Investors in almost everything can reasonably expect their gains to average well above what they could get if they took no risk. A stock portfolio might average 6% or 8% a year, more than bonds or savings accounts. 1/6
But really, no investment can be rationally expected to do significantly better than any other once adjusted for risk. Why? Because if one was, it would get crowded and whatever value it could produce diluted until it was no longer significantly better. 2/6
This is why I opposed bailouts for travel companies throughout the pandemic. Their owners made good money for many years and in exchange they took the risk that a global event would devastate their industry. That's the deal. 3/6
Sure, it's not their fault they lost money. But investment isn't about fault. Bailouts help owners in proportion to how much they own. Companies can't suffer. I'm all for helping employees. If planes are worth flying, someone will and they'll need pilots and mechanics. 4/6
And if the planes aren't worth flying, it's incredibly dumb to fly unprofitable planes around as an employment boosting scheme. Boost unemployment and other direct cash aid instead. In the past few days, some hedge funds lost a whole lot of money in an arguably unfair way. 5/6
But that's the deal with investing. The pandemic wasn't fair either, and lots of retail investors lost a lot. High returns mean high risk. There is no way out of that. If there was, everybody would be rich. 6/6

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More from @JoelKatz

22 Jan
So we know exactly what happened with that bitcoin double spend transaction. It was a weird situation where an attempt was made to raise the fee on a transaction but the original transaction succeeded instead. 1/5
I do consider it a double spend. A valid transaction that someone could have seen as being confirmed was later orphaned by a conflicting transaction. But it's reasonable to not agree that's a double spend. 2/5
It's arguable whether it's an RBF instance or not. Someone could have relied on the first transaction, even if they were aware of RBF. But it was the low fee of the first transaction that allowed the second transaction to be relayed. 3/5
Read 5 tweets
21 Jan
A couple of years ago, my parents were supposed to take a cruise to Alaska. But, sadly, my father became too ill to go. So my wife and I generously offered to take their tickets and go on the cruise for them.
We had to change their excursions to ones more appropriate to our tastes. And one thing we really looked forward to was a helicopter ride to a glacier. But when we got there, the weather was awful.
The helicopter guys told us that they would not fly in that weather and offered us another day. But our ship was only in that port for that day. We were sad, but ...
Read 8 tweets
11 Jan
@VentureCoinist @MycolePawket @Ripple If you don't know which asset you'll need next, it makes sense to hold the bridge asset. If you are just being opportunistic and want to make money, you want to hold the asset people will need when they sell a rare asset cheap and that will be the bridge asset.
@VentureCoinist @MycolePawket @Ripple I don't buy the argument that the performance of the native chain doesn't matter. If that were true, bitcoin wouldn't have been a significant innovation because it's just a better native chain. If it takes hours to set up a pipe or fund a pipe, you need to pre-fund the pipe.
@VentureCoinist @MycolePawket @Ripple XRP has less regulatory clarity in the US than bitcoin. Maybe less than ETH. Everything else, ... Who knows?
Read 11 tweets
10 Jan
@VentureCoinist @HypeBillion @MycolePawket If the whole world settled on one stablecoin, I'd agree with you. But stablecoins are always going to be tied to jurisdictions and counter-parties too. So it is unlikely one winner will emerge.
@VentureCoinist @HypeBillion @MycolePawket Today, one of the roles of the dollar is acting as an intermediary or bridge between currencies. For that role, its tie to the US jurisdiction is both an advantage and a disadvantage. Better US than a worse jurisdiction, but a pure digital asset is better still.
@VentureCoinist @HypeBillion @MycolePawket Imagine a future (maybe not so far off) where everything is tokenized and you can have your salary agreed in dollars but gold gets delivered to your wallet and you can buy groceries by selling tokenized shares of a REIT.
Read 9 tweets
3 Dec 20
@cczurich @Ripple @micicjo @OpodisConf I welcome papers like this and appreciate having any weaknesses identified and pointed out. Any opportunity to improve XRPL’s consensus protocol or the security and reliability of blockspace generally is a good thing. 1/8
@cczurich @Ripple @micicjo @OpodisConf The attack on liveness outlined in the paper identifies intentional behavior. If a substantial fraction of your UNL is malicious, you don’t want to make forward progress, you want to fix your UNL. 2/8
@cczurich @Ripple @micicjo @OpodisConf The attack on safety is comparable to attacks in other blockchains. Bitcoin loses safety if an attacker can partition the network. XRPL is more resistant because an attacker has to both partition the network and control part of your UNL. 3/8
Read 8 tweets
24 Nov 20
I recently got to do some coding again and wanted to share this branch while I'm still excited about it.
github.com/JoelKatz/rippl…
This saves memory, simplifies and reduces code, and speeds up ledger sync and historical ledger fetching. It cleans up an ugly bit of cruft in the getMissingNoded->NuDB path that has irritated me for a year.
It has not been reviewed yet so use at your own risk. The branch also has a NuDB latency fix that speeds up ledger advancing.
Read 4 tweets

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