Success may not be the only reason for existence, but if you make a game that people love, you damn sure deserve some.
Category: Tech
Speed Traders Meet Nightmare on Elm Street With Nanex
The nemesis of Wall Street’s high-frequency traders operates out of an apartment-sized office above the Bliss Salon — manicure/pedicure $45 — on Elm Street in the Chicago suburb of Winnetka.
Big Data’s Little Brother
Standard statistics might project next summer’s ice cream sales. The aim of people working on newer Big Data systems is to collect seemingly unconnected information like today’s heat and cloud cover, and a hometown team’s victory over the weekend, compare that with past weather and sports outcomes, and figure out how much mint chip ice cream mothers would buy today.
The Bitcoin Bubble and the Future of Currency
Volatility is a serious problem, if you’re trying to put together a currency, rather than a vehicle for financial speculation. If the currency of a country ever fluctuated as much as bitcoins did, it would never be taken seriously as a medium of exchange: how are you meant to do business in a place where an item costing one unit of currency is worth $10 one day and $20 the next? Currencies need a modicum of stability; indeed, one of the main selling points of bitcoin was that it couldn’t be destabilized by government institutions. But that comes as scant comfort to people watching the value of a bitcoin behave like some kind of demented internet stock during the dot-com bubble.
In reality, then, bitcoin doesn’t really behave like a currency at all. In terms of its market value, it looks much more like a highly-volatile commodity. That’s by design: bitcoins were created to be the most fungible commodity the world had ever seen – to the point at which they would effectively erase the distinction between a commodity and a currency.
The Religion of Entrepreneurship
In relgious communities, when someone is in need, the community rallies around them. People do kind things to other people just because it is the right thing to do. The startup world has a similar shared value; investors, CEOs, and service providers throughout the entrepreneurial ecosystem are always willing to lend a hand, donate time, and provide guidance and counsel.
Abnormal Capitalist 