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There’s Nothing to Do Except Gamble

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Re: There’s Nothing to Do Except Gamble

#331

Post by carom »

solosoyokaze wrote: post #297
alert0 wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comparing cryptocurrency to real estate is laughable. With real estate you have either a place to live, reducing a real world expense (rent), or an income producing property. No matter how much you dress up cryptocurrencies as stocks, by using terms like market cap, you are not buying a share of an income producing asset. You're speculating on a digital collectible. You can speculate on real estate and stocks, but yo…

They compared it to the appreciation of real estate, which is wildly divorced from real value. Real-estate prices in say, the Bay Area are driven by legislation and speculation. Not actual value. The move to remote works accelerates the discrepancy.

It isn't. If you look at residential income properties, they trade around the rents that they command, sometimes with some development potential sprinkled on top.

Re: There’s Nothing to Do Except Gamble

#332

Post by grafporno »

6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #321
legulere wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the other way around. First there was personal debt, then impersonal money. In the beginning you would just lend stuff from other people and give it back, or with consumables give something back of similar worth. Precious metal was pretty rarely used, as its main benefit is that you need almost no common trust relationship.

Describing it as debt makes it sound like people tallied it, which I believe they didn’t for a long time. It gets the facts right but uses a very modern way to frame it. I think it’s more accurate to look at it as reciprocal altruism. I do you favors, you do OP favors, OP does me favors and we do so so long as it feels like nobody is mooching. It’s the difference between 1) going out to a bar with friends and remembe…

Strong disagree, people tallied it basically from the start, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tally_stick

Re: There’s Nothing to Do Except Gamble

#333

Post by thorwasdfasdf »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #226
tcbawo wrote: post #8

Money is stored wealth, the ability to buy goods and services in the future. The problem seems to be that we live in a time of societal upheaval. The future of stored wealth becomes cloudier and more uncertain the further you go out in time. So, what is the best place to store wealth? Will my wealth be eroded by inflation? Will the companies I invest in become obsolete by technology or market-manipulating nation stat…

I heard of a wealthy family that had managed to maintain their wealth in Europe across multiple generations, through lots of war, upheaval, regime change, and so on. Their formula was "one third gold, one third art, one third land". You could lose any piece of it in any upheaval, but you wouldn't be likely to lose all of it.

that's a good strategy, but I'd change one thing: instead of art, use equities, and broden gold to commodities. so then you have: 1/3 real estate, 1/3 equities, 1/3 commodities (mostly gold and bitcoin with some other precious metals thrown in). It's hard to get more diversified than that.

Re: There’s Nothing to Do Except Gamble

#334

Post by nostrademons »

jasonwatkinspdx wrote: post #222
legulere wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the other way around. First there was personal debt, then impersonal money. In the beginning you would just lend stuff from other people and give it back, or with consumables give something back of similar worth. Precious metal was pretty rarely used, as its main benefit is that you need almost no common trust relationship.

I see you've read Graeber. Great book and changed my views on a lot of things, particularly how much of our "common sense" understanding/education on topics relies on "just so" assumptions made by some aristocratic scholar a couple centuries ago. Anyhow, to explain for the forum: Graeber's book goes through the evidence we know of from the places were money first appeared. In essence, debt came first, and money was a…

> It's also a great lens for understanding what's happening now with cryptocurrencies.

Expanding on this - one of the brilliant innovations in Bitcoin was to make the ledger fundamental and the coin an implementation artifact. The blockchain doesn't store coins - it stores a ledger of who transacted with whom, and for what amounts, and then ownership of a Bitcoin is a derived quantity from the transaction history. Ethereum just expands that ledger to let smart contracts on the blockchain define other quantities to track, as well as the rules and relationships between them.

It's completely backwards from how I would've thought to implement a cryptocurrency, which would be to start with the coin and figure out how to make its ownership distinct & incorruptible. By starting with the ledger first, you don't need to think very hard about ownership (because it's all recorded in the ledger), you just need to find a way to define a source of truth for the transaction history.

Re: There’s Nothing to Do Except Gamble

#335

Post by thorwasdfasdf »

paulpauper wrote: post #24
tcbawo wrote: post #8

Money is stored wealth, the ability to buy goods and services in the future. The problem seems to be that we live in a time of societal upheaval. The future of stored wealth becomes cloudier and more uncertain the further you go out in time. So, what is the best place to store wealth? Will my wealth be eroded by inflation? Will the companies I invest in become obsolete by technology or market-manipulating nation stat…

My answer to these questions and other unknowns about the fed, fiscal policy, America and its role in the world, the economy etc. is that the future will be a lot like the present, but more so. So extent the current trends into the future. Sure, things sometimes change, even dramatically such as the fall of the USSR or 911, but we are living in a steady-state world in which the underling trends do not change. Inflati…

inflation has been much higher than reported. Just look at the big mac index, which shows nearly 4% inflation for the last 20 years. Cape shiller housing index, also nearly 4% for the last 20 years. According to Peter Schiff, "Trusting the CPI from the labor department is like trusting the Mob to report on crime."

Re: There’s Nothing to Do Except Gamble

#336

Post by AnimalMuppet »

stainforth wrote: post #316
xyzzy123 wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't like this comment, but I can't put my finger on why exactly. I think it's the drive-by, reflexive assignment of guilt, while knowing nothing of the circumstances. This strikes me as the opposite of thinking. What you said might be true, it might not, what have you added to the world?

The gold, land, art reference 2 posts above yours almost certainly refers to the Rothschilds, so I don't know why solosoyokaze is being downvoted as the Rothschilds most definitely funded wars to their own profit.

I believe it was the Rothschilds, yes. I suspect solosoyokaze is being downvoted for the word "triggered". That's a long step past "funded".

Re: There’s Nothing to Do Except Gamble

#337

Post by randomsearch »

tcbawo wrote: post #8

Money is stored wealth, the ability to buy goods and services in the future. The problem seems to be that we live in a time of societal upheaval. The future of stored wealth becomes cloudier and more uncertain the further you go out in time. So, what is the best place to store wealth? Will my wealth be eroded by inflation? Will the companies I invest in become obsolete by technology or market-manipulating nation stat…

My take was always that money is a medium of exchange. A mechanism by which you can buy or sell things.

Wealth is something that people want. Lawnmowers or a movie stream.

One consequence of this distinction is that if money fails as a medium of exchange (eg everyone loses confidence in the dollar) then those dollars are now useless. But no wealth has been destroyed.

So I conclude money is not a store of wealth.

Re: There’s Nothing to Do Except Gamble

#338

Post by wallacoloo »

LargeWu wrote: post #164
wallacoloo wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do I create value when I loan another person some asset? What about when I act as a currency exchange, and offer at any moment in time to take either side of any trade along with a 0.3% fee? These are two things I do on Ethereum right now which have analogs in the traditional finance system. Seems to me it matters little whether the activity is done in a traditional space or in cryptoland: they either both create val…

Loans would be one of the classic value creating activities, because they allow others to use otherwise idle capital to produce something new. Currency exchange is fuzzier. If the exchange is happening to facilitate commerce, then sure, I would consider that value creation. If it's happening simply in order to support speculation in a different currency, then no, it's not value creating. And it's pretty clear from th…

AFAIK most of the loans in DeFi go to people who are leveraging their bets one way or another. So if speculation isn’t valuable, then perhaps many of these loans are also also not valuable under that criteria.

Re: There’s Nothing to Do Except Gamble

#339

Post by thewarrior »

6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #318

> In an era defined by slow growth and flatlined productivity (if not outright economic stagnation) and marked by widening inequality and underemployment, “money” feels at once deadly serious and stupidly silly. Seen from this viewpoint, the pandemic economy isn’t an anomaly but a heightened version of one possible future: a world where money is abundant but safe long-term investments are rare and where “getting rich…

It’s not enough to do things like buy a house.

Re: There’s Nothing to Do Except Gamble

#340

Post by gretch »

stainforth wrote: post #316
xyzzy123 wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't like this comment, but I can't put my finger on why exactly. I think it's the drive-by, reflexive assignment of guilt, while knowing nothing of the circumstances. This strikes me as the opposite of thinking. What you said might be true, it might not, what have you added to the world?

The gold, land, art reference 2 posts above yours almost certainly refers to the Rothschilds, so I don't know why solosoyokaze is being downvoted as the Rothschilds most definitely funded wars to their own profit.

Well actually if solosoyokaze had said something more like

"This is probably referring to the rothschilds based on (link to historical information). It's reasonable to extrapolate that they were war profiteers based on (reasoning)"

Then I think it really could have added some insight into the world instead of being like the drive-by ignorance the parent comment refers to.

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