 'bubble' until long after the bubble has burst. Bitcoin is far from having burst, so this article and all those that came before it offer nothing new or insightful. Please, let's move p…
We had the dot-com bubble, but it didn't stop the internet from changing everything in fundamental way. Google, Facebook and Amazon are in the top 10 most valuable companies in the world - all completely dependant on the internet for the business model. Granted webvan and pets.com didn't make it, but it didn't mean the internet had failed as an idea.
> We had the dot-com bubble, but it didn't stop the internet from changing everything in fundamental way
We also had the Japanese theme park bubble, which left behind a lot of scrap metal. Be wary of sampling bias.
Re: Beyond the Bitcoin bubble
#60I love Stephen Johnson, the author. His show on Prime/PBS "How we got to now" was an incredible series about how small innovations with glass, sound, and light made the modern world possible, and he does it with a lot of charm. Highly recommended for the HN audience!
I read his book with the very same title. The history of glass, hygiene, etc. especially in the context of civilization is definitely eye opening!