With Bitcoin's rising price I get many people asking me my opinion about it: Here are nine tips

1) Don't take advice about Bitcoin from those with a vested interest in seeing its price rise. That's like listening to CDO dealer in 2006. When prices go up, critical thought go down

This "bitcoin is better than gold" statement going around once more show that bitcoiners have no clue about monetary history and what the purpose of a monetary system is. A thread.

1- Metal standards were never inflexible; they could not in order to operate properly. Qty of metal was changed, usually lowered, to accommodate for changing economic conditions: price of metal, scarcity of coins, financial needs of economic units (state and private), etc.

2- The purpose of a monetary system is to make the rest of the economy go. It is there to accommodate financial needs. The more elastic one can design the supply, the better.
That doesn't mean that monetary creation & destruction shouldn't follow any rules & have no constraint.

3- Rules and constraint impose depend on economic system and evolve over time has we learn how to manage better the system. In a capitalist economy, the private sector is subject to the profitability constraint. We have learned from experience that this is not enough.

3 (ii) Financial stability requires a "hedge finance" constraint for most private agents: profitability should be judged on income gains, not capital gains.
In the government sector, the constraints are ressource availability and political constraints.

Lindy Effect 101

With Bitcoin's return to the spotlight, debates on its long-term viability are raging. Its proponents contend @nntaleb's Lindy Effect says the technology is here to stay.

But what is the "Lindy Effect" and how does it work?

Here's Lindy Effect 101!

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1/ First, a few definitions.

The Lindy Effect is a theory that the future life expectancy of specific non-perishable items, like a technology or idea, is proportional to their age.

Put simply, the longer it has already lasted, the higher the likelihood it will continue to last.

2/ The term "Lindy effect" is a reference to Lindy's, a New York deli frequented by comedians in the 1960s.

While author Albert Goldman used the term "Lindy's Law" in a 1964 article, it was mathematician Benoit Mandlebrot who moved the dialogue towards the current definition.

3/ In his book, entitled The Fractal Geometry of Nature, Mandlebrot commented that the more stage appearances a Lindy's comedian made, the more future appearances he could be predicted to make.

The longer he lasted, the longer he would continue to last.

4/ @nntaleb built upon Mandelbrot's work, formally coining the term "Lindy Effect" in his book, Antifragile.

He noted the Lindy Effect with books - the longer a book has been in print, the longer it is likely to survive.

With no natural upper bound, power laws come into play.

Bitfinex files discovery in "Yo bro, where did our $800 million go?" action and it is every bit as interesting as you'd expect it to

Here's their CFO describing their agreement (which we know from other litigation was never contractualized because, presumably because money launderers hate paper trails):

Bitfinex's CFO was shocked, shocked to learn that the money launderer they engaged to provide money laundering services while I-swear-to-God-this-is-an-actual-quote "we learned to bank like criminals" may have from time to time lied to banks.

"Institutional constraints" means, here, "We were attempting to avoid velocity checks placed by our banking partners to detect fraud and money laundering, which would have detected our fraud and money laundering."

Money at the speed of code, yadda yadda yadda, the Bitcoin economy is surprisingly blasé when several hundred million dollars is in an interstitial state for months.

In a situation never before encountered by a financial institution: the check was not, in fact, in the mail.

If you've been following DeFi or Ethereum over the past few months, you've likely heard the term "flash loan" mentioned again and again.

This new DeFi primitive has been at the core of a number of economic exploits and arbitrages.

A thread on the basics of flash loans - 👇

Most DeFi loans take place across days, weeks, or even months.

You can deposit Ethereum into Aave, then withdraw stablecoins for yield farming in Yearn, for instance.

On-chain loans have garnered much traction, with total debt outstanding moving toward $2.5 billion.

While popular, DeFi loans are not capital efficient: to account for custodial risk and volatility risk, you need to put up 130-150% of the value of your loan in collateral.

If your collateral slips below the threshold, you're liquidated, resulting in a fee anywhere from 5-13%.

Flash loans are much different than longer-term DeFi loans.

Flash loans are non-custodial, take place over the course of one block, and require no collateralization.

That's to say, the coins you borrow never appear in your wallet.

When taking a flash loan, you can direct the coins to any protocol and function, as long as you pay back the loan + interest fee within the same transaction.

So what the hell? What are flash loans used for?

More often than not, arbitrage.