Recent content by Sig

Actually Walmart is one of the most sought after employers for truckers. They pay their truckers very well (starting at $86,000/year) with excellent benefits and work conditions. You need to have a driving record with no dings for the past 5 years to even apply, and the interview process is...

How closely are those companies correlated to futures prices? The unique thing about lumber compared to other commodities is that you can leave trees to grow a couple more years at essentially very little marginal cost if the spot prices are low, so I wonder how closely the timber owning...

You're right in some respects. But as you can probably tell I'm all about pragmatism over idealism. While a trusted centralized authority could do T+3 minute settlement, that costs money and requires a system with much higher tolerances for them to manage. If you're going to spend that money...

Only if they used power that came from a nuclear plant with a few $B in cost overruns that were being passed on to ratepayers:D

There's a great concept in the world of finance called risk adjusted return. To simplify it, the guy in El Salvador making the average income of $300 a month isn't looking for any return. He just needs to be able to buy roughly the same amount of rice at the end of the month for a given amount...

The UK project is exactly what I was thinking about. I have a classmate who is working on something different but in that same space. Realtybits is his company, but he has kind of been sucked into the financial side of it because that's where the VC bubble is. We've had similar discussions to...

Sure, basically using blockchain to record ownership of things that change hands besides currency, which at the end of the day is really what blockchain is. It creates actual value and generally doesn't require building a Dyson sphere around the sun to enable. For example, tracking stock share...

Listen, you're talking about increasing the energy production of the entire world by 50%! I don't know how many more times or ways I have to demonstrate that massively more energy would be required by a world with crypto as the reserve currency. You can't just keep saying it's more efficient...

As I pointed out, to the guy in El Salvador or really anyone anywhere who has the purchasing power of their currency vary by 40% in 3 months in either direction could care less about your dissertation on substitution of base metals in coinage. That kind of currency fluctuation makes any kind of...

When I am an El Salvadoran and my entire income could buy 10 lbs of rice in November and 5.6 lbs of rice in January, your protestations that there is no debasement of the currency I'm using is going to get you a punch in the face for sheer stupidity! Your entire argument is circular, 1 USD is...

You clearly disapprove of the U.S. currency, despite the fact that a dollar today can buy you pretty close to what a dollar could buy you this time in November. Meanwhile you want to replace this horrible awful bad currency with one where one unit of currency in November has inflated such that...

No-one in the remittance community is worried in the slightest about trusted intermediaries. That's a first-world problem cited by people who haven't the first clue what it's like to be the people who they're condescendingly crafting solutions for. Again, this is a solution looking for a...

It wasn't my impression that the travel wasn't included in part of the percentage transaction cost, that was just an extra bonus potential hardship. El Salvador is a little different case than most others in that there's never been a currency exchange issue because they use the dollar, so the...

My impression was always that this was a bright shiny object he could distract everyone with in order to avoid the hard real work of tackling things like new export industries or reducing corruption.

So it turns out that in practice it costs an El Salvadorian 4X as much to repatriate funds using the Bitcoin as it did using existing means. Oh, and El Salvador's sovereign debt has dropped from being worth $.75 on the dollar to $.36 since this whole Bitcoin idiocy was announced...