Liberty

"I can't believe what I just saw" Insane:

You gotta admit, this is some seriously cool stuff happening today:

I'm enjoying the new documentary series on Netflix, 'Dirty Money'. Only seen a couple, though: ep 1 is on the VW diesel scandal, and ep 3 is on Valeant.

Scene straight out of the big short: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-02-01/a-bitcoin-conference-rented-a-miami-strip-club-regrets-ensued

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-02-02/bofa-to-decline-all-cryptocurrency-transactions-on-credit-cards

Isn't GBTC selling way above NAV (net asset value)? Any investment you buy should be something you understand and are comfortable with. Not because someone on some forum told you to. You don't know us, some of us might sound convincing, but maybe we have no idea what we're talking about. But your money is real and I'm sure you worked hard for it. Don't fall for FOMO (fear of missing out), it usually ends badly.

Nobody can tell you that. Be very skeptical of anyone who says they can.

https://twitter.com/prestonjbyrne/status/959120498381787136 https://twitter.com/prestonjbyrne/status/959120951597326338 https://twitter.com/prestonjbyrne/status/959122421856067585

That's the crux of the matter, IMO. But the next level down is to ask whether he's a great CEO at accomplishing his goals, which might be different from those of most shareholders. I think he cares more about the tech than about per share value, something that many on wall street can't wrap their heads around because someone who doesn't put personal net worth above all else is an enigma to them. F.ex. Wall Street makes a huge deal of how he keeps missing his (self-imposed) dealines. But Elon probably knows that the crazy deadlines makes things move much faster than if he had given more realistic targets to his people, so the net result is worth it to him since he's got basically multi-decade ambition, so the pace is very important if he wants to get to his goals (EVs everywhere, space-faring civilization, ubiquitous clean energy generation, safe AI, whatever).

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/31/technology/bitfinex-bitcoin-price.html

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-30/sec-seeks-to-freeze-crypto-assets-of-600-million-coin-offering

Exactly. But on top of that, Musk is known for actually doing other people's jobs. The Vance bio has anecdotes about people telling Musk that they can't do something he asked, that it's too hard or would take too long or impossible or whatever, and if Musk thinks they're not trying hard enough, he's been known to say something like "Ok, on top of being CEO of two companies, I'll also do your job" and then actually does the thing for a while until he's proven his point. Obviously he's busy and can't study everything, but there's little doubt that he has the brainpower to do almost anything if he could actually dedicate the time to do it. The dude's running two large companies that he grew from basically nothing using the hundreds of millions he made with his startups in totally different fields (where he coded and designed complex systems), is lead rocket designer at the first private reusable rocket company, has overseen every detail on the first aspirational EV company, and in his free times he's trying to improve infrastructure-scale tunnel digging (a field that basically has been stagnant for decades, like rockets were) and designs things like the hyperloop.. But yeah, some random engineers are saying they're better than him ::)

Funny, I was just writing about this here 2 days ago... https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-30/crypto-exchange-bitfinex-tether-said-to-get-subpoenaed-by-cftc https://twitter.com/Bitfinexed/status/958420215301394432 Also: https://www.recode.net/2018/1/30/16950926/facebook-mark-zuckerberg-bans-crypto-advertising-bitcoin-james-altucher

I think Amazon probably brought forward the idea but even them didn't have the critical mass of employees to make this make sense, so they went to BRK and JPM.

New book by Steven Pinker. Not out yet, but Bill Gates wrote a pretty glowing recommendation for it: https://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/Enlightenment-Now You can pre-order here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0525427570/

There's a lot that is technically interesting, though I think that's probably overhyped at this point. There's also a lot that is incredibly worrying, wrt to the amount of fraud and scams and BS flying at high velocity. Looks like Tether might be a giant fraud that might blow up a lot more than just itself later on since so much of it is recycled into other things... I've been interested in cryptography since the late 1990s, I've first looked into BTC and cryptocurrencies in 2011. It's interesting stuff for sure, but the mania around it is getting tiresome. It's mostly getting a lot of attention because of the price action, not so much because of any actual products or problems that are being solved, which is always worrying. There's some stuff in there that I agree with: http://www.investorfieldguide.com/preston/ I prefer investing to speculating anyway (I don't have that gambler gene -- don't get pleasure out of it even if I win), so I keep an eye on it for the entertainment value. Or I might change my mind at any point as I gather more info, but so far I'm following it the same way I follow CPU architectures and EV technology.

Humans are social animals. Those lower in the hierarchy always have to try to take pot shots at the top dog to try to raise themselves up. It's pretty stupid, and makes them look weak and insecure, IMO.

Entertainment. That's the main way to be assured of getting net positive value out of this show right now. So your opinion is that that the worlds first judgment resistant + trustless asset isn't worth anything? I didn't say anything of the sort.

Entertainment. That's the main way to be assured of getting net positive value out of this show right now.

"Coincheck Says It Lost Crypto Coins Valued at About $400 Million" Oops I guess.

https://hackernoon.com/extortion-police-raids-and-secrecy-inside-the-venezuelan-bitcoin-mining-world-6e97a25e7402

Falcon Heavy static fire:

That support for Canadian markets is weak. Unless they file in the U.S. it just shows the name with a chart for the share price. http://www.rocketfinancial.com/Charts.aspx?fID=356947&r=3650&t=1 More support for the Canadian market is coming, it's a new feature that isn't entirely implemented yet afaik.