Netflix Launches Service in Cuba, Where Nobody Has Internet or Credit Cards

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Netflix announced yesterday that, effective immediately, anyone in Cuba with high-speed internet and access to international payment methods can subscribe to Netflix. In other words, nobody.

Market penetration is really easy when your total addressable market is zer0! But I guess now Netflix can claim to be the leading streaming video service in Cuba.

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In other news, Sand Hill Exchange launched in North Korea today. Any North Korean resident with an iPhone and US credit card (or bitcoin) can immediately fund their account and begin trading. After just one day of trading, we have grown to become the largest stock exchange in North Korea.

See Also:
Almost No Cubans Have Broadband. Why Does Netflix Want to Stream There? –bloomberg

Robinhood (part 2): Democratizing Access to the Financial Markets

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I love that Robinhood allows me to flip stocks on the toilet.

I used to do all my trading through Interactive Brokers, but its secure login system required that I be tethered to a desktop.

With Robinhood, I place orders with a thumb swipe. With a sufficiently volatile stock, I can make or lose a few pennies every time I visit the bathroom, which is about 76 times a day because I have issues.

So cool.

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I used to think that maybe the financial markets shouldn’t be quite so democratized, maybe stock-picking should be reserved for sophisticated investors. Who am I kidding? Individual stock traders suck no matter what brokerage they use.

Retail investors are uninformed traders who underperform the market. Wall Street calls them wealthy hobbyists. Not me, of course, but the other retail investors.

Brokerages love wealthy hobbyists. Whether it’s E-trade or Scottrade or your beloved Robinhood, they sell orders placed by people like you to wholesalers. Wholesalers try to fill your orders internally because they know it’s generally a good idea to bet against dumb people.

Robinhood’s real goal isn’t to spread financial literacy or democratize market access. The goal is to democratize the illusion of access.

Just like Uber lets anyone feel baller by hailing a black car, Robinhood lets anyone feel like Jordan Belfort flipping stock orders.

We don’t care about the creation of wealth so much as we care about the feeling of wealth.

If you want to know what democratized access to the financial markets really feels like, open a client account at Goldman Sachs. The minimum deposit is $50 million. Want your wealth managed by a hedge fund like Bridgewater Associates? Minimum buy-in of $100 million.

With that kind of money you could buy your own Robinhood.

See Also:
1. Robinhood (part 1): Feeling Like a Rock Star is not a Trading Strategy
2. We Are All Useless Morons that Suck –Dragonfly Capital
3. How Your Order Gets Filled –bloomberg
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What is the Intrinsic Value of Bitcoin?

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What is the intrinsic value of Bitcoin? What are Bitcoin’s fundamentals? What is its cash flow, earnings, coupon, yield?

Zero, of course. You could ask the same thing of gold. Or Steve Cohen’s art collection. Or TWTR, whose fundamentals are so negative they ought to be paying people to hold their shares.

An asset with no intrinsic value is not an investment, it’s a trade. More specifically, it’s a greater fool trade.

Fiat money, the pieces of paper in your wallet, has no intrinsic value*. We are willing to accept it for goods and services because we know we can trade it for more goods and services. This makes it an established medium of exchange.

Bitcoin’s true potential lies in its ability to serve as a global medium of exchange. The people buying bitcoin as a speculative asset are doing the community a huge disservice because they take bitcoin out of circulation and spend dollars instead. Bitcoin cannot establish itself as a medium of exchange if no one actually uses it to buy stuff.

Bitcoins aren’t assets. They exist only as entries in a public ledger. Owning bitcoin doesn’t mean having a banknote in a digital wallet; it means having the right to transfer a balance to someone else.

Bitcoin has no central bank to prop up its value. As long as Bitcoin is treated as an investment, its only value will derive from the existence of a greater fool willing to buy that balance.

The good news is that Bitcoin is totally rallying this week if your investments are denominated in Mexican Pesos.

*Guess what, your dollars aren’t even really money. The top of a paper bill says “Federal Reserve Note”. It’s a contract that says the Federal Reserve owes you something. Don’t you feel silly accepting a Federal IOU for that lapdance you gave earlier this evening!

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See Also:
1. Bitcoin and the Digital-Currency Revolution –wsj
2. cryptocurrency paul vigna

Shark Tank Meets Coffee Meets Bagel

Coffee Meets Bagel is a dating website based on Facebook. They should have taken Mark Cuban’s $30M and invested in a time machine to take them back to 2006 when Facebook was still a thing.

Here are some numbers… Shark Tank: Coffee Meets Bagel –warrenmar

http://youtu.be/ci_3j89yo6k

The Upside of Being Hacked

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While I was out of the country, my Gmail account was compromised. The attacker changed my password and security information and proceeded to send phishing links to everyone in my mailbox history.

I’ve had my Gmail account since 2004. Every single e-contact I made in the past decade received a “Hello” attempt from me. As a result, I got hundreds of worried replies from people I had not seen in years. From high school classmates to college professors to the Indian consulate in Sydney. It was embarrassing and heartwarming, in a way.

Having my account hijacked was unfortunate, but somehow this third-party attacker managed to put me back in touch with all the people whose lives I’ve crossed in the last decade. And reminded me that some of these people are pretty darn awesome. I should have my Gmail account hacked every year.

I don’t know what all damage the perpetrator did to my account. I’m guessing that by now he’s seized my bank information and is going to town in Mexico. Needless to say, if you received a strange message from me in the past couple days, please don’t click on any links. And if you did, you should probably change your password. Or, just let the hacker say “Hello” to everyone in your email history for you.