Thanks for this very lucid comment. Even people who've been working with linear algebra for years have trouble wrapping their heads around the fact that rotations in 3D have eigenvalues and eigenvectors that aren't real.
This is a plan by an FX exchange to discretize time and to fill orders in random order. This has been previously criticized on HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3855610. We'll see how it goes.
An entrepreneur's character is truly tested only when his company is failing. You can take one of two options: 1) pay your employees and suppliers everything you owe, return any money that's left to investors and close up shop, or 2) take all the cash from the till and go to Vegas (or some other equivalent of betting the farm).
If this story is true I wouldn't want to have anything to do with Mr. Smith.
I don't see how your conclusion follows from the data. It appears to have been a very wise decision by the bank, given that even though Copper Union's investments have gone bad they're still paying the loan back. If I were a bank I would jump at an opportunity to own a loan that's backed by the land under the Chrysler building.
Neither. It's not a currency because you can't use it to buy products and services (other than drugs and socks). It's not a commodity because it's not a raw material or agricultural product.
People here are saying over and over again that there is no such thing as "real value". That's bullshit. Economists have great ways to measure real value. For example, for financial assets real value is net present value of future cash flows. For currencies, real value is parity purchasing power. (Bitcoin is not a currency in this sense.) Things have real value.
Could you say a bit more about how a futures market can reduce volatility in the underlying asset? This is an honest question, not being cynical. To me it seems that assets that have futures markets can be very volatile (say gold or oil), but I guess causation goes the other way?
I don't know the numbers but I'm not sure using 2008 data gives a fair picture. If the ROA of Barclays would have been consistently so much lower than that of GSK, the capital would simply gradually move to GSK. Banks are not allowed to borrow money, their creditors want to lend them money. (Presumably because TBTF lending is perceived to be a safer business than risky development of pharmaceuticals.)
Well, maybe this could work, but probably it would have to replicate the "coercive" component of the current system. In other words, by reviewing other people's papers you somehow improve the chances of having your own papers reviewed. And if somehow that system manages to also provide an incentive to do the job thoroughly, then that would be a huge improvement on top of what we have now.
Refereeing papers is an odious chore that you only do to get your back scratched in return in the future. (They call it "giving back to the community", but it's really a protection racket.) You can't replace this with a voluntary system.
Saying that value is subjective is tautological, it's like saying pretty girls are pretty. What's the base case of the recursion? With stock certificates, you have expectations of future dividends. With stamps, they're nice to look at. What do you have with Bitcoin?
I'd like to hijack the daily Bitcoin thread for a tangential discussion. My dad used to have a stamp collection. Back in the day most people would give you a funny look if you told them you collect stamps, but it was pretty cool to browse the collection and see all those stamps from all over the world. And the really rare stamps could cost quite a lot of money. So here's the question: is Bitcoin more valuable than stamps?
Banning short selling removes the profit motive from price discovery. So maybe the price will eventually reach the equilibrium point, but it would be much slower.
You're incorrect about me. I live in a country that went through hyperinflation a few decades ago, and I was born in another country whose currency was wiped out in the late 90's. In both of these places society responded by converting de facto to US dollars. People would stuff their mattresses with dollars and prices for anything other than groceries would be named in dollars. Sure Bitcoin offers an alternative if you live under a regime that can tell you what kind of currency you can hold, but wouldn't that sort of a regime also crack down on holders of Bitcoin if that were to catch on?
P.S.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't Argentina go through a dollarization phase at some point?
You're presenting a strawman. The choice for Lybians and Syrians isn't between their local currency and Bitcoins, it's between the local currency, Bitcoin and one of the first-world currencies. And people in the third world have been choosing to hold USD for decades.
In fact your comparison exposes the biggest problem with Bitcoin: it's a solution in search of a problem. The USD has a long track record as the best managed currency in the world. The 70's stagflation debacle was a minor hiccup by world standards, and the current quantitative easing policy is nothing. Why would anyone in their right mind convert their dollars into Internet funny money? I mean, sure, back in 2009 when Bitcoin started, people were panicking having witnessed the Lehman collapse and TARP. But now we know the world isn't coming to an end, so why bother?
If the crash will happen it will lead to a drop in trading volume, making prices unreliable. You will not be able to sell substantial quantities of Bitcoin without crashing the market further.
Reiterating the GP's point, I don't see anything concrete about speed and stability. Let me throw in my 2e-2 USD. I've been running BTRFS on my laptop since Ubuntu 12.10 came out without any troubles. Installing Ubuntu on BTRFS was effortless and I even rigged up a script to do scheduled snapshots of my home directory (hourly, daily, etc.) and found this feature to be very handy a couple of times.
I think it's good enough for writing a journal paper. The journals would probably need to stay with LaTeX for the powerful typesetting and layout features, but converting from this MathML-Markdown mix to LaTeX should be trivial for them.
Personally I think it's time to retire LaTeX. There's been a few solutions based on MathML and Markdown, which offer the power of LaTeX formulas without the convoluted language. A notable example is notepag.es (https://github.com/fivesixty/notepages).
Email is prone to misunderstanding so you have to be verbose. If I would have gotten a "no thanks" that would have left me guessing "Why?". Possible reasons which are ruled out by this message: 1) I don't trust YC anymore; 2) The guy you referred to me was a jerk; 3) I'm out of the VC business; etc.
Here's what I gleamed from the message:
1. Taggar doesn't want to invest in the company.
2. He wants Graham to keep referring other companies to him.
3. He may want to invest in the company in the future.
4. He introduced the founder to some of his acquaintances (see 2).
I feel that the only relevant factor in hiring should be competence. How do you define being well rounded, and how do you measure that when you're interviewing? Is that just a code word for being someone like you?
Sure, but I still have my doubts. Apparently merchants like Namecheap accepting Bitcoin don't name their price in Bitcoin, they name their price in USD. Again, if you believe in Bitcoin, shouldn't you name your price in Bitcoin?
That's exactly what I'm saying. If it's deflationary then it should be worth your while to give me a loan at 0% (assuming I am low default risk). The fact that we don't know where Bitcoin is going to be in one week means that we don't really believe it's deflationary.