https://www.ibm.com/investor/att/pdf/IBM-2Q23-Earnings-Press... IBM is getting killed in infrastructure, their margins look to be growing but losing ~15% of their revenue y/y. This seems like them just gouging the last of the customers who are either unwilling or unable to leave.
for context during the same period AWS grew 12% y/y.
most people globally do hold most of their savings in cash, many people are unbanked and physical currency is the only way they have to preserve wealth.
sure, if you think the US government is united against bitcoin and willing to step on the civil liberties afforded the ~30 million US citizens who own it.
but.... I really don't think either of those things is true. You should talk to people in the state dept or DoD and pay less attention to FED/Treasury. The current USD global reserve status quo isn't always great for the US gov.
so you're saying a black swan event might affect the price? gee well Im glad that doesn't currently happen with USD, CNY, JPY....
you can also use bitcoin like a physical bearer asset (gold bullion) by using things like https://opendime.com/ so even if the network was 100% down transactions could still happen IRL. You'd just be exchanging a hidden private key that can move UTXO's on the blockchain.
considering that I'd say bitcoin is much more anti-fragile than a bank statement, in most of the natural disasters you're talking about im not so sure banks will be letting you withdraw any significant amount of $
anyone throwing those critics at bitcoin needs to provide criteria for when their critic is no longer valid.
They need to provide:
- vol metric thresholds
- price targets
- adoption %
- etc...
We've had over 10 years of shifting the goalposts with bitcoin. At this point it's starting to sound like denial. Every meaningful metric has continued to improve in bitcoins favor yet we keep hearing the same critics.
wrong. The great lakes has been an ecological experiment since the St. Lawrence seaway was opened and continued to be that when the Chicago river was reversed.
There are almost no "native" species left in any of the lakes (excluding superior).
If you want sustainable native great lakes ecology you need to cut them off from the oceans, re-reverse the flow of the Chicago and do a one-off massive trout and other native fish stocking. None of that is ever going to happen so until then we can keep experimenting with ecology and in that case Zebra muscles is much better than massive population booms and busts of alewives or other invasive fish species (Salmon were originally introduced to help keep the alewife population down)
the SEC shutting down centralized exchanges would be a short term shock to the value of BTC but long-term would be a disaster for regulators.
Decentralized P2P exchanges exist(bisq/hodlhodl), and shutting down centralized exchanges would force people to use those as the on/off ramps.
The best way for regulators to fight bitcoin imo is to slowly assimilate it into the legacy finance infrastructure to the point that it becomes similar to gold reserves, something only central banks and large institutions hold, while the public might only hold IOUs. Similar to what paypal is already doing.
Commercial beef feedlots vs commercial dairy feedlots are a mile apart, but unfortunately most dairy cows end up at the former after they hit declining milk production.
I'd recommend checking if you can go tour a local dairy, I've found that any quality dairy will let you do that and you can judge for yourself about the welfare of the animals. You're gonna to pay more but the nutritional value of a gallon of milk at $8 vs $2 is still well worth it imo.
I'd also really recommend looking into the health impacts of vegetable oils. Most milk substitutes are, at their core, emulsified vegetable oils. I found that the trade-offs were higher glycemic load(oat/rice), increased vegetable oils(soy/almond) or something that tastes nothing like milk (unsweetened coconut milk).
Hey yeah Im no expert but happy to share some of the stuff that I've looked at.
Glycemic Index - not every gram of carbohydrate is made equal. You can have a drink with fewer grams of sugar but that still has a higher glycemic load. Lactose has a fairly low glycemic index which results in it often having a lower glycemic load of drinks sweetened with lower quantities of maltose/dextrose. In terms of scientific literature I think there are a bunch of well regarded studies on this topic (glycemic load and how it relates to health) since its a pretty key factor in diabetes.
I still occasionally use unsweetened coconut milk, since it has no added sugars and none of the more suspicious vegetable oils. But what I've found is that when you get rid of the sugar/vegetable oils none of the milk substitutes taste anything like milk.
haha yeah it does come off a bit harsh. I don't doubt their sincerity but am definitely curious about how many farms they've visited.
If anytime you think of meat/dairy you think of mcdonalds style feedlot hellscapes, you're out of touch. Your oat/soy milks are coming from giant monocrop fields, loaded up on pesticides, fertilized with the poo scraped off the feedlots you hate.
I think its much more likely that dairy production becomes more sustainable than it gets replaced by even more intensive monocropping.
I went through a phase of drinking milk substitutes but I'm back to milk.
The glycemic index of most milk substitutes (oat,soy,almond) are equivalent or greater than a can of coke. Milk substitutes also tend to be really really high in vegetable oils that seem to at least have a troubling correlation with chronic disease.
The metrics used for the environmental impact of intensive animal husbandry tend too skew towards the worst case (obese cows on a grain fed diet in a feedlot). There are plenty of dairy farms raising cows with a more sustainable grass-based diet that doesn't release nearly as much methane (Think how gassey you'd be if the only thing you ate was ice-cream?)
I like supporting my local dairy farmers, more than I enjoy supporting some multi-national milk-substitute beverage company with a supply chain spanning the globe.
Iran is using btc to settle international trade transactions[1]. Using a gold backed coupon for settling trade has been talked about for a really long time by a bunch of people. If you're confused why people are speculating about crypto they might know something you don't. The rewiring of the global economy off of the USD _is_ coming, the USD introduces counter-party risk (albiet small for most people) and if btc can avoid that its an improvement.
for context during the same period AWS grew 12% y/y.