Early Retirement Extreme Forums

It might be helpful to think of the memecoin phenomenon in the context of web1 (read) -> web2 (read-write) -> web3 (read-write-own). Each generation having its own power law. With web1 the barrier to entry is a static web page where something like 20% of sites attract 80% of attention. Web2 introduces social networks of various kinds where content can be produced and shared. Leading to various power laws based on content, with cross-content, cross-platform providers having more edge. Now web3 is in a volatile phase where the more legitimate coins and use cases get clouded out by the get-rich-quick noise. If web1 is content engineering, web2 is social engineering, and web3 is economic engineering. The vision being that content, social interaction, and trustful trade can be woven together across political boundaries.

@daylen:

Yeah, but web00 is potato engineering.

Appears that crypto philanthropy has helped on occasion provide food to people in times of centralized/political destabilization or overwhelm. Perhaps crypto can be grounded all the way down the hierarchy of needs. Hedging against traditional, encumbered power structures in times of volatility or underreach. Potentially solving coordination problems with less wasted energy more quickly (given proof of stake systems).

jacob wrote: ↑

Tue Jan 21, 2025 1:52 pm

If there was any way to be less impressed by this scheme than I was 5 minutes ago, I am now. I mean, I'm worth about $250M in Elite Dangerous and I have a NW of about $9M in equity in Prosperous Universe and that wealth seems entirely more useful than this. I realize that the line between the digital and the real world are fluid, but somehow I doubt I'm going to be able to use my CobraMk3 spaceship as collateral for ... even a real toothpick.

Yeah, the market cap numbers are ridiculous and not indicative of the real value. That's not to say that there isn't actual money that is being made in these schemes. It's not hard to track real world examples with everything on public ledgers. I've seen quite a few individuals making tens of millions on Trump coin alone. Realized profit. The largest I've seen is one person who bought $1 mil worth of Trump coin at $0.18 and exited the position after it became available on Robinhood. For $300 million (!!).

As if we weren’t transferring enough wealth from the poor to the rich already.
It is somehow funny in a sinister way that one of the main app used to syphon wealth away from the masses is called Robinhood.
What surprises me is the brazenness of it all.
Already surprising when it’s the “Hawk Tua girl”, imagine when it’s the wealthiest who do that.

Sorry for the “old fart” post, but I am still an idealist and would like to see the ultra wealthy (the model the masses usually loop up to) be people with at least some semblance of dignity and values.

The fact that they have none does not bode well for the near term future of humanity.

Seppia wrote: ↑

Wed Jan 22, 2025 2:43 am

Sorry for the “old fart” post, but I am still an idealist and would like to see the ultra wealthy (the model the masses usually loop up to) be people with at least some semblance of dignity and values.

The fact that they have none does not bode well for the near term future of humanity.

I’m not sure this was ever true. Getting to this point first self selects for lack of morals / scruples / willingness to lie, then self selects for those seeking power, then self selects for those who are willing to treat others like garbage / scam them in pursuit of wealth.

In older societies, this would be heavily looked down upon, basically unless you were the king (see Scrooge / Christian values against greed / etc). In the current orange society in the US it is the scoreboard and thus encouraged.

Well, we could just choose to eliminate ENTJ males from society on the basis of early testing and/or tendency to take control of all the trucks in the play corner. Maybe a colony on the land mass revealed after first huge ice sheet slips into ocean? Of course, this might lead to a sort of "first they came for..." trend, and according to my rough data analysis, I believe INTJ males would be Schedule 3 or 4 deportees. Luckily for me, eNTP females (in the manner of Bugs Bunny) fairly easily pass for "the meek upon the earth" and/or occasionally tend towards regarding the prospect of being deported to an island full of ENTJ men attempting survivalist permaculture project much like B'rer rabbit regarded the briarpatch.

Slevin wrote: ↑

Wed Jan 22, 2025 11:38 am

In older societies, this would be heavily looked down upon, basically unless you were the king (see Scrooge / Christian values against greed / etc). In the current orange society in the US it is the scoreboard and thus encouraged.

I suppose it's a matter of how much noblesse oblige exists. The Downton Abbey lot were considerably more benevolent than the junkers for example, probably because they were considerably less powerful.

Seppia wrote: ↑

Wed Jan 22, 2025 2:43 am

Sorry for the “old fart” post, but I am still an idealist and would like to see the ultra wealthy (the model the masses usually loop up to) be people with at least some semblance of dignity and values.

I agree. Well said. The fact that it is being done so openly, for all to see, is unbelievable and disgusting. That said, I find it hard see much difference between this and the quant-fueled, front-running, high-frequency trading that has been going on for quite some time.

daylen wrote: ↑

Tue Jan 21, 2025 2:42 pm

It might be helpful to think of the memecoin phenomenon in the context of web1 (read) -> web2 (read-write) -> web3 (read-write-own).

For those who are interested in not being distracted by the shiny objects and want to learn more about how web3 in particular is likely to make the world better, consider reading, Read, Write, Own by Chris Dixon.

https://search.worldcat.org/title/1385290533

Front-running refers to e.g. a broker receiving an order (private information) and uses that to [illegally, because it's acting on private info] buy some shares for themselves before sending in the customer's order and possible selling the shares they just bought for themselves to the customer at a higher price.

What HFT does is not front-running. The difference is that the algos use public data. They see the order above being posted by the broker, detect a pattern that someone is buying and likely intending to buy more and thus puts in buy orders while pulling away their sell orders if any (betting they can sell higher). The only difference here is that algos are much faster (but also somewhat dumber) than humans. Since this happens faster than a human can blink, it's easy for a human to [naively] conclude that the algo must have had prior knowledge---because it's hard to believe that computers can do math that fast(?!) However, the difference is that the algo traded 500 products in 30 milliseconds, whereas a human trader trades 1 product in 400 milliseconds or maybe 2 products in 600 milliseconds if they got good twitch reflexes. Even if the algo is dumber than the human, the algos make it up on sheer volume/statistics. Naturally, this group of human trader dinosaurs are a bit sore about being replaced by robots who react faster than them.

Much of the profit made by algos comes from replacing the salaries and profits of this previously large but now dying group of human traders. In my estimate, one algo (run by a team of 2-4 scientists and engineers) can pretty much replace 50-100 human technicians for that kind of grunt work.

A decent analogy would be how one used to be able to go into a thrift store and use one's knowledge of books to find rare books and pay the standard price half a dollar that could be sold at a generous profit margin. However, then amazon did the quant equivalent of making an app where you could scan the ISBN of a book and instantly list it online for its actual value. This pretty much killed the "going to thrift stores to buy books cheap and sell them at a profit in rare book stores" market. The app wasn't front-running the rare book dealers, though. It just did its magic by having access to market information faster. Where did all that rare book dealer profit go? First it went to the app developers and users, but eventually it went to the thrift stores themselves.

Similar to how retail investors now enjoy 1cent spreads and zero-fee trades instead of paying nearly 1% of the entire value of the trade to some broker clown whose only job was to speak some numbers into a telephone... not more than 20 years ago.

On the currency/meme/shitcoin side, there seems to be a bit of a "war" between ideological libertarians who want to see crypto currency become a legit decentralized (no-state) alternative to state-backed money and "get rich quick" shysters who piggyback on the [currency] technology to create a sportsbetting equivalent for the popularity of memes for the terminally online. Shitcoins seem extremely similar to NFTs except instead of 1 person owning 1 instance of a link to a jpg file, using the currency protocol, the creator can split the petwifhat.jpg into a billion subNFTs (now called coins, except these ones can apparently be almost arbitrarily divided into millicoins, etc). Then sell of 20% of the subNFTs for the "lesser fool/greater fool" bettors while attracting cash money from the suckers (I hear there's one born every minute so there should be at least 30 million of them alive at any one point according to my math), and as a result call yourself a crypto billionaire. This scheme really does it all.

I think the value in nfts was allowing people to wash their crypto. Obfuscate the source, adjust the tax basis, etc. My understanding is the greater fool aspect was relatively minor.

That's not the case with the broader crypto field. The patterns underlying evolution of our regulated securities markets, repeat. Maybe it's the price of establishing new technology, but there's a wealth transfer happening / happened.

I've observed many people like those here profiting. Questions that give me pause - What do I want to profit from? Haven't I already profited enough? What's the opportunity cost? Down side risk?

There's serious potential in the underlying technology. An immutable public ledger is very cool.

Scott 2 wrote: ↑

Thu Jan 23, 2025 12:01 pm

There's serious potential in the underlying technology. An immutable public ledger is very cool.

And yet I haven't heard of a single serious use. The idea is 15 years old already. Banks got excited about it around 7-8 years ago, and they actually have the heft to do something major with it - but unfortunately they're also the last place I'd expect any real innovation from, so, in the end, nothing happened.

zbigi wrote: ↑

Thu Jan 23, 2025 4:41 pm

And yet I haven't heard of a single serious use. The idea is 15 years old already. Banks got excited about it around 7-8 years ago, and they actually have the heft to do something major with it - but unfortunately they're also the last place I'd expect any real innovation from, so, in the end, nothing happened.

That's because the real world applications are a lot less sexy than the casino versions presented in popular media.

JPMorgan's blockchain platform has made over $1.5 trillion of transactions since its inception in 2020. https://www.coindesk.com/business/2024/ ... or-usd-eur

Oracle and DHL have blockchain platforms in operation to manage/track shipments and logistics.

Wal Mart uses the blockchain to track food origins to ensure safety and monitor their supply chain.

Novo Nordisk Ihealthcare) uses it to secure patient and trial data.

Insurance companies are using smart contracts for claims processing.

There are more examples and these are just the big companies, not the web3 companies that have this tech as their central focus. This stuff is just getting started.

AI agents, IoT, and blockchain is about to get insane. People will ask their fridge to meal plan for a week and come back 15 min later to a plan with like 20 verified steps to insure freshness or whatever from farms to fridge. Each step linking to another agent you can interact with for whatever reason. Just confirm and the wheels start turning, or maybe you decide to make it a field trip instead while another 53 agents are helping with work/personal projects in the background.

The inanimate becomes animate. Points of failure being washed away in a partially transparent sea of vigilant agency as close to data source as possible.

Buy a fridge now when you can, eh? Kind of like a 90s car situation. No one can get the non-computerized actual mechanical version of the thing you can fix yourself that has actual buttons and dials instead of touchscreens

With all the extra free time and cheap intelligence/labor, your local neighborhood could start up an old school mechanic shop to build personalized dumb machines out of recycled materials that are robust to solar flares. While the neighborhood is at it, may as well go ahead and adopt ERE-like principles and practices to fall back on in case of systemic failure. Perhaps game A and game B go on in parallel.

zbigi wrote: ↑

Thu Jan 23, 2025 4:41 pm

And yet I haven't heard of a single serious use.

git (the source control system Linus Torvalds wrote in 2005) is a blockchain. The world runs on that.

A public ledger for money seems ridiculous. If I pay for a beer with bitcoin the recipient can query all earlier transactions made with that wallet. I don't want to share my spending habits with vendors, neighbors and family.

delay wrote: ↑

Fri Jan 24, 2025 7:01 am

A public ledger for money seems ridiculous. If I pay for a beer with bitcoin the recipient can query all earlier transactions made with that wallet. I don't want to share my spending habits with vendors, neighbors and family.

A public ledger for money is good monetarily: the inflation rate is provable.

A public ledger as a payment system is suboptimal. And that's not what the Bitcoin network is really for. Payment systems, such as Lightning, will be built on top of the base layer to provide scale and privacy.

daylen wrote: ↑

Thu Jan 23, 2025 8:54 pm

AI agents, IoT, and blockchain is about to get insane. People will ask their fridge to meal plan for a week and come back 15 min later to a plan with like 20 verified steps to insure freshness or whatever from farms to fridge. Each step linking to another agent you can interact with for whatever reason. Just confirm and the wheels start turning, or maybe you decide to make it a field trip instead while another 53 agents are helping with work/personal projects in the background.

In other words, it's possible to take a TV dinner from the fridge and heat it in the microwave. For whatever reason (I can't think of one) people could read the ingredient list ("potassium sorbate, hydrogenated oil, soybean extract, ...") while waiting for dinner to heat up. Some may marvel at the industrial food processing chain involving at least 341 "associates" that brought the many ingredients of this lovely and convenient product together. There's a phone number on the technicolored package that consumers can call for more information. Also a reference to something called a web-site. Breakfast cereal boxes will include small IQ tests and puzzles to train the minds of young students and senior citizens and perhaps one day, if not already, provide most of the schooling children will need or get right at home while eating breakfast. What opportunities we now have in this modern world! What will they think of next?

My point being: Isn't this pretty much what we already? A solution looking for an already solved problem dressed up in the technobabble of the latest techmology for the neophytes to buy or invest their venture capital in. Ditto putting things on the blockchain instead of just putting it on paper somewhere with official stamps or notarized signatures. Functionally it does the same thing with a few extra features the lack of which hasn't been an insurmountable problem as of yet.

I agree it's cool, but I remain unimpressed by the general utility/value-add. I probably sound like gramps wondering why one would put an engine on the buggy when there's a perfectly good horse in the barn to pull it.

delay wrote: ↑

Fri Jan 24, 2025 7:01 am

git (the source control system Linus Torvalds wrote in 2005) is a blockchain. The world runs on that.

I don't think git is a blockchain (in the sense introduced by Satoshi). It lacks the key feature of maintaining integrity across machines. Integrity needs to be estabilished externally to git protocol, usually by all users agreeing that a repo hosted on a certain machine is the refence repo, and everybody's else copies are just local scratchpads. Which makes git centralized.