injeolmi_love

The correct term is “googled on Bing”

Many countries just hide poverty and homelessness. For instance by sending them all to a district foreigners don’t go to or know about.

>bewilderingly naive

I am guessing none of your friends or family have been a victim of aggression directed by the Pentagon?

You’re probably right about this issue. BTC is a bearer asset and is inherently difficult to store right- someone has to know the private key, and that someone could always irreversibly steal the funds (hopefully it’s multiple someones with a multisig). Especially with such a large pot of money all state backed hacker groups are going to be actively hunting for vulnerabilities.

There’s a very small number of mining pools that control Bitcoin. All the USA has to do to force a hard fork is order them to run alternative mining software.

> bond-buying and tax-paying are the exact same thing, real consumption forgone by current workers

No. US Treasuries are one of the most liquid and easy to borrow against assets in the world. When institutions buy Treasuries, they use them as collateral to borrow against with new money created by the banking system. This money is then spent in the real economy. That’s very different from taxes.

It was smaller than that, some kind of bridge toll, then got multiplied by late payment up to that number

I’ve received so many of these scam calls from fake authorities that I used to just hang up (now I don’t answer calls ever). One time I didn’t hang up because something felt weird. Turned out it was legit and I owed a $20 traffic ticket from years ago. I’m pretty certain it wasn’t a scam, maybe it was.

Worth considering in light of Vitalik’s recent essay “Make Ethereum Cypherpunk Again” which addresses how blockchains lost their original cypherpunk roots to financialization and the accompanying statist interventions.

https://vitalik.eth.link/general/2023/12/28/cypherpunk.html

You can open a bank account, but the daily limits are low.

International cards usually work.

>welcome foreigners

Kind of, it depends on your ethnicity. Koreans tend to treat white people pretty well. There’s a lot of anti Chinese sentiment, and some anti Japanese. If you have African ancestry they won’t mistreat you but they have very strange stereotypes. There’s currently a “crisis” regarding South East Asian illegal immigrants plus drug smuggling, so if your ethnically from that region keep that in mind.

Korea is not as open to foreigners as for instance Thailand. It’s similar to Japan, being more easy to make friendships but having less State services that are foreigner friendly. Most documents are available in English, and most freeway signs are in both Hangeul and English.

Just keep in mind that the financial system is very locked down in South Korea. Foreigners have very limited access to Korean bank accounts while crypto exchange accounts are completely banned even for permanent residents.

The allied powers exercised total media control in Germany and Japan. This strategy is no longer possible due to social media.

The problem with 3 is global radicalization. Attempts to suppress populations can only work with the ability to convince the population to take your side; in the case of large scale bombing campaigns, the result is more radicalization and an increase in attacks elsewhere.

What’s your bank? I’d like an account there. Every one I’ve checked so far freezes accounts and has a painful process for international wire transfers.

I don’t use Bitcoin because it’s too slow and expensive. Other people do find value in it.

Carrying more than $10k in cash is dangerous, and likely to be seized during international travel.

That’s a list of things people use crypto for. Obviously, if they preferred the non crypto version of those services, they would use them instead.

Personally, the ability to always have access to my money, accept contracts internationally, and to be protected from a fickle financial system.

For other people I’ve seen a wide variety of things they consider valuable that I don’t care for. Trading, community, loans, art, gaming for examples.

Crypto is not zero sum since new value is created.

Surveillance of private spaces is a violation of the human right to privacy. As far as international warrants go, these are issued and serviced all the time.

Acceptance of warrantless searches. To enable greater power and wealth for the political classes.

I’m so disgusted by the people who support these violations of rights. Even if someone isn’t a us citizen, they are still a human and should be treated as such

Just because an object can possess a property does not mean it necessarily has the property. Regarding Bitcoin, it does not necessarily require a regulated market (proof: existence of Bisq). Same holds for private households; instead of relying on force for enforcement, you can rely on trade via the non aggression principle- “I won’t steal your property if you don’t steal mine” prevents us from requiring force to settle disputes. This does not hold true for equities because of the owner/manager problem among other issues; there’s a lot of research on equities markets and why they require regulations you can read if it’s interesting to you.

It doesn’t matter whether the state says Bitcoin is an equity or not; it isn’t one. States frequently make all sorts of false claims.

Regarding democracy, in modern parlance it’s a set of institutions; a 25 person tribe is too small to support those institutions; accordingly a 25 person tribe cannot be democracy in the modern sense.

Crypto exchanges are trading digital assets, not equities.

Public markets need state intervention because the application of force is required.

The point regarding democracy is that you cannot call a 25 person tribe a democracy just because they vote. “What we mean by an election” is about diverse institutions of power such as multiple parties, independent media, freedom of political speech, etc.

Why don’t Bitcoin maxis prefer Monero? It seems you get better decentralization plus a more private digital gold and something that’s much more similar to p2p cash than Bitcoin, without needing a proof of stake chain.

Bitcoin is more centralized than some proof of stake chains. Just 3-5 pools control almost all of the hashrate. Many popular proof of stake chains have 20-50 validators, and some have thousands. Proof of stake is proven to be more decentralized than Bitcoin - except in cases like Ethereum which are similarly centralized.

Public markets are equity markets that any member of the public can participate in. They cannot exist without regulation due to the owner/agent problem. It’s not just a theoretical problem; daos that have tried to have public markets only regulated by code have run into the same issues. Private markets can exist without regulation since private assets are held by individuals or small groups that are able to coordinate effectively.

It is reasonable to be upset at the use of force by the state to protect big tech companies that are using this protection to violate human rights. We might like the idea that the system functions differently, and perhaps some powerful individuals could institute temporary reforms, but as long as a monopoly of force exists it will be abused due to incentives.

There’s a huge difference between a 25 person “democracy” and a 25m person democracy. Firstly in common modern parlance democracy means a set of institutions with a distributed power base. That’s why Germany is democratic and China is not, even though both appeal to the “will of the people” and both have elections. Obviously a 25 person group will not have these institutions and cannot be democratic. Second the small group is based on fundamental human social relationships, while the second one is necessarily parasocial. You can personally know everyone in a 25 person group; you cannot for a 25m one.

States are parasocial, not social. It might feel like state officials are your friends, the president is like a father, and your representative is like a respected community leader you’ve known your whole life. But those relationships aren’t based in natural social human behavior; they require a media ecosystem. Arguments that humans are social and therefore statist doesn’t hold water.

Public markets cannot exist without regulation, for complex reasons you can read about elsewhere. Private markets can exist without the state and do; whether it’s drug markets or decentralized crypto trading apps. The distinction is important to understand for people working in blockchain especially; people have tried to import ideas from corporate governance with general failure. The most successful daos measured by impact are molochdaos, which are designed to be controlled by a small number of private actors. Publicly owned daos such as dash and makerdao have consistently run into issues related to governance, such as decision capture by private organizations, low voter turnout, poor returns to capital, and more. Even now in the case of MakerDao the main driving force is a single developer, Rune, while the dao mostly acts as a discussion platform for his ideas. His endgame plan even will result in the dao governance from having minimal control over the core protocol. Understanding the difference between public and private would have prevented a lot of mistakes.

The article is textbook burnout, including the denials and “friends have it worse”. People need to take care of themselves and their families first, then worry about the rest of the world.