The benign product is sovereign programmable money, which is historically a niche interest of folks with a relatively clustered set of beliefs about the state, the literary merit of Snow Crash, and the utility of gold to the modern economy.
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This product has narrow appeal and, accordingly, is worth about as much as everything else on a 486 sitting in someone's basement is worth.
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The other product is investment scams, which have approximately the best product market fit of anything produced by humans. In no age, in no country, in no city, at no level of sophistication do people consistently say "Actually I would prefer not to get money for nothing."
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This product needs the exchanges like they need oxygen, because the value of it is directly tied to having payment rails to move real currency into the ecosystem and some jurisdictional and regulatory legerdemain to stay one step ahead of the banhammer.
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Pause here to acknowledge that product two has learned exactly which words to emphasize to product one's audience to borrow their credibility, networks, and talents to facilitate the building of their payment rails and legal entity shellgames. ("It's censorship resistance!")
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"Why are Bitcoin exchanges hives of scum and villainy?" Because if they weren't Bitcoin would be valued at its use value, not its speculative value. "Why don't we find a bottom in the market?" Because the use value is, to a reasonably accurate approximation, zero.
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Oh to be a character in a Michael Lewis book, seeing the world around him gone utterly mad and being virtually unable to stop it or profitably trade it because of market microstructure. *sigh* Hey narrator, make this book more like the Big Short and less like Flash Boys, please.
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Replying to @patio11
I have a soft spot for mortgage backed securities -- in their purest form they serve actual both policy and economic interests. Cryptocurrency though... man, I've been looking at it for five years now and I still have no idea what purpose it serves.
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Replying to @kchoudhu
I like mortgage-back securities too. Among other things I think it is highly likely adoption of them in Japan is what made all the banks very willing to underwrite my mortgage. (“Hmm white guy but eff it the loan conforms.”)
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Replying to @patio11
One of my favorite party conversations is positing that the mortgage securitization industry is a major component of whatever success we've had in fighting racial inequality in the last 40 years. Ranieri as Savior is a hard sell in the college professor circle.
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Mortgage securitization, FICO (specifically) / CRAs, and replacement of underwriting-by-discretion with underwriting-by-rule and then underwriting-by-algorithm are all big parts of that story, I think.
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Replying to @patio11
We can do better going forward, but in comparison to what came before what we've done so far isn't shabby *at all*. This is a huge, huge story that has been lost in the swamp of the last decade or so.
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(hehe, this is a more interesting tangent than all the other things I was gonna post)
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