Live data from Hacker News

Calling All Hackers: How money works (2024)

phrack.org

151–160 of 262 posts

Re: Calling All Hackers: How money works (2024)

#151
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you take that logic to its natural conclusion HN would shut down.

Why not? One of these days YC is gonna fund something worse than Flock and get itself on the Senate's radar.

You mean like when YC-funded startup OpenAI CEO Sam Altman appeared before Congress, or when Garry Tan, YC president and CEO went before Congress and talked about YC startups? The senate's heard of YC, if that's your question.

Re: Calling All Hackers: How money works (2024)

#152
post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can swing a few percent. So can gold. Either one could make a bank insolvent. In the long term treasury bonds are not volatile, especially if you hold them to maturity.

What does holding to maturity have to do with their current value?

It makes the current market price irrelevant because you're still owed the same amount on the same date.

Re: Calling All Hackers: How money works (2024)

#153
post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many Christians very fervent opponents of listening to such authorities and stick to the Bible itself. Nowhere in the Bible for example it is written that one can pay off sins by giving money to some authority. But someone had to pay for the Saint Peter’s Basilica so there was an incentive to adjust scripture.

Well, that's about as valid as listening to sovereign citizens' interpretation of the US constitution. (At least from the Catholic point of view as far as I can tell.) > Nowhere in the Bible for example it is written that one can pay off sins by giving money to some authority. I'm no expert but doesn't James 2:26 says "Faith without works is dead."? Surely giving some money (that you had to work hard for!) to the gre…

> Well, that's about as valid as listening to sovereign citizens' interpretation of the US constitution. (At least from the Catholic point of view as far as I can tell.)

From an "axiomatic perspective" this means accepting much more encompassing axioms than the holy scripture; such a "proof" requires much more than "the Bible/Quran says" as huijzer implicitly used in his argument "That’s why the Bible and Quran are against usury.", but more like "the Bible says and we additionally accept the following axioms that imply that the Pope's interpretation of the Bible is the correct one".

Re: Calling All Hackers: How money works (2024)

#154
post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Non-responsive paragraph. You've attacked what could interchangeably be dollar or gold asking what it might buy or store, failing to recognize I was measuring relative stability rather than absolute stability. The dollar has lost over 95% of its value since inception of the federal reserve (at which time dollars nature changed significantly) in 1913 against some imperfect measures of CPI. That gives you a 20x differe…

The US always had really weird and restrictive financial regulations. Right from when the country got started. Look to Canada for a much stabler system that didn't have banking crisis all the time. See eg https://archive.is/v13TM

Classical liberals are akin to communists in that when the practical application of their ideas fail, it's obviously because it was only a corrupted version that ended up being really put in practice. “It wasn't really Communism” and “It wasn't deregulated enough”.

Re: Calling All Hackers: How money works (2024)

#155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For every debt there's a debtor and a debtee. For the first debt is a liability, while it's an asset for the second.

and liabilities are always paid back in full and never smoothed over with money printing bailouts.

I don't understand the point you're making.

All kind of assets can lose value overnight, be it stocks or real estate.

Re: Calling All Hackers: How money works (2024)

#157
post #23

This smells a lot like a hacker thought because they are exceptional in one field (cybersecurity), they therefore are exceptional in all fields. The result is that information presented in this article is very surface-level, and quite biased.

the only thing it takes to be exceptional in most fields is time and effort. there is no secret sauce. There is not something innate that "finance people" have that "computer people" don't, other than a willingness to trudge through boring finance-related crap and vice-versa.

This is all spawned from insecurity that your prestigious degree or whatever can be replicated through independent learning

Re: Calling All Hackers: How money works (2024)

#158

[flagged]

He's talking about bonds, though. These can't generally be paid back early. The same goes for some other loans like mortgages which often come with an agreement that you won't pay it back within a number of years (unless you pay a fee). If you intend to pay back the interest normally then you could totally book it as a liability up front, it's the same thing at the end of the day. I mean, it is literally a liability. You've agreed to pay back the amount of the loan plus interest.

I'd encourage people doing their own accounts to think of it like this and don't do things that professional accountants do "just because".

The thing is accounting is all made up. We try to squeeze this idea of "value" into this abstraction called "money" and make it all work. But it's trivial to find cases where it's overly simplified and doesn't really work.

For example, how do you book depreciation of a motor vehicle? For the average person with a single utility vehicle the vehicle's value remains roughly the same from the moment of purchase until the moment is is written off. The value is its utility to you. In my accounts, I book this simply as "1 car" in my assets. But accountants don't like that. Everything has to be valued in money. So you end up with stupid stuff like averaging the depreciation over time that is pure fiction and only exists to make the books work and reduce the "shock" when a vehicle is finally written off.

Re: Calling All Hackers: How money works (2024)

#159

Unpopular opinion, but I don't think banks should be able to loan out money that's not theirs, and printing money is bad. Gold good, paper bad. But also, gold bad, because clipping. If only there was a solution.

This probably won't make you feel any better, but banks don't really loan out money that's not theirs. When they lend money, they literally create it out of thin air. Creating that money has a cost, which is what ultimately limits how much they can lend, and having more deposits can lower that cost somewhat, but there's no direct connection between the money you deposit in your account and the money that the bank lends to someone else.

Re: Calling All Hackers: How money works (2024)

#160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It can be difficult to figure out whether the theoretical limit is 10x or 100x in my mind because there isn't a reserve ratio federally (well, there is one, but it's zero) , and the other regulations surrounding that aren't so cleanly understood in a neat formula.

Extremely simplified: When I deposit a dollar, the bank records a $1 deposit liability. If the bank makes a $1 loan, it creates a new $1 deposit for the borrower. If that dollar is spent and redeposited, deposits increase even though the amount of base money has not. It looks like multiplication, but what’s really happening is that loans and deposits are expanding together on the balance sheet. The bank is not creati…

Reserves matter even if reserve ratios are zero. If Bank A lends too much money, then when its customers spend that money, a lot of it will end up deposited at other banks. These banks will then ask Bank A for reserves (as in, central bank money) to clear the inter-bank transfers, which Bank A will need to borrow from the central bank, at a cost.
Post reply on HN