Wednesday, April 20, 2011
Tuesday, April 19, 2011
The economics of Bitcoin — Marginal Revolution
The economics of Bitcoin — Marginal Revolution
What anchor's a currency? I know that is an denotatively unclear question with a connotative suggestiveness. What makes a currency valuable is the ability to buy and save, and the ability to save is the confidence in the future ability to buy, which depends on others' expectations of their future ability to buy. So what is the source of confidence. Convertabilty to a useful or valued commodity such as gold was common. Now confidence is based either or the need to get fiat money to pay taxes or wishful thinking that the next seller will accept the money. Bitcoin is not collecting taxes any time soon, and they don't have a track record of wide acceptance, so convertibility might be their answer. Maybe become the technical basis for a gold, basket of commodity, or basket or currency system. I think the developers are long on technology and short on economics.
Thursday, April 14, 2011
Monday, April 4, 2011
Insane in the membrane...
LivingSocial Files To Authorize Up To $565M In Series E [Update: And Raises $400M]
This round values Living Social at $3.5 billion. What is their intellectual capital? What is their brand equity? What are the barriers to entry? Potential entrants? Current competitors? Power of suppliers? Power of buyers?
Any 0f these can squeeze the profit box dry. In this case the threat is competitors and potential competitors. The buyers cannot collude and neither can the businesses.
Know that the deal sites are not even worried about their brand equity. I know because they run ads by known scammers, port producers like Cole Whittaker who, according to her, hired my girlfriend to do teeth whitening by never paid her. To the best of my knowledge he runs adds on deal sites, flakes on many appointments and pockets the cash after not even paying the temp offices in which he sets up shop. The point is the deal sites do not even plan on establishing brands which is a short term perspective. Deal software can also be bought for a couple hundred bucks so that is no barrier.
How about a simple tax code and less wasted time
ROI: How to Avoid Paying Income Taxes - WSJ.com
Tax preparation is one of the most annoying costs of rent seeking. How many smart people are occupied squabbling with the government rather than producing something. Argh!
Groupon beware
Coming soon: Better Ads in Gmail - Gmail Help\
Google, and surely MSN but Yahoo! is likely to lame, will soon combine their "Places" service with their email users and offer daily deals. Google is typical fashion will likely automate the majority of the deal registration process and cut their percentage take which for most deal sights is 40-50% of the discounted price. What does Groupon have that Google does not? Google has more email address, most likely, more relationships with businesses, more brand equity, more engineers...all Google is missing is a sales force for the product, which will be less necessary that for a company without so many users, such brand equity, and experience automating, especially after the markets has been educated by Groupon.
Google's $6 billion offer for Groupon will start sounding sweet pretty soon.
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