wcoenen

48 ms·

571.
by wcoenen 6y ago
A single investment is not strategy though. Think of the investments in Loon, Taara, SpaceX and Google Fiber as part of a larger strategy to bring internet access with decent bandwidth to a larger number of humans. Some investments will not
572.
by wcoenen 6y ago
I wouldn't call this a strategic failure. Google is a big SpaceX investor.
573.
by wcoenen 6y ago
A serious analysis would have to account for mining hardware depreciation. Mining hardware becomes obsolete relatively quickly. So letting it sit idle except for the times when there is free electricity, probably doesn't work.
574.
by wcoenen 6y ago
Kraken has margin trading, which allows you to hold negative positions in BTC. However, this means you are borrowing the BTC that you're selling, and the interest on that is rather high (0.01% per 4 hours). You also need to keep EUR or
575.
by wcoenen 6y ago
The Chapwood index looks a bit weird. It's based on only 500 items (compare to CPI which uses 94,000 according to [1]). And those 500 items[2] include things like "cat grooming", "horseback riding lessons" and &quot
576.
by wcoenen 6y ago
> I sometimes find it very _very_ hard to not see this all a transfer of wealth from the middle/lower classes to the upper classes - either calculated beforehand or just being taken advantage of now I don't think it matters.
577.
by wcoenen 6y ago
On the FRED website, you can easily experiment with dividing one time series by another. Just search for the first time series, then add another from the settings, then plot "a/b". https://fred.stlouisfed.org/
578.
by wcoenen 6y ago
This man was recently in the news for having made $200M on Quantumscape by accident, obviously he doesn't need to work. He's said to work "primarily in environmental philanthropy". https://www.ft.com/con
579.
by wcoenen 6y ago
The Brave browser for Android is chrome-based and blocks ads by default. There is some controversy here on HN around Brave for other reasons, but I found that it works well for this purpose.
580.
by wcoenen 6y ago
Note that we don't sync to the Earth's position in the solar system (sidereal year), but to the seasons (tropical year).
581.
by wcoenen 6y ago
For the non-unix folk: I regularly use wolframalpha.com for similar things. Example query to estimate how much electricity bitcoin miners can afford to use at current prices: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28%28
582.
by wcoenen 6y ago
There are two types of rates that are negative: the central bank deposit rate, and the government bond rate. Neither means that commercial banks can borrow at negative rates.
583.
by wcoenen 6y ago
Note note how the word "legal" comes back again there. It doesn't mean "legal" as opposed to illegal. It means "for the purpose of settling things within the legal system". Anyway, that treasury.gov link i
584.
by wcoenen 6y ago
I don't see how the paragraph you quote is contradicting what I said. It is saying that the US dollar can be used as "legal tender" for certain things, but it doesn't define what it means precisely for something to be &q
585.
by wcoenen 6y ago
This is only a consequence of what happens in court. Suppose someone owns you a certain amount of gold according to an agreement, but it turns out they can't actually deliver the gold. Then there's no point in refusing a settlemen
586.
by wcoenen 6y ago
From the introduction: > For example, if the smallest coin unit is one cent, then one cannot use a money unit below one cent. This can be enforced by law because only legal tender can be used. I think the author misunderstood what &quo
587.
by wcoenen 6y ago
The title of the pie chart in the article is "December 2020 France passenger auto registrations".
588.
by wcoenen 6y ago
> how size improves usage and efficiency The power of a wind turbine scales linearly with the swept area. The swept area scales as the square of the height. Furthermore, wind turbine power also scales with the third power of wind spe
589.
by wcoenen 6y ago
I read the post you linked, and was surprised by the description of money being created when a UK bank buys a government bond from a pension fund. I thought commercial banks were only allowed to create money when creating loan assets. Is cr
590.
by wcoenen 6y ago
Quantitative easing only increases "bank reserves" in the accounts at the fed, not the money supply. The accounts at the fed are an isolated system. To increase the money supply, commercial banks need to create money via loans.
591.
by wcoenen 6y ago
The fed creates bank reserves, which is different from the commercial bank money in your account. It's quite confusing because both are called "dollars", but they can't be used in the same way.
592.
by wcoenen 6y ago
The limitation is that the bonds need to be payed back with income from taxes.
593.
by wcoenen 6y ago
When the government issues bonds, they sell them for commercial bank money, the same type of money in your bank account. When the central bank later buys those bonds from banks (they never buy them directly), something different happens: th
594.
by wcoenen 6y ago
> We've injected trillions of dollars of fiat into the economy this year When the government issues debt and then uses the money to send out cheques, that money had to come from investors in the first place. So the money was realloc
595.
by wcoenen 6y ago
As explained in the linked page under "starting point", the priors for zoonosis are much higher than lab escape. So lab escape actually is a much stronger claim which requires more evidence. The source of the numbers is under the
596.
by wcoenen 6y ago
That procedure is for recording a hash in the blockchain, which is overkill in this case. There is no need to make an actual transaction. If you only want to prove ownership of an address, you can simply sign a message with the private key
597.
by wcoenen 6y ago
> You can do proof-of-work on L2 state just like L1 which would enable light clients. The more I think about this, the less sense it makes to me. Do you have a reference that explains how this would work? It sounds like you're tal
598.
by wcoenen 6y ago
Before starting work on Ethereum, Vitalik worked on "colored coins", i.e. tokens on Bitcoin. The 2013 Ethereum whitepaper[1] talks about the various limitations in Bitcoin that motivated the creation of Ethereum. One of them was t
599.
by wcoenen 6y ago
I believe the products that make it easy are currently only available through financial advisors, and for high net worth clients. But the demand seems to be there, so something accessible to the average retail investor may appear in the nex
600.
by wcoenen 6y ago
Thanks to automation, fractional shares and zero commissions, "direct indexing" is a thing now. You can track an index of your own design instead of trying to cancel out positions.

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