Liberty

One person's commentary on what happened at CASP with AlphaFold: https://moalquraishi.wordpress.com/2018/12/09/alphafold-casp13-what-just-happened/

Award for smartest crypto guy goes to: https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2017/12/20/litecoin-founder-charlie-lee-sells-his-holdings-in-the-cryptocurrency.html

No, it's a fun novel, it's funny, it's kind of sci-fi. It's a fun ride, and pretty short. It's not Serious Literature.

I think you misunderstood what Slaughterhouse 5 is. Read it. You'll be entertained.

Guns, Germs and Steel was a good read. Makes you think about humans from a macro perspective. Sapiens was like that too.

This is cool: https://deepmind.com/blog/alphafold/

I'll second Forever War if you like that kind of military sci-fi that StarShip Troopers started (Forever War is to the Vietnam war what Starship Troopers was to WWII). I remember not liking American Gods nearly as much as most people. But that was a long time ago so memory's fuzzy on it... I mostly remember what is basically a short-story stuck somewhere in about the frozen lake with the car on it. Scalzi is one of the original wave of bloggers. One thing that he wrote that got really viral back in 2005 might interest you: https://whatever.scalzi.com/2005/09/03/being-poor/

Hadn't heard of this site before today. Allows you to do all kinds of visualization of financial data, graph all kinds of things, make comparisons, etc. Looks really interesting so far. www.koyfin.com h/t Mike Puangmalai for the recommendation (@NonGaap on twitter)

The author of Scuttleblurb.com (a high-quality subscription site, but with many free samples that you should check out--they're very detailed and I'm sure you'll learn something) now has a podcast: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/scuttleblurb/id1443244539?mt=2 They discuss 4 companies and go into specifics, this isn't just a general finance/macro/investing stragegy podcast (there are many of those out there). here's the official announcement:

Not true for me. I think changes are memorable. I.e. location changes, school/university/job changes, marital status changes. Plus traumatic and/or very happy memories. Things like travel/vacations are somewhere in the middle: some are memorable like bigger changes, some are mush. Plus some not that special moments that for some reason get stuck into memory (maybe they are somehow special for my brain/mind/persona). I agree about that, but didn't want to make a big off-topic aside about this. Of course big changes, trauma, huge happy events, etc are also memorable. But on average, I think it's true that childhood/teenage years tend to be much more memorable than the average year in your 30s or 40s. If you don't remember anything exciting about the late 90s and early 2000s, maybe you weren't paying much attention? ;)

Related video by CGP Grey (worth watching):

scorpioncapital, I agree that's a real phenomenon, but it's different from what I was talking about. I'd phrase it as: You can have a deeper appreciation for mentors as you get better, even if you aren't are surprised and changed by the things they have to say over time because you're not as starting from as low a base of knowledge. I think the title of the piece trips people up, but I didn't find a better one at the time... Oh well.

Exactly. BRK shares and gold aren't currency, and BTC isn't recognized as such by the government yet despite how some people are interpreting that headline. You can't pay your taxes in BTC, you can sell BTC to pay taxes in USD. But that's not a headline that will get clicks...

I wrote a little something else, if anyone's interested: https://medium.com/@Liberty/formative-years-forever-echo-for-investors-8542ecb0c058

Ohio becomes the first state to accept bitcoin for tax payments https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/25/ohio-becomes-the-first-state-to-accept-bitcoin-for-tax-payments/ "Ohio filers will technically send their tax payments to an Atlanta-based payments processor called BitPay, which will then convert the bitcoin to dollars for the state treasurer’s office." They still are asking for dollars and the amount is denominated in dollars, they're just making it more convenient to convert. Not nothing, but not quite what the headline makes it seem.

No problem

$3.7k now. Small hiccup.

This is an internal presentation that was released publicly. Mostly about technology, progress, how they invest, but also some philosophy/psychology stuff. High level stuff, but I found it interesting.

Both of those concerns are addressed. There are teams, points (more computations = more points), there are APIs, so dozens of sites give you different visualizations of your stats (there's a better ecosystem than for financial data, almost). You get daily average number of points, if you run it on more than one computer you can use the same account so it's cumulative, etc. And it's been around for a long time, it's open-source, and it's based at Berkeley university. They take security pretty seriously and are totally legit. "Folding@Home is supported by the NIH and NSF, and already has over 200,000 active users. It has been published in over 100 papers" Rosetta also has published many papers, including in Science and Nature. https://www.bakerlab.org/index.php/publications/

Happy thanksgiving to my American friends, don't fill up on the worst side dishes, keep room for the good stuff.

How so? I live in Canada. I have to heat my house. All electricity (hydro, in my case) used by this is then converted to waste heat, which helps heat my house. This is just a smaller version of baking in the winter (you get food and heat -- cogeneration?) reducing how much the furnace has to run...

Your yearly reminder that the cold season is the perfect time to run distributed computing projects on your CPUs/GPUs/consoles. Extra heat produced just heats your house... My fave is Rosetta@home, a biomedical computational protein design project: https://boinc.bakerlab.org/ Feature piece about David Baker, the head of Baker lab where Rosetta@Home is based: http://discovermagazine.com/2018/nov/all-in-the-fold Another popular project in health research of Folding at Home. Because of what it does, it's particularly efficient to run on GPUs and consoles: https://foldingathome.org/start-folding/ (this one has a version that can run in-browser, so you don't even need to install the app to help: http://nacl.foldingathome.org/ ) But there are many projects, some in physics, math, cryptography, etc: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_distributed_computing_projects Einstein@home's a cool one that looks for gravity waves: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein@Home

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/21/hacker-lifts-1-million-in-cryptocurrency-using-mans-phone-number.html

The asset creates some form of value for its customer (ex. coke creates value for a person to enjoy a flavored drink over water, SAP allows a major organization the ability to monitor itself using SAP tools, etc.). If you believe that people will value these services long into the future, it does not matter what currency the company accepts. In this scenario you are not betting on what currency people will pay you in, simply that your company produces a value for its customers. +1. And the bull case for bitcoin is that people will choose it to store value. That thesis could be correct or not. Yes, and for the N'th time, that's totally speculative at this point. I'm not saying it can't happen, I'm saying you guys are gambling rather than having found known digital gold or having divined the IV of a bitcoin and buying it when it's undervalued. Why would someone pick something else rather than bitcoin? There can be lots of reasons. This is all digital, so if the goal is to send money, abstraction layers could be created that make it as easy to use any of the coins, and the one with the lowest fees/lowest latency/highest security/funkiest brand/etc can be used. If the goal is to store value, maybe other coins with characteristics that make them more stable or better can be picked, or excitment picks up for the brand new shiny thing taking lots of demand away from BTC, cratering the price, creating a self-reinforcing panic, reducing the network effect, etc. If somehow weaknesses are found in the crypto math, or sophisticated attackers succeed in putting very well obfuscated backdoors in the code, or if some black swan event scares away miners except for a large state-controlled presence that gets above 50%, etc. The idea isn't even that BTC doesn't stay the biggest one, just that it's not true that crypto supply is limited as long as there are a bunch of small challengers sucking up some of the demand that would otherwise go to BTC. Why do my dollars have value? Because I can spend them to buy the things I need or productive assets, because I got paid in them and pay my taxes in them, and because they aren't changing in value by 20% a day up and down so I can predict pretty well their purchasing power to be able to run my affairs. But I'm not storing value in dollars, I'm using them for transactions.

My post was about forks being dilutive (if they have value). No sure how any of that answers that. The rest is the usual story. I'm saying it's too early to tell if that'll work out that way. Some new fork or brand new coin could come out in 10 years that has characteristics so much more attractive than bitcoin that it could effectively compete away a lot of demand for bitcoin and make price drop, affecting the "store of value" part and the "supply is limited" part. Not really. Productive assets can return cashflow to shareholders via dividends, special dividends, or buybacks, or from an outright sale of the company for cash or some other stock, and if the company does well, those streams can increase over time. That's part of why someone else might want to buy it off you. Gold won't ever give you a cent, so it's all relying on someone else buying it.