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GameStop, Bitcoin and the Commoditization of Populist Rage

stephendiehl.com

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Re: GameStop, Bitcoin and the Commoditization of Populist Rage

#151

Post by filoeleven »

pcstl wrote: post #112
albntomat0 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a somewhat modified view, in that articles like this (and ones regarding income inequality) need to be specific in exactly what they mean by comments like "nasty, brutish, and short", or inequal wealth distribution. Do they mean decreases in life expectancy? Student debt? Homeownership? Disease prevalence? Violent crime? It's continually stated as an axiom, but poor writing such as that really weakens their ar…

That's pretty much the same view I hold, I just couldn't stop myself being a bit less polite about it. When Hobbes coined the idiom "nasty, brutish and short" he was thinking of a lifestyle with next to no guarantees. You might be dead at any moment. Compared to that, I can't really see how first worlders being a bit less comfortable than previous generations is a valid use of the phrase.

I agree with your opinion of the phrase’s use here. Hobbes was talking about more than “no guarantees” though; he was referring to a life outside of society. The rest of this comment is about that, and tangential to the topic at hand.

He was working from the axiom that laws are what create societies, that “nature” without laws makes the life of man “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” It’s interesting how the first two are almost always dropped, isn’t it?

Anyway, this is a false premise. Nature abounds with examples of cooperation at the same rate as those of competition, from communal species banding together to mutualistic interspecies relationships. We keep finding more and more of them. My own suspicion is that what we find in nature broadly reflects our own ideals, because those are simply what we are most likely to look for, and so Hobbes’ society reflected more nastiness than ours does today.

Re: GameStop, Bitcoin and the Commoditization of Populist Rage

#152

Post by kinghajj »

smlckz wrote: post #139

Is it possible to make a cryptocurrency that does "real" work as its proof-of-work: work which is computationally intensive, but it solves some real life problems instead of "wasting" the energy?

It is, yes. Curiously though, making the work "useful" might actually harm the security of a block chain and make it more likely to suffer a 51% attack.

With a chain like Bitcoin's, if you want to perform a 51% attack, you would have to purchase a large amount of SHA-256 ASIC mining hardware. After the attack, public confidence would be shaken so severely that the market price would crash, and might never recover. So afterwards, the attacker is left with a pile of ASIC hardware that's nowhere near as valuable as before.

If the PoW algorithm were based on something more "useful", then after a 51% attack, the attacker would have a large amount of hardware that they could easily repurpose, so it would retain a lot of its previous value. That makes the total cost of the attack much lower.

Re: GameStop, Bitcoin and the Commoditization of Populist Rage

#153

Post by selestify »

nazgulnarsil wrote: post #64
yongjik wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not enough jobs. People do settle in smaller cities if there are jobs - the city of Ulsan has higher GDP per capita than Seoul, thanks to Hyundai Motors and other big plants, but it's not exactly easy to get one of these jobs. In the end, most people flock to the greater Seoul area because that's where most jobs are.

if your savings rate is lower then it isn't exactly a good job, though you may enjoy the amenities while you are there...though not if you are working too hard to have time for them.

What makes you think the savings rate is lower in the cities? You might not even have a job in the first place outside the city

Re: GameStop, Bitcoin and the Commoditization of Populist Rage

#154

Post by coolgeek »

h0nd wrote: post #124

>The last ten years have seen a massive redistribution of wealth from this age bracket into older demographics. This has very strongly increased during that year of pandemic. In my country a vast amount of money is spent on protecting old people that future generations will be liable for.

> a massive redistribution of wealth from this age bracket into older demographics

I'm not defending the current system/situation, but this seems to mischaracterize the article it links to.

Wealth wasn't redistributed, because millenials (more generally, younger generations) didn't have it to begin with. What happened was that older generations were able to - and did - capture almost all of the surplus that was generated.

I'm not saying that the author intentionally mischaracterized this. I'm saying that you can't solve a problem if you don't understand the nature of the problem. You can't solve a problem by focusing your efforts on a different problem (possibly the wrong problem, at least in this context).

Re: GameStop, Bitcoin and the Commoditization of Populist Rage

#155

Post by trevelyan »

smlckz wrote: post #139

Is it possible to make a cryptocurrency that does "real" work as its proof-of-work: work which is computationally intensive, but it solves some real life problems instead of "wasting" the energy?

Look into Saito Consensus:

https://saito.io/saito-whitepaper.pdf

The network pays the nodes that run infrastructure rather than miners or stakers. Cost-of-attack is generated by the same nodes, so paying for infrastructure does not defund consensus. Security scales with fee-throughput of the network, while fee-throughput pays for scalability.

Re: GameStop, Bitcoin and the Commoditization of Populist Rage

#156

Post by pcstl »

dontbeevil1992 wrote: post #149
pcstl wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair enough. But my point is to be disruptive. I don't think the author has a point here. I think he's appealing to the fact that, on an emotional level, humans think they're entitled to always have their standards of living be equal or better to what they were before to make people think they live in uniquely hard times. Looking to the world outside of the US might provide some badly-needed perspective as to why tha…

People should stop complaining that they don't have healthcare because they have iPhones and vaccines and don't literally live in the mud? Maybe that would hold water if there were literally no other option, and if the distribution of wealth and misery were an unchangeable force of nature. But the reality is, people don't have healthcare BECAUSE some people don't want to pay more taxes, and want poor people to stay i…

Life is not a zero-sum game. The reason why some people have little is not that some people have a lot. This is not something we will agree on.

I agree that the distribution of wealth could be a lot more equitable, but I fundamentally disagree with this idea that "If some people have little, that is only because evil/stupid people don't want them to have more". The world is a lot more complicated than that.

I live in a country with crushingly high taxes. Our public services suck. If it were just a matter of raising taxes, we'd have no issues.

Re: GameStop, Bitcoin and the Commoditization of Populist Rage

#157

Post by pcstl »

filoeleven wrote: post #151
pcstl wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's pretty much the same view I hold, I just couldn't stop myself being a bit less polite about it. When Hobbes coined the idiom "nasty, brutish and short" he was thinking of a lifestyle with next to no guarantees. You might be dead at any moment. Compared to that, I can't really see how first worlders being a bit less comfortable than previous generations is a valid use of the phrase.

I agree with your opinion of the phrase’s use here. Hobbes was talking about more than “no guarantees” though; he was referring to a life outside of society. The rest of this comment is about that, and tangential to the topic at hand. He was working from the axiom that laws are what create societies, that “nature” without laws makes the life of man “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” It’s interesting how the…

Even if nature has about as much cooperation as competition, society seems to put a damper on the nastier effects of competition. While we can find amazing examples of cooperation in the record of human history and prehistory, we also find a lot of brutal behavior which seems to have become almost monotonically less frequent ever since we started organizing into complex societies.

(Also, as predicted by complex systems theory, when brutal behavior does erupt, it is much more catastrophic - the 2 world wars are good examples)

Re: GameStop, Bitcoin and the Commoditization of Populist Rage

#158

Post by selestify »

missedthecue wrote: post #57
seibelj wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I neglected to explain it in my original post but bitcoin has all of the good properties of gold and none of the bad - primarily in terms of how easy it is to settle (especially over long distances) and the guaranteed fixed supply and emission rate.

Gold has real industrial and consumer uses (and therefore reliable demand). I don't see why anyone buys Bitcoin for any reason other than that another speculator will pay him more for it later.

Why does it have to be more? As long as someone else pays him roughly the same amount for Bitcoin in the future, it’ll have worked as a store of value.

Do you really think the people buying gold are buying it so that they can sell it to industry, as opposed to buying it so that they could potentially sell it to someone else who does the same thing? If gold price were based on industrial uses alone it’d be worth a small fraction of what it’s worth now. Is gold a Ponzi scheme?

Re: GameStop, Bitcoin and the Commoditization of Populist Rage

#159

Post by bob_doggo »

seaourfreed wrote: post #22

The US Congress sells out all citizens, via lobbyists. Populist rage comes a rigged economy, where they are losing money. Rigged pharma. Unethical medical billing. Out of control healthcare costs. 2008 mortgage crisis. High Frequency trading firms front running trades. Panama Papers. Libor. And a million more. Citizens won't have it any more. Fixing congress (so they don't sell us out), and congress CAN would WOULD f…

The problem is that populist rage won't fix anything.

Re: GameStop, Bitcoin and the Commoditization of Populist Rage

#160

Post by moralsupply »

> Bitcoin doesn’t work, it’s a naked speculative bubble based on a technology that doesn’t scale can’t and can’t replace any existing financial service

Feel free to short Bitcoin in a futures market, and keep all your wealth allocated in assets associated with the US dollar.

We'll talk again in 5 years time.

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