IronIvan

If Peter did in fact work hard and now he's stripped of the results of his labor while being told that probably he only managed to accumulate capital because he was just exploiting others, what incentive landscape does that create.

Is a lot of profit a function of factors much less commendable than creating value for others? Sure. But by lumping in the productive people with the parasites, you are undermining those people who deserve your protection the most.

Moving to the US I was able to 5-6x my income (from what I could have realistically made) , while reducing my tax burden by 15 percentage points, and so I've been happily living a workaholics' lifestyle since.

Looking back, it really boggles my mind how much engineering potential is squandered in Europe. You'd have to be an idiot to want to work hard given how raw of a deal you are getting (work for almost 2 decades as an engineer just so you can afford the average one family home - what a joke!) and people understand that intuitively (hence pushing for ever fewer work hours or even days because what else is there if your salary is essentially capped and you quickly hit a 50 % tax rate (when combining income tax and social security) for every additional hour worked).

</rant>

So this has been a long time in the making, really.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_one-hundred-doll...

or more briefly: never

After all as we all know: If you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear.

And look at how inefficient all these permissionless, trustless protocols are! What a waste! Let's just all trust a central authority and think of the savings and the children.

Technically, this is not correct.

If your chance of dying drops exponentially (perhaps not very realistic, hence 'technically'), your probability of survival converges to something greater than 0.

E.g.: If your probability of dying in the first year is 1/2, then 1/4, then 1/8 and so on, then your probability of living forever is roughly 29 % ( https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=product+i%3D1+to+infin... )

I made a rather long (2 hours) YouTube video that explains the fundamentals of our current economic system - perhaps it is helpful to someone who wants to get a better understanding of the issue:

http://youtu.be/t8_sjmRBGPE

http://www.heise.de/jobs/artikel/Wer-verdient-wie-viel-98184...

From my personal experience I can tell you that colleagues at the company I previously worked for in Vienna, Austria made about 42 k / year with a several years of experience and a masters in computer science. But pay was always an issue there.