seibelj

I think you have a fundamental misunderstanding of how all of this works and have a sneering, dismissive affect because this is something you don’t understand embraced by people who don’t care what you think.

My company is one of the largest NFT companies. This is one of our projects. Millions of dollars in secondaries on OpenSea and our hosted marketplace at https://Nickelodeon.xyz/

We collect all royalties and remit payment to the rights holders which include all artists and creators with residuals on Rugrats, of which there are many. They get their check quarterly along with all the other payments (movies, tshirts, video games, etc.)

This isn’t exactly rocket science

A perfectly healthy baby 1 day before birth that is put to death is entirely different. There is nothing magical about birth that makes it OK to slit the throat of a healthy baby.

As a thought experiment, imagine a healthy baby born premature 1 day early. Could you take a knife and stab it to death as it screams and cries? If not, perhaps it is indeed murder.

Similarly, physician assisted suicide could make sense in some cases. However a chronically depressed patient that is annoying the doctor, I don't approve of offering suicide to. As someone who battled depression for many years and eventually vanquished it, a quick and painless suicide might have made sense when I was at my lowest point. I don't like how easy it has become in Canada according to this article.

The government didn't even sanction all the smart contracts. BSC chain had more activity than the Ethereum contract, but they didn't seem to know about it. Furthermore, Tornado had compliance tools built in that allows users to prove where their funds came from to make themselves compliant with KYC rules.

The whole thing seems really hamfisted and poorly thought out. The US Secretary of State even tweeted incorrectly that North Korea built Tornado, then had to delete the tweet! https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2022/08/08/us-secretary-of-s...

I don't think the government really thought it through, and future lawsuits will hopefully result in Tornado being un-sanctioned and privacy affirmed as a constitutional right, as it did in the 90s when source code was declared free speech after a long battle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernstein_v._United_States

Just because it's on the internet, doesn't mean ISPs aren't ultimately responsible. People chose to route internet packets, they chose to build and manage data centers, and they chose to run the service. And now everyone involved in the internet has to deal with this sanctioned information flowing with everything in that space.

Clearly, we need to require all IP packets to be transmitted only from people and entities who are registered with the government so we can censor any bad data from being transmitted. Otherwise, illegal information might flow.

In reality the rich get richer etc. etc.

But bigcos don’t trust their own employees and have to justify their massive capital investments in office space. So there is a real, tangible benefit to startup life over cushy bigco.

It's better to be hungry and scrappy than born with a silver spoon and well-connected, although the rare combination of raw ambition tied with excellent connections is the ideal.

Worst case you bust out but your skills are 10x from the FAANG clock punchers. Good luck out there

It is far easier today than ever to get material support with food stamps, section 8 housing, the EITC, food banks, and things are so good that we literally can’t stop the poor masses from illegally crossing our borders in order to live here.

There is a fever dream in the woke / intellectual left in America that some long struggling proletariat will rebel. This is against the ethos and culture of America as a bootstraps, capitalistic nation that even the leaders of the Democratic Party have to bluntly reject socialism (see Nancy Pelosi’s shouting at the question).

My wife is Vietnamese and her parents were boat people. The entire extended family despises democrats and specifically faults their hatred of meritocratic education as a sticking point. The left has no idea what minorities really think because the party is run primarily by rich white people who exist in an echo chamber.

America is the land of opportunity. It will continue to be so provided we do everything we can to stop the deranged, intolerant, anti-business left from ruining what makes our country the best in the world.

It’s another to actively reject traditional structures like hard work and family. There is a sizable cohort of online-types that actually thinks society would be better if the government ran everything, work was outlawed, rich people went to jail, and all manner of extremely insane ideas that they blame their own problems on. They actually think the world is ending because of global warming, democracy is under attack, and doom scroll every day reading horrible nonsense that will never happen.

I would argue the human condition is to think everything is failing and the apocalypse is coming at any moment. This a frequent phenomenon throughout history and every generation has this narrative. However instead of religion now it’s environmental destruction but I see that as another type of religion.

Narcissism is rampant throughout society and no one wants to feel any pain or have to struggle whatsoever for success. We live in the greatest time that ever existed and some people are more miserable than ever.

I choose to be happy and appreciate what life offers rather than despair at things I can’t control and ultimately don’t matter.

It seems to be the hyper-online types that reject traditional values that are the most depressed and apocalyptic in their mindset. Myself - I look outside and the sun is shining, my kids are playing, everything is good in the world to me.

It’s totally reasonable to expect a bare minimum of compliance in order to get taxpayer funded housing. I don’t know if you have friends or family who are heroin addicts but I can promise you they are not pleasant people to be around, especially when they start stealing to fund their habit.

Arguably the blockchain makes detecting and prosecuting money laundering easier than our opaque legacy financial system.

Bitcoin worth anything above $0 would have been an absurd thought 10 years ago, now it's a global asset class worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Unstoppable money not backed by any state is an amazing accomplishment. This alone is a mind blowing fact to me, but again, to the HN crypto hater it's meaningless, because the definition of "success" is constantly moving.

Blockchain and finance are deeply intertwined, so a lot of applications built on digital financial rails (blockchains) are naturally around capital formation, derivatives, trading, etc. but to the socialist / statist that should be outlawed (not just in crypto but likely Wall Street itself) so that isn't anything to you.

One counterpoint is the HN shibboleth of Stripe. Stripe is barely a tweak on PayPal, or at least it was at first, yet everyone on HN ejaculated in amazement at the ability to take a credit card with a javascript function. Of course I think Stripe is a great company, I just want to put into context how on HackerNews, Stripe = "Amazing incredible glorious $100 billion epic company" and cryptocurrency = "Wow a trillion dollar asset built on pure computer science and economic principles created by mysterious cypherpunk, who cares".

USDC is over $50 billion - https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/usd-coin - so clearly the market is seeing value in a stablecoin running on crypto rails.

But then the counterpoint is "BUT NO ONE NEEDS THIS HAVEN'T YOU HEARD OF VISA DURR DURR HURR" it's exhausting to try and argue.