Cuba’s Bitcoin Revolution

US sanctions usually attempt to prohibit not only trade with USA but also with all the countries under influence of USA (most of the world).

E.g. China cannot import some items from EU, although they are not under EU sanctions, but because USA effectively controls EU and prohibits trade of some goods with China.

Same with Russia. E.g. every time Russia tries to sell weapons to some third country, USA attempts to create a pressure to cancel the deal.

I'm sure Cuba suffers from similar restrictions.

Anyway, no matter what you do, an island with almost no mineral resources, no source of energy, will always suffer. It doesn't matter whether the government is capitalist or socialist, what currency you use, whether there's embargo or not.

People living in Cuba will be always poor. It's impossible to change that because it would contradict fundamental laws of the universe: you need resources to grow, you need energy.

It's just that now all of them have more or less the same income. If they'd return to capitalist system, very few will become extremely rich (drug suppliers, brothel owners) and the rest will become extremely poor. Just the way it was before revolution.

As another poster said it does drain the economy, but even more directly. I don't know exactly what the Cuban government allows its party members and employees to do vis-a-vis accessing foreign currency, but I can give the Argentine example. Argentina used to have currency controls that pegged their peso at 3ARS/1USD. If you were a tourist with $100 USD and you need to buy pesos at the airport, you get 300ARS. If you go to anyone on the street in Buenos Aires, they'd give you the black market rate, about 1300ARS for the same $100USD. Okay fine, so no one is stupid enough to sell dollars at the government exchange rate.

But where it gets strange is, when you want to buy dollars for your pesos. To support the fiction of their artificial rate, Argentines were allowed to buy $100 for 300ARS... but only in tiny, tiny quantities. In fact this is what their ATM cards would get them if they traveled to the US. But the max for their entire trip was something like $200 and they had to pay a 100% import duty on everything they purchased abroad.

And now for the knockout punch: If you worked for the government, you could have 20% of your salary converted to USD every month at the official rate.

Where did these cheap dollars come from? The treasury's quickly dwindling strategic dollar reserve. However, in order to keep the government employees at this level, they had to keep the peso at the same official exchange while in reality it devalued more and more.

And where did those dollars out of the treasury go when they got into the hands of government employees? Into banks in Miami.

To be clear, no one worked to get this wealth, it was a favor for being part of the party in power. People who worked got fucked because in the end their life savings in pesos became worthless in any other currency. To stop this from getting out of hand, the government then instituted price controls to keep the price in pesos steady on certain goods produced in the country, mainly beef, bread, etc. But those food producers could make much more selling their produce abroad, and the government had lucrative deals with China and other countries, so they slowly reduced how much food you could buy at these artificially low prices. The stickers on items in the supermarket would show you couldn't buy more than one or two a day. Other items went up in price daily.

This is how a dual currency system bleeds an economy, by funneling most of the citizens' wealth into the bank accounts of a corrupt government elite who do nothing more than manipulate the currency to drain the nation dry.

Your first and second sentence read as contradictory. Your first sentence suggests that you do think people control their genes and environment, your second sentence admits they don't, but claims this doesn't matter because those things are necessary but not sufficient to earn a lot of money - you say it also requires education and effort. I will assume your second sentence expresses your true belief.

It is controversial (though a widespread belief among philosophers), but I believe that human talent is entirely a function of the interaction of genes and environment. We don't control the neighborhood in which we are born, the school in which we're enrolled, the values instilled in us, or our temperamental inclination to learning. I believe, for similar reasons, that we don't control our own effort. Humans don't stand apart from the naturalistic universe, but are a part of it. Others claim that while genes and environment play the largest role in determining our talents, we also have a degree of volition in those constraints with which to make better or worse use of those conditions, and for which we should be awarded responsibly. Either way, on the strong or weak version, our talents are largely our of our control, and it is therefore unfair to heavily reward or punish people for them.

I'm also extremely sceptical of the idea that high-earning jobs demand more effort. I have a PhD and it required a fair amount of work. My immediate family were all in unskilled, low-paying jobs which they found boring, and derived little satisfaction from. Who put more effort in? We both had to work, but I found it interesting and fulfilling, whereas they did not. For them, there was a far greater gap between what they were doing and what they wanted to be doing. I think it's obvious that their jobs required more effort in any morally relevant sense. The relationship between effort and pay seems fairly incidental, but a general trend is that the more you are paid, the more likely the job is to exercise and develop your faculties. In this respect, the trendline goes from harder to easier with pay.

Haha I've lived in a post communist country - if you believe for one second that a surgeon and street cleaner have the same compensation you are extremely naive. The artificial restrictions on direct pay just get transformed into other things.

I've listened to Yoel Romero talk about their Olympic program, how the children in the camp would get more food if they performed better in training and they would pit each other aginst one another to promote competition. You think the kids participate because they wanted to compete in the Olympics ? He could have just cleaned the streets and make the same as a surgeon...

> By how much do you think it would reduce the L1 load? That article suggests if you can get 10 people together it would reduce the load to 1/10, so still almost a decade.

If I understand correctly the maximum number of people involved in a channel factory creation is the same as the maximum number of keys involved in a multi-signature transaction. The limit is currently 15 or 20[1] but with Shnorr signatures (that will be enabled in the protocol with taproot in November) I think there is no limit to that number.

> And that's iff you happen to find 10 people who fit the specific shape exactly.

I'm not sure what specific shape you're referring to. At the end they all need to sign a specific transaction but that transaction can easily generated by a wallet software or a service provider given all the participants' key and UTXO. They don't need to all send the same amount to the factory.

> LN has always been a "but wait! we've got a solution just around the corner - please don't give up!" feature - but there's nothing around the corner.

The problem itself (on-boarding the whole population) doesn't exist yet either. It doesn't look like a problem impossible to solve by the time it needs to be solved. And if it needs to be solved first then the whole population can probably wait for that to happen.

[1] https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/23893/what-are-t...