4 ms·

We Kept Almost Making Money

58 points by xrd 7y ago

kgwgk 7y ago
“When people tell you that cryptocurrency will enable smart contracts on the blockchain that supersede traditional court systems and automate trust, allowing frictionless commerce with no need for archaic subjective state justice systems, remember the time people asked the police to dig up a corpse to ask it who stole their Bitcoins!”
- yarrel 7y ago
  Yes it's a great example of how not using those systems leads to problems. "Not your keys, not your coins" is an old cryptocurrency motto. Would-be critics of cryptocurrency seem to be slowly rediscovering it.
  - perl4ever 7y ago
    The very first paragraph of the section on Quadriga is about that: "For a while Bitcoin people got really into putting their Bitcoins in “cold storage” on hardware wallets disconnected from the internet, etching the private keys for the wallets on metal plates, and burying the plates in their backyards. Because Bitcoin was the future of money, see, and the future of money is burying metal in your backyard." You don't of course need crypto to bury precious metal in a secret spot. You could call it "security through obscurity"...
- jkoudys 7y ago
  I'm CTO of a legal tech company, and we've set pretty realistic goals: define a good schema to describe contracts, link them to relevant knowledge, and track how they change over time like git. We use some NLP for figuring out how a contract is structured and identifying clauses. The number of competitors we saw start up 2+ years ago, promising a fully-automated lawyer, predicting outcomes to cases, building smart-contracts that would somehow be perfect and not ever be contested or need to keep up with case law, getting funded was shocking. Less shocking is how many of them I've seen collapse under their utterly unworkable premise over the past 6 months. Worst part is, this is actually bad for us, because all the baseless hype has eroded trust in the industry.
  - woodnich 7y ago
    Just curious - what company is that?
Scoundreller 7y ago
WRT Aramco ‘s IPO: > By the way, all of this is … sort of an obvious trick? Like, go public with a limited float, put the stock in friendly hands, give investors incentives to buy and not sell, get a high price and then hand the stock off to index funds to consolidate that price and make a profit for the early investors. But isn’t that what short sellers prevent? Every index investor basically bets on there being active long and short investors keeping everything in check.
- qqqwerty 7y ago
  > limited float, put the stock in friendly hands That part is key. In order to short the stock you need someone to lend you shares first. If there is high demand from short sellers relative to the available float, then the cost to borrow the stock will go up, making the short position more expensive to maintain.
- perl4ever 7y ago
  I'm not saying it works in reality either way, but I think theoretically short sellers are unnecessary for accurate prices. I may have even read that in Levine's column some time ago. Don't remember the reasoning though.
- swarnie_ 7y ago
  Who exactly is including SA in their index fund> I bet its a tiny fraction of index markers.
draw_down 7y ago
T. Rowe Price's story shows that it was possible to see what was going on and hit the brakes. It has been pretty remarkable watching Neumann be so vilified throughout this, as if he conned the poor billionaire investors. As if they were just some good-hearted but gullible hayseeds taken in by a big-city slicker.
dmix 7y ago
Does Levine talk about WeWork in all of his articles?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- gumby 7y ago
  No he also has a running joke about the the SEC’s seeming view that “everything is fraud”. He has said that for some topics like WeWork he’d like to stop writing about them yet they continue to have absurdist revelations that can even be enlightening, or at least amusing. Hovinian was like that for a few months.
  - perl4ever 7y ago
    Also, he used to almost always have a section called "people are worried about bond liquidity" although sometimes it was something else, like unicorns. Some recent column had a bit where he should have mentioned bond liquidity and he didn't, so maybe he's gotten tired of it.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
jkoudys 7y ago
The biggest scam WeWork pulled was only lightly touched on: getting investors to compare them to a software company. I'll never understand how a group trying to monopolize office space so they could jack up the price in the future has anything at all to do with tech.
Amira11 7y ago
Bitcoin is totally secured and a good source of investment if you have the right information. According to report many leading economists, crypto enthusiasts like myself, definitely! bitcoin will reach six figures but it will only take time sooner than later. You do not need a lot of money to invest in bitcoin, trust me i started with a small amount and I have made so much money in just a couple of months. I made about 78,000 dollars on my first week and this would not have been possible without the help of my very good friend that introduced me to the best bitcoin investment platform online. I reached out to them via their email at..(Digitalassetsconsultancy AT hotmail com ) I communicated with them for about 6 hours and asked a lot of questions and they gave me great answers and I was very much convinced so I subscribed to their investment package. I received almost 2000 dollars the next day and I said to myself that I will take my time to share this with the world because I really believe in the blockchain technology and not just the money or gains. I was surprised at how much money one can make just by investing and not doing anything. Many many thanks to the digital assets consultancy team for helping out. My first wallet was hacked by online spammers and they helped me to recover it with my funds back in it. I humbly have to add this that I will be buying my first house next week, what more can I say Christmas gift came in very early lol : )
Amira11 7y ago
Bitcoin is secured and a good source of investment if you have the right information. According to report many leading economists, crypto enthusiasts like myself, definitely! bitcoin will reach six figures but it will only take time sooner than later. You do not need a lot of money to invest in bitcoin, trust me i started with a small amount and I have made so much money in just a couple of months. I made about 78,000 dollars on my first week and this would not have been possible without the help of my very good friend that introduced me to the best bitcoin investment platform online. I reached out to them via their email at..(Digitalassetsconsultancy AT hotmail com ) I communicated with them for about 6 hours and asked a lot of questions and they gave me great answers and I was very much convinced so I subscribed to their investment package. I received almost 2000 dollars the next day and I said to myself that I will take my time to share this with the world because I really believe in the blockchain technology and not just the money or gains. I was surprised at how much money one can make just by investing and not doing anything. Many many thanks to the digital assets consultancy team for helping out. My first wallet was hacked by online spammers and they helped me to recover it with my funds back in it. I humbly have to add this that I will be buying my first house next week, what more can I say Christmas gift came in very early lol : )

58 points by xrd 7y ago

“When people tell you that cryptocurrency will enable smart contracts on the blockchain that supersede traditional court systems and automate trust, allowing frictionless commerce with no need for archaic subjective state justice systems, remember the time people asked the police to dig up a corpse to ask it who stole their Bitcoins!”

yarrel 7y ago
Yes it's a great example of how not using those systems leads to problems. "Not your keys, not your coins" is an old cryptocurrency motto. Would-be critics of cryptocurrency seem to be slowly rediscovering it.
- perl4ever 7y ago
  The very first paragraph of the section on Quadriga is about that: "For a while Bitcoin people got really into putting their Bitcoins in “cold storage” on hardware wallets disconnected from the internet, etching the private keys for the wallets on metal plates, and burying the plates in their backyards. Because Bitcoin was the future of money, see, and the future of money is burying metal in your backyard." You don't of course need crypto to bury precious metal in a secret spot. You could call it "security through obscurity"...
jkoudys 7y ago
I'm CTO of a legal tech company, and we've set pretty realistic goals: define a good schema to describe contracts, link them to relevant knowledge, and track how they change over time like git. We use some NLP for figuring out how a contract is structured and identifying clauses. The number of competitors we saw start up 2+ years ago, promising a fully-automated lawyer, predicting outcomes to cases, building smart-contracts that would somehow be perfect and not ever be contested or need to keep up with case law, getting funded was shocking. Less shocking is how many of them I've seen collapse under their utterly unworkable premise over the past 6 months. Worst part is, this is actually bad for us, because all the baseless hype has eroded trust in the industry.
- woodnich 7y ago
  Just curious - what company is that?

Scoundreller 7y ago

WRT Aramco ‘s IPO: > By the way, all of this is … sort of an obvious trick? Like, go public with a limited float, put the stock in friendly hands, give investors incentives to buy and not sell, get a high price and then hand the stock off to index funds to consolidate that price and make a profit for the early investors. But isn’t that what short sellers prevent? Every index investor basically bets on there being active long and short investors keeping everything in check.

qqqwerty 7y ago
> limited float, put the stock in friendly hands That part is key. In order to short the stock you need someone to lend you shares first. If there is high demand from short sellers relative to the available float, then the cost to borrow the stock will go up, making the short position more expensive to maintain.
perl4ever 7y ago
I'm not saying it works in reality either way, but I think theoretically short sellers are unnecessary for accurate prices. I may have even read that in Levine's column some time ago. Don't remember the reasoning though.
swarnie_ 7y ago
Who exactly is including SA in their index fund> I bet its a tiny fraction of index markers.

draw_down 7y ago

T. Rowe Price's story shows that it was possible to see what was going on and hit the brakes. It has been pretty remarkable watching Neumann be so vilified throughout this, as if he conned the poor billionaire investors. As if they were just some good-hearted but gullible hayseeds taken in by a big-city slicker.

dmix 7y ago

Does Levine talk about WeWork in all of his articles?

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
gumby 7y ago
No he also has a running joke about the the SEC’s seeming view that “everything is fraud”. He has said that for some topics like WeWork he’d like to stop writing about them yet they continue to have absurdist revelations that can even be enlightening, or at least amusing. Hovinian was like that for a few months.
- perl4ever 7y ago
  Also, he used to almost always have a section called "people are worried about bond liquidity" although sometimes it was something else, like unicorns. Some recent column had a bit where he should have mentioned bond liquidity and he didn't, so maybe he's gotten tired of it.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

jkoudys 7y ago

The biggest scam WeWork pulled was only lightly touched on: getting investors to compare them to a software company. I'll never understand how a group trying to monopolize office space so they could jack up the price in the future has anything at all to do with tech.

Amira11 7y ago

Bitcoin is totally secured and a good source of investment if you have the right information. According to report many leading economists, crypto enthusiasts like myself, definitely! bitcoin will reach six figures but it will only take time sooner than later. You do not need a lot of money to invest in bitcoin, trust me i started with a small amount and I have made so much money in just a couple of months. I made about 78,000 dollars on my first week and this would not have been possible without the help of my very good friend that introduced me to the best bitcoin investment platform online. I reached out to them via their email at..(Digitalassetsconsultancy AT hotmail com ) I communicated with them for about 6 hours and asked a lot of questions and they gave me great answers and I was very much convinced so I subscribed to their investment package. I received almost 2000 dollars the next day and I said to myself that I will take my time to share this with the world because I really believe in the blockchain technology and not just the money or gains. I was surprised at how much money one can make just by investing and not doing anything. Many many thanks to the digital assets consultancy team for helping out. My first wallet was hacked by online spammers and they helped me to recover it with my funds back in it. I humbly have to add this that I will be buying my first house next week, what more can I say Christmas gift came in very early lol : )

Amira11 7y ago

Bitcoin is secured and a good source of investment if you have the right information. According to report many leading economists, crypto enthusiasts like myself, definitely! bitcoin will reach six figures but it will only take time sooner than later. You do not need a lot of money to invest in bitcoin, trust me i started with a small amount and I have made so much money in just a couple of months. I made about 78,000 dollars on my first week and this would not have been possible without the help of my very good friend that introduced me to the best bitcoin investment platform online. I reached out to them via their email at..(Digitalassetsconsultancy AT hotmail com ) I communicated with them for about 6 hours and asked a lot of questions and they gave me great answers and I was very much convinced so I subscribed to their investment package. I received almost 2000 dollars the next day and I said to myself that I will take my time to share this with the world because I really believe in the blockchain technology and not just the money or gains. I was surprised at how much money one can make just by investing and not doing anything. Many many thanks to the digital assets consultancy team for helping out. My first wallet was hacked by online spammers and they helped me to recover it with my funds back in it. I humbly have to add this that I will be buying my first house next week, what more can I say Christmas gift came in very early lol : )