Fiat is a currency that's continuously going down in value. There can be no dispute about that; it's the stated goal of nearly every central bank.
So, I don't want that. It's that simple. If you could transfer USD anywhere without audit and the US fed had it increasing in value, I wouldn't need bitcoin.
But they can't do that. They literally cannot afford to in the sense that the government they're attached to does deficit spending and the bond market isn't enough. They have to print. Not only must they print, but the spending that causes them to do it is heavily military. They're buying the tanks and planes they used to start wars for as long as any of us have been alive (Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc.) Thus, every dollar I keep in my pocket is a continuous loan to their war machine; it loses value and that value goes to buying bombs.
I'm not participating any more. I'm taking my barbies and going home. Before BTC, there was no where to run to. Now there is. No more fiat. Long live deflationary, un-censor-able, distributed crypto currencies.
Every job in management is managing people, IMHO. That CEO is watching after VPs who are themselves people with typical people issues. It's people all the way up. :)
Yea, but I don't have a problem with volatility. I have a problem with inflation. So, as a customer of this product, you can tell me I should want a lack of volatility. But what I really want is a lack of inflation. And indeed, your note implies that you too are fleeing cash. But I don't want to park all my money in bonds (also being printed like crazy) and houses (also being printed like crazy) or even companies (also being printed like crazy). I'd like to just park it in the IOU-form I earned it in without having it's value stolen or being forced to invest in something being printed like crazy with all sorts of complexity of risks (e.g. debt filled companies, real estate I have to rent or something). Just to have my money not lose value and for me to be able to spend it without someone being able to stop me. And it does that. I'll take the volatility.
How do you know who to trust under Weak Subjectivity? It amounts to saying "I'm pretty sure we'll be able to google it and figure it out". But that then relies on these 3rd party systems to be able to identify who to trust. How can you really know who to trust for a protocol that's supposed to be distributed and ownerless. If the US turned into Russia-level of corruption, we essentially have to trust the owners of ETH to successfully flee to somewhere that we can protect them. What if they die or go bankrupt and no one agrees on who owns ETH?
If the answer is 'we'll trust the majority of users'. How do you know who that majority users are? Is that literally people the hold a lot of the ETH gas? So I know who has ETH based on what software I download and I download software based on who has ETH? And I know I'm in the right cycle of that form because I googled it and found an 'authority'? Risky.
I guess I don't totally know how to respond to that; I have no idea what everyone is using it for. That's rather hard to know just looking at the blockchain, or even reading message boards like this. I have no problem spending it; pretty easy to convert it to gift cards that can be spent anywhere (they give you a kick back even), there's some places that do take it directly (not restaurants, or car repair, but like electronics stuff on the internet). And of course you can just sell it for fiat on an exchange then turn around and dump the fiat for stuff (in this case, fiat is kind of the weak asset since no one really wants to hold cash for long). Plus, it can buy some stuff you can't get with fiat (e.g. overseas purchases not tied into USD, or all the dark web stuff people talk about). It feels pretty darn liquid; I've never had a problem turning BTC into stuff. And it is way more so than gold, land, even stocks and bonds; none of which can turn into stuff in under an hour much less without audit/paper-trail/control. Only fiat is more liquid, except no one wants to hold fiat; just turn it into something else actually worth having. The real problem is getting BTC. Lots of roadblocks in acquiring it and generally the people who have it would rather pay you in fiat and keep their BTC.
What do you mean? We totally got what we wanted; we have a deflationary currency we trade for goods and services.
I'm 100% serious here; it's been working fine for quite a number of years. The fiat conversion is pretty noisy but BTC on average goes up in value in fiat terms at a fast pace. BTC is easy to turn it into stuff. No one has ever censored my transactions or asked for ID. Even if you buy something really expensive or totally illegal. It has literally already worked. It started working the day that guy bought a pizza and it hasn't stopped working.
As a technical person, I think we should be a little more careful than to ban a technology because there's a proposal for a newer tech that could work (knowing if it works is harder than a posting on a website saying it's going great in beta). Crypto at all is risky and the tech is uncertain. Seems pretty extreme to get the guns involved on the premise someone somewhere can do it better.
This reduces security considerably. Fundamentally, the proof of work system locks in longer chains because of all the work that was done historically. If there is just one honest node out there you will be able to tell the difference between the honest one and a majority of fakes. With proof of stake there is nothing beyond the will of the current majority to lock in what is right. If you feel the majority is always right, and you'd be comfortable with the majority being able to re-write all of the history of the ownership of your currency, that is fine. I do not feel I can trust the majority to be correct every minute or every day forever.
It is interesting that people think proof of stake works. If there is no work, there is not time-lock in. It's just the whimsy of the majority at this time. Today's majority can re-write all of history if they feel like it. With proof of work, the past is locked in by the work done to validate it. Under proof of work, if there is just one honest node out there, it's provably correct and you can tell the others are lying. Under proof of stake, it's just the will of the majority.
Yea, just people being silly. They can do what they want with their money. And it doesn't look like anyone actually invested $70M worth of human effort there; it's just illusions of the market cap metric.
The main claim is it's almost as bad a fiat currencies; in which case you're buying stock in a company that produces nothing, has no assets, is being constantly inflated, and has a bunch of rules about who you can give it to and how.
I found this helpful in describing a bit about how to build such a system. As someone that operates solar, it's become quite clear that solar gives very little energy in the winter and water heating is a huge part of winter power use. So if you're going off grid, this seems like a critical part. Now if we just had some better tech around turning felled trees into a furnace without so much human effort....
Not that I'm good at this yet, but I've found one solid way to do it: Read a textbook on it cover to cover. Don't do any of the problems, that'll like 10x the time. But the textbook will have an overview of the entire space and then as you have questions you'll know how to dive into them. It's helped me get into technologies that are wholly and totally different from what I work in and studied.
The software engineers have plenty of leverage over every company without unions. A proof of that is high wages across the industry. And for Amazon in particular, where is that extra money coming from? It's not like they have a dividend to shareholders they could stop paying out. They're not some law firm where the partners are profit sharing. It's a publicly traded company that just constantly reinvests in growth. They're practically famous for that. So really to pay more, they must either get more efficient (probably already trying at that) or raise prices or stop reinvesting. I guess they could pay the higher paid workers less, but isn't that already the software engineers we're talking about? Those are the higher paid workers.
As an aside, I sometimes wonder if they could literally have qualified as a not for profit whose sole goal is to grow into new market segments and employ more people. Because if you take a wide angle view of it, that's pretty much all they ever do.
I'm not going to down vote either of these at the moment. But the basic idea is to attack ideas not people. Any statements that name call (e.g. 'bastards') or attack the idea by attacking the author of it (e.g. 'dont remind me that I'm privileged') will not lead to an environment where we are all learning from each other.
This article seems to intentionally ignore the core reason for cryptocurrencies; escaping inflation and control. The article then proposes to use the law to bring those people back within the control of fiat and government oversight.
I no longer think the environmental argument is really plausible here. Clearly crypto mining is emitting using a lot of power and some of that is CO2. But the competition is fiat; backed by fighter jets and nukes; literally. How is it that someone can't steal your money? The bank makes sure. How is it the bank can be sure? The cops protect them. How is it the cops aren't overwhelmed? The military protects them. Law and order stands on the backs of a lot of stuff and CO2. Bitcoin is an example of one little piece of this not needing all that stuff. Instead it's protected by this mining fleet. And if you want to contest ownership there's no one to invade, no one to attack; the best you can do is make a fleet and try to mine. It's a small step in the direction of getting away from all these endless wars and control. A little step away from needing to point guns at eachother to protect our pile of stuff. And this author is saying "point guns at them and make them give it up". That's crazy. Just leave them alone.
(If you need to point guns to save the environment, do that specifically. Carbon tax CO2)
Do trees actually 'sleep'? Like they don't have neural centers that we consider to be brain-like, that I know of. Further, just defining the concept of sleep is a little tricky and I'm not aware of anything like sleep-ish brain waves, or not moving for a long period of time that we consider sleep-like in trees.
So this idea of sleep evolving in two different species whose ancestor didn't sleep is very interesting.
They are practically aliens to us, having such a very long ago common ancestor. We can learn a lot about ourselves by studying this alien species and that convergent evolution they have with ours (e.g. sleep). A good, deeper book on this is "Other Minds".
I don't think they can afford to see every bird as a threat during a battle. That means they'll also see every piece of shrapnel as a threat. And every piece of outgoing large munitions. I got the impression that speed and direction of travel are common filters. So something that's slow, tiny, and changing direction a lot is legitimately going to be hard to distinguish from a lot of non-threatening things.
Perhaps a more direct way of saying this is: If individuals are not able to use tools to defend themselves, then the police should take the role of specifically defending all people (like they do with government officials) and be culpable if they fail to protect those people. And if they're not willing to sign up for that (i.e. you can sue the police if they fail to protect you) then the police should not disarm you.
You still need to use oil, but you don't have to use dollars. The support for dollars relies on a lot of things including the government and thus the military, which are big costs and oil consumes. If the dollar didn't rely on the military power of the US, why is the Bretton Woods meeting and the post war monetary policy so important to it's dominance (something practically no one disputes)? Why is it that the US seems to care so much about pricing oil in dollars? You don't need a tinfoil hat (as other comments suggest) to notice the US government has a strong interest in everyone using our currency and that where the gov has a strong interest, it also uses it's guns.
I think the problem is that it's not obvious why getting super big is bad. Anti-trust is a law around abuse of customers by cornering a market. But what if they haven't abused customers? What if they treat customers really well and otherwise provide a lot of value? Why stop them from becoming that big?
(It is a big company, but I also appreciate being able to order on-demand compute, or getting like a hundred million things in under a day delivered to my door)
Agreed. This kind of situation is perfect for separating the true freedom loving (i.e. "you do what you want with what you own") from the conservatives (i.e. "you do what we want you to do"). Those who like freedom says "that's fine, it's their call" or even "I won't do business with them anymore because I disagree with this call", but the conservatives say that "it's wrong and the gov should intervene".
That is a mistake of getting a very ad-hoc contract and then doing something that creates a lot of risk of negative consequences (i.e. supporting the overthrow of a democracy).
Honestly, this feels to me like just the best sort of stuff that private companies, and a world that relies on them does: Everyone likes but doesn't need those services. There's a lot of companies competing and the offering is great. If someone is such a pain in the butt that no one wants to do business with them, they have a hard time but still can if they want to go it alone and build it all themselves.
These are light "highlights how well it works" stories to me.
First, it does seem like it's a form of money. You can trade it for all sorts of things. Some of them directly. Some you make a trade. But it's super liquid; accepted more widely than a lot of country-specific currencies (e.g. I could pay my friends in BTC because they can use BTC, but they're not going to take rubles).
To your questions:
1. You can't know how many shares there are going to be for companies. Even if you choose to use some company's stock as a long term store of value, that company will eventually fail at making profit and will issue new shares.
2. If the US banned BTC, it's easy to move overseas with it; memorize the key (not easy, but possible) and just spend the money when you get overseas. Or if you're going to stay in the US, you could just use it the way the dark web already does (not totally clear on how all that works, but clearly it does).
I don't think they have the ability to keep a secret like that. A couple reasons:
1. The act of keeping the secret makes the tech useless. If it's not incorporated into equipment that could use it (e.g. a naval vessel, an isolated firebase) then what good is it? And if it is incorporated and there's a bunch of 20 year old techs working on it, it's going to leak.
2. I don't think they're that bad of people. If they could save us from global warming with fusion tech, not doing so would be a great tragedy. And historically at least the US military just isn't that selfish. For example, they opened up GPS even when they didn't have to. I think they get that a richer/stronger public means a richer/stronger military.
If you don't mind, why exactly? You're worried the care will get screwed up? Or you worry that someone will steal that data and charge more for insurance?
I'm just wondering about why exactly the paradigm doesn't totally work here. I get that we don't want medical devices failing, but that's different than charting. And I get it that we don't want everyone to have your data. But risking that someone does a data copy vs. reducing healthcare costs seems perhaps a risk worth taking (and it's not like the insurance companies who actually charge us money don't already have it).
Some people debate the ROI of pandemic controls. Also, not all lockdowns are pandemic lockdowns. There have also been curfews unrelated to the pandemic and in some cases predating it.