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The Edited Latecomer’s Guide to Crypto

mollywhite.net

71–80 of 331 posts

Re: The Edited Latecomer’s Guide to Crypto

#71

The article (or, rather, the commentary in the link above on the article) talks about the fallacious notion of "market cap" in regards to cryptocurrencies. That is to say, e.g., multiplying the number of bitcoins in existence times the current market price is a silly metric because the entire market would never be able to cash-out at that maximum price. What I was wondering was: is there a better number? e.g., is the…

Overall, I enjoyed the analysis of the piece, but I disagree with their take on market cap.

Amy Castor - "Yeah, market cap is a meaningless number. It assumes everyone bought at the current price and could cash out at the current price."

We could just as easily apply that basic logic to any security. Amazon(AMZN) is ~3275 a share with a market cap of ~1.668T. That also assumes everyone could cash out at ~3275, but the reality is if selling pressure is higher than the buy side demand that selling shares will drive the price down as buyers would be able to continually bid lower. Eventually it would reach ~0 share price and effectively a 0 market cap.

So in that sense token market cap is a fair equivalency. What makes a dollar worth a dollar? Crypto value at any given point in time is just an exchange value against fiat currencies. This isn't much different than an exchange value between USD and the Ruble; it will fluctuate.

Re: The Edited Latecomer’s Guide to Crypto

#72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe https://hypothes.is/ ?

Hypothesis is a really interesting platform, but in my mind it's kind of too community-focused. Hypothesis's restricted groups ( https://web.hypothes.is/help/annotating-with-groups/ ) are closer to what I think people would want, but to get them you'll have to self-host. Not trying to throw shade at them, but I feel like their push for annotations is hampered a little bit by how much their specific implementation of…

Which standard is that? ePubs, for example, use canonical fragment identifiers, which could also work on HTML. I think hypothes.is uses them too but adds fuzzy matching fields so that they can match up after document changes. At least from what I remember

I'm working on an annotation project myself, though not really related to what the parent commenter is looking for. A generic solution to the highlight/annotation problem is quite difficult, especially if you allow for document changes.

Re: The Edited Latecomer’s Guide to Crypto

#73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I appreciate your reply. You dug into a claim I made and lay out your criticisms dispassionately, thanks. This is the kind of discourse I'd like to see more of. > This stuff is scrubbed from his website, and Adjoint doesn't even appear on his LinkedIn profile. But I can easily see why that might be the case if he's decided the whole field is rubbish and left the industry, or if his work is being misconstrued. Gives h…

Thank you for a response in the spirit of good discourse. Anyway, I don't even know if he has moved on from Adjoint. I agree there's something odd about this, but I've also seen how people who are vocal critics on the internet have to be less public about their associations. Not sure what to think about it.

You added more data to my view and definitely made me think. Thanks for that!

Re: The Edited Latecomer’s Guide to Crypto

#74
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find a lot of DeFi projects to be very useful, but you have a logical fallacy - If I buy 1% of Apple stock at $100, and later it's worth $1000 based on the last trading price, money didn't change hands to make me have more USD, it's my paper wealth. If Bitcoin goes from $1 to $50k, and I never sell, I didn't take any money - the wealth simply grew.

The point is that holding Apple stock is a claim of ownership of the assets of Apple as well as the future income of Apple, either in the form of dividends or stock buybacks. The activity of Apple is economically meaningful; and the price of Apple stock reflects that.

[deleted]

Re: The Edited Latecomer’s Guide to Crypto

#75
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Stephen Diehl (who's been astroturfing crypto because he works on his own blockchain company) If you criticise crypto based on general software engineering experience, the cryptobros say: "You don't know what you're talking about!" If you criticise crypto based on experience trying to actually use it, the cryptobros say: "You're astroturfing!" Thus the only people allowed to discuss crypto are seemingly those with…

> Thus the only people allowed to discuss crypto are seemingly those with a financial interest in token prices going up. Funny how that works. > Funny how that works. This rhetorical device is tiring and divisive, please stop. I have no interest in crypto other than some coins I bought years ago that constitute a negligible portion of my portfolio and a passing interest in IPFS. I think the space is full of fraud and…

You're the one implying that Diehl's criticism isn't valid because he has worked for a blockchain company.

That's a genuinely bizarre line of argument that I've only ever heard in crypto circles.

Re: The Edited Latecomer’s Guide to Crypto

#76
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is seen most often is NYC or equivalent finance traders and executives bolting into crypto. It seems hard for firms below the Coinbase/Kraken/heavy hitter trading shop bar to pull serious resume hires out of SV, but quite a few Managing Director+ level hires moved over into crypto. My sense is the NYC finance realize a core aspect of crypto - you might not think it's money, but enough people do, and there's an a…

There's an important nuance to this: enough unsophisticated people think it's money, so there's lots of opportunity for finance people to make money. Traditional finance is well-trodden, every arbitrage opportunity has been tried decades ago. But crypto is full of doe-eyed innocents who think they're reinventing finance. Of course experienced traders want to take advantage of them. It must be more fun than ye olde eu…

> enough unsophisticated people

Well, sophisticated people also think it's money, but they entered '12-'17 and stopped talking about it. A more recent example though is Neuberger Berman's entrance.

The tragedy of the crypto moment is serious folks who didn't come from crypto made up their minds about it and did it a while ago, but articles like OP run interference against "everyone else" doing the same.

Some links:

https://medium.com/john-pfeffer/an-institutional-investors-t...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wences_Casares > Casares was the entrepreneur to convince Bill Gates, Reid Hoffman, and other tech veterans in Silicon Valley to invest in bitcoin

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantera_Capital - scope out Morehead's background.

Re: The Edited Latecomer’s Guide to Crypto

#77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hypothesis is a really interesting platform, but in my mind it's kind of too community-focused. Hypothesis's restricted groups ( https://web.hypothes.is/help/annotating-with-groups/ ) are closer to what I think people would want, but to get them you'll have to self-host. Not trying to throw shade at them, but I feel like their push for annotations is hampered a little bit by how much their specific implementation of…

Which standard is that? ePubs, for example, use canonical fragment identifiers, which could also work on HTML. I think hypothes.is uses them too but adds fuzzy matching fields so that they can match up after document changes. At least from what I remember I'm working on an annotation project myself, though not really related to what the parent commenter is looking for. A generic solution to the highlight/annotation p…

https://www.w3.org/annotation/

I read through the docs when they first came out but I don't remember all of the details anymore. Fragment identifiers are part of it though. I've gone back and forth on how much I like them, allowing for document changes is always going to make stuff really complicated, fuzzy/fragment matching is about the best you can do I think without the cooperation of the source you're annotating.

It feels like annotations probably should be tied to specific document versions, but I also get the reasoning why they're not in this proposal. Unless you're self-hosting everything or forcing everything to go through the Internet Archive... it's just kind of difficult.

I've been curious about trying to get annotations to work before using something like Matrix to handle accounts/groups, but not curious enough to actually try to build a working example.

Re: The Edited Latecomer’s Guide to Crypto

#78
post #3

Worth adding >>> And in Silicon Valley, engineers and executives are bolting from cushy jobs in droves to join the crypto gold rush. No they do not. I am an engineer in a technology heavily used by crypto projects and they have a really hard time recruiting. Engineers slam the door in their face the moment you tell them the opening is for this industry.

Opposite anecdote, I would be happy to take a 30% paycut to work on (some) crypto projects and actually do 60+ hours of work (I do like 10 hours in my cushy job now). Unfortunately, I am not in SV and don't have a padded a resume, and they are flooded with better applicants - so I can't even compete.

Please apply: https://informal.systems/careers/

Re: The Edited Latecomer’s Guide to Crypto

#79
post #19

If you're getting frustrated at how thin the commentary column is, make your screen width less than 1800px wide; there's a bug in their CSS for wider breakpoints!

These days, I mostly browse the web at 150 to 200% zoom. This offsets a lot of such glitches for large screens.

Re: The Edited Latecomer’s Guide to Crypto

#80
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find a lot of DeFi projects to be very useful, but you have a logical fallacy - If I buy 1% of Apple stock at $100, and later it's worth $1000 based on the last trading price, money didn't change hands to make me have more USD, it's my paper wealth. If Bitcoin goes from $1 to $50k, and I never sell, I didn't take any money - the wealth simply grew.

The point is that holding Apple stock is a claim of ownership of the assets of Apple as well as the future income of Apple, either in the form of dividends or stock buybacks. The activity of Apple is economically meaningful; and the price of Apple stock reflects that.

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