Oh totally agree - someone can just pull a necklace right off you. I was just surfacing the point that at least gold does has some value on its own as a status symbol - there is a market for jewelry outside of gold as a transfer protocol. An bitcoin wallet without ability to transfer it is just some used up memory, it doesn’t have any value on its own. See coins going to 0 when exchanges close their doors. All the banks in the world could close and people would still find shiny rocks attractive and admirable. We have for thousands of years.
nothing is of any real value unless there's also some risk of losing it.
If you're looking for a commodity to have trade or exchange value, then it must be tradeable or exchangeable. That's the notion of "inalienable" as used in the US Declaration of Independence: rights which cannot be alienated (separated) from the individual posessing them. Life, liberty, happiness being the three used in that document.
This doesn't mean undeniable, and there might be some value which can be extracted through threats of denial: "your money or your life".
And there are aspects of value which can be exchanged though the good itself doesn't move: title, copyright, and patent rights might be three such of these. If I transer you land title, the land itself doesn't move, but the claim to usefruct from it does.
A hypothetically nontransferable, non-appropriable technical asset is still subject to claims if a superior right or denial of access to that asset may still be claimed.
And in general, a currency which is used to facilitate trade should in general be portable, readily recognisable, divisible, durable, and homogeneous, all attributes William Stanley Jevons proposed in 1875:
(He also claimed money required intrinsic value, which appears to be an error. Rather, intrinsic value exchanges for trust within the financial system.)
I like that. Risk of losing it, and difficulty of recovery of the same or an equal asset.
Life, for example, is extremely valuable. Everyone loses it, but there’s no getting it back. If you lose the apple, you can probably get another relatively easily, unless we’re talking a post-apocalypse situation…
Totally agree. For example, I have 10,000 SOL (Solana tokens) that I regularly screenshot and show off. It's all on devnet, though, so it's free and worthless.
It's the web3 version - in web 2 I'd be instagramming my knockoff Rolex I bought in Tijuana
Your mistake is valuing cryptocurrency purely as a currency. In reality BTC and other cryptos have combined properties of currencies, commodities, securities, as well as unique elements that can't be found elsewhere. Crypto is its own asset class and trying to value it using old models of other assets is bound to fail.
This is a fallacy, similar to thinking that a portfolio should be invested into the worst performing stocks because "they have the most room to improve".
Education and stock market are not analogous. The key question is whether current level is correlated with expected improvement. For education it is, for stock market it isn't.
What is the unifying goal of the community you live in?
We don't have one in mine, the US. We have anarchists and right-wing stochastic terrorists and suburban dwellers engaged in the rat race and college professors seeking tenure and veterans working to find good healthcare and teachers paying way too much out of pocket for their classroom supplies and business owners often cheating to milk PPP loans or other shady revenue streams and public work officials making side deals and.....
If the bottom line is GDP, let me introduce you to GNP, and both of which miss cottage industry generally.
We don't have a shared mission, because society does not have a tangible owner.
There is a certain brand of person who is obsessed with redistributing resources from the most productive to the least productive. They don't see how allocating the best teachers in the world to students who are disabled or borderline disabled is not beneficial to society.
Yes this. As someone who was “gifted” in school but with a father who teaches mild/moderate learning disabilities, the skill sets of the two ends of the spectrum of teachers are dramatically different. “Gifted” student teachers can take as a given that their students are there to learn and generally speaking want to be there. For my father getting students to begin to think that is a big part of the job. To replace him with a “gifted” student teacher who has no experience with that type of clientele would be absurd.
>But everyone notices when every aspect of their society is led by people of one race.
I didn't go to China and become resentful when I noticed their leadership was Chinese. But I did immigrate to America, then eventually become resentful when I noticed white people & asians were discriminated against out of some twisted sense of fairness.
> I didn't go to China and become resentful when I noticed their leadership was Chinese.
Of course not. You're a visitor.
> then eventually become resentful when I noticed white people & asians were discriminated against out of some twisted sense of fairness.
You probably need your eyes checked. White people run the United States, and Asians make up an outsized proportion of US college admissions.
> out of some twisted sense of fairness.
You haven't been reading my comments. I already addressed this. It's not supposed to be fair at the level of the individual. You need fair representation of a broad cross-section of the populace in order to achieve optimum happiness across the population.
>Can someone explain this in logical, non-political, terms.
Probably not, because it's ultimately a political phenomenon. In left-leaning circles it's popular to deny that there can be significant statistical differences between demographics for any reason other than discrimination. Based on that logic they view all unequal gender ratios as problems that need to be solved.
This is does not quite fit the general "left-leaning" belief that I have heard.
I would rephrase it as "it's popular to deny that there's an underlying preference at play when jobs which used to be female dominated, like programming, became male dominated shortly after they became lucrative."
Bringing it back to the subject of the article, this entire discussion is really about tribalism. Humans tend to look favorably on their group and askance at other groups. Where people get into trouble with this is assuming you know from the outside what groups someone thinks they belong to (e.g. do you see yourself as a man who happens to be a programmer or a programmer who happens to be a man).
I've heard a lot of people argue that women and men would have identical preferences, and their different preferences are entirely attributable to differences in socialization from a young age.
As for the "jobs became male dominated when they became lucrative" observation, it seems like very weak evidence for discrimination. If I were a betting man, I would guess that as the field became lucrative, the number of jobs in the field rapidly outpaced the supply of qualified women (how many women were literate in math or programming in a time when it wasn't common for women to go to college at all).
Moreover, women achieved parity with men in fields like medicine and law in the 80s and 90s when discrimination and harassment were pervasive, explicit, and severe by today's standards. What's going on in tech today that only 20% of our workforce is female despite many, considerable advantages:
* Explicit sexual discrimination and harassment have been illegal and taboo for decades
* The overwhelming majority of US tech jobs have been concentrated in the most ideologically progressive counties for decades (one would expect lower levels of harassment and discrimination in these places)
* Every sizable tech company has a dedicated DEI department and quarterly DEI seminars
* Most tech companies have diversity hiring and retention targets
And not only that, but there appears to be a pronounced inverse correlation between gender equality in a society and the careers that women select into. In other words, the societies in which women are the most free are often the societies that have the least even gender/job distributions and vice versa.
All of this is to say that your perception of "left leaning beliefs" is hardly better than the parent's.
> ... when jobs which used to be female dominated, like programming, became male dominated shortly after they became lucrative.
Programming was never female dominated. What we call "programmer" now (writing algorithms to compute artillery trajectories or whatever) would have just been "scientist" back then. "Coder" (and before that, human "computer") were indeed female-dominated positions but there's no analog to that in the modern world; we've completely replaced those jobs with assemblers/compilers and electronic calculators respectively.
Or wasting their allowance on ether gas fees to send shittokens like SHIB to their friends.
It presently costs $140USD per transaction to send ERC20 tokens to someone. https://etherscan.io/gastracker
Ethereum is not a useful, cost effective or even uniquely functional blockchain in 2021.
History has shown that this does not happen in crypto. Even for coins like Bitconnect and Confido that plainly turned out to be scams, there were still buyers long after the news was revealed. People like to bet on dead cat bounces, or some kind of news after the fact that redeems the coin.
>I’ve been shorting a few bitcoin-related public companies on the theory that in a run on Tether they will have to liquidate large bitcoin holdings
I doubt a run on tether would even cause a 50% drop in BTC price. Hope your account doesn't blow up when Bitcoin inevitably reaches 1 million per coin ;)
Sure, in the short term, unregulated markets can be manipulated.
But Tether's been around more than seven years, more than enough time for the "smart money" to profit by obliterating them.
You can sell Tether on Coinbase for U.S. Dollar deposits to your bank account.
The fact that Tether maintains its 1:1 peg to the dollar is a signal that maybe all the smart guys who have been confidently predicting its imminent and inevitable failure for the last seven years might be missing something.
> But Tether's been around more than seven years, more than enough time for the "smart money" to profit by obliterating them.
> The fact that Tether maintains its 1:1 peg to the dollar is a signal that maybe all the smart guys who have been confidently predicting its imminent and inevitable failure for the last seven years might be missing something.
Bernie Madoff claimed that his scam started in 1991, though in reality it was probably much earlier. It didn't collapse until 2008.
Even in the cryptocurrency space, Mt. Gox took five years to collapse.
There wasn't this loud of a chorus continuously yelling that Madoff and Gox were scams, in every possible media outlet from blogs to Bloomberg, for seven years.
There wasn't a well publicized US federal indictment and investigation of Madoff and Gox, settled with a fine and no injunction.
I'm not saying Tether is clean or 100% funded, I don't know. But unlike Madoff and Gox, accusations have been very loud and very public for a very long time, and the market still accepts USDT at parity with USD.
If Tether's treasury is empty, and if people can freely trade USDT for USD, it wouldn't hold 1:1.
> But Tether's been around more than seven years, more than enough time for the "smart money" to profit by obliterating them.
How would the smart money profit from obliterating them? If you’re referring to a Soros/GBP style trade, how would one borrow enough USDT to pull it off?
> The really smart money with large crypto stashes could borrow USDT with crypto as collateral, and trade the USDT for greenbacks.
Have you looked into the mechanics of this trade? The crypto loans I'm aware of are all significantly overcollateralized. You would have to pledge say 1m BTC to get 0.8m BTC worth of USDT which you could then sell for dollars. If you succeeded USDT tanks, everyone who holds USDT would be rushing for the exit, wiping out the crypto you pledged as collateral also. So you succeed in losing 20% of your money on the initial USDT trade and almost all of the value of the crypto assets you pledged for the loan as well.
These markets are nowhere near as flexible and liquid as regular fx - I would be amazed if you ended up making money overall on this kind of strategy and the execution risk is significant.
In this scenario, if USDT drops low enough, might you not have trouble actually procuring enough USDT to payback and unlock your BTC? It would seem like a sudden collapse of USDT might cause a complete stop in all trading of USDT pairs, no? I suppose you could counteract that a bit by continuing to hold a certain amount of USDT, but would the loan instrument still accept USDT as repayment if USDT becomes worthless?
1)In normal FX markets the amount transacted goes to trillions of USD per day, and liquidity at the touch is very high. So if you need to unwind a position there will be people who will take the other side and the market won't move much even if you're trying to unload a lot of a single cross.
2)In equity markets (which I'm a little more familiar with from a microstructure point of view) a single large market participant like a big broker/dealer will do more than a billion client orders on a busy day (when you add up the orders they do internally and all the child orders from executing trades in pieces). If you wanted to do a billion transactions on the ethereum blockchain at the current throughput it would take you almost 2 years, and no-one else would be able to do anything. So making a lot of trades fast isn't really possible.
Obviously chains like solana would help this a lot, but the point remains that in the current defi ecosystem markets aren't very resilient because they can't react as fast and they don't have the kind of depth of liquidity that conventional markets have.
A lot of folks in the “tether will fail spectacularly” camp also believe that its failure poses a systemic risk to other crypto, both because tether holds positions that they would have to quickly liquidate in a run, and because USDT makes up a large component of the daily trading volume for many coins.
So I suspect there’s not much overlap between people who believe they could break tether and people sitting on a large crypto stash to use as collateral.
> Somebody holds large chunks of the $70.5 billion in USDT.
Personally I'm really really confused about who holds all that Tether. Just who is it? I can't come up with any good idea. Is it the exchanges? But if so then why would they?
Massive amounts of Selegiline, probably.