Categories
FinTech

The Train Has Not Left the Bitcoin Station

This is a short excerpt from Venture Capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya on CNBC, Dec 12, 2017.

I wrote an article about bitcoin in 2013. There is so much asymmetric upside here. This is a thing that goes to roughly the value of gold. There’s very little downside.

Take 1% of your money and put it into schmuck insurance. This is now a confidence game, this is a hedge against autocratic regimes and banking structures that are corrosive to how the world needs to work properly. You cannot have central banks infinitely printing currency, you cannot have guys with misdirected and misguided fiscal policy…

So we’ve seen the first few chapters of this and now we have to see the great unwind. [Referring to QT: quantitative tightening]

All I’m saying is its a hedge against the infrastructure that made those decisions without our input is a smart thing.

I think 1 bitcoin will be worth $100,000 in 3 to 4 years, and in the next 20 years, a million dollars a coin.

Former Facebook Exec Chamath Palihapitiya On Social Media, Bitcoin, And Elon Musk (Full) | on CNBC.

Here’s the link: 10:20 in,  Let’s Talk Bitcoin:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zyRpq2ODrE&t=620s

Categories
Marketing tech

Web Analytics: First Steps

Step 1: Find the best rated “Google Analytics” book on Amazon Search

OK, I found a couple books: Web Analytics 2.0, and Web Analytics: An Hour A Day, both by Avinash Kaushik.  Looking good, but really old in internet years. I remember making a point to study the first book a long time ago…

Step 2: Google him!
I found a few interesting things: 1) his website is called Occam’s Razor. It formed the basis for his books, so I should be able to get a lot of info from them.

Next I found: “5 Avinash Kaushik blogs every digital marketer should read” in google search. Why not?! I’m getting distracted.

In signing up for Avinash’s newsletter, he refers me to an article featuring an icon of the design industry: Dieter Rams: Ten Principles of “Good Design”, one can’t go wrong studying Dieter!

So, time to do the “hour a day” in reading up on this. (Only problem, I’m already overbooked!)

Categories
Education Participation

Everything Altogether is Trying to Be a Revelation for you

Everything altogether is trying to be a revelation for you. It is just that you are not sensitive to it in your ordinary habit. The shaman, you see, has entered into a discipline to make himself sensitive. It is not that he is making the magic happen. The magic is already there. He is just not sensitive to it, not in a position to observe it. Thus, he must engage in a discipline that enables him to participate in what is already happening. Then all of a sudden he sees all kinds of magical things.

–the World-Friend, Adi Da, from The Transmission of Doubt, Talks and Essays on the Transcendence of Scientific Materialism through Radical Understanding, page 239

Categories
FinTech

FUD Vs Foresight


Today on March 16, 2018 bitcoin is sitting at $8,550 USD. Here we have a couple of my favorite investors throwing shade at bitcoin. What’s interesting is that the crypto industry is actually going thru the necessary growing pains of regulation and use scaling. Because both bitcoin and ethereum are testing their scaling solutions (to compete with banks & visa/mastercard, etc), both are poised for more use adoption this year.

So here’s the FUD:

In February, Berkshire Hathaway, Inc. (BRK.A, BRK.B) vice chairman Charlie Munger had harsh words for bitcoin at the Berkshire annual shareholder meeting.

“It’s just disgusting. Bitcoin is noxious poison,” Munger said. Billionaire Berkshire CEO Warren Buffett once famously called bitcoin “a mirage.”

And the Foresight:

Still, bitcoin has plenty of supporters on Wall Street. Fundstrat Global Advisors co-founder Thomas Lee[WD] says Fundstrat’s bitcoin misery index suggests the sell-off is an excellent buying opportunity for long-term investors.

“The BMI is telling us to keep the negative headlines in perspective,” Lee said, according to CNBC. “When the BMI is at a ‘misery’ level, future returns are very good.”

Fundstrat has a year-end price target for bitcoin of $25,000.

Categories
FinTech

CoinPuffs Vs Coinmarketcap

Coinmarketcap’s homepage.

One day I noticed that the bitcoin price dropped alot, and the coinmarketcap as a whole also dropped $50 billion. What?! It turns out someone running coinmarketcap.com decided to drop South Korea off the market index because it’s prices were higher than other countries without telling anyone in advance. What?! Their prices are higher because South Korea makes it hard to move money in and out of country on purpose–that shouldn’t bar the country from being part of of the general index. Anyway, in the process of discovering this info, I found out that CoinPuffs works like CoinMarketCap, but not as capriciously. It seems more like a community site, and it has over 2000 coins listed. Article on coindesk.