Counting Beans
An Old World Coffee Trader’s Guide to the New World of Compute Markets.
Arena Magazine <[email protected]>
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Arena Magazine promotes an article, "Counting Beans", which explores the parallels between the 17th-century coffee market and modern compute markets. The article draws inspiration from David Liss' book "The Coffee Trader" and discusses the importance of computation in today's world. It highlights the competitive advantage gained by those who utilize computation and advanced technology.
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Telling the Great American Story, in Print!
Counting Beans
An Old World Coffee Trader’s Guide to the New World of Compute Markets, by Cooper Veit. This article was first published in Issue 009: Hello, World, our ode to software.
One of the best books about trading is The Coffee Trader, David Liss’ account of the development of the coffee market in the seventeenth century Netherlands. Protagonist Miguel Lienzo recognizes coffee’s potential and hatches a scheme to crash the East India Company supply and then buy it up cheap before the market wakes up to exploding European demand. He moves his plan forward with a series of secret auction schemes and shaky partnerships across the taverns of Amsterdam. The legal ethics and bet sizing are a bit hairy. But a modern trader can see in Miguel the seeds of a new world, the trader’s world.
One nice moment in the book is an account of the benefits of caffeine. “Coffee,” a promotional pamphlet proclaims, “has all but destroyed the plague in England. It preserves health in general and makes those who drink it hearty and fat; it helps the digestion and cures consumption and other maladies of the lung. It is wonderful for fluxes, even the bloody flux, and has been known to cure jaundice and every kind of inflammation.”
Respect the copy, but the world didn’t get addicted to coffee because of its health benefits. The pamphlet saves its honest pitch for last: “Besides all that, it imparts astonishing powers of reason and concentration. In the years to come the man who does not drink coffee may never hope to compete with the man who avails himself of its secrets.”
Today, more than was the case with coffee, the man who does not use computation cannot compete with the man who avails himself of its secrets. No hedge fund can price second order effects faster than a 200-megawatt Jane Street data center. No lone genius can produce a better language model than Anthropic.
It’s not just that companies need compute to serve software applications. Many of our biggest companies, with highly scalable business models in things like search and learning, actually have “hyperscale” demand for compute that appears limitless.
Whereas the seventeenth-century market for coffee beans was measured in perhaps the equivalent of millions of modern-day dollars, the computing and cloud market today measures in the hundreds of billions a year, with trillions more committed to building it out. And whereas the coffee trade involved a vast colorful tapestry of characters from Turkey to Ethiopia to Indonesia to Amsterdam, the compute market concentrates into a shockingly small number of multi-trillion-dollar actors.
Magic Beans
Coffee is a simple commodity: coffee beans are grown in farms in places like Colombia or Tanzania, graded, bagged, and exported to global markets. The grading allows a buyer in, say, Hamburg, to price a lot of coffee he’s never seen before. Compute, meanwhile, is harder to even define. The thing that’s sold is not a commodity but a sellable capacity for work done on computers, purchased by the hour. When a startup “buys compute,” it is renting time on racks of specialized computers in massive data centers. You cannot put compute in a bag, store it for later, or sell it in a farmer’s market. No grade exists that tells a buyer what he’s getting.
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