Master's degree requirements completed
News, School, Economics ·Friday March 18, 2011 @ 22:26 EDT (link)
Last presentation Friday night, for Cryptography - random ordering, 6th of 12, behind another person not on "the list" who as it happened had the same topic, Bitcoins. Think it went reasonably well; not much over the five minutes; answered questions. One I think I could have answered better in hindsight; but I don't blame myself for not apprehending it immediately. The question was about deflation—causing it—in a Bitcoin system (by recalling coins), presumably after inflation, which really can't happen, given the fixed maximum number of coins (21 million) and (controlled) steady rate of generation (300/hour). Naturally I answered that inflation or deflation (a flood or dearth of coins chasing the same amount of goods), if it were possible, is fixed by the market's price mechanism. But I use inflation and deflation in the economic sense, that is, an increase or decrease in the money supply. The layman sees inflation (deflation) as an increase (decrease) in prices: however this is actually an effect of inflation. But even if the question was more correctly, "How would the Bitcoin system handle rapidly falling (rising) prices?" the answer would be that it would do nothing. First, there is no central controller able to do anything in any case. Second, prices are a market feature, used to convey information about relative scarcity and so forth, and meddling in them is unwarranted and inimical. So, questioner, if you're out there, I hope you find this and this better answers your question.
It is a sigh of relief to be finished. Graduation is Saturday June 11 at Husky Stadium; my parents are coming to town for it. Relief. Won't miss being out late on class evenings or poring over homework, either. Feel bad about this last class: the grader was borderline incompetent and the profs, although I went through the system of appealing first to the grader, and then sent an appeal request to them, and then they asked I resend it and promised in class to give it attention, continued to ignore it. So I felt cheated and hoped the class doesn't hurt my GPA. But in the end, they re-graded everything, so I guess they agreed about the grader.
But it's great to be done. I don't know how or if I can leverage it in my present job, but it may be useful in the future (the Master's is the new Bachelor's, don't you know?) It's an accomplishment; I have an excellent GPA; no debt; I wish I knew more profs to write me a recommendation if I want to do a doctorate, but I'll worry about that when I get there.
For now, it feels good to be done.
