Ask HN: The biggest technology that people think is working, but it doesn't?
What's the biggest piece of technology that everyone thinks or pretends is working fine, but it actually doesn't?
Currency is a lot like electricity. It's a very portable form of power, easy to store, easy to convert to something else.
Like you can have a lot of political power, you can have charisma, skills, or military power. But you can't convert that easily into the other, the way you can't convert a river into lighting your house.
But the thing with electricity is that it still follows nature. You can't convert 1 MW of electricity into kinetic power, then convert it back to 1.1 MW. You can't lend it to someone with less, expect them to give you more, and have this system run forever. You can't just print as much of it as you think you can get away with.
Banking is a kind of arms race. If nobody used banks and usurious debt, everyone would be better off. But the people who do it have an unfair advantage, forcing others to as well. Except now we're pushing it as far as the concept can go, with every country taking well near their GDP in foreign debt.
The Bitcoin boom didn't come out of nothing. Some people lost faith in fiat and wanted to give alternative currency a shot. The bubble only happened when crypto attracted the attention of those who broke fiat in the first place.
The key attribute of money is that it's much more efficient than the next best alternative, which is trading my pigs for your shovels and that's why it continues to work even in extreme (eg hyperinflation) contexts.
You're probably right - that could be money's key attribute. So what happens when someone else does it better?
ML models making decisions about who gets to receive benefits (according to a bunch of articles in today's Guardian)