I've seen others have success complaining on the Coinbase subreddit [1]. It's run by Coinbase staff and they seem to respond better there than the ticketing system.
1,896 karma · joined November 10, 2012
This assumes that one lives in a jurisdiction where the law is just and financial institutions are trustworthy. As another example, if the United States were to make end to end encryption illegal [1], are you willing to say, well that's the law of the land, why do we need to keep developing Wireguard or OpenVPN? There would be other jurisdictions that don't disallow it, so the existence of jurisdictions that do disallow it isn't a reason not to continue to develop the technology.
Technologists can be picky about when it's okay to flaunt regulation. I won't speak for you, but many who denounce cryptocurrency for its dubious legal status will in the same breath praise companies like Uber for improving the transportation status quo by "disrupting" the outdated regulations that existed. I see cryptocurrency the same way. I hope that its disruptive nature will cause jurisdictions to reevaluate their financial laws. In the United States, the aforementioned announcement from the OCC today [2] giving guidance to banks on how to use cryptocurrency is a step in the right direction, whether or not you think it's a genuine opinion or opportunism. Certainly there is a place for centralized systems, but centralization should be optional, not a requirement. If one doesn't trust the person/company/government running the centralized service, there should be alternatives.
[1] https://protonmail.com/blog/usa-laed-act-anti-encryption/
[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/haileylennon/2021/01/04/occ-reg...
To compare this to open source, why did we need Linux in 1991? If you wanted Unix with paid support from a company, it was available. If you wanted free Unix, the BSDs were available. If you were worried about the BSD lawsuits, then it'd seem more appropriate to encourage this Torvalds fellow to contribute to GNU Hurd, a right proper operating system in development, instead of embarking on a scrappy one person effort.
If you trust the rule of law and the financial system, then you are free to continue to use it and ignore cryptocurrency in your life. But what's the problem with having an alternative for those that don't share your view and wish to develop a system free from the encumberances of trust in third parties?
[1] https://www.texasmonthly.com/articles/good-bye-to-all-that/
Indeed, the story is that he got his start selling PCs out of his Jester dorm room.
Gambling, yes. But the stock market is not a ponzi scheme.
In 2010, I had just graduated college, was quickly running out of money, and had no luck applying to jobs at software shops with languages I knew. Out of desperation, I applied to a PHP shop, with my only qualification being that I knew Perl, a cousin of PHP. Embarrassingly, I had to admit this in the interview, and even though they let me finish the interview in Perl, I wasn't optimistic.
A week later, I got a call back that the job was mine. There was a big learning curve, but I picked up PHP well enough to rise up to a leadership position on the dev team. When I was promoted, I learned that when I originally applied, the only other person that applied for the position was a guy who brought a guitar with him hoping that would sell them on the fact that he was a great culture fit. They said if anyone had applied that actually knew PHP, they would have gotten the job by default.
I was lucky that no one who knew PHP applied to the job when I did, but it was my hard work that kept me there.
Later in the thread you state "Being born in a free country with a working brain and body is most of what you need". This is the luck of winning genetic, social, and geographical lotteries.
I was addressing OP's concern about his own life: "In some cases I really would become poor or have no future if I didn't succeed"
I agree with you that part of OP's problem is framing success together with things like being rich and having a future.
I've approached this by taking the stance that life should be process-oriented, not results-oriented. Sometimes you can do the right thing and still lose. Sometimes you can do the wrong thing and win. "Success" is often just luck with a nice backstory written after the fact. That isn't to downplay anyone's hard work, but often it's luck that provides the opportunity to work hard for something worthwhile in the first place.
It's entirely possible that in your life, you could have succeeded and still ended up becoming poor due to circumstances beyond your control. It's also possible that if you had ultimately failed, circumstances would not have turned out the way it so obviously looked like they had to play out.
Ultimately, you can only control yourself in this universe. If you've done everything you could do and gave it your best, really did all you can, then regardless of the outcome, you should be proud of yourself.
I think NDizzle's point is that most peoples' rationale goes economically as you did, and that maybe we should reconsider that.
That's the catch. We don't know what problems are important. We think we do, and sometimes we're right, but we've gone down dead ends too. And sometimes something that feels like a dead end turns out to be pivotal.
I'd bet there's many scientists and researchers out there who had their eureka moment while their brain was disengaged during leisure time. Disconnecting and play are essential parts of discovering the important things.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graviton#Experimental_observat...
Many philosophers and others have written about how the powerful divide the lower classes in this way. I don't have any explicit citations offhand, but your observations have merit amongst those who study these issues.
Similarly, the axiom of choice allows for the existence of nondefinable choice functions [5] in certain cases, so is rejected.
Regarding the part about analysis, the field of computable analysis [6] exists to establish analysis on constructivist footing.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructivism_(philosophy_of_...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definable_real_number
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computable_number
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructible_number