# Hamish MacEwan

## Here’s what critics miss about Bitcoin’s long-term potential (TL;DR: "Bitcoin looks pretty lame today, but the early Internet looked lame too")

What made the Internet special wasn’t any specific application, but the fact that it provided general-purpose infrastructure for moving information around the world that was open for anyone to use. Crucially, it was designed in a way that made it easy for others, like World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee, to extend the network’s functionality.

The open-ended character of the Internet is especially powerful because innovation can happen at multiple “layers.” After Tim Berners-Lee extended the basic capabilities of the Internet protocols by inventing the Web, others such as Larry Page and Mark Zuckerberg used the web as the foundation for still more sophisticated services. More recently Zuckerberg’s Facebook has itself has become a platform in its own right on which thousands of others have built online services.

The reason so many nerds are excited about Bitcoin is that they see the potential for Bitcoin to do for financial services what the Internet did for information: provide a general-purpose platform anyone can use to conduct complex financial transactions. The network’s open architecture not only means that anyone can use the network, it also means that one person’s improvements can become the foundation for another’s tinkering. Optimists predict that competition among Bitcoin entrepreneurs will lead to a steady improvement in the technical capabilities of the Bitcoin network, just as competition on the Internet produced the World Wide Web and then Google and Facebook.

The incapability of exclusion is what makes Bitcoin so intriguing.  And powerful.

## Yet another bit on bitcoin: is it a semi closed-end index fund on electricity and hardware?

That got me thinking: are there analogies other than Tulips panics and Ponzi schemes that may apply and may have different conclusions? Can we assume something else? And if we assume something else what different possible conclusions could we entertain?

The answer is yes: Bitcoin can be thought of as a variation of a semi-closed-end index fund (or semi-open-end index fund) where the underlying assets are electricity and computer hardware (on a forced changing price schedule). If you believe this analogy then by analogy Bitcoin could behave like an index fund that is forced to appreciate due to the designed rapidly increasing entry expense (in terms of computer hardware and electricity) in creating Bitcoins (which perhaps gives us some of the behavior of an open-end fund with a rapidly increasing entry fee).

## Why 'Thought Diversity' Is The Future Of The Workplace

More cause for celebration.

## The FBI files on being and nothingness

The irony that emerges from the FBI files on Camus and Sartre, spanning several decades (and which, still partly redacted, I accessed thanks to the open-sesame of the Freedom of Information Act) is that the G-men, initially so anti-philosophical, find themselves reluctantly philosophizing. They become (in GK Chesterton’s phrase) philosophical policemen.

Hoover needed to know if Existentialism and Absurdism were some kind of front for Communism. To him, everything was potentially a coded re-write of the Communist Manifesto. That was the thing about the Manifesto—it was not manifest: more often it was, as Freud would say, latent. Thus FBI agents were forced to become psychoanalysts and hermeneuts—drawn into what the historian Carlo Ginzburg neatly called the “cynegetic paradigm” (a brotherhood of clue-hunting detectives in which he includes Freud and Sherlock Holmes). Thus we find intelligence agents studying scholarly works and attending lectures.

## Arguments for Litecoin are fraudulent

Simple

$\log(p(t)) = A + B(t_c - t)^\beta + C(t_c - t)^\beta \cos( \omega \log(t_c-t)+\phi)$
I didn’t profit from this. I thought of applying LPPL to the BTC bubble well before the crash during a bullshit session with a friend, but I didn’t run the analysis until after. I have better things to do with my time than play with weird monopoly money, and the “exchanges” presently offering shorts are not even close to useful. I also think anyone who trades on LPPL is basically gambling. The most interesting parameter, $t_c$ is hardest to fit, and, well, with all those parameters I could fit a whole lot of elephants. Just the same it is a useful enough concept to justify further research. No, I won’t be telling the world about that research on my blog. A man’s got to eat, after all. Doing bubble physics costs money.