scyclow

This is a fun book, but it famously embellishes, exaggerates, and sensationalizes the tulip bubble [1]. The efficient markets people obviously don't like the story, but there doesn't seem to be much evidence that it happened on the same scale that Mackay portrays it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania#Modern_views

This is where non-financial use of blockchain could really shine, IMO. Self-sovereign identity management with a smart contract-based process for recovering ids if keys get lost or hacked. Blockchains are pretty out of favor these days, but I really don't see a better solution for decentralized identity management.

No, people are still trading them for some reason, and there's pretty good liquidity. The highest offer right now is $15.2k, which someone can dump any of the 10k apes for that. And there were 16 sales (totaling $271K) in the last 24 hours.

It does fluctuate, but the floor price is still miraculously $16k

I don't know what American LLMs you're using. Just asked Claude, which gives nuanced answers on both, but amounts to "It's contested, but numerous authoritative bodies say yes" and "it depends on your definition of gender".

As an American, I can conclusively say that we absolutely have no moral high ground whatsoever. But bringing the topic back to LLMs, I don't feel great about using an LLM that has a panic attack any time I ask about Tiananmen Square or Taiwanese sovereignty.

Really? Blocked how?

I agree as it relates to bitcoin: It's positioning itself as a store of value... and it kind of works as long as the collective delusion that it _is_ a store of value holds up. But that sort of self-fulfilling prophecy is kind of flimsy. Governments get to decide what money is based on charging taxes and demand how it gets paid.

Legal contracts are similar. They 100% are reliant on social and institutional forces for enforcement and meaning. But I think smart contracts are different because they are self-enforcing. It would be very difficult to use a smart contracts as a replacement for legal contracts in most circumstances. But when the contract relates to state and digital assets on the network then it's a great tool. And if you end up with a network that hosts a lot of these important contracts, then the native crypto asset (which is used as gas to power said contracts) has value as a commodity. And if that commodity also shares all the properties of good money (fungibility, durability, portability, etc.) then all of a sudden you have money.

Author here. Gas costs have actually come down a lot over the past few years. It only costs me a few dollars to run the transaction. It's more that scheduling, setting up, conducting, and tearing down each burn session is a huge pain in the ass. So if I can burn 10 bills an hour, then I'd clear maybe $450 an hour after gas, which doesn't feel crazy for providing boutique financial services.

That's not really a valid criticism. You can say that same thing about any protocol. Who's to say that the majority of btc hashing power isn't single force or conspiring group?

Being able to handle Bitcoin transactions is fine, but it's disingenuous to act like it's the only way to be truly decentralized.

Frankly, this is better than a stablecoin since the value is locked on the blockchain forever no matter what.

It's a federal crime a federal crime pursuant to United States Code Title 18 (CRIMES AND CRIMINAL PROCEDURE), Part I (CRIMES), Chapter 17 (COINS AND CURRENCY), Sec. 333 (Mutilation of national bank obligations):

Whoever mutilates, cuts, defaces, disfigures, or perforates, or unites or cements together, or does any other thing to any bank bill, draft, note, or other evidence of debt issued by any national banking association, or Federal Reserve bank, or the Federal Reserve System, with intent to render such bank bill, draft, note, or other evidence of debt unfit to be reissued, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than six months, or both.

The math here doesn't really work out for a couple reasons.

First... sure, if you spend $500,000 on buybacks instead of paying dividends, then large shareholders might make trillions of dollars. But individual investors make money also. In fact, every shareholder will make money in proportion to how much stock they own! The little guy isn't really getting screwed here.

Second, the stock price is determined by supply and demand. Stock buybacks increase the price by reducing supply. But, if we take the example mentioned where the company blows its entire bank account on stock buybacks (thus, harming the actual business)... the stock becomes less valuable, demand goes, and the price goes down.

Stock buybacks are functionally the same as if the company pays a dividend, and then every shareholder decides to reinvest. Except doing it as a buyback is (I believe) more tax efficient since the investor doesn't get hit with income tax before the reinvestment.

> POW is necessary to keep the network secure

It's certainly a way to keep the network secure. At best it's marginally better than POS. At worst, it's a ticking time bomb security budget cliff.

Pretty much everything other than bitcoin, monero, and dogecoin are running proof of stake these days anyhow, so it kind of doesn't matter.

There are different flavors of stablecoins though. There's the ponzi scheme flavor that is propped up based on hand waving alchemy, and there's the boring (and now regulated) flavor that's actually backed by real money.

Yeah, but so can PayPal and Visa and Mastercard. The issue here is that payments is essentially a duopoly. Itch doesn't have any alternatives because they're locked into traditional payment rails. Stablecoins at least let someone else decide "Hey, you know what, I'm going to create a coin that can be used as payment for porn games." And executing on that is fairly straightforward.

There are a lot of people mentioning crypto as a possible solution to this, and a lot of people responding that crypto is a ponzi scheme, and they're not interested. But congress recently passed stablecoin legislation that could possibly fix this problem. Recipients would have a straightforward way of receiving money, and they wouldn't need to gamble on the price of bitcoin. Most people would probably still use a third part payment processor to handle the rough edges of managing money on the blockchain. But if any of them try to pull something like this it would be incredibly easy spin up a new processor and migrate accounts.

Look at the GENIUS Act https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/394...

Sure, so I guess if the owner of the land doesn't own the mineral rights then they have no incentive to look for oil with or without a LVT.

LVT proponents also typically advocate for pigovian taxes (tax things you want less of to disincentivize it) and taxes on rent-seeking activities. So, offshore drilling would probably be hit with something like a carbon tax (directly or indirectly) and tech companies might get hit with a tax regarding their monopolies or IP. The CPAs and the electricians would get off easy, though.

Let's be real: if this scenario unfolded today, your land would be worth more as housing/infrastructure/commercial/etc. than as farmland, some real estate developer would buy it from you, and you'd make a lot of money without having to do anything. If there was a 75% LVT then you'd just make less money.

The first two arguments he makes here miss the point of a LVT entirely

> An LVT discourages searching for new uses of land

> An LVT implicitly taxes improvements to nearby land

If I find oil on my land, or if someone builds a park across the street from me, then I should be taxed more. The land is more valuable to me! At a 100% LVT I essentially break even. Anything less then that, and I still come out on top.

The only valid arguments in here are the last two. If people buy a piece of property with certain assumptions and the government turns around implements a 100% LVT, then I can understand why they would be upset.

So sure, there are some practical considerations to implementing a 100% LVT immediately tomorrow with no exemptions, and it probably wouldn't raise enough revenue to eliminate all other taxes. But the government could still raise a ton of tax revenue with minimal deadweight loss by phasing in a 75% LVT over 30 years with a handful of common sense exemptions.

My biggest criticism of LVT is that the name is confusing :)

The idea is that you're taxing 100% of land rents, not 100% of the total value. So if there's a 5% cap rate on your property, and the land value is $300k, then the annual tax bill would be $15k.

If I'm understanding the paper correctly, they're assuming that defenders are also scanning deployed contracts with the intention of ultimately reporting bug bounties. And they get the $6,000/$60,000 numbers by assuming that the bug bounty in their model is 1/10th of the exploit value.

This kind of misses the point though. In the real world engineers would use AI to audit/test the hell out of their contracts before they're even deployed. They could also probably deploy the contracts to testnet and try to actually exploit them running in the wild.

So, while this is all obviously a danger for existing contracts, it seems like it would still be a powerful tool for testing new contracts.

So why do you need timestamps? Or, why do you even need a third party server to run HME to begin with? Why not just encrypt the data and let the client figure it out?

Encrypt the diffs for the server and write the hash to a blockchain to manage the ordering. Boom, problem solved without HME.

If they really cared about cracking down on ebikes then they'd only try to nail ebikes, not regular cyclists.

The conspiracy theorist in me thinks that the real reason they're doing this is to help ICE nab a bunch of delivery workers.