Yep, the current state of bitcoin is far from fiat. I hope it does make strides as a currency, but if it never evolves past a deflationary store of value it’s still an attractive asset.
264 karma · joined June 15, 2017
If you’re in Venezuela it’s hard to get your hands on $5000 USD and convince other people it’s legitimate.
$5000 USD in eggs will go bad before you can trade them all.
$5000 USD in laundry detergent is several truckloads!
Gold coins might be a good option but A) You’d better keep them well protected and B) Why not keep $2500 in gold coins and $2500 in bitcoin?
Or do you keep it in a vault in your house along with two years’ rations in case the world’s electricity stops working?
I don’t mean to be rude, but let’s try to keep the arguments rational. I’m happy to be convinced otherwise about bitcoin’s value. But I need to be convinced.
Gold has an intrinsic value of “beauty” and has a minor use in electronics. Bitcoin lets you make international money transfers easily.
People rarely buy sandwiches with gold. People rarely buy sandwiches with bitcoin (though I hope that changes in the future, because it will increase the value of bitcoin!).
It’s true that you can hold a piece of gold in your hand. But, honestly, how often do you do that? And more to the point - do you think most of the people who own gold do it for its physical properties, or so they can eventually exchange it for fiat currency?
I compare bitcoin to gold because, to me, they serve the same purpose for the same reasons.
“Economists define a currency as something that can be at once a medium of exchange, a store of value and a unit of account. Lack of adoption and loads of volatility mean that cryptocurrencies satisfy none of those criteria... as things stand there is little reason to think that cryptocurrencies will remain more than an overcomplicated, untrustworthy casino.“
That bitcoin is a poor medium of exchange and unit of account is hard to argue against at this stage of adoption. But store of value? I’m more confident in the maintained value of Bitcoin than that of a Venezuelan Bolívar. That’s not a strong enough reason for me to hold bitcoin, but if I lived in Venezuela it sure as hell would be!
Moving from the realm of currency to usefulness, there’s no faster & cheaper way to transfer money across national borders.
Viewed in this light it’s just a younger, more easily stored, more fungible, more easily transferable gold.
Now I do hold more gold than bitcoin (in USD, combined about 6% of my portfolio atm) because certainly risks remain. But to say it has no utility is just crazy! I guess precious metals are useless too. What’s their market cap again?
Even if "generic advice" isn't worth anything else, the psychological benefits of keeping a subject at the front of your mind, being reminded something is possible, and building excitement are valuable.
Also, scary.
It ain’t perfect, but is there a better way to organize a large-scale society?
Surely cofounder and CTO Parker Harris had a lot to do with multitenancy and countless other technical innovations, yet he gets very little play in the media. Maybe he likes it that way.
Fog Creek is a nice case study. Everyone gets their own office with a door.
Why does an organization need to enforce what can be taught and incentivized on an individual level by offering higher productivity (and thus higher compensation/gratification in the black box model)? Don’t artificially inflate your theory, Cal! It’s interesting and useful as-is.
“I'm a few chapters in and it's hard to keep going.
The idea that I'm left with is that Tim Draper is absolutely insufferable to be in the same room with. In every story, he is the "hero", an amazing crusader who never makes a bad decision and is prescient about tomorrow. Some of the stories are interesting, but if you took Guy Raz's question on "How I Built This" and asked Draper about how much of his success was luck versus skill, the impression is that he does not believe in luck.
Case in point - the chapter on his bucket list, and how many things he has done on it, comes in at 25 pages. The very next chapter is on treating people well, and it is 4 pages.
Which type of person would you admire?
If you want to read stories of an age gone by, where he is the star of the story for being in the right place and the right time, with lots of privilege (including family money to start a venture fund, and a HBS degree), then this is the book. Also, if you want to read poetry that he has written and included at the end of each chapter, this is also the book you are looking for. I just can't imagine that he didn't know someone who had the courage to take him aside and say, "Tim, this is a dreadful idea. Don't put poetry in your book." But having money means you get to do stupid things and people won't stop you.
The current top positive review mentions behind the scenes stories on a bunch of big named companies that he noticed when he "flipped" through the book. That must have been all that he did, or he would have noticed the stories have as much substance as name dropping at a cocktail party. Tesla, Skype, etc. "I met a guy, who knew another guy, and I wrote a check. I'm totally amazing." If he were to compare the stores of the also-rans, the ones that didn't go alongside them, he would have my respect, but this isn't a book worth the digital paper it's printed on.
I had hoped for so much more. If you read the intro and feel similarly, Ben Horowitz's book is likely the one you are looking for.”
It's more likely that a smaller waist circumference is correlated with "feeling sexy" and that this feeling, rather than waist circumference itself, is resulting in a higher propensity to orgasm.
The idea formed while reading The Motley Fool "analysts" make arguments for or against a certain position. As I began to read regularly I started to trust certain authors and ignore others, yet I was filtering on how much I agreed with their arguments instead of how often their predictions were correct.
Enter a service that records public predictions then verifies them X days/months/years later, keeping track of some metric like a "correctness score" for each predictor. Could be an interesting, tech-light side project.
For this reason and this reason alone, I will continue to advocate for take-home coding challenges.
(1) IMHO, the best practical solution is a pair-programming interview using a real bug or feature the company has already solved.
For example, I'm surprised to find no mention of quality of life or more specifically work-life balance. Surely that's a dimension that motivates at least as many people as "loyalty to a social group," and it's rare to have a meaningful discussion of compensation without considering the trade-off with work-life balance.
What's more, there's no mention of the enjoyability of the work itself. I think many software engineers can attest that it's hard to beat a tight feedback loop combined with a problem that's just on the edge of your circle of competency. Or, to put it bluntly, would you be more motivated in your job as a {insert money-is-no-issue-dream-job here} or working the "returns" counter at Macy's?
Social responsibility be damned.
"Are you a billionaire?" --> if you were a billionaire I imagine you would be pretty stoked.
The format works well for learning high-level concepts, but anyone planning to "go from 0 to coder" with this app is fooling themselves.