91–100 of 331 posts
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.
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 th…
First of all, money or value is a purely memetic construct. It's a grand illusion that only exists in our collective network of consciousnesses and operates as an abstraction to efficiently keep track of favors owed.
Therefore, value or money doesn't just transfer with explicit trades, as in trading $40,000 for 1 bitcoin adds $40,000 of value to bitcoin. Value also transfers memetically and invisibly, as in many people suddenly start to believe that asset B has 20% more value than asset A than it did yesterday. No explicit trade took place to create that transference of value. It's just that lots of people suddenly started believing that asset B was worth more favors that asset A. Sometimes that value is fairly easy to define, like by projected earnings of a company over the holding period of a stock. More often it's a nebulous and decentralized calculation of the market.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's like saying the USD is a negative sum game because "any CNY taken out of the system someone else has to have put in, plus whatever the government takes out. Fortunes aren't created, they are redistributed." The transference, redistribution, and storage of wealth is itself the value of monetary networks. The more circular trade that doesn't need to exit the network happens, the more valuable the network becomes…
>The point is to build an open monetary system A structurally impossible goal when it is deflationary in nature.
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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…
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In both crypto tokens and startup equity, you are literally gambling that there will be a liquid market for your asset. Tokens _are_ worthless if no one wants to buy them, and pretending that is somehow different than startup equity is ignorant at best and downright predatory in the worst cases. Crypto growth overall does not mean _your_ token is going to gain value anymore than the general growth of the economy mean…
> Tokens _are_ worthless if no one wants to buy them, and pretending that is somehow different than startup equity is ignorant at best and downright predatory in the worst cases. Fundamentally not true. Unlike traditional markets, crypto exchanges work by leveraging AMM liquidity pools. Obviously, a token can go up/down based on supply and demand, but if there's liquidity you can literally always sell. Confusing earl…
If no-one wants to buy a thing at any price, it is - by definition - illiquid. The notion that something for which there is no demand can be liquid is strange.
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Astroturfing means what?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astroturfing > Astroturfing is the practice of masking the sponsors of a message or organization (e.g., political, advertising, religious or public relations) to make it appear as though it originates from and is supported by grassroots participants. It is a practice intended to give the statements or organizations credibility by withholding information about the source's financial conne…
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.
This hasn't been my experience at all. I feel like this is just pandering to group sentiment. My work (household name so we work with a lot of companies) has been seeing increased spend from crypto companies and so we've talked with a few folks from these companies and they've been hiring headcount like crazy. We've had lots of our own engineers churn to crypto companies also. Yeah they won't get the anti-crypto-bubb…
Maybe you have a better view, but I don't understand what you mean here: "My work (household name so we work with a lot of companies) has been seeing increased spend from crypto companies and so we've talked with a few folks from these companies and they've been hiring headcount like crazy."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Tokens _are_ worthless if no one wants to buy them, and pretending that is somehow different than startup equity is ignorant at best and downright predatory in the worst cases. Fundamentally not true. Unlike traditional markets, crypto exchanges work by leveraging AMM liquidity pools. Obviously, a token can go up/down based on supply and demand, but if there's liquidity you can literally always sell. Confusing earl…
The definition of liquidity is something like "the ease with which buyers and sellers can transact at transparent, stable prices". If no-one wants to buy a thing at any price, it is - by definition - illiquid. The notion that something for which there is no demand can be liquid is strange.
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…
Velocity is a very important factor that critics of asset-wealth ignore.
When it comes to criticizing crypto-assets specifically, people just turn their brain off or are completely ignorant to how assets they respect work in order to hold crypto-assets up to a fictional higher standard. but even when articulating their standard its like "do they even know what they're talking about?"
for example, when comparing crypto assets to currencies, due to the "cryptocurrency" misnomer and skeumorph in the name, the illiquidity and relative few transactions in comparison to the marketcap seems like an important area to focus on, to them, while completely missing that currencies are broken down into 4 segments for this exact same reason. M1 being that tiny sliver used for transactions with M2 and beyond being illiquid allocations of the currency, the similarity of behavior ironically bolsters the currency aspect of crypto in what was supposed to be a criticism.
Many of these criticisms focus on the conversion to a fiat currency, and neglect the ability and reality of acquiring goods and services and investments directly with the crypto.
I see something like this over and over again.
These all factor into how one would go about valuing any particular asset. If a replacement for marketcap was sought after. But "dollars in over time" is not good enough, as it misses how liquidity can change at any moment, and misses the velocity of activity within any one crypto economy.