71–80 of 193 posts
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You could never ever patch log4j.
Of course you could, you make a new version of your smart contract or blockchain and people use that instead.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Money is hard to value. Fundamentally, it relies on a consensus that it's useful and valuable, but there's nothing inherent in money that makes it that way. It's a useful collective hallucination. So is crypto. Some people came up with a collective hallucination that they considered useful and valuable, and convinced some other people that it was, because, hey, we all like valuable things, especially when we can crea…
> there's nothing inherent in money that makes it that way Yes there is. Typically money is legal tender, which means you’re mandated to accept it by a government with large numbers of guns and prison cells. That’s what for all debts public and private means.
> Yes there is. Typically money is legal tender ...
Parent comment was right, subjective value thesis says people will value things (including money) differently.
And legal tender laws are only "typical" of government coercion in the central bank era, basically the past century or so. Prior to that the king or the local sovereign may have required taxes paid in his coin, but multiple monies circulated and people freely chose which ones to spend, save, accept, or not.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Of course you could, you make a new version of your smart contract or blockchain and people use that instead.
This defeats the core idea of having something immutable, that no one can mess with. If you can agree to roll out a new version, why not do it with regular software?
The author looks at this from the perspective of making money. Bitcoin is a form of money. It's like HTTP/HTTPS vs IPv4/IPv6. Bitcoin operates at a lower level than stocks, looking at it from that perspective is like looking at the facebook home page and trying to understand the value of IPv6. Investing/speculating is all about increasing a counter. Here we are talking about another separate counter.
Investing is about increasing production capacity or production efficiency, with the expectation of getting a positive return on investment in the future. Everything else is not investing, but speculation.
With the expectation of increasing the counter.
Exactly my point.
Most "cryptos" are just affinity scams riding on the coattails of the true innovation of Bitcoin. They offer nothing significantly new or important over Bitcoin. Most people in the space understand this and why. Institutional investors starting to come in understand this. State governments are starting to understand this. The energy sector is starting to understand this. Yes crypto is a bubble, and it will pop. When…
Bitcoin is massively, overwhelmingly manipulated by a very small number of actors. The price is a complete fantasy, and exists mostly to transfer money from new investors to those manipulators, and bitcoin miners. There is a lot of money going in. There will not be a lot of money coming out. The money is gone.
Most "cryptos" are just affinity scams riding on the coattails of the true innovation of Bitcoin. They offer nothing significantly new or important over Bitcoin. Most people in the space understand this and why. Institutional investors starting to come in understand this. State governments are starting to understand this. The energy sector is starting to understand this. Yes crypto is a bubble, and it will pop. When…
In contrast, we already know exactly how bitcoin works presently and how it works in the future. It's right there in the cpp file. It doesn't matter who the Senator from California is, it doesn't matter who is the chairman of the Fed is.
So bitcoin competes with other currencies by being a system with transparent and predictable behavior. Meanwhile the current dollar system - which is valuable precisely because the government always meets its obligations - is being valued by pretty much just ignoring all its underfunded obligations in the hope that some unknown solution will be arranged when it becomes a crisis.
To tie these findings back to the concept of financial "valuation", I think the author elides the role that predictability plays in it. And specifically overestimates the predictability of status quo at a time length of five to thirty years.
But what's easy to value is public pensions. Do the existing reserves and projected inflows match the liabilities? Of course not, they are underwater by trillions of dollars. How will fifty very different state governments and the federal government distribute these losses? Impossible to say, because different factions are already lining up different schemes with vastly different outcomes. In contrast, we already kno…