> But now I’m sitting on this cash, and like Matthew McConaughey says in wolf of Wall Street , they’re fucking addicted
Only point of contention is that when you have a currency experiencing sustained inflation over any medium/long term time horizon, it makes sense people would want to hold anything over than cash. Anyone who saved in cash (even using Term Deposits) from basically the 70s to today in any currency has had their purchasing power destroyed.
I swear some Americans seem to think the world they live in is from 1955 or 1975 or something. The US is just one player amongst many, a very important one but by no means the paramount one for every country in the world. The idea it is simply isn't backed by facts on the ground.
So yea, if forced to choose between USA vs Rest of World virtually every country will choose RoW. Americans are delusional if they think they can just snap their fingers and everybody else will jump to attention.
> Given a choice between an embargo by the US or embargo by the rest of the world, cuba and every country in the world would choose 'the rest of the world'.
You really think countries will willing choose to trade with the USA over the rest of the world when it isn't the biggest destination for their exports nor their major source of imports? Why would they do that exactly?
And this has been a major problem for them since then. Look up the "Triffin Dilemma". If a nation's currency is the reserve currency it pretty much must run a trade deficit and one of the major impacts will be loss of manufacturing prowess. Happened to Great Britain when the Pound was the reserve currency too.
I think "follow the money" is the correct call but not like this. I think having the reserve currency be the USD means there is more demand for the currency than is needed to trade with the USA (because USD is used for all sorts of other international trade as well including things like buying oil). This makes the USD relatively too strong which makes their exports relatively too expensive.
This then has all sorts of flow on impacts throughout the manufacturing process and incentives inside the country.
My base case is still that the USD being the reserve currency is the problem. There will persistently by more demand for USD than is justified by the need to purchase American exports, so the currency is artificially high. This makes their exports more expensive than they should be relative to others, which hurts manufacturers.
Having a currency that is too strong for your economy always does this, look at the situation in European nations under the Euro.
At this point crypto clearly isn't a bubble. And why would it be? Cryptographically secured money has some advantages over fiat money. This doesn't mean fiat will disappear and all crypto will succeed. But most fiat currencies haven't really "succeeded" either.
Money is a very "efficient" market in this sense because each individual can decide do you want to hold currency X or currency Y or currency Z? And there are pros and cons to each that lead to price discovery between currencies. And I think as time goes on it is becoming more and more apparent that many central banks do not take the management of their countries currency seriously and so people choose alternatives. This is what well-functioning markets look like. Consumer choice and incentives.
- increasingly large cars far bigger than required from a utilitarian perspective
- luxury good production
- theme parks/fireworks displays
- cruise ships
Etc.
Bitcoin/crypto opposition is 95% pushed by embedded financial interests that will use any lever to protect their control over money and the power it gives them.
Legally, probably. I don't know the laws around environmental protection in that area so there may still have been a violation but it appears he was convicted here for violation of property rights as this is public land. But this whole situation is more about the property rights and how the lake here will be used for recreation rather than ecological concerns if I'm reading correctly.
I work as a doordasher and have never once spoken to or interacted with anyone who works at the company.Well that's not quite true, I had an order with issues once that went to a CS rep in the Philippines who I chatted with via messaging.
For all intents and purposes my "boss" is a computer.
More that lawyers will hoard contracts but there will be financial incentives to defect early (the idea being to sell your contracts while the price is high).
Then that lawyer's contracts will become the mass-produced "good enough" boilerplate and be used widely driving down the value of hoarding contracts at all.
Welding is incredibly important in modern construction. All steel-framed buildings are held together by welding pretty much. Not surprisingly it is quite highly paid (at least in my country).
> Last Friday, Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare released the results of an annual study of the number of homeless people *in the country’s parks and riverside areas.*
So this isn't the full count of homeless, just the ones living in specific park areas.
I don't think it does need an update, it came across quite clearly in the article that you were pretty happy with life in general but felt that selling the company took away a sense of purpose/identity that you hadn't expected.
Was a really interesting read and gave me a lot to think about as a (hopefully) future founder!
This is a bizarre framing to support the argument people don't like faster delivery of goods.
But in the spirit of good faith I will give some:
- Movement of fish/meat to markets before it spoils
- Delivery of military messages around the battlefield. Also supply trains for military expeditions
- Projects like the Grand Canal in China (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Canal_(China)). Pretty much anywhere in history where people opted for using water transport of goods over land transport was done for speed/cost reasons.
Lol that isn't what a 51% attack is...The confidence people on this thread are speaking about something they have no clue about is staggering. A 51% is ALL about miners and nodes.
Noone has forgot a thing just aren't clowns like you who think businesses are some substitute god who can't be beat. Fidelity doesn't "hold" the transactions. Transactions to be relevant MUST be broadcast to the network and if this doesn't happen then the blockchain plods along as if they didn't happen.
Honestly, learn a bit more about how this stuff actually works before commenting.
I didn't address that point because it is conceptually and factually incorrect. But I will breakdown why for your benefit:
> The reason that bitcoin's energy usage is a philosophical nightmare is because it's a system where energy consumption is the product.
False. The "Product" is a permissionless global peer to peer financial network using a (relatively) non-depreciating commodity. Energy consumption is a side-effect of providing this product/service. I'm sure if you thought about it for a bit you would have to agree here. Noone is mining bitcoin for the sake of it, they are mining it for profit and the only reason bitcoin has value is other attributes of the network/commodity itself. So not a good start from OP.
> As opposed to industries which are "merely" energy-intensive, let's take aluminum refining for example, spending more energy to refine aluminum does not create more demand for aluminum, but spending more energy on bitcoin increases the price of bitcoin, which induces more demand, which increases the price, which incentivizes mining, which costs more energy, and so on in a vicious cycle.
This is factually incorrect and easy to see why. Here is a link to an overlapping chart showing the hashrate for bitcoin against the market cap (https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/hashrate-marketcap-btc....). You'll notice the lack of connection between the market cap (overall price) and the hashing rate. This is an empirical fact based on the data we have so op is wrong once again.
It is true that price increases do incentivise more mining but the price increases aren't DRIVEN by increases in the mining. Otherwise it would be possible for anyone anywhere to spin up bitcoin farms and make guaranteed profit because the price would rise to a level commensurate with the energy expended. It is the other values of the network (peer-to-peer permissionless decentralised finance with an eventually depreciating commodity) that drive the price. Those are being priced by the market currently and more and more people are deciding to store wealth in the Bitcoin network as opposed to the Fiat network or other assets like property/gold/etc because they feel it gives a better combination of:
1. Store of value (or possibility for profit)
2. Functionality
Bitcoin mining is very often not profitable if you don't have cheap energy or do it collectively which is why it is moves around so much to find cheap energy sources (often using the cheapest forms of energy available which is burn off/extra gen that has no otherwise in grid) and miners pool to take a portion of the gains from mining the next block and getting the bitcoin that come with it.
OP's view of Bitcoin and proof of work is a very slanted one at best, completely factually inaccurate at worst.
> But now I’m sitting on this cash, and like Matthew McConaughey says in wolf of Wall Street , they’re fucking addicted
Only point of contention is that when you have a currency experiencing sustained inflation over any medium/long term time horizon, it makes sense people would want to hold anything over than cash. Anyone who saved in cash (even using Term Deposits) from basically the 70s to today in any currency has had their purchasing power destroyed.