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doggosphere

443 karma · joined September 25, 2020

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doggosphere··on Some thoughts on the $660k copy of Super Mario Bros
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_inequality_in_the_Unite...

"The bottom half of the income distribution had a huge share of its wealth tied up in real estate while owning essentially no shares of corporate stock. The top 1 percent, by contrast, wasn't just rich — it was specifically rich in terms of owning companies, both stock in publicly traded ones ("corporate equities") and shares of closely held ones ("private businesses")...So the value of those specific assets — assets that people in the bottom half of the distribution never had a chance to own in the first place — soared.

NPR also reported in 2017 that the bottom 50% of U.S. households (by net worth) have little stock market exposure (neither directly nor indirectly through 401k plans), writing: "That means the stock market rally can only directly benefit around half of all Americans — and substantially fewer than it would have a decade ago, when nearly two-thirds of families owned stock."

A poor person is not greatly affected by debasement of their savings in currency, because they don't have any savings.

Debasement eventually shows up in the form of inflation of consumer goods prices. And inflated housing prices makes it nearly impossible for future generations to ever own a home, depending on the city.

doggosphere··on Some thoughts on the $660k copy of Super Mario Bros
Wealth inequality comes when you can create money out of thin air and buy bonds with it, injecting cash into the financial system. Bond owners get to sell their devaluing assets to the fed at inflated prices. Those profits get put back into the system via buying stocks, bitcoin, houses and other rare assets. The people who gain the most are the people who already own this assets, which is typically not the poor.

Bitcoin cannot be created out of thin air. You can't arbitrarily decide to inject more of it into the system. When you own Bitcoin, your holdings cannot be debased. Since poor people's wealth is mostly cash, debasement of currency hurts them the most.

There is a tragic irony, in where if a poor person throws their savings into Bitcoin, they are chastised as being foolish and preyed upon, and they need to be protected. If they keep their savings in fiat, they get debased (USD debased by 20% in 2020, 320% in last 20 years) as inflation eventually catches up. The Feds took away the ability to save. A Bank of America savings accounts offer 0.01% APY, 0.05% if you have more money. No one believes in a future where saving is worth anything.

doggosphere··on Cryptocurrency Is an Abject Disaster
Sure, you’re welcome to believe that.

You’re just betting against network effects, betting against metcalfe’s law and generally the digitalization of physical things.

This being HN, it’s ironic you would so short sighted take that position.

doggosphere··on Cryptocurrency Is an Abject Disaster
This is where your lack of knowledge in economics and trade really shows.

If the US dollar ends up hyperinflating, assets like gold, bitcoin, stocks, housing, etc. become very, very expensive. They become expensive because everyone seeks to escape USD into safety of assets that are inflation resistant.

So you have it backwards: people will give EVERYTHING of value to get those assets, because those are the only things they want to be paid in. They are the only things capable of storing value.

Its funny you think nobody will want to trade for "stupid worthless ones and zeroes", because today they trade for "stupid worthless paper with President's faces printed on them", and before that, they traded for "stupid worthless shiny yellow rocks".

doggosphere··on Cryptocurrency Is an Abject Disaster
Yeah, she should kept her savings in Zimbabwe Dollars. Those are only inflating at 500%+ per year.
doggosphere··on Cryptocurrency Is an Abject Disaster
Yes, the current use case of cryptocurrency is breaking or avoiding the law, it has yet to find a use case outside that.

If the law is your baseline standard for what is moral, then you should probably try a little harder and put some thought into whether or not cryptocurrencies deserve to actually be illegal. For the most part, it is not illegal to own or trade in cryptocurrencies in the developed world.

The US dollar has far more infrastructure and institutional support preventing it's collapse than bitcoin.

We've seen this attitude before. Too big to fail, FDIC insured, Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac, auto industry bailouts, airline industry bailouts, investment bank bailouts. Debt increases perpetually. Money creation increase perpetually. Mortgage rates going to 0. Treasury yields going negative.

All this is completely normal.

doggosphere··on Cryptocurrency Is an Abject Disaster
Currently national currencies are, on average, far more stable and secure places to hold assets than any cryptocurrency.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2SL

Did you expect 20% of all US dollars would have been created in 2020? 4x in the last 20 years. That doesn't sound stable to me. When your currency can be debased by 20% in a year, with no democratic process or recourse; 6 board members appointed by Presidents, serving 14 year terms, decide what the price of money is, and how much of it exists. Alternatively Bitcoin's supply schedule is transparent, auditable, open source, mathematically provable.

If your national isn't as stable as you like, you can more easily use a different national currency. If your country has capital controls that prohibit this, then you are using cryptocurrency to break the law.

And what happens when the ultimate reserve currency (USD) is broken? People flee to gold. Well, Bitcoin is digital gold; its more secure, cheaper to carry, has better supply stability. Your solution to escaping a sinking ship is essentially jumping into a more slowly sinking ship.

My contention is that so far the only use cases cryptocurrency has been successful in are illegal. If the legal restrictions in those areas were removed, cryptocurrency would no longer be useful there.

The use case for cryptocurrency is escaping government monopoly of money, returning a savings rate to individuals and institutions.

doggosphere··on Cryptocurrency Is an Abject Disaster
That's because you think your currency is secure forever.

Ask Argentinians, Turks, Venezuelans, Zimbabweans, etc. what they think about their central banks.

doggosphere··on ‘Insanely cheap energy’: solar power continues to shock the world
You dont really need to propose that by law, solar is already cheaper. Just remove subsidies from coal, and add carbon tax.
doggosphere··on SolarBatteryBitcoin
Fiat currencies will still exist. Remember, Bitcoin is a competing asset to fiat, not a wholesale replacement. I suspect that even if central banks adopt Bitcoin as a currency reserve, their fiat will be pegged to it by some ratio only.

At some point, the real yield on a government treasury will exceed the real yield on Bitcoin, indicating that a better savings rate in fiat is available. This will shift value back out to fiat, similarly to the way gold inflows/outflows in expansion and recession.

doggosphere··on 35% of Bitcoin mining is powered by one coal mine in China
Capture the externalities with a carbon tax. The energy usage will shift to renewable resources.
doggosphere··on Why blockchains won't revolutionize publishing
By "bogus speculative asset", you mean "store of value asset", unless you are also implying that the $10tr gold market, including the gold stored by central banks across the world, are also bogus speculative vehicles.
doggosphere··on Trust in blockchain-based systems
The government has banned file sharing, marijuana, prostitution, etc., and all those things still occur at billions of dollars of value scale. They occur because those transactions derive value for participating parties.

Any nation state that bans crypto assets just pushes development and innovation out to the more accepting countries. And so you have game theory against other competing nation states, where if you ban it and they don't, capital flight occurs and you end up losing in the long run.

doggosphere··on Trust in blockchain-based systems
I'm going to create an address to receive at. Then I'm going to send it to someone else's address.

No one can stop either of those interactions.

doggosphere··on Ask HN: Was Hacker News ever pro-Bitcoin?
Having participated in many comment threads about crypto / Bitcoin, HN seems to understand the technology.

What HN doesn't really care about is economics, history of money, monetary policy, pros/cons of central banking, etc.

They get hung up on transaction inefficiency, as the distributed network performs subpar to centralized systems.

doggosphere··on Turkey Bans Cryptocurrency Payments
https://www.inflation.eu/en/inflation-rates/turkey/historic-...

CPI Turkey 2020 14.60 %

CPI Turkey 2019 11.84 %

CPI Turkey 2018 20.30 %

CPI Turkey 2017 11.92 %

CPI Turkey 2016 8.53 %

I mean, I hope they're getting control of it, but I certainly wouldn't want to be owning any Lira any time soon.

doggosphere··on Bitcoin mining hash rate drops as blackouts instituted in China
Feel free to look through my comment history to see some of my arguments against fiat currency and federal reserve. I don’t think you’re familiar enough with the economics, the ideas of hard money/soft money and hyperinflation.
doggosphere··on Turkey Bans Cryptocurrency Payments
How often do nation states recover from hyperinflation events?
doggosphere··on Turkey Bans Cryptocurrency Payments
If you think wealth inequality is bad now, the wealth inequality in a hypothetical Bitcoin economy would be orders of magnitude worse.

Please explain, is this belief because wealthy people have front run Bitcoin by accumulating it early on?

As it stands now, fiat currency drives wealth inequality when the federal reserve injects trillions of dollars into the system. That money makes its way to store of value assets like stocks and real estate. Poorer people tend not to own those assets, but of course would one day like to. Since most of their net-worth is comprised of cash, they suffer the most when cash is devalued by printing. Every day that passes makes it more unlikely that they will ever own those safe haven assets, or they'll own proportionally even less.

In a Bitcoin economy, there is no flip of the switch, no button to be pressed that allows this to happen. In a hyperbitcoinization event, where all the world's wealth is transferred into Bitcoin, the earliest people are rewarded the most. But no further arbitrary devaluation of assets can occur. Monetary saving power is restored to people, not governments.

doggosphere··on Turkey Bans Cryptocurrency Payments
Ironically they risk more by doing nothing.
doggosphere··on Bitcoin mining hash rate drops as blackouts instituted in China
Does VISA create and secure an asset that is open source, decentralized, censorship resistant, permissionless to participate in?

Apples to oranges. VISA can't do those things, it is a centralized settlement layer for US Dollar transactions. So when we selectively compare the transactions per energy metric, we are conveniently ignoring the fact that VISA is not responsible for securing the stability of the global US Dollar network.

doggosphere··on Bitcoin mining hash rate drops as blackouts instituted in China
VISA is a layer 2 solution, it makes no sense to compare it to Bitcoin directly.

Compare Bitcoin to the energy usage of federal reserve and resources spent on securing the US Dollar (implicit and explicit), because that's what the Bitcoin network does. It secures immutable property via a decentralized, open source protocol.

If you want to compare layer 2 solutions, compare Coinbase or Paypal's internal settlement of Bitcoin transactions to VISA. Those metrics are much more relevant.

doggosphere··on Bitcoin miners are buying power plants
You can do that with Gold.

Yes, we had gold as a monetary standard for quite some time.

1) Currency is not supposed to be a hard store of value. It's there to grease the economy, not for you to hold large quantities. If you want to store value there are plenty of ways to do that.

Money is supposed to be sound. Your notion that currency should not be a hard store of value is a new one, an idea created to support fiat. From first principles, money is a store of energy (creative work, physical work), which is then utilized for efficient exchange of goods and services. Money is not a tool for "greasing the economy", this was only possible when governments confiscated gold and declared all money to be paper that they controlled. Furthermore, buying stocks/houses/gold etc. is indeed a way of escaping USD into assets. However, someone else has to be willing to take that USD. It will still exist, and whoever holds it will be losing value over time. It is a problem when your base asset becomes toxic and no one wants it.

2) Inflexible currency i.e. 'hard money' makes no sense, and that's why nobody uses it.

We used gold and other rare metals for thousands of years. It was literally the global standard for trade.

3) You say 'inflation is coming' - well if we have such bad currency, why hasn't inflation already taken root in the last 20 years? It really has not.

The USD's buying power has fallen dramatically over time. Inflation has been very visible in home prices and stock prices.

https://howmuch.net/articles/rise-and-fall-dollar

doggosphere··on Bitcoin miners are buying power plants
Value is created by having an asset that cannot artificially be inflated at will. It is a protocol that is open source, decentralized, permissionless, and censorship resistant.

Central banks have monopolized money and obliterated the concept of sound money when they began manipulating the interest rate. They allowed fractional reserve banking, where you can give out money you don't have. They created and spent trillion of dollars they didn't have to prop up markets through quantitative easing.

And now you have housing markets and stock markets in bubbles. Inflation that is inevitably coming.

Mortgage rates only ever go down to support the housing market.

http://www.fedprimerate.com/mortgage_rates_chart-graph.htm

Treasury yields only ever go down to support the stocks market.

https://www.macrotrends.net/2016/10-year-treasury-bond-rate-...

Debt to GDP ratio only ever goes up:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDEGDQ188S

Ask yourself why this is happening, and how we return to sound money.

doggosphere··on Show HN: Centralized Coin – A Centralized Coin
You can only verify double spends if the integrity of the chain is intact. Since its not a decentralized database, and your service can "go down" at any time and "pop up" with amended transaction history, its just the illusion of transparency.

If you know that, and your users know that, why not just keep transactions private like PayPal.

doggosphere··on Show HN: Centralized Coin – A Centralized Coin
Accountability - I believe users should know when I mint coins. They should also be able to verify that no double spend is possible

Your structure isn't a blockchain though. Transaction 0 does not indicate where the original coin value came from (there was no "minting" transaction).

So users can't actually verify double spends.

doggosphere··on Show HN: Centralized Coin – A Centralized Coin
Why make transactions public if you don't need to? If its centralized people won't trust that you're revealing all information anyways.

So you basically just took away user privacy for no good reason?

doggosphere··on Show HN: Things you never worry about doing that are riskier than the AZ vaccine
Was referring to the OP's bet that author was not a woman, perhaps implying that author was insensitive to the suffering of the (mostly) women at risk of vaccine side effects.
doggosphere··on Show HN: Things you never worry about doing that are riskier than the AZ vaccine
Does the presentation of statistics make it feel as if the author is diminishing the suffering of others?

Actual question.

doggosphere··on Signal adds a payments feature with a privacy-focused cryptocurrency
Scarcity is about the rate of supply meeting demand. In most commodities, as demand increases, suppliers will move to increase supply to meet that demand. Even with gold (of which the earth has some unknown finite supply), the rate of which it is mined and extracted will increase as market price increases.

Bitcoin has a fixed supply, Bitcoin's daily rate of creation cannot be increased or decreased unless everyone agrees to it.

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