Any two-sided market will have prevailing prices at certain volumes (even if internal to a dealer) that are not perfectly matched before the actual trade. Say, SPY at 180.5 X 1000 bid and 181 X 1500 Offer. If that goes on a lot (1000 vs 1500, etc), market makers will adjust prices to stay as even as possible.

What finance people mean, and this is how language works, 'More buyers than sellers [at the prevailing price]'. Good financial journalists are speaking to a sophisticated audience that understands basic market microstructure.

Forex traders may have been attracted to a market without regulation but their customers were there to make foreign currency trades. I'm sure that not as many bitcoin users would be happy to lose their anonymity to gain that accountability.

I'd say that more and more bitcoin users are using it because of the hype, not because of the anonymity.

>>I'm sure that not as many bitcoin users would be happy to lose their anonymity to gain that accountability.

Maybe not yet. But if everybody currently holding and hyping bitcoin achieves their goal of mainstream adoption, then at that point the new majority bitcoin user demographic will probably be very happy to lose anonymity to gain accountability.

What about the other side of regulation? Not from customers demanding safety but from governments demanding reporting? (E.g. anti-money laundering, tax-evasion laws, commodity markets laws)

I don't know nearly enough about the mechanics of bitcoin to say anything remotely meaningful, but it seems like there is no way that bitcoin won't be regulated like any other commodity. At least in the US, the CFTC will absolutely regulate it by criminalizing anyone for not registering their holdings. Or, even outside of commodities, you could get something like FACTA that forces people/banks to report stores of value in offshore centers where US citizens are involved. This is all US-centric, sure, but why wouldn't it be like this generally? Or, rather, do the mechanics of bitcoin mean you could stay anonymous while not becoming a criminal under the regulation that is going to come?

Sure, a company like Google directly does more good than Goldman. (Although, trivially, you could argue a taco stand does something arguably more important than inverse-indexed search) Non-trivially, though, in order for a company like Google to get financed, it needs to have investors. Now, you'd be right that this doesn't necessarily require bankers, but it does present an interesting problem.

When an investor makes an investment, she wants to make more money than she put in. Else, why do it? Ok, so the simplest possible way to get more money than you put in would be to just let the invested business produce cash from profits and receive distributions over time. Ok, great, but what if that takes 20 years and you need the cash sooner?

The other option is to sell the stake to someone else. But the second you do that, in fact, the second you even offer to do that, the person on the buying end has the same worry. The only possible way for this to work is for there to be a bunch of other people who are willing to buy or sell at a certain amount at a certain price. That, my friends, is a market.

But what if there's no one out there to buy or sell your stake? Or what if there's very few? You need a market but there is none. Well, what if a person could somehow make a market for you? Someone, who, because of their deep knowledge of your company, companies like yours, the way markets work generally, and a view of the future state of markets could come in and say, "Hey, listen, I know there's not a lot of people out there right now who are willing to buy or sell, but I'm willing to buy X shares of your company at Y amount and sell X shares of your company at Y + Z amount." You, as the investor, are loving it since you don't have to tell someone upfront, "Hey, I'm saying my entire stake, what's the price?" Because that would be extreme adverse selection and would lower your price. And further, you don't have to say, "I'd like to double my share," thereby hinting you know something and the price should be higher. A market is made: there's a standing price to sell at X, and a standing price to buy at Y.

This actually happens all over the place. Facebook, amazon, google, et al. make money by being platforms for other people to create content. Facebook as a platform is obvious. For google, they are really the platform for the internet itself. No matter what firm w're talking about, the only way for content-creators to be willing to share is if there are enough people to consume/listen. And for there to be enough people to listen, there has to be someone who aggregates. And for someone to aggregate it necessitates a huge amount of upfront investment. Meaning, for example, that Facebook had to build itself before a billion people used it. Yes, this was in stages. But at each stage, it required a huge amount of risk before other people were there to use it. The same with google. Same with amazon. You see, these firms are underwriting the act of sharing content. Their knowledge of the eventual payoff allows them to buy the time, commitment, etc before there is an obvious customer. They have made a market.

Now, while Google, Amazon, and Facebook are doing this for things on the internet. Goldman is doing it for the Googles, Amazons, and Facebooks themselves. Goldman is providing a platform for the businesses in general. And, not only that, for anything that has substantial future cash flows!

It might seem that anybody could do this. Like why not Tim Ferriss on Angellist-Underwrite? That isn't so clear. The only reason Goldman can afford to post a bid and offer (i.e. make a market in cash-flows generally) is to have a better idea of the value of that something than whomever they are transacting with. Goldman has to think, "Ok, we'll buy/sell at x/y price because we know the real price that is z and so we can make money by offering the spread x - y." And guess what? In order to know that, they have to spend what seems like a life-wasting amount of time getting into the minutiae of esoteric financial knowledge. Because, remember, it's not that the market-maker is just connecting buyers and sellers. The market-maker is actually fronting the money--bearing the risk, by posting a bid and offer--in order for there to be a guarantee of the market. So the stakes are huge.

Now, in the future, it will be Tim Ferriss on AngelList-Underwrite. But he will hire 10 guys/gals to help him analyze markets. And then will he will get a lot of software to help aggregate information. And then he will want to be near the action, so he'll get an office in SF. And before you know it, he will be Goldman Sachs in jeans.

In the end, the only way for a platform to exist of any type is for someone somewhere to bear the initial risk on an unconditional (not knowing if a person is buying or selling) basis. It doesn't matter if it's a Facebook, a taco stand, the Hoover Dam or asset-backed securities. Goldman (and the other mega dealer-banks) are facilitating a platform for the entire world to unload cash-flows: the platforms' platform. And if you pick Finance as a career, it will be thankless, often boring, hard and people will likely not understand what you do and will demonize you for it. But you will know that you are doing something special: you are building the platform for everything.

an email that I made: specialemailforthisrightnow@gmail.com

It is sorta misleading, in fact, because a lot of good authors and speakers assume it as a well known fact and add their leaps of imagination to it. It is OK at best as a pop culture thing, maybe a poetic spin off.

Why does it have no place on Hacker ... oh, you know what, scratch that. No point entering that debate. Thanks.

It's not so much about whether the stance is true or not and whether we should debate that. It's that articles that discredit something as trivially untrue by way of a trivially small statement. In the extreme it would be like discrediting [insert pseudoscience topic] by simply mentioning a copy of Nature. There's some degree here, sure. But tabloid-style takedowns, regardless of whether they are right, seem almost out of place.

I am wrong to say this has no place, though, which is in itself a pretty big claim with no substance behind it.

The onus is not on anyone to disprove the theory, the onus is on the theory's proponents to prove it, they haven't done so, not to the slightest degree.

I read The Brain that Changes Itself recently and it markedly reinforced certain suspicions I had. Which other areas of are most active in neuroscience at the moment that might one day be related to human/computer interfaces?

The incentive could exist for scientists who want to write books and be more public facing.  However, I think most neuroscientists want to write something that relates to their professional work and is more interesting to them.  Triune brain theory just isn't on radar.  

Moreover, popular neuroscience is really really hard to do well.  You need to find the overlap between the narrow controlled experiments of neuroscience and the messy realm of observable human behavior and experience. Things are that are known in the former are seldom known in the latter.  Careful scientists know this and often feel alarmed when asked to talk about things outside the lab. 

This leaves much of the writing, by default, to people who aren't concerned about being exact and who are happy to use technical terms as loose metaphors.  Many of these aren't neuroscientists, but people who want a little neuro terminology to make their work seem cooler. Accurate neuroscience is not all that important to success in punditry and publishing.  For example, psychiatrist Louann Brizendine's books on gender and the brain and economist Paul Zak's oxytocin book The Moral Molecule seem to me to write egregious neurobabble.  

(There are certainly modules in the brain -- contemporary work statistically identifies which areas are active at the same time.  There's a large cool literature on the default mode network, which is a pretty central concept in neuroscience: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Default_network ).  

(edited to fix a typo)

Also, and more importantly, isn't it a bit strange that there needs to be tool like this at all? Is it still going on where Coursera pulls old course material off when the course is finished? If it is, can we have a discussion on that?