> Bitcoin should be at least $150,000 right now and everyone knows it.

Based on what? I'm a fan of Bitcoin, but "should be" is utter nonsense. As is "everyone knows it". HN doesn't, for one.

> Every trading day at 10am Eastern, coinciding with the U.S. stock market open, Bitcoin experienced sudden and sharp sell-offs. The drops were precise, algorithmic, and wildly disproportionate to broader market conditions. They wiped out leveraged long positions, triggered cascading liquidations, and then reversed within hours.

> [...] This happened every day, day after day.

If these swings are so predictable, why isn't everyone else getting wildly rich off them at the expense of Jane Street?

> Selling into thin order books at the open would depress the price, trigger liquidation cascades among leveraged traders, and create buying opportunities at lower levels. The firm could then re-enter at the bottom of a move it had manufactured.

Yea well don't be overlevered on Bitcoin I guess?

> Simultaneously, the firm boosted its holdings of MicroStrategy stock by 473%, accumulating 951,187 shares worth roughly $121 million

> Basically, Jane Street has direct access to the pipe that connects the Bitcoin ETF to actual Bitcoin, and almost nobody else does.

You too can buy and sell MSTR and BTC.

> In either scenario, the firm has every incentive to use its privileged position as authorized participant to suppress the spot price, trigger liquidations, and harvest the spread.

Yea well don't be overlevered on Bitcoin I guess?

> In other words, the 21M cap only works if the market sitting on top of it is honest.

No. Hell no.

> It has been accused of running algorithmic sell programs that suppressed Bitcoin's price for months.

Cheap Bitcoin sponsored by Jane Street. Cry me a river.

  - The carried interest loophole
  - We could add small transaction taxes
  - We could raise capital gains taxes
  - We could be a little more focused on enforcing antitrust
  - We could raise higher end marginal tax rates to reduce the relative attractiveness of off-scale payrate jobs
  - We could provide better universal services to do the same

While the pharmaceutical industry is large, the marginal researcher does still seem to have a pretty positive impact from an outside view.

The most positive use of human time probably looks something like antiwar advocacy, but I don't really think that most quants have the social skills for that tbh.

Just look at what happened when AI took off in the US and our ongoing struggle to get global warming under control - only China is taking a serious stab at this which is why they’re absorbing AI more effectively than we are.

Also semiconductor manufacturing has clearly gotten way too concentrated and there’s not enough experimentation with new designs (eg throwing more at existing DRAM designs instead of building new designs like in-RAM compute to shift the power and performance by an order of magnitude or 2 thereby easing the pressure of how much is built).

Under capitalism each of these individual systems needs to turn a profit to be deemed worthwhile instead of treating the system as a whole and taking into account the economic externalities and benefits to the entire system.

Of course the suspicion towards this is eternal. People always hated the traders as opposed to the farmers. But trade is crucial. And it relies on estimating what value things have and rewards correcting over the incorrect beliefs of uninformed people. This kind of information based knowledge work was always disliked by most people as it seems lazy. And for sure there are zero sum and rent seeking aspects or insider trading etc. But it's not so simple as to say that all investment and finance jobs are negative and working on farm efficiency is always better.

IMO, the "smartest people" are really fucking bored and doing nothing meaningful right now. You really think "the smartest" people are people who find working on Google's ad machine enjoyable? That they are programmers or traders?

Since when has "smartest" meant seeking the highest wage? Einstein didn't look for the highest paying job he could get, he took a do-nothing job and worked on what he cared about instead.

Fermi too took jobs that allowed him to pursue his passion, rather than accumulate wealth.

Newton blew a shitload of money on a pump and dump scam and spent all his time on proto-chemistry and calculus.

Bell basically ignored his company after patenting the telephone, giving almost all of his shares of the company to his new wife, who in turn entrusted them to her father, the guy who helped Bell make the company and who was defacto in control of the company. Bell spent a good amount of time studying the new field of Heredity.

The brilliant people involved in the invention of computing as a field during WW2 were doing it because it fascinated them. The military would have been happier with simpler computing machines. Von Neumann distributed a document describing EDVAC that helped nullify patent claims of the inventors.

The internet itself runs nearly entirely on free software and volunteer work!

It's insane that people are so utterly propagandized in the US "Hyper capitalism is best" mindset that even those who think the system doesn't work still implicitly believe that the system works to put the smartest people in the top earning jobs! Why do you believe smart people are primarily motivated by money?

Maybe, just maybe, smart people don't actually align their preferences to a market system at all! Maybe their priorities aren't actually money, or fame, or power.

It’s also missing that advancements in one field, particularly computer science, computation, and AI creates significant infrastructure that can be applied to those tasks in never before seen ways.

And finally, physical problems evolve much more slowly and is more capital intensive and requires a lot more convincing of other people. Digital problems by comparison are more “shut up I’m right, here’s the code that does X”. It’s easier to validate, easier feedback resulting in quicker mastery, etc. Not saying it’s completely bulletproof in that way, but more true than in physical sciences these days. So just throwing more people at the problem may not necessarily yield results without correct funding which historically was provided by the government (hence the huge boom in the 60s) but as the low hanging fruit were picked and government became more dysfunctional, this slowed to a crawl.

For example, personally I probably could have ended up working on fusion research if I had more economic security growing up and it felt like the nuclear industry was booming instead of constantly underdeveloped (both fission and fusion). But instead I’ve worked with computers because I felt like it was a boom segment of the economy (and it has largely been while I’ve worked) and the problems felt interesting (I’ve worked on embedded OSes, mobile OSes, ML, large distributed systems, databases, and now AI) and like there’s always interesting products to build to help improve the world.

Should we view those who chase status as a bad thing, or look to those who assign status that is then chased? If the average person cares more about who won last night's big game than some work done to improve medication, should we really have anything to say about those who decide to optimize their lives by what society actually rewards?

I noticed this way back in grade school. Good grades were, if anything, a net negative prestige, while sports were a positive prestige. It made me wonder what the school was actually optimizing for, because the day to day rewards weren't being given to the studious. (The actual reward function was more complicated, such as good grades being a boost if one was already a sports star, but these were exceptions to the norm.)

Yeah, no. The smartest people on earth didn’t convene and design this system. What we have now is just a fragile equilibrium we collectively stumbled into. There’s no reason to think it’s final, unless you've come to assume history ends with you...

Also there is no such thing as 'cancer' it is '_____ cancer' which seems to be about one of a million different things. So technically you have to cure cancer a million times. Expanding our compute ability and smart algorithms to solve the medical issues are a far more scalable option than having humans work on it alone.

And then there are the guys managing things like pensions, skimming a percentage every year, just because they happen to be locked into that position, meanwhile underperforming a basket of index funds. Just happily eating away at the retirement savings of thousands-millions.

> For example, the tariff tantrums caused by trump proposing 100%+ china tariffs where he crashed the markets last spring, leading to a moderation in policy.

"Akshually traders are good bcuz they crash the market when the president does insane things" is not the own you think it is.

For some crops we have. But it would be nice to have more diversity, so that the cheapest food options wouldn't be just wheat and corn because they happen to be the crops that are most amenable to mechanized agriculture.

Sometimes that's getting information a few seconds faster, sometimes a data source no one else has exploited, but more often than not its something that feels a bit more "unfair".

there is a ton of things that are there simply because at some point people made money out of it, and then lobbied politicians to death to avoid regulation.

If you buy that (not everyone does) then it follows that an industry can be compensating beyond its social value.

That is, the value of providing market liquidity is not zero. The value of figuring out the optimal next video on YouTube is not zero. But in my opinion there is also social value in making sure poor kids can read.