Wrong. Bitcoin has a fixed supply of 21M bitcoins that will ever exist. I could also create software alternatives of Facebook & Wikipedia, but they would have no value. Network effects are what matter.
I'm not sure if this is the point you were making, but divisibility doesn't make something less scarce, any more than being able to cut a gold brick into nuggets means gold isn't scarce. A single Bitcoin remains exactly as scarce regardless of how it is divided.
I don't think scarcity necessarily correlates directly to value. Land values are a good example. New land is not getting created, you can subdivide it down to small pieces, yet it's worth more in some areas.
Since Bitcoin is divisible down to a small fraction, and you can trade it for whatever price you'd like, it makes more sense to me for the two parties involved in a Bitcoin transaction to take some tiny fraction of a coin and use that as a token to transfer the value from one party to another. You'd convert fiat -> BTC fraction -> fiat almost immediately.
You would have the benefit of the decentralized network to make completing the transaction much easier, and by using a fraction of a coin you'd remove risk caused by exposure to fluctuations in the value of a whole BTC.
Tampons would have a high barter utility in a doomsday scenario. Alcohol and cigarettes would be in high demand too, I would imagine. Just think of household items people use on a daily/weekly/monthly basis that they couldnt live without.
Not only that, but if the body weight of a woman (particularly her fat reserves) drops too low, her periods become sporadic. So if women are starving, periods become less of an issue. Something about evolution designing for not getting women pregnant when they don't have the resources to feed themselves, much less nurture an infant. Mother Nature is weird like that.
You need to receive a confirmation code on your phone to login. I agree, bitching on hacker news rarely, if ever, helps. Im just trying to point out an issue with their reporting system for lost phones.
Can someone please explain what the 646, b7, 36, and other numbers mean? They discussed it briefly, but I didnt really follow. Sorry if its a noob question. Looks great though!
The thing I wondered was whether that was deliberate or not. Charles Duhigg talks about this in his book on habits. Target has the data to identify expecting mothers. Rather than bombarding strictly baby related photos, they careful include seemingly other unrelevant ads so it doesnt come off as intrusive.
Although I will say that in my own ad experience, the ads have generally been more related to my interests than this author describes. .
Hearing the anecdote, it’s easy to assume that Target’s algorithms are infallible – that everybody receiving coupons for onesies and wet wipes is pregnant. This is vanishingly unlikely. Indeed, it could be that pregnant women receive such offers merely because everybody on Target’s mailing list receives such offers. We should not buy the idea that Target employs mind-readers before considering how many misses attend each hit.
In Charles Duhigg’s account, Target mixes in random offers, such as coupons for wine glasses, because pregnant customers would feel spooked if they realised how intimately the company’s computers understood them.
Fung has another explanation: Target mixes up its offers not because it would be weird to send an all-baby coupon-book to a woman who was pregnant but because the company knows that many of those coupon books will be sent to women who aren’t pregnant after all.
None of this suggests that such data analysis is worthless: it may be highly profitable. Even a modest increase in the accuracy of targeted special offers would be a prize worth winning. But profitability should not be conflated with omniscience.
I think he's referring to lot of people that spend their time mindlessly sifting through their smartphone in order to avoid eye contact with a stranger.
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