What happens if the bubble is late?
There seems to be an increasingly vocal segment of people who are "worried" that the upcoming bubble will come much later than July 24. I don't agree with them, and /u/moral_agent's bubble charts show that we are exactly within the expected range for this period of the bubble cycle.
Someone asked what I would do if July 24 came and went, and the price were still stationary around $650, and I thought the answer is interesting enough to be worth mentioning. If that were the case, then we need to examine which of the underlying fundamentals for the bubble cycle would have changed, and to make a decision accordingly.
As I've repeated before, it is unlikely that a bubble is going to be "missed" unless something has changed. If that happens, then we could have been using inaccurate data for the fundamentals. For example, one of the fundamentals is that the number of wallets continues to increase. If no bubble occurs and we later discover that someone, for whatever reason, had created 1m wallets and placed 1 bitcoin in each of them, then we would have to reevaluate the future prospects of bitcoin based on the evidence.
Thoughts about software project management
I commented a few days ago about how the mining pool on which I'm working has been delayed six weeks by a person's resignation. He was responsible for payouts and trading, and someone said that his departure was for the better because then I would be able to become knowledgeable about what the other commenter believed was the most important part of the project.
The problem with that logic is that there is only so much a single person can do. At some point, additional people need to be trusted to accomplish the work. If those people cannot be trusted to perform well by themselves, then they never should have been hired. In an ideal world, it would be great for me to sit over everyone's shoulder and understand everything that is going on, but I have other things to get done in the two days a week I have to complete them.
Software engineering is complex, but a far more difficult task is managing a project. Computers always behave the same way no matter what you do to them; people often behave differently even in the same circumstances. While a lot of people have a negative opinion of what I said about ethics a week ago, but you need to try to hire people before you can really make an informed decision about whether most people's resumes accurately reflect their abilities. While a CEO is never worth 1000 times the average worker's salary, managing people is much harder than development and I can see why CEOs deserve to be paid slightly more for their skills.
What surprises me is that human resources personnel, at least at the last place I worked, were paid only $50k, when they could make so many good or bad hiring decisions that were much more important than any small piece of development an individual developer could do.
The best article on bitcoins
The best article I've read on bitcoins to date is located at:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/n ... archy.html
This was posted to /r/bitcoin yesterday. Written by /u/mattsparkes, this article gets across the most important points about why bitcoins are important.
Most articles about bitcoins rehash unimportant parts of the protocol that are necessary to know only for developers. They focus on mining and the rules of the network, and altcoins, and so on. When people read those sorts of articles, I've found that they often come out thinking that it's interesting, but they have other things to worry about. These people don't understand why this is important until they are told what sorts of uses bitcoins have, and the idea of autonomous corporations in this article is one of the world-changing events that most people never thought of in their visions of the future.
The only issue that /u/mattsparkes got wrong was that he, like many other people, makes the mistake of thinking that there will be millions of separate blockchains for things like votes and property. But in order to have a voting blockchain, you need to reward miners - and the reward would be votes, which isn't a viable reward in a democracy. The future is in colored coins, with all of these auxiliary applications built on top of the already secure and functioning bitcoin network.
Despite that flaw, this is an excellent article and it is worth reading.
Look at the direction of talent
To see where the world is headed in any field, look at which direction the top talent is moving. In IT a few years ago, the big push was with facebook hiring developers from Google and Microsoft, and that was around the time that facebook was becoming huge.
If you notice what's happening today, we're starting to see people from banks be hired away into bitcoins. For example, yesterday Visa's former chief compliance officer was hired by BitPay to deal with legal issues. As with the social trend a few years ago, watching where the talent is going is a good way to get an idea of where the future lies.
These corporate executives don't join companies with no promise. They are being paid big money and they see the potential to get in on something that is going to be huge.
Other
- Days until July 24: 44