I can obviously understand not wanting to list massive outliers in an average, but at the same time there isn't realistically a way for them to "safely" adjust which exchanges they include in the averages.
No matter what, it's either going to cause big sudden jumps in either direction, or they can "smear" it across some time, which (in my opinion) would look really bad as it would imply sustained increase or decrease.
Giving advance notice should be expected of them, but I honestly don't know if they gave one or not, and I don't really think that many people would have read it if they did.
IMO the problem was not adjusting the dollar value, but the fact that they did not regenerate the past week's data in the sparkline. So the weekly price graphs showed a sharp drop in many coins that didn't actually happen. They should have regenerated the graphs (they also should have posted an announcement on their site)
Yeah that's really the only thing I can fault them on here. They really should have given some advanced notice that they would be changing how they calculate the averages.
Especially since they have a widely used API that many people use, and I'm assuming some trading bots as well.
The problem with giving advance notice is the impact would just be felt at the time of the notice (bc smart traders will just determine the adjustment immediately.) I think the suggestion above to make the change immediate, but re-calc the historicals so the % change is still right, is probably not bad.
> but at the same time there isn't realistically a way for them to "safely" adjust which exchanges they include in the averages.
this is a very solved problem in financial markets: you source quotes from a set list of contributors, ditch a set number of the highs and lows and average rest, possibly weighted in some way, e.g trade volume.
Well actually, yes, pretty much. No trader actually succeeded in meaningfully moving the fix, precisely due to this mechanism - except for 1 guy - Tom Hayes, probably the best known of the Libor guys (the other guys were done for attempting to move the fix, not actually moving it)
Tom knew full well that it was impossible for a single guy to move the fix - go too high or too low and your submission gets chucked out. In the range, as 1 of 12 others, you aren't going to have a meaningful impact.
The only way of moving it is to get all submitters (or at least lots of them) to submit high or low fixes in your favour. But a cartel like that is never going to work:
1) It means revealing your positions to your trading counterparties and competitirs - not good
2) Others could be the other way round to you, and want to submit fixes against you
3) Even in those heady days of loose standards, setting up and running a cartel would be logistically tricky
So - what to do? Well Tom had a great insight. he realised that athe interbank lending market was pretty illiquid and there was wasn't much mush actual trading to reference. Most banks were submitting "best guesses" and those guesses were based on broker screens like ICAP. The rationale was that ICAP saw all the flows, so ICAP know the levels, so it was reasonalble to base your submission on the ICAP screens (ICAP screens are used as a reference in all sorts of markets, they are the gold standard).
Now Tom also raelised that ICAP weren't seeing much flow either and that their prices weren't much better than guestimates. So - he basically bribed a couple of brokers at ICAP to bump the screens. And that way he'd effectively bump the whole market as everyone was basing their prices on them! (He bribed the ICAP guys by executing "wash" trades, back-to-backs, that have no economic rationale, but generate brokerage fees).
So, in short, yes the top & tailing averaging approach is pretty robust. But of course no system is completely infallible.
I am deeply surprised by how few people are mentioning bots. This is no doubt directly related to trading bots that are polling coinmarketcap and then buying/selling through some API like the one bittrex offers. The number of bots that are actively trading is unknown, but if you do some digging the amount of resources and interest there is around trading bots leads me to believe that the pool of bots must be massive. I would love to be able to quantify the number of trading bots that are running wild, but my feeble brain can't come up with anything, maybe if I worked at an exchange I would be able to. Any thoughts?
Have a look at http://http://www.dancingbots.com which visualizes Orderbook positions. Most of the action (95%?) close to current price looks like positions from bots.
Compare the orderbooks of exchanges which have no fees for maker orders (like gdax, bitfinex) and are preferred by bots to those exchanges who do ask for a fee.
HEY! this site is amazing and is just what I am looking for. BUT the link you provided is missing a colon after "http" and I thought the site was down for a second. I am sure if others see this they will have similar issues. Please fix your link :)
Yep, given that practically all altcoins are priced in bitcoin, market cap artificially rises extremely, or lowers extremely due to the inertness of the open trades.
Possibly intentional market manipulation? They are in the top 200 most visited sites in the world and supply api data to hundreds if not thousands of cryptocurrency price apps. Surely they knew their change would impact the market.
I really think there is a considerable amount of market manipulation going on with crypto-currencies in general. There was an earlier thread to a blog post that got voted up quite a bit, but the comments all brought up that the author was just speculating and tried to pass it off as fact.
There was also a pastebin up earlier that showed how someone had found wallets on the blockchain that used their own hashes as passwords, and were potentially being used to funnel money around (security holes in exchanges potentially?) It was removed from HN; found it on Lobsters.
The trouble is that no one has really presented hard evidence, but a number of people I talked to who are developers in the regular financial sector do think it's highly probably that there is intentional manipulation. And with the blockchain being all hashes, numbers and mathematics, it also seems plausible that it's a system that can be gamed; or at least more easily gamed than regular fiat currency.
They removed data from the Korean exchanges which have always had higher prices due to Korean exchange controls - once you've changed money to bitcoin you've got it out of the country. That data should always not really have been included if you wanted a fair idea of value.
If you use GDAX (the underlying exchange technology behind Coinbase and also owned by Coinbase) as a maker (meaning you use a limit order), you pay 0% fees. If you use GDAX as a taker (market order), you pay 0.25% fees.
That's not what the maker/taker distinction means—a taker is an order to the extent it is filled because it matches a pre-existing order when it hits the sysyem; a limit order can be a taker if there's a matching order on the book when it hits the system. GDAX supports marking a limit order as “Post Only”, which cancels it if any part would fill as a taker order, but that's optional.
"cryptocurrency" is a bit of a mouthful, so I at least understand the urge to shorten it, but I wish we could agree to at least shorten it to "cryptos," as in: "A Cryptos Website Changes Its Data..."
The suggestion was that "cryptos" could be a suitable plural abbreviation for "cryptocurrencies" (unless it's typically used as an abbreviation for "cryptographies," which it doesn't seem to be). Anyway, I confess that seems likely to just cause more confusion.
Well that definitely contributed, but that alone didn't cause the crash. There was irrational price rise in the last few weeks for certain cryptocurrencies(Ripple, Tron) and this is part of the correction.
In Tron's (TRX) case, the project's whitepaper is plagiarized [0] from Filecoin's, and the CEO (Justin Sun) dumped 6 billion tokens [1] after pumping the price by announcing "partnerships" that turned out to be him hiring developers. TRX is the literal definition of a shitcoin, yet the price pumped 10x in less than 10 days.
No, dogecoin theoretically caps out at ~30 transactions a second. Bitcoin caps out at ~7 tx/s. This bottleneck increases demand for tx completion and raises tx fees for bitcoin.
The Dogecoin network can handle 4.5x more traffic than the Bitcoin network, meaning the satire cryptocurrency is a better technology at being a currency than bitcoin is.
Of course, since the Dogecoin client software hasn't been updated in the past two years it lacks the rather substantial performance optimisations that Bitcoin has developed over that time period, so it's not clear how well it would actually cope if it ever had to handle a transaction rate anywhere near its theoretical limit. (Or, for that matter, if miners are actually willing to process that many transactions.)
Because I can create a cryptocoin with 2B tokens, sell one coin to friend for $100 and have a $200B market cap. It's got nothing to do with reality. Anyone (literally) can create a $200B market cap coin by forking a github repo.
That's just how market caps work in general. The same argument has been made for startup valuations. It's not a problem with the metric at all and doesn't hold for the case being discussed as actual market based transactions in enough volume are happening. It's not just a made up number. Here's an argument that Facebook was not worth 33B$ in 2010 because only 3% of its value had ever been transacted:
It's worth almost 17 times more than that now. Market cap is not a perfect metric because it doesn't capture the depth of the market willing to buy but coins don't make that any different.
No one measures the marketcap of gold or soybeans. When was the last time someone mentioned the marketcap of the USD?
It's an absurd metric made worse by the fact that more coins are issued every 5 mins. If price remains the same virtually all coins will go up in marketcap regardless.
That's not what a market cap means. There are cryptocurrencies too that have no limit on the number of produced coins. Market cap means market capitalization.
With stocks, the market cap is the total valuation of the company. Companies can have valuations because they can be bought and sold - either when they're private, like when Google buys a startup, or when they're publicly traded, like when Microsoft bought LinkedIn.
The valuation of a company is determined based on its financial performance and, ultimately, by its ability to generate cash for shareholders. (Keep in mind that, unlike cryptocurrencies, companies generate profit for their owners just from their daily operations).
That overall valuation drives share price. Equity investors consider how valuable they think a company will be in the future and back into a price they're willing to pay per share from there.
Market cap is a meaningless metric for crypto since nobody would ever want to buy all the Bitcoin in the world and hold it for ten years. What would be the point? It won't generate cash flow during those ten years, and it almost certainly won't be worth more in ten years - with one person hoarding all the Bitcoin in the world nobody could use it for any transactions and people would lose interest.
Case in point, nobody talks about the market cap for USD or other currencies. It just doesn't make sense for assets that are only valuable as a medium of exchange.
They were irrational because if you analyzed all the coins in the top 100-200 you'll realize that it was primarily cheaply priced coins that were making the outsized gains and a lot of it can be attributed to market psychology.
It feels better to own 200 of something you don't understand than 0.00159. But at the end of the day returns are returns and it makes no difference if you have 200 of a coin or 0.00159.
Economics is a social science. It could be argued very few things have intrinsic value. It could be argued all markets are down to purely human psychology.
Birds, for example, don't really care how much you paid for those 3000 tonnes of wheat, only that there's a hole in one of the train carriages transporting it.
That's mostly true, but it doesn't completely work. 200 of something with a low market cap with the potential to gain 200-4000% is way better than 0.00159 of something with a large market cap and low likelihood of doubling. E.g. a random altcoin vs bitcoin today
When you are betting on Bitcoin or Ethereum, you are betting on the technology, developer community, ecosystem and the adoption. With Tron, there's hardly a product and Ripple while seems to have some successful pilots, is still far from realizing the dream of replacing the FIAT currency among banks.
Full stop. You are trading or investing - if the word "betting" passes through your brain, stop now. The public surge of interest in crypto currencies is a redistribution of wealth from retail speculators to professional speculators. You aren't betting on the technology, developer community, ecosystem, or adoption anymore. At this point, you are betting you aren't the last one to the party.
You can buy stocks with no expectation they will increase in value (or even maintain value) if the dividend yield is high enough. And stocks have value because of this - the assumption in any stock, even one currently without a dividend, is that eventually it will pay out some form of a dividend to its holders.
You may buy a stock hoping it will will rise in value, but that rise is predicated on the eventual delivery of cash via dividends or some other mechanism of distribution. Contrast that with say, Gold, where in fact it costs money to hold and there's no expectation it will ever generate any kind of dividend.
There are plenty of stocks that no one ever expects any distribution or dividend from, but they know it represents a claim on real value (assets and incomes) in the business, and that there is a market where they can resell it for more money if the value of the underlying assets increase. All the incomes may go back into the business but that doesn't mean they don't increase real value.
At the end of the day, on even these stocks, the value is still predicated upon either those assets being sold and the value being distributed, or those incomes turning into a dividend or liquidation value. A business that reinvests its income into its own business does to because it believes that the return on that investment in the future exceeds the rate of return demanded by its equity investors. Otherwise, doing that would reduce the value of the stock.
It's impossible to assess, of course, but the true value of any equity is the net present value of the future cash it will generate for its holders. Full stop. Equity holders don't care about value in the business that won't translate into dollars coming out of the stock at some point in time.
No one knows what going to happen tomorrow let alone in ten plus year.
My bet is: it all comes down to risk tolerance. In the long term some forms of investments have shown, historically, to be consistently less risky, or more risky, than others.
Gambling and investing both involve risk, but they're not the same thing, and there's important differences. In particular, in most gambling, the sum of returns to participants is less than the amount wagered by all parties, whereas in equity investment it's generally / historically the opposite. Additionally, whereas gambling is generally fairly time-bounded, investing isn't, and in fact often rewards longer holds via dividend and coupon yields in addition to the potential difference between purchase and sale.
More to point: most studies show that you do best in investing simply by having money invested for long periods, and being diversified to mitigate secular risk. That wouldn't work in gambling.
If you choose a broad enough definition of betting, everything is gambling. But to be more specific, the post I replied to stated that everyone who invests in stocks is betting that their price will go up, which isn't true. There's good stock investments where you know the price of the stock is going to go down to zero, because you have high enough certainty that it will pay out dividends of sufficient value to justify the purchase price. (This would be typical of a "late stage" or "liquidation stage" enterprise.)
Yes but the increase comes from the company having more revenue by producing and selling more cars, iphones, CPUs, GPUs, pizzas, etc.
Cryptocurrencies like bitcoin don't generate an income. Therefore they shouldn't be increasing in value at all beyond the rate of inflation.
They should stay at a stable price adjusted by inflation +/- some volatility. If bitcoin suddenly increases in price there are only two possible reasons. Either inflation of USD is higher than expected (unlikely) or more speculation happens which drives up the volatility.
May be.Really, In the current scenario, you can't like avoid any implicit bias, like even if you don't mean it. That's why in my comment, I didn't explicitly comment on Ripple's product or team.
Also, a bet is one thing, but the get rich quick scheme going on in the market with new investors is another. I still hold some Ripple if that breaks any bias, and I think the correction was unavoidable.
It's facetious (and bad 'journalism') to claim $100B vanished. It was never there to begin with: market cap isn't something you can cash in on. It's merely the result of price multiplied by supply. If you owned a significant portion of all the coins in the world, and tried to sell them all at once, you wouldn't end up with number_of_coins * price, it would (realistically) be a smaller number given the market slippage.
>It's facetious (and bad 'journalism') to claim $100B vanished.
It's certainly not bad journalism, this is how all sorts of assets are reported on. Market Cap isn't a perfect metric but it's pretty good and keeps us from saying things like "AMZN is down 50%" when they do a stock split.
In the sense that yesterday if you summed up what all the individual holders saw when they checked their accounts you'd get $200b and today if you did the same you'd get $100b then $100b did vanish.
If 10% of stock holders are able to cash out without changing the price significantly, market cap would be an inaccurate measure, but not that far off.
If, on the other hand, only 0.1% of holders of some token are able to cash out without significantly affecting the price, the value they think they have just isn’t there (to a much larger extent than the case above).
To use an extreme example: if I issue 2^100 tokens, and manage to get a couple of orders in an order book with a mid (and “last trade”) price of 0.1 cent, and this price goes to zero, did 1.268^27 dollars of market value just vanish, or were the holders of this token misinformed?
The inherent inaccuracy of market cap value is inversely proportional to liquidity: the less liquid the asset, the further away from reality market cap value is. And these tiny tokens are some of the least liquid assets in existence.
If I bought monopoly money for $1B then later am able to sell 10% for 200M. I might believe and tell people my stash is now worth $2B, but most reasonable people would say your stash is worth $0 because its monopoly money and you got scammed for the first $1B.
> If you owned a significant portion of all the coins in the world, and tried to sell them all at once, you wouldn't end up with number_of_coins * price
Note that the same would happen if everybody started dumping their wealth in whatever form: shares, real estate, and fiat money, even hard bills.
What we call value is just the promise that somebody, at some future moment, will be willing to exchange what we have for something else (food, goods, houses, or of course any other different store of value). If everybody is trying to get rid of something, the value of that something just drops to zero.
Wrong. The market value is only what you get for it when you sell it. It's a subtle but very important difference.
A good analogy is comparing the advertised price of a used car versus what you actually get for it. You might think it's worth $5k, but there's only 1 person who wants to buy it and they're only willing to pay $4k, so it's actually worth $4k, not $5k. It doesn't matter if someone else sold theirs for $5k.
I'm not exactly sure what you are arguing but the value of these coins were trading about 30% lower, so using your definition above, the market value was clearly lower as can be seen by actual market activity. The price has since recovered.
I don't think anybody is claiming the number on Coin Market Cap is the actual market value because it is simply a metric derived from aggregating across multiple, very volatile exchanges.
EDIT: ok i saw your comment below, and it seems you are arguing, albeit very aggressively, that daily market fluctuations are random and cannot be attributed to an actual event, such as this one?
I hear this all the time, but does anyone really think that the market cap is what you can really get for an asset?
It's a metric, one as "untrue" as an average or median. It's not a contract, and you won't get that if you change the market, which selling and buying does.
I don't think that means we shouldn't use it as a metric to use to get information from for comparisons. And I don't think that it's bad journalism to say that the market cap dropped by $100B when it did, even if that doesn't equate to $100 billion being burned.
The point is that no one really knows the actual value of any asset until you've sold it. You can only measure value in the past; future values can only be guessed (excluding things like future contracts).
This is true regardless of whether we're talking about Bitcoin, stocks, metals, houses, chickens, or seashells.
Most of these stupid market movement predictions are equivalent to astrology and only exist because WSJ and others have nothing interesting to say. The daily market fluctuations are pretty much random, and this has been proven many times over.
I completely agree about "market movement predictions", but market cap is not a prediction, it's a metric, a statistic, a made up value that can help you compare one asset to another.
It is used like a unitless measuring stick, not a prediction on what you can get if you sold.
And I'll argue that it does it's job fairly well. It's difficult to "game", and can help give you some information about an asset. It doesn't say everything, it can't tell you if it's stable, or if it's being used or not, or if it's a scam. It's just a tool, a metric, something that you use with a bunch of other tools to get an idea of the ecosystem.
I would be happy to "rename" it to a unitless value that doesn't imply a "total worth", but that ship has sailed, and it's not going to be possible, so we have what we have.
How can a thing which never existed to begin with vanish? There wasn't $100B sitting around in a bank account waiting to be claimed, which then suddenly evaporated.
Also investopedia isn't exactly a high quality source.
"Market capitalisation or market cap is the market value of a company's issued share capital – in other words. the number of shares multiplied by the current price of those shares on the stock market."
Net worth is the same concept. Jeff Bezos net worth is calculated based on how much his assets are theoretically worth based on current fair market prices. He doesn't have to sell all his assets to determine his net worth.
People don't like the "lost $100B in market value" part, but it is accurate since market value is calculated on paper.
It's not only dollars that have value. Lots of assets do, like company shares.
In the stock market, if a company has ten million shares at $100 each we say the company is worth a billion dollars, even though that $100 price is only the most recent transaction. We say that because if price times quantity didn't match what the overall market thinks the whole company is worth, the price would quickly correct until it did.
Investopedia should not be your source of truth. While you can get quality education for free on the internet in various subjects(math, CS, biology) - financial markets is not one of them.
Market value is exactly what the parent asserted it is, and the source of truth for that is your bank. If you are long 500k shares of AAPL and the quote is $100 - your bank will not consider you to have $50mil liquid assets. They know(and you should to) that starting to unwind a position of that size will decrease the market value a considerable amount.
Maybe an example will help you out here.... Let's walk through that AAPL example. You are sitting on 500k shares.
Step 1: Order 100,000 shares sold at market.
Step 2: Observe your average sale price is more likely to be $90-95 than $100.
Step 3: Order another 100,000 shares sold at market.
Step 4: Observe your average sale price is more likely $90-91 than $90-95.
Steps after this: same result, diminishing prices resultant from your sale(s).
See a trend here? The market value of your assets is decreasing based on the market's perception of value, not on the mechanical formula investopedia fed you. Your unloading of shares is going to decrease the perceived value, which decreases the price you can sell them for.
tldr; investopedia's advice on markets is barely more accurate than urban dictionary's advice on word meaning.
No, market value is the name of a math formula. It sounds like you're asserting that market value != Real world value which is true but irrelevant to the definition of market value.
So as crazy as it sounds $100B in market value can be erased by a drop in the market price of an asset. But don't confuse that with $100B actually being lost or investors realizing $100B in losses. But in any event the title of the article is accurate.
You've got the right idea, but picked the absolute wrong stock for your illustration. Apple's current market cap, i.e. shares outstanding times share price, is approximately $866 billion dollars.
Apple traded 21,583,997 shares today. Aggressively selling 500,000 shares (less than $100 million dollars worth) might move the market in this stock by perhaps 1%, certainly not anywhere near 10%.
AAPL 500k shares? Yeah, not correct. AAPL average 50 day daily volume is slightly less than 28 million. Sell Day 500k AAPL bid - 0.001 SHOW QTY 100 won't move a market at all.
There are a bunch of websites that offer to value this or that website. I once plugged an old website of mine in there and it was well over $1M. I was like - please tell me who the buyer is, I'd sell right away.
"Market value" doesn't mean squat if you've no buyer in front.
But, market value means the market price * total assets. So, market value is erased when market prices drop and created when they rise. How you interpret a ride or drop in market value is up to you.
It's just like saying my house was appraised at $300k. That doesn't mean you will get an offer at that price, but it's not accurate to say that the appraisal value isn't $300k unless you find a buyer at that price. The appraisal price and purchase price are separate.
An aggregator changed its reporting methodology. Coinmarketcap is a price aggregator, not a market. All of the markets are unaffected, it just happened that the markets that got removed from the aggregator are the ones that had the highest prices. But they're still there. You can still trade on them the same as before.
I keep asking if there is a better term than than straight MarketValue (shares * share price). Quoting from a previous comment of mine:
Imagine two different sets of digital objects: AlphaCoins and BetaCoins - they're identical in the say way physics professors say "imagine an infinite frictionless plane". Both have a 1000 in circulation.
Both are worth $10 each.
Both have a market cap of $10,000 US Dollars.
But the market for AlphaCoins is "thin" (small changes in supply and demand make for really big price swings).
There's a run on the market and everybody wants to sell off their coins.
After a day's trading:
AlphaCoins price is $3 / coin.
BetaCoins price is $9 / coin.
For goods and services you'd call this the price elasticity of demand (You can change the price of medicine and people will keep paying it b/c without it they'd die - it's inelastic - the same can't be said for a snack bag of cheetos).
To me, this is the article's argument. That while these terms describe the same things across markets there are some big differences not captured in simple "market cap" comparisons.
Maybe a better analogy is two all you can eat restaurants (identical, yadda yadda) but at one you can use your full set of dining implements and at the other you can only use a fragile toothpick to eat your food with - and all anyone can write about is how the quantity of food in both places is the same.
Can an economist or serious financial person please tell me what this term is called?
Market cap is just one way of determining the value. You should consider others when making any investment/gamble. Many of the traditional ways of valuing a company can be applied to value a crypto currency. If the market cap is much higher than the net present value or discounted cash flow that is a sign of an overvaluation or bubble.
24h volume is related. For instance NEM has a market cap of 14B, but 24h volume puts it at 62M where as LTC has a market cap of 13B, but 24h volume of 0.9B.
If you tried to liquidate the same amount (denominated in USD) in NEM and LTC you'd see much more price slippage in LTC than in NEM.
I'm probably misunderstanding something fundamental. If there's 14 times more 24h volume in LTC than NEM, wouldn't a seller experience more slippage in NEM?
> It was never there to begin with: market cap isn't something you can cash in on. ... If you owned a significant portion of all the coins in the world, and tried to sell them all at once ...
until of course you can take a loan collateralized by the asset. Or get/sell some CDS/future/option based on the asset - that way you can even work with amounts larger than the market cap.
I'm beginning to see how delusional it is to think you can make money by producing something useful or of value in people's lives. That's for lusers. Instead mess with the neural pathways of a large population such that they just give you their money.
I'm sure many of us feel this way but would you please not post unsubstantive rants to Hacker News? It leads reliably to lower-quality discussion, partly because it's so generic, and partly because rage gets the lower-quality juices flowing.
Unless you're straight-up stealing, you have to persuade people to hand over their money. The way you do that is by convincing them that what they're getting in return is valuable.
Unfortunately people tend make value assessments that I think are horrible, and that causes entire industries to pivot in ways I don't like. For example, I love Nintendo's $60 games that come with plenty of content and no microtransactions. I don't like "free" smartphone games that do the opposite.
However, huge numbers of people have determined that getting nickel-and-dimed with thousands of dollars in microtransactions is something that adds value to their lives. I certainly don't think I have any right to object to their conclusion, except in the way that I'm already objecting: by refusing to spend any money on microtransactions. It just stings a little that I'm quickly finding myself in the minority.
It sounds like you're going through something similar with respect to the cryptocurrency market.
That’s somewhat like a conclusion I came to about another field I am in, glassblowing. For a long time, I thought the idea was to become more skilled at the art, and that would make me
more sucessful… It turns out getting better at marketing is much more important, assuming the overall goal is to make money. Financially, mediocre glassblowers with excellent marketing do far better than excellent glassblowers with mediocre marketing.
marketing was born with competition, you need marketing, because you are not the only one good at what you do
marketing is anything and everything you do, to influence others, to achieve your objectives .. this does include the product design and features .. or in other words, the features you chose to include in your product
marketing is not bad, and is not a waste
marketing is not, in my opinion, more important than the skills required to create a product, but it is definitely very important ... because simply put, you are not the only "skilled" one in the market
Indeed, nothing bad about having marketing skill or excelling at it. Certain people can take average glass skill and, through marketing, networking` and product savvy, parlay it into greater fame and fortune than others - people who have been pounding at their craft for decades.
Building a brand is a skill many artists don't excel at. It requires similar people skills to being a salesman. Often they have to rely on dealers, gallery owners and store owners who have the people skills to do retail and wholesale more successfully. The situation is somewhat mirrored in tech with the schism between programmers and CEO/investor/founder type personalities.
In the niche I work in, some people got lucky and became 'famous' in a kind of underground video way on Instagram and Snapchat. These days it's starting to resemble a more traditional art market.
Caring solely about money often has the side effect of making others' lives better. Amazon gainfully employs over 500k [1] people, giving them means to put food on the table. Not saying that wouldn't happen without Amazon, but more job availability is always better than less. Bezos just became the richest man ever recorded [2].
Who is forcing them to work at Amazon? Their lives are clearly better working there than if Amazon had never existed. If conditions are so bad that these employees live in tents, why not quit and.... oh wait.... live in tents (now with less money).
Amazon presumably. Without Amazon they would be making a living wage at a mom&pop store, and we would all be paying more for lower quality products with less choice.
My, how the world was improved by ruthless optimization and margin squeezing, centralization of commerce and retail, concentration of wealth, buying of legislators, invasions of privacy, etc.
I mean, we have attempted (at least in part) to create a system where acting selfishly in pursuit of money forces you to create value for society. That's literally the intent of the idea of capitalism.
It's a good idea - people will act selfishly instinctively, so if you can align that to make it good, then everything works.
Of course, we know raw capitalism doesn't work (e.g: monopolies break it). So our systems have all sorts of hacks to try and fix it. The problem is that so many of the richest people just focus on breaking those fixes and finding gaps to exploit to avoid creating value for society.
Currently, a lot of the groups in power across the world are actively trying to make more of those gaps they can slip through, and remove the layers of fixes we have put in to support the people that are not helped by that simple system.
Yes, it's good for people to want to make money in a capitalist system, assuming the system is perfect and that there is no way to break it is to ignore reality.
> I mean, we have attempted (at least in part) to create a system where acting selfishly in pursuit of money forces you to create value for society. That's literally the intent of the idea of capitalism.
No, it's not; that's an after-the-fact rationalization.
I mean, we were a few centuries into the feudalism-capitalism transition before anyone started even talking about property rights in those terms in general, at least another century before capitalism as a system was even described (and by it's critics, not it's supporters), and I think several decades later till this excuse was cited specifically as a justification for capitalism as such.
Capitalism was created, incrementally over time, because rich merchants decided to use their wealth to force feudal overlords to cede progrrssively more power and influence to the rich merchants. Not as a manner to harness greed for the public good. Just as a matter of greed, pure and simple.
Yes, I'm talking about how we justify it now and why we continue to try to use it as our primary system. That is at the very least the sales pitch. I believe it's a sensible idea - trying to ignore or change human nature seems unlikely to work, trying to harness it and direct it seems viable, and works to at least some extent in our current system.
My point was that, while that may be the aim of the system, it's not inherent to it - you are backing up my point by saying that it was not always used that way.
>I mean, we have attempted (at least in part) to create a system where acting selfishly in pursuit of money forces you to create value for society. That's literally the intent of the idea of capitalism.
No that's completely false. Capitalism is the replacement (and logical continuation) of feudalism, after its collapse, as a system of social stratification. Saying that is trying to validate your thinking and ignoring the history of the matter.
I am talking about the idea as it exists now, not the historical thing. I accept that it didn't spring up as it stands, but the idea that it is a system to create the society we want is at the very least the current claim for why we use it. I believe it's a system that can be made to work well, given the right setup.
My point was that, while that may be the aim of the system, it's not inherent to it - you are backing up my point by saying that it was not always used that way. (You may argue it still doesn't, although I'd say it does at least to some extent).
You are making a big assumption which I don't think you can make which is ... that Amazon is the result of a person or people who solely care about money.
Life, which you so nobly serve, comes from destruction, disorder and chaos. Now take this empty glass. Here it is: peaceful, serene, boring. But if it is destroyed
[Pushes the glass off the table. It shatters on the floor, and several small machines come out to clean it up]
Look at all these little things! So busy now! Notice how each one is useful. A lovely ballet ensues, so full of form and color. Now, think about all those people that created them. Technicians, engineers, hundreds of people, who will be able to feed their children tonight, so those children can grow up big and strong and have little teeny children of their own, and so on and so forth. Thus, adding to the great chain of life. You see, father, by causing a little destruction, I am in fact encouraging life. In reality, you and I are in the same business.
I don't get it, either, especially with the Kodak news today. Like, someone please explain if I'm misunderstanding, but can't pretty much anyone create a cryptocurrency? Do I instantly become valuable if I create one tonight?
You can make anything seem valuable by bankrolling a sock puppet buyer to buy from you at a fantastical price while others are watching.
Cryptotokens work particularly well because of pseudonymity, a very receptive audience and exchanges that will happily provide a stage for just about anything as long as they get a little cut.
Competition between similarly inflated tokens make success and failure a matter of storytelling quality. The legend doesn't even have to personally convince anybody, but it should lend the sock puppet buys some plausibility.
It’s sad... a friend bought me ‘For Honor’ and it became almost immediately clear that it was a cheaply made Skinner Box. It was also clear that plenty of people were stuck in it.
I love games, but this emerging trend is boring, and worrying in equal measure. Games have shown so much positive potential, and I’ve been defending their value for a couple of decades at least. Now... I’m really worried, st least in the near-term, and I don’t know if I can still support them in the aggregate.
Or you can make money by issuing a new blockchain token and making it useful and add value to people's lives. People are obviously ascribing value to these things otherwise prices wouldn't be so high.
Separately, CMC delisting some Korean exchanges is actually probably a good thing since prices in Korean Won have been trending 20 to 30% higher than crypto assets priced in USD or EUR. It was creating a lot of weird market conditions. A correction in price isn't a bad thing.
When I first heard the term Initial Coin Offering last year, I laughed and thought "who would be so gullible as to just give someone their money?". Well...
It's just a way to finance a start-up. Sure most ICO's are scams, but surely there are a few gems. The way I see it, it's a way for a common man to become an angel investor. And just like with angel investing, most start-ups fail. But you could get lucky. Of course one should always do some research before investing. Figure out the history of the team members, check the source code commits if available, believe the use-case adds some real value, etc…
If I would join an ICO I would probably not spend more than a few hundreds of dollars on it. Something I wouldn't worry about losing.
The utility of bitcoin is that it's a global currency backed by an impartial computer system rather than a government. By being politically neutral it eases tensions and competition between countries. It makes commerce more efficient by taking national politics out of the heart of financial system.
Now, if the % change is more or less, I guess that indicates how many market participants have their own value estimates of each currency.