5 ms·

I feel literally like Abe Simpson "I used to be with 'it', but then they changed what 'it' was. Now what I'm with isn’t 'it' anymore and what's 'it' seems weird

I feel literally like Abe Simpson "I used to be with 'it', but then they changed what 'it' was. Now what I'm with isn’t 'it' anymore and what's 'it' seems weird and scary. It’ll happen to you!" We used to buy things that had physical value, now we just buy memes.

trompetenaccoun 5y ago
Well, in case you're referring to cryptocurrency, isn't that initial claims fraud case one of the good old kind? Some things never change. It's crazy how much our (financial) world is built on fraud. The cases that are discovered and where the perpetrators get convicted are only the tip of the iceberg.
vmception 5y ago
$SHIB actually does have cashflow, they built an exchange with decent volume and about $500mm in assets on it so far. Volume fees at any price flow to $SHIB token holders. The - therefore - price multiple is still meme specific and can evaporate at any time But I mean we would be having the same conversation if this was a $100mm marketcap coin, instead of a $36bn marketcap coin, but the criticism would be less true so yeah just something to see, not exactly a counterpoint, just some additional peculiarity that makes you go “huh, well how about that”
- joosters 5y ago
  It's the same as any other crypto coin; a negative-sum game, where investors (as a whole) are guaranteed to lose. https://www.ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/bitcoin/2018-07-18-0148-vaneck-solidx-etf-comments.pdf https://www.ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/bitcoin/2018-07-18-0148-va...
  - vmception 5y ago
    Many cryptos, including SHIB, have revenue, which is the crux of that authors argument against bitcoin 3 years ago People saw the criticism and created something else actually due to market forces Its like wow there are so many good criticisms and you pick that one immediately after I gave you newer information that supersedes the main point of your old information?
  - johanneskanybal 5y ago
    Don't want to be grouped with some shiba fanatic but lots of misunderstandings in that paper (although always nice to hear arguments from both sides to avoid becoming a fanatic). The biggest root misunderstanding in the paper is comparing bitcoin to shares of a company instead of say usd. There's also a ton of final consumer use cases nowadays and don't really buy the negative sum game either, would be fun if he used the same logic on shares here for comparison but no surprise he doesn't.
    - rmbyrro 5y ago
      Exactly. Problem is Bitcoin was meant to be a currency. But it still cannot feasibly be a currency, so in practice people see it as an investment vehicle, which it's not supposed to be
      - johanneskanybal 5y ago
        Store of value proposition has never been stronger though which is the driving force behind this speculative wave. Simply the idea has never been more sound and that's trivially easy to understand to most.
    - vmception 5y ago
      > Don't want to be grouped with some shiba fanatic > But I mean we would be having the same conversation if this was a $100mm marketcap coin, instead of a $36bn marketcap coin, but the criticism would be less true apparently pointing out the limitations of a low-hanging fruit criticism makes one a fanatic with no discussion on the common enterprise generating revenue, just the association with the meme brand. zero discussion on whether the observer caught or missed all of the alpha, zero discussion on whether there was any conflict or any interest in the underlying asset, zero verification of whether the aforementioned exchange product created actually had the $500mm in assets and growing or daily trade volume even though people - including a Brazilian University's professor in a comment to a US securities regulator - have been trying to compare crypto assets to equities or a commodity supported by cashflow for an entire decade. the irony being that without the token nobody would have noticed this 4 month old exchange generating $30mm-$490mm daily volume existed - earning fees no matter what the nature of the volume is - but the existence of the token and accessible branding prompts otherwise intelligent people to shut their mind off to any discussion about it, not even considering to even look at the product. just call the person that did look, or at least someone else that would look, a fanatic. probably hyperbole, as they feel the need to blend in to elevate their own opinion without similar exclusion, but frustrating none the less. and doubling down makes me look like a fanatic, well played, ser historians: this is the state of crypto discussions in 2021, just want a couple people now, and more people in the future, to see that.
kybernetikos 5y ago
> We used to buy things that had physical value, now we just buy memes. Money doesn't really have physical value, only speculative (you want it because you trust that someone else will want it in the future). Shares in public companies don't really have physical value unless you own enough to change the management. Sure you 'own' that fraction of the company and their assets, but the managers of the company don't ever have to pay you out any of it. Almost all the value of a share for most people is in its speculative value. Art generally doesn't really have physical value, the value is almost entirely in the story that goes with any specific piece. This isn't just true of modern art, being part of the story of the Mona Lisa is much more important than the aesthetic experience of looking at it (they let plebs do that for free!). Education certainly isn't something with physical value. Sometimes it has utility value for what you can do with it, but more often it's just something that people want you to have because it distinguishes you from people who don't have it. Insurance doesn't have physical value, it's more the value of feeling safe, which is a meme. Entertainment is almost entirely memes and people have been paying to listen to music or watch drama for millenia. Even the stuff that we 'used to buy' that was physical, like a car actually has a huge segment of its value that was meme based. You can tell by watching what companies advertise for. They rarely advertise for utility, they advertise for meme value. Certainly monuments like cathedrals, huge stone circles, shrines etc were memetic as well as physical, and humans spent a phenomenal amount of effort on those things. A huge amount of stuff that people spend money on has been primarily mimetic going back into prehistory.
- johanneskanybal 5y ago
  By taking things to their extreme you end up grouping things together that in practice behaves very differently, that's not really a practical approach. Disagree with too many points to list but in general the asset list is more like "things that generate money" (shares/farms/rent), speculative assets. Then you added a more meta category that's not about assets.
  - kybernetikos 5y ago
    I think maybe our disagreement is based on us talking about different categories. The category I'm looking at is not 'things that generate money', and I'm not taking things to an extreme here. I'm much more talking about things that have value only because people think they have value. That's mimetic value. These things are valuable because the meme of them being valuable has infected society. Like money, or art, or education (except in narrow practical fields) or entertainment or a notional (but rarely practical) ownership claim on a company, or intellectual property, None of those things would have any value at all if people didn't think of them as valuable, or treat them as valuable, or respect them. Notably, a farm does not fall into this category. It is a physical asset that produces other physical assets; that's utility value, not mimetic value. You can eat its output for food or burn it for energy. The more meta stuff is about how even physical and utility value assets are often partially acquired based on mimetic elements. So people pay more for a car that makes them feel like an international spy than they do for a car that gets them from A to B, so the meme of feeling like an international spy has increased the value of the simple physical asset.
vsareto 5y ago
I feel like this has just been a casino built with entertainment and memes from the last 10 years. No one wants the old school casino experience of smoke-filled rooms, classic table games, and shows any more. We just want to buy random tokens with questionable value, see a Shiba Inu dog show, and walk past a bunch of TV walls with Twitch streamers talking about how they got rich with some new coin on the way to buy legal weed. The whole movement is really good at making you feel dumb for following safe and conservative career advice like "do something practical, save your money, and retire eventually (maybe)". Why sit through yet another technical interview when you could just buy the right stock/cryptocoin?
- nefitty 5y ago
  It reminds me a lot of Terror Management Theory. Sure, there are apex predators who are knowingly scamming and defrauding people, but how do I describe a coworker who is enthusiastic about the $1000 of Bitcoin he has? Even a cursory, technically-minded dig in the garden shows that there's nothing at the center. Smart contracts require oracles. NFTs are addresses that depend on an external interface to make any sense of them. Blockchains are expensive public immutable databases... I tend to filter a lot of these crowd behaviors through the lens of Terror Management Theory. In this case, convincing others that crypto has some true value might not only benefit investors financially, but also reinforce their identity as part of some important movement. I think it's been a tragic waste of economic resources and brain power. Talk about "the smartest people of my generation spend their time figuring out how to make me click ads." If all of this energy had been pointed in the direction of innovating against the direct problem of abundance vs scarcity, it would have avoided becoming a joke. Otherwise, it's just a mimicry of the economic patterns that have dominated the West since its inception, and thus, not revolutionary in the least bit.
  - rmbyrro 5y ago
    I used to think just like that (in general, not this particular topic). Today, it looks to me as a presumptuous way of considering what each person decides to do with they time and lives. One could as easily argue the oxygen you and I are breathing right now is a big waste of resources. Let's just let people do what they want to do. If they wanna spin up a machine and run a hash algo all day, just let them. What's the real difference compared to you playing a game? Or watching YouTube? Or whatever you'd like to? They're not forcing us into anything, let them in peace...
beervirus 5y ago
We’re one big crash away from a return to value investing. This is fun while it lasts though.
- not2b 5y ago
  And then it will flip back again. We had a big crash in 2008 and there seems to be a lot of evidence that the lessons have already been forgotten and the same mistakes are being made again.

trompetenaccoun 5y ago

Well, in case you're referring to cryptocurrency, isn't that initial claims fraud case one of the good old kind? Some things never change. It's crazy how much our (financial) world is built on fraud. The cases that are discovered and where the perpetrators get convicted are only the tip of the iceberg.

vmception 5y ago

$SHIB actually does have cashflow, they built an exchange with decent volume and about $500mm in assets on it so far. Volume fees at any price flow to $SHIB token holders. The - therefore - price multiple is still meme specific and can evaporate at any time But I mean we would be having the same conversation if this was a $100mm marketcap coin, instead of a $36bn marketcap coin, but the criticism would be less true so yeah just something to see, not exactly a counterpoint, just some additional peculiarity that makes you go “huh, well how about that”

joosters 5y ago
It's the same as any other crypto coin; a negative-sum game, where investors (as a whole) are guaranteed to lose. https://www.ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/bitcoin/2018-07-18-0148-vaneck-solidx-etf-comments.pdf https://www.ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/bitcoin/2018-07-18-0148-va...
- vmception 5y ago
  Many cryptos, including SHIB, have revenue, which is the crux of that authors argument against bitcoin 3 years ago People saw the criticism and created something else actually due to market forces Its like wow there are so many good criticisms and you pick that one immediately after I gave you newer information that supersedes the main point of your old information?
- johanneskanybal 5y ago
  Don't want to be grouped with some shiba fanatic but lots of misunderstandings in that paper (although always nice to hear arguments from both sides to avoid becoming a fanatic). The biggest root misunderstanding in the paper is comparing bitcoin to shares of a company instead of say usd. There's also a ton of final consumer use cases nowadays and don't really buy the negative sum game either, would be fun if he used the same logic on shares here for comparison but no surprise he doesn't.
  - rmbyrro 5y ago
    Exactly. Problem is Bitcoin was meant to be a currency. But it still cannot feasibly be a currency, so in practice people see it as an investment vehicle, which it's not supposed to be
    - johanneskanybal 5y ago
      Store of value proposition has never been stronger though which is the driving force behind this speculative wave. Simply the idea has never been more sound and that's trivially easy to understand to most.
  - vmception 5y ago
    > Don't want to be grouped with some shiba fanatic > But I mean we would be having the same conversation if this was a $100mm marketcap coin, instead of a $36bn marketcap coin, but the criticism would be less true apparently pointing out the limitations of a low-hanging fruit criticism makes one a fanatic with no discussion on the common enterprise generating revenue, just the association with the meme brand. zero discussion on whether the observer caught or missed all of the alpha, zero discussion on whether there was any conflict or any interest in the underlying asset, zero verification of whether the aforementioned exchange product created actually had the $500mm in assets and growing or daily trade volume even though people - including a Brazilian University's professor in a comment to a US securities regulator - have been trying to compare crypto assets to equities or a commodity supported by cashflow for an entire decade. the irony being that without the token nobody would have noticed this 4 month old exchange generating $30mm-$490mm daily volume existed - earning fees no matter what the nature of the volume is - but the existence of the token and accessible branding prompts otherwise intelligent people to shut their mind off to any discussion about it, not even considering to even look at the product. just call the person that did look, or at least someone else that would look, a fanatic. probably hyperbole, as they feel the need to blend in to elevate their own opinion without similar exclusion, but frustrating none the less. and doubling down makes me look like a fanatic, well played, ser historians: this is the state of crypto discussions in 2021, just want a couple people now, and more people in the future, to see that.

kybernetikos 5y ago

> We used to buy things that had physical value, now we just buy memes. Money doesn't really have physical value, only speculative (you want it because you trust that someone else will want it in the future). Shares in public companies don't really have physical value unless you own enough to change the management. Sure you 'own' that fraction of the company and their assets, but the managers of the company don't ever have to pay you out any of it. Almost all the value of a share for most people is in its speculative value. Art generally doesn't really have physical value, the value is almost entirely in the story that goes with any specific piece. This isn't just true of modern art, being part of the story of the Mona Lisa is much more important than the aesthetic experience of looking at it (they let plebs do that for free!). Education certainly isn't something with physical value. Sometimes it has utility value for what you can do with it, but more often it's just something that people want you to have because it distinguishes you from people who don't have it. Insurance doesn't have physical value, it's more the value of feeling safe, which is a meme. Entertainment is almost entirely memes and people have been paying to listen to music or watch drama for millenia. Even the stuff that we 'used to buy' that was physical, like a car actually has a huge segment of its value that was meme based. You can tell by watching what companies advertise for. They rarely advertise for utility, they advertise for meme value. Certainly monuments like cathedrals, huge stone circles, shrines etc were memetic as well as physical, and humans spent a phenomenal amount of effort on those things. A huge amount of stuff that people spend money on has been primarily mimetic going back into prehistory.

johanneskanybal 5y ago
By taking things to their extreme you end up grouping things together that in practice behaves very differently, that's not really a practical approach. Disagree with too many points to list but in general the asset list is more like "things that generate money" (shares/farms/rent), speculative assets. Then you added a more meta category that's not about assets.
- kybernetikos 5y ago
  I think maybe our disagreement is based on us talking about different categories. The category I'm looking at is not 'things that generate money', and I'm not taking things to an extreme here. I'm much more talking about things that have value only because people think they have value. That's mimetic value. These things are valuable because the meme of them being valuable has infected society. Like money, or art, or education (except in narrow practical fields) or entertainment or a notional (but rarely practical) ownership claim on a company, or intellectual property, None of those things would have any value at all if people didn't think of them as valuable, or treat them as valuable, or respect them. Notably, a farm does not fall into this category. It is a physical asset that produces other physical assets; that's utility value, not mimetic value. You can eat its output for food or burn it for energy. The more meta stuff is about how even physical and utility value assets are often partially acquired based on mimetic elements. So people pay more for a car that makes them feel like an international spy than they do for a car that gets them from A to B, so the meme of feeling like an international spy has increased the value of the simple physical asset.

vsareto 5y ago

I feel like this has just been a casino built with entertainment and memes from the last 10 years. No one wants the old school casino experience of smoke-filled rooms, classic table games, and shows any more. We just want to buy random tokens with questionable value, see a Shiba Inu dog show, and walk past a bunch of TV walls with Twitch streamers talking about how they got rich with some new coin on the way to buy legal weed. The whole movement is really good at making you feel dumb for following safe and conservative career advice like "do something practical, save your money, and retire eventually (maybe)". Why sit through yet another technical interview when you could just buy the right stock/cryptocoin?

nefitty 5y ago
It reminds me a lot of Terror Management Theory. Sure, there are apex predators who are knowingly scamming and defrauding people, but how do I describe a coworker who is enthusiastic about the $1000 of Bitcoin he has? Even a cursory, technically-minded dig in the garden shows that there's nothing at the center. Smart contracts require oracles. NFTs are addresses that depend on an external interface to make any sense of them. Blockchains are expensive public immutable databases... I tend to filter a lot of these crowd behaviors through the lens of Terror Management Theory. In this case, convincing others that crypto has some true value might not only benefit investors financially, but also reinforce their identity as part of some important movement. I think it's been a tragic waste of economic resources and brain power. Talk about "the smartest people of my generation spend their time figuring out how to make me click ads." If all of this energy had been pointed in the direction of innovating against the direct problem of abundance vs scarcity, it would have avoided becoming a joke. Otherwise, it's just a mimicry of the economic patterns that have dominated the West since its inception, and thus, not revolutionary in the least bit.
- rmbyrro 5y ago
  I used to think just like that (in general, not this particular topic). Today, it looks to me as a presumptuous way of considering what each person decides to do with they time and lives. One could as easily argue the oxygen you and I are breathing right now is a big waste of resources. Let's just let people do what they want to do. If they wanna spin up a machine and run a hash algo all day, just let them. What's the real difference compared to you playing a game? Or watching YouTube? Or whatever you'd like to? They're not forcing us into anything, let them in peace...

beervirus 5y ago

We’re one big crash away from a return to value investing. This is fun while it lasts though.

not2b 5y ago
And then it will flip back again. We had a big crash in 2008 and there seems to be a lot of evidence that the lessons have already been forgotten and the same mistakes are being made again.