Too Clever by Half

Closes the article by implying that the federal government is a monolithic political entity ("the State") that stands apart from private financial interests.

And then quotes Jesus.

Way to stay true to your roots.

Fun article, interesting point, and I don't even necessarily disagree (entirely, anyway), BUT: coyotes have a larger range now than they have had since long before humans showed up in North America, largely because humans cleared out their main competitors, the wolves. And raccoons are not stupid, although they are destructive.

So, I get what the author is trying to say with this little parable, but the fact that the central facts it is using (coyotes losing out, raccoons are stupid) are both false, it makes me more than a little suspicious of the conclusion, when I otherwise might not be.

> Maybe try to figure out how to make the work fun?

I don't think this is the right approach, because you need the ability to focus on work even when it is not fun.

You do need something that makes the work rewarding in some way, but I wouldn't push to hard to try to make it fun.

> Or, try and instill a goal less of "getting the grade" and more "attain mastery of the subject"?

This was my approach in high school as well. It led to me being the one everyone wanted to study with because I picked up the material the best, but then I flunked classes because I never did the homework.

I would flunk classes that depended mostly on homework, and ace classes that depended mostly on tests. Since I had convinced myself that mastery was more important than grades, this reinforced my behavior.

Somehow, the acing the tests part allowed me to get into an Ivy League college. Which I then flunked out of because at that point, I couldn't get by without actually doing the homework and studying outside of class.

This pattern of behavior continues to be something I struggle with as an adult. I can be quite productive for short bursts of time, but have a hard time keeping on track with longer term projects that don't pay off immediately.

I think what you need is to learn the value of steady incremental work that only shows significant results after a long period of time. Basic reinforcement training techniques can be used for this; provide rewards for getting incremental work done, but better to provide them intermittently. Eventually work up from smaller rewards for smaller goals to larger rewards for larger goals.

I think that reinforcing consistency, habit, and small incremental progress rather than brilliance is a big part of what you need. The problem with brilliance is that you can easily get a lot of positive reinforcement for it; people are impressed at how well you understand something, at how much you know, at how quickly you pick it up. But even if you are better than average at picking things up and figuring things out, you will eventually hit the limits of what you can do through brilliance alone; there are some things that will just take long hard work no matter what, and then all of that reinforcement for brilliance comes back to bite you because you're not getting the same kind of reinforcement, and you can easily get stuck and lose faith in your self-image.

The author describes how coyotes win the "skirmish game" when they casually walk into suburban yards and demonstrate that they are not afraid of the humans when they do things to scare them away such as make loud noises at them. However, they lose the "meta-game" when animal control shows up and puts them down because they won't go away.

The author uses this analogy to compare coyotes to financial innovators. His argument is that every time financial innovation gets out of control and the economy at large is impacted, larger powers step in and squash it. He argues tha this is what happened in the 2008 financial crisis with mortage backed securities, and that this is the same thing happening now with Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies.

I disagree with the parallel he draws to cryptocurrencies.

While I don't necessarily think cryptocurrencies will dominate the world, and Governments may even succeed in reigning them in, they aren't in the same category as other financial innovation.

Mortgage backed securites were the coyotes stalking across the laws of suburban moms, hoping animal control wouldn't interfere.

Cryptocurrencies are a coordinated attack by a pack of coyotes on animal control headquarters.

They were designed specifically to be as government-resistant as possible. Now, animal control has a lot of firepower and they can call in reinforcements. Governments have a lot of resources and powers they can draw on to stop and regulate cryptocurrencies. However, these coyotes are well aware of the meta-game, who the true enemy is and they're gunning hard for him.

Before bitcoin, no currency that wasn't backed by a government lasted long before being shut down by a government entity. Bitcoin has been going for nine years now, and in that time further innovation has given us Monero and Zcash which are even more censorship and surveillance resistant.

The primary attack vector, the only one that's worked, has been made by the "racoons" at Blockstream and their investors from Visa and the banking industry. This is a much more subtle attack than direct government intervention. In a nut-shell, when Satoshi left the project, he left a guy named Gavin Andresen in charge. Gavin trusted the wrong person with commit access to the project, who was co-opted by the banking industry and who then booted him from access. Thos current group of developers crippled Bitcoin by repeatedly refusing to expand the block size and moving forward developing the "Lightning Network" which is nothing more than a copy of the current inter-bank payment system and which, quite frankly doesn't work.[1][2] They also took over the r/bitcoin subreddit as well as the bitcointalk forum and completely censored it.[3]

The fact that the racoons have taken this more subtle approach, suggests to me that the enemies of Bitcoin now believe that attempts to shut it down by more direct mean will fail.

However there are still a lot of coyotes working on other cryptocurrency projects. These coyotes are clearly playing the meta-game, and for now they're winning.

[1] Summary of what the lightning network is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYHFrf5ci_g [2] Discussion of a developer who tried to implement micropayments with lightning network, but had to switch because it did not work well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ew2MWVtNAt0 [3] A (brief and incomplete) history of censorship in /r/Bitcoin: https://medium.com/@johnblocke/a-brief-and-incomplete-histor...

Outside of the college recruitment pipeline, I've neither seen nor heard of anyone asking for gpa. Some places want or even require degrees, but nobody cares about gpa at all once you have a year of experience.