prompt_front: Now, answer the following question based on the text below, only give me the answer and do not output any other words.

Question: What are the three phases of the author's preaching process?

Read the following text and answer briefly.

Context 1: // josh vajda // | a blog about theology and everything else
// josh vajda //
Sunday School Notes
Preaching Method
January 17, 2016 Josh Vajda	Leave a comment
I’m not a preacher; I’m a theologian  But now that I’ve graduated seminary I sometimes have the honor of preaching  And as someone who just barely passed the two required preaching courses while he was focused on other things, I’ve had to go back and really develop a theology and strategy of preaching  It should go without saying that it’s a work in progress, but I’m at a place now where I’m comfortable with my system—which means the next step is to share it  Maybe someone out there can benefit from what I’ve learned, but either way there’s always room for improvement and maybe you can help me see where 
Topic/Text Selection
The first and most obvious question is what to preach on  I was trained to be sensitive to what the congregation needs to hear, but not being a pastor I don’t have that kind of insight  I once heard John Piper say when he’s a guest preacher he preaches to himself that way he knows at least one person needed it  I like that better, but this early in my ministry I’ve taken to something a little less holy: what can I preach well?
This has really driven most of my sermons to-date, especially because I usually have only a few weeks’ notice  I preached on Ahab because I had just read about him in my devotions  I preached on the tree and its fruits because I had just studied the passage in the context of LGBT acceptance  Most recently, I preached on 1 Corinthians because that’s what we’ve been studying in Sunday School  The more I know something ahead of time, the better chance I have of knowing what to look for and how to communicate it 
Once I have my topic, I start running the passage through a system in the three phases we used in seminary: exegetical, theological, and homiletical 
Phase 1: Exegetical
The exegetical phase is just getting into the passage itself  First, I want to know the immediate context for the passage  Why is this here? What ideas are continuing, and which are new? How the author frames the passage is probably the most important factor in choosing how I will introduce it in the sermon  If it’s an epistle, I will also play with a structural outline to try and identify rhetorical choices 
Second, I want to try and surface issues in the Greek  I do a very rough translation, and if a word jumps out at me I take note  I’m looking for ambiguous meanings, untranslated concepts, repeated words, related words, etc  I don’t expect to come up with a better translation than the professionals; I just want to have some idea of why they made the choices they did and what might be getting lost in translation  (Note: I don’t talk about Greek and Hebrew words from the pulpit; I only explain the concepts because that’s what I expect people to remember )
Third, I take the list of questions I’ve been building and I start to do research  Who’s the referent in this verse? What does this metaphor mean? Is it used elsewhere? What’s the relationship between these two ideas? Does this command really imply that? My research is mostly based on Scripture alone, although there are times when I have to turn to historical background information to really get a reference  I see the Bible as one whole text even though it has many authors, and I’m very interested at drawing legitimate connections across books  I’ve also found Carson’s Exegetical Fallacies is a great help at avoiding common errors in biblical studies 
Phase 2: Theological
The boundary between exegesis and theology is thin and messy  I was given conflicting advice on this: some professors insisted I “bracket out” my theology, take nothing for granted; others insisted the only way to read it rightly is with Christian presuppositions 
I try to do both if I can 
Not all doctrines are equal  I refuse to bracket out core doctrines like the Trinity or salvation by grace alone through faith alone  But I feel very free to challenge other doctrines  My sense of how far to take which ideas is really very intuitive and not something that lends itself to explanation 
In short, the question raising and answering process is really the beginning of the theological phase for me  I’m looking for key ideas and trying to identify the timeless truths they communicate  Now there’s a danger here: you can use a passage to communicate all kinds of good theology  I think it’s much better when you can identify the theology the author was trying to communicate 
So one could hypothetically use Jesus’ tree/fruit analogy to talk about order in creation or a theology of arboreal imagery—and I might even do that in a teaching context  But preaching is a different task to me  I believe preaching is exhorting with the authoritative words of God  I’m not up there to educate  I’m there to press the points I believe God is pressing  If I teach anything else, it’s on my own authority  Hopefully it’s right  But if I’m going to say “thus saith the Lord,” I’d better be a sure as I can be that this is really His point; because again, not all doctrines are equal  So that’s why in this example I preached that the fruit of your life reveals the tree of your heart  I’m confident that was Jesus’ point, not mine 
Once I’m done with my exegetical studies, once I’ve done my best to figure everything out on my own—that’s when I turn to the commentaries  Just like with doing the translation, it’s not that I think I’m better than the experts; I do it because I know the text better when I wrestle with it myself  What’s more, as I wrestle with it I get a better sense of where others may have trouble, so I know to explain them more carefully or illustrate them more vividly  The only reason I even open the commentaries is for validation: did I miss anything or draw a wrong conclusion 
Phase 3: Homiletical
Throughout the whole process thus far, I’m keeping my eyes open for anything interesting, catchy, or eloquent  In some ways I’m having a conversation with the text and cross-references, and I note the parts of the conversation I like  If a crucial idea jumps out, I want to note it so I can craft a phrase around it  If an idea gets me really excited, I’ll jump out of my seat and pretend I’m preaching on it right then and there  Often those bursts of inspiration have gems worth polishing  Hopefully by the end of the exegetical process and the theological Q&A, I have a list of ideas and phrases to sprinkle in as I actually write the sermon 
One unfair advantage here is I took a course in copy writing, which is basically script for advertising  I especially liked what my professor called “fulcrum phrases,” like M&M’s famous “melts in your mouth / not in your hand ” It’s a skill I’ve tried to hone in my songwriting  If you can find that well-crafted phrase that has symmetry, it connects deeper and sticks better  I try to make sure I find at least one for every sermon  Here are some I’ve used:
It’s not yours to take; it’s God’s to give 
He who walks in humility walks in grace 
The fruit of your life reveals the tree of your heart 
You don’t have to hold on to anything for God to hold on to you 
So that’s my ideal, but I’m looking for anything at all that excites me, because if I’m excited about something there’s a good chance someone else will be, too 
Sermon Structure
At this point, I’m ready to start writing my sermon  I know what the text is about, why it exists, how it relates to the rest of Scripture, which parts are difficult to understand, and which parts are exciting  But before I can build content, I need a skeleton 
At Dallas Seminary I learned that a good introduction has the same essential parts, and I use the acronym INSTeP to remember them: image, need, subject, text, and preview  As someone with some creative writing background, I didn’t like this at first  But truth be told, a good sermon borrows from both storytelling and essay  The story draws you in, but the essay keeps you grounded  And just like a good essay, you need a thesis statement and its essential supports to help prepare people for what’s to come 
In my mind, the most important aspect of the introduction is the boring stuff: what’s the subject, what problem does it solve, where is our passage, and what are the main points  The image serves that  As a student I wanted to pick a great image that really stood out and captured people’s attention  But right now I’m in a place where all I care about is getting people interested in the need  If I have an image that raises the need, great; if not, I’ll try to explain my way to it  If you get through the introduction and people still don’t know what you’re talking about or why they should care, you’re about to fight an uphill battle 
The preaching style taught at Dallas and many other evangelical schools is sometimes called “Big Idea” preaching  The short version is that every sermon should have a well-crafted thesis statement  The way it’s taught, it’s everything; your exegesis is all about finding it, your homiletics are all about driving it home  In some cases the thesis becomes more important than the passage itself, which I think is going too far 
But I do think there should be one main idea tying everything together  It shouldn’t replace the passage, but it should drive the passage  As I go through my study process I’m making a list of possible thesis statements  If I haven’t found it by the end of the study process, I keep working toward it  There’s no point in writing the sermon until I have that unifying thought because I’m interested in every detail, every rabbit trail  I need that thesis to give my writing purpose, to tell me what to cut and what to emphasize 
Once I have the thesis, I try to take the existing structure of the passage and relate it back to that thesis  I know there are many different structures you can play with, but I find I do a better job of preaching the passage when I follow its structural cues  When I try to write a novel structure, I tend to make the passage just a series of illustrations for my own points; I’m sure better preachers are skilled at avoiding this problem 
Once I have the thesis and the structure, I write a draft of the whole sermon, weaving in those phrases I had stored up 
Somehow application seems to be the most contentious part of the sermon  Some preachers try to draw out every possible implication while others see application as purely the Holy Spirit’s job and provide nothing  While there are many possible applications, I try to find one that the text emphasizes more than the others and make that the whole deal  So while I really wanted to say something in my last sermon about how we should love unconditionally just as God does, that wasn’t Paul’s application  It’s true and we should do it, but Paul’s application trumps mine because it’s his passage  So I talked about boasting in the Lord 
Once I have my application, I take it in two directions—and I consider this my own secret sauce  I’m sure I’m not the first person to think of it, but I didn’t hear it anywhere else  My professor always told us “give them something to do!” In fact, he would say to give them something concrete to do that very day to maximize the chances that they will actually apply the sermon  I love it! It takes no time at all to forget a sermon 
But then I discovered there are some who take issue with this entire method of application, among them one of my favorite preachers, Tim Keller  For them, giving people something to do inspires legalism, and that endangers the Gospel  Instead they strive to show how Jesus already fulfilled the command of this passage, and the application is just to believe in Him, to adore Him, to marvel at Him  I love this, too! I absolutely believe that every passage properly understood relates to Christ in some way, and every application can be used to point to His perfect example and finished work 
So I try to do both  And here’s why: both are true  Christ has given us new life and yet we are called to live out a new life  The work is done in one sense, and yet we labor in another  So I always begin with showing how Christ has perfectly applied the passage and inviting people to believe in Him and rest in His finished work  Then because of what Christ has done, I call us to imitate Him by applying it ourselves 
At this point all I have to show for my labor is a rough draft  In order to make it presentable, I have a few more steps I go through, and these typically take me a week all by themselves  My goal is to make the sermon sound as natural and engaging as possible 
First, I read the sermon out loud and mark anything that doesn’t sound like me  Maybe I was copying someone’s tone, or more likely my tone was too formal or too informal for the moment  I also italicize the words I want to emphasize  It’s all about the sound 
Second, I memorize the sermon  (Yes, the whole thing ) This is what they trained us to do in seminary, and I thought it was overkill  Yes, you can get better eye contact, step away from the podium, I get that  But what I’ve discovered is that when I memorize my work it polishes the sermon like nothing else  If I can’t remember what I’m about to say, how can I expect the congregation to remember? Memorizing forces me to find the best words for the job 
It also helps me on a structural level, because if I can’t remember what I was about to say next, it shows that there’s a weak connection between the two points  In a compelling script, the next thing has to follow the last  Once you know why the two are married, you can go back and make it more obvious to the congregation 
As I memorize, I boil down the transcript into a preaching outline, which has just enough structure and content to cue me if my mind goes blank in the pulpit  It will have the necessary structural elements, markers for key phrases, and all condensed so that it fits on just a few pages on the platform  (One danger is if I don’t use it in practice, it’s less helpful on Sunday )
Third—and frankly this is the step I’m most likely to skip—I try to choreograph my movements  I believe good preaching is theater, but not in the sense that you’re dramatizing the text  Your whole body is communicating whether you want it to or not, so your gestures should be purposeful  Use the space to organize thoughts, repeat certain motions when you repeat the same thought, make sure you’re not sending mixed signals  Usually I run out of time before I get here, so I have plenty of room to grow in this area 
As I reflect on my process I realize that it’s uniquely tailored to me  My background as a writer, my love for theology, and my unique skills all lead me to emphasize different things  For someone with a different background and skill set this might be like trying on another man’s armor  How can you leverage who you are to preach better?
Of course, I didn’t do this from scratch; I was given a great model in seminary and have observed some great preachers thanks to modern technology  The key for me is molding this process to fit my unique mix of strengths and weaknesses, and that’s sure to be a never-ending project 
Annual Meeting in Review: ETS 2015
November 22, 2015 Josh Vajda	2 Comments
Last week I made my usual pilgrimage to the place where all the evangelical seminary geeks converge: the Annual Meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society  This year was the second time Atlanta has hosted since I began attending, and it was fun reliving early autumn just before the snow arrived back home 
Over the years I developed a strategy: make plans to attend nonstop papers, then throw out those plans when relational opportunities arise  This year the program was a bit light, but thankfully the people made up for what was lacking 
When reflecting on the meeting I was reminded of just how good last year’s meeting had been  This year had none of the same “aha!” moments, but I did enjoy many rich times of reflection after various papers 
As is my usual habit, I attended a number of friend’s papers (e g , Ford on Ignatius, Roeber on historiography, Svigel on the Didache)  But then I also stalked a few of the theologians I’ve come to admire in recent years: Al Mohler, Carl Trueman, and Anthony Bradley  Of course the problem there is that once you begin following someone you have the ever-increasing experience of anticipating what they are going to say on a given subject  This is especially true of Mohler, whose two podcasts have been my intellectual lifeline this year in times when babies and house projects and service commitments have prevented deeper study 
Analytic Theology
What came as an outright disappointment was the afternoon I spent in the Analytic Theology section  For those of you who don’t know, “analytic theology” is a recent movement to apply the tools of analytic philosophy to the questions of theology  I’ve been thrilled about this from the moment I heard of it, but what I saw really didn’t reflect what I think the movement is capable of  The thinking seemed lackluster and the questions unhelpful  Crisp and especially Rae were there asking insightful questions, but I think being overly kind to the presenters  I suppose you can’t be too inhospitable if you want guests to come back next year 
Avoiding the Marriage-and-Family Theme
The theme this year was “Marriage and Family” but it’s clear the real interest was continued discussion of how to deal with LGBT-related doctrines  In the past year I’ve read numerous books, taught two classes, and delivered a regional paper on the subject  That was enough for me  Maybe there were some missed opportunities here, but I’m ok with that 
Reflection on 2015
One of the things I’ve been forced to do each year—and rightly so, I think—is to reevaluate my purpose and progress in the intellectual community  This occupied much of my reflection in private, some with friends, and significant portions of the drive time from Michigan 
Here are a few conclusions I reached:
Even though I can’t justify a doctorate for my career, I am coming to the conviction that I can justify one for ministry  It may even be something I must do 
Even though I have the tools for self-study, I can accomplish much more with a cohort of like-minded individuals  I need to find a group of theologians I can run with or I will fall behind 
Even though I feel as though I’ve hardly studied this past year, (I recall reading only two theology books!), I’m reminded that I’ve still accomplished quite a bit with my LGBT studies, weekly Sunday School prep, church doctrinal formulations, and ministry strategizing  It’s different work, but I haven’t been as lazy as I feared 
Even though I have been working to be useful to our local church congregation and open to correction about my academic bent, the fact remains that right beliefs are a crucial part of our walk with Christ  Theology matters 
I used to journal incessantly, but have cut back quite a bit this year to focus on getting stuff done  All that to say the time was ripe for some reflection 
Lately I’ve referred to my calling as a “ministry of ideas ” As I chart a course for 2016, the question of what that ministry looks like looms large  The plans are still up in the air, but my time in Atlanta this year has been enormously helpful in the process 
See you next year in good old San Antonio, TX!
Sanctify Us with the Truth
July 9, 2015 Josh Vajda	Leave a comment
I’ve been a big fan of the Bible all my life  As a child I was amazed by the miracles God did  As I got older it was His character that captivated me  These days I’m intrigued by His wisdom  I want to know how He thinks, what He’s planning, how to make sense of His creation  The Bible is at the center of my relationship with God, and it always has been 
But the Bible isn’t God, and the Bible isn’t the whole of my relationship with God  So why is it that I always come back here? I believe that God reveals Himself in Creation and in the Church; I believe I have His Holy Spirit  So why does my relationship with Him keep coming back to a book?
One passage that gives us some clues is John 13–17—known as the Upper Room Discourse  It’s Jesus’ last teaching time with His disciples before He goes to the cross  It’s a time of transition 
Up until now, having a personal relationship with God was as easy as ever  You just spend time with Jesus—the Jewish guy  You want to talk to God? Just go find Jesus  You want an answer from God? Ask Jesus a question  You need divine intervention? Call Jesus for help 
In fact, not only is Jesus God in the flesh as the second person of the Trinity, but we see that He also manifests the Father and is indwelt by the Spirit  This goes beyond the perfect unity of the Trinity: all three persons are present in unique ways 
But in the Upper Room, Jesus is about to leave  He won’t be there to answer questions, to heal the sick, to right the wrong  And if He’s gone, so is the manifestation of the Father, and so is the Holy Spirit within Him 
So what does a personal relationship with God look like when God leaves the building?
First and most importantly, God hasn’t really left  Even though God incarnate has ascended into heaven, He did not leave us alone  The Holy Spirit is God’s special presence in this age 
“And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Helper, to be with you forever, even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him  You know him, for he dwells with you and will be in you ” (John 14:16, 17 ESV)
The same Spirit that indwells Jesus will indwell His disciples, and if we skip ahead to Acts, we can see that this Spirit of Truth indwells all believers  He is described as a Helper—which should come as no surprise from the God who just washed His disciples’ feet  And at least one aspect of His ministry is to point back to Christ 
“But when the Helper comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth, who proceeds from the Father, he will bear witness about me ” (John 15:26 ESV)
But it’s not as though the Spirit is a consolation prize  Even though His ministry is all about Christ, Jesus seems to say the Spirit’s ministry will be better than His!—at least for the next phase of God’s plan 
“Nevertheless, I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Helper will not come to you  But if I go, I will send him to you  And when he comes, he will convict the world concerning sin and righteousness and judgment: concerning sin, because they do not believe in me; concerning righteousness, because I go to the Father, and you will see me no longer; concerning judgment, because the ruler of this world is judged  I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now  When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth, for he will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears he will speak, and he will declare to you the things that are to come  He will glorify me, for he will take what is mine and declare it to you  All that the Father has is mine; therefore I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you ” (John 16:7–15 ESV)
There’s a lot to unpack here, but first I just want you to notice: when we lost the Savior, we gained the Helper, and He’s exactly what we needed next  Even though Jesus fully paid for our sins, we need a Helper to teach us the perfect obedience that Jesus modeled, to realize the change that Jesus purchased for us 
Now we get a fuller picture of what the Spirit of Truth has come to do  To the unbelieving world, He is a source of conviction, confronting sinners with the reality of who Jesus really was and what He did  To believers, He is a source of wisdom and knowledge 
This is a ministry of words and truth  We usually call Him the Holy Spirit, which rightly emphasizes His character and the work that He does in our hearts, but He is also called the Spirit of Truth  He draws us back to the words Jesus spoke, which bear the Father’s authority 
The Sanctifying Word
These days we’ve become cautious about putting our trust in words or staking claim to truth  We’re allowed to have our own truth, and we’re expected to have our own interpretations  But to go beyond this is to invite conflict 
Some of us have also grown weary of knowledge because we’ve seen people devote themselves to a dead orthodoxy that devours truth and then does nothing with it  So we associate the Christian walk with a ministry of love and compassion and holiness—which it is—and try not to get too distracted by the rest 
But it’s clear that Jesus spent a good deal of time ministering in words and teaching truth, and that the Holy Spirit is also committed to a ministry of words and truth 
“Whoever does not love me does not keep my words  And the word that you hear is not mine but the Father’s who sent me  These things I have spoken to you while I am still with you  But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you ” (John 14:24–26 ESV)
When Jesus prays, He even emphasizes this before the Father:
“Now they know that everything that you have given me is from you  For I have given them the words that you gave me, and they have received them and have come to know in truth that I came from you; and they have believed that you sent me ” (John 17:7, 8 ESV)
It’s a precious thing to have the words of God  They came from the Father, through the Son, and by the Spirit  These words have been compiled in Scripture—the Bible—and it’s not God’s leftovers  At the heart of the Trinity’s ministry is a message  When we put our faith in Christ, we confess and believe specific realities 
“I have given them your word, and the world has hated them because they are not of the world, just as I am not of the world ” (John 17:14 ESV)
But this word is not some passive collection of propositions to be absorbed  Just as the Holy Spirit is also the Spirit of Truth, so the true words and message of Scripture are given to make us holy 
“Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth  As you sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world  And for their sake I consecrate myself, that they also may be sanctified in truth ” (John 17:17–19 ESV)
This truth has a purpose  God’s message—the words of the Father—they are to make us holy  They are to wash us and set us apart  We are to be purified by this message, and at the heart of these instructions is love 
“If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love  These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full  This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you ” (John 15:10–12 ESV)
God has not left us alone  We have the Holy Spirit of Truth, and we also have the words of the Father 
I think this must be what Jesus alluded to in John 4, when He told the Samaritan woman at the well about those who would worship in spirit and in truth  Jesus clearly leaves us here with His Spirit and His truth  These are the twin lights guiding us on our pilgrimage  These are the two ways God is present with us today  Even though He is not with us physically, He is with us personally, spiritually, and verbally 
Truth is good for its own sake, and sanctification is, too  But we must not forget that our relationship with God as Spirit and through the Word draws those two things together  We pursue truth in order to be sanctified  We are sanctified by the truth 
When we talk about how we relate to God, our first thought is often the Cross, and that’s not wrong  Without Jesus’ work on the Cross we could have no fellowship with God  But even though it is what made a relationship with God possible, our relationship with Him goes much deeper  God is specially present in the world today by His Holy Spirit, Who indwells each and every believer  And the words of the Father have come by the Son and the Spirit to us in the form of the Bible  It is the Holy Spirit of Truth together with the Holy Words of God that mark God’s presence in our lives  They are what guide us and sanctify us 
This is why we can’t get away from Scripture  This is why our relationship with God depends so much on our relationship with this book  Creation reveals God by what He has done, but it does not offer His words to us  The Church is united and empowered by the Spirit of God, but it cannot speak His words either  The Bible is how the Holy Spirit speaks to us; it is one of the means by which God has chosen to sanctify His people  Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God 
The Story of Death (2/15/15)
February 18, 2015 Josh Vajda	2 Comments
Intro: The Matter of Life and Death
Death as Punishment
Death and God
Chinks in Death’s Armor
For Now We Wait
Closing Thoughts: Ash Wednesday
Introduction: The Matter of Life and Death
A friend once told me that Christianity is a “culture of death ” This was of course a reversal of Pope John Paul II’s 1995 condemnation of the modern culture of death, which sees the weak as useless at best—a burden to be eliminated  He pointed to the crucifixion, the Old Testament sacrificial system, and the way we seem to look forward to death so that we can go to heaven 
In a strange sense my friend was right: Christianity has a lot to say about death, and sacrifice is central to our theology  Of course, in context Christianity is anything but a culture of death, but if we’re not careful we can definitely sound the way my friend described us  We sometimes get confused about the role death plays in God’s plan 
So today we examine what the Bible says about death and reconsider what role it plays in our lives 
It’s interesting: there’s a way in which you could read the Bible as a book about death  That’s obviously not all it talks about, but the “story arc” of death spans the entire book 
Let’s take a stroll, shall we?
The first mention of death is in the second chapter of the Bible: “in the day you eat of [the forbidden fruit] you will surely die” (Genesis 2:17)  This promise was the center of the debate between the woman and the serpent in Genesis 3, and they ate of the fruit  But they didn’t die  God was gracious not to put them to death physically, but there is a kind of spiritual death that took place then  Since the Fall, mankind has been unresponsive to God 
But make no mistake, physical death was coming  We know from Romans that death entered through Adam’s sin—it wasn’t part of the original created order  And as proof, we see in Adam’s genealogy the reign of death: each one dies  We read “and he died” over and over here  Romans 3:23 tells us “the wages of sin is death ” All sinned, so all die  Death had become a part of life 
But Genesis is just getting warmed up! Because next comes the Flood where—you guessed it—everybody dies  Then the Patriarchs die  Then the book ends with the death of Joseph  Who ends a book that way?!? This is not a happy ending 
But then there’s Exodus, where the Egyptians die, Leviticus where animals die, Numbers where unbelieving Israel dies, Joshua where the Canaanites die  Death is everywhere! It’s all over the Pentateuch 
Why would this be? Because death is the punishment for sin  All crimes against God are capital offenses  That doesn’t mean He immediately smites everyone the moment they sin—but technically speaking, He could  That would be just  And if it doesn’t feel just then maybe we don’t understand sin as well as we thought we did 
In Ezekiel, God tells us He gets no pleasure from the death of the wicked  Does this surprise you? He would much rather see the wicked turn from their ways—to repent and live  But those who will not get what they deserve 
Sometimes if we’re not careful this is a way that we distort God’s character, as though God somehow hungers for death and blood  God isn’t pleased by animal sacrifice, but He requires some recompense for sin  God didn’t send the Flood on a whim but because evil on the earth had become unbearable  If we take death out of the context of grace and patience and kindness, we get a very wrong view of God 
But because death is part of life in a fallen world, we sometimes get confused about our relationship with death on the one hand and God’s sovereignty on the other  The author of Ecclesiastes notes that people are just as dead as animals in the end  The wise man for all of his wisdom still ends up just as dead as the fool  The nice thing about being dead is you don’t have to live in fear of death anymore! It’s a bleak way to look at things, but not wrong  What’s the point of life if the only thing we can be sure of is death?
If this is getting depressing, good! Sin is serious business and so is death  Christianity has a lot to say about death because it takes sin seriously 
But there’s a whole lot left to be said 
It turns out contrary to popular belief, death can be undone  Yes, you heard me: the end might not really be the end after all  Elijah and Elisha are both able to raise the dead  Jesus raises the dead  Jesus’ disciples raise the dead  Of course, these were all temporary  But it’s a start!
God promises us that it gets better than this  In Isaiah 25, He promises to swallow up death forever  How is this possible?!? The wages of sin is death  A holy God can’t just get rid of death 
He’d have to get rid of sin somehow 
This is where everything gets turned on its head  This is that part in the movie where you fly through the black hole and end up in a different dimension, or where Alice jumps down the rabbit hole  God swallows up death by letting death swallow Him up  Jesus, being fully God, lives a perfectly sinless life—a life not meriting death—and dies on our behalf, paying for all the sin of the world 
Let that sink in for a moment: God dies  But the death of God becomes the death of sin, and the death of sin becomes the death of death  And death’s final defeat is announced through the resurrection of God back from the dead  The God of life is alive! And He offers eternal life to all 
As Tim Keller likes to put it, Jesus died the death we deserved so that we could live the life He deserved  Because Jesus submitted to death on our behalf, our relationship with death gets really complicated  It’s still the enemy  It’s still the wages of sin  It’s still not good  But every good thing—salvation, resurrection, eternal life, peace with God—these all came from one great death: the Crucifixion 
So now all death is bad, but that one death brought us everything good  We praise the God of life, but we celebrate His death  God took a horrible, terrible, rotten, no-good thing and redeemed it 
I suppose that shouldn’t surprise us either 
We may sometimes look like we’re rejoicing in death itself, but really we rejoice in that one death that God used to bring eternal life  Our problem isn’t that we sing about death too much—we probably don’t sing about it enough! But we have to keep it in the context of the bigger story  We can’t make any sense of the Crucifixion apart from the Fall, the Resurrection, and Return of Christ 
This is the theme we see in the Book of Acts: God raised Jesus from the dead  It’s all about resurrection now! We baptize in the likeness of His death—and resurrection  We take the bread and cup to remember His death—all the while waiting for His return 
In Romans, death takes on a whole new meaning: since our sins were buried with Christ, we are now alive to God and dead to sin  Spiritual death is over now  Death has become just a metaphor for our relationship with sin 
But make no mistake, death didn’t just die spiritually  We might think that because we still see death all around us  Christians still die  But at the very end of the Bible we see that when Christ returns, death will finally be thrown into the lake of fire and be no more  All the dead will come to life—but this time never to die again 
I can’t help but think of John Donne’s Holy Sonnet X: Death Be Not Proud:
Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;
For those whom thou thinkst thou dost overthrow
From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be
Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow
And soonest our best men with thee do go
Rest of their bones and soul’s delivery 
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,
And poppies or charms can make us sleep as well
And better than thy stroke  Why swellst thou then?
And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die!
Today we sit knowing that we are no longer spiritually dead, and instead we are dead to sin  Christ has risen from the dead, but He has not yet returned  Physical death is still a reality  It’s still cruel  But it’s not the end 
I have another friend, a learned scholar who is emphatic about how much he hates death  He doesn’t want to die  Yet Paul almost seems to disagree  In Philippians he writes, “To live is Christ and to die is gain ” Is death gain? Is there something good about death—our deaths? Is my death-hating friend overreacting?
Insofar as my friend is only talking about death, he’s right  You can’t really hate death enough  And our hope is in the resurrection, when we get our new bodies and live with Christ forever  Paul’s not saying that death isn’t really so bad after all  He’s saying Christ means so much to him that he would even suffer death to be with Him  It’s not that death is lesser; it’s that Jesus is greater 
This is how we make sense of Paul’s taunt in 1 Corinthians 15, which talks at length about the resurrection: “Death is swallowed up in victory  O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?” Ultimately he’s talking about the end of death when we are raised, but there’s a sense in which death’s sting is tempered by the sweetness of life with Jesus 
When we lose a loved one, it’s hard  If he or she is a believer, we’re comforted by the fact that even though they died they enjoy the sweetness of Christ’s presence  Don’t let anyone take that away from you  Just don’t forget: that’s not the end of the story  It gets better!
They won’t stay dead 
Who is this God who can even bring good out of death?
Today is Ash Wednesday  Many Christians will receive ash on their foreheads and be reminded, “You are dust, and to dust you will return ” Not a message we particularly like to hear  We often think of ourselves as souls who just happen to be in bodies, that our parts are interchangeable—maybe even expendable  But these words are the words God Himself spoke to Adam after the Fall  You are dust  A sobering thought  Our bodies are a part of us, and our reflection is a daily reminder that we’re not as strong as we think we are 
That’s not the whole truth about us, but it’s a part we can’t afford to forget  Considering our frailty and our mortality shouldn’t lead to despair; it should bring us to our knees before our Savior  We confess how much we need Him, and how grateful we are that we have Him  Recognizing our insufficiency is just one way we deepen our appreciation for all we have in Christ  We humble ourselves not to make Him greater but because He is greater! He has brought us forgiveness and eternal life, sent us His Spirit  If we were left to our own devices, we would have no hope  But because of His love, rich in mercy, we have this gift from God 
Bonus: Christ is Risen by Matt Maher
We Didn’t Stay Perfect (2/1/15)
February 2, 2015 Josh Vajda	Leave a comment
The Unfolding of the Fall
Fractured Relationships
Total Depravity—but not Extreme Depravity
Comparing Theories [new! not discussed in class]
So What Do We Do Until Then?
Bonus Thoughts
We all know the story of the Fall from Genesis 3  Perfect woman with perfect husband in perfect garden meets talking snake  He tempts her to disobey God and eat the forbidden fruit, then she hands some to her husband who does the same  God comes and gives them a spanking and sends them out of the garden 
Ok, so the details might be a little off… maybe even a little forgettable  But the story is familiar and the consequences tragic  We live in those consequences  So what does this story have to tell us about the world today and our lives in it?
You can learn a lot about sin and humanity by really chewing on the details here  Consider:
The serpent (we’re later told it’s also Satan) begins with questioning what God has said 
The question overgeneralizes and invites a conversation 
The woman adds to God’s commandment 
The serpent challenges God and offers a desirable half-truth 
The woman (although perfect) is tempted  That temptation draws her to inspect the fruit 
Looking at the fruit, the woman focused on the positive side of the equation 
She risked her life trusting the serpent over God, because eating the fruit should have meant certain death 
The man ate without any signs of a struggle 
Their eyes were open  Before they knew only the good; now they knew good and evil 
Their first response to sin is to cover up, which indicates fear and probably shame 
Their response to God (their creator whom they knew personally!) was to hide  Apparently they either didn’t know or forgot that God is everywhere and knows everything 
God asks the man a question for effect 
The man blames his wife and even seems to accuse God 
The woman blames the serpent and even seems to deflect by saying she was tricked 
At this point God punishes the serpent, the man, and the woman by cursing all creation  Work will be hard, childbearing will be painful  But there is hope in the promise of One to come who will crush the serpent 
I love how the Good News glimmers even in that first dark moment 
It’s so tempting to read more into the story because there are so many more details we wish we had  The gaps in the story invite our imaginations to jump in, but we need to be careful not to put words in God’s mouth 
One theme we see in the Fall is one broken relationship after another  We noted last week how we were created to need one another and how that’s a good thing  But after the Fall we see husband and wife blaming each other  Worse yet, we see them hiding from God  After creation is cursed there’s really nothing left: man’s relationships with God, with others, with creation, and even with himself are all broken  And so our need for each other grows even greater, but our incapacity to find what we need and be who we need to be for others makes meeting this need impossible 
But let’s be honest here: the biggest problem is this broken relationship with God  He is their Creator and Sustainer  He knows them personally, guides them, and has given them all they need  What’s more, He’s perfectly good  This fall into sin was an act of rebellion against a God who had been nothing but loving and giving  Everything depends on Him 
Is it any wonder He warned them they would die?
Now the astute reader will note they didn’t drop dead  Does this mean the serpent was right? Not hardly! This broken relationship with God is sometimes thought of a “spiritual death,” a state of unresponsiveness to God  I’m generally fine with this idea—after all, they certainly became separated from God! What else could you call a state apart from the God of life? Death makes sense 
But we know that this is where physical death enters the picture  Mankind wasn’t supposed to die  YOU right now reading this: you were never supposed to die  Now we tend to say death is a part of life  It wasn’t supposed to be that way  Death was never a part of life  Death is a reality we have to live with, but it’s not good 
So I think spiritual death metaphorically happened, but physical death literally happened  And the only reason they walked out of that garden alive has to have been God’s grace and mercy 
Another observation we can make is that Adam and Eve weren’t immediately as bad as they could have been  This is sometimes what we think when we talk about “total depravity ” If you want a really bleak picture you have to turn ahead a few pages to the state of the world before the Flood  It took a long time to get there 
No, extreme depravity wasn’t the result of the Fall, but total depravity still is  Total depravity is the doctrine that says sin bent every part of man  Sin pollutes man’s reason, man’s emotions, man’s willpower, man’s desires, man’s imagination, man’s memories, man’s senses, man’s body, and even man’s conscience  Nothing is safe  Nothing is pure 
And this is intimately wrapped up in the image of God  Remember that man was made in God’s image, unique among all creation  But sin now pollutes that image  It’s still present—we still can’t help but “image” our Creator when we act rationally, make wise decisions, love others selflessly, and so on  Instead the image is defaced but not erased  What should normally reflect God’s character instead reflects a mixture of good and evil 
Comparing Theories
Now if we take a step back, we all recognize that we live in a broken world  Very few people would argue that everything is perfect, that sin, suffering, and death somehow don’t exist or aren’t really bad  We (generally) all agree that there’s a problem  But there’s little agreement about why it is the way it is 
People who don’t believe in a literal Adam and Even tanking the human race are generally stuck  For example, if you only believe in the natural world, evil is just a part of nature  Death is a part of life  Suffering is a biochemical response to destructive conditions  And if you’re just one organism out of millions competing for resources, all you can really say is that you don’t like these things  They are distasteful  Maybe you’re hard-wired to show empathy with others because of some evolutionary imperative, but objectively speaking what can you say?
Well, you can say lots I suppose, but you can’t be consistent without ending up a nihilist 
Other religions have the same problem: either evil belongs as some part of the bigger cosmic plan or it’s an illusion  Either way, it’s hard to take evil seriously  Either it belongs in some way, or it doesn’t exist at all  Either way it’s hard to justify our natural reactions to injustice, suffering, and death 
But let’s forget about consistency and get to work: what problems can we name and how do we fix them?
If the problem is society, the cure is social change 
If the problem is pride, the cure is humility 
If the problem is bad decisions, the cure is right decisions 
If the problem is lack of love, the cure is love 
If the problem is a broken relationship, the cure is forgiveness 
If the problem is rebellion, the cure is submission 
If the problem is demons, the cure is their destruction 
If the problem is illusion, the cure is truth 
If the problem is original sin, the cure is death of the old self 
If the problem is doubt, the cure is faith 
If the problem is in every part of us, the cure is a new creation 
If the problem is death, the cure is eternal life 
Of course this just scratches the surface  But what I want you to notice is that for all of these problems, Christianity offers the solution  And for all of these problems, the solution is the same: that one seed of woman that God promised, the One to come that would crush the serpent  His name is Jesus 
Some of these things were addressed in His first coming, when He died on the cross for our sins and rose to life to offer us eternal life  But the work isn’t done yet  He’s coming back to finish the work, to make all things new  Think about that  We’ll explain further another time 
As a wise poet named Tom once wrote, the waiting is the hardest part  If we as Christians are a new creation (we are), have eternal life (we do), are filled with the Holy Spirit (yup), and are no longer slaves to sin (seriously!), then why is the world still messed up? And more to the point, why are WE still messed up?
Frankly, we still suffer the effects of sin in all our faculties  Our wills have been freed from slavery, but they’re still polluted  We won’t be fully free from the effects of sin until Jesus comes back 
So we’re no longer slaves, but we’re still polluted and live in a polluted world  We have the Holy Spirit, but we still choose to disobey  In theory you should be able to live a perfect life after you’re saved, but because we’ve already been marked by sin in our lives and live in an imperfect world, we will never be perfect under our own power 
What do we do then? Give up? Of course not! We beat our bodies into submission  We learn right and wrong from Scripture, and we challenge our motives day to day 
But if we want to go the extra mile, we can’t do it alone 
There will be times you trick yourself into thinking you’re doing what’s right  There will be times you misread Scripture and misunderstand what God expects  And to guard against those times you need to surround yourself with fellow believers  You need people who know you, who know the Word, and who are committed to following Jesus with you  They can provide that outside check to make sure sin isn’t getting the best of you 
Because let’s face it: some days it’s hard to tell the difference between the Holy Spirit’s promptings and our own desires  Nothing can do better to counter that than other Spirit-filled people who bring a different perspective 
We ended up talking a lot about sanctification today, but that’s because it’s how we cope with the effects of the Fall in our lives  I don’t ever want to teach about sin and suffering and death without also pointing to the hope we have in Christ! The sin we as Christians struggle with is our bad choices day to day  If you’re saved, all you can do is persevere in what’s right and help others to do the same  We’ll say more about suffering and death another time 
My challenge to you is this: who do you have in your life who can give you that outside angle to your struggles and decisions? Where can you go to make sure you’re on the right path? If you’re not sure, start looking!
We need each other more than ever 
Isn’t it interesting how hard it is to remember the details of a story we’ve heard dozens of times? Our memories aren’t perfect  It sure helps having other people to lean on…
Historically speaking, the discussion of the effects of the Fall gets really fun with Augustine and Pelagius  In a nutshell, Augustine argued that we are always in need of God’s grace, but Pelagius believed we didn’t suffer from original sin and could become perfect if we try hard enough 
Regarding different relationships with sin, Augustine put it this way: God is not able to sin, Adam was created able not to sin, the Fall left us not able not to sin, and those in Christ are back where created Adam was: able not to sin 
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Context 2: South Dakota v  Wayfair, Inc  - Harvard Law Review
Fourth Circuit Invalidates Maryland Statute Regulating Price Gouging in the Sale of Generic Drugs 
South Dakota Supreme Court Holds Unconstitutional State Law Requiring Internet Retailers Without In-State Physical Presence to Remit Sales Tax 
Judicial junk, the Court has long thought, is easier to scrap when the erroneous precedent cannot be fixed by Congress, as in constitutional cases 1× 1  See Burnet v  Coronado Oil & Gas Co , 285 U S  393, 405–10 (1932) (Brandeis, J , dissenting); Lee Epstein, William M  Landes & Adam Liptak, The Decision to Depart (or Not) from Constitutional Precedent: An Empirical Study of the Roberts Court, 90 N Y U  L  Rev  1115, 1116 (2015) (“[Justice Brandeis’s] dissenting opinion       now has the status of black letter law ”)  On the flip side, whenever a bad precedent can be corrected by Congress, stare decisis applies with “special force ”2× 2  See Patterson v  McLean Credit Union, 491 U S  164, 172–73 (1989)  The Court, following Justice Brandeis, usually articulates the rule as distinguishing between “constitutional” and “statutory” precedents  See, e g , id  But the distinction is occasionally said to be between “constitutional” and “nonconstitutional cases ” See, e g , Glidden Co  v  Zdanok, 370 U S  530, 543 (1962) (plurality opinion)  Nomenclature aside, the Court has — until now — adhered to Justice Brandeis’s key insight that the important factor is whether or not the mistake may be legislatively corrected  Last Term, in South Dakota v  Wayfair, Inc ,3× 3  138 S  Ct  2080 (2018)  the Court tinkered with this thinking in overruling an outdated dormant commerce clause precedent  Dormant commerce clause decisions technically produce constitutional holdings, but Congress may override them at will 4× 4  See Prudential Ins  Co  v  Benjamin, 328 U S  408, 421–27 (1946)  Under the usual logic of stare decisis, it should take special force to dislodge such precedents  But Wayfair applied the weakened stare decisis of constitutional cases, asserting that the Court must “address a false constitutional premise         whether or not Congress can or will act ”5× 5  Wayfair, 138 S  Ct  at 2096–97 
Emerging from Wayfair is an odd and ominous development in stare decisis doctrine  Odd, because it turns on a formal classification instead of on Congress’s practical ability to fix the problem  Ominous, because the Court’s logic leads far past the dormant commerce clause  Wayfair grants only feeble stare decisis to precedents that set a “constitutional default rule,”6× 6  Id  at 2096 (“While       Congress has the authority to change the physical presence rule, Congress cannot change the constitutional default rule ”)  meaning constitutional decisions that allow for legislative adjustment or override  This new stare decisis analysis makes other precedents setting constitutional default rules more vulnerable — including, perhaps, mainstays of criminal procedure like Miranda v  Arizona7× 7  384 U S  436 (1966)  and Mapp v  Ohio 8× 8  367 U S  643 (1961) 
Since its 1967 decision in National Bellas Hess, Inc  v  Department of Revenue,9× 9  386 U S  753 (1967)  the Court has held that, under the “dormant” or “negative” implication of the Commerce Clause,10× 10  The dormant or negative commerce clause is a judicial derivation from the Commerce Clause “prohibiting States from discriminating against or imposing excessive burdens on interstate commerce without congressional approval,” which “strikes at one of the chief evils that led to the adoption of the Constitution, namely, state tariffs and other laws that burdened interstate commerce ” Comptroller of the Treasury of Md  v  Wynne, 135 S  Ct  1787, 1794 (2015)  states may not compel remote sellers with no physical presence in the state to collect and remit sales taxes 11× 11  See Bellas Hess, 386 U S  at 759–60  In Quill Corp  v  North Dakota,12× 12  504 U S  298 (1992)  the Court refused to overrule the “bright-line, physical-presence requirement” of Bellas Hess, leaning heavily on stare decisis 13× 13  Id  at 317–18  Three Justices joined a concurrence explaining that their decision rested solely “on the basis of stare decisis ” Id  at 320 (Scalia, J , concurring in part and concurring in the judgment)  So the physical presence test remained the law of the land while the internet conquered the earth  Justice Kennedy had joined the Quill majority and Justice Scalia’s concurring opinion emphasizing stare decisis, but by 2015 he had second thoughts  Writing separately in Direct Marketing Ass’n v  Brohl,14× 14  135 S  Ct  1124 (2015)  Justice Kennedy acknowledged that “[t]he Internet has caused far-reaching systemic and structural changes in the economy” and therefore “Quill now harms States to a degree far greater than could have been anticipated earlier ”15× 15  Id  at 1135 (Kennedy, J , concurring)  He concluded with the wish that “[t]he legal system should find an appropriate case for this Court to reexamine Quill and Bellas Hess ”16× 16  Id 
Seldom has a concurring opinion signed by a lone Justice prompted a state to officially declare an emergency  Yet in 2016, in response to Justice Kennedy’s overture, the South Dakota legislature passed a law, S B  106, “to provide for the collection of sales taxes from certain remote sellers       and to declare an emergency ”17× 17  2016 S D  Sess  Laws ch  70 pmbl  217 (codified at S D  Codified Laws § 10-64 (2017))  It required every remote seller to collect and remit sales tax if the seller’s business in South Dakota comprised either a “gross revenue” greater than $100,000 or at least 200 “separate transactions” within one calendar year 18× 18  Id  § 1  Significantly, the law did not apply retroactively 19× 19  Id  § 5  The “emergency” declaration was necessary to give the law immediate effect, for the purpose of “permitting the most expeditious possible review of the constitutionality of this law” by the U S  Supreme Court 20× 20  Id  § 8(8)  As Justice Alito put it, the “South Dakota law [was] obviously a test case ”21× 21  Transcript of Oral Argument at 27, Wayfair, 138 S  Ct  2080 (No  17-494), https://www supremecourt gov/oral_arguments/argument_transcripts/2017/17-494_7lho pdf [https://perma cc/8HYH-VU8N] 
Expeditiously, a group of remote sellers challenged the law  After being sued by South Dakota for refusing to register for the newly required sales tax license, Wayfair, Inc , Overstock com, Inc , and Newegg, Inc  moved for summary judgment in South Dakota circuit court on the grounds that S B  106 was unconstitutional under Quill and Bellas Hess — a point South Dakota conceded, indicating that it was seeking review by the U S  Supreme Court to overturn Quill 22× 22  State v  Wayfair Inc , 2017 SD 56, ¶¶ 9–11, 901 N W 2d 754, 759–60  Accordingly, the South Dakota circuit court granted the motion for summary judgment and South Dakota appealed to the state’s highest court 23× 23  Id  ¶ 12, 901 N W 2d at 760  The South Dakota Supreme Court unanimously affirmed, recognizing that South Dakota’s “arguments on the merits” may be “persuasive” but “Quill remains the controlling precedent ”24× 24  Id  ¶ 18, 901 N W 2d at 761  See generally Recent Case, State v  Wayfair Inc , 2017 SD 56, 901 N W 2d 754 (S D  2017), 131 Harv  L  Rev  2089 (2018) 
The U S  Supreme Court vacated and remanded 25× 25  Wayfair, 138 S  Ct  at 2100  Writing for the Court one last time, Justice Kennedy26× 26  Justices Thomas, Ginsburg, Alito, and Gorsuch joined Justice Kennedy’s opinion  pilloried Quill’s physical presence rule as “arbitrary, formalistic,” “anachronistic,” and “unfair and unjust” to both states and brick-and-mortar retailers 27× 27  Wayfair, 138 S  Ct  at 2092, 2095  After all, the rationale of Quill was that remote sellers lacked a sufficiently “substantial nexus” with the state to justify imposing a duty of tax collection 28× 28  Quill Corp  v  North Dakota, 504 U S  298, 311 (1992) (quoting Complete Auto Transit, Inc  v  Brady, 430 U S  274, 279 (1977))  This was wrong even in the mail-order catalog days of 1967 and 1992, but “the Internet revolution has made [Quill’s] earlier error all the more egregious and harmful ”29× 29  Wayfair, 138 S  Ct  at 2097; see also id  at 2092  The rule deprived the states of billions of dollars, since they could not force remote sellers to collect the tax and consumers hardly ever paid it on their own 30× 30  Id  at 2088 (“[C]onsumer compliance rates are notoriously low ”)  Quill “serve[d] as a judicially created tax shelter” for remote retailers who do a great deal of business online 31× 31  Id  at 2094 
Satisfied that Bellas Hess and Quill were wrongly decided, the Court then jumped the hurdle of stare decisis  The Quill Court had feared upsetting reliance interests 32× 32  Quill, 504 U S  at 317 (“Bellas Hess       has engendered substantial reliance and has become part of the basic framework of a sizable industry ”)  Wayfair shrugged off this concern, noting that “stare decisis accommodates only ‘legitimate reliance interest[s]’”; by contrast, reliance on the physical presence rule was largely due to consumers evading their use-tax obligations 33× 33  Wayfair, 138 S  Ct  at 2098 (alteration in original) (quoting United States v  Ross, 456 U S  798, 824 (1982))  Quill had also appealed to Congress’s ultimate authority over interstate commerce as a reason to abide by a precedent, even if wrongly decided 34× 34  See Quill, 504 U S  at 318–19; id  at 320 (Scalia, J , concurring in part and concurring in the judgment) (“Congress       can change the rule of Bellas Hess by simply saying so ”)  But Wayfair denied that Congress’s ability to change the law was a proper consideration:
While it can be conceded that Congress has the authority to change the physical presence rule, Congress cannot change the constitutional default rule  It is inconsistent with the Court’s proper role to ask Congress to address a false constitutional premise of this Court’s own creation  Courts have acted as the front line of review in this limited sphere; and hence it is important that their principles be accurate and logical, whether or not Congress can or will act in response 35× 35  Wayfair, 138 S  Ct  at 2096–97 
Having dispensed with the physical presence rule, the Court remanded the case to the South Dakota courts to determine in the first instance “whether some other principle in the Court’s Commerce Clause doctrine might invalidate the Act ”36× 36  Id  at 2099  But the Court listed “several features [of South Dakota law] that appear[ed] designed to prevent discrimination against or undue burdens upon interstate commerce ” Id 
Justices Thomas and Gorsuch each filed concurring opinions  Justice Thomas wistfully likened himself to Justice White — who voted for Bellas Hess but against Quill a quarter-century later — and confessed that he “should have joined [Justice White’s dissenting] opinion ”37× 37  Id  at 2100 (Thomas, J , concurring)  Justice Thomas added that the “Court’s entire negative Commerce Clause jurisprudence” is wrong and should be abandoned 38× 38  Id  Justice Gorsuch also wrote separately to express skepticism of the Court’s dormant commerce clause jurisprudence, raising “questions for another day” of whether the doctrine “can be squared with the text of the Commerce Clause, justified by stare decisis, or defended as misbranded products of federalism or antidiscrimination imperatives flowing from Article IV’s Privileges and Immunities Clause ”39× 39  Id  at 2100–01 (Gorsuch, J , concurring) 
Chief Justice Roberts dissented 40× 40  Justices Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan joined the Chief Justice’s dissent  Surprisingly, the dissenting Justices “agree[d] that Bellas Hess was wrongly decided, for many of the reasons given by the Court ”41× 41  Wayfair, 138 S  Ct  at 2101 (Roberts, C J , dissenting)  The dispute between the majority and the dissent turned entirely on the principles and application of stare decisis  Chief Justice Roberts argued that whether or how to reverse Quill should be left to Congress, which “has the flexibility to address these questions in a wide variety of ways” and “can focus directly on current policy concerns rather than past legal mistakes ”42× 42  Id  at 2104  He also pointed to the “baffling” burdens of compliance with the idiosyncratic tax codes of “[o]ver 10,000 jurisdictions,” particularly for small businesses, and doubted that new “software” — the majority’s proposed solution to this mess43× 43  Id  at 2098 (majority opinion) (“Eventually, software that is available at a reasonable cost may make it easier for small businesses to cope with these problems ”)  — would soon solve the problem 44× 44  Id  at 2103–04 (Roberts, C J , dissenting)  In Bellas Hess, the Court reasoned that the dormant commerce clause protects interstate business from being “entangle[d]       in a virtual welter of complicated obligations to local jurisdictions ” Nat’l Bellas Hess, Inc  v  Dep’t of Revenue, 386 U S  753, 759–60 (1967)  The dissent replied that the Court “vastly underestimate[d] the skill of contemporary man and his machines ” Id  at 766 (Fortas, J , dissenting)  The dispute in Wayfair over whether software is up to the task effectively reprised the old debate from Bellas Hess, only this time couched as part of the stare decisis inquiry’s concern for reliance interests rather than as a matter of dormant commerce clause doctrine  While Wayfair acknowledged that “[c]omplex state tax systems could have the effect of discriminating against interstate commerce,” 138 S  Ct  at 2099, the Court remarked that “[t]he physical presence rule is a poor proxy” for an inquiry into any actual burdens imposed on interstate commerce, id  at 2093 
Chief Justice Roberts emphasized that a “heightened form of stare decisis”45× 45  Wayfair, 138 S  Ct  at 2102 (Roberts, C J , dissenting)  applies when “Congress       can, if it wishes, override this Court’s decisions with contrary legislation ”46× 46  Id  at 2101 (first citing Michigan v  Bay Mills Indian Cmty , 134 S  Ct  2024, 2036 (2014) (tribal sovereign immunity); then citing Kimble v  Marvel Entm’t, LLC, 135 S  Ct  2401, 2409 (2015) (statutory interpretation); and then citing Halliburton Co  v  Erica P  John Fund, Inc , 134 S  Ct  2398, 2411 (2014) (judicially created doctrine implementing a judicially created cause of action))  In Quill, the Chief Justice noted, the Court had taken to heart that “Congress may be better qualified” and “has the ultimate power to resolve” the question47× 47  Id  at 2102 (quoting Quill Corp  v  North Dakota, 504 U S  279, 318 (1992))  while Justice Scalia had “recogniz[ed] that stare decisis has ‘special force’ in the dormant Commerce Clause context due to Congress’s ‘final say over regulation of interstate commerce ’”48× 48  Id  (quoting Quill, 504 U S  at 320 (Scalia, J , concurring in part and concurring in the judgment))  Moreover, “[i]f stare decisis applied with special force in Quill, it should be an even greater impediment” afterward since Quill effectively “tossed [the ball] into Congress’s court ”49× 49  Id  (alteration in original) (quoting Kimble, 135 S  Ct  at 2409); cf  Bay Mills, 134 S  Ct  at 2039 n 12 (“When we inform Congress that it has primary responsibility over a sphere of law, and invite Congress to consider a specific issue within that sphere, we cannot deem irrelevant how Congress responds ”)  Because the Court invited Congress to act and then “suddenly chang[ed] the ground rules, the Court may have waylaid Congress’s consideration of the issue ”50× 50  Wayfair, 138 S  Ct  at 2102–03 (Roberts, C J , dissenting) 
In Wayfair, the Court applied the flimsier form of stare decisis to a precedent that could have been overruled by Congress  It did so in the context of a dormant commerce clause case, but Wayfair’s logic extends to all constitutional default rules — that is, constitutional decisions that Congress remains free to change  Not only does Wayfair deviate from the Court’s decades-old stare decisis analysis, it also imperils other precedents that set constitutional default rules 
The Court’s reasoning in Wayfair departs from its prior stare decisis analysis  In 1932, Justice Brandeis posited that stare decisis must bend “in cases involving the Federal Constitution, where correction through legislative action is practically impossible ”51× 51  Burnet v  Coronado Oil & Gas Co , 285 U
Context 3: Paper Info

Title: Age and market capitalization drive large price variations of cryptocurrencies
Publish Date: 23 Feb 2023
Author List: 

Figure

Figure 3  Illustration of different effects of age and market capitalization on power-law exponents of cryptocurrencies (a) Posterior probability distributions of the linear coefficients associated with the effects of age [p(A)] and (b) the effects of market capitalization [p(C)] on power-law exponents related to large positive returns Panels (c) and (d) show the analogous distributions for the association with power-law exponents related to large negative returns In all panels, the different curves show the distributions for each of the top 20 cryptoassets by market capitalization Cryptocurrencies significantly affected by age or market capitalization are highlighted in boldface, and the numbers between brackets show their positions in the market capitalization rank 
Figure S5 There is more probability mass in the positive tail than in the negative tail of price returns (a) Probability distributions of the lower cut-offs (r min ) obtained by applying the Clauset-Shalizi-Newman method to positive (blue) and negative (red) returns The vertical dashed lines indicate the median values of r min for positive and negative returns (b) Probability distributions of 90th percentiles (r 90 ) estimated from the power-law models adjusted to positive (blue) and negative (red) returns The vertical dashed lines indicate the median values of r 90 for positive and negative returns (c) Probability distributions of the fraction of weeks that r 90 estimated from positive returns (r + 90 ) is larger than r 90 estimated from negative returns (r − 90 ) This fraction is calculated only for weeks in which the power-law hypothesis is not rejected for both tails The percentage of cryptoassets for which r + 90 > r − 90 is shown in the panels The first column of panels depicts the results when considering data from all cryptocurrencies, while the second and third columns present the results for the top 2000 and top 200 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization, respectively 
Figure S7 Robustness of the results of Fig  2(b)-(d) against considering only cryptocurrencies with fraction of rejection f r < 0 1 Panels (a) and (b) show the same distributions of Fig  S4 but after filtering out all time series of cryptocurrencies with fraction of rejections f r ≥ 0 1 As in the case related to sampling issues, we observe that these distributions barely change when considering only cryptocurrencies with f r < 0 1 Indeed, the distributions in this figure are not significantly distinguishable from their counterparts in Fig  S4 (two-sample Kolmogorov-Smirnov test, p > 0 05) 

abstract

Cryptocurrencies are considered the latest innovation in finance with considerable impact across social, technological, and economic dimensions  This new class of financial assets has also motivated a myriad of scientific investigations focused on understanding their statistical properties, such as the distribution of price returns 
However, research so far has only considered Bitcoin or at most a few cryptocurrencies, whilst ignoring that price returns might depend on cryptocurrency age or be influenced by market capitalization  Here, we therefore present a comprehensive investigation of large price variations for more than seven thousand digital currencies and explore whether price returns change with the coming-of-age and growth of the cryptocurrency market 
We find that tail distributions of price returns follow power-law functions over the entire history of the considered cryptocurrency portfolio, with typical exponents implying the absence of characteristic scales for price variations in about half of them  Moreover, these tail distributions are asymmetric as positive returns more often display smaller exponents, indicating that large positive price variations are more likely than negative ones 
Our results further reveal that changes in the tail exponents are very often simultaneously related to cryptocurrency age and market capitalization or only to age, with only a minority of cryptoassets being affected just by market capitalization or neither of the two quantities  Lastly, we find that the trends in power-law exponents usually point to mixed directions, and that large price variations are likely to become less frequent only in about 28% of the cryptocurrencies as they age and grow in market capitalization 
Since the creation of Bitcoin in 2008 , various different cryptoassets have been developed and are now considered to be at the cutting edge of innovation in finance   These digital financial assets are vastly diverse in design characteristics and intended purposes, ranging from peer-to-peer networks with underlying cash-like digital currencies (e g 
Bitcoin) to general-purpose blockchains transacting in commodity-like digital assets (e g  Ethereum), and even to cryptoassets that intend to replicate the price of conventional assets such as the US dollar or gold (e g  Tether and Tether Gold)   With more than nine thousand cryptoassets as of 2022 , the total market value of cryptocurrencies has grown massively to a staggering $2 trillion peak in 2021  
Despite long-standing debates over the intrinsic value and legality of cryptoassets , or perhaps even precisely due to such controversies, it is undeniable that cryptocurrencies are increasingly attracting the attention of academics, investors, and central banks, around the world   Moreover, these digital assets have been at the forefront of sizable financial gains and losses in recent years , they have been recognized as the main drivers of the brand-new phenomena of cryptoart and NFTs , but also as facilitators of illegal activities, such as money laundering and dark trade  
Financial research dedicated Our results are based on daily price time series of 7111 cryptocurrencies that comprise a significant part of all currently available cryptoassets (see Methods for details)  From these price series, we have estimated their logarithmic returns 2/16 Log-return, r )  The black horizontal arrow represents a given position of the expanding time window (at t = 2004 days) used to sample the return series over the entire history of Bitcoin 
This time window expands in weekly steps (seven time series observations), and for each position, we separate the positive (blue) from the negative (red) price returns  The gray line illustrates observations that will be included in future positions of the expanding time window (t > 2004)  (b) Survival functions or the complementary cumulative distributions of positive (blue) and negative (red) price returns within the expanding time window for t = 2004 days and above the lower bound of the power-law regime estimated from the Clauset-Shalizi-Newman method  
The dashed lines show the adjusted power-law functions, p(r) ∼ r −α , with α = 4 5 for positive returns and α = 3 0 for negative returns  (c) Time series of the power-law exponents α t for the positive (blue) and negative (red) return distributions obtained by expanding the time window from the hundredth observation (t = 100) to the latest available price return of Bitcoin 
The circular markers represent the values for the window position at t = 2004 days and the dashed lines indicate the median of the power-law exponents ( α+ = 4 50 for positive returns and α− = 2 99 for negative returns)  (d) Time series of the p-values related to the power-law hypothesis of positive (blue) and negative (red) price returns for every position of the expanding time window 
The dashed line indicates the threshold (p = 0 1) above which the power-law hypothesis cannot be rejected  For Bitcoin, the power-law hypothesis is never rejected for positive returns (fraction of rejection f r = 0) and rejected in only 4% of the expanding time window positions (fraction of rejection f r = 0 04) 
where x t represents the price of a given cryptocurrency at day t  All return time series in our analysis have at least 200 observations (see Supplementary Figure for the length distribution)  Figure (a) illustrates Bitcoin's series of daily returns  To investigate whether and how returns have changed over the aging and growing processes of all cryptocurrencies, we sample all time series of log-returns using a time window that expands in weekly steps (seven time series observations), starting from the hundredth observation to the latest return observation 
In each step, we separate the positive from the negative return values and estimate their power-law behavior using the Clauset-Shalizi-Newman method   Figure (a) further illustrates this procedure, where the vertical dashed line represents a given position of the time window (t = 2004 days), the blue and red lines indicate positive and negative returns, respectively, and the gray lines show the return observations that will be included in the expanding time window in future steps 
Moreover, Fig  (b) shows the corresponding survival functions (or complementary cumulative distributions) for the positive (blue) and negative (red) returns of Bitcoin within the time window highlighted in Fig  (a)  These survival functions correspond to return values above the lower bound of the power-law regime (r min ) and dashed lines in Fig  (b) show the power-law functions adjusted to data, that is,
with α = 4 5 for the positive returns and α = 3 0 for the negative returns in this particular position of the time window (t = 2004 days)  We have further verified the goodness of the power-law fits using the approach proposed by Clauset et al  (see also Preis et al  )  As detailed in the Methods section, this approach consists in generating several synthetic samples under the power-law hypothesis, adjusting these simulated samples, and estimating the fraction of times the Kolmogorov-Smirnov distance between the adjusted power-law and the synthetic samples is larger than the value calculated from the empirical data 
This fraction defines a p-value and allows us to reject or not the power-law hypothesis of the return distributions under a given confidence level  Following Refs  we consider the more conservative 90% confidence level (instead of the more lenient and commonly used 95% confidence level), rejecting the power-law hypothesis when p-value ≤ 0 1 
For the particular examples in Fig  (b), the p-values are respectively 1 00 and 0 17 for the positive and negative returns, and thus we cannot reject the power-law hypotheses  After sampling the entire price return series, we obtain time series for the power-law exponents (α t ) associated with positive and negative returns as well as the corresponding p-values time series for each step t of the expanding time window 
These time series allow us to reconstruct the aging process of the return distributions over the entire history of each cryptoasset and probe possible time-dependent patterns  Figures ) and 1(d) show the power-law exponents and p-values time series for the case of Bitcoin  The power-law hypothesis is never rejected for positive returns and rarely rejected for negative returns (about 4% of times) 
Moreover, the power-law exponents exhibit large fluctuations at the beginning of the time series and become more stable as Bitcoin matures as a financial asset (a similar tendency as reported by Begušić et al  )  The time evolution of these exponents further shows that the asymmetry between positive and negative returns observed in Fig  ) is not an incidental feature of a particular moment in Bitcoin's history 
Indeed, the power-law exponent for positive returns is almost always larger than the exponent for negative returns, implying that large negative price returns have been more likely to occur than their positive counterparts over nearly the entire history of Bitcoin covered by our data  However, while the difference between positive and negative exponents has approached a constant value, both exponents exhibit an increasing trend, indicating that large price variations are becoming less frequent with the coming-of-age of Bitcoin 
The previous analysis motivates us to ask whether the entire cryptocurrency market behaves similarly to Bitcoin and what other common patterns digital currencies tend to follow  To start answering this question, we have considered the p-values series of all cryptocurrencies to verify if the power-law hypothesis holds in general 
Figure (a) shows the percentage of cryptoassets rejecting the power-law hypothesis in at most a given fraction of the weekly positions of the expanding time window ( f r )  Remarkably, the hypothesis that large price movements (positive or negative) follow a power-law distribution is never rejected over the entire history of about 70% of all digital currencies in our dataset 
This analysis also shows that only ≈2% of cryptocurrencies reject the power-law hypothesis in more than half of the positions of the expanding time window ( f r ≥ 0 5)  For instance, considering a 10% threshold as a criterion ( f r ≤ 0 1), we find that about 85% of cryptocurrencies have return distributions adequately modeled by power laws 
Increasing this threshold to a more lenient 20% threshold ( f r ≤ 0 2), we find large price movements to be power-law distributed for about 91% of cryptocurrencies



ground_truth: The three phases are exegetical, theological, and homiletical.

prompt_front: Now, answer the following question based on the text below, only give me the answer and do not output any other words.

Question: What did Justice Kennedy argue about Quill in Direct Marketing Ass'n v. Brohl?

Read the following text and answer briefly.

Context 2: S  393, 406–07 (1932) (Brandeis, J , dissenting)  The Court has long since adopted his argument,52× 52  See, e g , Smith v  Allwright, 321 U S  649, 665 (1944)  as well as its corollary — that stare decisis commands “special force in the area of statutory interpretation” where “Congress remains free to alter what [the Court has] done ”53× 53  Patterson v  McLean Credit Union, 491 U S  164, 172–73 (1989)  For normative evaluations of heightened stare decisis for statutory precedents, see generally Einer Elhauge, Statutory Default Rules: How to Interpret Unclear Legislation 211–23 (2008); and William N  Eskridge, Jr , Overruling Statutory Precedents, 76 Geo  L J  1361, 1364–1409 (1988)  Justice Brandeis’s logic demands that dormant commerce clause cases, where Congress is free to act, be granted the weightier stare decisis 54× 54  Scholars have noted the curious fact that Justice Brandeis included many dormant commerce clause cases as examples of overruled constitutional precedents  See, e g , Earl M  Maltz, Commentary, Some Thoughts on the Death of Stare Decisis in Constitutional Law, 1980 Wis  L  Rev  467, 468–469, 469 n 11  One explanation for this is that Justice Brandeis sought the authority of Chief Justice Taney’s dictum that the Court’s “opinion upon the construction of the Constitution is always open to discussion” — which referred to the dormant commerce clause  See Burnet, 285 U S  at 408 n 3 (Brandeis, J , dissenting) (quoting The Passenger Cases, 48 U S  (7 How ) 283, 470 (1849) (Taney, C J , dissenting))  In Chief Justice Taney’s time, it was thought that Congress could not override the Court’s dormant commerce clause decisions, see Cooley v  Bd  of Wardens, 53 U S  (12 How ) 299, 321 (1852), so the context of Chief Justice Taney’s dictum does not conflict with Justice Brandeis’s theory of stare decisis  The Court applied this reasoning in Quill, as Chief Justice Roberts underscored 55× 55  Wayfair, 138 S  Ct  at 2102 (Roberts, C J , dissenting) 
Yet the Wayfair majority refused to consider Congress’s authority to legislate as a relevant factor for stare decisis 56× 56  Even Justice Kennedy’s earlier opinion in Direct Marketing contemplated judicially overruling Quill, conspicuously neglecting a possible legislative solution  See supra p  278  The Court even insisted that to do so “is inconsistent with the Court’s proper role,” since Quill embodied “a false constitutional premise of th[e] Court’s own creation ”57× 57  Wayfair, 138 S  Ct  at 2096 (emphasis added)  This refusal breaks from the practical Brandeisian wisdom that has guided the Court’s treatment of precedent for the better part of a century  The point is not that stare decisis should have ultimately propped up Bellas Hess yet again, as Wayfair’s dissenting Justices maintained  After all, a realistic approach that is alert to each branch’s institutional capacities might have led to the conclusion that Congress was actually ill-equipped to overrule Quill  In this vein, the Court could have sensibly pointed out that Congress is unlikely to stick its neck out with a tax hike (or a look-alike) from which only the states would benefit 58× 58  For two practical arguments to this effect, see Brian Galle, Essay, Kill Quill, Keep the Dormant Commerce Clause: History’s Lessons on Congressional Control of State Taxation, 70 Stan  L  Rev  Online 158, 160–62 (2018), https://review law stanford edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2018/03/70-Stan -L -Rev -Online-158-Galle pdf [https://perma cc/22YP-P4V5]; Edward A  Zelinsky, The Political Process Argument for Overruling Quill, 82 Brook  L  Rev  1177, 1191–92 (2017)  Indeed, South Dakota advanced such practical arguments in its brief 59× 59  See Petitioner’s Brief at 54, Wayfair, 138 S  Ct  2080 (No  17-494) (“Congress has little incentive to act here because it would be (or appear to be) authorizing new or greater tax collections from its constituents, while receiving none of the revenue in return ”)  More generally, the Court might have discussed the limits of the states’ influence in the federal system as a reason not to wait for congressional intervention, a topic it has debated on other occasions 60× 60  See Richard H  Pildes, Institutional Formalism and Realism in Constitutional and Public Law, 2013 Sup  Ct  Rev  1, 30–32; see also Galle, supra note 58, at 159 (“Congress is not a trustworthy guardian of state fiscal power, making continuing judicial involvement a more appealing prospect ”)  Or it could have argued that new facts on the ground — namely, the blast of e-commerce that hit like a comet after Quill — overpowered stare decisis of any force, special or plain 61× 61  Two recent studies of stare decisis highlighted the physical presence rule as exemplifying a precedent that may reasonably be overruled due to changed facts  See Bryan A  Garner et al , The Law of Judicial Precedent 364–65 (2016); Randy J  Kozel, Settled Versus Right: A Theory of Precedent 112–13 (2017)  It should be noted that the authors of The Law of Judicial Precedent classify the physical presence rule as a constitutional precedent for stare decisis purposes, thus anticipating the Court’s misstep in Wayfair  Garner et al , supra, at 354–65  Because even statutory precedents may sometimes be overruled,62× 62  See Patterson v  McLean Credit Union, 491 U S  164, 173–74 (1989) (discussing justifications for overruling statutory precedents)  Contra Lawrence C  Marshall, “Let Congress Do It”: The Case for an Absolute Rule of Statutory Stare Decisis, 88 Mich  L  Rev  177 (1989)  the Court could have killed Quill without first planting its constitutional kiss of death 63× 63  Cf  Thomas R  Lee, Stare Decisis in Historical Perspective: From the Founding Era to the Rehnquist Court, 52 Vand  L  Rev  647, 704 (1999) (“Justice Brandeis’       memorable prose has since become a mandatory part of the burial rite for any constitutional precedent ”) 
The Court resisted such arguments  Instead, Wayfair reasoned that Congress’s total ability to correct an erroneous decision counts for nothing when the Court gets the Constitution wrong  That such a theory sprouts from a case like Wayfair, which repudiated a “formalistic distinction,”64× 64  Wayfair, 138 S  Ct  at 2092  is ironic  Wayfair’s stare decisis analysis resorts to the formalism of making constitutional a “magic” word65× 65  See Transcript of Oral Argument, supra note 21, at 12  rather than asking whether Congress can step in 
Moreover, the Court’s new thinking on stare decisis threatens other constitutional default rules  Wayfair now stands for the proposition that a “constitutional default rule” — a term the Court apparently lifted from South Dakota’s reply brief on the merits66× 66  Reply Brief at 22, Wayfair, 138 S  Ct  2080 (No  17-494) (“Congress is polarized, which makes it critical       to get the constitutional default rule right ”)  — gets only weakened stare decisis  To appreciate why this holding matters, it is worth exploring the concept and scope of constitutional default rules  Contract theory describes default rules as legal rules that the parties may “contract around ”67× 67  See, e g , Ian Ayres & Robert Gertner, Filling Gaps in Incomplete Contracts: An Economic Theory of Default Rules, 99 Yale L J  87, 87 (1989)  Although “constitutional default rule” could be read broadly to include a variety of actors and contracting mechanisms,68× 68  See John Ferejohn & Barry Friedman, Toward a Political Theory of Constitutional Default Rules, 33 Fla  St  U  L  Rev  825, 826 (2006) (“When we speak of default rules in constitutional law, we typically are talking about specifications of ways the government can act (or modify its behavior) to get around a constitutional prohibition ”)  the Court’s use of the term for purposes of stare decisis may be narrowly defined as judicial precedents of constitutional law that “are ultimately subject to congressional control ”69× 69  Gillian E  Metzger, Congress, Article IV, and Interstate Relations, 120 Harv  L  Rev  1468, 1525 (2007) (describing judicially enforceable “constitutional default rules imposing obligations on the states in the name of union [that] are ultimately subject to congressional control”)  The dormant commerce clause is a paradigmatic constitutional default rule because what the Court does today Congress may undo tomorrow  Justice Scalia declared this fact “[t]he clearest sign that the negative Commerce Clause is a judicial fraud,” for “[h]ow could congressional consent lift a constitutional prohibition?”70× 70  Comptroller of the Treasury of Md  v  Wynne, 135 S  Ct  1787, 1808 (2015) (Scalia, J , dissenting)  But that’s what a constitutional default rule is  The Court has allowed Congress to overturn its dormant commerce clause cases since 1891 71× 71  See In re Rahrer, 140 U S  545, 560–62 (1891) 
Dormant commerce clause cases are not the only constitutional default rules  Professor Laurence Tribe’s treatise identifies two others 72× 72  1 Laurence H  Tribe, American Constitutional Law § 6-35 (3d ed  2000)  And in a groundbreaking article, Professor Henry Monaghan revealed “a substructure of substantive, procedural, and remedial rules” forming “a constitutional common law subject to amendment, modification, or even reversal by Congress ”73× 73  Henry P  Monaghan, The Supreme Court, 1974 Term — Foreword: Constitutional Common Law, 89 Harv  L  Rev  1, 2–3 (1975); see also Susan R  Klein, Identifying and (Re)Formulating Prophylactic Rules, Safe Harbors, and Incidental Rights in Constitutional Criminal Procedure, 99 Mich  L  Rev  1030 (2001) (further developing Monaghan’s theory in criminal procedure context)  What follows is a list of six lines of cases beyond the dormant commerce clause that may be fairly described as constitutional default rules  The first two are drawn from Tribe’s treatise while the next four are found in Monaghan’s article:
(1) State Taxation of Federal Instrumentalities: States may not tax instrumentalities of the federal government74× 74  McCulloch v  Maryland, 17 U S  (4 Wheat ) 316, 436 (1819)  — unless Congress consents 75× 75  See, e g , Helvering v  Gerhardt, 304 U S  405, 411 n 1 (1938) (“Congress may curtail an immunity which might otherwise be implied or enlarge it beyond the point where, Congress being silent, the Court would set its limits ” (citations omitted))  One court has described such judicial decisions as setting a “constitutional default rule ” United States v  Delaware, 958 F 2d 555, 560 n 9 (3d Cir  1992) (“[W]e must decide the constitutional default rule for this type of tax, fully aware that Congress could decide at any time to reverse our decision statutorily ”)  (2) Article I, Section 10 Cases: Article I, Section 10 provides that certain prohibitions on the states may be waived by Congress 76× 76  See U S  Const  art  I, § 10, cls  2–3  The Court has taken note of this when considering whether to overrule, for instance, an Import-Export Clause precedent 77× 77  See Hooven & Allison Co  v  Evatt, 324 U S  652, 668 (1945) (“In view of the fact that the Constitution gives Congress authority to consent to state taxation of imports and hence to lay down its own test for determining when the immunity ends, we see no convincing practical reason for abandoning the test which has been applied for more than a century        ”), overruled on other grounds by Limbach v  Hooven & Allison Co , 466 U S  353 (1984)  In Michelin Tire Corp  v  Wages, 423 U S  276 (1976), the Court left open the question whether “Congress may authorize, under the Import-Export Clause, an exaction that it could not directly impose under the Tax Clause ” Id  at 301 n 13  Metzger, however, argues that the Import-Export Clause is free of other clauses’ limits on congressional power  See Metzger, supra note 69, at 1500 & n 120  (3) Bivens Cases: In Bivens v  Six Unknown Named Agents of Federal Bureau of Narcotics,78× 78  403 U S  388 (1971)  the Court held that a violation of the Fourth Amendment gives rise to a right to sue for damages 79× 79  Id  at 397  But the Court has also held that “[s]uch a cause of action may be defeated       when       Congress has provided an alternative remedy which it explicitly declared to be a substitute for recovery directly under the Constitution and viewed as equally effective ”80× 80  Carlson v  Green, 446 U S  14, 18–19 (1980)  (4) Miranda Cases: The Miranda Court famously “encourage[d]” Congress and the states to explore alternative “procedures which are at least as effective in apprising accused persons of their right of silence and in assuring a continuous opportunity to exercise it ”81× 81  Miranda v  Arizona, 384 U S  436, 467 (1966)  In Dickerson v  United States, 530 U S  428 (2000), the Court struck down a congressional attempt to effectively abolish Miranda, holding that “Miranda announced a constitutional rule that Congress may not supersede legislatively ” Id  at 444  But Dickerson also stood by Miranda’s “invitation for legislative action” to replace Miranda with an adequate substitute  Id  at 440; see also Michael C  Dorf & Barry Friedman, Shared Constitutional Interpretation, 2000 Sup  Ct  Rev  61 (discussing legislative alternatives to Miranda)  (5) The Police Lineup Case: In United States v  Wade,82× 82  388 U S  218 (1967)  the Court created an exclusionary rule for evidence obtained from a police lineup in violation of the Sixth Amendment right to counsel but acknowledged that it could be replaced by “[l]egislative or other regulations       which eliminate the risks of abuse ”83× 83  Id  at 239  (6) The Exclusionary Rule Cases: Mapp v  Ohio made the Fourth Amendment “exclusionary rule” binding on the states,84× 84  367 U S  643, 655 (1961)  yet Congress is thought to have the power to replace it 85× 85  See Bivens v  Six Unknown Named Agents of Fed  Bureau of Narcotics, 403 U S  388, 422–24 (1971) (Burger, C J , dissenting) (inviting Congress to replace the Fourth Amendment exclusionary rule); Harold J  Krent, How to Move Beyond the Exclusionary Rule: Structuring Judicial Response to Legislative Reform Efforts, 26 Pepp  L  Rev  855, 864–71 (1999) 
All of the above are arguably constitutional default rules set by the Court that remain, to one degree or another, open to congressional revision  The list could be longer or shorter, depending on which default rules the Court will view as constitutional86× 86  A shorter list could be produced by whittling away at the constitutional status of the cases identified by Monaghan  While the Court has held that Miranda is a constitutional decision, Dickerson, 530 U S  at 444, some of the other cases may be viewed as nonconstitutional  See, e g , Collins v  Virginia, 138 S  Ct  1663, 1675–80 (2018) (Thomas, J , concurring) (arguing that Mapp is “nonconstitutional,” id  at 1678 n 5); Richard H  Fallon, Jr  et al , Hart and Wechsler’s The Federal Courts and the Federal System 775–77 (7th ed  2015) (discussing whether Bivens is constitutionally required)  Conversely, a longer list might include any constitutional right that can be waived by a party  See, e g , Daniel A  Farber, Another View of the Quagmire: Unconstitutional Conditions and Contract Theory, 33 Fla  St  U  L  Rev  913, 918 (2006) (describing the Eleventh Amendment as “just a contractual default rule that the states are free to barter away”)  Such a list might also include various constitutionally inspired judicial presumptions  See, e g , Jack Goldsmith & John F  Manning, The President’s Completion Power, 115 Yale L J  2280, 2299 (2006) (describing the Chevron presumption of delegated interpretive power to administrative agencies as “a constitutionally inspired default rule”); Nicholas Quinn Rosenkranz, Federal Rules of Statutory Interpretation, 115 Harv  L  Rev  2085, 2097–98 (2002) (describing clear statement rules as “constitutional default rules” reversible by Congress)  Many other decisions could likely be characterized as constitutional default rules; the list above is only an initial stab  and on how it will answer open questions about congressional authority over certain constitutional provisions 87× 87  See, e g , Thomas v  Wash  Gas Light Co , 448 U S  261, 272 n 18 (1980) (plurality opinion) (leaving unresolved whether Congress may limit constitutional full faith and credit obligations); White v  Mass  Council of Constr  Emp’rs, Inc , 460 U S  204, 215 n 1 (1983) (Blackmun, J , concurring in part and dissenting in part) (leaving unresolved “whether Congress may authorize       what otherwise would be a violation” of the Privileges and Immunities Clause); 1 Tribe, supra note 72, § 6-35, at 1243–44 (arguing that Congress cannot override judicial constructions of the Privileges and Immunities Clause); Metzger, supra note 69, at 1486–89 (arguing the opposite)  But the takeaway is clear: weaker stare decisis for constitutional default rules  Pre-Wayfair, one would have thought that stare decisis applies with special force to such precedents, given congressional power to set them straight  Not anymore  Why? Because it is improper to “ask Congress to address a false constitutional premise of th[e] Court’s own creation ”88× 88  Wayfair, 138 S  Ct  at 2096  The Latin for Wayfair’s doctrine is not stare decisis, which should reflect a realistic, working relationship between the legislative and judicial branches  It is mea culpa 
In its zeal to update the Constitution for “the Cyber Age,”89× 89  Id  at 2097  the Court deleted Congress from stare decisis doctrine in constitutional cases  The Court had better options  It could have left Quill on Congress’s doorstep, as the dissent argued  Or it could have justified overruling Quill notwithstanding the special force of stare decisis  Instead, the Court reasoned that it doesn’t matter whether Congress is willing and able to do the job: a constitutional mess calls for a judicial clean-up crew  For constitutional default rules — a category of decisions embracing the dormant commerce clause and sweeping far beyond — Wayfair’s new theory of stare decisis makes the Court’s precedents less sticky and Congress less relevant 
Context 3:  These results thus provide strong evidence that cryptoassets, fairly generally, present large price movements quite well described by power-law distributions 
Moreover, this conclusion is robust when starting the expanding window with a greater   Large price movements are power-law distributed over the entire history of most cryptocurrencies with median values typically smaller than those found for traditional assets  (a) Percentage of cryptoassets rejecting the power-law hypothesis for large positive (blue) or negative (red) price returns in at most a given fraction of the weekly positions of the expanding time window ( f r ) used to sample the return series 
Remarkably, 68% of all 7111 digital currencies are compatible with the power-law hypothesis over their entire history, and about 91% of them reject the power-law hypothesis in less than 20% of the positions of the expanding time window ( f r ≤ 0 2)  (b) Probability distributions obtained via kernel density estimation of the median values of the power-law exponents along the history of each digital currency 
The blue curve shows the distribution of the median exponents related to positive returns ( α+ ) and the red curve does the same for negative returns ( α− )  The medians of α+ and α− are indicated by vertical dashed lines  Panels (c) and (d) show the distributions of these median exponents when considering the top 2000 and the top 200 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization, respectively 
We observe that the distributions of α+ and α− tend to shift toward larger values when considering the largest cryptoassets  number of return observations (between 100 and 300 days) and filtering out cryptoassets with missing observations (Supplementary Figures )  Still, it is worth noticing the existence of a few cryptoassets (9 of them) with relatively small market capitalization (ranking below the top 1000) for which the power-law hypothesis is always rejected (Supplementary Table ) 
Having verified that large price movements in the cryptocurrency market are generally well-described by powerlaw distributions, we now focus on the power-law exponents that typically characterize each cryptoasset  To do so, we select all exponent estimates over the entire history of each digital asset for which the power-law hypothesis is not rejected and calculate their median values for both the positive ( α+ ) and negative ( α− ) returns 
The dashed lines in Fig  ) show these median values for Bitcoin where α+ = 4 50 and α− = 2 99  It is worth noticing that the variance of large price movements σ 2 is finite only for α > 3, as the integral σ 2 ∼ ∞ r min r 2 p(r)dr diverges outside this interval  Thus, while the typical variance of large positive returns is finite for Bitcoin, negative returns are at the limit of not having a typical scale and are thus susceptible to much larger variations 
Figure shows the probability distribution for the median power-law exponents of all cryptoassets grouped by large positive and negative returns  We note that the distribution of typical power-law exponents associated with large positive returns is shifted to smaller values when compared with the distribution of exponents related to large negative returns 
The medians of these typical exponents are respectively 2 78 and 3 11 for positive and negative returns  This result suggests that the asymmetry in large price movements we have observed for Bitcoin is an overall feature of the cryptocurrency market  By calculating the difference between the typical exponents related to positive and negative large returns (∆α = α+ − α− ) for each digital currency, we find that about 2/3 of cryptocurrencies have α+ < α− (see Supplementary Figure for the probability distribution of ∆α) 
Thus, unlike Bitcoin, most cryptocurrencies have been more susceptible to large positive price variations than negative ones  While this asymmetry in the return distributions indicates that extremely large price variations tend to be positive, it does not necessarily imply positive price variations are more common for any threshold in the return values 
This happens because the fraction of events in each tail is also related to the lower bound of the power-law regime (r min )  However, we have found the distribution of r min to be similar among the positive and negative returns [Supplementary Figure ]  The distribution of high percentile scores (such as the 90th percentile) is also shifted to larger values for positive returns [Supplementary Figure ] 
Moreover, this asymmetry in high percentile scores related to positive and negative returns is systematic along the evolution of the power-law exponents [Supplementary Figure ]  These results thus indicate that there is indeed more probability mass in the positive tails than in the negative ones, a feature that likely reflects the current expansion of the cryptocurrency market as a whole 
The distributions in Fig  ) also show that large price variations do not have a finite variance for a significant part of cryptoassets, that is, α+ ≤ 3 for 62% of cryptocurrencies and α− ≤ 3 for 44% of cryptocurrencies  A significant part of the cryptocurrency market is thus prone to price variations with no typical scale 
Intriguingly, we further note the existence of a minority group of cryptoassets with α+ ≤ 2 (7%) or α− ≤ 2 (3%)  These cryptocurrencies, whose representative members are Counos X (CCXX, rank 216) with α − = 1 96 and α + = 1 84 and Chainbing (CBG, rank 236) with α + = 1 87, are even more susceptible to extreme price variations as one cannot even define the average value µ for large price returns, as the integral µ ∼ ∞ r min rp(r)dr diverges for α ≤ 2  We have also replicated the previous analysis when considering cryptocurrencies in the top 2000 and top 200 rankings of market capitalization (as of July 2022) 
Figures ) and 2(d) show the probability distribution for the median power-law exponents of these two groups  We observe that these distributions are more localized (particularly for the top 200) than the equivalent distributions for all cryptocurrencies  The fraction of cryptocurrencies with no typical scale for large price returns ( α+ ≤ 3 and α− ≤ 3) is significantly lower in these two groups compared to all cryptocurrencies 
In the top 2000 cryptocurrencies, 51% have α+ ≤ 3 and 26% have α− ≤ 3  These fractions are even smaller among the top 200 cryptocurrencies, with only 44% and 15% not presenting a typical scale for large positive and negative price returns, respectively  We further observe a decrease in the fraction of cryptoassets for which the average value for large price returns is not even finite, as only 2% and 1% of top 2000 cryptoassets have α+ ≤ 2 and α− ≤ 2  This reduction is more impressive among the top 200 cryptocurrencies as only the cryptoasset Fei USD (FEI, rank 78) has α+ = 1 97 and none is characterized by α− ≤ 2  The medians of α+ and α− also increase from 2 78 and 3 11 for all cryptocurrencies to 2 98 and 3 35 for the top 2000 and to 3 08 and 3 58 for the top 200 cryptocurrencies 
Conversely, the asymmetry between positive and negative large price returns does not differ much among the three groups, with the condition α+ < α− holding only for a slightly larger fraction of top 2000 (69 1%) and top 200 (70 6%) cryptoassets compared to all cryptocurrencies (66 4%)  Moreover, all these patterns are robust when filtering out time series with sampling issues or when considering only cryptoassets that stay compatible with the power-law hypothesis in more than 90% of the positions of the expanding time window (Supplementary Figures ) 
We also investigate whether the patterns related to the median of the power-law exponents differ among groups of cryptocurrencies with different designs and purposes  To do so, we group digital assets using the 50 most common tags in our dataset (e g  "bnb-chain", "defi", and "collectibles-nfts") and estimate the probability distributions of the median exponents α+ and α− (Supplementary Figures ) 
These results show that design and purpose affect the dynamics of large price variations in the cryptocurrency market as the medians of typical exponents range from 2 4 to 3 7 among the groups  The lowest values occur for cryptocurrencies tagged as "doggone-doggerel" (medians of α+ and α− are 2 38 and 2 83), "memes" (2 41 and 2 87), and "stablecoin" (2 65 and 2 79) 
Digital currencies belonging to the first two tags overlap a lot and have Dogecoin (DOGE, rank 9) and Shiba Inu (SHIB, rank 13) as the most important representatives  Cryptoassets with these tags usually have humorous characteristics (such as an Internet meme) and several have been considered as a form of pump-and-dump scheme , a type of financial fraud in which false statements artificially inflate asset prices so the scheme operators sell their overvalued cryptoassets 
Conversely, cryptoassets tagged as "stablecoin" represent a class of cryptocurrencies designed to have a fixed exchange rate to a reference asset (such as a national currency or precious metal)   While the price of stablecoins tends to stay around the target values, their price series are also marked by sharp variations, which in turn are responsible for their typically small power-law exponents 
This type of cryptoasset has been shown to be prone to failures , such as the recent examples of TerraUSD (UST) and Tron's USDD (USDD) that lost their pegs to the US Dollar producing large variations in their price series  The asymmetry between positive and negative large returns also emerges when grouping the cryptocurrencies using their tags 
All 50 tags have distributions of α+ shifted to smaller values when compared with the distributions of α− , with differences between their medians ranging from −0 74 ("okex-blockdream-ventures-portfolio") to −0 14 ("stablecoin")  Indeed, only four ('stablecoin", "scrypt", "fantom-ecosystem" and "alameda-research-portfolio") out of the fifty groupings have both distributions indistinguishable under a two-sample Kolmogorov-Smirnov test (p-value > 0 05) 
Focusing now on the evolution of the power-law exponents quantified by the time series α t for positive and negative returns, we ask whether these exponents present particular time trends  For Bitcoin [Fig  )], α t seems to increase with time for both positive and negative returns  At the same time, the results of Fig  also suggest that market capitalization affects these power-law exponents 
To verify these possibilities, we assume the power-law exponents (α t ) to be linearly associated with the cryptocurrency's age (y t , measured in years) and the logarithm of market capitalization (log c t )  As detailed in the Methods section, we frame this problem using a hierarchical Bayesian model 
This approach assumes that the linear coefficients associated with the effects of age (A) and market capitalization (C) of each digital currency are drawn from distributions with means µ A and µ C and standard deviations σ A and σ C , which are in turn distributed according to global distributions representing the overall impact of these quantities on the cryptocurrency market 
The Bayesian inference process consists of estimating the posterior probability distributions of the linear coefficients for each cryptocurrency as well as the posterior distributions of µ A , µ C , σ A , and σ C , allowing us to simultaneously probe asset-specific tendencies and overall market characteristics 
Moreover, we restrict this analysis to the 2140 digital currencies having more than 50 observations of market capitalization concomitantly to the time series of the power-law exponents in order to have enough data points for detecting possible trends  When considering the overall market characteristics, we find that the 94% highest density intervals for µ A ([-0 01, 0 06] for positive and [-0 02, 0 03] for negative returns) and µ C ([-0 02, 0 03] for positive and [-0 001, 0 04] for negative returns) include the zero (see Supplementary Figure for their distributions) 
Thus, there is no evidence of a unique overall pattern for the association between the power-law exponents and age or market capitalization followed by a significant part of the cryptocurrency market  Indeed, the 94% highest density intervals for σ A ([0



ground_truth: Quill harmed states more than anticipated due to the Internet.

prompt_front: Now, answer the following question based on the text below, only give me the answer and do not output any other words.

Question: What type of distribution do the tail distributions of price returns follow?

Read the following text and answer briefly.

Context 3: 87, 0 93] for positive and [0 63, 0 70] for negative returns) and σ C ([0 57, 0 61] for positive and [0 49, 0 52] for negative returns) indicate that the cryptocurrency market is highly heterogeneous regarding the evolution of power-law exponents associated with large price variations (see Supplementary Figure for the distributions of σ A and σ C )  Figure illustrates these heterogeneous behaviors by plotting the posterior probability distributions for the linear coefficients associated with the effects of age (A) and market capitalization (C) for the top 20 digital assets, where cryptocurrencies which are significantly affected (that is, the 94% highest density intervals for A or C do not include the zero) by these quantities are highlighted in boldface 
Even this small selection of digital  currencies already presents a myriad of patterns  First, we observe that the power-law exponents of a few top 20 cryptocurrencies are neither correlated with age nor market capitalization  That is the case of Shiba Inu (SHIB, rank 13) and Dai (DAI, rank 11) for both positive and negative returns, UNUS SED LEO (LEO, rank 18) and Polkadot (DOT, rank 12) for the positive returns, and USDCoin (USDC, rank 4) and Solana (SOL, rank 9) for negative returns 
There are also cryptocurrencies with exponents positively or negatively correlated only with market capitalization  Examples include Tether (USDT, rank 3) and Dogecoin (DOGE, rank 10), for which the power-law exponents associated with positive returns increase with market capitalization, and Binance USD (BUSD, rank 6), for which power-law exponents associated with positive and negative returns decrease with market capitalization 
We also observe cryptocurrencies for which age and market capitalization simultaneously affect the power-law exponents  Polygon (MATIC, rank 14) is an example where the power-law exponents associated with positive returns tend to increase with age and decrease with market capitalization  Finally, there are also cryptocurrencies with power-law exponents only associated with age 
That is the case of Bitcoin (BTC, rank 1), Ethereum (ETH, rank 2), and Cardano (ADA, rank 8), for which the power-law exponents related to positive and negative returns increase with age, but also the case of Uniswap (UNI, rank 19), for which the exponents decrease with age  Figure systematically extends the observations made for the top 20 cryptoassets to all 2140 digital currencies for which we have modeled the changes in the power-law exponents as a function of age and market capitalization 
First, we note that only 10% of cryptocurrencies have power-law exponents not significantly affected by age and market capitalization  The vast majority (90%) displays some relationship with these quantities  However, these associations are as varied as the ones we have observed for the top 20 cryptoassets 
About 52% of cryptocurrencies have power-law exponents simultaneously affected by age and market capitalization  In this group, these quantities simultaneously impact the exponents related to positive and negative returns of 34% of cryptoassets, whereas the remainder is affected only in the positive tail (9%) or only in the negative tail (9%) 
Moving back in the hierarchy, we find that the power-law exponents of 32% of cryptocurrencies are affected only by age while a much minor fraction (6%) is affected only by market capitalization  Within the group only affected by age, we observe that the effects are slightly more frequent only on the exponents related to negative returns (12%), compared to cases where effects are restricted only to positive returns (10%) or simultaneously affect both tails (10%) 
Finally, within the minor group only affected by market capitalization, we note that associations more frequently involve only exponents related to negative returns (3%) compared to the other two cases (2% only positive returns and 1% for both positive and negative returns)  Beyond the previous discussion about whether positive or negative returns are simultaneously or individually affected by age and market capitalization, we have also categorized the direction of the trend imposed by these two quantities on the power-law exponents 
Blue rectangles in Fig  represent the fraction of relationships for which increasing age or market capitalization (or both) is associated with a raise in the power-law exponents  About 28% of all cryptocurrencies exhibit this pattern in which large price variations are expected to occur less frequently as they grow and age 
Conversely, the red rectangles in Fig  depict the fraction of relationships for which increasing age or market capitalization (or both) is associated with a reduction in the power-law exponents  This case comprises about 25% of all cryptocurrencies for which large price variations are likely to become more frequent as they grow in market capitalization and age 
Still, the majority of associations represented by green rectangles refer to the case where the effects of age and market capitalization point in different directions (e g  exponents increasing with age while decreasing with market capitalization)  About 36% of cryptocurrencies fit this condition which in turn contributes to consolidating the cumbersome hierarchical structure of patterns displayed by cryptocurrencies regarding the dynamics of large price variations 
This complex picture is not much different when considering only cryptocurrencies in the top 200 market capitalization rank (Supplementary Figure )  However, we do observe an increased prevalence of patterns characterized by exponents that rise with age and market capitalization (37%), suggesting that large price variations are becoming less frequent among the top 200 cryptocurrencies than in the overall market 
)  Each of the previous three levels is further classified regarding whether both positive and negative returns are simultaneously affected or whether the effect involves only positive or only negative returns  Finally, the former levels are classified regarding whether the power-law exponents increase, decrease or have a mixed trend with the predictive variables 
Overall, 36% of the associations are classified as mixed trends (green rectangles), 28% are increasing trends (blue rectangles), and 26% are decreasing trends (red rectangles)  We have studied the distributions of large price variations of a significant part of the digital assets that currently comprise the entirety of the cryptocurrency market 
Unlike previous work, we have estimated these distributions for entire historical price records of each digital currency, and we have identified the patterns under which the return distributions change as cryptoassets age and grow in market capitalization  Similarly to conventional financial assets , our findings show that the return distributions of the vast majority of cryptoassets have tails that are described well by power-law functions along their entire history 
The typical power-law exponents of cryptocurrencies (α ∼ 3) are, however, significantly smaller than those reported for conventional assets (α ∼ 4)   This feature corroborates the widespread belief that cryptoassets are indeed considerably more risky for investments than stocks or other more traditional financial assets 
Indeed, we have found that about half of the cryptocurrencies in our analysis do not have a characteristic scale for price variations, and are thus prone to much higher price variations than those typically observed in stock markets  On the upside, we have also identified an asymmetry in the power-law exponents for positive and negative returns in about 2/3 of all considered cryptocurrencies, such that these exponents are smaller for positive than they are for negative returns 
This means that sizable positive price variations have generally been more likely to occur than equally sizable negative price variations, which in turn may also reflect the recent overall expansion of the cryptocurrency market  Using a hierarchical Bayesian linear model, we have also simultaneously investigated the overall market characteristics and asset-specific tendencies regarding the effects of age and market capitalization on the power-law exponents 
We have found that the cryptocurrency market is highly heterogeneous regarding the trends exhibited by each cryptocurrency; however, only a small fraction of cryptocurrencies (10%) have power-law exponents neither correlated with age nor market capitalization  These associations have been mostly ignored by the current literature and are probably related to the still-early developmental stage of the cryptocurrency market as a whole 
Overall, 36% of cryptocurrencies present trends that do not systematically contribute to increasing or decreasing their power-law exponents as they age and grow in market capitalization  On the other hand, for 26% of cryptocurrencies, aging and growing market capitalization are both associated with a reduction in their power-law exponents, thus contributing to the rise in the frequency of large price variations in their dynamics 
Only about 28% of cryptocurrencies present trends in which the power-law exponents increase with age and market capitalization, favoring thus large price variations to become less likely  These results somehow juxtapose with findings about the increasing informational efficiency of the cryptocurrency market  
In fact, if on the one hand the cryptocurrency market is becoming more informationally efficient, then on the other our findings indicate that there is no clear trend toward decreasing the risks of sizable variations in the prices of most considered cryptoassets  In other words, risk and efficiency thus appear to be moving towards different directions in the cryptocurrency market 
To conclude, we hope that our findings will contribute significantly to the better understanding of the dynamics of large price variations in the cryptocurrency market as a whole, and not just for a small subset of selected digital assets, which is especially relevant due to the diminishing concentration of market capitalization among the top digital currencies, and also because of the considerable impact these new assets may have in our increasingly digital economy 
Our results are based on time series of the daily closing prices (in USD) for all cryptoassets listed on CoinMar-ketCap (coinmarketcap com) as of 25 July 2022 [see Supplementary Figure (a) for a visualization of the increasing number cryptoassets listed on CoinMarketCap since 2013]  These time series were automatically gathered using the cryptoCMD Python package and other information such as the tags associated with each cryptoasset were obtained via the CoinMarketCap API  
In addition, we have also obtained the daily market capitalization time series (in USD) from all cryptoassets which had this information available at the time  Earliest records available from CoinMarketCap date from 29 April 2013 and the latest records used in our analysis correspond to 25 July 2022  Out of 9943 cryptocurrencies, we have restricted our analysis to the 7111 with at least 200 price-return observations 
The median length of these time series is 446 observations [see the distribution of series length in Supplementary Figure   We have estimated the power-law behavior of the return distributions by applying the Clauset-Shalizi-Newman method to the return time series r t   In particular, we have sampled each of these time series using an expanding time window that starts at the hundredth observation and grows in weekly steps (seven data points each step) 
For each position of the expanding time window, we have separated the positive returns from the negative ones and applied the Clauset-Shalizi-Newman method to each set  This approach consists of obtaining the maximum likelihood estimate for the power-law exponent, α = 1 + n/ (∑ n t=1 ln r t /r min ) , where r min is the lower bound of the power-law regime and n is the number of (positive or negative) return observations in the power-law regime for a given position of the expanding time window 
The value r min is estimated from data by minimizing the Kolmogorov-Smirnov statistic between the empirical distribution and the power-law model  The Clauset-Shalizi-Newman method yields an unbiased and consistent estimator , in a sense that as the sample increases indefinitely, the estimated power-law exponent converges in distribution to the actual value 
Moreover, we have used the implementation available on the powerlaw Python package   In addition to obtaining the power-law exponents, we have also verified the adequacy of the power-law hypothesis using the procedure originally proposed by Clauset et al  as adapted by Preis et al    This procedure consists of generating synthetic samples under the power-law hypothesis with the same properties of the empirical data under analysis (that is, same length and parameters α and r min ), adjusting the simulated data with the power-law model via the Clauset-Shalizi-Newman method, and calculating the Kolmogorov-Smirnov statistic (κ syn ) between the distributions obtained from the simulated samples and the adjusted power-law model 
Next, the values of κ syn are compared to the Kolmogorov-Smirnov statistic calculated between empirical data and the power-law model (κ)  Finally, a p-value is defined by calculating the fraction of times for which κ syn > κ  We have used one thousand synthetic samples for each position of the expanding time window and the more conservative 90% confidence level (instead of the more lenient and commonly used 95% confidence level), such that the power-law hypothesis is rejected whenever p-value ≤ 0 1 
We have estimated the effects of age and market capitalization on the power-law exponents associated with positive or negative returns of a given cryptocurrency using the linear model where α t represents the power-law exponent, log c t is the logarithm of the market capitalization, and y t is the age (in years) of the cryptocurrency at t-th observation 
Moreover, K is the intercept of the association, while C and A are linear coefficients quantifying the effects of market capitalization and age, respectively  Finally, N (µ, σ ) stands for the normal distribution with mean µ and standard deviation σ , such that the parameter ε accounts for the unobserved determinants in the dynamics of the power-law exponents 
We have framed this problem using the hierarchical Bayesian approach such that each power-law exponent α t is nested within a cryptocurrency with model parameters considered as random variables normally distributed with parameters that are also random variables  Mathematically, for each cryptocurrency, we have
12/16 where µ K , σ K , µ C , σ C , µ A , and σ A are hyperparameters  These hyperparameters are assumed to be distributed according to distributions that quantify the overall impact of age and market capitalization on the cryptocurrency market as a whole  We have performed this Bayesian regression for exponents related to positive and negative returns separately, and used noninformative prior and hyperprior distributions in order not to bias the posterior estimation  
Specifically, we have considered and ε ∼ U (0, 10 2 ) , where U (a, b) stands for the uniform distribution in the interval [a, b] and Inv−Γ(θ , γ) represents the inverse gamma distribution with shape and scale parameters θ and γ, respectively  For the numerical implementation, we have relied on the PyMC Python package and sampled the posterior distributions via the gradient-based Hamiltonian Monte Carlo no-U-Turn-sampler method 
We have run four parallel chains with 2500 iterations each (1000 burn-in samples) to allow good mixing and estimated the Gelman-Rubin convergence statistic (R-hat) to ensure the convergence of the sampling approach (R-hat was always close to one)  In addition, we have also verified that models describing the power-law exponents as a function of only age (C → 0 in Eq  3) or only market capitalization (A → 0 in Eq  3) yield significantly worse descriptions of our data as quantified by the Widely Applicable Information Criterion (WAIC) and the Pareto Smoothed Importance Sampling Leave-One-Out cross-validation (PSIS-LOO) (see Supplementary Table )  ) is larger than r 90 estimated from negative returns (r − 90 ) 
This fraction is calculated only for weeks in which the power-law hypothesis is not rejected for both tails  The percentage of cryptoassets for which r + 90 > r − 90 is shown in the panels  The first column of panels depicts the results when considering data from all cryptocurrencies, while the second and third columns present the results for the top 2000 and top 200 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization, respectively 
Sampling issues refer to missing data and problems caused by prices of cryptoassets decreasing to zero  We note that these distributions barely change when considering only cryptocurrencies without any sampling issue  Indeed, the distributions in this figure are not significantly distinguishable from their counterparts in Fig  (two-sample Kolmogorov-Smirnov test, p > 0 05) 
)  Each of the previous three levels is further classified regarding whether both positive and negative returns are simultaneously affected or whether the effect involves only positive or only negative returns  Finally, the former levels are classified regarding whether the power-law exponents increase, decrease or have a mixed trend with the predictive variables 
Overall, 35% of the associations are classified as mixed trends (green rectangles), 37% are increasing trends (blue rectangles), and 18% are decreasing trends (red rectangles) 



ground_truth: Power-law functions.