81–90 of 98 posts
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Iron is much more useful. It also requires more energy to extract.
iron is far more abundant though.
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>the forces of greed Of course. Greed drives only those fishy defense corporations. Any other for-profit organization is driven purely by desire to change the world for the better. Like Facebook, you know... You can do defense right, you can do it wrong. But you can't do it at all. Like it or not.
I think you meant to say "but you can't not do it at all".
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Use of force is a separate problem from the development of weapons. I don't really have a problem with startups doing weapons development - someone is going to do it, and I have a hard time seeing how the world would be better if China or Russia took the lead on this.
> someone is going to do it You could use that excuse for almost anything morally repugnant.
Consider, for example, nuclear weapons. I think it's generally agreed these days that nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki was unnecessary at best, a war crime at worst - but I don't really see that a better world would have resulted from the USSR or Germany being the first to obtain nukes.
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So your logic is that "people buy gold because other people believe it's a safe investment"? That same logic applies to crypto - if people stop believing that gold is a good investment and start believing that crypto is a good investment, gold will cease to be a good investment and crypto will become a good investment. I think gfodor is asking something more along the lines with "What can you do with gold that you ca…
Ignore the utility of gold, I feel that just muddies the waters. The volatility of crypto makes it a terrible store of value. While people may use it as such, it is primarily a speculative asset. OTOH, gold has historical precedent assuring its stability. So while that could suddenly change, its going to take a fairly sizable event to shift the perception. Like a nuclear holocaust or something. If there's any generat…
https://goldprice.org/gold-price-history.html
At the time of my birth, gold was worth $800/oz. By the time I was old enough to ask "What's gold?", it had fallen to $300/oz. It was up to $500 by 1991, then began a long slide down to almost $200 in 2000. Then it rapidly zoomed to $1900 during the Financial Crisis, and has since fallen back to $1200. If you invested in gold in 2009, you would've lost 40% of your money in constant dollar terms, and almost 6x relative to the S&P 500.
It's even worse if you zoom out to the 100 year history. Private ownership of any significant amount of gold was outlawed from 1933-1974, and owners were required to turn in their gold for $20.67 or face 10 years in prison.
It's not Millenials who are being naive here (well, maybe they are too). It's the generations before them who believe there's any such thing as a reliable store of value. Everything is speculative - things are worth only what other people will pay for them, and there's a long history (still continuing in places other than the developed world) of people not even doing that and just taking them at the barrel of a gun.
I'd love to hear more about perceived opportunities in legal tech. For some reason, the legal industry seems very averse to change, but I'm sure that's not always going to be the case. (Lawyer here).
1. Law is highly interpretable, it can't be just 1/0. Facts are 1/0, but not the law 2. Law firms tend to be small in size, generally There are a few more challenges, but am able to recollect only a few.
(am a software engineer and my brother is a lawyer. we keep trying to build solutions for law firms)
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Ignore the utility of gold, I feel that just muddies the waters. The volatility of crypto makes it a terrible store of value. While people may use it as such, it is primarily a speculative asset. OTOH, gold has historical precedent assuring its stability. So while that could suddenly change, its going to take a fairly sizable event to shift the perception. Like a nuclear holocaust or something. If there's any generat…
So my perspective is basically that crypto is a terrible store of value, but gold is also a terrible store of value. Take a look at the price of gold since the Nixon Shock: https://goldprice.org/gold-price-history.html At the time of my birth, gold was worth $800/oz. By the time I was old enough to ask "What's gold?", it had fallen to $300/oz. It was up to $500 by 1991, then began a long slide down to almost $200 in…
Which asset is "safest" / will reduce the least in value in times of turmoil?
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It is a big shift and I could be wrong. However, horses are also something we used for transportation going back to the beginning of recorded history... (lots of other examples too). Crypto has a lot of aspects that make for a superior store of value (easy to move, seizure and censorship proof etc). Obviously, also has some drawbacks too like difficulty to custody...
I feel like the recent 51% attack against Etherium shows that seizure and censorship proof isn't strictly true.
I'd love to hear more about perceived opportunities in legal tech. For some reason, the legal industry seems very averse to change, but I'm sure that's not always going to be the case. (Lawyer here).
First job of legal tech: convince the Judicial Conference to make PACER free and not terrible.
H.R.6714 - Electronic Court Records Reform Act of 2018
https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/6714
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I don’t buy it - gold has a natural floor, for one thing. I can sell it to make pretty earrings or fancy computer cables. The risk of it losing all its value is basically the risk that we will move to a post-scarcity Star Trek style society with matter replicators. Crypto.. not so much.
Why does this floor influence your choice to purchase it over some other commodity to store value (crypto or otherwise?) What do you think that floor even is? (My working assumption right now is gold could lose 99.9% of its value if it was priced based upon it's utility as a metal and not as a culturally agreed upon store of capital.)
So you'll have to convince a billion+ humans that gold is only worth it value as a metal before it loses 99.9% of it's value.