David Fuller and Eoin Treacy's Comment of the Day
Category - Technology

    7 Misconceptions About Bitcoin

    Thanks to a subscriber for this well-argued article by Lyn Alden which may be of interest. Here is a section:

    The question then becomes whether that energy associated with Bitcoin is put to good use. Does Bitcoin justify its energy usage? Does it add enough value?

    So far, the market says it does and I agree. A decentralized digital monetary system, separate from any sovereign entity, with a rules-based monetary policy and inherent scarcity, gives people around the world a choice, which some of them use to store value in, and/or use to transmit that value to others.

    Those of us in developed markets that haven’t experienced rapid inflation for decades may not see the need for it, but countless people in emerging markets have experienced many instances of severe inflation in their lifetimes, tend to get the concept more quickly.

    Furthermore, a significant portion of the energy that Bitcoin uses, could otherwise be wasted. Bitcoin miners seek out the absolute cheapest sources of electricity in the world, which usually means energy that was developed for one reason or another, but that doesn’t currently have sufficient demand, and would therefore be wasted.

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    Quant Shock That 'Never Could Happen' Hits Wall Street Models

    This article by Justina Lee for Bloomberg may be of interest to subscribers. Here is a section:

     

    As money managers rushed to price in stronger economic growth, factor investors who dissect stocks by how much they’ve risen or fallen saw this strategy, known as momentum, crash on Monday like never before. Equities more sensitive to the economic cycle like value and small-cap names skyrocketed.

    So while the S&P 500 is just shy of its record high, it’s been a wild week for quants even by the standards of this wild year, with many enduring violent moves rather than capitalizing on the risk-on mood.

    All this recalls long-standing worries that freakish cross-asset gyrations are getting more common thanks to cheap money and investor crowding.

    Quigley’s estimate for the odds of this week’s shock is in part tongue-in-cheek, based on a rule of thumb for a normal distribution of statistical data. Asset moves are not known to reliably obey this convention that says 98% of all data points occur within three standard deviations of the mean.

    But even with the knowledge that market prices are more prone to outlier moves, a rotation of the magnitude seen this week was still a shock to risk models.

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    Email of the day on investing in Ethereum

    As you are an investor in Ethereum (it also comprises 35% of our fund), I've attached my recent Fact Sheet comments fyi :

    Ethereum announced on 4 November (after a lengthy period of research, development and extensive testing) the imminent launch of the first phase of the major ETH2 upgrade. Ethereum, like Bitcoin, currently uses Proof Of Work (POW) to secure its blockchain while ETH2 will use Proof Of Stake (POS). POS requires that sufficient quantities of ETH are deposited on the blockchain and that these depositors also run a validator/node to process transactions and reach consensus on their validity.

    Depositors/validators are rewarded for the risk they take and the service they perform by receiving additional ETH (the total quantity of ETH issued is determined by a sliding scale depending on the total amount staked). Should depositors act with malign intent they stand to lose their ETH, while tardy maintenance or excessive downtime will result in depositors/validators being penalised. Should the minimum threshold of 524288 ETH and 16384 validators be reached on 24 November, the ETH2 Beacon chain will go live on 1 December (if not then 7 days after the thresholds are reached). Running a validator is not without its technical challenges, and any ETH staked cannot be withdrawn until the current ETH1 chain becomes a shard of the ETH2 chain. That could take anything from one to two years from now. We are potentially keen to stake some of our ETH, but are proceeding cautiously and would likely use a third party to run the validators on our behalf.

    Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum, recently posted a blog post https://vitalik.ca/general/2020/11/06/pos2020.html on why the new POS will be more decentralised, more secure and far more resistant to attack than the current POW used by ETH and Bitcoin. It is worth remembering that the majority of Bitcoin’s mining is in China – and ANT Financial’s IPO travails demonstrate yet again the extent that power is centralised in China. The next priorities for Ethereum are to release Sharding on ETH2 (which will increase the potential transactions per second to 100k) sometime in the next year as well as Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) 1559 which will substantially improve Ethereum’s fee model – including burning the bulk of the fees generated on the system. EIP1559 will likely have the effect of reducing Ethereum’s net issuance (after ETH1 becomes a shard of ETH2) to negative.

    On a one to two year horizon, Ethereum therefore offers the following advantages relative to Bitcoin :1) greater security and resistance to attack, 2) more decentralised (an average consumer laptop can run many nodes easily vs the large server farms needed to mine Bitcoin ), 3) lower inflation/issuance, 4) vastly higher scalability (100k transactions per second vs 7), 5) full programmability from inception (while Bitcoin’s programmability is limited), 6) the ability to earn a yield on your ETH through staking (which will become very easy in time and with no lockups), 7) the centre of the DEFI (Decentralised Finance) ecosystem, which it is already, and 8) use vastly less electricity (Bitcoin’s POW uses as much as say New Zealand).

    I am however also very bullish on Bitcoin….the bull case of which is becoming increasingly well known (for example https://winklevosscapital.com/the-case-for-500k-bitcoin/). The Ethereum bull market has barely started in my opinion.

    I can send the full Fact Sheet if you are interested.

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    Pfizer Soars After Vaccine Prevents 90% of Covid Cases in Study

    This article by Robert Langreth, Naomi Kresge and Riley Griffin for Bloomberg may be of interest to subscribers. Here is a section:
     

    However, the strong reading from the first large-scale trial to post efficacy results bodes well for other experimental vaccines, in particular one being developed by Moderna Inc. that uses similar technology. Its big trial could generate efficacy and safety results in weeks. If that study succeeds as well, there could be two vaccines available in the U.S. by around year-end.

    Pfizer expects to get two months of safety follow-up data, a key metric required by U.S. regulators before an emergency authorization is granted, in the third week in November. If those findings raise no problems, Pfizer could apply for an authorization in the U.S. this month. A rolling review is in process in Europe.

    So far, the trial’s data monitoring committee has identified no serious safety concerns, Pfizer and BioNTech said.

    Leading the Race
    The positive preliminary data mean the U.S. pharma giant and its German partner are on track to be first with a vaccine, after signing advance deals with governments worldwide for hundreds of thousands of doses. The companies have said they should be able to produce 1.3 billion doses -- enough to vaccinate 650 million people -- by the end of 2021. About 50 million doses are expected to be available in 2020.

    “It shows that Covid-19 can be controlled,” BioNTech Chief Executive Officer Ugur Sahin said in an interview. “At the end of the day, it’s really a victory of science.”

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    Welcome back America!

    Thanks to a subscriber for this article by James Breiding. Here is a section:

    Resolution requires concerted and consistent effort over a long period of time. It took 25 years to reform Finland’s primary education system before it topped the league in PISA scores. Singapore achieves superior health care outcomes at 25% of the cost of the US and 40% of Europe thanks to a system which gives consumers “skin in the game”.  It’s now thirty years in the making. Denmark’s commitment to wind power dates back to the 1970’s when the benefits were egregiously uneconomic. More than half of its energy is now from renewable sources. Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan has evolved over thirty years since Lamoureux convinced Canada’s labor unions that the fund needs to attract and pay the best people from Goldman Sachs and Blackrock to work for them, rather than paying them fees.  Ontario Teachers’ has had an annualized total-return of 10% since reforms were made in 1990, and retirees’ pensions are fully funded with 100% inflation protection provided on all pensions.

    It may be far-fetched to think that small, successful, experimental nations can fill this vacuum of leadership, but the world is begging for consistent leadership and a positive example, so an opportunity presents itself to step up.  

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    Video Game Prices Are Going Up for the First Time in 15 Years

    This article by Olga Kharif and Takashi Mochizuki for Bloomberg may be of interest to subscribers. Here is a section:

    Sony executives have been deliberating over a price increase for some time, said people familiar with the discussions. A spokeswoman for Sony said the company is selling titles at launch for as little as $50 and the “biggest games" for $70. She said the higher price is “reflective of the growing development resources needed for these ambitious games.”

    Game companies argue prices haven’t kept pace with the cost of other media like a movie ticket, Netflix or cable television, said Yoshio Osaki, the head of IDG Consulting Inc., which works with most major publishers. Since 2005, the cost to develop a game has tripled or quadrupled, he said.

    “Not all publishers will launch next-gen games at $70,” Osaki wrote in an email. “However, we do anticipate that a growing percentage of games will launch at $70, but not all at once and not uniformly across every publisher or every game franchise.”

    Capcom Co., the Japanese publisher of Resident Evil and Street Fighter, won’t release software for the new systems until next year. But like other companies, Capcom said it’s taking a “title-by-title” approach. “We believe game software’s price should be determined by how much money consumers are willing to pay for the quality, not by how much money we spend to make that game,” said Kenkichi Nomura, the chief financial officer.

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    Gold Surges on Dollar, Stimulus Hopes With Election Outcome Near

    This article by Yvonne Yue Li for Bloomberg may be of interest to subscribers. Here is a section:

    Strong performances across most commodities with stocks sharply higher and the dollar lower is “in the realization that the combination of a Biden win and senate majority by the Republicans may remove a great deal of policy uncertainty,” Ole Hansen, head of commodity strategy at Saxo Bank A/S, said in a note.

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    Renewable Energy Falls as U.S. Green Ambitions Dim

    This article by Will Wade for Bloomberg may be of interest to subscribers. Here is a section:

    With votes still being counted in key battleground states, it’s unclear if the the U.S. will more aggressively shift toward green energy, as Democratic candidate Joe Biden has pledged -- or if President Donald Trump will get four more years to promote fossil fuels.

    While investors may be spooked by the uncertainty, its unlikely a second Trump term will significantly thwart the growth of wind and solar power. Demand for clean power has increased throughout the Republican’s presidency, thanks to state-level policies, corporations pushing to go green and a growing appetite for environmental, social and governance, or ESG, investments.

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    Biogen Shares Surge After FDA Publishes Alzheimer's Documents

    This article by Anna Edney for Bloomberg may be of interest to subscribers. Here is a section:

    The Cambridge, Massachusetts-based company presented data from two trials at a conference in December. One trial showed the drug may slow the progression of the disease, while the other found no effect. Researchers questioned the positive results because not all participants completed the trial before it was stopped.

    Aducanumab targets amyloid plaque that builds up in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients. Brain scans showed the drug removed the plaque, but whether that had any benefit is unclear. While the plaque is found in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients, scientists don’t know what role it plays in the disease.

    More than 40% of patients who took high doses of aducanumab developed brain swelling or hemorrhages. Most didn’t develop symptoms but the side effects were seen on brain scans.

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    How Discord (somewhat accidentally) invented the future of the internet

    This article from Protocol.com may be of interest to subscribers. Here is a section:

    One user, who goes by Vind on Discord, was among Discord's earliest cohort of users. He and his Battlefield 4-playing friends ditched TeamSpeak for the app, right as they were also starting to do more than just talk about Battlefield. "We were moving away from being purely about the game to being more about a general community." Discord let them set up different channels for different conversations, keep some order in the chaos, and jump in and out as they wanted. But Vind said one feature particularly stood out: "Being able to just jump on an empty voice chat, basically telling people, 'Hey, I'm here, do you want to join and talk?'"

    Almost everyone I talked to picked that same example to explain why Discord just feels different from other apps. Voice chatting in Discord isn't like setting up a call, it doesn't involve dialing or sharing a link and password or anything at all formal. Every channel has a dedicated space for voice chat, and anyone who drops in is immediately connected and talking. The better metaphor than calling is walking into a room and plopping down on the sofa: You're simply saying, I'm here, what's up?

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