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比特币早期参与者Jeffrey：大矿池让比特币越来越偏离本质
比特币早期参与者Jeffrey Wernick今日表示：比特币是一种哲学，不仅仅是钱，货币。比特币在最初4-5年是遵循这样的哲学准则。但是挖矿、矿霸、大矿池腐蚀了比特币的设计原则，让比特币越来越偏离本质。比特币的价值在于存储价值，这是挑战我们政府的货币主权的，这也是哈耶克推崇的铸币权归人民大众。但是很多人把存储价值和交换、使用价值混淆。比特币用于支付，是非常糟糕的付款方式，浪费很多资源去确认。
Jeffrey Wernick: If we want to transform things, we have to think about its framework
The Blockchain Festival held by Huobi Pro opened at Gem Center in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam on 24, MAY.
Jeffrey Wernick, Entrepreneur, Uber, Airbnb and early Bitcoin investor participates the conference and delivers important speech. He says that if you’re in the business of raising money to do something, you have to learn how to make money, not just raise money.
Following is the full text of Jeffrey Wernick ‘s address.
Jeffrey Wernick:
Hello. I don’t know most people in this room, and I don’t really know your background and I was told I have to speak slowly, which is usually pretty difficult for me, so I will do my best.
First a lot of what you will hear so far is a lot of words, smart contract, scaleability, Blockchain, bitcoin, token, crypto, ICO, and I think a lot of people can tell you the definition of a lot of these terms, but really very few understand the meaning.
I think the weakest thing about so far the ecosystem that is attempting to be developed is most of the people, even many speakers at the program, don’t really know much about what they’re talking about. And it is a very, very sad fact.
One of the things, I know the language people use is Blockchain technology. So we have already been told that the Blockchain technology is not very private, it is not very secure, the smart contracts have limited actions and you can’t scale it. That’s I think if you listen to some of the things said so far, that is pretty much what you have heard.
So why are we all here? Why are we trying to do what we think we will do?
Now, I have seen a lot of people, very smart, they have their Ph.D., I have a couple myself. What people need to do is understand business, not raise money. We know people can raise money, but is anybody doing anything useful with the money they’re raising, and I think basically on the most part most people are doing useless things with the money they have raised.
Since people have already used coins and tokens, I see the script I was given, the words I am not supposed to use that others have used so I guess I can use them myself. I tend to like to say it is a bitcoin or shitcoin. So you can pretty much assume that if it is not bitcoin, it is probably a shitcoin. Some of you I assume, since not everybody here is figuring out how to buy bitcoin, you’re trying to figure out how not to issue a shitcoin or not invest in a shitcoin. Maybe what I will do is give you a little guidance from my perspective and then instead of hearing myself talk and you hearing me talk, maybe I will give you an opportunity of you guys asking questions so I can hear what you want to hear rather than me just talking, you know, stream of consciousness here.
Everybody should read the Satoshi paper and understand it in depth. The second thing is when I see the applications people are building, the people building applications don’t know anything about the market structure that they’re attempting to disrupt. I don’t see anybody doing anything really disruptive at all outside of bitcoin. There is nothing really disruptive going on. Some of these cases, I don’t think any disruptive. So how supposedly wonderful the Internet is, and I think it is a great tool, I love using it, but really what we have seen is if you look at how much wealth has been created because of the technology of the Internet, we have basically seen a period of very economic growth worldwide since we have had this technology. So the question is for a number of us, it has made our lives better. What technology has been good at is concentrating wealth. That’s what it has been most effective at, concentrating wealth. If you look at the statistics, the improvement of the middle class, lower middle class, many parts of developed world with the advances of technology, we have more comfortable lives, but we have had more comfortable lives mostly because we’re borrowing more money and becoming debt slaves in return for enjoying some comforts.
So we have to think why is the economy in such bad shape basically all over the world, and it has to be sustained by very creative policy on the part of central banks all over the world, whether quantitative easing, whether it is capital controls, whether it is with the ACB buying up almost all the corporate debt. Ultimately every market in the world is so fragile that it has to be supported by governments in order to preserve the quality of the financial markets. How will we make a better world? One percent owns about 70 to 75 percent of the net worth of the world in the next 20 years.
When we talk about application of big data, what does that mean? You give a lot of information about yourself and in return other people make money off of it, not you. Other people. So that’s what all these platforms, mega platforms are involved. I express it two ways, either data is labor or we are input to people’s production. Only we’re not compensated. How is it that we can maybe reorganize economic activity in a way that would create not only more wealth but that might distribute it naturally better than we do today.
That comes to where I see the application in Blockchain or the type of thinking driving Blockchain where the solution may not be Blockchain but some of the derivatives we spoke of earlier with people building scaleable platforms.
For some who may not know, Blockchain is old technology. 1976, first Blockchain company, ciphered Blockchaining. So if you think why hasn’t technology been around since 1976, no one has done anything interesting? We have to think about what the limitations are, and I think most people working on the platform don’t understand the limitations of the technology because they view it as technology. So when they look at it, they don’t know that. They just hear trustless, get rid of intermediate reveals and the world will be a better place.
Buzz words sound nice, that seems to be sufficient. And there are enough stupid people writing checks to will fund stupid ideas. So whether it will produce a valuable business, that remains to be seen. So far that has really not been the case, except for bitcoin.
So what is the problem we have, a different frame work for the economy, is what has been the consequences of centralization. The consequences of centralization is that we have concentrated economic power, which not only translated into the economic power but also into the concentrated political power which then reinforces itself. The question is a lot of the outcomes we have in the world have nothing to do with how valuable your input is into the production process and mostly has to do with your bargaining power.
The question is how do we change bargaining power? We change bargaining power by growing organizations that go vertical from horizontal. So how do we grow horizontal to where people have to negotiate with people as peers and one person doesn’t have significant advantage over somebody else.
Also, how do we not have people profit off information asymmetries. When I look at how I think of the ecosystem, I think about it as how do we create structures that have us end up behaving more in cooperation with each other rather than in competition. Most people in life, the things they enjoy most are the things they do that generally have them building consensus with people they enjoy and sharing activities with people they enjoy. That’s our relationship with families and friends. Most of them are peer to peer relationship. The only place we don’t have that is in our job. In order for us to be productive, can we only be in a place where we work in absence of peer to peer relationship? I think that many of you who have worked for a company, you think if your boss didn’t show up, you think your productivity would be improved. Many organizations that are successful it is because people are better at organizing themselves in the absence of somebody instructing them to do. You can’t be productive if people are waiting for instructions from one or two people, because then that creates too many bottlenecks.
So what is the opportunity we have really in us being able to extract more value and have more bargaining power over other agents that we interact with in the world? And that’s really a function of how we think about how we organize our activities.
One of the people that influenced me when I was a student at University of Chicago was Ronald Coast, and I encourage you to read his work, “nature of the firm”. So he asked a question most people didn’t think about, and he said why do firms exist? Most people say they exist so there must be a good reason. So he hypothesized that they mitigate transaction. We organize ourselves in the most efficient way possible, to mitigate the cost associated with organizing ourselves among and between ourselves.
So in a world where contract lawyers are somewhat limited and a lot of regulation where you have to lobby, organizing scale gave you bargaining power. So a lot of how we organize ourselves is a function of getting bargaining power over third parties. If we want to influence government, we need to be big. If we want to get a big deal with the supply chain, we need to be big. If we want to make money off of customer, we need to be big. So we figure out how to be big, not necessarily because that creates more value, but it means of how the pie gets divided, we can take a larger share ourselves.
So ultimately the outcomes we have in how prices are allocated really has a significant amount to do with bargaining power.
That’s all I have left? All right. I went through that. So if we organizes ourselves in a way where now we have to cooperate with ourselves. If we had a world out there where every one of you was a token, a sense in a token that because what is the most important capital? Human capital. Everybody in this room is valuable. If you look at the work done by Gary Becker, if you look at the value of companies and the value of a nation, the value of the nation about two thirds is human capital. If you look at property plant, equipment, those type of tangible assets, they’re only a small percentage of the creation process. The rest is us in the room. The question how do we allocate who gets the benefit of it? Prior to really the beginning of this central banking and hyper, leverage, basically the marketplace was valued decently. But once we found a way to balance it, like in the U.S. for example, the financial sector was about 4 to 6 percent GDP prior to the deregulation that occurred in 77 to 1980. Now it is about 20, 25 percent of GDP. So it just so happens coins dent to that is when saving stopped for the middle class, income stagnated, and a lot of it has been basically redistribution of wealth. Other people are capturing the value of our human capital. How do we recapture that?
We can recapture it in a decentralized world. Right now with the beginning of being able to think about the decentralization, there is a world where we define the currency we want to use and we design the organization that we think is appropriate for the way to interact with each other. So we can have a decentralized world if we do more in bitcoin, among and between ourselves, and also if we do more in organizations where we end up having flat organizations where we end up figuring how to cooperate with each other and we don’t let people predate against us, exploit our information. If you think about it, if you would withhold all of your information from Facebook; their value would be nothing.
If you said I have a platform with this data, and this data I will put on this Blockchain platform, and it doesn’t have access to my data, the data I am keeping myself. I keep control of the data, but what I do is I can give a platform governance over that data. So now you can create a platform where all the people who contribute to Facebook, they get to share in the market cap of Facebook rather than just getting some convenience associated with being able to chat with a few friends while the benefits are significantly concentrated. Almost all of these platforms today, everybody is producing information and the value is the information you are producing. The information is how do you get control of that information where you end up profiting and the person you share with is creating value for you.
If you really want to do something that is transformative, you have to think about why the world is organized the way it is and what would cause it to be different. I think people refer to me as I was an early investor in Uber, and I can tell you my thought process between those two platforms.
My thought process in those businesses and how I got my participation is simple. I went to people, my lawyers, and my lawyers represent a lot of the VCs and I told them once this smart firm came out I understood because I’m trained in economics I understood matching models. Wherever the market is, it gets perverted. So once the government intrudes on the market, then it is poorly allocated. It is not a real market price, it is administered and the government is heavy handed.
In the United States, if you look at the data information, and I will refer just to the United States, and I assume studies would be similar in many other countries, if you took a look at the price index for things that the government has nothing to do with, you see deflation. The only areas we have deflation in the United States is in areas where the government is actively involved in. Health care, education, housing, every sector with a significant government involvement we have inflation. And every sector where the government is minimally involved, we have deflation. Naturally deflation is the natural occurrence in history, and that’s why bitcoin is a natural deflation. It has its right.
Once the matching models came out, I thought which of the durable goods are completely mispriced. So I went to my lawyers with connections and I said two businesses people should do. One is somebody can use now the smart phone and create an app where they can match cars with people who need access, because you can never get a taxi in New York when you need one. And the hack license is very expensive because they put restrictions on how many. So if it is raining, forget getting a taxi. You can only find it when you don’t need it, and when I know you need it you can’t find it. So I went to the company and laid out how you can look at the law and I went to my lawyers and I said this work, speak to your friends, and I came up with the idea about a year and a half before Uber exists. Air BNB, same thing. I knew people who owns real estate could advertise their assets, and they’re consumer durables that are mispriced by the marketplace. I basically went to my lawyer and said these are two things people should do, you can do it all in an app, this is just a matching model, so there is actually no real party in the interim, just providing an app, and therefore it doesn’t violate any rules and here is a legal analysis I did.
And if anybody does this, hopefully they’ll remember that the idea came from me. Because at that point in time I was just too lazy to do it myself. I’m generally too lazy to do things myself. So about a year and a half later, two years later my lawyer called me and said a couple of the firms they spoke to were now going to fund this company called Uber, and air BNB, and they were going to be nice enough to give me an allocation at the early round. So I just got it because somebody remembered that the idea came from me and decided to share it with me. But my whole investing philosophy my whole life has been to figure out why when government gets involved in something, how to affect that. Ultimately if we want to transform things, everything basically is an arbitrage operation. We have to think about it in that framework. It can’t just be keep this nice. We have to understand market structure. There is a big difference between being smart and knowing how to make money. And ultimately if you’re in the business of raising money to do something, you have to learn how to make money, not just raise money. And to make money, because I get pitched a lot of ideas and I can tell you most things I get pitched give me a headache after listening. Because people haven’t really thought through it. I feel bad because I think a lot of people are really trying hard to do something meaningful, they just haven’t made the investment in trying to learn enough yet prior to making the effort they’re trying to make. I’m over my time, I need to shut up now. I didn’t give anybody the opportunity to ask question, sorry. |
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这第一步 (2008-11-30) 沅 
视角与味蕾的盛宴之二------北海道篇（全文完） (2012-12-24) hr6970 
楼主:猫儿不笨
发表于 2018-5-26 01:53
