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Goldman Sachs executive quits after making millions from Dogecoin

theguardian.com

151–160 of 170 posts

Re: Goldman Sachs executive quits after making millions from Dogecoin

#151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I believe strongly that a monetary system that's provably scarce, programmable, completely decentralized, permission-less, trustless, higly divisible, borderless and very easy to transfer has the potential to revolutionize how we store value." But is adding massively to global carbon levels needlessly...

That is an implementation detail of bitcoin, not a fundamental aspect of cryptocurrency. Bitcoin is cryptocurrency 1.0, or proof of concept, and the concept is well and truly proven. Developing others which operate more efficiently than the proof-of-concept or 1.0 version, or even than the existing banks and credit card exchanges is just engineering and iteration, and hardly a great leap of imagination or faith.

The only concept that is well and truly proven is that of an expensive and barely usable payment system with a colossal environmental cost. Everything else is vaporware, as of today.

Re: Goldman Sachs executive quits after making millions from Dogecoin

#152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I believe strongly that a monetary system that's provably scarce, programmable, completely decentralized, permission-less, trustless, higly divisible, borderless and very easy to transfer has the potential to revolutionize how we store value." But is adding massively to global carbon levels needlessly...

That is an implementation detail of bitcoin, not a fundamental aspect of cryptocurrency. Bitcoin is cryptocurrency 1.0, or proof of concept, and the concept is well and truly proven. Developing others which operate more efficiently than the proof-of-concept or 1.0 version, or even than the existing banks and credit card exchanges is just engineering and iteration, and hardly a great leap of imagination or faith.

It's an implementation detail of the blockchain

Any currency seeing moderate amounts of use and speculation is going to rapidly start sucking up power.

Re: Goldman Sachs executive quits after making millions from Dogecoin

#153
post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am deadly serious. There has been a successful multi-decade gaslighting initiative to make people think middle class and working class are different when in fact they are both just working to make the investment class rich. Time is your most valuable asset and unless you own it 100% then you are working class.

You're absolutely right in implicitly arguing that social class isn't exactly determined by the amount of money you have. You're also correct that traditionally the proletariat (the working class) were those who sold their labour. By a very strict definition, anyone who earns a wage is working class and that would include CEOs (as you are doing explicitly). That definition is deficient and doesn't relate to reality.…

Having a job that requires you to deploy capital efficiently doesn’t give you much power at all of it’s not your money.

Re: Goldman Sachs executive quits after making millions from Dogecoin

#154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is an implementation detail of bitcoin, not a fundamental aspect of cryptocurrency. Bitcoin is cryptocurrency 1.0, or proof of concept, and the concept is well and truly proven. Developing others which operate more efficiently than the proof-of-concept or 1.0 version, or even than the existing banks and credit card exchanges is just engineering and iteration, and hardly a great leap of imagination or faith.

It's an implementation detail of the blockchain Any currency seeing moderate amounts of use and speculation is going to rapidly start sucking up power.

That's not correct. There's proof of work (what you're talking about), proof of stake (much more efficient, different purpose), and proof of history (more time centric).

These narratives about power and emissions are narratives with an agenda. The agenda may be good in nature, but don't mistake them for accurate or precise.

Re: Goldman Sachs executive quits after making millions from Dogecoin

#155
post #24

No wealth was created or destroyed in the making of these millions, the millions simply changed hands. Think about that before purchasing a cryptocurrency. You're basically handing your money to an earlier "investor" in the hopes that a future "investor" will hand a greater amount to you. This is all there is to it.

Gold and stocks are very similar to that

Re: Goldman Sachs executive quits after making millions from Dogecoin

#156
post #100
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about people buying time pieces (watches)?

In the UK, watches, being mechanical in nature, are not subject to capital gains tax on any profits. For this reason alone luxury collectable watches are a smart investment for diversification purposes for the ultra wealthy.

For me they are as good as NFTs

Re: Goldman Sachs executive quits after making millions from Dogecoin

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a bubble now in speculative stocks, and it's not good because it means billions in funding are going towards failing companies. That's why I said "in an ideal world". I do believe this bubble will pop eventually and the stock market will return to its appropriate primary function (which it still is doing ex-retail hype stocks) of allocating capital to the most productive companies. Note also that I was respon…

> the stock market will return to its appropriate primary function (which it still is doing ex-retail hype stocks) of allocating capital to the most productive companies. Do you think it has done this in the last 30 years? I am of the opinion that has it has at best done this exceedingly poorly. There are many reasons for this: 1. Speculating is the one we've already covered 2. HFT, which isn't that much different to…

It has done this rather well historically. A failing, badly managed company is most of the time going to be worth less than a highly successful one or one that's growing and gaining traction. That's why when a company beats quarterly earnings, the stock price goes up. It's also why Enron's price crashed when their fraud was revealed. That means capital is typically and on average flowing in a productive direction versus the alternative, which is good for the economy for obvious reasons.

HFT isn't relevant to this picture, their role is primarily market making and arbitrage and they have no net impact on pricing. Their sole role is to replace human market makers in a liquidity provision capacity, which reduces the cost to the active manager of doing business, at the expense of the extinct human market maker.

Hedge funds aren't that consolidated. There's lots of them. There's no such thing as market power (in terms of oligopoly or monopoly power) for the industry either. The bigger you are, the harder it is to operate on a marginal basis, since price impact becomes prohibitive. Hedge fund spin offs are a dime a dozen since all the IP is in individual's heads. The biggest ones are resigned to longer bets where the edge is smaller. Market power is a thing only for HFT firms, due to economies of scale and scope on the tech and fee side, but as mentioned above HFT aren't relevant to what we are discussing.

Index funds chase valuations set by active managers since they're typically investing in market cap weighted indices. Their existence doesn't change the value add or necessity of accurate security pricing, and they're not really relevant to that either.

Re: Goldman Sachs executive quits after making millions from Dogecoin

#158
post #24

No wealth was created or destroyed in the making of these millions, the millions simply changed hands. Think about that before purchasing a cryptocurrency. You're basically handing your money to an earlier "investor" in the hopes that a future "investor" will hand a greater amount to you. This is all there is to it.

> This is all there is to it.

Well, think about operating a credit card company and taking fees whenever one of your cards is used. You could be very rich that way. Was any wealth created, or are you just siphoning off value that, in your absence, would have gone to someone else?

In that case, you created a lot of wealth and kept a part of it. The extra wealth arose from transactions that wouldn't have occurred without the service you provide.

Cryptocurrency isn't used much as a medium of exchange, but that was a design goal. Theoretically, it could be.

Re: Goldman Sachs executive quits after making millions from Dogecoin

#160
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crypto could easily be the largest pyramid scheme in history, I have zero interest in participating even if returns were guaranteed - that's not how I want to make money, I see no value being created in these "investments". Recent developments on the stock market kind of killed the market idealism for me. I don't know what's a better alternative, but from where I'm standing the financial system is rewarding wasteful…

> Crypto could easily be the largest pyramid scheme in history, I have zero interest in participating even if returns were guaranteed - that's not how I want to make money, I see no value being created in these "investments". Yes! Exactly! I have a friend who's doing well from crypto. He bought an NFT for $800 and it's not worth $8,000. Where is the (social) value in that? Except for the social experimentation this i…

Welll… If you made 1M today from crypto (and ofcourse you did "relatively" no evil in obtaining so) - wouldnt using that 1M later to actually solve a hard problem (or say a social cause) be just as worth it?
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