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"西游记中, 孙悟空能大闹天宫, 都没事, 为啥取经路上, 老是打不过, 还经常要神仙来降妖?" 老爸深吸一口烟说: "等你工作了就明白了. 大闹天宫时, 孙悟空碰到的都是给玉帝打工的, 出力但不玩命; 西天取经时, 孙悟空碰到的都是自己出来创业的, 个个都玩命!" - the wisdom of EDMW, as it pertains to the "successful divestment" of yet another ex-national treasure in Neptune Orient Lines, coincidentally again at the hands of a parachuted CEO with next to no directly relevant experience (but ah, no blame culture hor!) [N.B. Ironically, with very plausible defence implications] [N.N.B. See guide to EDMW lingo] Mr. Ham: *puffs on cigar* You said it, human. Ya gotta have a feel of how the market is goin', innit? Sense it in your bones, and all that. Gotta immerse oneself in every tick of the candlesticks, every tremor of the price - the greed, the fear, the hopes of the participants... the miners huddling up in an isolated Tibetan valley... the old-timer crypto-libertarians arguing on 80s BBS-es about their untouched blocks... the johnny-come-latelies nomming in Domo suits, the hodlers, the speculators, the scalpers, the shorters, the arbitrageurs, the government spooks... can you feel the flow, human? Me: Maybe let's not presume too deeply... Mr. Robo: Yesss, itsss all in theee statistics, mannnn... threee moreee cross-validateddd stressss tesssts on theee newww riskkk-adjusteddd Monteee Carlooo models to gooo... Me: Are you okay, Mr. Robo? Mr. Ham: Ran a caffeine IV drip into him for these few nights. Hey, somebody had to monitor the price, right? Fine, don't look at me like that, I'll take the next watch. But, have you heard, human - it was up as high as US$780 already, just US$20 off our upper bound, before settling about US$750 for now! It's happening for realsies!  Finally, we get to use this. (Source: reddit.com) Me: It's tough to see US$800 not being broken outright at this point, however - it's still three weeks to The Halvening, and the macro factors are arguably mostly in favour of continued appreciation. The Feds are skipping a rate hike once more as they try to simulate a "recovery", in line with our reasoned expectations of about 0.7% for 2016 from December last year. Yellen's conveniently citing the Brexit vote as an excuse, but one has to suspect that it was always going to be deferred, what with even behemoths like Deutsche rushing to lock in depositors' cash, and having their ratings cut to near junk. Mr. Ham: *waves cigar* On Brexit, the deplorable murder of a pro-Europe politician - and by a looney shouting "Britain First", to boot - appears to have staunched the formerly-irrepressible momentum towards an eventual exit... and possibly an unravelling of the power compact that has maintained stability in Europe, since World War Two. Now, I don't consider myself a conspiracy theorist much, but the timing of this - as well as the implied bookie odds, despite the poll numbers - is getting me to reach for the aluminium foil, just in case. DAO BI? Me: Eh, the globalists are gonna screw the working class over again with the connivance of their media outlets, what's new? In the same way that you won't hear about how the Japanese pay-for-babies scheme is working, or how the minimum wage is doing well in Hong Kong, here. Note, Hong Kong beat us in competitiveness despite historically low reliance on foreign labour - which we are basically stuck with because of entrenched interests. But, muh innovation will solve it all... Mr. Robo: As a consolation, it appears that the IDA is "smartly" tailoring jobs to its employees, if maybe a bit too personally. Me: This all makes one want to just stick to the technical stuff. Continuing on the positive factors for Bitcoin's outlook, the governor of the Bank of England is exploring cryptocurrencies, scarce two weeks after Yellen herself visited the topic. Throw in some of the ubiquitous Chinese capital flight, sprinkle in a dash of helpful hedging in an uncertain, possibly negative interest rate policy environment, and one can only appreciate how tantalizing an asymmetric bet proposition Bitcoin can be. But more on the technicals. So it seems that H.L. Ham's analysis of Ethereum as having a "hard-to-quantify complexity of contract execution", from just two weeks back, turned out to be prescient after all. The Ethereum story thus far: sold as a distributed Turing-complete virtual machine, investment interest in Ether exploded with its flagship vehicle, The DAO (decentralised autonomous organization). The idea was that The DAO would act as a hub for "smart" contracts, with capital allocation and voting rights represented by DAO tokens. Like Ether (from Bitcoin) itself, these DAO tokens were generated by crowdsale (from Ether), and attracted 10.7 million Ether, or over US$100 million at then exchange rates. To get a sense of how big this is, there are only about 81 million Ether in existence, meaning that The DAO represented 13% of Ethereum's value by itself. Moreover, other than the obvious hype potential, the DAO token setup meant that Ether supply would additionally be restricted, which could only mean good things for its price - which indeed rose mostly in lockstep with Bitcoin in recent weeks, despite most other altcoins falling off. This had some of the Ethereum crowd positing - prematurely, as it turned out - that Ethereum would be Facebook to Bitcoin's Myspace, based on the computational features it offered. Early warnings of vulnerabilities were generally brushed off by the community and The DAO developers, who touted the presence of their "Father of Solidity" almost as a talisman against attacks.  Both appearing over discerning merchants' doorways! (Sources: bitcoin.org & examiner.com) To be completely honest, I was not totally sure about how The DAO participants could productively absorb all that money, but it wouldn't matter soon enough anyway. Barely a fortnight after its IPO-launch, a hacker executed a recursive race vulnerability, essentially being able to disgorge Ether infinitely into his own address; by the time the news got out, the attacker had claimed millions of Ether, and as at the time of writing has obtained over 3.6 million of the 10.7 million invested into The DAO, or roughly a third of their total capital. This would have been worth over US$30 million, had the Ether and DAO markets not understandably tanked in response. On the bright side, it is possible that nothing was, in fact, lost - after an initial vain effort at counter-hacking and self-spamming the network to reduce the siphon rate, it was revealed that the "stolen" Ether was locked in a child DAO after all, which means that the hacker would not be able to abscond with his loot, for almost a month. Given this, a range of solutions became possible, with Buterin's suggestion being a soft fork to disable the relevant address outright, then a (permanent) hard fork to reverse the hack, restoring the original state of the Ethereum network to what it was before. However, while this option may sound perfect for traditional systems, many users have observed - even before the hack - that the cure may be worse than the disease. Recall, the primary motivation behind cryptos, including Ethereum, was the elimination of external authority and trust as far as is possible, such that the blockchain is all there is; notably, The DAO's own overview describes itself as borne from "immutable, unstoppable, and irrefutable computer code". Then, although it is certainly technically possible to erase the hack, doing so would cast heavy doubt over the independence and integrity of Ethereum itself. If a fork is used to recover funds today, what if a government then leans on the developers to tie up "terrorist funds" tomorrow? Or demands access to tax dodger accounts? Where does it stop? Consider, while the terrorist angle may seem watertight, one man's legitimate authority may be another's coercive larceny...  It's one way to handle the situation... (Source: imgur.com) Expectedly, some - especially those invested in The DAO? - are comparing a hard fork to foiling a bank robbery, and not a bailout, but it's tough to put a good spin on Ethereum's own Mt.Gox incident. At a minimum, and as anybody involved in software engineering at any appreciable scale should be able to attest to, producing bug-free code at anything larger than trivial scope, on the first go, is quite unrealistic. Although there are renewed calls to formalize specifications in the wake of the attack, it is hard to imagine that this will forestall future exploits, given the never-ending discovery of loopholes in long-established operating systems such as Windows, Unix, etc. Coupled with the very nature of the environment, which provides no second chances by design - no loading a backup copy, if your code leaks all your assets, they're lost forever - it is only reasonable that participants have second thoughts about how safe they feel about this. In any case, Bitcoin's simple adherence to the blockchain fundamentals in databases, networks and cryptography, without attempting to stack general programs atop it all, must be looking eminently sensible about now; instead, with such more-complex developments delegated to secondary layers such as the Lightning Network, there should be no question about the immutability of the main Bitcoin blockchain, under similar circumstances. Further, with sidechains like Rootstock for Bitcoin in the works, that are slated to provide identical smart contract functionality, Ethereum's longer-term future remains hazy, before even wading into the whole quagmire of their proposed transition to proof-of-stake. Mr. Ham: So, Ethereum's done? Me: Well, probably not. One can't really take joy in another much-worked-on crypto being hit, especially one that is a groundbreaker in so many respects. It's undeniable that this will likely predicate a short-term loss of confidence at least, though, and the Ether price has indeed plunged from its all-time high of US$21.69 on Bitfinex, to as low as US$11.51, before recovering slightly. Depending on how this plays out, Ether could yet be a buy, if it gets clearly undervalued, though the real-world mapping issue as raised in our first review of Ethereum continues to dampen my enthusiasm somewhat. Mr. Ham: Makin' bank's all about the relative movements, after all. Tracking Bitcoin alone is enough for me, I gotta say - bunch of juicy rumours about Chinese miners conspiring to hold down prices by shorting, to begin with. Don't you worry, sir, the firm of H.L. Ham is on top of the market, as always... what's that sharp pain in my butt? Is it time again? Sell! Sell! Se... ah, scratch that, left the three-pin plug on the seat again. A Camel Guide To Q.E. Mr. Ham: By the way, it recently struck me about how analogous the old camel division riddle is to the practice of quantitative easing - you know, the one about the old man who left seventeen camels to his three sons, while specifying in his will that half would go to the eldest, a third to his second son, and a ninth to his youngest son. Me: Setting aside the issue of the fairness of primogeniture, the solution is well-known for its elegance - not wanting to end up with fractions of a camel, the sons went to a wise man for advice. Said wise man solved their problem by lending his own camel to the deceased's estate, causing the willed portions to yield nine, six and two camels exactly. This left the wise man's own camel, which he then recovered. It could be argued that this could, in some sense, represent the essence of Q.E. - as opposed to merely "printing money", the "eased assets" are intended to mostly stay on the balance sheets of the banks, kind of like ballast. In theory, the very fact that these assets exist should reduce the risk that they have to be called upon, and in the ideal case, they can simply be returned to the central bank untouched once economic conditions improve, as the wise man retrieved his own camel. Mr. Ham: Well, in practice, the sons may well be suing for that camel too, if the middleman doesn't abscond with it first - but that's a tale for another day... Rainbow's Gravity And we finally get to the headlines for the week - the mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida that saw fifty dead, making it the largest mass shooting in recent times, and the deadliest terrorist attack since 9/11. Tragic and unspeakable as the massacre was, netizens on various sites could not help but visit one point unbidden, in some form or other, almost before the gunfire had died down: TRUMP had warned of this. What now? On the face of it, TRUMP was completely vindicated in this case - the shooter was undeniably Muslim (one of the radical ones); he publicly pledged loyalty to ISIS; heck, he was even a registered Democrat. Of course, the Democrats would blame the guns (fortunately for them, the assailant didn't rig up pressure cooker bombs, like in the Boston Marathon attack) Sure, sure, it's totally unfair to paint a religion with a broad brush, but one could sense a rising disquiet about pussyfooting around calling it as it is - why, in an environment where "white supremacy" etc is a popular label, is "radical Islam" an unacceptable term? TRUMP saw the opening, and hammered at it relentlessly - why do Obama and Hillary not simply tell it as it is? Are they content to hide their heads in the sand? Definitely, they may have had their reasons, but to be frank, there's only so much not calling a spade a spade one can do, before it makes for very bad optics. Predictably, Obama and Hillary caved after a few days, using the "radical Islam" phrase, while haughtily justifying their previous reluctance. Well, as Scott Adams explained in January, the First Rule of Persuasion is that you nudge the other person, but never let them nudge you. And there you have it - Hillary got nudged. Obama got nudged. And the bottom line is, TRUMP was right, which was why they had to concede. The absolute madman! [N.B. On trans washroom usage, one suspects it was never much of an issue if the user looked the part; it's the obnoxious ones that ruin it for everybody...] Just to clarify, before I continue - since I don't see myself ever running for politics, I am at liberty to divulge that I have completely zero issues with homosexuals, because live and let live; I don't see how what two (or more) consenting adults get up to in the privacy of their own rooms is any of my business. Also, I am of the opinion that governments should limit themselves to administrating civil unions purely for legal purposes, and leave the "marriage" business for the various Fellowships of Imaginary Friends that abound. Easy. In fact, there is widespread suspicion that the shooter was terribly repressed, given that he used gay dating apps and frequented gay bars, and that the inability to reconcile this with his religious identity finally did him - and forty-nine others - in. And to what end? Supposedly, he flipped after he saw "two men kissing in Miami". I mean, what did he expect? And further, isn't kissing a pretty common form of greeting all over the world, including nominally Islamic countries (where, in fact, it is often kissing the opposite gender that is a crime)? Really, it's just horrible all around, and I'm just thankful that I don't have to deal with this bullshit in Singapo... did the ball-challenged MDA just censor the kiss between Thénardier and another male actor in Les Misérables?! And, not content with that, the geniuses over at We Are Against Pink Dot are suggesting that the Orlando killings were staged. If ever a group needed some quality trolling, they would be it. This comes as the Ministry of Home Affairs has warned off "foreign entities" sponsoring the Pink Dot event, after they had no issues with it for the previous five years (but, they can buy our strategic national assets, no problems!). One senses the insidious influence of the religious "White is Right" movement behind this. Well, if it's any consolation, my instinct remains that our head honchos are leaning that way largely due to coldly pragmatic considerations, and that they'll shamelessly flip-flop like Hillary once they figure that it'll gain them more votes than it loses. What's new? Next: Brexit!
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