Month: February 2015

It’s more than just the ability to earn a profit over a sustainable operation.  It’s a group of people working to do that, in infinite permutations, constantly changing.  New ideas vs. tried and true.  At its worst, business represents the crudest elements of life: ignoring all morals and ethics and regard for another person, in order to earn a profit.  At it its best, business represents the most redeeming aspects of humanity: the ability to cooperate, each person doing their part, each person benefiting from the joint efforts.

Business is more about the idea of earning a profit, rather than earning it.  Many businesses will fail, or will fail to earn a profit in some years, or never at all.  But they’re still businesses.  The striving is what matters

This is differs from art then. Art is about the creation / expression of ideas, beauty, love.  Things our words alone cannot express.  It can be analyzed like business, but not judged.  Is that were the difference is?  If a business cannot earn profit, it may be a lot of things, have a lot of good ideas and rational decisions, but it cannot be deemed successful business.

Art, on the other hand, cannot be judged as systematically. It could take centuries to determine the success of an art piece.  Further, success in one century could be different in another.  How many of today’s pop masterpieces will be forgotten?  how many of yesterday’s failed creations are today highly praised?  Sure some business ideas may successful in different era’s, but that’s the idea not the business itself.

Business is temporary, fleeting, a product of the people conducting it at the time. With no people, there is no business. Art is timeless, it lives after the death of people creating it.

Had an interesting session today related bitcoin.  They talked about how we’re in the early stages, like the early 90s with the internet.  We’ve heard this before.  But he brought up a good metaphor: we’re inthe MP3 phase of digital music.  Meaning htat MP3 was critical to success of making people comfortable with digital music accessing music over the web.  However, today most people don’t use that technology, they religh on stream or itunes…they are not familiar with MP3 technologies.  What he’s basically saying is that we’re in “bridging” phase of bitcoin wherein its becoming useful enough so that people get comfortable and they’re a scaled base of users.  But like, MP3, it’ snot until there’s a scaled base of users that the real applcations will start to be developed. It took years of MP3 to get us to a Spotify or Beats Music.

Here’s the thing: he keep talking about financial transactions as the big promise of bitcoin.  However, financial transactions are like hte MP3s: it’s what bitcoin offers today.  I would suggest the breakthrough in Bitcoin is not going to be in financial transactions (for a number of reasons having to do with trust  /KYC /) but in some of other fields where the “open ledger” can dramatically change.

I was also creeped out someone with the talk of “open ledger” – does everyone want every transactin so publicly available?

Then there was the idea of making everything fungible: you could trade a book for food using bitcoin protocol rather than having to sell your book, get money, and use that money fo rfood. It seems like tha towuld take us back in time, not forward.  Further, I still think this would ultimately require an intermediary to determine the value inthe firs tplace.  Which takes us back to money.