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First I’ve heard of this interview question but if anyone is wondering here is a guaranteed way to fail a job interview with Thiel by answering the question thu
by dools 3y ago
First I’ve heard of this interview question but if anyone is wondering here is a guaranteed way to fail a job interview with Thiel by answering the question thusly:
Money has never existed without taxation
- nvm0n2 3y agoHe would undoubtably respond with, "What about cryptocurrencies?".
- sanderjd 3y agoWhat about them? Taxation applies to them...
- dools 3y agoTo which I would of course reply that they are not money ;)
- chrisco255 3y agoTo which I would reply that money is defined by three properties: 1. Store of Value 2. Unit of Account 3. Medium of Exchange Of which it's fair to say that several crypto currencies fit that bill.
- a_bonobo 3y agoOh good, so Beanie Babies are also money :)
- ensignavenger 3y agoBeanie Babies would make a rather poor unit of account. As at any given time, two of the same model Beanie Baby can be worth two very different amounts in trade based on their condition. Whereas a dollar bill does not matter what its condition is (at least within a reasonable range), it is still worth a dollar. Also, two different models of Beanie Babies will vary in value with relation to each other, whereas a one dollar bill will generally always be worth 1/100th of a 100 dollar bill.
- dools 3y agoI disagree with that definition of money. I don't think it actually defines what money is or what it does. I think that if you want to think of money in terms of "value" that rather than a "store" of value, it is a "record" of value. If you want to think of it as a unit of account, it has to be a state unit of account in order to actually function as money. And finally I think that the function of money as a medium of exchange is actually a side effect; that is to say that money is the most liquid asset because it is created by an obligation in common to all citizens of a sovereign entity. As such, it is the most likely medium of exchange because it is universally accepted. However, anything can be a medium of exchange. Hot rocks can be used to heat a room, but you wouldn't call a pile of hot rocks a heater. In the same way, virtually anything can be a medium of exchange, but money (by virtue of being created by the imposition of a tax liability) is the most effective medium of exchange. My definition of money is: a credit that can be used to extinguish a tax liability imposed by a sovereign. Everything else is a commodity.
- kmeisthax 3y agoWhich ones? Every crypto that gets any amount of usage immediately hits up against deliberate scaling limits in the consensus mechanism[0] and stops being a useful medium of exchange. Cryptocurrency also has extreme speculative risks, which means that it's useless as a unit of account or a store of value. Fiat currencies don't have these problems[1]. Because they are instituted by a government that forces people to use it, they have a large volume of economic activity which makes it harder for the currency to swing dramatically in value. The reason why Bitcoin can fluctuate so wildly is because few actually use it like a currency, so there's nothing to buffer against market manipulators and forex speculators. [0] Because crypto needs global consensus over every satoshi in the system, all transactions need to be widely propagated to all full nodes, which imposes strict limits on how much transaction data can be processed at once. If the limits are too high then only large institutions can run full nodes which is centralizing. Of course, literally everything else in crypto is centralizing, because centralization is the gravitational force of economics. [1] No, Zimbabwe doesn't count.
- nvm0n2 3y agoI suspect Thiel has got bored with such debates at least ten years ago tbh and given his history with PayPal quite possibly 30.
- ninkendo 3y agoTry investing in them and not paying taxes on the gains, and see what happens.
- sebzim4500 3y agoTo be fair, at least thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of people have done that and maybe a few of them were punished.
- foul 3y agoDo you prefer "Money never existed without levy", then?
- Karellen 3y agoWhat about network/transaction/gas fees? They're charged by the entity that issues the currency (the network/the miners), for the act of using the currency, which I think could reasonably be classified as a form of tax.
- dools 3y agoThey could be considered a transaction tax and/or payment processing fee. But they are not the reason people would be willing to accept a token in exchange for some real resource like labour, because unless you’re already using that token you are not obliged to pay for anything using that token. Demand for that token is thus entirely speculative and could evaporate at any time. Since there is no issuing authority that guarantees to accept the token in order to exonerate some obligation we have in common the last person holding the token simply loses the game.
- sanderjd 3y agoYeah in practice, it's almost certainly important for the answer to be something that most people don't believe but which Peter Thiel does believe. It's just the typical "are you like me?" interview. If the interviewer is a conformist, they are looking for a conformist, if they are a contrarian, they are looking for a contrarian. Same as it ever was.
- bradleyjg 3y agoI’ve never met the man, but in my experience with more locally famous/infamous people with roughly similar reputations is that there are few things they love more than a really strong intellectual sparring partner. Of course many boring posters on HN will never accept that because their models of the world only allow for 1 dimensional villains on the other side of any ideological disagreements.
- dools 3y agoMaybe you've never tried to tell a tax-is-theft libertarian that money only exists as a result of taxation.
- pjc50 3y agoRender unto Caesar on the server. (Mandatory HN joke explanation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Render_unto_Caesar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Render_unto_Caesar plus a pun on the original thread title)
- abecedarius 3y agoOK, my model of Thiel would say: are you offering me a thesis from bestselling author David Graeber, or is this a view that actually very few people hold which you're disguising as a popular one for some reason? (i.e. he'd reject this as boringly conventional before it got to the level of does it make sense? I've only read a little bit of Thiel, like 2-3 blog posts worth.)
- dools 3y agoDisguising as popular? Also I know Graeber talks about this in his book Debt but I haven’t read it because I hate his bullshit jobs work so much.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]