Here is Izabella Kaminska on a new plan "developed by students at University of Edinburgh Business School" that would use the blockchain "to create a new, more efficient model of blood transfers between hospitals." Yesterday we talked about the weird mysticism of using the blockchain to transform dollars into "pure digital assets": Dollars are already digital assets; the blockchain may be an efficient way to move them, but the talk of transforming them is mostly obfuscating mumbo-jumbo. Blood has the opposite problem. The problem with blood is not with efficiently transferring legal entitlements to it, or with reconciling different parties' ledgers to reflect how much blood they own. Owning blood is useless. You have to have it in your body. Blockchain can perhaps speed up the process of transferring blood between hospitals -- perhaps it is more efficient than just, like, e-mailing other hospitals or whatever -- but there's only so much it can do for the settlement process. The settlement of a blood transfer requires moving blood, actual physical blood, and you can't do that on the blockchain.
People are worried about unicorns.
There's nothing a unicorn likes more than to kick back and relax with a nice game of ping-pong, but now even that simple pleasure is losing its appeal:
“Last year, the first quarter was hot” for tables, says Mr. Ng, who thinks sales track the tech economy. Now “there’s a general slowdown.”
In the first quarter of 2016, his table sales to companies fell 50% from the prior quarter. In that period, U.S. startup funding dropped 25%, says Dow Jones VentureSource, which tracks venture financing.
Mr. Ng is Simon Ng, owner of Billiard Wholesale in San Jose, "who drives a Porsche Boxster to work." Twitter, the ex-unicorn whose stock hit its lowest closing stock price ever yesterday, is the face of the ping-pong crunch, though it is putting a hilariously brave face on the matter:
Asked why Twitter stopped buying tables, spokesman Jim Prosser says: “I guess we bought really sturdy ones.” Twitter spokeswoman Natalie Miyake says: “Honestly, we’re more of a Pop-A-Shot company now,” referring to an indoor basketball game.
Sure, sure, it's Pop-A-Shot, not a bubble bursting. I continue to be a little ambivalent about reader drawings in this space, but I could probably use an illustration of two unicorns playing ping-pong.
Elsewhere! A while back we talked about the dream of replacing the market with a central computer that allocates resources and sets prices. I joked: "This is called the socialist calculation problem, and it is pleasing that late-stage unicorn capitalism has solved it." I was talking about mutual funds' approximate valuations of private tech companies, and was mostly kidding. But here is a story about how Uber is working on replacing surge pricing (which uses prices to allocate resources, although it uses an algorithm to set prices) with an algorithm that will just figure out how many drivers should be driving and where. I am not entirely sure about the mechanism for that -- isn't the point of Uber that its drivers are independent contractors motivated by piecework pay rather than by their bosses' orders? -- but, whatever, as Arindrajit Dube points out, it's one unicorn step toward socialist calculation. And it seems fitting that the libertarians at Uber would be leading the way.
People are worried about bond market liquidity.