greatwave1

If you don't even understand that speculation can (and does) occur outside of on-exchange transactions, then I don't think this conversation is worth continuing.

I now understand that you probably weren't lying, you were just clueless about what you were talking about and actually thought that exchange volume is the only place where speculation occurs lmao.

In case it still isn't clear to you: on-exchange activity != total speculative activity. It isn't an upper threshold on total speculative activity. It has no concrete relationship with total speculative activity. Both on-exchange and off-exchange transactions can be speculative, or non-speculative. The metric you provided is not "exactly the data I asked for", it's a complete non-sequitur that betrays your ignorance on the underlying topic.

> That doesn't sound too different from all modern investing.

This is a valid comparison, you're on the right track here! Crypto ownership is very similar to modern investing, in that it's a speculative asset class, and not primarily being used for its function as a currency.

Which is an entirely different metric than the % of bitcoin volume that's speculation. If I link a paper that says "1% of squirrels are albino", and I claim that it says that 1% of bitcoin trading is speculative, then I'm not "bringing objective data to the conversation"... I'm just lying

My original comment was

What do you think the ratio of speculation and illegal activity to legitimate use cases is? I'd be willing to be it's greater than 10:1, maybe even 100:1

You responded by lying and trying to shut down any actual data-driven discussion

> You don't have to bet, the data is in the paper I linked. 75% of bitcoin volume is speculation.

And then you have the audacity to ask for a source on the claim that "currency speculators make up a tiny portion of the real-world economy"? How many people do you know who are participants in the real world economy (should be literally everyone you've ever met), and how many of them are FX speculators?

Now compare that to crypto, where the entire marketing apparatus is built not upon its current value proposition but instead the idea that value will go up.

Why would I spend my time digging up data to quantify things are incredibly obvious from observation, when you're willing to lie and make up facts to support your narrative?

You claimed that 75% of bitcoin volume was speculation. There is nothing in the paper to support this claim. I'm not arguing that there is 0 non-speculative activity, I'm saying that it is significantly less than 25%, and you're making up bogus statistics that aren't supported by your sources in the way that you say they are.

> Say I'm subscribed to a Australian musician's patreon. I send her USD, then a middleman sells that USD and gives her AUD. I also support a French musician. I send him BTC. He (or a middleman) sells that BTC for EUR. How can you say either of those situations is more or less economically meaningful?

Yes, these are both economically meaningful. This type of transaction is much more common in the fiat world than it is in the crypto world (where speculation and wash trading drive the majority of transactions).

Currency speculators make up a tiny portion of the real-world economy, while they make up the vast majority of the crypto economy.

>Starting from 2015, 75% of the real bitcoin volume has been linked to exchanges or exchange-like entities such as on-line wallets, OTC desks, and large institutional traders.

Because there is certainly plenty of speculation outside of those entities.

And for the traditional financial system, when you said "see below", are you referring to the ratio of forex volume to global GDP? Because those metrics are terrible proxies for "global financial activity" or "speculation"

I would recommend doing some reading on what GDP is, and how it's calculated. It's not the same thing as the total volume of transactions, or even in the same ballpark. The United States alone had more than $128T in just non-cash payments in 2021 (https://www.federalreserve.gov/paymentsystems/fr-payments-st...)

You should also understand that all forex activity is not speculation. I would think that global trade would fall under the bucket of "economically meaningful activity", no?

> To me, 3% is an acceptable level. It's a lower percentage than the black market in many countries even.

Yeah, but that's because the vast majority of volume comes from speculation and wash trading lmao.

What do you think the ratio of speculation and illegal activity to legitimate use cases is? I'd be willing to be it's greater than 10:1, maybe even 100:1

The letter that you linked doesn't cite any sources, and doesn't come from a reputable fund (based on a quick SEC search, Hirschmann Capital seems to only managing ~$20m AUM, meaning it's likely a one-man operation)

It's not impossible to balance a budget with 130% debt to GDP.

Even if you have a teenager who is social at school and through extracurriculars, many meaningful social interactions are happening online or through social media.

For example, almost every team/club these days has a "group chat", where kids spend time bonding outside of practice / organized events. Even if your child shows up to every organized event, they still may feel isolated due to being excluded from the conversations happening outside of practices.

Also, social media is the predominant force that is shaping Gen-Z culture. Being excluded from such a large driver of your peer's culture can definitely create feelings of isolation. Imagine if you had grown up in a household where music wasn't allowed, and how that could have made conversations with your peers more difficult. And social media is a significantly bigger cultural force than music was when you were a kid.

These are just a couple of examples, if you'd like I can list more ways that social media is semi-necessary for many kids to avoid feeling excluded.

I'm not saying this is necessarily always a bad thing (there are definitely strong arguments to be made for abstaining from some elements of society), but I would make sure you're communicating with your child and that you understand their social situation.

I would argue that almost all of Gen-Z culture today is driven by internet communities and social media, and raising a child without access to online media will make it difficult for them to relate to many (not necessarily all) of their peers.

I don't feel like I have much of voice when I submit one comment to my legislators, and a kid from California submits 10 million (as mentioned in this case).

("Scaling to Very Very Large Corpora for Natural Language Disambiguation" by Michele Banko and Eric Brill, Microsoft Research, 2001)

I was under the impression that the size and quality of the training dataset had a much bigger impact on performance versus the sophistication of the model, but I could be mistaken.

You'll have to be more specific. There are literally millions of people who 'fund politicians campaigns', and many of them have competing interests at stake. Is it your contention that all of these people are in on it, or only a subset?

> Abolish central banking and have a gold-backed financial system and they mostly disappear.

The U.S. was on the gold standard until 1971, do you have any evidence that there was no government corruption before we made that switch?

Seems like a rather ridiculous assumption.

Can you provide any evidence that single-family homelessness is rapidly increasing in the United States? Everything I'm seeing is showing that it has been trending downwards over the last decade.

One example: https://endhomelessness.org/homelessness-in-america/homeless...

When I went to public high school in rural America, pretty much everyone I knew owned some sort of headphone/speaker system, and they would be used at every party / larger gathering where audio was important.

It depends on the context though. Obviously if someone is just sharing something casual like a Youtube video on their phone, they're going to use the built-in speakers.

Nudging policymakers in a favorable direction on legislation that could effect your portfolio is the most obvious, but there are tons of other examples as well.

I'm not arguing that this is a primary driver of YC's success (I don't know the extent, if any, of their government influence), but you'd be silly to think that political connections can't benefit an investor.

I can't claim to speak for everybody, but I think that as high-end (relative to previous standards) audio tech has become very mainstream over the last decade or two, most people recognize that the default phone/laptop speaker setup isn't ideal.

If you're talking about someone hosting a party where they're playing music off their phone/laptop, that's something I've never personally seen before lol

The point is that there's a $100b+ industry towards selling audio devices.

You can debate to what extent people care about audio quality, and what tradeoffs they're willing to make for better quality, but you can't deny that the majority of people appreciate that phone speakers are not the optimal audio setup.

I don't ask people for their IQ score before I spend time with them, but this has held true across the entire cross-section of society that I've personally experienced. When I was working as a dishwasher, everyone would bring small Bluetooth speakers to their area if they wanted to listen to music.

Do you think that people with a certain background / IQ score are not enlightened enough to recognize tinniness or poor sound quality?

I doubt that $40 billion of AirPods would be sold every year if most people didn't care about audio quality to some extent.

Why though? The "$250k per bank" rule is clearly a feature of the system, not a bug. If the FDIC wanted to have the insurance limit be across all banks, that's how they would've structured the rule.

But they didn't, because their purpose wasn't to provide unlimited protections to corporations from bank failure, it was to limit the impact of any individual bank's failures and decrease the likelihood of bank runs.

The current rule does this effectively, and encourages larger businesses to diversify their assets while also providing significant downside protection to many individuals and small businesses.

SVB had ~$200b in total assets, less than 1% of the total assets in banks across the U.S. alone.

There are definitely going to be indirect effects, but HN and other voices in early-stage tech are predisposed to overestimate the impact on the broader economy.

It literally doesn't though. Like, that's not the meaning of the word "commercial" in any sense.

Your favorite indie band is commercial. Your friends who charge $5 for their shows are commercial.

Your issues aren't with "commercial" musicians, they're with musicians who prioritize commercial success over artistic expression.

I don't think is a new phenomenon, and actually think it's a lot less prevalent now than it was in the past. With free streaming services, most people have easy exposure to a much wider range of music, and aren't relying on the radio to dictate their tastes.

There have been dozens of albums from the last few years that have had huge commercial success, and also taken big artistic risks. Happy to provide a list of recommendations if you're having trouble finding good new music.

"Mass-marketed" just means that something is widely promoted. Many of the most creative, influential, and authentic musical groups are "mass-marketed".

"Commercial" doesn't really mean anything in this context, as presumably everything that you listen to on the radio/streaming services is commercial.

"Pop" is descriptive of the style of the music, not how it's produced (there are indie pop groups).

"by committee" means that multiple people contributed to it. Do you think the only valid creative process is one where somebody works in isolation? If so, that disqualifies pretty much every band / non-solo act from meeting your standards for authenticity.