Thursday 21, April 2022
ETH and Excel
Writing software is slow and frustrating. Even outstanding programmers, who may be an order of magnitude faster than mere mortals, take time to create anything big. ETH (Ethereum) is a crypto currency, but with an interface to allow programmers to build apps on top of it. I am a crypto sceptic, but a lot of smart people think it’s go legs, so I know I’m missing something. This seems a good attempt to explain why it’s not just hot air (or hot crypto mining rigs). The article compares ETH to Excel: the PC app that will not die. I thought it was funny, because the article argues that Excel has huge value, and I just see it as huge waste of time, for most users. Excel is a sort of programming language, but written in a peculiarly unstructured way, in such a way that it’s inextricably mixed with data. To be fair, it is largely functional (although I’m not sure about goal seeking and pivot tables). I spent a lot of time writing DLLs to be called from Excel. I get it that bolting stuff onto Excel can add value. I’m just sceptical that ETH is strictly comparable.
I just don’t know. Crypto is a huge ecosystem, and has drawn in a lot of money. Regular currencies are now overwhelmingly just entries in a ledger, as is credit. Having that ledger maintained on a publicly inspectable secure form seems an advance on creaking 1960’s bank mainframe databases, and if ETH is a central bank, one can see lots of commercial banks clearing funds through it.
Is this all worth trillions of dollars? I remain sceptical. For me, the problem is that ETH seems to think it can substitute for law and courts as arbiters and enforcement of contract. At some point, someone is going to lose a lot of ETH because his interpretation is different to his counterparty’s. We live in the real world: he is going to sue. If he succeeds (and, surely, someone will) this renders an ETH contract risky, and the ETH block chain just a filing cabinet.
Epstein, Ghislane and Anti-trust
Matt Stoller has written a piece on the corruption of ‘Big Law’. When the price of everything man-made drops because of advances in technology, the cost of law just goes up and up. I guess it’s because the value to a defendant goes up and up, when it is a big corporation or an oligarch or a hedge fund manager or a child trafficker.
Wrap
Lots of volatility today. Markets largely ended up where they started, with the exception of equities. NDX was down 2%. It remains volatile, but some of the FAANG are suffering. FB was down 4%. Bonds were generally down, even though equities were risk-off. Currencies were risk off. The dollar was up against its open, after a wide range, at 100.67, but not back to the 101 it hit yesterday. It feels like equities are due for a crash, but I’ve been wrong so many times before I am probably wrong again.
#Team42, there is a globally synchronized slowdown underway that is set to get worse in the coming quarters.
— 42 Macro🇺🇦 (@42macro) April 21, 2022
OECD Composite Leading Indices for the US, Chinese, Eurozone, Japanese,and Global Economies pic.twitter.com/NuAeIWpxfs
Image
Bert Hardy, Glasgow, 1948 pic.twitter.com/PsFPfkQCmw
— Daniel Brami (@Daniel_Red_Eire) April 21, 2022
Idea
It came as a great surprise to me to find that when I actually arrived at some real life problem, expressible as a differential equation, that there were no analytic solutions available. All my training up until that point had been about arriving at some neat analytic solution to such equations. It was quite upsetting to realize that I’d have to use a computer to grind out a numerical solution.
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