I assume the person you’re talking about who made $100K is Vitalik. Vitalik knows much more about making Ethereum contracts work than the average person, and details the very complicated series of steps he had to take to get everything worked out in his blog post. There probably aren’t very many people who can do all that successfully, and the people who can are probably busy becoming rich some other way.
I could have imagined this was true a month ago, but then I spent about 15 total hours learning about Ethereum financial widgets, which was fun, and wrote it up into this post, and now I totally understand Vitalik’s steps, understand many of the possible risks underlying them, and could have confidently done something similar myself. Although I am probably unusually capable even among the LW readership, I think many readers could have done this if they wanted to.
Similarly, I don’t know anything about perpetual futures, but I guarantee that I could understand perpetual futures very clearly by tomorrow if you offered me $20k (or a 20% shot at $100k) to do it.
Having to think hard for a week to clearly understand something complicated, with the expectation that there might be money on the other end*, is definitely a convincing practical explanation for why rationalists aren’t making a lot of money off of schemes like this, but it’s not a good reason why they shouldn’t. Of course, many rationalists may not have enough capital that it matters much, but many may.
*It’s not like these are otherwise useless concepts to understand, either.
It’s worth noting that doing Vitalik’s steps is one thing. Figuring out to pay taxes on the trade and how that effects the trade will be much more complicated.
I could have imagined this was true a month ago, but then I spent about 15 total hours learning about Ethereum financial widgets, which was fun, and wrote it up into this post, and now I totally understand Vitalik’s steps, understand many of the possible risks underlying them, and could have confidently done something similar myself. Although I am probably unusually capable even among the LW readership, I think many readers could have done this if they wanted to.
Similarly, I don’t know anything about perpetual futures, but I guarantee that I could understand perpetual futures very clearly by tomorrow if you offered me $20k (or a 20% shot at $100k) to do it.
Having to think hard for a week to clearly understand something complicated, with the expectation that there might be money on the other end*, is definitely a convincing practical explanation for why rationalists aren’t making a lot of money off of schemes like this, but it’s not a good reason why they shouldn’t. Of course, many rationalists may not have enough capital that it matters much, but many may.
*It’s not like these are otherwise useless concepts to understand, either.
It’s worth noting that doing Vitalik’s steps is one thing. Figuring out to pay taxes on the trade and how that effects the trade will be much more complicated.