On anti-crypto toxicity • Hacker News Board

Re: On anti-crypto toxicity

#671

Post by przeor » Thu, Apr 21, 2022, 5:30 AM UTC

saltcured wrote: post #656

loup-vaillant wrote: post #641

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, so redistributive pension systems are pyramid schemes… I’ll just note that this is a highly debatable interpretation of such systems. Now if we think about it for a moment: social security need money for 3 major things: unemployment, retirement, and health care. At any given point in time, you can divide the population in 2 categories: those who are currently working, and those who are not. And those who are curr…

Right. In essence, I think these details of the redistributive function are what make it Ponzi-like or sound. On one end of the spectrum, you have personal and "defined contribution" saving and investment schemes: the individual carries a personal pool into their later years where they draw it down. How are differences between the contribution+performance and lifetime needs reconciled? Estates pass inheritances or in…

Every aspect of life is related to population distribution graph which is doomed in Europe.

Even if you save your retirement in a real estate, it's value is tightly correlated to amount of people in productive age when you try to sell it.

The only thing that can save one, is to start saving money early and give it to componding effect. Albert Einstein once said “Compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world. He who understands it, earns it; he who doesn't, pays it”.

Anything else wont work because demographic at least for europe is bad.

The good information is that to make componding effect to work, crypto is much more compund effect friendly asset in the world. Of course, in the mean time you need to use your brain to not lose your priv key or being phished etc.

Good luck

Re: On anti-crypto toxicity

#672

Post by telomero22 » Thu, Apr 21, 2022, 5:34 AM UTC

K0nserv wrote: post #78

telomero22 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's really irrelevant in 2022, since 90% of blockchains are not Proof of Work anymore.

Maybe 90% by count, but not 90% by volume of transactions, prominence, etc. Bitcoin seems to be entirely resistant to moving away from PoW and Ethereum have been in the process of moving to PoS for years. Pop quiz: What will happen first, Ethereum PoS or the year of linux on the desktop?

Yes, 90% by number transactions. Binance chain, Solana, Luna, AVAX, ADA, DOT are doing around 15 million transactions a day altogether while Bitcoin and Ethereum are only doing 1.5 million altogether.

Re: On anti-crypto toxicity

#673

Post by shkkmo » Thu, Apr 21, 2022, 6:01 AM UTC

trutannus wrote: post #504

shkkmo wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "just pass a law" If I search for that phrase you are quoting/referencing in this thread, you are the only one using it. I explained what point I was making. Do you have anything to contribute beyond attacking your strawman over and over?

> You make a law that everyone must be served by the banks. Easy. Here is the "just pass a law" line. I've summarized a line that makes this exact point. I see no straw-men here. Can you point out where I make a straw-man? Genuinely interested in why you see this as creating a straw-man in my summary. I fail to see how else you can interpret other than 'just pass a law'.

"just pass a law" is longer than "make a law" and is thus not a summarization...

Quotations marks imply a quote or a refernce to a term / phrase. When you deliberate misquote someone and then repeat that all over the thread as the basis for your argument, that is a strawman at best and pure bad faith at worst.

I see nothing in the line you are referencing that indicates any sort of blind trust is suggested. Even simple, easy legistlation works best when the trust it is based on is not blind.

Re: On anti-crypto toxicity

#674

Post by sneak » Thu, Apr 21, 2022, 6:51 AM UTC

falcolas wrote: post #440

sneak wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All a government has to do is shut those commercial ventures down, and the value of the $coin will disappear for those residents. So long as any of those residents can travel to another place where they can exchange it for hard money, that's not true. Countries do not exist in isolation.

Carrying large quantities of cash across a border is usually investigated by the border guards. If you don't declare it, you're breaking the law. This is compounded by how some countries are big enough that traveling across a border is a fairly significant undertaking (Brazil, for example). Not something most folks can or will do on a whim. Plus, you'd have to transfer a fairly significant amount of money to be worth…

It doesn't matter. As long as some members of society are willing to cross the border with cash, the availability of liquidity will be preserved (albeit with a slightly higher cost). "Most folks" won't need to deal with it any more than most folks know how to drive a semi full of groceries.

Re: On anti-crypto toxicity

#675

Post by G3rn0ti » Thu, Apr 21, 2022, 6:53 AM UTC

loup-vaillant wrote: post #641

G3rn0ti wrote: post #602

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, all redistributive social security systems have a strong pyramid like scheme inherent to them. Take the German retirement funds which - AFAIK — works similarly to „social security“ in the US: Every employee in Germany is required to pay a share of about 20% of their income (1) into the retirement „fund“ — which isn’t one really as the money is not invested to gain interest but instead is immediately payed out t…

OK, so redistributive pension systems are pyramid schemes… I’ll just note that this is a highly debatable interpretation of such systems. Now if we think about it for a moment: social security need money for 3 major things: unemployment, retirement, and health care. At any given point in time, you can divide the population in 2 categories: those who are currently working, and those who are not. And those who are curr…

> So okay, I understand the pyramid analogy there. There’s a problem though: the boomers will die.

Well, after the boomers have died, Generation X and the Millenials will demand their retirement package. The population age distribution will not become a pyramid with the next generations.

> just raise contributions a little bit

A little bit. Lol. In Germany the contributions are quite unpopular, too (and rightly so with 20% removed from your gross income), but the government just increased the tax subsidies over the years. Nowadays, they amount to about 30% of Germany‘s federal budget — on top of all the contributions. How much money do you think does a society need to pay for their retirees to make a redistributive pension system sustainable?

> See, even though you’re ostensibly investing money so you can retire later, what happens in practice is that your money is being injected in parts of the economy to fuel your investment. And ultimately, part of that money will be used to pay currently retired people.

No. You have a weird notion of how capital markets work. In a capital based system an individual saves for his retirement. Money is put aside every month and invested over a long time. The individual‘s money and its returns of investment are used to pay the pension.

You can make this a public system where everybody is forced to pay and even set up a national fund. It can be subsidied a little to support the poor when retiring.

This is how to render this system fair and sustainable.

Re: On anti-crypto toxicity

#676

Post by ulzeraj » Thu, Apr 21, 2022, 7:03 AM UTC

sofixa wrote: post #549

ulzeraj wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO we should do the opposite. We should bombard those countries with our shit. Our cheap services, our shows, our food, our way of life. Hire their engineers. Give them tech like Uber and crupto to create a nightmare for their control freak governors. Erode and drain their funds. Capture the hearts of their young. But instead Russians are listening to their government say "See I told you they hate us".

That's what has been done until now. Germany even had an explicit policy of economic interdependence to make a war unimaginable. You can see how well that worked, right?

That’s not what I’ve wrote. I’ve wrote about exporting goods and ideas to their _people_ not buying gas from their government.

Re: On anti-crypto toxicity

#677

Post by dmitriid » Thu, Apr 21, 2022, 7:17 AM UTC

rglullis wrote: post #645

dmitriid wrote: post #626

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> government putting a tax of 0.38% on every financial transfer (does not seem like much until you think of all the cascading effects) Unlike crypto/web3 which checks notes puts a tax on everything > If you are talking about Bitcoin (or crypto currencies in general given how BTC unfortunately still makes its own gravity in the crypto market), I will 100% agree with you. Bitcoin's price fluctuation in the past year is…

What "tax" is put on web3? This is the kind of thing that seriously makes me doubt your interest in any reasonable debate.

> What "tax" is put on web3

You pay for almost any interaction with it. Except, perhaps, reading.

Re: On anti-crypto toxicity

#678

Post by igorkraw » Thu, Apr 21, 2022, 7:20 AM UTC

binibus wrote: post #166

igorkraw wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really not that hard. Libertarians, minarchists and "anarcho-capitalists" take one of the things which inherently need a state to uphold it (private property) and use it as the conceptual foundation of their social order - while not liking "the state". All other anarchists don't and hence get labeled as "left". That's the main difference, and the reason why "anarcho-capitalist" is inherently paradoxical. There i…

Hi, minarchist here. You are almost right in the distinction between right and left anarchism being about private property. But it's a little more profound. The main difference radicates in the conception of legitimate power. For a right anarchist, power is illegitimate only when it's carried out through violence. Meanwhile, for a left anarchist almost any power hierarchy is illegitimate in itself. To the extent that…

I agree with you on the more nuanced distinction, I just didn't want to open the discussion of what legitimate power structures constitue.

Re your criticism of left-anarchism, one of the big unsolved challenges in my eye is exactly your point: how do you keep per from pooling? In a sense, you also need a "state" but one which has as it's explicit goal the self dissolution - which is of course the same paradox that ancaps face. The difference to me is that it seems to me more feasible to build societal systems and cultures that disperse power if we build our ideology around consent and cooperation than to build a society where the central building block is the by-necessity cooperation of small dictators who somehow are supposed to also respect their weaker neighbors private property rights. The former seems like positive feedback loops are possible (and we see spontaneous cooperation like this emerge throughout history, without any powerful person pushing it) while the latter...was the robber barons and cleptocrats of the 19th,20th and 21st century

Re your question, I don't like to quibble to much about this if it doesn't have a possible payoff, but do you believe in e.g. environmental regulations, provision of public goods via a regulated healthcare system, basic education etc? If yes then I think your position might be rare amongst self identified minarchists. If not, then do you see how e.g. natural monopolies like healthcare or highly influential realms like healthcare are open to power concentration and state hijacking?

Re: On anti-crypto toxicity

#679

Post by dmitriid » Thu, Apr 21, 2022, 7:20 AM UTC

rglullis wrote: post #640

dmitriid wrote: post #628

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Visicalc was not free software... but Linux 1.0 is from 1994. Goalposts: shifted. The shift itself is also extremely funny because web3's entire premise is: "you pay for everything" > The point is not just in having an application, the point is in having an application created under the new paradigm. So, where are they? Where's web3's VisiCalc (1979), emacs (1976), vi (1976)? Douglas Engelbart's Mother of All Demos…

> Goalposts: shifted. Not at all. It was you and OP who asked for some kind of "killer app" from web3 as a way to justify its existence. My response is to say that this is an absurd ask. Not only is absurd, it already exists, you just prefer to ignore it. I may agree that Bitcoin as a currency is a failed experiment, there is no denying that the possibility of sending value across borders is the killer app already. "…

> Not at all. It was you and OP who asked for some kind of "killer app" from web3. My response is to say that this is an absurd ask.

No. Your response is literally "you wouldn't ask Unix people to create VisiCalc instead of compilers", but they did, to which you responded "but it isn't free".

> it already exists, you just prefer to ignore it. I may agree that Bitcoin as a currency is a failed experiment, there is no denying that the possibility of sending value across borders is the killer app already.

You mean, the thing that people have been doing since the invention of borders is the killer app?

> But I am sure you want to ignore that

No, I'm not ignoring that. And the reason it doesn't count because original question was about web3, and if all web3 has to offer is sending money across borders, it's not web3, it's Western Union 2.0.

Re: On anti-crypto toxicity

#680

Post by sofixa » Thu, Apr 21, 2022, 8:28 AM UTC

ulzeraj wrote: post #676

sofixa wrote: post #549

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what has been done until now. Germany even had an explicit policy of economic interdependence to make a war unimaginable. You can see how well that worked, right?

That’s not what I’ve wrote. I’ve wrote about exporting goods and ideas to their _people_ not buying gas from their government.

And do you think the people didn't get ideas, services and stuff imported? They had McDonalds, IKEA, YouTube, iPhones, Netflix, etc.