XRP is kind of this weird faux crypto, very different than most of the rest. But I do think there's one important lesson it holds for the others, and that is what it says about the "store of value" vs "medium of exchange" debate that was prominent in the 2017 scaling wars...
Ripple likes to point out how fast it can be transferred, which is fine so far as it goes, but the ability to transact in some currency is only useful if that currency has some value to the end recipient of it.
You could, say, evade capital controls by sticking a bunch of napkins in a suitcase and calling them money. Border agents won't care. But nobody wants to accept the napkins that you're calling money.
So ease of transfer logically must come after establishment as a store of value. Nobody has a good argument for why XRP is a good store of value. And this is what BSV and BCH people don't get, and why they lost to BTC
First you have to establish why something is worth holding as money. Then you can talk about ease of use. To do otherwise is putting the cart before the horse.
This is also why so many silicon valley types were attracted (and still are) to alts, making the mistake of thinking of them as software (always iterating, scale uber alles), rather than thinking in terms of money, in which these concepts don't apply at all.
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I block people rarely, but when I do it’s just because I find them extremely annoying and don’t want to think about them. I can’t imagine being this Rudy havenstein fellow who blocked me but still apparently tweets about me non stop. Why bother? Just go on and live your life
I’m just a normal guy who likes talking about markets, posting some shit, hanging out with my kids and listening to country music. And sometimes writing it too. So it’s weird to me how guys like Rudy, or @KeithMcCullough is another one, who think about me and get so mad.
The prediction markets are great, they're just misunderstood. People get hung up on the "prediction" part. But that's not really what they're for. What they do is put a number on the current state of the conventional wisdom, which can be very useful.
If a prediction market gets it "wrong" it's just that people got it wrong. Which happens all the time. But to be able to go from something fuzzy (eg: "experts think Biden will win") to (eg "The market puts a 70% chance of Biden winning") is useful.
Then if you disagree, you have something substantive to benchmark your views against.
I wrote about permanent layoffs for the @markets newsletter today, and how even with an overall recovery that's clearly faster than expected, they're still getting worse at a quicker pace than the Great recession bloomberg.com/news/newslette…
@markets BTW, I think when thinking about the election, it's going to be extra-difficult to plug in some "economic fundamentals" into a model. Top-line GDP growth may be surging, and unemployment is coming down. But beneath the surface, deeper labor market pain is continues to grow.
A middle class, professional thinking about the state of the economy may have been extremely worried about their job in March/April. Then relatively sanguine in June/July, and then increasingly anxious August - October.
I'M MORE WORRIED ABOUT SUPERSTAR COMPANIES THAN I AM ABOUT "ZOMBIES"
In today's @markets newsletter, I wrote about why the huge, booming tech companies could be holding back GDP growth more than the so-called "zombie" firms everyone likes to fret about bloomberg.com/news/newslette…