-12 karma · joined April 5, 2021
If you want to make money you have to be pretty accurate in your prediction.
Nobody knows what Bitcoin or the S&P will do tomorrow. It's all rooted in psychology and we don't understand anything about it.
We don't even know where ideas come from
Legacy financial applications are fine. People who are afraid of inflation just convert BTC>USD the sole amount they need to use the financial application and that's it.
Also DeFi apps are very illiquid and extremely complicated to use.
Finally let's not hide the truth: 99% of financial apps are based on loans. Crypto loans are doomed because people don't want to borrow crypto as they anticipate huge appreciation and such appreciation would leave them in a hole financially speaking.
Also without an identity system a borrower can just steal crypto, and never pay back interest or principal
Also the lender requires high interest to separate themselves from their crypto considering how novel is the system and how frequent hacks and as I said people outright fleeing are.
The most successful crypto loans are the ones denominated in USD and happening on centralized platforms (and those crypto never leave the platform as they are used to short)
ESL would be participant would have been better off by fighting for the right to negotiate their TV rights individually
Italy has that organically!
The middleman is a social necessity, not solely a technical one. Retail doesn't want the responsibility. Is that simple, so enter the middleman there to absorb risk.
A protocol can't be a middleman. A middleman should be capable of being sued and be the fall guy if something goes wrong. Mostly it should be there to give peace of mind to the customer.
A protocol can't give peace of mind to the customer given that such code can't be read by 99.99999999999% of the population.
The middleman needs to exist to give peace of mind to the customer, and as I said it can't be a protocol. So it can only be a company with a brand, spending millions in Ads to earn the trust of the consumer so that he'd feel confident to put his money in it and in turn can sleep tight at night, knowing that his money are with an institution which is somehow trustworthy.
Nobody in the crypto world ever makes a market study or a revenue projection, or even a survey among the population and users.
People go and build stuff. Projecting themselves into the retail user. The only problem is that the crypto founder is not representative of the retail user, not even one bit. The crypto founder wants the responsibility, wants to kick the the final penalty in the World Cup final or be with the ball in your hands and 2 mins to win the SuperBowl. That is not the mindset of the retail user.
"We ship the products we'd want to buy" as Steve Jobs said in a keynote...only he used it as catchphrase to get the applauses and sell Apple to the world and to Wall Street.
People in crytpo , they do it for real. You never do it for real. You end up with your butt on the ground and nothing to show for financially.
The greatest motivation for Crypto success are hatred and fear.
BTC is succeeding because people hate/fear Central Banks printing money , so people love BTC and hate Central Banks.
Ethereum doesn't put itself up against the printing of money but against companies instead. Google, Apple, Spotify etc. People don't hate those companies and to the extent that they do....they manifest their hate by asking Government to tax them more, not migrating to a super hard to use and super costly decentralized platform to undercut their power. The consumer doesn't think in those terms.
You can't predict demand, nobody can. So all things being equal (demand being unpredictable) you are better off holding something which is in low supply.
People are absulutely scared to death about inflation. It's deeply rooted in our brain and rightfully so. The first governments would dilute their citizen by adding lead to coins and reduce the silver %.
The same thing has been going on for millennia.
This is the reason why people hate inflation and have a strong preference for deflation.
Sure but she will use the Spotify app or the Sotheby app to buy NFTs
Spotify and Sotheby on the other hand they will not even use a blockchain. Just like Coinbase doesn't use a blockchain
This whole decentralization mania solely work when people are are terribly scared of something: Government diluting their purchasing power via printing money and inflation.
That's a really deeply rooted thing in our brain as governments did that since the stone age. That's the only killer app of decentralization. As shown by the marketcap of king BTC and the success of exchanges like Coinbase and Binance.
NFTs, DeFi...all the other stuff...the user doesn't hate Spotify or Sotheby or the Google Store , but let's say for a moment that it does..well even if the ease of use and fees of DeFi were on par with legacy companies (they are not)...the consumer will always keep using the legacy company product and ask the government to tax them more. So they'd have the best of both worlds: a functioning product and a way to express their hatred
Theoretically if the EU wanted to trade with Iran or if China wanted to sell gas to China...they can do it
The US will notice it and would block that bank access to USD and close that bank US branch if they have any.. but they can subsequently continue in RUB, EUR, CNY..
For a bank losing the ability to loan to US customers or do retail business in the US is not a big deal....the very huge problem is that you won't be able to access the US bond markets and the US equity markets. The ability to buy and sell the world's best debt: the mighty US treasuries goes away.
No bank survives that.
SWIFT is not special, it just saves time to the FBI and the NSA...but if SWIFT were to lose its relevance due to Central Banks Digital Currencies, then the US will still know that you violated sanctions and you'd still be immediately blacklisted and sanctioned yourself
Digital currencies such as the digital yuan or the digital euro will have 6-12 months of free reign before those same countries which make up SWIFT come together again to agree on the same principles behind SWIFT (the ability to inspect etc). The Central bank of an other country can be too big to sanction (opposed to a commercial bank) but the new framework will require that the identity of those who made the transaction are targeted.
So with the new Central Bank Digital Currency regime the sanction and blacklist doesn't hit the whole commercial bank (because the transaction won't be facilitated by the commercial bank but by a Central Bank) but directly the person or the company violating the US sanctions.
In the end the ability that the US has to sanction and be the world police comes from the strenght of the US economy and the might of the US military as well as the power of US intelligence. The balance of power with regards to that hasn't changed
Are those things really needed to ...you know commercially sell the product to the public, give them ease of use and make money in the process?
Because if we must ride the blockchain thing for Venture Capital funding or to look hip among the public on twitter...well we can stick an ethereum logo on it and invite Vitalik to the company podcast.
It's much easier and accomplishes the goal in much more straightforward manner.
Bitcoin is open source, all right. But the first mover advantage and marketing campaign that it has...well it's insurmountable at this point.
> Problem is that is still centralized
The world doesn't give a damn about that. The only killer app of decentralization as of today is the ability to give people peace of mind that the unit of account they use to store their wealth cannot be tempered with by anybody.
Literally the only application of decentralization was the ability to avoid the ever present threat of money printing because people are scared of inflation and rightfully so. Ever since the stone age people have been diluted by the the central currency authority, it's a fear that is deeply rooted in our brains.
People aren't similarly scared about Paypal or Visa processing their transactions.
Fear is the greatest motivation and fear of inflation is the only thing giving the decentralization thing any market. Everybody , ranging from the supermarket employee to Stanley Druckenmiller...they are all scared as hell about inflation.
And it shows in the marketcap and price of king BTC
BTC gives those 7 billions people a way to express such fears in the market whereas they could only buy Gold, Silver, and Inflation indexed bonds before BTC came about.
Nothing..they won't even have to pay because the project is opensource.
They can solely focus on ease of use and marketing which is what proper companies do best and just take the technical part without any compensation.
This is also the reason why Larry Page is among the richest men in the world and Linux' Linus is a nobody who is only known and relevant among nerds
The common folk wants ease of use above anything else. It has to be as easy as sending money via paypal.
No doubt ETH can be the base of that technically, but the model which has ETH holders make money off the appreciation of the ETH token in the process is flawed.
Fortune500 and even startups who'd use the open source ETH blockchain technology to bring many services to the common folk won't ever accept to pay a huge cut to parasitic behavior such as to those hodling or staking.
Also nobody ever mentions how the ETH blockchain is opensource. If a startup of a fortune500 wants to do something about it they have a big chuck of the development cost eliminated just by forking off the ETH blockchain. This is great! But just like Android doesn't owe Linus anything, so those companies will owe nothing to the stakers and the ETH holders.
So to summarize, if you want to build something go to Zug, find Vitalik and give him a big kiss because he saved you a lot of money, at the same time show the middle finger to hodlers and stakers on your way out.
On the other hand...if you want to have a shot at getting rich without doing any work...buy deflationary crypto such as king BTC and watch it appreciate vs the dollar....and it will because people are scared as hell about inflation (regardless of the merit of such scare), and everybody is scared about it...from the common person at the supermarket to Stanley Druckenmiller
also let the dollar be infinitly divisible up to the 10th decimal and then let's talk about the system clogging up
You like to see human agency in the resolution of the crisis.
In my opinion that's not the case, all the interventions and the tinkering of the unit of accounts and messing with the plumbing of the money markets has a neutral effect.
Wallace Neutrality and Miller-Modigliani prove this mathematically.
You also have to take into account the extreme worry if not outright panic that people have when they see the Fed resort to these sort of hail mary interventions.
"If they need to do this...how bad must it be?"
This was a recurrent theme during the GFC, so there's empirical evidence to claim it's not even neutral but actually counterproductive
The US as a country is more dynamic, younger and more risk prone than the Eurozone . That's about it. QE had nothing to do with anything.
In turn the dynamism and risk proneness of the US is nothing compared to places like India, Pakistan or Nigeria.
The EU is still a bit more risk prone than Japan but it's really close
Japan is the most risk averse country on Earth and are stagnating since the 90s , no matter how much QE they do or how much they tinker with their unit of account. Economic growth requires entrepreneurial risk taking and consumer risk taking. Down there they don't even risk going to the bar and approach girls, they hardly have sex anymore. With this social landscape the entrepreneurial risk taking which is necessary to start a business and consumer risk taking necessary to max out a credit card for purchases...that's a pure mirage and tinkering with the unit of account or the plumbing won't save them, or anybody for that matter. Just serves as a way for Treasury secretary and the BoJ chair to keep his job and justify his social status because he is "doing something to fix the economy"
Back to the GFC, the US went down more steeply and emerged faster the same way a dude in his 20s can do too much drugs, be wasted and out for a couple of hours and then go to work as nothing happened in the morning.
The destiny of megasocial groups made up of 400M people are not decided by the few elected officials, it's the elected officials who find themselves in those spots because they enact the policies which are popular among the 400M people.
But I think you are projecting yourself onto the regular citizen.
The thing which up to now the crypto world has managed to capture about the regular citizen is its fear of inflation and strong preference for deflation which allows him to increase his net worth without doing any work, just by sheer deflationary force baked in the protocol.
From a purely financial return standpoint: If DeFi/DAO/Eth is what the internet was back in the days, then it's IRC.
IRC didn't make any money. Facebook which is the dictionary definition of tired and not fun...well it will smash the record as the fastest Company from 0 to 1T.
So the equivalent to that would be betting on the Bank which decides to make Buterin the CEO or the maybe a new properly regulated fintech startup which wears the mantle of DeFi and the PR of Eth, but it's really an old school intermediary.
I get what you are saying about fun, but fun and finances shouldn't be mixed, in my opinion. Because you'll never know what other people who are not yourself would consider fun and if they'd jump on board to legitimize the community and have the token/stock you invested in appreciate
The 99% is represented by the regular normie citizen who likes intermediaries because they don't want the responsibility.
The legacy financial system with intermediaries didn't emerge from some evil dictators pushing it onto the world.
It spurred from the market desires, and the market is made up of the regular normie citizens AKA the 99%
Despite what the headlines say, the 99% as a whole controls 99% of the total wealth and they dictate the rules
In reality, you either do it in secret...or it makes the crash even worse because people would be even more risk averse because they see the government using these non conventional tool...hence "it must be pretty bad, better save some more"
QE is the quintessential example of this. The only American who benefitted from QE was Bernanke, so he got to be hailed as a hero and now everybody genuflects to him and uses his "playbook".
Actually reserves are slightly better!
The more you use extreme measures to force people to do what they don't want, the more they'd refuse to do so.
When people are scared and paralyzed by fear, messing with the unit of account won't calm their worries, if anything given how out of the ordinary it is, it could be argued that it makes things worse.
Money is external, people pick the scheme apart rather quickly and you end up worse than before because now you look desperate to force them to do what you want
The bailwick of Jersey sent citizens a prepaid card with £100 expiring in 6 monhts which was also disabled for ATM withdrawls during 2020. Again moderate results.
Money is a unit of account, if you mess with it people adjust quickly, there is no free lunch.
It's not the same as giving Wellbutrin+Ritalin to somebody who is depressed.
Also how can we make money from this?
This is like asking why Tom Brady keeps training.
Money are not meant to be spent, just like Lombardi Trophies are not meant to be looked at or held more than the 24hrs after winning it. Money , just like Lombardi Trophies or WSOP bracelets are a way to keep the score
These people, they pathologically refuse to eat the marshmallow, they live their whole life eating 1/1000000th of the marshmallow and postponing the optionality to eat the rest in the future.
Then they die.
No, with the people. What you could do is a direct deposit in each American bank account in a very public way.
180M adults * 10USD = 1.8B
Not a joke but also not that much for Google to build long lasting goodwill among the public
In one swoop you delegitimize politicians by doing direct payments (maybe even a PR campaign with "money for nothing" as soundtrack) and win the public favor.
"UBI-light" offered by Google..so many PR angles to think this thing through
In the end the envy can be described as:
"Larry&Sergey number is higher than my own number and the ego boost they get by looking at their number is bigger than the ego boost I get looking at my own number"
These guys, they don't spend money, don't surrond themselves with luxury, they are pretty down to earth in their behavior and consumption, don't seek fame.
Alphabet inc is like Mozart's Sonata n12 and Larry&Sergey are like Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart keeping the foot on the gas opposed to go and party like an animal using the fame which his opera gave it to him.
People are envious of a number
"Billionaires such as Bezos already pay 0% tax! Companies such as Amazon and Google already pay a 0% tax! Let's have a 0% flat tax for everybody to even the playing field!!!"
You'd get a sizable part of the BernieBros, as well as the Yang Gang if you also concede some form of UBI financed via selling/renting Federal Land (which you'd have to do anyway to pay down the debt given that you won't be collecting taxes anymore).
Libertarians should really get on it and start taking advantage of the class warfare, which can be really powerful.
So maybe Adam Kokesh can think about it...or Vermin Supreme or JoJo whoever will run as Libertarian
All taxes are essentially a re-do or a refund at the socieatal level
Corporations sell a product or a service, citizens see such product/service and think they might use it to improve their lives.
Then they decide to exchange some social status (represented by their net worth in USD) for the quality of life provided by that product or service.
Then they collectively realize that everybody had the same idea and that the corporation and its owners accumulated so much social status in the form of net worth flowing out of citizens and into the corporation/owners coffins.
Now they want all want a re-do/refund even though they voluntarily agreed to exchange part of their social status for quality of life and the corporation delivered on that.
What pushes people to claim a refund is :
1) They regret that everybody had the same idea as themselves and that they contributed to socially elevate that person so much
2) Hedonistic treadmill kicks in so the quality of life provided by that product/service doesn't feel as good as the first day you used it...so you are now even more regretful that you purchased it.
Witnessing the social elevation of somebody other than self (and having contributed to such social elevation) plus the hedonistic treadmill which makes the product/service not feel like something that is so special anymore compels people to come together and claim a refund in the form of taxation against those who were socially elevated