Five Days in Malaysia

It’s kept me too busy to blog every day like I intended to, but the world debate championships has been a load of fun.

Getting here took ages. From Seattle I went to San Francisco, and from San Francisco I went to Taipei, and from Taipei I finally went to Kuala Lumpur. That travel day took 33 hours and I still had to clear customs and take a bus from the airport to our hotel an hour away. But I was able to sleep on the long flight across the Pacific, and arrived only a little bit exhausted. After a relatively early night I had more or less beaten the jet lag.

The next morning we had the tournament briefings but everything was in the hotel we are staying. So, I didn’t have to get up very early or go anywhere. It was a nice way to settle in.

That said, when I first arrived to check in I was placed in a room with two guys from the University of New York. Oscar and Jake were pleasant and nice, but Jamie and Daniel, two of my friends from Oxford, thought that I was rooming with them. It turns out that I had been double booked for rooms and I’d been assigned both to the room with Oscar and Jake and to the one with Jamie and Daniel. I only found this out in the morning and ended up moving my things downstairs four stories to room with Jamie and Daniel, which was a good decision for me all around being a member of the so-called “extended Oxford delegation”.

Unfortunately we all took the day to finish sleeping off our jet leg. Then the next morning we had to take a 7 AM bus from the hotel to the university campus where the tournament was being hosted. The bus ride took an hour and we still didn’t start the tournament until about 11:30 AM because teams and judges didn’t check in properly when they arrived and had to be hunted down before we could run the draw. The tournament continue to run late and we didn’t arrive back at the hotel until close to 11 PM.

One would expect the problem to be fixed for days two and three. Regrettably, that wasn’t the case, and for the next two days we woke up at six in the morning and only arrived back at the hotel quite late at night.

On break night at the end of three days of competition, we only got to go back to the hotel very briefly before heading to the club that the tournament had booked for the break night and New Year’s eve party. All of that was really fun. In fact the rounds themselves were very fun. I only wish that we didn’t have to wait several hours in between each one.

The motions have been fantastic and the adjudication core deserves a lot of credit for setting interesting, innovative, and challenging topics.

I didn’t think that I would enjoy winning as a judge. But the motions, the chair judges, and the teams have proving me wrong. It’s been a pleasure to watch and listen to brilliant students and judges. I learned a lot about how British parliamentary debate should work and about host of interesting topics. My chair judges apparently liked me back because I was selected partly through their feedback to chair round seven and also to break to the elimination rounds as a judge. I’m honored by the trust that means the adjudication core is putting in me, especially since this is the first time I have judged a British parliamentary tournament. It also is the first time that Swarthmore has been represented in worlds elimination rounds in at least six years if memory serves, and I’m proud to represent a wonderful institution and debating society at the highest levels of competition.

We had today off and went to a nearby shopping mall for lunch. I would have like to get into the center of the city to explore, but we’re on the periphery and the traffic getting into the city is less than ideal. Nonetheless, it’s been a nice much-needed day of rest and relaxation in the middle of an intense and long tournaments. I’m looking forward to tackling elimination rounds refreshed and energized in the morning.

Most of our meals have been provided for us so I haven’t eaten in the hotel restaurant yet. I intend to break that spell tonight, since I hear it’s pretty good.

Shut out to all of my friends in the Oxford delegation, in the US, and generally around tournament. I’m looking forward to finishing strong and traveling home for the rest of winter vacation.

Paris, Day 3: The Louvre

Despite advice to tour some of the less crowded museums in the city, I decided to take a slow start to my third day in Paris, then spend a casual afternoon in the Louvre. Three hours, a lot of walking, and six pages of brainstormed research topics later, I felt vindicated in succumbing to the standard tourist fare on the Tuileries.

I suspect that I could have gotten in for free – European citizens under 18 do, and the lady at the ticket counter seemed sufficiently fooled by my accent to ask my age after I asked to buy a ticket. I didn’t have the quick wit in French to lie, and I’m not sure that I would have if I had thought to. Yet any regret I had at the 12 Euro entrance fee (already quite reasonable, by any standard), quickly evaporated as I took in the sights and had a handful of historical epiphanies.

I started – and spend most of my time – in the Egyptian and Assyrian antiquities sections. For whatever reason, I’m just a sucker for ancient civilizations and think it’s a shame that the Louvre is so Euro-centric. I would have gone into an intellectual frenzy if, for example, the Louvre matched its ancient Western collections with an equally impressive and parallel exhibit of ancient China or India. But maybe its good that they didn’t, because I only had the one day set aside for it.

 

Now, one thing that really got me thinking were religious and social texts, preserved in stone and on papyrus scrolls, that were carved, used, and read by the public and even, on many occasions, by Egyptian women. Against that foil of European history, it seemed odd that the common folk or females should be empowered to participate in a form of communication that was preserved mostly for the clergy in the Western world. That foil got me thinking about how literacy can function as a tool of social and political control, allowing the literate to pass, store, and distribute information with monopolistic authority – at least in a society that has learned to value the written word. None of this is to say that Egypt was a haven of gender equality, but literacy may have contributed to equality in the creation and distribution of knowledge, even if other institutional barriers prevented meaningful equality from materializing. What I found interesting was not a difinitive answer to the question of gender relations in ancient Egypt – the Louvre exhibit is not nearly detailed enough to provide one – but rather the idea, in general, of deriving power from the control of new and valuable forms of information media. I proceeded to pull out my iPad and sit in a side room for an hour, typing out six pages of brainstorm for possible future research in history or philosophy. Whether or not it comes to anything, it was an enjoyable excercise, and it seems so far that “information studies” might not be a terrible way to go in examining graduate school options.

Of course, I felt obligated to visit the Mona Lisa, since to return from the Louvre without a picture of it would be an act of touristic sacrilege. I dutifully report those pictures here:

It is, of course, a fantastic piece of art. But I couldn’t help but observe how equally fantastic were other pieces of art, at least to my untrained eye. And that, combined with my sense of obligation to see the Mona Lisa, called into question exactly how it is that fame is accrued to certain pieces. I suspect that the hordes of people crowding around Da Vinci’s masterpiece couldn’t, on average, critique the painter’s technique any better than I could. Yet they (and I) seemed to lend it supreme priority over other works. Take, for example, this enormous – and truly remarkable – painting of a Roman feast directly opposite the Mona Lisa, and removed perhaps thirty or forty feet across an open room. Notice the grand total of five people looking towards it in the below picture, and compare that to the dense throng facing the Mona Lisa in the photo gallery above.

To take nothing away from the Mona Lisa, I simply don’t understand why it enjoys such privileged status amongst the art at the Louvre. Rather, I understand why the sensationalization of a particular piece takes place in guidebooks and advertisements, which, of necessity, simplify reality into a few key pieces while highlighting the same pieces that others have sensationalized in the past. What I don’t understand is any good, Platonic reason why, qua art, we should care more about one end of this gallery than the other, and that drives me up a wall. Perhaps it’s why I should never get involved in pop culture.

The massive painting occupying the wall opposite the Mona Lisa.

As with the Mona Lisa, so too with the Venus de Milo – again, a fantastic sculpture surrounded by many other, far less famous sculptures that received far less attention.

The Venus de Milo:

A sampling of other sculptures in the same gallery:

I concede readily that an art historian or well-informed critic might be able to provide a good reason to take special interest in these famous pieces – i.e., a good reason why they should be famous. But to whatever extent these reasons exist, they are not evident in any display, brochure, or guidebook that I found in the museum. I can only suspect that, pretty much as I did, the vast majority of tourists visit these famous pieces to say that they visited, more than to take time to explore and understand them either as art or as history.

One last cohesive set of photos that I want to share are these three, from a bigger set of busts of important thinkers and politicians in ancient Greece. (Sadly, the set excluded Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.)

I explored a lot of the Louvre, and couldn’t begin to give a fair account of it in its entirety. The building is so massive, and it contains so many impressive pieces, each with detailed histories, that an army of historians is needed to do it justice. One consistent feature throughout, though, is how impressive the building itself was. Here, I’ve just included a few pictures of the galleries, the ceilings, and the inner courtyard, all of which duly impressed me.

To close, I want to include some photos of art that stood out to me but didn’t really fit anywhere else in the post. Here is one of artwork that I found remarkable:

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And here is one of sculptures. I think the combination of dark stone (here, mostly green granite), light stone, and metallic substances created some really cool effects.

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Anyway, that was my day at the Louvre. I had other adventures (read: dinner and some more walking around downtown), but I’ll include them with my next post about Day 4 just for the sake of brevity. I hope to return to the Louvre sooner rather than later, perhaps while studying an M.Phil. in History at Oxford. 😉

Thanks, as always, for reading!

Paris, Day 2: Exploring the City

So, as usual, more time has elapsed between blog posts than I had intended. The upside is that I’m writing this one from Waikiki, Hawaii, where I’ll be for the week on a vacation with the family. (Yes – there will be a post later about that. How much later is, again, up for debate.) BUT, it’s worthwhile to include the story of my first full day in Paris nearly a month ago. It could also be called “A Series of Fortunate Events”.

Fortunate Event #1: The weather was fantastic – high sixties and sunny, while the trees and flowers took the cue to start blooming and smelling delightful. I was able to walk everywhere without trouble, relax on park benches, and all those other nice things that good weather enables in the city. Most importantly, I was able to enjoy Paris’ abundant outdoor spaces. As you can see from some of the photos below, Paris is a remarkable city because, if you get lost, you can simply scan the horizon for the nearest national wonder and use it to orient yourself. Between the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame, and the Arc de Triomphe, I pulled that trick many times.

Fortunate Event #2: Partly as a result of the same high pressure that kept the clouds away, the city was unusually smoggy. As a permanent resident, that would suck. But as a visitor in a country so fundamentally decent, I was more than happy to trade a few days of high air quality for the benefits of the city’s response: three days of totally free public transit beginning exactly when I happened to arrive. That meant that I could do crazy things. For example, when I had walked the Tuiléries, I jumped on the metro to the Sacré Coeur cathedral…

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At the base of the hill, near Ntore Dame de Lorette, I found a really reasonably priced sushi place that I wanted to eat for dinner, BUT after seeing the cathedral, it was only five, and the restaurant didn’t open for dinner until six. So I got back on the metro, went across town to the Eiffel Tower, then got back on the metro and came back to eat before heading home for the day. Why? ‘Cuz I could, and it was free. I don’t think that’s exactly what the authorities had in mind in opening up public transit, but it was nice.

One thing that struck me as I approached the Eiffel tower was how cool it would be to have a montage of photos getting closer and closer, so that the reader could get a sort of time-lapse sense of how I experienced the park. As I approached, the sun also made its final descent below the horizon, so you can see the sky changing colors in the last couple of photos.

The other thing that struck me was how much we always focus on the most famous landmarks, to the exclusion of other impressive structures. The building pictured below sits directly across the Champs de Mars from the Eiffel Tower. For every photo I took approaching the tower, I also turned 180 degrees and snapped a photo of the receding view of this palace, complete with all of the monuments placed in front of it. I hope it gives a nice sense of both the scale of the space in the context of a more normal-sized subject than the Eiffel Tower; but also that it shows how rich and pleasant the area was even without its most famous structures.

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Fortunate Event #3: That first day was also the occasion of my host’s daughter’s birthday party, for which the family purchased and made a spectacular array of baked goods. When I returned from my explorations around 9pm, I found this lovely plate of leftovers waiting for me-

It supplied an excellent dessert and an even better breakfast the next morning, powering a day of artistic contemplation to which I will return in my next post, complete with oodles of photos from the Louvre. Au revoir!

Paris, Day 1: Travels

I “started” my day at 5 am, blearily slapping the snooze option on my alarm until 5:30.

I *started* my day at 6:05 am, rushing out the door with my overstuffed backpack and garment bag carry-on in tow, trying to catch the 6:20 X90 bus service to London to ensure that I would make my connecting bus to Paris at Victoria station at 9. I had used three roll-up space bags to fit six weeks of clothes – plus some excess winter clothing that I wanted to leave at home – into my carry on. What I hadn’t counted on was how much heavier that made the bag, with the predictable result that my shoulder strap snapped as I ran anxiously to the bus station. My friends in Oxford will know that getting from the Hertford Graduate Center to Gloucester Green on foot takes that whole 15 minutes without the heavy luggage or the mishaps. Somehow, though, I managed to make it just as the driver stepped out for the last call, boarded the bus, and felt a profound sense of triumph that the number one threat to my itinerary had been averted.

That triumphant feeling lasted about four minutes, until the bus stopped to pick up passengers just two blocks from the Grad Center, at a stop I had not only forgotten about, but run straight past in my rush to make it to Gloucester Green. So much for being prepared.

Anyway, I did make my connection, and I did get on a bus to Paris. We left through Dover, where we briefly debarked for the easiest customs clearance I’ve ever received. Then we got on a ferry and continued on our way. Here are the scant photos of that trip:

On the bus, I found a fantastic iPad app called Pocket Paris. It wasn’t so great as a guidebook, since it was barely curated and instead just downloaded every Wikipedia page available for destinations in Paris. What made it so useful was that it used location services even when I didn’t have wifi or a 3G connection (read: almost the entire time I was in France). As an interactive street map and GPS, it was worth far more to me than the 99 cents that I paid for it.

Case in point: somehow, our bus ended up arriving at 7 pm, a full hour early. Since I hadn’t arranged to check in until 8:30, I pulled up my handy map, realized that the walk from the bus station to my BnB was just about three miles, and hoofed it, using the GPS as a handy guide to the unfamiliar streets. By then, I had forgotten the frustration of carrying my bag without a shoulder strap – but oh, did I remember by the time I made it that full three miles. I remember it as a superb workout, after which I arrived exactly on time.

My hosts were simply wonderful, and the accommodations were great. I’d be remiss if I didn’t recommend them to anyone traveling alone in Paris, or as a pair who doesn’t mind being just a little cramped.

Vincennes, the area where I stayed and through which I walked, is a gorgeous urban area just outside of the center of Paris. I’ll include here some pictures from the following morning, since I saw these sights on my walk in but just didn’t take pictures in the dark.

And the park seemed to go on forever…

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When I walked by this park every evening, I saw kids skating and scootering (razor scooters seemed massively popular wherever I went), adults lounging, and only a handful of delinquent 20-somethings kicking back a few too many beers.

Inevitably.

On last interesting observation was that the entire park sat on top of an underground parking garage. I didn’t go down into it, but signs around the area showed the number of available parking spots, which I saw in the neighborhood of 200 on a couple of occasions. It’s a pretty cool idea, creating a multi-purpose space like that, and one that I thought worked splendidly with the aesthetics of the area (I can’t very well speak to the practical needs).

Anyway, the terminus of that park was just a block away from the Chateau de Vincennes, the medieval fortress that forms the centerpiece of the area. That I explored on Day 2, and the photo gallery from that will be forthcoming in part 2.

 

P.S. Damn, it feels good to be writing again!

Spring Break Blogging

Three weeks later, I’m finally getting around to blogging about my trip to Paris! I’ll have loads of photo galleries in the next few days, walking through the time I enjoyed there at the beginning of my six week-long Easter break.

Since then, my time at home has definitely been strange, and I think that’s contributed to my lethargic publication rate. Most of my friends are working full time or in school around the country, so I’ve hung around the house a lot and played lots of video games. I think I’ve outgrown them – the hours plowed into them have felt forced, like I know that I’m just trying to occupy myself with something mindless before I plunge back into the whirlwind of the next term. Totally checking out for a few days has always been a good recovery tool for me immediately following the end of a term. But forcing myself to check out when I’m already well rested has had the side effect of sapping my will to do anything productive for extended periods of time. It’s an avoidance strategy, and the silly thing is that I’ve known that all along.

The good news is that my will to procrastinate has been overcome by my sheer boredom with the mindless pursuits in my repertoire. There’s only so much Civ V that I can play before the game is broken for me, not because I’ll always win, but because I’ll always know 25% of the way through the game whether or not I’ll win in the end – that makes the remaining 75% seem pretty pointless.

Of course I’ve found other outlets. I spent last weekend chilling with my old buddy Dakotah at his apartment in North Bend. We ate tons of good food and caught each other up on our lives. I’ve also read all 101 currently-published chapters of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality in just the last three days. (It’s an excellent book that I would recommend to everyone who, like me, is both a nerd and a moderate to devoted HP fan). Fortunately, those more enthralling pursuits are finite. In the absence of more mindless obsessions and with the break starting to wind down, I’m therefore returning to the world of the living to blog, read, and write my first Kant paper for next term. So here’s to that, and here’s to spring break!

Spring break blog posts:

• Paris, Day 1: Travels
• Paris, Day 2: Exploring the City
• Paris, Day 3: The Louvre
• Paris, Days 3 and 4: The City, Continued
• Paris, Day 5: Le Bois de Vincennes
• Back to Swat: Friends
• Back to Swat: A Debate Tournament
• Hawaii, Part 1
• Hawaii, Part 2
• Paris Revisited: Union Debate
• Spring Break Extra: Selfies

On Football Officiating

This counts for my foreign travel blog because I said “football” instead of “soccer”, and because I’m shamelessly pandering to EPL fans where this awful call probably would never have been made.*

On 57 minutes in the Seattle Sounders’ MLS match against Columbus, Sounders center back Djimi Traore was sent off and Columbus was given a penalty kick, which they converted to tie the match at 1-1. Columbus later went on to win with a dubious corner kick in the 93rd minute.

Whether or not the corner was legitimate, I want to talk about the red card. Despite my confessed bias in favor of my home team, I do think it was an objectively bad call. (You can watch the video of the sending off here. The angle shown at 48 seconds best approximates the view of the referee.)

Anyway, the laws of the game dictate that the referee may send a player off if he

1. Denies an obvious goal-scoring opportunity
2. to an opponent moving towards the goal
3. by a foul punishable by a direct free kick.

Condition (ii) is undeniable. Condition (i) was simply not met. The red card is warranted not by denying a goal, but by denying the obvious opportunity to score a goal. Dominic Oduro got a good shot on target. Clearly, he was not denied the opportunity to score – the fact that he failed no more satisfies condition (i) than would the goalkeeper making any normal save.

Now, there’s a reason why football has evolved to give these penalties – if a player has to keel over and not attempt a shot in order to get a deserved penalty, it incentivizes players to flop in the box rather than making a good faith effort to just play the game. But I think the correct solution here is simply to be harsher in punishing simulation as a form of unsporting behavior, which is afforded by the rules without our having to do this bizarre balancing act between the value of instrumentally reducing simulation and of giving the laws their obvious plain-text interpretation.

Training referees to better spot and punish simulation has been a major initiative of global professional officiating organizations in the past few years, and I think it has produced a marked – if still incomplete – improvement in player behavior in the EPL, MLS, and international competitions. There is no reason to believe that trend will reverse itself, so we really don’t need to distort games and rules just to try and crack down on it.

UEFA and, to a lesser extent, FIFA, are considering doing away with the sending-off punishment in these cases. Leaving aside the independent merits of the law itself, the careful enforcement of condition (i) makes that whole debate rather superfluous. The major issue is that players are being heavily punished for marginal offenses like Traore’s. If condition (i) and anti-simulation rules are both properly enforced, then these marginal offenses don’t trigger the harsh punishment and players will only be sent off for egregious and game-changing offenses. That’s clearly the spirit of the law, and it just makes intuitive sense in a competitive, adversarial context.

The last issue I want to mention is how frequently people ignore condition (iii). It’s not at all clear to me that Traore actually committed a foul punishable by a direct free kick – he didn’t kick, push, hold, strike or trip his opponent. There’s probably a case that what he did was somewhere between a kick, a trip, and a push, and made his opponent lose balance. But there’s also a case that it was closer to impeding the progress of an opponent, which is punishable only by an indirect free kick. Since condition (iii) is also a prerequisite for awarding a penalty kick, there’s no reason why marginal cases like this need to trigger a penalty, either.

Referees are highly reluctant to give indirect free kicks inside of the penalty area, even though the laws expressly allow for it. Whether or not this was an appropriate case to do so, I think that referees should be more willing to consider marginal cases as obstruction. The law exists to provide a less severe alternative to the “triple punishment” of penalty, sending off, and league ban. Officials should use it as such.

——–

*Allen Chapman kind of looks like a scrawnier Howard Webb, but I know who I would rather see officiating a top-level match.

Young (and Scary) Debaters

So I’m a little late to the party, but I want to know how much site traffic I owe to former Etonian Jamie Jackson. He’s made me feel special, so I’ll give him a quid for every fifty poll responses. And (shameless plug) feel free to follow the blog!

Last Saturday, I had the distinct pleasure of adjudicating the Oxford region’s round of the “International Competition for Young Debaters”, or ICYD. Twenty-four teams of middle-schoolers competed in three preliminary rounds and a final in British Parliamentary debate format, which is the style of the World University Debating Championships. In it, four teams are divided into “government” and “opposition” benches, two teams on each side. A motion is given by the tournament’s chief adjudicator, and 15 minutes later the debate begins. Each speaker gets one speech, and, at the end of the debate, the teams are ranked first through fourth. The only difference between this and university debate is that speeches were shortened from seven minutes to only five minutes.

Considering that this is a totally impromptu debate style on relatively complex issues that even college and university students screw up, I went into the day terrified that I was going to watch some truly atrocious rounds.

I was wrong. And that’s scary.

So, to be fair, we judged the tournament on the university speaking scale – the average university speaker gets 75 points per round, and the effective range of possible scores is 55 (absolutely atrocious and possibly offensive) to 95 (the best speech you’ve ever seen). Realistically, though, scores below 65 or above 85 are fairly rare – 85 is the approximate average of the best speaker at the World Championships every year.

Now, you would expect these 13-15 year-olds to be speaking in the 50’s and 60’s pretty consistently – and they were. I don’t have the full tab, but I think the average speaker was right around 65. Still, that wasn’t because they couldn’t formulate intelligent thoughts or express themselves well – they were all quite articulate – but rather because they more frequently made the exact same interpretive mistakes as college students might on the same topic. I was randomly assigned to some of the better rounds, and I think the average speaker score that I gave was closer to 72, about what you would expect from a well-read college freshman with no formal debate experience.

So some of these kids were pretty good. But that’s not the scary part. The scary part is Eton. What the hell…

Eton had three of the four teams in finals. One of their speakers scored a 78 in a preliminary round. The Eton finalists had in-round speaker score averages at or above that of the average university student competing at the World Championships. We don’t give speaker scores for the final, but I’m pretty sure that three of the six Eton speakers gave as good a speech as I would have in the exact same circumstance. And they’re in middle school.

I think there’s something in the water…

Anyway, perhaps the most telling trait of the Eton kids is how differently they approached judge feedback from the other competitors. If you’ve ever gone to a university-level debate tournament, you can instantly single out the most ravenous debaters by how they descend on the judge after every round to get extensive feedback and find out exactly why they won or lost. It can get really intense. At this tournament, full of middle school students, almost nobody was doing that. They weren’t swarming us between rounds. They weren’t exhibiting obvious stress during preparation time. If they found out that they won, that was all they needed, and they didn’t ask further questions. When they lost, they looked kind of sheepish, accepted your advice, and went back to their friends.

Not the Eton kids.

After the final, we almost missed our ride back because all six of the Eton debaters in the final came to the judging panel for extensive feedback and asked persistent questions about how they could have done every single argument or strategic move better than they did. To maximize feedback, they did something that I haven’t even seen university debaters doing – they split up partnerships, sent one person to one judge and the other to another judge, then switched to get double feedback from the same person. And that includes the team that won.

So here’s why I’m scared: I’m scared of 14 year-olds in their first or second years of debate who would be non-trivial competition for me in my sixth, because that shows how far I still have to go to be a great BP debater. I’m scared of how much preparation and experience those kids will have in this style before they ever go to university, because they will almost invariably go to top UK universities and make it difficult for more technically-minded American debaters to attain success on the international level. And I’m scared that the extent to which these kids are focused on international styles of debate will concentrate them in BP, while American debaters get dispersed across policy, LD, Public Forum, APDA, NPDA, and BP. That means that these kids will be the calibration standard and the top judges at international competitions five years from now, and will perpetuate a culture that the U.S. is only slowly penetrating as a serious competitive force.

I really like British Parli. I think it’s a highly engaged, intellectual, exciting, and accessible style of debate. I would like to see more focus on it in American high schools and colleges. But consider this my call to action: we have a lot of work to do if we want to make the States as a whole (and not just Yale, Harvard A, and Colin Etnire) a serious force on the international scene.

*The cover photo is a panoramic view of the countryside around the Chenderit School, a middle school a short drive outside of Oxford, where the tournament was held.

BitCoinference Report

Last weekend*, the “real founders of FaceBook”, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, joined hedge fund manager and BitCoin speculator Michael Novogratz at the Oxford Union for a panel discussion of the digital currency’s future. Here’s what they had to say:

(Note: Since the room was so crowded, I couldn’t see the front to tell who was speaking. Mr. Novogratz had a quite different voice from the Winklevosses, but Tyler and Cameron sounded quite similar to me. As such, their answers are listed collectively under “Winklevoss”. It was clear, though, that one of them had greater expertise in the technical aspects of BitCoin and the other in the financial markets and regulations. Please also note that these answers are my substantively notes, but not exact transcriptions of either the questions or the responses given. I take full responsibility for any errors in reconstructing the dialogue.)

Question: Could you provide some background to Bitcoin?

Winklevoss: First of all, there are actually two different words being used here. “Bitcoin”, with a capital “B”, is the network and process through which transactions take place; “bitcoin” with a lower-case “b” is the digital currency itself. The important innovation of the Bitcoin network is its decentralization. The “mining” process, whereby people in the network verify transactions, cuts out the middle-man in currency or document exchange. Basically, that verification network provides a public ledger where assets are accounted, but of course no physical asset actually exists – bitcoins are all digital. But anyway, bitcoins are unique in that they aren’t necessarily a trust-based currency. What I mean is that past currencies have always been based on trust in some third-party institution – banknotes relied on trust that the issuing bank had gold to exchange for them, fiat currencies rely on trust in the faith and credit of the issuing government, and digital transaction services like PayPal rely on trust in the honesty and reliability of the middle man. Bitcoin’s real breakthrough, beyond the currency itself, is solving the problem of getting a distributed network to establish consensus on the validity of transactions so that a third-party doesn’t have to certify it.

Q: What is driving speculation in bitcoin markets?

Michael: Speculative bubbles are always formed around simple narratives that people can easily buy into. There are enough anti-government libertarians and technophiles in the world who like the narrative of cutting the government out of currency transactions, and they will create a bubble in this asset. We bought it and hoped for that, and held on when it started to fall. The reason we held on is that bubbles don’t tend to pop until years after they have been called bubbles. Lots of people are calling bitcoin a bubble right now, so it really isn’t one. Bubbles only really pop after every starts believing that the growth will continue forever – think about how people were talking about a housing bubble in 2000 and 2001, but it was only in 2007, when people didn’t believe it anymore, that it actually came true. It will be years before bitcoin is worth selling for maximum profit. But while we believe that bitcoin is speculative, we also believe that it represents a long-term paradigm shift in finance. That paradigm shift will become evident when large institutional investors like Goldman Sachs back effective, reliable exchanges, unlike less well-funded and developed exchanges like Mt. Gox.

W: It’s also not just a paradigm shift in the currency. In 5-10 years, we expect to see this type of protocol as a universal public asset registry on which other businesses and applications can be built, including document verification for contracts, deeds, or sales.

Q: What do you see in the future of bitcoin with respect to regulation?

W: bitcoin isn’t likely to be outlawed in the U.S. like it has been in China. Regulation in the U.S. is mostly a state issue, since the Fed doesn’t recognize it as a currency and the SEC doesn’t recognize it as a security. So right now there’s really no oversight, except the need for state-to-state licensing to operate exchanges.

M: In the medium-term, regulation at the federal level will be good for bitcoin because it will simplify the patchwork of licensing requirements. As to how we should categorize bitcoin, and regulatory classification aside, right now I have tech investor friends who urge me to view bitcoin basically as a really cheap technology stock. If you take the value of bitcoin as its market capitalization and divide it between the number of users, then it really is phenomenally cheap right now and a really good deal. And like any tech stock, it will continue to grow in value as it gets more users, so everyone who is invested in bitcoin has an interest in making it stable and growing it so that they can maximize value.

Q: What do you think about alternative digital currencies, so-called “Altcoins” like Litecoin, that claim to improve upon the Bitcoin protocol?

W: bitcoin isn’t necessarily the long-term winner in the digital currency race, though there is a huge first-mover advantage here. We don’t see the alternatives as really solving any important problems, either, so we don’t think that any of the existing Altcoins are likely to take over. Whatever digital currency does win out though, we think there will only be one, and it will be winner-take-all.

M: Currencies need to reach some kind of stable equilibrium in order to be a good store of value. bitcoin is still very volatile because it has relatively few users, but it will reach an equilibrium as it grows. Altcoins are currently exploiting that volatility to try to get into the market, but I agree that scale is essential to the long-term success of a digital currency.

Q: What are the biggest challenges facing bitcoin going forward?

W: Clearer regulation. Security breaches from malicious miners. Neither of these is keeping me up at night. Uncertainty and fraud are common in all currencies, and the black market in bitcoin is much smaller, as a percentage, than the black market conducted in fiat currencies. There are also really smart people working on resolving these problems, so I think it will work out.

M: The biggest problem right now is the shortage of reliable infrastructure. I think the Chinese ban comes in recognition of the fact that no big investors have created the stability needed for long-term viability yet. But once they do, the currency will become universally viable as a medium of transaction, and China will want back in.

Q: Since the bitcoin ledger is public, people concerned with their privacy use “coin mixing” services to obscure their identities. Thoughts?

W: We think that much privacy is unnecessary. Coin mixing is dangerous because it can be used as a form of money laundering, so it could draw a regulator crackdown. A common misunderstanding is that Bitcoin is anonymous – that’s just not true. The ledger is totally public, so it’s not anonymous at all. And governments have a huge interest in a transparent exchange medium that will make it easier to regulate drug rings, fraud, and other illicit activities. Creating opacity in the system threatens to make regulators scared and aggressive, and it also risks making it harder to work the market as an investor, since you don’t know where trades and transactions are happening.

Q: The Bitcoin verification protocol that you endorse for other applications, like document transfer, relies on a proof mechanism that traces the blockchain (basically, the public ledger) to verify the pedigree of exchanged coins. The longer the currency is around, and the more trades are made, the longer the chain gets, making proof difficulty harder and more expensive in terms of computational power. Do you see any viable solutions to this problem on the horizon?

W: That’s a lot of questions. I’m not worried about it. There are lots of really smart computer scientists and engineers working on this sort of thing, and I’m sure they’ll find a way to make it work.

Other W: To clarify for everyone, the process of mining is when people set up their computers to do the verification of transactions. Then every ten minutes, they attach a chunk of transactions to the blockchain, which is the ledger we were talking about earlier. So mining is the process that makes the network function and raises this concern. One promising thing that some people are looking into is a way to compress the blockchain, kind of like how you zip a file. But this also raises another worthwhile point, which is that the blockchain is totally public and transparent – that’s how the proofs are done – and that makes Bitcoin a terrible place for money laundering.

Q: I’m really interested in the social and political aspects of bitcoin. For example, in your investing experience, how many of the people involved are women?

M: The success of Bitcoin will help people currently without access to banks, so it will most benefit the very poor and those living in undeveloped areas, especially in developing countries. As for who’s involved in the market, it’s pretty much the same makeup as all of financial investing, which tends to be a pretty male-dominated field.

W: Keep in mind that Bitcoin is not an essentially libertarian project. It can certainly be used that way, and it’s mysterious creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, recognized that it could be used that way, but said that it wasn’t his intent. It was an experiment. Outside of the libertarian project, it has huge potential to be applied to micro-finance schemes and micro-payments for individuals who aren’t connected to banks or credit card companies to transfer their money.

M: I think the next killer app is one that makes this type of micro-transfer reliable and accessible to anyone with a mobile device.

W: bitcoin transfers are cheap, reliable, and almost instantaneous, 24/7. That’s a big improvement on other forms of money transfer. You could use it for disaster relief – imagine if, after the Haitian earthquake, people could instantly send money to those affected or to aid organizations on the ground. Of course, it’s also really valuable for un-banked people, and much better than high-cost alternatives, like the pilot currency that Vodaphone has rolled out in Kenya and Tanzania. People are flocking to it because its the only form of money transfer available to them, but the transaction fees are still pretty steep. There’s no way it could compete with basically free transactions in bitcoin, so if we can figure out how to get bitcoin to un-banked people in the developing world, it will instantly give them access to free financial services that they obviously want, so there’s massive room for expansion and use of the currency in that regard.

M: Exactly. bitcoin is like the monetary version of Twitter. Think about how it would be if, aside from being able to organize via social media, protestors in Cairo could hold up signs for TV cameras requesting bitcoin donations to a particular account? They would have an instant, crowd-sourced funding mechanism for social movements.

Q: Given that bitcoin is distributed, who will have the incentive and the media power to remove the stigma created by bitcoin’s illicit use on The Silk Road?

W: The more bitcoin is used, the more people will change the way they talk about it in a positive way. It’s already much better press in the last year or so. Early on, it was easy to make headline-grabs with scares about black markets, but facts show that only about 4% of bitcoin transactions occur in shadow economies in the deep web, which is a lower proportion than black markets in most fiat currencies. When people are confronted with the facts, the discourse changes, so it doesn’t need a single institution to be pushing positive publicity. We can see, for example, how early derisions of bitcoin as a Ponzi scheme have almost completely faded away because more information is coming out and more reliable teams are coming in to run the infrastructure.

Q: You’ve all talked about the need for more stable infrastructure. Should small investors wait for big-business exchanges before they buy?

M: Mt. Gox is currently going down, and the faster, the better. We need to get rid of the “B-team” exchanges and bring in the “A-team” to set up reliable exchanges before bitcoin can become truly reliable as a store of value. But, while I don’t give investment advice, because markets are volatile and there’s risk and all of those sorts of caveats, if bitcoin falls to around $400 again, I say buy it. Today it’s around $550, I think, but if it falls that low, it will be a great deal and have a lot of growth potential, in my opinion.

W: The later you invest, the lower your risk; but there will also be a correspondingly lower reward. More exchanges and better regulation will keep the price more stable and make fraud less likely. But Bitcoin is going to be the new internet. It has massive potential as a platform that we haven’t even begun to fully exploit, and it will revolutionize the way we manage our online lives. If you wait for it to reach that point, it will be too late to make money in the market. If you want it as an investment, buy sooner rather than later and sit on it for a few years while the infrastructure develops and more people get involved.

M: Oddly, and this isn’t normally the case, I like bitcoin now, on the way day, even better than I liked it at the same value on the way up. That it’s on the way down right now is a sign of the market moving towards equilibrium and stable infrastructure that will make bitcoin more valuable again going forward.

Q: How long do you think it will be before small firms and individual consumers are widely adopting bitcoin?

W: Well, it’s already happening, and it will continue to expand. Overstock.com accepts bitcoin now, as do lots of other small firms. The reason is that these firms have pretty low margins, and the fees that credit card companies charge for their transactions cuts into those margins. Since bitcoin is basically free, adopting it increases the profit margin for these firms, so there’s a big incentive for them to keep signing on.

Q: What’s going to happen to all of the bitcoins that the FBI seized when it shut down The Silk Road?

M: They’ll probably auction them – it might be a good time to buy.

W: Some of the coins will be tied up in litigation for the next couple of years – the purported owner of The Silk Road is challenging the legality of their seizure. The remainder, though, are worth about $30 million, and will come up for auction. The FBI has no intention of becoming players in the bitcoin market – they want out as fast as they can. As a matter of fact, though, they’ve risen pretty substantially in value since the FBI seized them, so the government stands to make a tidy profit on their sale.

Q: You mentioned earlier that bitcoin is inherently deflationary because the quantity in circulation caps out. Doesn’t that lead to a pressure to hold bitcoins instead of spending them, which would hurt the expansion of the transaction market?

W: So right now, bitcoins are still inflationary on a logarithmic scale. So there are something like 25 coins mined every ten minutes right now, and next year there will be 12.5 every ten minutes, and so on. It will cap out at 21 million coins in circulation in 2020. When that happens, it will pressure people to save more, but I don’t see that as necessarily a bad thing. It will stabilize and become deflationary, but right now uncertain regulation and the relatively low number of users are spurring volatility.

M: Current investors are basically hoarders, but even when the currency is deflationary, you have to recognize that everyone has a point when they will sell at least some fraction of their hoard. And the infinite divisibility of bitcoins makes that possible no matter how valuable any given bitcoin gets, which I think side-steps the major problem with hoarding in fiat currencies or product markets. Since everyone eventually can and does sell, the important factor in increasing the use of bitcoin will just be getting more people involved.

W: Think about it like this: people who hold stocks will sell them at irregular intervals when life events dictate it. If you want to buy a house or a car, or anything like that, you might call your broker and ask them to trade in some of your shares for a liquid currency. You always have things that you want to buy, so people will still use bitcoins for transactions even in a deflationary market five or ten years down the road.

Q: What are credit card companies doing with respect to bitcoin?

M: They’re running scared. Their entire business model is based on being able to charge transaction fees for their networks. Even if the difficulty of mining makes miners’ fees non-negligible, they will still be tiny compared to what credit card companies and other intermediaries need to charge in order to make a profit. So Visa and MasterCard want to slow down bitcoin as much as possible, and a lot of transactional business are trying to develop their own alternatives. Amazon, for example, now has its own digital currency, but I don’t think they can compete in the long-term with essentially free bitcoin transactions replacing current payment methods.

W: Banks can’t make their own effective currencies. The technological support and innovation just isn’t there. The people proposing revolutionary changes are coming from outside the existing tech space, and we’ll have to see how industry reacts. It might react regressively. It’s interesting to note how the recording industry didn’t invent iTunes, and telecom companies didn’t invent voice-over-IP – it took a creative team outside of these industries to fundamentally change them. So Visa and MasterCard will almost certainly try to fight bitcoin, but they’ll just as certainly eventually lose.

Q: Will bitcoin be big in business-to-business transactions? How about in the financial industry?

W: Yes, and it will disrupt white-collar workers the way the mechanization disrupted blue-collar workers. You won’t need Escrow agents when you have a trusted transaction network that can hold and release bitcoins for you when certain conditions are met. You won’t need trustees when you can tell your bitcoin wallet to distribute x amount of bitcoins to your child on their 18th birthday, or when they go to college. And you can require multiple authorizations to use particular coins or in particular ways, so we won’t need the same network of fraud prevention that exists in the white-collar world today.

Q: How will developing countries adapt to bitcoin?

W: Exchanges are still pretty risky, so early movers like us had to work on trust and word-of-mouth reputation. That’s what it comes down to: trust. But in theory, all you need is internet in order to use bitcoin. In fact, people are also developing SMS-based bitcoin wallets that can allow you to manage transactions over any basic cell network. So expansion will be easy, but agains there’s the need for some more investment in infrastructure.

*Saturday, February 22

A Tale of Two Tacos*

In the comparison that follows, I perform an action so egregiously unfair that it deserves no place in civilized discourse. It betrays the principles of sound logic, rejects the burden of simple honesty, and laughs in the face of human decency. What are we waiting for!?

In one corner, we have England, as exemplified by Mission Burrito, a small, six-location fast-food Mexican restaurant across the street from the Oxford Union. In the other corner, the U.S.! represented by Chipotle, a multi-million dollar restaurant chain with a stellar marketing team, highly paid executive chef, and vertical controlled supply chains ensuring only the freshest ingredients and most satisfying flavors. Chipotle has rightfully opened its own six locations in London, thereby exemplifying the inevitable journey of American capitalism to the cultural re-conquest of its former imperial master.

This is obviously no fair fight (nor a fair mapping of national identities), but in the interests of shameless elitism, I am willing to put that to one side.

Begin!

Round 1: Ordering

Chipotle and Mission Burrito have identical service styles for nearly identical menus: starting from one end of a service line, you order a burrito, soft tacos, or a salad bowl, then go down the line adding whatever yummy fillings they have for you. At Chipotle, though, there seems to always be one more person than they really need, and everyone is so fast that the time from ordering to paying is tiny, even if the lines are longer. Mission Burrito isn’t as well staffed or quite as well trained, but its lower volume means that service is also pretty quick, unless you get it at its very busiest.

This round: Draw

Round 2: Cost 

This round is a cut-and-dried knock-down by Chipotle. Mission Burrito keeps its meal costs pretty comparable to Chipotle’s, even accounting for the horrid exchange rate, but its higher drink prices, its extra charge for cheese, and its legal obligation to charge VAT tax when you eat in** make it noticeably pricier even pre-exchange rate calculations, all for the exact same amount of food.

**Normally, I just take my food and walk, but who wants to eat in a dark street on a windy night?

This round: Chipotle

Round 3: Dining Room

Chipotle’s dining rooms are large, modern, and organized to allow maximum movement. Mission Burrito’s dining room is sparse, early 2000’s with cheap plastic stools, and packing in a large table to maximize seating, but at the expense of easy access to the street-side bar.

This round: Chipotle

Round 4: Selection

Both restaurants provide lettuce, rice, black and pinto beans, cheese, guacamole, pico de gallo, three intensities of salsa, chicken, beef, pork, etc. Chipotle does give you an extra choice between white and brown rice, but Mission Burrito gives the option of roasted peppers and red onion, which I don’t think I’ve seen at Chipotle. The round is practically a draw, so if Chipotle really does have that option, it is a draw. Otherwise, slight edge to Mission Burrito. Congrats England! … don’t get cocky.

This round: Mission Burrito

Round 5: Taste

Comprehensive, knock-out win for Chipotle. I’m shocked it went to this many rounds! Let’s just list all the advantages:

• Chipotle serves cilantro-lime rice. Mission Burrito’s rice is plain, bland, steamed white rice.
• Chipotle dices its meat, then cooks it, so every piece is covered in seasoning. Mission Burrito cooks their meat, then shreds it, so the chicken tastes exactly like… well… unseasoned chicken.
• Chipotle’s pico de gallo tastes fresher and more flavorful.
• Chipotle gives you roughly twice as much guacamole, which is of course the best part of everything.
• Chipotle is actually named a flavor. Mission Burrito has a name a facade tastelessly reminiscent of Spanish Catholic conquerors’ attempts to coerce labor from heathen Native Americans.

This round: Chipotle!

 

The obvious and infinitely predictable result is that, despite its minor advantages, England (i.e., Mission Burrito) gets absolutely crushed by the U.S. (i.e., Chipotle). I will retain this arbitrary and inflated sense of national superiority until the U.S. gets shit-stomped by Ghana in the World Cup group stages,  at which point I will whimper sadly in a corner for some ten minutes before remembering that no REAL American cares about soccer, anyway. Then I’ll probably go console myself with gratuitous amounts of Mexican food… from Mission Burrito, which will be right down the street.

 

*As usual, I actually got the burrito, but that’s not nearly as good a turn of phrase. 😉

 

Bonus American advantage: Mission Burrito even expressly lists San Francisco as the source of their “authentic” burritos.

Last Day at the Opera

Time actually flies, and it’s now been a week since I made my last visit to London to see Bill, Tamar, and Ciara. Right now they are spending some time in Paris, and next week they will move to Ghana on a permanent basis, depriving me of their food, their company, and their theater tickets.* Obviously, my prudential reasons for wanting them around are far more important than any principled support of their life goals. Though they are family, and you might think that I love them and want the best for them, I insist that they abandon their plans and stay in London so that I might continue to mooch good food off of them. That is the only thing that a college student cares about.

In all seriousness, though, I wish them the very best in their new home. I understand that, on their last visit, Ciara enrolled in the local school and is excited to attend, and that she and Tamar found three viable houses. Bill showed me the pictures they took, and all of them look gorgeous. Tamar’s de facto job description continues to evolve, but I’ll let them update you on all the details of their move. The important point is that I’m very happy for them, and very grateful for the time that we’ve been able to spend together these last few weeks.

On this particular weekend, I took the bus into downtown to join them for The Phantom of the Opera, my favorite of the (admittedly somewhat limited) selection of musicals that I’ve seen. Andrew Lloyd Webber’s masterpiece premiered at this very theater in October of 1986, with an intended run of six months. Instead, it has run non-stop for the 27 years and change since, with the exception of a three-day closure in 2008 to install a new sound system.

In 2010, to celebrate its upcoming 25-year anniversary (which, for some reason, Her Majesty’s Theatre continues to celebrate on its posters and commemorative playbills), the rights to the musical were made available for lease, and Rogers, my high school, was one of the first to take up the show. I had the distinct pleasure of playing lead cello in the pit for eight sold-out houses, and it is possible that my love of the show comes as much from euphoria of finally mastering the difficult score as from the actual quality of the show; though neither of these is in any doubt. I had also seen the show on tour in Seattle, and thoroughly enjoyed it then. For whatever reason, I was very, very excited to get to see a second professional rendition, especially of Music of the Night and Point of No Return, which are (musically) my favorite songs in the show.

Of course, fate is never so kind. Our tickets were for the matinee, so I was set to board a bus in the mid-morning. Unfortunately, high winds the night before had knocked a tree across the freeway** and delayed all the buses indefinitely. I should have arrived an hour before the show – instead, I arrived ten minutes before intermission, right in the middle of All I Ask of You. Even though I knew the intermission was close and offered to wait in the back, the usher insisted on showing me to my seat mid-song, which led to my falling over a poor woman in the dark and nearly knocking someone over with my backpack as I sidled down the row of seats. Alas that I had to both miss a big chunk of the show and spoil a good song for a handful of the nearby guests, but that’s London wind for you.

We met up with some family friends of theirs for a pizza dinner afterwards, and had a lazy, chatty evening and morning before eating lunch out and parting ways. Setbacks aside, it was a great way to spend the weekend, and I’m sad that I won’t be spending any more such Saturdays with the itinerant Olmsteads in the Old City.

A short photo gallery of the weekend is below. I have to go back to my essays now (I have two to write before Wednesday), but I have at least three more posts in the making that I hope to have out this week, including my notes on a panel discussion this afternoon – the Oxford Union hosted the Winklevoss twins of Facebook lawsuit and now Bitcoin fame along with Michael Novogratz, a billionaire hedge fund manager with investments in Bitcoin, on the topic of Bitcoin as a currency and as a platform for distributed information validation across all social and business applications. So keep an eye out for that, it has some interesting investment advice. 😉

*Sorry, I meant “theatre tickets”.

**Err… “motorway”.