I guess I'm more wondering what possible value such a tiny micropayment could be. There's no conceivable business that would charge in such small increments. Even an average ad impression is more than a penny.
In fact, things are heading the other way, with "micro"-transactions in mainstream games sometimes exceeding the price of the game itself.
It costs multiple dollars to make a BTC transaction... Even in a perfect world we are not going to be able to make it free if we still expect the infrastructure to be independently run.
The S&P 500 just didn't exist before 1957, so it can't say anything about back then. Remember S&P 500 is actually a specific (actively-managed!) large cap index.
I'm not sure what the return on all US stocks is since then, but Japan's market has only just returned to the level it was at in its 80s bubble.
In 1860, Henry Varnum Poor formed Poor's Publishing, which published an investor's guide to the railroad industry.[20]
In 1923, Standard Statistics Company (founded in 1906 as the Standard Statistics Bureau) began rating mortgage bonds[20] and developed its first stock market index consisting of the stocks of 233 U.S. companies, computed weekly.[1]
In 1926, it developed a 90-stock index, computed daily.[1]
In 1941, Poor's Publishing merged with Standard Statistics Company to form Standard & Poor's.[20][21]
On March 4, 1957, the index was expanded to its current 500 companies and was renamed the S&P 500 Stock Composite Index.[1]
1929-1948 gave investors a +0.6%/year, which I think is the lowest nominal return. 1962-1981 was +0.8%/year.
As you allude, there were 20-year periods spanning the 1970s where Treasuries outperformed large-caps, but that’s fairly rare (and with the printing presses running three shifts, something we’re in extremely little danger of right now).
For the first question, it depends if you bought the fifty cars for $100 each, or if your basis is less than that. Cost basis is key here. And no to the second question.
The IRS has designed crypto as a property, so you are subject to paying capital gains (or claiming capital losses) whenever you sell, convert, pay or earn. Converting one crypto to another (or to USD) is a taxable event, while transferring BTC in one wallet to another wallet is not (since you keep the same property). Further details at https://www.coinbase.com/bitcoin-taxes#paytaxes.
It's considered the same as an in-kind transfer for stocks from one broker to another.
Again, the understanding of "property" is evolving in this environment, and there are areas of regulatory uncertainty (such as synthetic assets from staking collateral in money markets). However, transferring from one wallet to another is pretty safe territory.
That's an implementation detail in service to controlling value on the ledger. Moving it around does not change that it represents ownership of a quantifiable amount of BTC, unless you sell it or trade it.
I think it would be extremely helpful to map the math into code. Nobody has done this as far as I've seen. I mean you can find Github repositories for some papers but really a set of explicit tutorials from the math to the code would be really helpful.
To say something is "machine learning", I think means that you should show the code not just equations and derivations.
I mean if you only show math and derivations, what's the point? To show off what you know? How is that helpful?
Ethereum is a much better place to build apps and tokens. The ERC-20 standard has been game-changing. Currently 19 tokens at $100M+ market caps, with more to come.
Ethereum has the developer mindshare and tooling today, no doubt. But ETH also has fundamental scalability problems which are pushing out smaller value transactions. The team behind CryptoKitties for example left to develop their own chain that scales better. My belief is that UTXOs and the Bitcoin model are going to be simpler and more efficient at representing state and state transitions because it can be done locally and on one chain, rather than globally and sharded across multiple.
Agree that today, Ethereum transaction fees are terrible. But I'm quite optimistic for the future. First we have Layer-2 rollups: https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/layer-2-scaling/. Even setting sharding and rollups aside, Eth2 and PoS rather than PoW should give a significant boost to transaction throughput. I don't see bitcoin competing in that domain, it's taken on the role of "digital gold" rather than "world computer".
If it thought there were grounds to do so, the SEC could take on the major BTC exchanges.
Losing a means to convert to/from fiat currencies would drive away the vast majority of BTC traders, and possibly cause something of a bank run upon the announcement of SEC action against them.
I mean, let's be real here, the vast majority of BTC transactions aren't for goods or services.
Until they are. Mining equipment for BTC is already effectively monopolized by one vendor and they are likely doing significant mining behind the scenes controlling much of the market.
>and they are likely doing significant mining behind the scenes controlling much of the market.
I don't get it, how does "controlling much of mining" allow them to control the market? It does give a bunch of bitcoin to play around with, but it costs money (electricity, manufacturing costs) for them to mine them, so depending on their margins they'll be less impactful than a whale who loaded up on cheap coins a few years ago.
It's a thought exercise, not a serious suggestion that it might occur, hence "if it thought there were grounds to do so." I'm imagining how a Government with sufficient power might go about crippling the value of BTC.
The US could cripple bitcoins value quite easily by sanctioning exchanges. The main power it would have to enforce those sanctions would be to cut off any institutions that violate them from handling USD. This is how the US manages to do stuff like force French banks to uphold US sanction on Iran.
That wouldn’t eradicate Bitcoin or anything, but it would make it far less useful than it is currently, and have a significant impact on its value. It would also be a pretty bad idea, because the power of US sanctions is largely derived from demand for USD, and political volatility puts downward pressure on that demand, so you generally don’t want to waste it on frivolous sanctions.
A single government can easily block it in country — nobody needs or wants Bitcoin, they want to buy things and that can be attacked by targeting whoever participates in the network. Bitcoin is designed to make this extremely easy since that public ledger means they can go after ever transaction you’ve ever made at any point in the future, not just at the time of transaction. Unless the government is incredibly corrupt and powerless nobody is basing a black market on a system which giftwraps your transaction logs for prosecutors.
A government which participates in international banking coalitions or treaty groups can use those relationships to go after transactions internationally, too. Think about how drug cartels have secret bank accounts frozen, and then about how Bitcoin is designed to make that easier by giving the authorities a full list of your activities which is trivially extended to every partner. Once you’re on that list, everyone you know will be getting pressure to turn on you.
Now think about a major government: they can not only use normal law enforcement but also control the exchanges themselves with things like anti-money laundering laws. Someone might choose to blow off demands from a small country or a pariah state like Iran but if the US or EU decided to act everyone involved is now facing things like not being able to fly internationally or do business with most major companies. Since they have no upside to resisting and it’s trivial to block Bitcoin transactions, anyone in those jurisdictions is unlikely to risk that protecting a stranger in a different country.
the SEC shutting down centralized exchanges would be a short term shock to the value of BTC but long-term would be a disaster for regulators.
Decentralized P2P exchanges exist(bisq/hodlhodl), and shutting down centralized exchanges would force people to use those as the on/off ramps.
The best way for regulators to fight bitcoin imo is to slowly assimilate it into the legacy finance infrastructure to the point that it becomes similar to gold reserves, something only central banks and large institutions hold, while the public might only hold IOUs. Similar to what paypal is already doing.
I still maintain that if the government truly wanted to regulate cryptocurrency they would go after average citizens and add onerous reporting requirements. Even with decentralized exchanges, the government can still find a way to clamp down on citizens using cryptocurrency. Sure, it would be impossible to prevent someone from using a decentralized exchange, but would you personally risk being prosecuted for doing so?
You can walk into any major bank in the US with tens of thousands in USD cash, deposit it via deposit ticket with no ID, and have anonymous bitcoin/ether/monero in your account within minutes.
It's hard to agree or disagree as decentralization doesn't have a clear definition. It is decentralized, but not to the point of making it censorship-resistant.
This is Berkson's Paradox. Even if coding competition performance correlates positively with job performance in the general population (which it certainly does, given that most people can't code), selecting for this attribute in the hiring process leads to a negative correlation among those hired.
Simple analogy. There is no correlation between height and salary across NBA players.[1]
The naive conclusion would be that height has nothing to do with basketball ability. The real answer is that markets are efficient and are already correcting one important feature against other predictors. Steph Curry wouldn't even be in the NBA if had the shooting ability of Gheorghe Mureșan.
It should be mentioned that Steph Curry was drafted behind Hasheem Thabeet, Tyreke Evans, Ricky Rubio, and Jonny Flynn, among others.
Hiring is always a crapshoot. Pro sports teams spend a lot more time and money on talent evaluation than tech companies and still get it hilariously wrong all the time.
On the flip side, every NBA player who has won league MVP in the lottery era (>1985) was drafted in the first 15 picks. Steph Curry of course has won MVP twice and was drafted behind the 6 players you mention, but then he was drafted next out of every other eligible player. I'd argue that through this lens, NBA teams are really good at "hiring".
Some teams draft for current skill, others draft for absolutely maximum possible potential, others draft for some combination of both. Some teams are willing to risk a "bust" if there is the potential of ultra-elite league-best skill. And considering that no player who has reached the MVP level has fallen further than 15th, I'd say as a whole the NBA teams are doing very well.
> every NBA player who has won league MVP in the lottery era (>1985) was drafted in the first 15 picks.
I mentioned Steph Curry because the original commenter did, but in general it's very strange to focus on the MVP. That's a small sample and cherry-picking the results, only talking about the successes and overlooking all of the draft busts. There's only 1 MVP in the league every season, and some players have won it multiple times. It was won 5 times by Michael Jordan, who incidentally was drafted 3rd (behind Sam Bowie). Only 21 players have won NBA MVP during that period.
In any case, that MVP record doesn't hold in other sports. For example, NFL MVP Tom Brady was drafted behind 198 other players in 2000.
> NBA teams are really good at "hiring".
Some long-suffering Minnesota Timberwolves fans might say otherwise.
I don't think that this is the conclusion I would come to. Height is not something that can be changed, therefore it cannot be used as an adjustable variable to make that market efficient. You can't train to be taller like you can train at coding competitions.
I would say that height is an advantage up to a certain point in basketball, but tall people are not especially rare. Within the market of basketball players, you can find tall people who also have other skills, sometimes you find short people (Steph Curry) who have exceptional skills.
Steph Curry is 6'3", in the 98th percentile for height. Wouldn't quite call him short. And there are only ~2,800 7-footers in the world, many of which are in the NBA. So tall players - meaning over 7 feet - are extremely rare.
Also, Steph Curry is not really short, he just looks that way next to NBA centers and forwards, but he's actually 96th percentile in height amount American men.
A better example would be Muggsy Bogues who was a full 12" shorter than Steph Curry and he could dunk.
Muggsy re:the NBA has always stood out to me as an example of the failure of a supposedly efficient market due to a massive but unintuitive oversight. It would be one thing if he had just been a middling player, but even with the MASSIVE height disparity between him and the rest of the league, he proved to be a standout player, easily in the top 50% of players historically, and probably much higher. Clearly, there's a role for short men even at the upper echelons of the sport - not just as a curiosity, but as an effective value-add above an average replacement, in part because of his lack of stature. But you almost never see NBA players below 5'9". The players are tall. The coaches are tall. Surely being tall is generally necessary for success in the sport? But then, Muggsy.
Read between the lines. If all the players are tall, and all the coaches are tall, and the game has been played for more than a half century with that assumption... who knows how to train/coach a short player?
He also could jump almost a foot and a half higher off the ground than the average NBA player, who in turn can jump almost a foot higher than the average man of the same age.
What proportion of people out there can learn to jump so high, even with extensive training/practice?
Hard to know, considering that said extensive training/practice is not as well-known as other basketball-related training, and that the practice of fielding players who would benefit from it is discouraged.
That said, a quick search of "training to dunk 5'6"" on Youtube brings up a number of videos.
The more accurate conclusion is you get a vastly smaller population to choose from at extreme heights which largely offsets the slight height advantage, when looking at people who make the cut.
Like it efficiently chooses all hockeyplayers with birthdays in January to March? [0]
The real answer is people hire based on their biases and organisational restrictions more than they hire on objective metrics - and we have plenty of evidence for that.
Why doesn't the NBA just lower the height of baskets by a foot? They would get much better athletes, so surely the games would be more entertaining and the league would make more money, no?
Aren’t the advantages of height mostly relative to the opponent, ie when trying to block him or shoot over him? I think 7ft players are already too tall to be able to shoot from an optimum angle.
Depending on how they define "winner at programming contests", this might narrow down the population to just a handful of "sport programmers". The same handful of guys win all the contests.
The statement might as well be "tourist has bad job performance". (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gennady_Korotkevich) And that isn't surprising given how much he has to train everyday to stay on top. He even turned down offers from Google/Facebook just to continue qualifying for the big annual competitions like Google Code Jam and Facebook Hacker Cup.
Just because I see some stronger-worded rebuttals in this thread, I want to point out that just because this is true (it is Berkson's Paradox), that does not mean it cannot be a valuable observation. As the author pointed out, for example, it might mean that this attribute is overweighted in hiring, which is something worth considering.
That write up is excellent and I found this paragraph particularly interesting.
> An interesting paper [1] claims a negative correlation between sales performance and management performance for sales people promoted into managers. The conclusion is that “firms prioritize current job performance in promotion decisions at the expense of other observable characteristics that better predict managerial performance”. While this paper isn't about hiring, it's the exact same theory here: the x-axis would be something like “expected future management ability” and the y-axis “sales performance”.
