Storage Update

It has been too long since I wrote about storage technologies, so below the fold I comment on a keynote and three papers of particular interest from Usenix's File and Storage Technologies conference last February, and a selection of other news.

Elon Musk Disrupts Cryptocurrencies?

Source

Recently there has been a regrettable failure of Bitcoin and most other cryptocurrencies to proceed in an orderly fashion moon-wards. I had great timing. As I started work on this post Tuesday Bitcoin was at $43,629, down 27% from its high of $59,592 on May 9^th, already down 8% from its all-time high of $64,899 on April 14^th. Yesterday, I woke to find it had bottomed out at $30,000, down 49.7% from the peak. It bounced back to $42,434 before sliding again to $38,914 and recovering to $41,899. On April 21^st the average fee per transaction spiked to $63.78. There is no way this makes sense as a store of value or a medium of exchange, only as a vehicle for speculation.

As Jemima Kelley notes in Crypto bros take the fight back to Elon as prices tank the speculators aren't happy and they know who is to blame:

Up until recently utterly enamoured with the self-stylised technoking, the brodom has become incensed after Musk sent the price of bitcoin sliding by tweeting first that Tesla would no longer be accepting bitcoin (because of its environmental impact), and then sent it down further over the weekend after appearing to suggest that Tesla would dump its bitcoin holdings because of the way he was being treated by the bros. (He later clarified that Tesla had not, at this point, sold any bitcoin.) Of course, he also found time to boast about his superior knowledge of money due to his time at PayPal.

Below the fold, I try to dispassionately assign blame for this flaw in the natural order of things.

It's The Inequality, Stupid!

How could it possibly make sense to "pay $69M" for a link to a link to a JPEG? Follow me below the fold as I try to answer this question.

Venture Capital Isn't Working: Addendum

I didn't find Nicholas Colin's Bill Janeway on Who Should Be in Control in time, or it would have been a significant part of Venture Capital Isn't Working. So, below the fold, an addendum discussing legendary VC Bill Janeway's views, and an interesting paper that he cites, The Rise of Dual-Class Stock IPOs by Dhruv Aggarwal et al.