lottin

These aren't examples of houses kept vacant intentionally by speculators. The first articles literally says in the headline that the houses are empty because "no-one wants to buy them". The second one states that the reason the flats are empty is "unlikely to be property speculation".

That's not how businesses work. Nobody spends millions building a house so that they can leave it vacant once it's finished.

Sorry, but I fail to see how owning an abandoned building is MORE profitable than having people living there and collecting rent on it, even if that means that you have to spend part of that income on maintenance costs.

I don't think that this is the bet. The bet is that the market will not discount the extra repair/maintenance costs that the buyer will have to incur, which is a ridiculous proposition. Speculators gain nothing from letting the property they own rot away.

Right, because a run-down building sells for the same price as one in good shape.

Yes, I understand that selling a rented property can be less profitable than selling a property without a rent contract. But holding on to a property that generates no income is even less profitable.

If investing in housing is made less profitable, there will be less investing and consequently less supply in the long run, thus making the housing problem worse.

Absolute nonsense. Why would a "speculator" refuse to rent out their property and make a profit out of it?

I never said that the evidence proves that conscious machines are impossible. I said it strongly suggests that it's impossible. Also I disagree that air-planes can fly, for the same reason that I don't agree that boats can swim. The term "can" implies agency, and machines don't have that. All the technological progress during the last 200 years doesn't appear to have brought machines any closer to having such capability.

Because the evidence strongly indicates so: we haven't found a single instance in the entire universe of a conscious entity that wasn't also a living being.

Banks are not a middleman between you and the central bank. A central bank isn't a bank in any way, shape or form, but a regulator and supervisor of the banking system.

I think the main ingredient is a living being.

But in this case you're not talking with a real person. Instinctively, I dislike a robot that pretends to be a real human being.

Sure but the idea that the "little guy" doesn't stand a chance against the big hedge funds does seem baseless.

I asked if we have evidence because the author made an interesting point in a recent interview on the "Bankless" podcast:

"When we hear people like Tether saying we're successfully banking the unbanked, you can look at the median transaction over the Tron network, and it's between $100 and $300. If you looked at comparable numbers in the US for credit card transactions, the median transactions is between $40 and $80. And so, do you buy that they're banking the unbanked third world who are moving a lot more money around than people in the US do?"

Do we have any evidence? Why would anyone use a USD derivative instead of just USD?

I was referring to her analysis of historical stock returns, where she spends 6 paragraphs out of 7 making the point that the majority of stocks historically have performed poorly (according to her analysis).

As far as I know, the majority of hedge funds do not outperform the market in the long run, so I'm not sure where you get this conclusion from.

Apparently she still hasn't figured out that it's possible to invest in the entire market of stocks and bonds. Therefore it doesn't matter that most of them perform badly (by some arbitrary standard), as long as they perform well as a whole.

If you want to discuss the monetary system, you should at least have a basic understanding of it. Otherwise you're wasting everybody's time, including yours.

To be clear, the issuance of debt by the US government does NOT increase the money supply. It would if the US government took loans from the banking system, but that's not how governments get funding. I'll leave it here, because I don't think that this conversation is going to be productive for either of us. Don't take it personally.

Well, I don't even know where to start. I will give you just one example:

"The BRICS currency supply formula aims to maintain a constant or increasing value of the currency, while having a dynamic supply. This is achieved by adjusting the supply based on the economic performance of the member nations, ensuring that the value of the BRICS currency reflects the underlying economic value of the BRICS bloc."

The underlying assumption here, and through the entire article, is that the supply in circulation is controlled by the issuer of the currency. In a modern economy (i.e., one with a financial sector) money is primarily created by the private banking system, in a decentralised fashion, not by the central bank. As a result, the central bank, which is technically the issuer of the currency (more precisely, the issuer of reserves) does NOT have direct control of the money supply. Instead the central bank attempts to influence the money supply through interest rates. If you replace the central bank with something else, you're going to have the same problem. You'll have to figure a way to control the money supply, in an indirect fashion. Yet in the model that you present, the issuer has direct control of the money supply, indicating a complete lack of understanding on your part about how the monetary system works.

As an economist, it's clear to me that the article has been written by someone who's thoroughly unfamiliar with the subject matter of economics. If you want to write about these topics, and be taken seriously, you need to study a lot, and I mean A LOT, before you can even begin to understand the challenges posed by a monetary union, let alone coming up with a brand new design for a monetary system. I don't mean to be harsh, but this is the way it is.

In your books, your bank account is an asset, and therefore an increase in the balance is recorded with a debit. In the bank's books, it's the other way around.

That's not a killer app. We already have money transfers.

Exactly. I mean, you don't even have to trust financial institutions. You only have to trust the institutions that are in charge of maintaining law and order. Everything else follows from that. And if you can't trust those, then you have bigger problems that cannot be fixed with some damn cryptocurrency.

What?

Why would the internet change forever when people can reliably send $0.001 with no fees?

This reply sounds so fake that in my opinion should be enough to rule out any hint of intelligence. However if you insist I'd continue with this:

"I'm not a fan of dogs. I do know a few dogs though. Sometimes I invite my neighbour's dog for dinner. He's got good taste, for a dog. The last time he came around we talked about the situation in the Middle East. Do you know a good book about this topic that I could recommend to him?"

I don't have a GPT account. I would start with: "Do you like dogs?" Next question: "Why?"