71–80 of 164 posts
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Every bank and credit card is also an unsanctioned mint. It works fine. The actual minting of money has not been a major factor in managing the money supply in a long time. It's all done by setting interest rates.
Setting interest rates AND THEN? come on you have to be able to complete that sentence, and when you do it will negate the prior sentence.
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Every bank and credit card is also an unsanctioned mint. It works fine. The actual minting of money has not been a major factor in managing the money supply in a long time. It's all done by setting interest rates.
> The actual minting of money has not been a major factor in managing the money supply in a long time. Very much not true. Quantitative easing, the process of minting money to inject liquidity into the economy, was a core tenet of the Obama administration’s* response to the Great Recession. Literally trillions of dollars created to purchase bonds and mortgage backed securities to prop up the economy. Edit: It was dur…
> was a core tenet of the Obama administration’s response
Quantitative easing is a monetary policy, not fiscal policy. A central bank dictates monetary policy. An administration dictates fiscal policy.
Would recommend you read this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantitative_easing
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> The actual minting of money has not been a major factor in managing the money supply in a long time. Very much not true. Quantitative easing, the process of minting money to inject liquidity into the economy, was a core tenet of the Obama administration’s* response to the Great Recession. Literally trillions of dollars created to purchase bonds and mortgage backed securities to prop up the economy. Edit: It was dur…
That's because interest rates were already at zero. Look over to what BOJ did - they straight up bought equity ETFs as a part of their qe, even more hardcore. Still, not much inflation!
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But i thought each libra must be backed by real money? i.e. when they sell 10 libra the 10 dollars go to the libra fund, and cant really circulate (but can be invested)
Investment is circulation though. They are no longer holding the $10 you spent to buy 10 Libra but $10 worth of Apple stock say that definitely isn't always worth $10 and Apple or whoever sold that stock now has $10.
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Every bank and credit card is also an unsanctioned mint. It works fine. The actual minting of money has not been a major factor in managing the money supply in a long time. It's all done by setting interest rates.
Setting interest rates AND THEN? come on you have to be able to complete that sentence, and when you do it will negate the prior sentence.
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>someone else will come up with a cryptocurrency that's actually useful You named 8 different digital coins. Why aren’t any of them useful? Why do we need other ones?
It's like any other startup: building a product that's useful enough to get widespread adoption requires nailing a lot of different details. You leave one critical feature off and you don't get adoption. You get all of them right and the product takes off on a hypergrowth curve. It's like how Reddit took off once they added comments, or AirBnB took off once they started taking professional-quality photos. It's not th…
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Yes, and banks are bound by incredibly tight laws, including laws around not being allowed to recirculate all the money you get as part of an exchange operation. If all the Libra association members are willing to be bound by the same laws, then cool: but do you trust Vodafone, or Facebook, or Andreessen Horowitz, to not try to bend the rules so they can make more money?
Banks follow fractional reserve so they have to keep 10-20% of the deposits in cash. Libra and most stablecoins keep 100% reserves so it's even stricter. Libra claims that every coin is backed by fiat currency so investing the deposits is not how they plan to make money off of this.
A huge float invested very conservatively still makes a lot of money. That is how most insurance companies actually profit.
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The original 10$ aren't "gone", they're held in reserve in the form of bank deposits and government bonds. If you hold Libra, you supposedly have a claim against those. This is unlike a fractional-reserve bank, which can turn those most of those $10 into loans of any sort and still pretend it's cash that's available at any time.
You know a bond is a loan? Why is a Libra loan to the government different to a fractional reserve loan of any sort?
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Do you view privacy as an important quality? Nano seems like a pretty good attempt at making a cryptocurrency that's useful as a currency, but transactions are not private and I'm not sure how big of a problem that is
I don't personally, but there are cryptocurrencies that have made some really big strides there: Monero and ZCash. I've heard that a lot of dark-web business is actually switching over from Bitcoin to Monero, so it's getting some real adoption. One of the interesting things about the cryptocurrency space is that it's challenging one of our fundamental assumptions about economics, namely that currency is a winner-take…
* porn?
* child porn?
* drugs?
What else?
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There are no decentralized cryptocurrencies. Like all other so-called "decentralized" coins, Bitcoin rewards economies of scale. That means that it tends towards centralization. Though of course Bitcoin has its own unique problems, like being deflationary (which is evil).
What? Are you aware that all commodities are basically deflation? Do you think it is "evil" to buy commodities? This is all about freedom of choice. If you don't like the properties of certain products, then buy the one that you like. But lots of people would apparently prefer to spend their own money on deflationary assets. Who are you to say it is evil to do this with assets that one owns?
You're welcome to your opinions, and I'm going to have mine. As you said, freedom of choice.
Personally I think that modern fractional reserve banking and the Fed are great, and bitcoin maximalists are overall not very smart.