When people think something is bad and keep encountering other people saying it is good, they respond. There's no reason why anyone should get "involved in the space" before expressing their opinion.
Of course it's possible to live in a more basic, debt-free way, but my suspicion is that in the USA (which is the scope of the article) most people do not, which reduces the pool of people with enough time and energy to do something interesting.
Did people during the period(s) of high innovation have as much personal debt (especially home mortgages) as people do today? A lot of people have too many bills coming in every month to devote time and effort to things too weird to "attract investment".
> [I]f there were legitimate buying of BTC with Tether, which is plausible after the ass-whooping USDBTC has taken recently, new Tether would need to be issued to keep the 1:1 peg.
Can you explain in detail why new Tether would need to be issued?
"Intuitive for who" is a good question, and I hope the answer is "intuitive to the new/occasional user".
I've used a number of different DAWs, and the main challenge is that if I haven't made any music for several months, I don't really remember all the various maneuvers that a daily user would have in muscle memory. I end up having to re-learn everything, and experience extra special frustration along the lines of "I know there was a trick to moving this thing to that place, but I can't remember what it is".
Almost every time, it's hard to argue that the way the DAW does it "doesn't make sense"; it generally does make sense. But a lot of the time the maneuver is so different than the things one does in a non-DAW for basic clicking, editing, and dragging things around, that it gets frustrating having to re-learn it over and over again.
I feel like I'm too ignorant of mathematics to be confused by this "proof".
When you set out to prove "for any set of n horses, every horse in that set has the same color" and you then "suppose for all sets of n horses, every horse in the set has the same color" as a first step, you're messing with a tautology, aren't you? I mean if you've supposed that it's true for all, it's definitely true for any, right?
What am I missing that makes the problem subtle and interesting, rather than just blatantly circular from the start?
I wasn't referring to upgrades, I was referring to control of the existing, finite supply of Bitcoin.
In a Bitcoin-centered economy, a relatively small community of "whales" would have de-facto control of the supply, because the supply available for circulation would depend on what they decide to do with their holdings.
> Bitcoin is totally elitist and mostly a vehicle for speculation.
I agree, but the parent poster does have a point. There are places where the economic situation has deteriorated to the point that using Bitcoin can solve some problems. Some things are worse than Bitcoin, but it's a rare phenomenon.
But his point that Bitcoin is also essentially controlled by a central authority, i.e. the Bitcoin community, has merit.
(Even if the control isn't formal, owning a large percentage of a finite "thing" still counts as control, if the "thing" is the unit of exchange for people's work, property, etc. A BTC economy would depend on what the large holders decide to do with their portion).
With Bitcoin, the community that controls the money supply is not at all democratic; it is the early adopters with large holdings that carry all the weight.
From the perspective of a non-early adopter, the Bitcoin world would be even worse then the central bank and government world. Banks can be regulated and governments can be thrown out. Bitcoin would create a tyranny of "hodlers" protected by intractable mathematics.
Ideally cryptocurrencies will disappear on their own before lots of people have lots of money tied up in them. Regulating them makes them appear safer than they actually are.
I don't understand this push for regulation of cryptocurrencies. Just let the mathematics govern. It'll either work on its own, or as people lose their money to trickery and/or carelessness, there will be less and less to regulate as people stop participating.
> outside of our comfy western countries most people have this problem.
Can you cite some evidence that there are people keeping long-term savings* in cash and has adequate internet access and computing resources to participate in cryptocurrencies? I'm still not buying this.
* (I believe people do hold short-term savings in cash, but those are not the type of savings that money-printing erodes significantly.)
> You don't see how people are unhappy with getting their savings diluted by unlimited money printing?
Money printing dilutes wealth if you hold it in cash, but every other asset appreciates. Moreover if you have more debt than wealth, money printing reduces that burden.
How many people actually have more wealth than debt but keep it largely in cash? I never understood who exactly has this problem.
Wouldn't a dozen prepaid SIM cards mean 12 times as many things to defend? Also wouldn't anyone you paid to "do it for you" need to be trusted, undermining the no-trust principle of cryptocurrencies?
> But no one forces them to be in that industry, other than their desire to earn high wages.
High wages are definitely a factor but being competitive and feeling energized by trades paying off count as well. It's a combination of high reward, betting excitement, and the pleasure of crushing your competition in a context where score is easily kept (in dollars).
If those are the things you enjoy, it's difficult to find all that in other industries.
> A disgrace for education but a win for educational communism.
I was under the impression that (actual) communist educational systems were geared predominantly toward the most advanced students, rather than the other way around. Cranking out prizewinning physicists, mathematicians, and chess grand-masters at a somewhat greater than expected rate.
> It felt like a lot of formality with no real benefit to either side.
Isn't the intent to benefit third parties though? I thought the point of pay transparency is to provide information to people who don't have the connections to know what the "real deal" generally is, so they can negotiate on an equal footing as other applicants when they have the opportunity.
- "Arnold" is Arnold Schwarzenegger, an Austrian-born American actor who served as Governor of California. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnold_Schwarzenegger
- The US Constitution restricts eligibility for the Presidency to "natural-born citizens" of the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural-born-citizen_clause_(U...