Of course everyone is actually there to meet people, but you can't look like that's what you're doing. You have to look like you're doing something else, to lower the stakes of the interactions. Everyone has to look like they're not trying.
562 karma · joined December 29, 2020
Even if cryptocurrencies weren't completely stomped out, shouting "Bitcoin lives!" from a prison cell wouldn't be that helpful to the person serving the sentence. The "many-headed hydra" isn't much use to the severed heads.
Moreover I don't think the failure of the "War on Drugs" provides a relevant example. The inability of the government to stamp out illegal drugs doesn't indicate that it would be a reasonable risk for many (or most) people to maintain their wealth in cryptocurrencies, if cryptocurrencies were to become illegal.
No one wants to be a "human [something_not_human]".
If the "real" contract is the one enforced by law, and the "smart" contract is the one that might facilitate a burglary, why not dispense with the latter?
Take out "natural" and it seems like any non-inflationary cryptocurrency would be a target for a Georgist tax.
I don't think this is true. This is one of these work ethic corollaries that helped build wealthy societies when productivity was proportional to people's effort. But it seems to grow more obsolete by the day.
"Common people" are entering the game without the most important piece of equipment they need, namely a pile of money that doesn't come out of their own pocket if they lose.
They'd just have to look at anyone unwise enough to use the money instead of turning it over to authorities (or abandoning the wallet).
Slander and libel are illegal, but the threshold at which the law takes effect depends on how public the target is.
As such care has to be taken when making statements about a private citizen, e.g. "Mr. X is [something horrible]", but one can say almost anything about a public figure like the president, or senators, without fear of legal trouble.
Could there be an equilibrium where energy efficiency is achieved because miners have avoid using a noticeable amount of electricity to avoid legal trouble?
Having a bunch of basic, generally useful algorithms in recent memory does save a lot of time on the "general solution" side when you're working in a new milieu. (That saved time then gets consumed trying to find, configure, and tune anything in an unfamiliar cloud environment, but that's another kettle of fish).
Cryptocurrency supporters should be lobbying for government bans, not against them.
The most direct way to demonstrate that cryptocurrencies are truly decentralized and resilient to censorship is to subject them to unrelenting attack, most naturally in the form of legal crackdowns.
Yes, as an alternative to not allowing the trade.
If the bank considers something highly risky, it makes sense to protect themselves and the customer by making sure they've got some money locked up outside of the trade (a bankrupt customer is no longer a customer, after all). It would basically cap the percentage of net worth that they could put at risk, where they'd need to have $10 set aside for every $1 in the risky position.
> "The reason the percentage of heirs has decreased is not that fewer people are inheriting great fortunes, but that more people are making them."
It's likely that many of the inheritances of 1982 were the echo of the corrupt and monopolistic industrialism in the 19th century. Is it a bad thing that the great individual fortunes that were built a century earlier couldn't be amassed in the 20th? Have we returned to a 19th-century environment now, with technology taking the place of railroads and telegraphs? On that note...
> "the major sectors of the economy were either organized as government-backed cartels or dominated by a few oligopolistic corporations."
Unless I see a FAANG company go out of business, soon, and as abruptly as it appeared, I'm inclined to think we're entering a new oligopolistic era. Just because these companies were recently startups doesn't mean they aren't entrenched now.
(As an aside regarding the wealth tax, that actually would have worked to reduce the number of heirs at the top of the list in 1982 had it been enacted some time earlier.)
Physical art, which people have historically paid for, is much more difficult to credibly reproduce than NFTs.
Edited to add:
Moreover if the argument in favor of NFTs is that they're not worse than what preceded them, then what's the point of introducing them? If the same problems in the traditional art market (especially for digital works) are recapitulated with NFTs, I don't see the point.
I don't think re-recording albums for the purpose of attacking former business partners, who priced the intellectual property at roughly all the money that she had been paid in their previous arrangement, indicates a willingness to keep re-recording things.
It seems like a blockchain-based technology that only works when backed by the threat of lawsuits combines the worst aspects of the art market and the cryptocurrency market.
That said, I as a buyer-and-holder, I welcome the hordes of active traders willing to expend time, effort, and money to discover the price that I too will be able to trade at.
What the original poster needs is a company that is already functioning without them, and does not require any of their effort to keep going.