rkbabang

+1 The Bitcoin Genius is out of a job.

Autonomous cars will kill Uber/Lyft. Why wouldn't I take out a loan, have the car drive itself for the 22 hrs/day when I don't use it myself, and capture that $ myself? And how are people going to find and call your personal car to them if not through the Uber or Lyft app? That's Uber v3.0 after they figure out owning and maintaining a massive fleet of AVs is an expensive, low margin proposition. Uber 3.0 will connect your car with customers where their platform just acts as a middleman. Like the current version but without the drivers demanding better wages. WSJ headline circa 2032 - "MIT Study Reveals Autonomous Vehicles are Working Well Below Minimum Wage" All fine and good until the robots unionize, then we’re screwed.

FYI for anyone who hasn’t read this. $2.99 this week only. https://m.harpercollins.com/9780061792571/cryptonomicon

Autonomous cars will kill Uber/Lyft. Why wouldn't I take out a loan, have the car drive itself for the 22 hrs/day when I don't use it myself, and capture that $ myself? And how are people going to find and call your personal car to them if not through the Uber or Lyft app?

Easiest places to implement due to population density and weather will be first, other places will get it slowly over time. I remember as a kid waiting for cable TV. The small city next to my town had it a good 5 years before my town started getting it, and even then it was a year or two before it reached my street. Kids at school would brag about getting cable and it seemed like forever before it reached my neighborhood. Population centers always get stuff first if population density is an issue. And eventually the weather condition concern will be solved as the AI gets better. Eventually it will be available everywhere but the most rural places (the type of places where dialup internet is still the only option today).

I suggest 'The Blank Slate' by Pinker, it's a great book. Thanks. I'll check that one out too. He didn't mention his book by that name specifically in the interview, but he did talk a little about his opposition to the theory that humans are born a "blank slate".

Just yesterday I listened to an interview with him on Joe Rogan's podcast. It is episode #1073 from Feb 04, 2018 (podcast, youTube). The book sounds interesting, I plan on reading it. A long time ago I also planned on reading "The Better Angels of Our Nature", but completely forgot about it until I listened to this interview yesterday.

Might want to have a reread if that's your takeaway... I haven't read anyone here lately saying ETH should be worth more than BTC. I certainly don't think so. I still hold some ETH which I bought before even the DAO fiasco, but I am looking for a good time to convert it to BTC. I think that there will be some undue excitement at first in the Etherium community when Casper comes online and I think that it is likely that the ETH/BTC price ratio goes up for a little while because of that. When/if this happens I will convert most or probably all of the ETH I have left to BTC. If the price doesn't shoot up I will still probably convert it anyway. If I was to buy more of anything right now I would buy BTC. That's just my opinion and my current plan.

Most are limited. Rectangular green pieces of paper are not limited in any way though. They are printed at the whim of the Fed. Gold is only limited because we currently have a difficult time finding much more of it. This may change dramatically when asteroid mining becomes a thing. What happens when the amount of gold brought to Earth far exceeds all of the gold ever mined here by many times over? Bitcoin however IS limited.

Other people can only explain to you how it works. As for why it is valuable? It is valuable for the same reason gold, or diamonds, or baseball cards, or stock in companies, or old coins, or stamps, or antique cars, or rectangular pieces of green paper, or anything else might be valuable...because people are willing to trade other things for it. Whether or not you want to trade other things for it is a decision only you can make.

Imagine if the federal reserve said that they would create 10 new dollars per year (no more no less) every year from now on. That would make the supply of USD technically unlimited, but the inflation rate would be almost zero. There is a fixed amount of ETH created every year so the inflation rate will be smaller and smaller as time goes on and will approach zero over time. Like the $10 new dollars example the new Ether will be so tiny as to not matter. It is even expected by many to be deflationary eventually as the amount of new coins created may be less than the number of coins lost. I don't like the fact that it isn't bounded, but it isn't quite as bad as its detractors make it sound.

Exactly. The point is that a house isn't an investment. If you are extremely fortunate you will break even or not lose too much. A house is where you live. You do what you (or more likely your wife) wants to do to make it the place you want to live in. If you are ever trying to calculate ROI on your home then you are missing the point entirely. You don't live in investment property.

The only books I've read are "Mastering Bitcoin: Unlocking Digital Cryptocurrencies" by Andreas M. Antonopoulos and "The Internet of Money" also by Andreas M. Antonopoulos. Both are excellent. Mastering Bitcoin is more about how bitcoin works and how to use it, where The Internet of Money is a book about the effects the technology will have on the future. You can pretty much get everything in The Internet of Money by searching for Andreas Anonopoulos on youtube and watching all of his videos.

This reads really concerning, Cardboard. Is it more or less the same situation in the different provinces of Canada, or are there differences among provinces? Back when I lived in MA the state decided to do an experiment by making a section of an interstate highway concrete rather than asphalt. With the freezing and warming that happens in New England you can imagine what happened next. A lot of cars where damaged, a few people were injured and one person eventually died when trucks started kicking up chunks of concrete and sending it flying through car windshields of drivers unlucky enough to be driving behind them. They had to tear up the whole section and repave it with asphalt the way it should have been done to begin with. Because it is government no one is ever personally sued/punished for this type of negligence. This was right near where I lived at the time which is why I remember it. Here's a story I found about it: http://www.thesunchronicle.com/state-to-repave-i--where-motorists-cars-hit-by/article_1341d126-d761-55b4-89cb-ec5827b1df42.html

http://digg.com/video/simultaneous-landing-spacex-sonic-boom

LOL what about the guy in the pilot's seat on the rocket module trying to land it.

Another good video

It’s like watching a sci-fi movie watching those boosters land.

Yes, humans often act like humans. Which can sometimes be very good and other times very bad.

Why would anyone ever look at it from another point than "what it has grown to"? You still risk the same amount, regardless of where the wealth initially came from or what amount you invested versus your total wealth. Depending on where money comes from (income, inheritance, investment returns, bonus, windfalls, etc.) people tend to invest differently. This is completely irrational behavior. I do it too of course but try to be at least aware of it. And if you decide to hold your current positions, you are effectively making the decision to buy them now at current prices. Ask yourself if you would hold the same positions if you were to start over with a new portfolio. Specifically ask yourself this: If I were to restart with 100% in cash and the same knowledge, would I invest 40-45% in crypto's today? More power to you if you would. Just make sure that it is a conscious decision. Of course I understand that, but it is easier said than done. I do this all the time even with stocks. For instance I recently sold half of my long time Overstock.com position in the high $40s. Of course it is now trading at $63, which I consider highly overvalued into the speculative range. I would not buy Overstock at these prices, but I am not selling, because I think of those shares as "free" since I made multiples of my original investment when I sold the other half. It isn't rational, I know, but it is a very difficult way of thinking to overcome.

Yes, and I meant it half jokingly. I was imagining WEB & JB sitting down in Gorat's, with Bezos pitching him the healthcare idea, and Buffett saying "you know what, you'd have a lot more time to crush this idea, if you didn't have to do SEC filings & analyst calls." The joking half was, of course, due to the the seemingly crazy valuation, and the huge leverage they'd probably have to take on to swallow Amazon. Everyone here knows that I'm not a balance sheet ninja, and instead, am a story guy (this will undoubtedly bite me some day.) I just love the concept of how BRK has freed up so many execs to run their businesses & re-allocate divs to capex (I know, no divs to re-allocate at Amazon, just having fun riffing on an idea here.) --- I don't know much about Kroc, other than what was included in the movie "the Founder." I'd guess that innovative processes and a relentless drive would be the main things the two men share in common. Invert. With Amazon growing so fast it will soon be able to swallow BRK. WEB can retire and with Bezos at the helm all of Berkshire's cash can be used to grow Amazon instead of being allocated to buying companies.

I have a hobby selling physical gold & silver. I will sell bars & coins and stuff like that. I have established clients and am always getting new ones. I can tell you WITHOUT A DOUBT that more people are interested in precious metals when the price is going up and the price is HIGH. Most people WILL NOT buy when the price is low...they are too scared it is going lower. They want to buy when it is high & going higher. I also suspect that this is the same in most markets. Perhaps it is because Jane Blow heard about Joe Blow making a killing in XYZ market. That peaks her interest and she wants to be like "Joe Blow". At the bottom of markets, you aren't hearing about how people made a killing...you are hearing about how they LOST MONEY. Nobody wants to lose, so nobody is interested. At market tops (or near) you hear plenty of stories about people getting rich, paying off houses, how "it is different this time" and so on. Thus, more people get interested, get involved and the market(s) go higher. A self reinforcing loop? I'm buying more. I bought very little in 2017, most of my buying was in 2015-16. I started buying again when it first went bellow $12K this month and I am buying more today. If it drops from here I'll be buying more still. What % of your portfolio are you allocating to this? It depends on how you look at it. What I have invested or what it has grown to. Lets look at what I have invested. The amount I invested before 2018 is around 1% of my portfolio. The amount I added in my two buys in 2018 is about 0.5% of my portfolio. So my total cost basis is about 1.5% of my portfolio. Looking at it this way I have increased my investment by almost 50% in 2018. So I haven't put all that much in, but if you look at what it has grown to. Off the top of my head, it was as high as 65-70% of my portfolio at one point in December and is now somewhere around 40-45% of my portfolio. So you can see that the new money I have allocated in 2018 barely moved the needle.

I have a hobby selling physical gold & silver. I will sell bars & coins and stuff like that. I have established clients and am always getting new ones. I can tell you WITHOUT A DOUBT that more people are interested in precious metals when the price is going up and the price is HIGH. Most people WILL NOT buy when the price is low...they are too scared it is going lower. They want to buy when it is high & going higher. I also suspect that this is the same in most markets. Perhaps it is because Jane Blow heard about Joe Blow making a killing in XYZ market. That peaks her interest and she wants to be like "Joe Blow". At the bottom of markets, you aren't hearing about how people made a killing...you are hearing about how they LOST MONEY. Nobody wants to lose, so nobody is interested. At market tops (or near) you hear plenty of stories about people getting rich, paying off houses, how "it is different this time" and so on. Thus, more people get interested, get involved and the market(s) go higher. A self reinforcing loop? I'm buying more. I bought very little in 2017, most of my buying was in 2015-16. I started buying again when it first went bellow $12K this month and I am buying more today. If it drops from here I'll be buying more still.

I tried to read Collapse but I just couldn't get into it for some reason. Tons of details in The World Until Yesterday, but I sort of like that, makes me feel it's more empirical and I can sort of draw my own conclusions The Easter Island case study was the most fascinating one for me as an example of societal collapse due to ecological damage. It's actually the only one that I can remember off the top of my head after more than a decade since I read Collapse last. Was it because they converted all of their resources into giant heads? It was digging those enormous holes required to bury stone giants up to their necks.

Even though I own shares, as I said before, it is more to support him than anything else, I wouldn’t be unhappy at that outcome. Of course I’d rather the shareholders make money along the way too.