epochbtc

Flock somehow stumbled into a business model that both the left and right politically-leaning groups in the US can join together in hating. That's not easy to do!

This article takes the view of the consumer, "Why do so many people pay to store items they almost never use?". But in actuality, the interesting part of this is why is there so much supply of self-storage businesses?

The answer is: cash flow. Self-storage businesses are the almost perfect solution for someone with a good size (but not enormous) bucket of money that they want to put to work generating cashflow:

1. Cheap build out (cheap land, cheap facilities) 2. Almost entirely hands-off (no employees, automated entry) 3. Low liability (low risk of customers suing you) 4. Low overhead (just pay for taxes, electricity, minimal maintenance) 5. Reliable monthly cash flow

The abundant supply of these businesses, I suspect, tends to generate demand: it's easier to pay $80/month to store your junk than spend the time and emotional labor of picking through what you want to keep and what you want to get rid of. That ends up being captive long-term revenue.

Counter-argument is: do you really want some team of 90% marketers and PMs throwing up a MVP/WIP codebase for some ancillary product not related to your core business on your core domain? At a minimum you'd want a thorough security review and risk assessment, and that goes against the ethos of "ship fast and pivot as needed".

Ironically, this might be at least partially because the internal security controls at Cloudflare for using or provisioning new domains/subdomains is so difficult and arduous that the team decided the fastest way to go to market is to get an entirely new domain. Possible bonus that the official bug bounty program won't apply either, since it's on a new domain so any vulnerabilities found won't have to be paid out (as much).

I remember reading an article by him in the 90s where he claimed e-commerce would never take off because all internet users expect everything to be free.

With all the recent controversy around BIP-110 (which is likely failing to reach activation threshold), I implemented a comprehensive, cost-bound transaction filtering DSL for satd, the independent Bitcoin node implementation written in Rust.

Two things can be true at the same time:

- Bitcoin was and is a massive, historic accomplishment in creating digital scarcity for the first time and the long term effects are still playing out.

- Virtually all of the "crypto" or Bitcoin 2.0 schemes in the 15 years since have been scams. Essentially a way for a tech founder to mint tokens out of thin air, and then try to convince others to treat them as money so he can get a huge (fiat-denominated) exit. Stablecoins are basically the only crypto innovation of note that have achieved PMF.

Don't confuse the former for the latter!

evaporative cooling, which saves on energy costs

My opinion throughout this AI revolution of the past few years is: appetite for software is insatiable. AI tooling will 3x-10x the output and sophistication of software but will not meaningfully decrease employment over the long haul, except perhaps in legacy or not-forward-thinking organizations.