8 ms·

What Happened In 2020

69 points by pixelmonkey 6y ago

arkj 6y ago
> Odd as it may seem, a lot more people want to buy Bitcoin at $28,000 than wanted to buy it at $5000. That’s just how things are. And it is important to understand that. This is a classic line.
- paulpauper 6y ago
  then by that logic it should go to infinity.
  - TigeriusKirk 6y ago
    As the first sentence in that paragraph says, it's explicitly discussing a speculative bubble. "There is no question that crypto is in yet another speculative bubble"
mark_l_watson 6y ago
Great, largely because it is short, synopsis of last year. Author nailed down what have been my random thoughts on the new economy and ways to do business. I started work at a medical AI company in September that will never reopen its offices again. I also liked the acknowledgment that so many people are hurting badly financially now, the problem just keeps getting worse.
lifeisstillgood 6y ago
>>> wasted on commuting and how much more productive we have all become without it. Woah there. As a father to young children I have become massively less productive and realise both the uncaptured value of parent provided childcare in the GDP stats plus the role that education plays in releasing workers for the rest of the economy. Teachers unions - the time to push for raises is now!
- Hedepig 6y ago
  I have an 8 month old, my productivity has definitely increased working from home, granted there is the odd moment I am taken away from my work, on the whole though it is a net gain. Not to mention the lack of commuting having a positive effect on my wallet Perhaps with toddlers things will be more difficult, but my spouse and I have an agreement to treat my work space as an office and only disturb when absolutely necessary. I do miss the office environment though
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - lifeisstillgood 6y ago
    Oh you have a live-in nanny and housekeeper already. But don't worry, after a couple more "start-ups" the live-in Nanny will hit scalability issues, and will need you to concentrate on the Ops side as well, andI warn you that easy solutions like hiring a young underpaid intern may result in industrial action !
    - Hedepig 6y ago
      I mustn't have explained my situation clearly I'm a junior/mid Web dev who has an 8 month old, my wife is on maternity leave, when she goes back to work he will go to nursery.
      - lifeisstillgood 6y ago
        I dont think I signalled my (gentle) sarcasm clearly. I wish you and your wife all the best.
        Hedepig 6y ago
        Blast! No I almost had it, but decided against my intuition. Thank you.
  - curlypaul924 6y ago
hyko 6y ago
Bit of slight of hand there tacking Cryptocurrency onto videoconferencing, electric cars, and online shopping. Cryptocurrency did not prove more useful in 2020 than it did in 2019.
- inthewoods 6y ago
  Yes well said - I'm not a Bitcoin hater or skeptic, but it does not seem any closer to being a currency to actually transact in. Happy to be proven wrong here - are there now a significant number of places to spend Bitcoin?
  - hyko 6y ago
    Yeah, I think the hopes of using it as a currency are pretty much dead tbh. This is evidenced by the fact that the most newsworthy stories are about the value of Bitcoin in U.S. dollars.
simonebrunozzi 6y ago
> There is no question that crypto is in yet another speculative bubble, but like I said, it is speculative bubbles that allow emerging technologies to go mainstream and finance themselves. Odd as it may seem, a lot more people want to buy Bitcoin at $28,000 than wanted to buy it at $5000. Yes, but: if most of that money comes from the pocket of ordinary people, and a bunch of geeks (or the usual Winklevoss twins, Tim Draper [0], etc) will cash out and drive the cost down again, the ones losing a ton of money will be - as usual - the ordinary people. As much as I like Fred Wilson, sometimes I'm really surprised by comments like this one. It seems he's not realizing the danger of this new crypto "bubble", and who's going to pay for it. But "we all have to eat". [1] [0]: https://www.wired.com/2014/07/vaurum/ https://www.wired.com/2014/07/vaurum/ [1]: https://simone.substack.com/p/we-all-have-to-eat https://simone.substack.com/p/we-all-have-to-eat
- ttul 6y ago
  Secondly, how much of the surge in the Bitcoin price is due to manipulation and fraud? Fred states that more people want to buy Bitcoin at $28,000 than at $500. Is that true? Or is it that a handful of market manipulators are printing USD coins and using this fraudulent leverage to boost the value that buyers perceive Bitcoin to have?
  - fourstar 6y ago
    Less fraud than the US treasury.
- nostrademons 6y ago
  The point of his analysis is that you should be taking the other side of the trade. Become a tech person, or a crypto person, or some other recipient of primary capital that's doing something with it. That's how the economy advances: speculative bubbles greatly increase the rewards for doing anything potentially useful related to the new technologies, smart people respond to these incentives by entering the market, the market selects for the best of these "potentially useful" innovations, and then an eventual financial crisis prunes out everything that wasn't useful and reallocates resources to the winners.
jgalt212 6y ago
My 2020 Summary: Powell tricked all the VC's into thinking they were geniuses.
nostrademons 6y ago
The thinking in here echoes Carlota Perez, which shouldn't surprise anyone since Fred Wilson has been a known Perez devotee since c. 2012. In the Perez model, this marks the transition from "irruption" to "frenzy" for the general constellation of 21st century technologies ("the sun, the genome, and the Internet", to take the title of a Freeman Dyson book). Perez's book doesn't really touch on the fractal nature of technological revolutions: published in 2002, it described the WWw as having just moved from "frenzy" to "deployment", which was true for the specific case of the WWw but missed the bigger forest of how software in general would eat the world. We're now starting to see many of the technological developments spawned by the Internet (cloud computing, AI, cryptocurrency, drones, etc.) get more mainstream attention.
benjaminwootton 6y ago
Are people on the ground outside of Silicon Valley seeing this technology boom? I know that Tesla etc are going to the moon, but from my perspective as a small IT services company and many peers in a similar situation, the market is pretty slow and fundraising sounds pretty hard. I think some of this commentary is disconnected from reality.
Gravityloss 6y ago
How is online retail more "tech" than physical stores? How does people not driving hurt gasoline car makers but help electric car makers?

69 points by pixelmonkey 6y ago

arkj 6y ago

> Odd as it may seem, a lot more people want to buy Bitcoin at $28,000 than wanted to buy it at $5000. That’s just how things are. And it is important to understand that. This is a classic line.

paulpauper 6y ago
then by that logic it should go to infinity.
- TigeriusKirk 6y ago
  As the first sentence in that paragraph says, it's explicitly discussing a speculative bubble. "There is no question that crypto is in yet another speculative bubble"

mark_l_watson 6y ago

Great, largely because it is short, synopsis of last year. Author nailed down what have been my random thoughts on the new economy and ways to do business. I started work at a medical AI company in September that will never reopen its offices again. I also liked the acknowledgment that so many people are hurting badly financially now, the problem just keeps getting worse.

lifeisstillgood 6y ago

>>> wasted on commuting and how much more productive we have all become without it. Woah there. As a father to young children I have become massively less productive and realise both the uncaptured value of parent provided childcare in the GDP stats plus the role that education plays in releasing workers for the rest of the economy. Teachers unions - the time to push for raises is now!

Hedepig 6y ago
I have an 8 month old, my productivity has definitely increased working from home, granted there is the odd moment I am taken away from my work, on the whole though it is a net gain. Not to mention the lack of commuting having a positive effect on my wallet Perhaps with toddlers things will be more difficult, but my spouse and I have an agreement to treat my work space as an office and only disturb when absolutely necessary. I do miss the office environment though
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- lifeisstillgood 6y ago
  Oh you have a live-in nanny and housekeeper already. But don't worry, after a couple more "start-ups" the live-in Nanny will hit scalability issues, and will need you to concentrate on the Ops side as well, andI warn you that easy solutions like hiring a young underpaid intern may result in industrial action !
  - Hedepig 6y ago
    I mustn't have explained my situation clearly I'm a junior/mid Web dev who has an 8 month old, my wife is on maternity leave, when she goes back to work he will go to nursery.
    - lifeisstillgood 6y ago
      I dont think I signalled my (gentle) sarcasm clearly. I wish you and your wife all the best.
      - Hedepig 6y ago
        Blast! No I almost had it, but decided against my intuition. Thank you.
- curlypaul924 6y ago

hyko 6y ago

Bit of slight of hand there tacking Cryptocurrency onto videoconferencing, electric cars, and online shopping. Cryptocurrency did not prove more useful in 2020 than it did in 2019.

inthewoods 6y ago
Yes well said - I'm not a Bitcoin hater or skeptic, but it does not seem any closer to being a currency to actually transact in. Happy to be proven wrong here - are there now a significant number of places to spend Bitcoin?
- hyko 6y ago
  Yeah, I think the hopes of using it as a currency are pretty much dead tbh. This is evidenced by the fact that the most newsworthy stories are about the value of Bitcoin in U.S. dollars.

simonebrunozzi 6y ago

> There is no question that crypto is in yet another speculative bubble, but like I said, it is speculative bubbles that allow emerging technologies to go mainstream and finance themselves. Odd as it may seem, a lot more people want to buy Bitcoin at $28,000 than wanted to buy it at $5000. Yes, but: if most of that money comes from the pocket of ordinary people, and a bunch of geeks (or the usual Winklevoss twins, Tim Draper [0], etc) will cash out and drive the cost down again, the ones losing a ton of money will be - as usual - the ordinary people. As much as I like Fred Wilson, sometimes I'm really surprised by comments like this one. It seems he's not realizing the danger of this new crypto "bubble", and who's going to pay for it. But "we all have to eat". [1] [0]: https://www.wired.com/2014/07/vaurum/ https://www.wired.com/2014/07/vaurum/ [1]: https://simone.substack.com/p/we-all-have-to-eat https://simone.substack.com/p/we-all-have-to-eat

ttul 6y ago
Secondly, how much of the surge in the Bitcoin price is due to manipulation and fraud? Fred states that more people want to buy Bitcoin at $28,000 than at $500. Is that true? Or is it that a handful of market manipulators are printing USD coins and using this fraudulent leverage to boost the value that buyers perceive Bitcoin to have?
- fourstar 6y ago
  Less fraud than the US treasury.
nostrademons 6y ago
The point of his analysis is that you should be taking the other side of the trade. Become a tech person, or a crypto person, or some other recipient of primary capital that's doing something with it. That's how the economy advances: speculative bubbles greatly increase the rewards for doing anything potentially useful related to the new technologies, smart people respond to these incentives by entering the market, the market selects for the best of these "potentially useful" innovations, and then an eventual financial crisis prunes out everything that wasn't useful and reallocates resources to the winners.

jgalt212 6y ago

My 2020 Summary: Powell tricked all the VC's into thinking they were geniuses.

nostrademons 6y ago

The thinking in here echoes Carlota Perez, which shouldn't surprise anyone since Fred Wilson has been a known Perez devotee since c. 2012. In the Perez model, this marks the transition from "irruption" to "frenzy" for the general constellation of 21st century technologies ("the sun, the genome, and the Internet", to take the title of a Freeman Dyson book). Perez's book doesn't really touch on the fractal nature of technological revolutions: published in 2002, it described the WWw as having just moved from "frenzy" to "deployment", which was true for the specific case of the WWw but missed the bigger forest of how software in general would eat the world. We're now starting to see many of the technological developments spawned by the Internet (cloud computing, AI, cryptocurrency, drones, etc.) get more mainstream attention.

benjaminwootton 6y ago

Are people on the ground outside of Silicon Valley seeing this technology boom? I know that Tesla etc are going to the moon, but from my perspective as a small IT services company and many peers in a similar situation, the market is pretty slow and fundraising sounds pretty hard. I think some of this commentary is disconnected from reality.

Gravityloss 6y ago

How is online retail more "tech" than physical stores? How does people not driving hurt gasoline car makers but help electric car makers?