If the CEO wants to buy a new Ferrari, they need to take money out of the company - either as income or dividends (both of which are taxed). If the company buys him his car then it's a taxable benefit too. If the company increases the value of the CEOs shares by doing share buybacks, then the CEO just pays more capital gains taxes. Avoiding corporation tax means the tax paid directly by the company goes down, but it's not at all obvious that the net amount the government receives goes down. Only direct taxes are reflected on their balance sheet, though, which is a good enough incentive.
If Amazon pays its employees income, and those employees pay income tax, how is that different to Amazon paying tax? The government gets its money from Amazon either way.
Your link just explains that they’re trying to reduce the gap between tax income and expenditure, but the absolute level of expenditure (my link) has gone up every year (in real terms too)!
> Banks get to create the principal that they loan out of thin air[1]
I’m not sure how you get this from your reference - people deposit money at a bank, and the bank lends (gives!) some of that money out to (e.g.) students. The “creation” comes from both the depositor and the borrower thinking they have the money.
Why do you lose a say over global standards? Surely you now represent yourselves directly on global standards bodies, instead of indirectly via the EU's common position?
The money that’s backing the Tethers. As an example - you deposit 1mm USD with Bitfinex, and they give you 1mm Tethers. Bitfinex invests your 1mm USD every night at overnight Libor, earning interest each day they do so. When someone (you?) wants to redeem the 1mm Tethers, Bitfinex gives them the 1mm USD, but keeps the interest it earned. You question is a good one, though - why would people ever pledge USD to create Tethers in the first place, given that treasuries have a higher (non-zero!) return? One example: if your 1mm USD came from a criminal enterprise, then you couldn’t deposit it at a brokerage and buy treasuries (due to KYC rules, etc).
Borrowing against collateral means the lender has something to seize if you fail to pay them back. The more valuable the collateral, the more money the lender will recover when they repossess and sell the collateral. This likelihood of recovery (if you default!) may make them willing to lend you more money, or give you a better interest rate.
I'm not sure why you say it's a strawman? The whitepaper[1] says that an ask order on the storage market is just (space, price) -- no mention of the cost to retrieve the data. Similarly, the storage market protocol (Figure 11) doesn't mention losing stake for failing to provide the data on demand (it only mentions losing stake for failing to post proofs).
They seem to have solved proof-of-storage, but the network can’t guarantee the available of the files you pay to store! A profitable strategy:
1. Set up a miner on AWS. You’ll only need a small machine as you’ll persist the data in S3.
2. Accept bids for storage, and use your free ingress bandwidth to copy the data into S3
3. Calculate and publish your proofs of storage so your Filecoin (held in escrow after your successful bid) is released.
4. Refuse all bids to access the content - egress bandwidth costs money!
5. Win! You’ll always be able to undercut other miners when bidding for storage as they have to bake in bandwidth costs in their bids, and you strategy is easily scalable (as you can pump as much data into S3 as you need - you’ll only need to get more machines to calculate more storage proofs).
Not even central banks can provide the guarantee you’re looking for - they can only print money to devalue their currency, but they can’t make it appreciate [1]!