I'm even surprised we didn't have this kind of news already. It's a predicted behavior for governments, let's how anti-fragile the system is (grabs popcorn)
It's quite fascinating to observe disruption and fear in society at the age of the internet. It most have felt the same for all the technologies the bitcoin haters use everyday ( phones, cars, electricity, internet ... )
> But if this would take off and get a strong foothold at the prices that we're seeing now (bitcoin almost 10K in dollars), then didn't some subset of techies print a lot more money than there is?
Over the course of history, people crated money out of many physical objects that had the "money" properties. Money is a tool to represent value of exchange. As long as we all agree on it's value.
In the fiat world, the value of money is artificially fixed by the central banks and backed by the military power of its governments. it has effectively an unlimited supply. Quantitative easing is one of the techniques used to quickly increase the supply as it fits the central banks. You, me and all fiat money users have no say in it.
Bitcoin, is a limited amount of money supply that will ever exist. It is backed by math and cryptography and an open source ecosystem. It was decided so by us the people and not central banks. We didn't ask for their permission the same way as they don't ask for ours when they decide to print more.
Many of us believers in Bitcoin do not agree with the way central banks handle the most important tool of our civilization (Money) and do not agree with the current mainstream economic theory. So we decided to exit that system and try our own.
> To me it seems there might be a chance that we're devaluing real currencies by quite a bit over the course of the next couple of years. Of course, the bigger chance is that this is a bubble and it will pop, but what if it isn't?
If fiat currencies get devalued, and they will if the Bitcoin experiment works, then it would just mean fiat money is a weaker money than bitcoin (see Gresham Law[1]). In that case, is it the fault of the inventors if they invented a better system ?
As of the "speculative" nature of bitcoin, yes it is. What drives speculation is greed. Bitcoin at the protocol level is just a communication system. If you couple greed and Metacalfe's Law[2], you obtain a very powerful incentive for the system to grow.
I think of this incentive as a the trojan horse to the current financial system. People will come through greed and stay once they discover and learn about this new system, since it's not likely the central banks will "objectively" assess the value of Bitcoin.
The biggest part of humanity does not benefit from our current central bank system, so it has to get disrupted and replaced with a better one.
Either this, or we're stuck with the current unhuman, exploiting system. As an optimist, I'm betting on the former.
I'm curious how you define "better"? If you go by wealth equality, Bitcoin is worse than USD because Satoshi Nakamoto, the inventor of Bitcoin, owns more than 1/21 of all ever available Bitcoin. Several other early adopters claim to own a few hundred thousand Bitcoin.
If you are talking about income inequality, it cannot be fixed with money as it is just a tool. If our economic system is based on hoarding capital, then you end up hoarding it. If the best and safest way to hoard is Bitcoin, they you will use it.
However, you cannot go further than hoarding or using it. What the central banks do is much worse, they print it out of nothing and it ends up in the hands a few individuals, with impunity. So on scale of bad to worse, I would argue bitcoin is the lesser evil since at least it would allow for true free markets to exist.
Regarding Satoshi and the early adopters, why do you care ? When using fiat money, do you care about the fact the US dollar got an unfair advantage when it forced the Bretton Woods system on all of us ? As a matter of fact, the US dollar has been the strongest currency and international settlement one exactly because of that unfair advantage.
And if you do care, the problem is not within the money but the economic system. It's an other topic for a bigger problem ...
[1] Bitcoin is not there yet, still a lot of progress to be done on the fungibility side of it.
What magic are you talking of when you know data is the most precious element to do anything meaningful and it's hoarded through a handful of megacorps. Why don't we hear of any small teams "outisde" the mega corps doing real progress on AI. There was an article recently where even professors in universities admit they cannot compete with megacorps since they offer much higher wages than academia.
edit: more sick, the said young researchers are financed by society than get sucked to private corps where their work is locked behind IPs.
Even in the case there is a small company having any progress they would get swallowed up right away.
Yes Keras and Sickit-learn are open source and available to everyone but it's like telling me, look you have access to pen and paper but you need to pay if you want to read the books, the metaphor here being access to data is equivalent to middle age's access to books...
The internet is full of data you can use. Just crawl it, like everyone does. There are thousands of open datasets, some gigantic in size. If you have sensors (camera, GPS, orientation, etc) you can generate a shitload of data. If you can create a game that is related to the data you want to collect, then you can collect data for 'free'.
On the other hand, think about it: what do Google and FB have that we don't? Personal data. What they have is data that is useful to target ads. If your interest in AI goes beyond ads, then you don't need that data.
| On the other hand, think about it: what do Google and FB have that we don't? Personal data. What they have is data that is useful to target ads.
Yeah ? like the tons of photos they harvest from people. Most of the progress they did in training computer vision is based on that. Should I build facebook or google to get access to it ?
What about language modeling ? They have access to conversational data and billions of search queries, both of which there is no way to access them from outside.
What about health ? Well if I'm not somehow working with some big pharma how could I access this kind of data ?
I can go on and on. The point is, yes I can crawl the web, but what "web" is there left ? everything is locked behind paywalls and private clouds. If the real vision of an open internet was fulfilled, all data generated on it would be accessible to crawl indeed.
I'm not saying it's not possible to get data and use it. I'm saying you cannot get the kind of data only monopolies have and you will never be able to compete with them.
Photos: if you build a facebook app, you can probably ask for permissions to fotos of your app users. Also the open datasets for machine learning with images like the coco dataset are pretty big. Can you really handle a lot more than that? Even hinton starts with mnist for new ideas like capsules.
Language modeling: hacker news, public mailing lists, wikipedia, github.
Health: you can usually get data if you work at a hospital as an md or researcher. Just need a reasonable idea and an IRB. If you want the pharmacy data, I imagine you could get at it by going to work as a researcher in pharma, insurance, or retailer.
alphago was built using publicly available games of go pros. Alphagozero didn't even depend on data at all.
For AI, the limiting factors are ideas, code, time, hardware.
AlphaGo and AG0 were built with ridiculous amounts of compute power that Google donated to the effort. To replicate their results would cost millions of dollars.
Unless your objective is to target ads, I'm really not sure why you'd think that Facebook's collection of people's holiday and wedding snaps and memes is a superior training set to say, the entire world's surface photographed at regular intervals, or millions of more-selectively-uploaded tagged images in Flickr, or image sets especially designed for training like OpenImages
sp4ke sez> " I'm saying you cannot get the kind of data only monopolies have and you will never be able to compete with them."
More a political statement than a statement of relevance to the workplace.
You need not worry that "they" will hold you back. It is unlikely that analyzing monopolys' data will explain how early man built flint tools, Joe the mechanic repairs his car, fifth-grade Fred solves his geometry problems or van Gogh painted. ML, including AutoML, appears to be a long way from solving most AI problems. There's no need to feel that "they" are holding you back by witholding data. And then remember:
"Be careful what you wish for, it might just come true."
- old saying
Patrick McKenzie is fortunate enough to not be born in a country that is currently suffering from hyper-inflation neither is he living under a dictatorship that is putting capital controls and deciding how he should use his hard earned money .... yet :)
In other words, "the rest of us" of Patrick's folks do not represent the people for whom crypto is a necessity and not a luxury. So if money is already working for you, keep using it and ignore this fad
Civil war of the future: everyone already having GPUs for cryptocoins, the resistance will offer "Freedom Coins" in exchange for lending compute via mesh networks for purpose of guiding DIY drones and missiles.
1- Bitcoin is not stock so comparing with stock has no weight in your argument
2- It has already been on a very long bear market (2013-2015) where everyone said pretty much the same thing (fad, tulip, the experiment failed .... ). So yeah the new holders will go through rough times but your argument that it reached the peak of the hype cycle has no logical facts to support it since you could have said the same in the peak of 2013.
If anyone knew when the peak is(was or will) would not be here commenting on HN or talking about it but rather selling this knowledge ... and this holds true for any investment.
You're right, I have no idea when the top is going to be. My point is that bear markets have a very different feel and can be emotionally devastating if you're in the middle of one and bitcoin has not been through that and made it to the other side. Are the bitcoin boys ready for that? Because it's coming, sooner or later.
The exact sequence of events you are describing happened between 2013-2016 when Bitcoin fell from a hype induced >$1000 to (at its lowest) $200, and didn't rise above $1000 until this year.
It clearly did not kill Bitcoin, and Bitcoin won't die if the same thing happens again.
Many of the "bitcoin boys" won't be ready for that. But that doesn't mean Bitcoin will fail. It does mean that many people investing in it are set for massive pain, though.
And how do I verify that the money printed is not more than the increase in productivity ? Effectively stealing from my productivity through price inflation ?
First, that already occurs to the tune of of about 2% annually. The Fed aims for about 1-2% inflation annually to encourage investment.
But to answer your other question, in order to verify this you would need a complete-ish picture of the entire economic output of the country: how much it grew (Growth Rate), and how much currency was destroyed (Destruction Rate). With those metrics you can determine how much currency you need to print.
Or to put it in Edward Tuft's "Lie Factor" terms using a 5000 lbs elephant and 5mg mosquito I get a lie factor of 454046 (if someone can check out the math).
