Oh god, this perfectly describes the company I just quit. They went from using Trello, allowing us to choose what to work on, loosely setting story points and ... that was it.
Then they decided they needed the metrics on everything, so they switched to JIRA, started doing retros, setting strict points on tasks(reprimanded in retros if you messed up), using burndown charts to reprimand even more, and giving the product manager the power to dictate what I work on and in what order.
It went from being a great company to work at, to a company I ran away from. I have half a mind to send this thread over to them.
The more interesting part of the post is in the 'Why I did it' section. I'd be interested to hear what others have to say on the topic considering I was about to invest some money into cryptos.
>The main question is: In one or five or 50 years, will everyone on earth want to use bitcoin, or a lot of people, or a few people, or nobody? There are no fundamentals, no cash flows or price-earnings ratios, to evaluate. It is pure speculation about speculation, a Keynesian beauty contest where all the pictures are blank.
>[...]
>Arguments about bitcoin are like every other shouty argument about financial markets, but with a void at their core. "Bitcoin is capitalism, distilled," says Adam Ludwin, but it isn't quite; bitcoin traders are not allocating capital to productive uses in the real world. Bitcoin is finance, distilled, though, in the narrow sense that the distillation throws away all the messy productive real-world consequences of finance and leaves you with just an abstract thing to trade.
Absolutely true, but that's also the case of most stock trading. If you're not buying a stock expecting dividends, but instead hoping to just sell it for more later, that's not much different than speculating on BTC.
That's not even remotely true. Stocks are directly tied to the performance of a company providing goods or services. There's something you can directly gauge.
At BEST you could equate it to currency trading, but even THAT is tied to real-world governments and their policies nine times out of ten. Bitcoin is literally trading on the belief that a bunch of people are going to switch to it instead of the dollar or insert your currency of choice because...?
> That's not even remotely true. Stocks are directly tied to the performance of a company providing goods or services. There's something you can directly gauge.
I'm no stock expert but isn't the majority of a stock's value due to speculation on what it will be worth one day in the future?
I think the parent made a valid point. Sure, stocks are generally easier to "gauge" (and therefore lower risk) but you're still just speculating that it's future price will be greater than it's current price after all.
> I'm no stock expert but isn't the majority of a stock's value due to speculation on what it will be worth one day in the future?
That's true, but stock can represent a portion of an asset with production potential. A factory or a mine or a dot-com. Bitcoin is pure fiat money.
If I owned all stock in AAPL, I would own one of the most valuable companies in the world which would yield me several billion USD in profits every year. If I owned all bitcoins my asset would be completely worthless because there would be no market for it.
I defer to Warren Buffett's quote [1] on Gold - an asset similar in it's uselessness:
> Today the world's gold stock is about 170,000 metric tons. If all of this gold were melded together, it would form a cube of about 68 feet per side. (Picture it fitting comfortably within a baseball infield.) At $1,750 per ounce -- gold's price as I write this -- its value would be $9.6 trillion. Call this cube pile A.
> Let's now create a pile B costing an equal amount. For that, we could buy all U.S. cropland (400 million acres with output of about $200 billion annually), plus 16 Exxon Mobils (the world's most profitable company, one earning more than $40 billion annually). After these purchases, we would have about $1 trillion left over for walking-aroundmoney (no sense feeling strapped after this buying binge). Can you imagine an investor with $9.6 trillion selecting pile A over pile B?
>If I owned all bitcoins my asset would be completely worthless because there would be no market for it.
Of course, but you could say the same about having the entire internet to yourself. Or being the only person on Facebook. That's just a function of how networks work.
> isn’t the majority of a stock's value due to speculation on what it will be worth one day in the future?
It’s more accurate to say that it’s a reflection of the value to still be generated by the productive capacity that your share represents minus the discount-rate of future money. That’s mostly a multiple of expected earnings (plus the value of capital) which is why earnings calls are so important and heavily regulated. If you buy a stock you’re saying that you think the market has undervalued it, or that it’s fairly valued and you expect it to grow with the economy as a whole.
In a pure gambling scenario like a lottery or roulette wheel all the information you have to go on is contained within the game itself. Increasingly crypto-trading is less about the fundamentals and more about the trading game itself. We’ve watched Ethereum go from one screw up to the next: TheDAO hack and rollback, the first Parity wallet hack, the “I killed it” bug, all ethereum contracts being hobbled for a weekend by a cartoon cat breeding game. Every time there is a big discussion here about the fundamentals of the tech, and how flawed the design is, how there are better approaches or projects. Yet the price is totally disconnected and responds more to being listed on a new exchange than any consideration of the viability or usefulness of the thing itself.
It’s why technical trading, which is close to reading tea leaves when it comes to usefulness on equity markets, actually seems to work in crypto-asset markets. So many people fall back on in the absence or neglect of external information that it that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
With stocks, you can more easily separate out the actual performance of the company from speculation (profits vs. stock price), and in the worst case they have assets that provide some intrinsic value. They also operate in a more stable legal environment - it's unlikely that new regulations would instantaneously devalue companies (which could happen with crypocurrencies as they still aren't a settled part of the legal world), and statements made by the company (projected revenues etc.) are regulated.
You can certainly draw parallels between stocks and crypocurrency speculation, but I'd say the differences between the two are fairly fundamental.
That depends how you trade. They might be based on something, but sometimes either THEY are not (look up RIOT as a stock symbol) or those trading don't at all care (day traders).
Look, the reason why stock technical analysis exists is because people sometimes want to make money independently of their perceived value of the underlying asset.
Instead, they try to enter a poker game of mass psychology, some armchair, speculative game theory. Don't kid yourself. While the image of the responsible Warren admiring or index-fund, Boglehead type is a warm one, most of the rest is as speculative and manipulative as Bitcoin.
That is all true in a way, but stocks are still a projection of a projection of a projection ... of future performance of the underlying company. Only bitcoin is turtles all the way down.
I also find it hilarious that people tell that BTC should rise in value because in future some other(!) cryptocoin may/will replace fiat. Because even by their own admissions current BTC state doesn't allow to use it as a working currency. "Hey, Tesla is a future of automotive, lest buy Dacia shares and pump it to the moon".
Bitcoin isn't growing in value because it represents shares of a business that makes real money: it's growing in value because demand is increasing. You can directly connect AAPL's profitability with the value of the phones and computers they produce. Bitcoin does not have such an analogue. The "asset" behind Bitcoin is one part the group of miners who consider to keep the ledger going, one part the ability to facilitate a trade using that shared ledger, and three parts speculation. It's the speculative component that makes it, and all other cryptocurrency, more gambling than investment.
> Bitcoin isn't growing in value because it represents shares of a business that makes real money.
With bitcoin, you’re investing in whomever the individual is on the other side of your trade. I hope some of these techies become rich enough to take government positions.
Why do the assets behind a company matter? In the event they go bankrupt and have a liquidation event, first their assets will go to loan-providers, then to bond-holders, then to private preferred stock holders, then finally if there are crumbs remaining, to public common stock holders.
>Bitcoin isn't growing in value because it represents shares of a business that makes real money
Neither is Tesla making real money. Or Amazon.
Yet their stock prices continue to grow from speculation about how valuable they might be one day in the future.
There's nothing inherently wrong with that. It's the same with crypto.
For sure those two companies are "safer" bets than most (or perhaps all) cryptos... but the underlying principle is exactly the same. It's just degree of risk involved.
isn't the killer app for btc tax evasion and laundering? isn't this how wealthy chinese are getting money out of the country and how russians are routing around sanctions? is the rise in btc therefore perhaps related to paradise papers and banking coming under greater regulation globally? if this is the case, those use cases aren't going anywhere and maybe represent strong fundamentals
Holding USD is another form of gambling. Buying a house to live in is gambling.
The thing is that USD can be used to pay taxes in April, a house provides you shelter, a share of APPL entitles you to small fraction of the company... And a bitcoin entitles you to a mathematical number, with nothing backing it.
Not much! Which is the point. You choose index funds based on lower expense ratio, how spread they are in the market (more spread means lower risk and more likely to just replicate performance of the overall market; less spread means higher risk and less likely to replicate the performance of the overall market), and how much you trust the institution running it.
Intentions don't matter; it's a function of the underlying asset. The worst stock market crash in US history was Black Monday in 1987 which resulted in a 22.6% drop in the DJA. Bitcoin has already experienced much worse crashes than that, multiple times (like the time it dropped 94% in 2011).
I'm not saying don't put money into Bitcoin/cryptos; I'm saying don't put in more than you would feel comfortable losing at a casino.
Intentions do matter though, it's not about the money to some people. Some people understand how revolutionary a decentralized economy would be and want to take part in trying to implement something they believe in. If it's all about making a quick buck then yes, it's gambling. Don't assume money is everything to everyone.
I don't feel comfortable losing any money at a casino, that money goes to an industry that I don't care to support; But I'd be fine losing money in crypto because It's something I want to support.
Bitcoin works on a concept called a block-chain; which is essentially a publicly available ledger of transactions. Since this block-chain is distributed around the world, no central party is in control over the wealth represented by the transactions listed on the block-chain. This wealth is further abstracted to arbitrary units we all bitcoins.
Like any artificial representation of wealth(aka currency) it's only as strong as the group of people recognizing it as a representation of value.
So by storing labor or wealth inside bitcoin, you're strengthening the network of participants, thus strengthening bitcoin, thus strengthening(or supporting) decentralized currency.
It doesn't. It pushes the value up and certainly gets more eyes on it but a rising market cap of cryptos doesn't suddenly defeat fiat currencies when a magic threshold is reached.
That "magic" threshold that fiat operates on is a group of people(fed gov) with guns that force it onto people, and will literally imprison you if you don't. Some people consider this oppressive and would like for it to change.
For me the reason to sell at the moment is quite banal: I do not want to spend time thinking about investing over the holidays, and I do not want to feel like I should pick out my phone.
Is there data out there about infants in a similar situation who didn't receive oxygen therapy? Is it possible that the developing child brain is what almost solely caused the improvements?
Invocation of Whataboutism is an easy cop-out to never have to look one's self in the mirror. It's used by people in glass houses who only want to throw stones at their neighbors.
It's also not applicable here since the grandparent already did a relative comparison of China with the supposedly better "western track record", so this comparison warrants a response.
No, the argument is more like saying that Germans calling the allies as beasts for what happened to Dresden should also look at what happened to the Jews.
The difference, in case you didn't notice, is that while racists are indeed racist and people against racism aren't, here the two sides are equally bad.
To say X has the moral high ground or X does not have the moral high ground is a variant of "argument from authority" and it's opposite as an ad hominem. It doesn't have any bearing what so ever on the issue at hand.
Except in Hong Kong. Obviously liberty for their citizens is the one to pick so the US easily comes out on top.
However if you pick percentage of their population they imprison or civilian death toll in expansionist/imperialist conflicts? Or scope of global assassination programs?
But a point by point comparison is not really the point here is it? Obviously the American system is more capable of checks and balances than the Chinese system. That arguably makes the massive failures to use them worse. We disagree on what the word "trying" means regarding a state's actions I suppose. That seems fair, it's a fuzzy idea in this context.
Then they decided they needed the metrics on everything, so they switched to JIRA, started doing retros, setting strict points on tasks(reprimanded in retros if you messed up), using burndown charts to reprimand even more, and giving the product manager the power to dictate what I work on and in what order.
It went from being a great company to work at, to a company I ran away from. I have half a mind to send this thread over to them.