trevelyan

> The sort of activity which led to the financial crisis would not be mitigated by the establishment of a decentralized currency.

It actually would deal with the issue that led to the GFC.

Remember --- the problem wasn't that there were fraudulent mortgages -- it is that these mortgages were packaged and repackaged in ways that deliberately obscured the risk involved so that people were buying stuff that had no underlying value. The lack of transparency is what encouraged the fraud and created the incentives for it, which is why the behaviour only stopped when there was a 65% fall in the value of pretty much all mortgage-backed-securities.

A mortgage CDO built on something like Ethereum would be programmatically transparent and anyone could look in real-time to see the value of their tranche. It would be trivial to distinguish between good and bad investments. And while there's still the potential for people to purchase things that do not have value, it becomes pretty much impossible for 2008 to happen again in a financial system run on crypto fintech -- intermediaries in the financial system would simply not be able to deliberately obscure transparency into which assets were owned and covered by which securities: if you wanted to check repayment rates you could script something to do the work in real-time by simply monitoring the blockchain.

Yes, it's a silly interpretation. Especially inconsistent since if Yoda is Luke's hallucination as the article asserts, then Luke himself is "killing the past" in the same way that Kylo Ren does, and treating the film as a Millennial attack on the Baby Boomers is rather short-sighted when they are both doing the same thing.

As far as I can see, the only thing approaching a coherent theme in TLJ is the question of how one can move forward if encumbered by the past (Finn and Rey also have these issues). This offers perhaps 1% of the thematic and political subtly of the Lucas trilogies. But even this seems a challenge for the script to grapple with coherently -- surely Yoda (presented as a figure of wisdom) should not be using lightning and fire (Sith tools) to destroy embodied wisdom. And if we are to view Luke as doing the right thing then surely the only logical conclusion of this way of thinking is that Kylo Ren is on the right track.

Ironic that Poe Dameron (who destroys most of the Rebellion) is seen negatively when all he was doing was clearing the way for victory by getting rid of all those ships (human lives)!

I'm going to end the discussion here because I don't want to personalize it, but all you are doing is contradicting yourself and you don't even seem to be reading what I have written. So what is the point?

Yesterday you were complaining that that if everyone transacted in crypto the money supply would be deflationary; today you are insisting no-one will want to hold crypto assets because of volatility. Yesterday you were comparing crypto to the gold standard; today you are suggesting that all economic activity prior to Bretton Woods was "barter" (as if that is an argument!). And then it is clear you haven't even read my previous comment, which explicitly states that cryptocurrency is non-problematic so long as prices continue to be denominated in a non-deflationary asset -- so of course taxes need to continue to be paid in fiat.

So I'll stick to my earlier observation: if you want to understand how crypto will intersect with the fiat economy you need to go back and read Keynes on the causes of liquidity traps, and then work forward from first principles. You don't see it now because -- like Krugman -- you think you are arguing against the Gold Standard. But the Gold Standard is irrelevant: in practice the only question that matters from a macro perspective is to what extent fiat-denominated activity will shrink as crypto-adoption spreads, and whether the manner in which crypto is adopted translates into wage and price rigidity across the economy as a whole. If your generation of macroeconomists do not or cannot understand this, the next ones will.

There's no reason that people can't transact in cryptocurrencies directly, qubex. Remember that the economic problems caused by the Gold Standard did not result from people transacting in gold -- they came about because there was a fall in aggregate demand. Governments embraced hoarding/austerity in response to their own budget problems and that starved the global economy of general liquidity.

As long as all crypto purchases require an exchange of fiat for crypto the total amount of fiat in circulation never falls. It doesn't hurt if people transact in non-fiat assets (that may be preferable in many cases given the efficiency gains involved). Sure, the growth of alternatives to fiat may lead monetary authorities to reduce the amount of fiat in circulation, but all that is really necessary to prevent deflation is that prices continue to be denominated in fiat and that fiat continues to be acceptable as legal tender.

The distribution of assets changes and also the relative purchasing power of each, but the total volume of fiat in circulation does not change -- you get it, yes!

You need to go back and read Keynes -- in a multi-asset world cryptocurrencies will absolutely weaken the ability of Central Banks to stimulate the economy through monetary policy. But the presence of highly-liquid and mildly-deflationary alternatives to cash will also reduce the need for market intervention at all since the people trading INTO crypto will by definition be trading OUT of fiat. And with fewer people holding cash off-market as a long-term investment we will have effectively eliminated the source of liquidity traps, which is the entire justification for monetary policy in the first place.

I blame the lack of enthusiasm for crypto among orthodox macroeconomists on the fact that economic history is out-of-vogue and no-one bothers to read the major thinkers anymore. But it's also ironic on the other end -- since for all of the fuss goldbugs make about Keynes, he would absolutely love bitcoin (read his war diaries!). Sure, it is important prices, wages and taxes continue to be denominated in and settleable in a national currency. But as long as that happens cryptocurrencies will be a boon not a curse, although they are also likely to bring about short-term inflation as the purchasing power of digital assets rises relative to those of traditional currencies.

If the host could open a door with the money behind it the correct response would be to switch doors anyway.

> I don't know what possible source gave you the idea that divisibility == unlimited, but sadly, it's wrong.

It would require a hard fork, but it is technically possible to increase the divisibility of the base satoshi unit. And it should be an uncontroversial change if needed, since it will not require any redistribution of money.

With that said, it doesn't seem likely that the value of a bitcoin will increase in the near future to the point where we will actually need more than 21 quadrillion units of precision.

The irony is that some of the NYT articles about Trump themselves constitute aggressive misinformation if not fake news. I'm thinking in particular about the hit piece they put out about his relationship with women.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2016/...

I share your condemnation of torture, but can we at least drop the partisanship and admit the alternative was hardly any better:

> So the problem for the US and the Europeans has been from the very beginning: What is it you -- who is it you are going to try to arm? [Hillary Clinton -- Goldman Sachs speeches]

In a world where the US acknowledges its role funneling weapons to extremists, the mainstream media doesn't raise an eyebrow at drone-bombings and the President is openly running an extrajudicial kill-list out of the White House, having a presidential candidate suggest that torture is a legitimate tool of war isn't even comparatively retrograde.

This is a bitter comment, but it's so very true. The only thing I disagree with is the assumption that this is just a problem for companies that want to scale or - as someone commented down below - businesses that are "only" worth a few million a year and are presumably too small to attract VC attention....

Because maybe that holds for B2B businesses where no-one outside of the industry knows you exist, but for any B2C startup the reality is that there are a ton of people with connections and stupid money (or pre-funded teams looking to "pivot") that will throw lots of resources into competing with you. These teams tend towards self-delusion (over-estimating market size, pretending that it is a world-changing product, imagining it as a stepping-stone to world domination) because this is necessary for them to raise capital.

Lots of people romanticise lifestyle businesses, but it is miserable competing against funded businesses when your competitors have free money. I have done it twice and one of the worst feelings you can have as a founder is when you've spent a year building a business and your customers start complaining because your service is more expensive than your funded competition. It is psychologically taxing.

How does it take eight people to write this paper?

Brian, do you have any examples of companies that failed using PHP that you think would have succeeded with another interpreted language, and what problems did they run into that gave you this judgment?

Asking as I've developed in a slew of languages and never found the PHP-bashing credible. Most of the complaints seem to come from Rails people, but there are no shortage of MVC frameworks in PHP, including at least one that is a direct clone of Rails.

Best of luck to Google, more like it.

Hilarious that this comment is downvoted. The coin has been quite literally pumped and dumped over the last week or so, and its value has fallen to around half of its ATH and around 15 percent of the value of the winning fork.

However one feels about the principal of the decision to fork and the decision of the market to follow the Ethereum Foundation, downvoting factual descriptions of recent price movement on the ETC chain constitutes inherently scammy behavior.

You're missing the point. The problem isn’t who buys the loans (that is optics). The problem is that you are imposing a long-term tax burden on Americans in order to paper over a structural demand deficit. This is unsustainable and also unfair -- Americans are already paying for the status quo through persistently high unemployment and wage stagnation.

The best solution of course involves China recognizing that persistent trade deficits hurt its trade partners. The problem is that the Chinese political system is its own distributional game, and while there are direct costs for its participants associated with opening up markets and letting foreign businesses compete with domestic ones, there are no costs and only benefits associated with foreign dumping.

The United States is already dealing with economic problems caused by the Chinese trade deficit, which siphons almost as much demand from the economy every year as Obama's 2008 stimulus added in a one-time shot. So it is an interesting question and certainly not one-sided....

https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/protectionism-g...

A trade war would theoretically cause a deadweight loss in global GDP, but as long as the US is not at full employment it is likely losses would end up distributed almost entirely on the Chinese side. Domestic losses would only take place after the return to full employment. Restructuring costs would also be imposed disproportionately on China because they'd be the ones dealing with insufficient demand.

Sure, a better alternative from a conventional economic perspective would be having the United States ramp up spending. The problem is that just printing more USD to enable this causes its own set of problems given that the USD is the world's reserve currency. Having the government take on additional interest-bearing debt avoids this problem, but does not seem particularly attractive when the Chinese are the ones who will end up collecting interest on the loan.

Political outcomes? My sense is that we'd see an upsurge in nationalism in China, perhaps more aggression in the South China Seas, but also a rapid collapse in the Chinese economy that would make coming to terms with the trade deficit a political priority. And is it really crazy for the West to demand a level playing field in exchange for its willingness to keep China from economic collapse?

Chance to work with Mike Hearn and the R3 team? This should be top of the page.

People also steer themselves away so the collision is more likely to happen on the other side of the car.

Malls in China are starting to hollow-out because people are buying almost everything online. Increasingly, you go to malls for the expensive stuff that can be easily faked as well as for restaurants. So if Alibaba isn't recording a lot of profit, that's because it's engineering ways to put money in useful places, not because it doesn't have customers.

You don't seem to understand Krugman, or perhaps it is the broken window fallacy itself. Krugman is not advocating redirecting spending from one use to another (i.e. buying glass instead of buying bread).

Krugman is advocating increasing budget deficits and printing more money to increase aggregate demand. There is a very obvious increase in the amount of money in circulation in the economy in this case.

link? I find this hard to believe.

Where to start? You won't win putting legal pressure on any Chinese startup since that is an empty threat, but you also won't win talking to any big Chinese IT company. The startup won't care about the threat of legal action and the big company will simply clone your product once you convince them the market has potential.

If your goal is making money and/or securing a partnership you have to put yourself into a position of strength. The best way to do this is to launch an actual Chinese competitor yourself. This should cost no more than 10k USD per month assuming you can leverage your existing code, which makes it much cheaper than going the legal route. Feel free to contact me (contact info in profile) if you need help or introductions to people who can actually make this a reality for you in a week or two. I'm in Beijing and have done three startups in China and can put you in touch with people here who can actually help you.

A live product from you poses an existential threat to your competitors and keeps the big IT company from delaying in perpetuity (the typical modus operandi for big players here is to have middle management rush to agreement on the general principles of possible cooperation and then stalling and never doing anything more substantial -- the delay means they aren't sure if it is worth their while to clone you yet). But the threat of your getting actual traction matters because growth puts a deadline on your willingness to accept other people stalling, and your presence starts imposing actual costs on the startup. Those guys will need to change their branding at a minimum since they can't build an independent brand with you in the market, and once they know you will play hardball you will find them a lot more amenable to compromise if you want to go that route. With that said, if your market reception is good you may not even want to continue talking with them, since most Chinese startups are really inefficient and you can probably blow them out of the market anyway.

Blockstream is developing bitcoin into a bank settlement network (that the banks won't use). Maybe you should focus your ire there, instead of on the guy who has actually pushed open source and consumer-grade P2P payment systems miles forward.

Renting isn't a short because you don't profit when the market goes down. And you are still out rent.

You can almost hear the beeping noises as they back the truck up to block the exponential growth curve.

Conspiracy thinking is a cancer: it will destroy you.

Because books speak of books, as with the manuscript, which is a letter about a book about a book about another book, until at the lowest level the story speaks of even more lost works, whose ideas survive through the hand of a scribe who does not understand them. And the burning of the library becomes a burning bush, releasing not destroying knowledge, for it is the light that matters.

It is my favourite of his as well. And thank you for sharing the joke about Wittgenstein. :)

Yes, you need to read that, particularly the subsection titled "Issue 2".

> who rendered a detailed decision based on significant amounts of witness testimony

This is factually incorrect. The UK High Court ruled only on the question of whether the European Arrest Warrant was valid. It did not consider the reasonableness of the allegations and dismissed defense attempts to challenge them on empirical grounds:

> "[Assange's objections] are matters which would be highly relevant at trial. But it is not for this court to determine whether the allegations may fail." (126)