161–170 of 190 posts
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That's why I said "hyperbole." I should have said "mild hyperbole," but I didn't bother to look up the actual numbers.
86% vs. 98% isn't mild hyperbole, in one case the dollar is worth 7x as much as the other case.
you're splitting hairs. 7x .02 doesn't change the trend.
Central bank digital currency efforts seem interesting. 1. They make it possible to deliver helicopter money directly to the consumers. Now central banks can only work trough banks or financial markets. Digital currency where everyone has access to central bank money can correct the errors in current systems. 2. Currency would be anchored in real economy with sound monetary policy. Nobody in their right mind takes Bi…
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> Such a military force would be facing a very well armed citizen-led guerilla response. As well-armed as the citizenry may be, the military is infinitely more so - they have, you know, tanks and planes and smart bombs - and in this fantasy civil war-esque scenario I don’t think the junta would be shy about exploiting that advantage.
...All of which require extensive logistics to employ that have hitherto been predicated in the Armed Forces not being on the wrong side of the American public's ire. I.e. you can handle hostile logistics in Afghanistan because it isn't that hard to get the raw materials stateside, and move them through Allied supply chains. Remove the part where it's easy to get things Stateside, and I assure you, a U.S. military co…
The US military problem would be that it has to subdue a population that has been socialized to resist (to the point that it already birthed paramilitary during the previous democracy) and constitutes the replacements for that military (and the industries necessary for supply) for coming generations. Hell, once it had a democracy the first time, it still went to civil war. Thinking about the short term doesn't get you much.
Predator drones, nukes, etc won't solve the problems that couldnt be solved in a foreign land. Domestically it would be harder and longer fought.
"In our design users interact with a central transaction processor using digital wallets storing cryptographic keys. ... Despite using ideas from blockchain technology, we found that a distributed ledger operating under the jurisdiction of different actors was not needed to achieve our goals. Specifically, a distributed ledger does not match the trust assumptions in Project Hamilton's approach, which assumes that the…
Reading Matt Levine's latest column on this CBDC was sort of mind blowing. With a truly centralized digital currency the Fed would basically monopolize all bank deposits (why store money in the bank at all when your digital wallet is perfectly safe) and destroy the entire banking sector. So they are forced to decentralize the currency to some extent, so that banks are the ones to actually issue the currency (after bo…
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We already have all of this. The government can tell your bank to do something, and your bank will do it. What a government digital currency would do is end the subsidy of banks as the only "safe" place to park money. If I have a government account with my money, banks don't get to gamble with it for their own benefit. If I want to do that, I could withdraw the cash from where it is safe and consciously put it at ris…
> banks as the only "safe" place to park money You can park your money safely anyway, just buy a vault. There are even specialized bank accounts where they just store you money and don't lend it out. However, you won't earn any interest, and thus will lose opportunity cost and also lose value as cash inflates. Additionally, the money that banks lend is critical to the economy - which includes your job and the general…
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...All of which require extensive logistics to employ that have hitherto been predicated in the Armed Forces not being on the wrong side of the American public's ire. I.e. you can handle hostile logistics in Afghanistan because it isn't that hard to get the raw materials stateside, and move them through Allied supply chains. Remove the part where it's easy to get things Stateside, and I assure you, a U.S. military co…
In America, it certainly isn't about who you can kill or how fast. Any individual can kill multiple individuals on a micro scale and multiply that every time a weapon kills a soldier or a soldier trades weaponry. The US military problem would be that it has to subdue a population that has been socialized to resist (to the point that it already birthed paramilitary during the previous democracy) and constitutes the re…
For example, let's say that the military made a deal with . Then they'd have people to install into the newly vacated positions of civilian economic administration, and in that, they'd have a way to motivate that faction to join them and support their legitimacy.
Many people on HN claim that the rise of crypto-currencies is a social catastrophe. Maybe so (I disagree), but wait until central-bank issued digital currencies become a reality, you'll very quickly learn the real meaning of social catastrophe. Spending 10 seconds thinking about it, I can come up with the following scenarios: - complete and utter "financial deplatforming" if you don't behave as a citizen. This is bas…
- Geo-replicated latency Amazing technical feat.
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The concept of a blockchain has ZERO connection to electricity usage. Proof of work is the thing that uses the electricity. blockchains can use or not use proof of work.
Here's an example of an electricity-free blockchain : http://www.righto.com/2014/09/mining-bitcoin-with-pencil-and...
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> Such a military force would be facing a very well armed citizen-led guerilla response. As well-armed as the citizenry may be, the military is infinitely more so - they have, you know, tanks and planes and smart bombs - and in this fantasy civil war-esque scenario I don’t think the junta would be shy about exploiting that advantage.
That's a weird argument. Yes, obviously the US government can win any engagement against anyone, including its own civilians, by nuking them at any time. Clearly there is additional nuance to this argument since the US didn't just nuke the Vietnamese, Iraqis, or Jan 6 protesters from the get-go.