sepiasaucer

From Matt Levine:

“Doesn’t that Journal story sound a bit like that? I mean here is a story you could tell:

1. You have 1,000 Bitcoin worth about $17 million.

2. You want to buy more Bitcoin, but you do not have any dollars.

3. You go to Tether and say “hey give me 17 million USDT, in exchange I’ll put up 2,000 Bitcoins as collateral.”

4. Tether is like “sure that’s the business we’re in” and hands you 17 million USDT.

5. You use that 17 million USDT — notionally worth $17 million — to buy 1,000 more Bitcoin.

6. Now you have 2,000 Bitcoin.

7. You post the 2,000 Bitcoin as collateral to Tether for the loan, which is now overcollateralized with liquid collateral ($34 million worth of Bitcoin).

8. More USDT have been created to buy Bitcoin, but no new dollars have come into the system.

Maybe this is fine, no problem, just margin lending. [4] But if your concern is “Tethers are printed out of thin air in order to allow people to buy crypto without putting any actual dollars in,” then this might make you nervous.”

A [crypto] Ponzi scheme is an investment fraud that pays existing [crypto] investors with funds collected from new [crypto] investors.

Sounds like a cool place to work! I interned at SpaceX in undergrad and worked at ONERA while getting PhD. I work as Data Sci now. I see an open Data Sci position that looks like good fit. Do you think I could negotiate for being remote or is the on-site policy pretty strict?

Seems like maybe you would want to teach kids about safe smartphone use instead of abstinence only

I don’t understand what point you are trying to make.

Specific stocks being bad investments is not an argument against passive investing. The whole point of index funds is to diversify your portfolio so you track the overall market, not any specific stock or group of stocks.

If you are assuming you know which stocks/sectors are under or overvalued, then I guess active investing makes sense, but that seems like a flawed premise to start from.

I don’t think you could easily prove Twitter is materially misrepresenting the number of bot/spam accounts. Presumably, it is just an estimate based on some combination of assumptions and statistical analysis. You might be able to create a significantly higher estimate, but that seems different than proving material misrepresentation.

I believe they (Twitter etc) are working on moderation. I do not know if that is their core competency or if they want to be in the content moderation business. I was wondering if a 3rd party might provide content moderation as a service.

Transparency is very important. If you can’t explain your solution then maybe a simpler, but less accurate method is preferred. Maybe you could set some defaults but allow more user control. Maybe you could have humans in the decision making process, but still integrate with ML models for scale. I don’t know best solution, but offering content moderation as a service would shift some blame away from social media platform even if it was not better than what they were doing in-house.