He said “slowing growth rate” not “shrinking economy”. Take 1900 to 2025 (or 2019 if you want to dodge covid) and EMA the (g’-g)/g and it will be visually apparent.
Quite hard to see higher derivatives or rates in the g vs. t graph. You need to plot at least dg/dt vs t to see. But definitely need dg/g vs t to see.
Haven’t looked at the true data (though it would be unsurprising) but your graph on its own hard to spot plus explanation makes no sense.
Slowing refers to a change in the derivative, in this context. Slowing growth would be a decrease in change in GDP per year — a decrease in growth. But the claim is that the growth (first derivative) is what’s slowing — that is, the second derivative of GDP w.r.t. time went negative, which does seem to be the case in mid 2018 from the linked chart.
So a minus of about 45% from the all time high three months ago?
If this is it for this cycle, that would indicate the volatility of Bitcoin went down significantly.
Taking a look at the Bitcoin to USD price chart, I see roughly these numbers:
2013: $1,100 -> $238 = -78%
2017: $19,000 -> $3,500 = -82%
2021: $68,000 -> $16,000 = -76%
It will be interesting to watch if the volatility really stays this low suddenly. If so, one could point to the institutional adoption over the last years as the reason for this. When I ask Gemini for the number of public companies with Bitcoin on their balance sheets over the last years, I get:
2023: 67
2024: 79
2025: 190
And a similar trend for Bitcoin ETFs and ETPs. Twice as many in 2025 than in 2023.
As others have pointed out, it also runs up less in percentage terms during the resurgence. If, as you posit, Bitcoin is becoming less volatile, then the question will be what the demand looks like when it is no longer a way of getting exposure to potential large upside. In other words, a lot of people have bought it in the hope that it will double or more. How many will buy it in the hope that it doesn't go down? Perhaps it will happen, but it's not obvious.
In the limit, that would mean that Bitcoin's volatility reflects only the savings rate of people.
That would mean that Bitcoin is pure monetary value. In that case, it would suck out all the monetary premium from other assets like real estate, equities and gold. The monetary premium in those is probably a few hundred trillion. So by that time, Bitcoin's price should be 2 orders of magnitude higher than today.
Europe has no wafer production and no companies that produce GPUs.
That means it is dependent on Taiwan for wafers and the USA for GPU design.
Then there is the question wether there is a will to invest. Gemini gives me this list of publicly traded companies in the US and what they invested in AI infrastructure in 2025:
Given Europe's productivity gap with the US, they appear they are becoming even further a vassal. They will survive, but they further lose their leverage with each year. We see this in international politics as the US pivots away from Europe and towards Asia. (Although Russia's decline has also made it less necessary too)
If you want Europe to rejoin 'great powers', as 'survival', yes they need AI.
Productivity in producing slop? Because that's the only thing LLMs are good for so far. And by the time this change the GPUs installed today will become obsolete.
People tend to fixate about cutting edge technology, but my naïve intuition says the problem in Europe is not in lack of some secret sauce: it is hidden in plain sight lack of energy to run the DC - and worse - lack of long term desire to make the tough choices to get that energy
I would also add lack of technical competence at C level. In my previous job, I have dealt with quite a few European CEOs whos only background was an MBA. Unlike the US where a lot of CEOs have a deep technical background...
Of course. One only has to take a look at Microsoft, Apple, or Google, to notice that they're run by CEOs with a "deep" technical background. No MBA whatsoever...
Google and (and more debatably Microsoft and Apple) were run by technical founders during the timeframe that they were achieving critical mass. The MBAs came later to run the machine and optimize the business. But, the machine was built and grown by technical leadership first.
I read years ago that Hetzner placed data centers near inexpensive power, but I understand that the EU’s energy situation has deteriorated. So you are correct, they have the larger energy problem to contend with.
> That means it is dependent on Taiwan for wafers and the USA for GPU design.
Both being dependant on ASML, that we're crippling to please our bully, the USA. We probably have more leverage that we want to admit, but that requires a lot of politic will and... planning the economy.
Well it is like Thiel said in a recent interview - European companies and investors are very risk-averse and will never be a vanguard like the ones in the US.
You'll never get here that kind of cash for any risky project, it usually is low risk + low margin.
Feels like people write that like it somehow is failure on investors side.
If you are investor on US market having 300M people speaking roughly the same language and then high possibility to easily spill over the world upsides on the bet are really high, burning cash to have a chance hitting jackpot are much much higher than in EU.
In EU you are starting in a single country so like 60M people and your payoff is capped from start at most likely scenario you go big in a single country and then you basically have clean start in next country.
That is the reality of game theory, not some failure of imagination or being scared to take risks - payoff is just not there, in US you have a shot at insane payoff in relatively short term.
> If you are investor on US market having 300M people speaking roughly the same language and then high possibility to easily spill over the world upsides on the bet are really high
The topic is cloud providers. Do you think it would be critical for a EU-based cloud provider to translate their admin GUI to Elfdalian, Basque and Romansh in order to succeed? Or perhaps there are some deeper underlying causes for European failure in modern computer tech that you can think of?
Thiel recently called Greta Thunberg the anti - christ. Thiel is maybe crazy as Musk. at least he is not an authorative source.
Besides the soure what does he mean with all of Europe: Berlin? London? Paris? Estonia? Sweden?
The start up eco system is fragmented / decentralised. I doubt Thiel is a good overview and he argues probably not in good faith anyway.
Wow you're so right, you did such a good job asking computer mommy to confirm your priors!
But actually, that's not the goal here. AI, at least the kind of products that need dedicated datacenters ie. generative, isn't critical infrastructure. The focus is on documents, collaboration tools, file servers, single-sign on, databases etc. that are seemingly monopolized by US providers.
> documents, collaboration tools, file servers, single-sign on, databases
All being (or soon to be) fed through LLM agents running on fibers and datacenters controlled by NOT European entieties. And if you build DC you'll be powering them with energy imports.
Software being built on library repositories also under foreign jurisdictions. Network infrastructure built on imported tech running whatever backdoors "partners" see fit.
Its like you didn't notice the snowden revelations, the shift from dependence on Russian Gas to US gas, nordstream sabotage, stuxnet, etc
Also to be honest, suppose EU uses kimi model which is open source. They can literally swap out one word from the provider and move from say American datacenter companies to European.
Quite frankly, there is literally 0 moat and its great to see EU focus on the real moat/lock-in issues.
Yes, this is a core issue. Most datacenter investments in Europe come from American big tech. If AI is going to be half as huge as predicted (kind of a big if), then Europe would depend even more on the US for compute. The highest energy prices in the world coupled with conservative investment mentality means Europe is practically out of the AI race.
If they wait a year or so, the new AI chips being used now in China will probably be available for LLM inference in Europe. It seems unfortunate for small and medium size countries, and also for the EU to be dependent on any IT infrastructure only from China or the USA, but perhaps being flexible enough to be able to switch venders or use both is safer?
exactly. in HPC we all understood that it was a tradeoff between money and time, and that the curve was exponential. if you wanted to race ahead of todays capabilities, you could, but you couldn't go very far without burning alot of cash.
because of the investment story about being first and building a moat, we have companies torching 100s of billions of dollars to see who can climb that exponential the furthest.
we have so much work to do, in infrastructure, and distributed computation models, and programmability, quantization, and information theory...just relax a little. you dont have to compete with OpenAI. OpenAI is just a giant waste of money. take your incremental gains and invest in research and I assure you we can get there without directing our entire economic output into buying the latest highest margin parts from Nvidia only to use them at 30%, if you're being generous.
It's true that the progress on clock speeds has slowed. Now we have to address the parallelism problem in order to keep moving forward. And we haven't done a very good job. Progress on that front will get us back on the acceleration curve. Saedfly, the current framing of 'who buys the most hardware', while I providing a nice marketing story, isn't netting us that much progress except what Nvidia spends internally.
You have not seen Alphabet, Apple, Microsoft? Where are you looking? They all did tens of billions of share buybacks every year for many years now.
Example: Alphabet has started share buybacks in 2015 and increased those every year. $70B in 2025 alone. And they are firing on all cylinders product-wise.
I'm not sure what the point is wrt ASML, they made good bets, they won their monopoly, their shareholders who funded the bets get to enjoy monopoly pricing. If they start cutting R&D and lose their crown, yes it's shame I guess but that's all there is. To expect a company to sell their goods cheaply when they are the only ones in the world who can them is asking for too much. It's great that they and their investors took the punt on EUV all those years ago, we probably would not have the chips we have today and all the economic benefits around it
Has anyone in the last 10 years praised Google for anything, ever? They've been engaged in enshittification the entire time. Search is getting worse, Youtube is getting worse, Android is getting worse, Chrome is getting worse. They are indeed a hollow shell of the company that originally established themselves, but now that they have such a wide-ranging monopoly they can freely debase the value of their products to extract as much from customers as they can.
Google is still the best search engine. YouTube is still the best video site. Android is still the best operating system. Chrome is still the best browser.
And on the side they built the best AI and the best autonomous ride service.
Youtube and Android particularly are completely garbage and are not the "best" on any technical merits. To the extent they are used, it's solely because people are locked into using them by network effects. If you as a viewer use a technically superior video website, you will have no content to watch. If you as a content creator use a technically superior video website, you will have no viewers to watch your content. Similarly, if you as an OS developer want to make a new phone OS -- tough luck, nobody will produce hardware that is open and accepts anything other than an existing OS, and you can't sell a phone people will buy without modern hardware. This is why monopolies are terrible for humanity, and why Google's ongoing success has absolutely nothing to do with its technical capabilities or complete lack thereof.
They lost battle for office software, they can't even exist in chat space, despise trying to make chat that sticks for 2 decades now, they squandered on video chat space and office space too.
IF Alphabet was actually efficient they should own office space, but 365 ate their office productivity and even the utter turd that is MS teams is beating them out on chat.
Even their search gets worse and only places where they actually have progress is AI.
They definitely have embarrassing failures (chat especially), and some are not as successful as you'd expect them to be (Gsuite, GCP). But overall I'd say they are doing pretty damn well.
Compare to Amazon for example. They've only ever had two really successful products: shopping and AWS. Alexa could have been too if they hadn't spent a gazillion dollars trying to monetise it.
Or Facebook. They've only ever had one successful product - the rest they bought after they were already successes.
If the USA cannot be trusted that they will honor the ownership of gold in their vaults, can it be trusted to honor the ownership of US equities and bonds held by foreigners?
All of these problems would go away if we had micropayments. So that the user could pay for the resources they use.
The user would know that each pageview is $0.001.
The website owner would know each pageview pays for itself.
We probably could get there with some type of crypto approach. Probably one that is already invented, but not popular yet. I don't know too much about crypto payments, but maybe the Bitcoin Lightning network or a similar technology.
Processing a micropayment takes more resources than serving a simple Web page, even if the payment fails. You would have to put in similar filters, or you would get DoSed using the micropayment service.
The incentive to send http requests is that data comes back. That's why the storm of scrapers hurts website owners. They gather the data and give nothing back.
What would be the incentive to send failing payment requests?
To break the site. But you're right that a lot fewer people will probably want to break it than to scrape it, and that stuff like CAPTCHAs is usually more about the "scraping" case. So basically a mistake on my part.
Additionally, I have read up a bit more on the Lightning Network now, and it seems not possible to send invalid payments in the first place.
The sender does not have a direct communication channel with the receiver. They send the payment to a hop they are connected to (they have a channel with) and it gets routed to the receiver. The first hop would already drop an invalid payment. If they spam them with more invalid payments, all that would happen is that their connection to the Lightning Network would get lost as their channel partners would disconnect from them. The receiver would not receive a single network packet in the whole process.
I wish that they'll just keep on running a good profitable business without going public, or getting bought by Amazon, or otherwise shifting focus to providing shareholder value.
This. I am a happy paying customer. Recommend them to my clients whenever it makes sense (more often than not). And hope they just keep running like they do as profitable business, like you said.
Why in the world would one want a company like this to go public? They are a very stable, established and profitable private entity. Based on what Hetzner is doing right now, it seems like the current way of operating that is intended by the leadership is closely aligned with what their customers want. This is often the first thing that goes out the window once a company becomes public
The comparison with OVH is a good one. For some reason OVH has much worse PUE, self-reporting 1.24 vs. Hetzner's 1.11. Operating costs are basically just electricity for these places, so their margins are that much worse.
For further comparison, Google at a similar latitude in Saint-Ghislain, Belgium, claims 1.08.
I don't understand anything in your comment, so I'm shamelessly posting some info from an LLM:
> PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) measures datacenter efficiency - it's total facility power divided by IT equipment power. A perfect 1.0 means all power goes to servers; higher numbers mean more waste on cooling/overhead. OVH's 1.24 vs Hetzner's 1.11 means OVH burns 24% extra power on non-IT stuff, hurting margins since electricity is their main cost. Google hits 1.08 at similar latitude.
Compared to IONOS, it is day and night. IONOS in my experience is just worse in every category that matters.
IONOS has buggy and bad wannabe SPA web frontend, broken OS images, bottlenecks in their provisioning API, that they don't care to fix, and 10x the costs.
If you are not desperate for one specific offering of IONOS, that Hetzner doesn't offer, and you have any other options, there is no good and justifiable reason to go for IONOS. IONOS is a low effort, low quality, high marketing spend shop. Hetzner is almost the opposite. They don't waste money on advertising, they cost much less to rent servers from, their OS images work, they got good technical support.
The last thing we need is more enshitification on this space.
I just migrated my selfhosted email server to Hetzner and I don't want them turning into monstrosity like AWS or Azure, with theit miriad of ways to nickel and dime the customers.
Going public usually means unlocking funding, so they could grow business, build more services, compete with say OVH or if some hyperscaler will decide to step into this niche.
Yes I agree, we need more public companies in Europe.
Private companies are inherently less social since they don’t allow ordinary people to participate in growth.
In this sense, they’re selfish.
PS: yes I know that there are also downsides to public companies. But looking at the trade-offs I prefer that success can be shared as broadly as possible.
At least in America, "a successful private company went public" often translates into "ordinary people got a bit of gold, selfish vulture capitalists butchered the goose, and there was precious little success or growth for anyone after that".
(Also - might your "allow ordinary people to participate" sympathies extend to people who would like to participate in your own financial affairs?)
Selfish VC becoming filthy rich through an IPO is exactly my point. Up to an IPO a private company will only make their owners rich - in your example "selfish vulture capitalists".
After an IPO anyone can participate. When Google, Amazon, Apple went public, VCs got rich. Everyone after that included every day people like you and me.
No - the selfish vulture capitalists are the outsiders who purchase a private company which has been successful for many years, then butcher it. There is no IPO - it is "you own X, and we are offering you $Y million to sell it to us".
After that - X's best assets are sold off (the VC's get the money), X goes deeply into debt (again, the VC's get the money), many of the employees are laid off, and X generally goes bankrupt within 7 years - because what is left of it can't make the payments on the debt.
(You're right - I made a mess of things, and inter-mingled the cases where a privately-owned company is sold directly to private equity / vulture capitalists, and the case where a privately-owned company "goes public" - but that still does not lead to a happy ending.)
>the selfish vulture capitalists are the outsiders who purchase a private company which has been successful for many years, then butcher it.
Sounds like the selfish vulture capitalists are the insiders who sell the company.
>X's best assets are sold off (the VC's get the money), X goes deeply into debt (again, the VC's get the money), many of the employees are laid off, and X generally goes bankrupt within 7 years - because what is left of it can't make the payments on the debt.
This doesn't make any sense, because X is the original asset. If part of X is sold, then the remaining portion of X loses value (assuming the sold part is the good part). If X is used as collateral, then it also loses value.
Privately-owned companies can provide better value to their customers. They can invest in customer trust and brand value that pays off over decades, not quarters.
They can also choose enshittification, but they are not pressured into it like companies with institutional investors are.
As a Hetzner customer, I would lose out if they went public.
> Private companies are inherently less social since they don’t allow ordinary people to participate in growth.
Consider two possibilities. The first is, if you want to make money in an industry, you start a company in it. Lots of people start companies because lots of people want to make money and then there are lots of companies, causing the profits to be widely distributed.
The second is, if you want to make money in an industry, you buy shares of an existing company. You have to buy them from whoever currently owns it, so the ones who got in early become billionaires, meanwhile even if an ordinary person were to invest their entire net worth they wouldn't even own 1% of the company so they have so little influence over it that it isn't even worth their time to vote their shares, and therefore have no influence over it at all. But you still make some profit while not having to actually do the work of building a company, so more people do that instead of entering the market themselves and then there are fewer companies that are each bigger.
The second one leads to market consolidation and concentration of wealth and power, so which one is actually less social?
It tells you something about how much a gambling place the market is when a site like this has a one day default for the price change. When it comes to a high level view of the market, why would I care for a comparison of todays prices to ... YESTERDAY??
My first reaction was to look for a 10 year option. There is none, so I took the 5 year option. All of the big names roughly doubled or tripled over the last 5 years. Amazon lagging a bit behind. I could start to reason about the numbers but .. 5 years is just too short. I would play with it more if there was a 10 year option.
And I would love Love LOVE a European version of this.
> It tells you something about how much a gambling place the market is when a site like this has a one day default for the price change. When it comes to a high level view of the market, why would I care for a comparison of todays prices to ... YESTERDAY??
Treeviews are pretty common views for traders trying to get into new markets. Just like a software engineer understands that the backbone of our networks is retries and waits, traders will create funds that smooth over this kind of daily volatility for people that just want to have their capital appreciate. Imagine explaining to a non software engineer that actually things on the internet are failing all the time and turning them off and on again (retries) is actually how we make sure it all works ;) (and obviously the math that underpins it all is pretty much the same. Networks and markets run on RVs and time-series.)
There is undoubtedly European versions of this btw. If I get around to it after work I'll try and post some.
In defence of prices yesterday - the people who would use a tool like this the most are the traders since they are looking at the numbers every day, so it probably comes out of the trader community.
Real returns are expected to be in the 2-8% range which means that most people should be looking at timeframes around 10-50 year. Unfortunately at that range the money printing has a real impact so the chart needs to be adjusted for inflation and, realistically, changes in the money supply [0] and so it is more work for the implementer.
[0] If it hasn't gone up 33% since 2020 it probably lost value in real terms.
> the gambler has higher chance at generational wealth
And a symmetrically higher chance of ruin, and in the process the "averaged out" gain might actually be worse than the index investor after taxes, fees, and inflation are factored in.
Are there any publicly traded European cloud companies that will benefit from Europe hosting more of their stuff on their own?
I looked at IONOS, but it seems they just let their cloud product rot away? The cloud backend looks outdated and lacks basic features like uploading private keys that can be used when provisioning new VMs.
I also looked at OVH, but their website and interface look like total chaos to me. I felt lost all the time while I was trying to set up a VM, and while trying to use their AI APIs.
Considering that Europe has an economy as large as the USA, it is puzzling how small these companies are. The combined market cap of IONOS and OVH is less than $10B.
Europe does not have the same market conditions as the US. The continent is divided into a gazillion amount of small countries, each with their own rules, laws, regulations, languages, customers, pension systems, healthcare systems, and taxes. Even the currency is not the same everywhere. Not to mention the cultural differences.
One thing they have for them is a lot of money to invest from their American market, and enough momentum that they can afford barely sustainable European operations for a few years whilst they figure things out and streamline everything.
EU federalism would solve this issue, and likely cause others.
The concept of European federalism is extremely interesting to me. The first I heard about it was at a house party in Prague, from a group of very excited young people. It feels both impossible and inevitable.
They would probably need a anchor client that would allow for predictable growth at scale - AWS always had Amazon.com GCP had its gmail and other workspace apps.
Ideally the varoius goverments in the EU would commit to only hosting their work on them , however from one article read recently even the rules they come up with to test sovereignity claims are gamed to benefit the US providers.
Yep,hopefully their API offerings are industry compatible and requisition of resources for clients is smooth. Would also help if they can onboard similar sized operations that are currently doing their own hosting or using one of the non-EU clouds.
If capable quantum computers become more probable and the soft fork is not already happening, it will be accelerated. And then everybody will move their coins to quantum resistant addresses.
So it does not look like a major problem. It will lower the price a bit though. Because old, lost coins will be revived and come to the market.
There will also be some type of war around "code is law" because some people will suggest to invalidate old coins on non-quantum-resistant addresses. That will be interesting to watch.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GDP