I'm pretty sure active trading with BTC is mostly regarding drug dealing through dark net market places. And the conversion mostly dealers selling BTC for USD to consumers, which buy drugs with BTC and those BTC will be sold back to the consumers for USD.
As far as I can tell there is simply nothing else to do with BTC as of now ... sure you can use it in some shops and you can buy plane tickets from Air Baltic with BTC - but those purchases are always actually more expensive to cover for the volatility of the BTC value and of interest only for users who think its fun to actually use BTC in the real world.
Probably it will either establish as an illegal clandestine super-national currency or it will be hijacked by banks for whatever weird theoretical purpose.
It's generally safer to use your own wallet. Online wallet services are a massive target for would-be thieves, so even if they use better security practices than you would, the risk isn't necessarily lower.
But in general it seems that most business owners I worked for don't think about that also open source and free software projects need money to be kept alive an thriving.
First of all I do dislike blog posts which lack a comment section to ask questions, criticize or praize.
Second of all I do dislike texts on data which lack information on where the data comes from.
I can think of ways to mine present day play counts from Spotify (while not working there) but I wonder where did he get the daily counts from he used in the last chart. Any ideas?
Furthermore I doubt that Spotify is necessarily a good indicator on how songs are being perceived in the long run. Especially b/c there are local platform-specific attractor dynamics at play.
The data is pretty clear in terms of source...Spotify in 2014...Billboard data via Whitburn.
The data was directly from one of Spotify's data partners.
Yea Spotify isn't a perfect indicator. This is the best proxy for present-day popularity that I can think of. I could have create an index that abstracted several data sources, but that would have killed the readability of the article.
> The data is pretty clear in terms of source...Spotify in 2014
That's not the "source" that's just a value of the time dimension.
> one of Spotify's data partners
well, you could have given that information in the text - if you talk about data, you gotta talk about where you got the data from.
Nonetheless the statement is still pretty obscure. Who is that "partner" - is it a secret?
Why don't you just dump the data on GitHub?
> I could have create an index that abstracted several data sources, but that would have killed the readability of the article.
I'm not sure if that is the true reason why you chose not to do it - but if so, then it is necessary to be transparent with assumptions, abstractions and simplifications, right?
Yea, there's lots of other charts, sources, notes that I could have included in the piece. The challenge is that this is not an academic study – it's Internet catnip. All the things that make studies too dense and boring to read (i.e., assumptions, abstractions and simplifications) are purposefully excluded.
I know that this undermines the credibility of the article, but I'm optimized for readability and storytelling, not to build a full-proof argument for timelessness. There's a million rabbit-holes that I could have gone down to make a much more solid case, but I decided to present the data and let the reader draw conclusions (kinda like I did with the hip hop/vocab piece: http://poly-graph.com/vocabulary.html).
I also realize that one could argue that this is a terrible way to approach a writing/data-analysis project. Assumptions and simplifications are important to highlight. But I weighed the options and decided to focus on accessibility.
Two equal LTVs could results in pretty different NPV results depending on the expected lifetime, and using both averages for the discount definitely has some error.
That's a good point. I'm reminded of von Neumann's quip that
"with four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk."
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As far as I can tell there is simply nothing else to do with BTC as of now ... sure you can use it in some shops and you can buy plane tickets from Air Baltic with BTC - but those purchases are always actually more expensive to cover for the volatility of the BTC value and of interest only for users who think its fun to actually use BTC in the real world.
Probably it will either establish as an illegal clandestine super-national currency or it will be hijacked by banks for whatever weird theoretical purpose.