1. They go to the toilet at least once a day.
2. They look at their smartphones at least once an hour
3. They are married.
4. They have kids
5. They ignore their spouses and kids. They work and they play golf.
6. They understand the difference between causation and correlation.
7. They never read articles starting with “7 habits…”
Bitcoin; what started out as an electronic trading currency, free of government interference, has become an asset class, competing with gold.
What I think has happened is this; we have created massive amount of superfluous wealth through ever increasing productivity (proof of this is continuing increases in per capita consumption on a global basis).
By some unknown law of economics the ROI of reinvesting this wealth back into (implicit) further increases in productivity cannot continue to go up forever; basically these ROIs are asymptotic. I suspect that this occurs when the cost of goods and services gets close to the cost of the raw materials embedded within, and also the ROI starts flat-lining when the starting raw materials are becoming scarce, or at least past peak, or half-life.
Lacking credible PE ratios for stocks, or debt yields for bonds etc, people start stashing wealth into fixed assets like real estate. Wealth usually isn’t sensibly stored as cash because governments are busily deflating the value of many currencies with QE programs. Trust is the issue here.
At some point, the value of these fixed assets also reaches some credibility barrier. For example, real estate values are vaguely under-pinned by rental yields. If asset values get too far ahead of yields then the market gets more and more nervous, eventually collapsing when there is collective panic-based withdrawal.
Gold is another option. It goes up and down like a yo-yo. There is effectively unlimited supply at a price. It is used in industry and jewellery as a metal. But it is mainly used as a store of wealth, for no good reason other than it was always so. And it doesn’t oxidise or age. And governments can exactly make it. They can mine it though. It’s a bugger to own.
So enter the Bitcoin as an asset class.
The problem for bitcoin is the finite cost of mining and maintaining the ledger, i.e. there is real money required for the system, and a finite supply of the coin, which has encouraged folks to pile in on the coin as a scarce asset, in competition with things like gold, bonds, cash and real estate.
The underlying value of bitcoin is influenced by many things and it is real:
The problem with bitcoin is that it is bloody slow when used as a trading currency, almost uselessly so. There are many, many attempts to resolve this with re-jigged approaches to the block-chain, mostly trading off security for speed.
The question I am trying to address here is whether there is any sense in Bitcoin becoming the primary place to stash wealth?
From an economics POV, stashing excess wealth into a virtual system provides no economic benefit. However it does do the planet a favor by not using that wealth to further propagate consumption. This could be a very good thing. This value might be off-set by the energy consumer by the system.
The current problem with bitcoin is that its value is changing so quickly, and the trades are so slow, that it is reduced in value as a trading currency. Its hyper-inflating effectively, or hyper-deflating. It feels like buying bread in 1925 in Germany.
To get into the crypto-currency game requires you to buy Bitcoins are market price through one of the few gateways that exchange fiat currency for bitcoins. Then you transfer your money to a crypto-currency exchange and buy other currencies. You then either store the things in a vault, hoping that they go up in value, or use them to buy goods and services.
Until these currencies dominate the purchasing of goods and services, the hyper nature of their value will be quickly exposed by the cost of buying into the things. Which will keep them firmly fixed as assets and not trading currencies.
Another issue, is that there simply isn’t enough to go around for them to dominate the market for buying and selling things. If there were, then fears of inflation would ruin the party in any case.
Essentially there’s a paradox in place.
I told Lola that one of the things I’ve learned is that there are some people that you just can’t make happy.
You can try, but you’re just kicking the can down the road.
You’re much better off kicking the can over the cliff, right now, and saving yourself a few years of pain.
It’s very hard to shake guilt sometimes. For whatever reason, the seasoning of guilt is dogging my dreams right now. I think I’m letting other people and their mental disorders punish me.
So I’m going to take a harder line and cut them out of my life. Filter, filter. If you don’t have good intentions towards me, then fuck off.
Of course the guilt could be internally generated but I don’t think so. In every instance the counter party has taken no responsibility for their involvement, their role, and they have learned nothing. A clear sign of madness.
It’s not necessary to feel guilty when, there by the grace of God, it could have been anyone else in my place. All these people need is a person, cannon fodder, for the drama of their own lives.
Eeech. Thank you blog.
One symptom of narcissism is seeing people as objects. Post your typical zombie apocalypse, this skill would be a survival trait. Being able to shoot strangers can be a good thing. Just not right now, in the whinestein era.
Two dimensional plot.
Optimism on one axis. Realist on the other.
Optimistic realists are an oddity. I’m one.
In Silicon Valley, the founders with a successful exit in this data set had an average age at founding, of… 47!
https://digitopoly.org/2017/07/17/the-young-entrepreneur-myth/
That’s because one key role of a startup CEO is to remove all the risks that can be managed; which takes experience of living with the consequences of ignoring risks. The other risks are outside human control. Controlling the manageable risks improves the average result; a large data set shows this result as regression to the mean.
It peaks at 47 because after a certain age most people lose the energy and the interest, quite rationally.
I was on an panel today at UNSW in front of a bunch of ECAs (early career academics). I made the statement that 99.99% of product ideas by Australian academics aren’t worth investing in. This confounded them. The data? A couple of careers back I was a general partner at Allen & Buckeridge venture capital (the best performing VC manager of the era) where we had a Pre-Seed (sic) fund of about $75m. Due to the constraints of having the government as an investor (LP) we could only invest in public sector research outcomes. We looked at ca. 4000 University, DSTO and CSIRO opportunities in order to (reluctantly) make 12 investments. One worked out. By my maths that is 99.975%. just saying.
What to say Deploy it when you’ve already been met with some resistance: “I know it’s not your first choice, but would you be willing to meet on Friday?”
What to say Try your own experiment over the next week. Read your emails back before you send them and count the number of times that “I just wanted to” or “Could I just” appear. Edit them out and see the difference in tone.
What to say If you really want someone to engage with you, use, “Can I speak to you about this?”, rather than “Can we talk?”
What to say The next time you have to speak to someone you don’t know, don’t be overly friendly. Stick to being polite.
What to say Try not to use “any” if you genuinely want feedback or to open up debate. “What do you think about X?” might be a more specific way of encouraging someone to talk.
What to say Kendall advises shifting the conversation by asking the other person “What’s needed here?” or, even better, “What do you need?” “It takes you from what I call ‘blamestorming’ to a solution-focused outcome.”
What to say Try, “It seems like you’re feeling frustrated with this situation – is that right?” Always give the other person the opportunity to comment on or correct your assessment.
What to say Use it (a very bright ‘Hello!’) when you want to resist getting into a confrontation. “You have to be careful not to sound too passive-aggressive,” Stokoe says, “but just one friendly word in a bright tone can delete the challenge of the conversation.”
The Weinstein effect. The other night I had one of those Weinstein conversations, you know the one; where a group of people bring their prejudices to the table on the subject of abuse of power in the form of sexual harassment. We had everything from outraged women to men in complete denial. I made the point (mostly misunderstood at the time) that the best outcome isn’t to scare the Harveys into a change of heart (which is quite unlikely), but to force behavioral change upon them through a shift in power structures. The Harveys of the world, being adroit in the black arts of abusing power, are also quite sensitive to fluctuations in the power structures above them. All it requires is that the CEO, board or Chair of their organisations takes a position that deviations from a mystically understood norm will not be tolerated, and then the exploiters will cease and desist because generally they are more interested in themselves than anything else. By corollary, the conclusion is unavoidable that any indulgence in abuse only occurs where the organisation in question tacitly and often unconsciously condones such behaviour.
offshore westerly 