Funny Matt Levine

Discuss all general (i.e. non-personal) investing questions and issues, investing news, and theory.
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TomatoTomahto
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Joined: Mon Apr 11, 2011 1:48 pm

Funny Matt Levine

Post by TomatoTomahto »

Sometimes he makes me actually LOL
Just imagine traveling 10 years back in time and trying to explain this to someone; just imagine what an idiot you’d feel like. “There’s going to be this online currency that people think is a form of digital gold, and then there’s going to be a different online currency that is a parody of the first one based on a meme about a talking Shiba Inu, and that one will have a market capitalization bigger than 80% of the companies in the S&P 500, and its value will fluctuate based on things like who is hosting ‘Saturday Night Live’ and whether people tweet a hashtag about it on the pot-joke holiday, and Bloomberg will write articles and banks will write research notes about those sorts of catalysts, and it will remain a perfectly ridiculous content-free parody even as people properly take it completely seriously because there are billions of dollars at stake.”
I get the FI part but not the RE part of FIRE.
scout1
Posts: 234
Joined: Thu Oct 18, 2018 3:26 pm

Re: Funny Matt Levine

Post by scout1 »

He's got great stuff every day. IMO, people who don't follow his writing, aren't serious about finance.
tomsense76
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Joined: Wed Oct 14, 2020 1:52 am

Re: Funny Matt Levine

Post by tomsense76 »

Definitely knew about bitcoin a decade ago and was familiar with the doge meme. In fact dogecoin came out in Dec 2013, so almost a decade ago and was aware of that as well. That said, the people playing with these things then were doing just that playing. It was mostly a curiosity. People would mine using commodity game workstations. Then they started beefing up the computers used to mine by buying higher end GPUs, setting up water cooling, etc. Since mining was relatively easy back then, there weren't really that many people that bought bitcoin or crypto. There was more a view of this being an interesting experiment and perhaps that it was fun technology. Maybe the components from it would be integrated into something else (financial transaction backbone?). I don't really recall people looking at this as digital gold or an investment. After a few years once it was worth more than a trivial amount of money, hobbyist had mostly moved on and sold. Not really having aimed to invest in this. When 2017 rolled around and people were investing in it and claiming it would go higher, I remember looking into whether it was possible to short bitcoin. Interestingly they were adding code that would enable shorting at that same time (maybe a clue? :wink:). Certainly wouldn't have expected people to get drawn back into it 4yrs later.
"Anyone who claims to understand quantum theory is either lying or crazy" -- Richard Feynman
TheDoctor91
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Joined: Thu Feb 25, 2021 11:43 am

Re: Funny Matt Levine

Post by TheDoctor91 »

IMO Doge coin should go down as the stupidest thing in finance history. Everyone is playing a Ponzi scheme with one another. If you go on reddit and look at people’s post, it’s people encouraging others. “Come on guys let’s push Doge to 0.1!” “Come on Europe don’t let us down get Doge to 0.420 by 4/20!”.

I legitimately believe that some people are destined to lose large amounts of money multiple times in their life because of their own idiocy.
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