1/ #Ethereum is crashing (not just in USD terms but in BTC terms); has the demand for a decentralized world computer disappeared, or is something else at play? Let's consider the fundamentals from an economic point of view.
2/ The price level of all monetary goods is determined by (and only by) reservation demand. More precisely, the duration that the average unit of the monetary good is held in reserve.
3/ At one extreme you have a good like gold that is stored in vaults in perpetuity because of a widely held belief that it will retain its value long into the future.
Gold has a very high reservation demand which is why it has a market cap of over seven trillion dollars.
4/ At the other extreme you have monies like the Venezuelan peso that is treated like a hot potato. If you receive it in exchange, it becomes imperative to relinquish it post haste lest its value slip away like sand through your fingers.
The peso has low reservation demand.
5/ The investment case for Ethereum (#ETH) is that it will become the most liquid token in a digital economy built atop of a Turing-complete decentralized computer that can execute smart contracts. But how do these contracts affect reservation demand?
6/ For the most part smart contracts have no affect whatsoever on reservation demand, just as transactional use on Bitcoin plays little-to-no role in reservation demand for it. The primary source of reservation demand is the removal of currency from the order book of exchanges.
7/ There is, however, one particular kind of smart contract that has increased reservation demand for ETH: contracts used for ICOs. These contracts lock up supply as ETH is held in reserve by companies raising capital to fund operations.
8/ ETH held in ICOs increases reservation demand at the time the capital is raised, but lowers it as the ETH is sold on exchanges to provide funding for operations.
9/ In a bull market companies that have raised ETH may sit on it (increasing reservation demand) in hopes of extending their runway with the rising value of ETH. In a bear market companies will want to dump their ETH as fast as possible, hoping not to be last in line.
10/ The most powerful reason for the crash in ETH is that the ICO market is now largely dead (it being apparent that almost all ICOs were complete scams), and those that did raise capital are trying to liquidate their ETH before their product runway vanishes before their eyes.
11/ #Bitcoin on the other hand does not face the same problem because its primary use case is as a non-sovereign store of value. I.e., the primary use case is HODLing - which is pure unalloyed reservation demand - and this will continue for a long time: until we see full adoption
12/ Addendum: Here is a list of companies that have raised ICO funding in ETH:
If one or two large holders sell their ETH to protect their product runway, it will trigger a stampede. The bottom is not in.
Thanks for the all corrections to this tweet. It's the Venezuelan Bolivar not Peso. At least I didn't say Rupee. That would have been really embarrassing 😂
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1/ @SatoshiLite recently debated @rogerkver about the merits of using Lightning Network vs BCash for payments. In the debate Roger brought up a point that needs to be addressed; Roger claimed that it is easier to censor payments on LN than on BCash.
2/ Here is the tweet that Roger mentioned in the interview. In it we see a strongly connected network with one isolated node - the node was named Roger Ver.
Roger claims that the ostracization of this node is not funny, but a sign of censorship.
3/ Let's consider the economics of his claim. It is important to recognize that with Lightning Network, as with #Bitcoin, or even with free markets in general, you never have guarantees of anything - you have incentives that create long term tendencies.
When I worked at Google, as an engineer on Google News, I was asked to write code to censor news articles in China (circa 2006). I refused and they took me off the project and put someone else on it.
Doesn't surprise me Google is back at it. "Don't be Evil" is a Google myth.
Since this is getting some attention, I want to explain what happened in more detail.
At the time Google was censoring Web results, but this was widely known. It was a conscious decision: being in China and censoring was better for the Chinese people than not being there at all.
Or at least that was the rationalization.
It was not widely known that Google intended to censor News in China. So I got up at an engineering "all hands" meeting (few hundred people) and complained about what we were going to do. Ironically, I got some applause for this.
2/ Let us not forget that reputation should be associated with the consequences of our actions. Erik and ShapeShift have earned the suspicion of people who care about #Bitcoin.
If 2X had succeeded (with Erik's help), BTC's core value would have been destroyed.
3/ Bitcoin survived because of a strong streak of corporate suspicion in its community. That suspicion is now trained on ShapeShift, which is clearly changing the nature of its business at the expense of the privacy of its users.
1/ I've found further evidence that the story written for Business Insider about Jeffrey Wernick, by Sara Silverstein (@IChartNY), is based on fabricated facts.
2/ In his self-penned biography at the @CryptoFinCon conference, where Mr Wernick is a key note speaker, he writes that he studied under no less than SEVEN nobel prize winners (see image below)
3/ In another conference he claims he was 15 in 1971, which means he was 6 years old in 1962 when Friedrich Hayek stopped working for the University of Chicago. It is therefore *impossible* that he studied under Friedrich Hayek. He is fabricating facts to manufacture reputation.
1/ @CryptoFinCon it is shockingly irresponsible of you to invite this person as a keynote speaker to your conference. He fabricated a claim to be buying bitcoins in 2009 - no one was buying them back then - and he laughable claims to have studied under 7 nobel prize winners.
2/ Have the conference organizers done a shred of due diligence on this person? There is no information at all on him before late 2017, then he suddenly shows up in a bunch of shady publications saying he was buying bitcoins in 2009 - all the articles have the same verbiage.
3/ It's quite clear this scam artist is manufacturing reputation for himself to be invited to conferences and get speaking fees. Why would an investor in bitcoin in 2009 also need to take board and advisory positions in scammy projects like QTUM and BitForex?
1/ Scarcity seems like such a simple concept, but do we really understand it? Sometimes we need to reframe a concept before its full potential can be unlocked.
How was the concept of scarcity unlocked for the digital age?
2/ At least as long ago as the 16th century, economists (in particular the Spanish School of Salamanca) understood that scarcity played a very important role in how money gained its value.
Money was more valuable where it was scarce, and less valuable where it was abundant.
3/ The modern Austrian school inherited the mantle of "hard money" economics from the School of Salamanca and one might have imagined that Austrian economists would have been the first to anticipate and understand the emergence of #Bitcoin.