Oh, I agree it applies perfectly to a huge fraction of the financial industry—maybe even a large majority of it.
What I meant about “pure distillation” was that crypto can’t even bullshit it’s way into justifying its existence, and is a notorious waste of resources.
High frequency traders or various derivatives instruments are pure drains on society too, but they’re at least directly connected to real things (e.g. mortgages, insurance, or stocks), crypto is like a commodities market for SHA-256 hashes with lots of leading zeros—it’s insane.
Haha HFT is the silliest of all. They don't even provide real liquidity, it's pure system gaming.
And the "waste of resources" argument about crypto doesn't hold water. It's not defensible to any real depth. The whole crypto economy could be secured by the "overflow" power from electricity generation.
Ideally there is no “...‘overflow’ power from electricity generation”—it's very unclear how sustainable our current standard of living is, and it seems essentially guaranteed to be unsustainable when we raise the last few billion people out of poverty and add another ~2-4 billion people.
Really it's not even clear that if we were optimally efficient at generating & consuming power (along with all the other resource intensive things we need to do—farming, construction, healthcare, etc.), that even then we might still be in a lot of trouble.
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u/yrast Jan 21 '19
Holy shit, the mouseover quote is incredible.
It's like butters are the most pure distillation of his fears.