Bankers Ditch Fat Salaries to Chase Digital Currency Riches

Smart contracts are getting noticed in the legal sphere as a possible alternative to the system we have now. Check out /r/ethlaw

The issue with this is that the best IT jobs are in places like San Francisco / New York / London which are very expensive.

So yes you make 200k (before taxes) but you spend 35-40k per year on rent plus bills (water, electricity, council tax, internet etc).

Throw in some social life and drinks once or twice a week, car plus insurance, supporting family financially.

So let's say after all that you end up saving 40k per year net. Times 5 is 200k. That is not enough to retire.

Now do the math with 1 million salary (the lowest possible 7 figure). Same living standard. After 5 years you can save let's say 1.5-2 million (I didn't do the math so if I am way off please correct me).

Now that is an amount you can retire on:

1) Buy two properties for 500k (live in one, rent the other one)

2) Invest 1 million in blue chip equities, this will pay you around 35k per year in dividends

3) You still have a nice sum of cash left on top of that

So you can see that 90k per year is definitely not a sweet spot. There are still massive improvements if you can make 200k, 400k, 800k and so on.

Yes perhaps going from 35k to 90k will improve your living standard much more drastically than going from 90k to 200k. So you could argue that there are diminishing returns.

But you are ignoring the fact that the higher you go the sooner you gain complete financial freedom when you can retire and live completely free.

>unaccredited investors

unaccredited investors, oh my! When you brush your teeth do you make sure you have government authorization to do so? Also, I hope the toothbrush and the toothpaste were OKed by a government bureaucrat, because thinking for yourself is hard!

For what it's worth, there are many different types of cryptocurrency enthusiasts, and trying to lump them all together is going to yield a ton of contradictory statements. Many see Bitcoin as a "disruption" of banking, or credit card companies, or Western Union, or gift cards, or contract law, or existing settlement/clearing systems, etc. But what I see Bitcoin disrupting is _central_ banking. The genesis block for Bitcoin doesn't say "visa transaction fees are too high", it says "The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks".

What happened to the outrage at the bailouts in the 2008 crisis? How have we completely forgotten that? Opinions differ as to the underlying causes of the 2008 crisis: was it reckless bankers and insurers, was it criminal bankers and insurers, was it the repeal of Glass-Steagall? Many people, myself included, place the blame squarely in the hands of central bankers. The crisis was created by them, and then glossed over by them by throwing money at the people who took the most advantage of their manipulations.

The problem is not that someone else should be in charge of central banking, it's that _nobody_ should be in charge of central banking -- the central banking, really, and the notion of a "lender of last resort" should simply not exist. Part and parcel of that is that we need a new currency -- one that cannot be created on a whim based on some "understanding" of macroeconomics that is completely incorrect. The goal here is so absurdly ambitious that people have stopped talking about it -- replacing Visa is nothing; Visa can exist and spend Bitcoins, just as Visa can (and does) exist and spend Euros and Yen and whatever the hell you want. But Bitcoin is the first serious attempt to make a currency that is independent of central bank manipulation (second, I guess, if you count gold).

> There aren't many legit use cases where bitcoin beats fiat nowadays

So here's the use case -- the US government cannot literally quadruple the amount of bitcoins in existence in order to pay off a bunch of bankers who lost their shirts, and a bunch of auto manufacturers that lost their ability to compete. I get it, this is not going to make it easier to buy your coffee, or whatever "mainstream" means to you. And there's a good chance that Bitcoin will not topple the Federal Reserve or the European Central Bank, or whatever, but it's an avenue to start opting out of a financial system that is increasingly dependent on massive government actions, and supporting the massive covert and overt international economic warfare being waged in our name, supporting the contemptible level of corporate welfare that threatens to undermine those aspects of our government that are essential to a free society, and resisting the attempts to use inflation as a hidden form of super-duper-regressive taxation to punish those who try to save money.

I'll have a crack at it.

ICO's like with most new tech are going to be plagued with get rich quick schemes, and there's a lot of FUD going on, but the concept it's great. When you have a token, in a given platform, you align the incentives of the people using that. It encourages people that are part of the network to create value for it, since it also impacts positively on their money.

Take decentralized storage platforms for example, Storj, FileCoin, Swarm, IPFS. It's a software that you install in your computer, you asign how much disk space you are willing to contribute, and in return it pays you in that network token. People that wants to save their info on the platform, have to use the same token.

I've been part of the bitcoin economy since 2013 and i've seen a lot of shitty and awesome projects alike. Right now is the wild west, because since there is no legal framework, the regulation has to be as well self created by the ecosystem. So , I think in around a year or two, we'll start seeing a much better ecosystem, with more knowledge, and less scams. It just takes time.