nthot · HackerTrans

vor 4 Jahrendiscuss

Disclaimer: I'm pretty new to twitter, so I may be misunderstanding something. On my Twitter Home Screen there are three little stars on the upper right of the central container which allow you to toggle between "top tweets" (ie. 'The Algorithm') and "latest tweets" which is the time based ordering.

nthot

vor 4 Jahrendiscuss

I get that feeling as well, fartcannon. The meteoric rise over the past year of the subreddit just feels artficial. I don't have any evidence outside of the a rapid increase of subscribers. I'm sure there is a large number of people with that sentiment out there, so I'd maybe put it at 40% or less that this is being coordinated by an external actor.

The whole sentiment around the subreddit really seems to be amplifying a class war attitude in the United States.

I remember reading an article (I think this was it [1]) about reddit getting manipulated by advertisers. Either posting about a product, or upvoting posts that were positive about a product and downvoting negative posts. Imagine what someone with a larger budget could do.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jaymcgregor/2017/02/20/reddit-i...

nthot

vor 5 Jahrendiscuss

Here's a few ways I could think of: 1. It's much more difficult to gamble with debt/debt is not used for gambling to such an extent that the scale would have enough of an effect. 2. From an economy's perspective gambling is net zero. What is catastrophic to an individual is a benefit for the person(casino) on the other side of the bet. Whereas the loss of value from bitcoin would reduce the total balance sheet for the economy. 3. I think that Bitcoin as assets can be used as collateral for other purchases or to be loaned out for others to use. This creates a chain of wealth based on the value of a bitcoin. Break the foundation of this chain (reduce the price of bitcoin by 75%) and that entire chain of wealth creation is broken. 4. The revenue from gambling is around $40 billion per year in the United States, whereas the market value of Bitcoin is over $1 trillion. It's really not apples to apples at all though, since it's market value vs. revenue. I'm not sure a good way to compare the gambling market vs. the crypto market.

nthot

vor 5 Jahrendiscuss

Are you implying a relationship between the two plots?

nthot

vor 5 Jahrendiscuss

Many of the individual businesses within Berkshire are able to act with a long term horizon that I think is uncommon within the stock market as a whole. Profits and float are able to be reinvested within Berkshire in a much more tax efficient way than separate companies.

One example is BNSF. Most railroads are on warpath to increase operating margin as much as possible. Cutting routes, laying off staff, and neglecting customer satisfaction are the norm. Imagine being laid off after your company has had its most profitable year ever. These actions are being dictated by institutional investors. BNSF is the only major railroad not taking on precision railroading. It's possible that this will be a failure on BNSF's part, but Berkshire is willing to take the bet and act differently from everyone else on the idea that this will be better long term. Institutional investors are not interested in that.

nthot

vor 5 Jahrendiscuss

Voting power is in my understanding the real reason. Dollar for dollar a shares have seven times the voting power of a b share. Following his death, the foundations he has bequeathed his wealth to need to sell his shares over the course of ten years. Ordinarily this would result in institutional investors having a majority of the voting power. To avoid this the a shares will be converted to b shares in order to reduce the voting power. A shares are by and large held by investors who have been with Berkshire for decades. Hopefully they will continue the long term focus of Berkshire. Once their progeny start inheriting the shares I think all bets are off. I worry activist investors will convince institutional investors to break Berkshire apart.

nthot

vor 5 Jahrendiscuss

0.6% is orders of magnitude larger than the percentage of people who have a legitimate use case. In my opinion it's not that coin does not have legitimate uses, it's that the cost of providing those uses far outweighs the benefit by design.

The current increase in value and ramping up of energy use is not due to an increase in the usefulness of the coin, but instead on a renewed interest in the game of hot potato that is speculation.

nthot

vor 5 Jahrendiscuss

Reading through the abstract it immediately doesn’t appear that they are using the correct statistical test to come to the conclusion they are claiming. Like another comment says, it takes minutes to criticize what takes months to make, so I’ll read through the article and work through how they came to their methodology before saying more.

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