LC

Oh this is a good one :D Thanks for the morning (and 1hr sleep deprived) laugh!

Perhaps it would be an instructive exercise to create a ledger (heh) of the best use cases for a blockchain/crypto-ledger. To me, the best use case seems to be public asset ownership records (home deeds, car deeds, etc.). Followed by semi-private asset ownership records.

+1

Completely agree! But Wood is no chump either in the competition for the prize. I've just seen a video of her where she uses the treasury yield as a discount rate for equity. Seriously? There's no risk premium anymore? Either she's selling to idiots or thinks we're all idiots. What's even more amazing is that the video was monitored by someone from her compliance team. I do not have a morning wood for Cathie wood but I recall this is also how Buffett thinks about DCF/value as well. Got to dig out that interview/letter. Buffett discounts by the treasury yield and adjusts for the equity risk premium through his margin of safety. E.g. riskier stocks would have to trade at 50% below his calculated value but he doesn't discount the risk at the DCF stage. Not quite sure what advantages this has as opposed to discounting for the risk at the DCF stage. It's from one of his early letters in his Partnership days.

What options are you looking at?

Similar

https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactionfees.html Currently costs about $19 per BTC transaction.

I went with puts on PLUG as essentially a short on a baloney business and also a hedge against other high-tech stocks I bought on whims (<1% positions each, stuff like AI), essentially netting out.

There are a few interesting debate points which are presented in this article, which I will reproduce here. Apologies in advance for the wall-of-text:

Thank you for the reply, SD. I am not sure I have the cojones to try and trade BTC, but I do agree with your approach of (1) growing the investment over time as the use case popularizes ; (2) Trying to decide between your first two approaches (e.g. spread amongst moderate sized players vs. consolidating in larger players performing the implementations). Good food4thought.

Wow- tragic. He was a hero to everyone who ever laced up a pair of skates. RIP

https://michael08.medium.com/why-visa-and-mastercard-will-continue-to-reign-supreme-in-an-increasingly-digital-world-5c4a9adf0a0e

I find the transactional improvement argument a more attractive investment thesis compared to the "store of value" argument. Question then is, what is the most direct investment vehicle to express that thesis? I would guess ethereum?

Thanks Cubs - appreciate the commentary.

Quite a sensationalized title and only if you extrapolate November 2017's monthly 25% energy growth rate over 3 years (as that part of the article mentions). The full analysis is found here: https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption Which estimates that today, the bitcoin network uses about as much energy as Chile. On a per-transaction basis, each bitcoin transaction uses 741 kWH of energy as of 2020, up from 686 kWH in 2019. (https://www.statista.com/statistics/881541/bitcoin-energy-consumption-transaction-comparison-visa/) By comparison, 741 kWH would power approximately 497,000 transactions on Visa's network. Some further figures: Bitcoin uses ~78 terawatt hours of energy as its current run-rate. JP Morgan used 2 terawatt hours of energy in 2019.

A tech question: At capacity, does incremental "mining" become more difficult? E.g. would the fee paid to the miner in your above scenario need to increase as each subsequent transaction costs slightly more resources to execute over the blockchain?

Well, who is being disingenuous now? :D The finance industry does a lot more than clear transactions. I am curious on your thoughts on whether you think eventual concentration of crypto-mining resources is a potential risk.

This is a great question and one I never thought of - and I would be curious to hear the responses. It's not just computing resources either. Electricity (and the heat it generates), not to mention the high performance processors required (already putting a strain on the GPU market) and the requirements needed to build those. Then you need space for datacenters, engineers to link and manage the operation. At some point market forces would take over and specialized groups will emerge to manage this. So now while the ledger itself may be decentralized, the group or groups with all the expertise and processing power will be centralized. This creates a new slew of problems. All this to replicate what bookies have been doing for millennia (based on an aforementioned system of trust - and enforced by some metaphorical broken knees) seems like a bit of a stretch.

More BABA - $239 They are certainly under some scrutiny. Jack Ma's pseudo fall-from-grace, the regulatory probe, Ant's shelved listing, etc. Is the thesis here a generic mean reversion? E.g. Competition is overblown, the underlying business can continue to generate meaningful profits, the regulatory/news-driven "cloud" will one day lift, etc.?

Looks OK but still not as nice as their previous offering. I migrated to Yahoo Finance for casual market information, I like that I can add select fields to the table view of a customized portfolio.

Gotta push your luck, Sanjeev! Thanks for sharing. If I really wanted to stir the pot, I'd compare Charlie and Tiger. Both can afford drivers, eh? ;D ;D

Perhaps based on his inaction 1 year ago and the general impression he left on me was that he overestimated the effect of the pandemic. Hey may have been kicking himself (gently) for missing an opportunity and/or misjudging the situation, and is therefore a bit humble on the topic? Just one of many potential explanations.

Outside of the blockchain transaction technology, how is cryptocurrency different from something like gold? Why not just remove the t+2 settlement timing and trade fractional positions in GLD futures?

I don’t agree with quite a bit of CMs beliefs, but in some senses I prefer him over WB because of his tremendous and often blunt transparency.

Do we have demographic information on this group? A theory that is worth investigating in my opinion is an aging population that was working longer into their lifetime, who "finally decided to retire" in response to an extreme stimulus (COVID).