Yes, some imports can reduce GDP, in particular imports of consumer goods that would have otherwise been bought and produced internally. But it is complicated, and many imports, especially of intermediate goods, are net positive for GDP.
Because here’s a surprising fact: It takes much more fuel to leave the Earth’s orbit than to go from the Earth to Mars!
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Look at this for Earth-Moon: 400x more fuel to reach the Earth’s orbit than to go there and back to the Earth!
Davidson (2021) usefully defines AI-induced “explosive growth” as an increase in growth rates to at least 30% annually. Under a baseline calibration where σ=1 and ρ=0.01, and importantly assuming growth rates are known with certainty, the Euler equation implies that moving from 2% growth to 30% growth would raise real rates from 3% to 31%!
Nelson added a bit of wisdom perfect for memelords. The Netflix team A/B tests cover images for shows and found that “faces with complex emotions outperform stoic or benign expressions—seeing a range of emotions actually compels people to watch a story more.” When testing images for their show The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, the photo of Kimmy with her mouth wide open in surprise did the best.
“Business people vote with their dollars, and are mostly trying to create near-term financial returns. Engineers vote with their time, and are mostly trying to invent interesting new things. Hobbies are what the smartest people spend their time on when they aren’t constrained by near-term financial goals.”
The block reward is reduced every four years based on a baked-in inflation control mechanism called the halving. It’s not mentioned in the white paper but Satoshi hard-coded it into the protocol.
Duolingo CEO interview:
English is the most popular by far. Forty-five percent of our active users are learning English. The second is Spanish, the third is French, and then there’s a big drop-off after that.
Murad:
The fundamentals are the people
Meme is only 40% of it, 60% is the people, the community
Each chain is like a different CEX
“we found no evidence of formal reasoning in language models …. Their behavior is better explained by sophisticated pattern matching—so fragile, in fact, that changing names can alter results by ~10%!”
life is a weighted sum of your choices
theres no starting over tomorrow
just the adjustment of the weighted sum with new decisions
most choices seem irrelevant in isolation
but you would be surprised how quickly they add up
From Litecoin BTC fork that required running PoW machines to ICOs to DeFi’s liquidity mining, the patterns are clear: Each cycle, token printing gets easier! And valuations keep going up.
And the slower new token launches adapt, the longer the memecoin craze will continue. Memecoins is the counter-trade for VC tokens. No utility, no revenue, no future product.
“If there’s one thing that you figure out after many, many, many, many hands, it’s you know what 52/48 is,” said Annie Duke, referring to a player who can distinguish a 52 percent chance from a 50/50 spot. “That’s the type of distinction that most people are very bad at making. But poker players are really good at making that distinction, and they can feel it.”
In fact, Coates’s studies found, the most successful traders had more changes in their body chemistry in response to risk. “We were finding this in the very best traders. Their endocrine response was opposite of what I expected when I went in.”
Murad
-“The one thing that can’t be faked is time”
-Memecoins much easier for low income to participate
Sequoia re: AI apps
The most interesting layer for venture capital. ~20 application layer companies with $1Bn+ in revenue were created during the cloud transition, another ~20 were created during the mobile transition, and we suspect the same will be true here.
The first part of the plan, booby-trapped walkie-talkies, began being inserted into Lebanon by Mossad nearly a decade ago, in 2015. The mobile two-way radios contained oversized battery packs, a hidden explosive and a transmission system that gave Israel complete access to Hezbollah communications. For nine years, the Israelis contented themselves with eavesdropping on Hezbollah, the officials said, while reserving the option to turn the walkie-talkies into bombs in a future crisis. But then came a new opportunity and a glitzy new product: a small pager equipped with a powerful explosive.
Cloud companies targeted the software profit pool. AI companies target the services profit pool. Cloud companies sold software ($ / seat). AI companies sell work ($ / outcome)
Cloud companies liked to go bottoms-up, with frictionless distribution. AI companies are increasingly going top-down, with high-touch, high-trust delivery models.
It is much, much easier to pick out a way in which a system is sub-optimal, than it is to implement or run that system at anything like its current level of optimization.
This is because it is only with fundamental anchors can a schelling point for all pools of crypto-native capital (retail, hedge funds, prop funds, long-only liquid funds) appear. This is $SOL’s story in a nutshell this cycle, where those who were paying attention to developer engagement in early 2023 were able to form a fundamental thesis for Solana ecosystem’s growth and subsequently enjoy the almost 10x rerating within a year.
Then, the community forms, charts rise, and influencers buy large portions of the supply from the open market. The game is the same for everyone, but the conviction isn’t. You might exit at 2x, but the influencer holds on at 10x, then builds a narrative to back their position. They’re often joined by VCs running shady, covert plays.
I stumbled upon this running affiliate ads to Amazon and realizing that exactly 11% of people who stumbled on herbal tea landing pages would purchase herbal tea from a fairly broad set of keywords. This 11% was completely static — the most it would move is to 12% or 10%. Over the course of months
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When you dug into the data, however, the CTR was not Gold Fish like. It was due to Elon Musk meme-ing. And showing up in the news. A large number of the clicks were coming through to Tesla stock. Not the car. People were just clicking on Tesla like crazy. The stock ended up working but the flow through on sales was deminimus. We didn’t sell any Tesla cars or generate any conversionsAnd in real time I saw financial analysts going berserk because Tesla sales were far too low to justify the valuation, and it’d only go up.
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Slowly it dawned on me that most of what I thought were fundamental re-ratings in stocks were actually memes. Customer acquisition cost didn’t matter. Investor acquisition cost mattered. But the only possible way this would be true is if the system wasn’t in fact a machine. It was a gigantic liquidity Ponzi that allocated capital according to attention.
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And because of the Goldfish hypothesis – that in aggregate, everyone is extremely predictable – this created a new base reality. That the most engaging reality would always win. And the most engaging realities were always the most gaudy, degenerate, and short-termist. Society was – and is – in a permanent sugar rush, that’s determining outcomes at every level. ranging from investment to political.
It’s possible that someone figures out continuous self-improvement with broad domain self play and achieves takeoff, but at the moment we have seen no evidence of this. Quite to the contrary, the model layer is a knife-fight, with price per token for GPT-4 coming down 98% since the last dev day.
Memecoins is proving to be the “confusing trade” of this cycle.
memecoins is just another step in our never-ending story of token (money) printing.We started with BTC forks (LTC, BTC Gold), moved to Ethereum ICO tokens with just stories to sell, then experimented with “fair launches” and liquidity mining, and recently ended the peak of points-for-airdrop meta. A new narrative will come and overtake memecoins.
“Chase the story behind the stock, not the money on the table. Money will make you rich, but the story will make you wealthy.”
Epoch: A string of 32 Slots. This is created as a secondary structure within the blockchain used to delegate roles and responsibilities. Slots are used for constructing blocks while Epochs are used for data propagation, reward distribution, validator selection, etc, etc.
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Checkpoint Block: This is the first block created within a given Epoch and is used as a reference point for solidifying chain history.
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Finality: The point at which a transaction is deemed irreversibly added to a given chain’s ledger. In the Ethereum ecosystem, this is used when 2 Epochs have passed (~13min) aka 64 blocks
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Validator Voting – Each epoch (32-block window) validators will vote on the checkpoint block of the current and previous epoch until specific checkpoint blocks reach 2/3rd majority of staked $ETH
Throughout my time at the IMF, I was struck by the easy access of leading financiers to the highest U.S. government officials, and the interweaving of the two career tracks. I vividly remember a meeting in early 2008—attended by top policy makers from a handful of rich countries—at which the chair casually proclaimed, to the room’s general approval, that the best preparation for becoming a central-bank governor was to work first as an investment banker.
This book holds that the sequence technological revolution–financial bubble–collapse–golden age–political unrest recurs about every half century and is based on causal mechanisms that are in the nature of capitalism.
Added together, getting listed on Binance could cost 16% of your token supply and a $5 million purchase of BNB. If Binance isn’t the primary exchange, a project will still face spending of almost $2 million worth of tokens or stablecoins.
In July, @DefiSquared heavily criticized Worldcoin on Twitter, pointing out the abnormally high valuation of WLD, signs of price manipulation by the project team, and tokenomics that heavily favor insiders. He warned that Korean retail investors might become “unfortunate victims,” noting that while only 2.7% of the total WLD supply was in circulation, the fully diluted value (FDV) reached $30 billion, with about 25% of the circulating supply deposited on Bithumb.
The % of proposals that actually passed has remained roughly consistent (~15%) since the launch of Ethereum showing that there is a stable approval process.
Altcoins aren’t primarily about tech. Memecoins aren’t primarily about memes. Both are tokenized communities using different narratives and techniques to recruit people and get the price to go up.
Fundamentally memecoins are fun and could become the next trend in the escapism consumer culture. They might be even a proxy to value creation as tokenization of culture is a powerful tool. But the way they are currently being narrated is Marxist to the core.
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Listen to what Murad/Ansem actually says and does and where all the real money has been made in memes – it has not been made buying billion dollar plus memes – its made buying sub 100m MC and them moving to the billions where the price target is tens of billions
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The end of memes this cycle is probably more like 10-20 memes going to multi billions and then fading while most are left holding the bag thinking its going much higher then the narrative of memes from this cycle going to 50-100bn as stated by Kols
I think the consensus is that crypto is a useful mechanism to distribute AI calculation, when the contrarian but right bet is that AI is useful for substantially improving crypto consensus mechanisms.
listing teams want to list coins that will drive maximum user onboarding- ie., how many users will sign up and make their first deposit to the exchange as a result of a particular listing. Coins with wide distribution in new ecosystems do particularly well with this; for example, clicker games on TON were quoted to be bringing in several million new users per listing (a shockingly high number) in an in interview with Bybit’s CEO
Throughout, SoftBank took advantage of the almost three decades of near zero interest rates in Japan. Son borrowed cheaply to pay generous prices for US assets, raising billions on the corporate bond market. “You don’t understand,” he once told a fretting colleague, “in Japan, money is free.”
Being-early-as-a-service is a concept coined in 2022 by CT personality Cobie, that really nails the actual product market fit of crypto.
When a country like Indonesia or South Korea or Russia grows, so do the ambitions of its captains of industry. As masters of their mini-universe, these people make some investments that clearly benefit the broader economy, but they also start making bigger and riskier bets. They reckon—correctly, in most cases—that their political connections will allow them to push onto the government any substantial problems that arise.
if you don’t let your community profit, you don’t deserve a community. memecoins fixed that. that’s the whole thesis. good enough for me. — redhairshanks
products that are truly interesting rarely fit in a market map because the sector is nascent and the mental models required to categorise it have not fully evolved
Of all the forms of money, slaves proved one of the least reliable because of their high mortality rate and their tendency to escape.
“When the stock price gets low, then it’s time for me to buy stocks,” Fujimoto said. “But the question is whether you have the money or the courage to do that.”
Most (if not all) governmental restrictions targeting bitcoin have failed to account for the fact that, under bedrock First Amendment principles, bitcoin activity is entitled to First Amendment protection. First, bitcoin consists entirely of the creation and transmission of information, which is speech protected by the First Amendment. Second, bitcoin activity is at minimum protected expressive conduct. And third, participation in the bitcoin network is expressive association separately safeguarded by the First Amendment.
“Postcards were seen as so fast,” says Monica Cure, author of Picturing the Postcard: A New Media Crisis at the Turn of the Century. “There were lots of complaints about what postcards were going to do to people’s reading and writing skills, because if you could just dash off a few lines, why did you need to actually learn grammar and become a good writer?”
Then – why don’t people have a fighting chance against the algorithms?
The answer is obvious – just hard to confront.
People don’t like their lives very much. Their baseline engagement with day to day reality and choices is so low, that random messages pumped in by advertisers actually seem pretty good in comparison.
In the wake of the 2008 Financial Crisis, former chief economist of the IMF Simon Johnson warned that the same dysfunctional policies he saw in his basketcase banana republics had taken hold in the United States.
Johnson warned that if America didn’t act fast, we would plunge into a “Quiet Coup” as the American financial system effectively captures the government, bailling itself out until we run out of money.
There’s this idea to focus entirely on your product—and like the Field of Dreams, you build it and they will come. So you pitch directly to the end user, the person in the field, and don’t worry too much about the authorizers and appropriators in Congress, agency leadership, or mid-level bureaucracy. At Palantir, we figured out that you had to work every single one of those audiences.
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There’s also this hilarious misconception that you should subcontract with the primes—Booz Allen Hamilton and Deloitte and all of those guys—because somehow they’re going to bring you in on their contracts. That doesn’t work. And there’s the idea that you should set up an advisory board where a group of retired generals and retired government officials shepherd you through this process. The reality is, they haven’t gone through it either.
Stanley Druckenmiller after losing $3 billion on tech stocks during the 2000 bubble:
“I didn’t learn anything. I already knew I wasn’t supposed to do that”.
https://x.com/KoyfinCharts/status/1838998921814868006
More software will be niche, private, personal, and local – and this will be economically rational. And just like we subscribe to our favorite content creators, we’ll subscribe to our favorite software creators too
Third, the concept of net present value–i.e., credit–is the killer app of finance. It allows you to transport value from the future into today. Of course, that debt must be repaid in the future, unless you can figure out a way to kick the can down the road forever.
Many apps have become application-specific chains over the past few months (Lyra, Aevo, ApeX, Zora, Redstone) and I suspect the trend continues until everyone from Uniswap to Eigenlayer become L2s.
