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Calling All Hackers: How money works (2024)

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

#161

I think overall, the idea of money is messed up on many levels. What we call 'money' today doesn't even have an identity. It's the most important thing in the world, it's also the most heavily utilized thing in the world but almost nobody knows what it means. - It's backed by nothing. - It's not a fair medium of exchange because it physically cannot circulate very far from 'money printers' (not many hops) before it's…

> - It's backed by nothing.

Money is never backed by nothing, or it's worthless. It may not be backed by anything physical, but it's always backed by some form of trust. National currencies are backed by trust in the corresponding government and institutions.

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

#162

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.

The problem isn't really that banks can create money. Ultimately it's up to the people whether they trust paper IOUs or not. The trust in IOUs happened organically and would happen again, unless you suggest they should be outlawed (ie. it's illegal to write a piece of paper saying "I promise to pay the bearer..." on it).

The problem is the governments can bail the banks out. After 2008, trust in paper IOUs (or their digital equivalent) should have plummeted, leading people to seek to store their wealth in other ways. But it didn't, because the governments stepped in and said, "nah, we need this to work, so we'll pay their salaries and bonuses with your taxes".

Bitcoin was intended to be a solution to this problem. There's nothing stopped people creating derivatives on top of Bitcoin and trading those. But nobody, no government nor anybody else, can just print more Bitcoin.

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

#164
post #93
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a common misconception, thinking that fractional reserve banking is the way in which banks lend. In actuality it's a limitation to how banks lend. Without fractional reserve rules the banks could lend their money infinitely. I like Richard Wagner's theories/research on the subject, as in he actually asked for a loan and went through the books of the bank to verify where the money came from, it came from nowhe…

> Without fractional reserve rules the banks could lend their money infinitely. What's that supposed to mean? > I like Richard Wagner's theories/research on the subject, as in he actually asked for a loan and went through the books of the bank to verify where the money came from, it came from nowhere, they just credited their account and that's it. That's a bit silly. Yes, when you get a loan and just let the money s…

>The constraint for the bank comes when you start spending that money. Most people take loans to spend the money, eg a company might invest in some new machinery or you might buy a house. The Mr Wagner in your story stopped his investigation too early.

No, you don't get it. Imagine if there was a single bank and no cash withdrawals. The bank can't run out of liquidity, ever. If you buy something from a company, the money lands in the bank account of the company, which is managed by the same bank. This means as long as there is no cross bank transfer, there is no limit to how much money can be created.

Now you might argue that this is a bit unrealistic, but at least in principle you could artificially engineer a situation like that even in the current system by having large corporations agree to use the same bank for money created by a specific loan.

But here is where it gets weirder. Imagine if there are two banks now. Surely now the idea presented above breaks down the moment there is a cross bank transfer, right? Except it's not that simple. There is merely a limit to how much of the created money can leave the bank in one direction. If the cross bank transfers are balanced so that for every transfer from bank one to bank two, there is a transfer from bank two to bank one, then you are back in unlimited money territory.

This means there is no static limit to the amount of money that can be created. The limit is dynamic and depends on the interactions between banks. Specifically, it depends on the liquidity/solvency of a given bank. This means this limit is purely practical and more akin to friction, rather than a fundamental restriction in the math of banking/accounting. It's like how computers aren't turing machines because they have finite amounts of memory. There is no limit to how much memory a computer can have as long as you can manage to build a computer with that much memory.

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

#165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Being exceptional in cybersecurity is a pretty good indicator that someone will be successful in other fields. I am not so certain about this. In particular being exceptional in cybersecurity does not make you good at playing political games or having the traits that a lot of bosses want from employees (I will attempt to avoid starting a discussion whether I consider such traits to be good or bad).

Exceptional includes soft skills too.

1. You re-defined the scope of what it means to be exceptional in cybersecurity.

2. One example of a trait that many bosses desire, but is not a social skill per se is docility.

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

#166
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's basically a tradeoff between wasting your personal life or wasting your professional life. If you get a job that is truly 9-5 (or maybe even a bit less), it leaves a lot of time for forging friendships and relationships and learning hobbies while you're still young, doing sports, seeing the world. Founders usually feel they're missing out on all or most of these. And some of them probably feel like they don't re…

Well said. To expand on what you wrote, I like to think of there being three components (axes) to activities: fun, value, and meaning. Fun is you enjoy doing it. Playing video games and watching TV is fun. Valuable is it makes money. Importantly, it's what other people are willing to pay you money for, not what you think is important or even good. Meaningful is it's spiritually enriching. These are things you would r…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ikigai

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

#167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It bothers me that finance people think they’re smarter than everyone when all their jargon bullshit boils down to SQL statements any senior DB person would understand.

Totally. Tech people don't have jargon that boils down to something simpler, nope. No "artificial intelligence" or "machine learning" or "back propagation" or "neural networks" or "big data" or "scaling up" or (one could continue for days....)

SQL seniors can understand anything in finance. Senior finance people would be baffled from chapter 1 of anything serious in CS. That’s the difference between general purpose programming and a math DSL.

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

#168

real learning- copy paste the content and ask for “critical and constructive feedback and potential false narratives from industry professionals” to get 10x from it https://chatgpt.com/share/695e125f-1254-800a-8661-d7a046f4c2...

From the first sentences, it looks like a 0.1x value. Discrediting the expanded hacker concept just because, criticizing its non-pc language, shaming on the small imoralities (in an industry full of life ruining unethical practices). The list goes on, and I didn't read everything!

In practice, that prompt gets chatgpt role-playing as industry professionals: who knows if it's near or far from the real deal.

Also, reading long texts is good for comprehension. You don't learn with reading summaries, you learn with repetition and even further if write your own summaries.

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

#169

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.

> 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) I know what you're thinking of here, but it doesn't mean anything like what you think it means. So the US used to have a rule that every bank hand to have a certain percentage of its assets stored in its account at a Federal Reserve bank; it is t…

>If a bank gets $1 million worth of new deposits, they get to issue... $0 more loans.

Then it doesn't make sense for a classical deposit-lending bank to pay interest on those new deposits. They can't generate revenue from the new deposits since they cannot touch them to perform lending , and they are now a liability because they must perform banking services to the depositor, regulatory compliance, and insure against the risk something accidently happens to the money. Under your scheme maybe they could go park it at the fed and get interest that way but even that is technically a loan; they are giving up the notional money in exchange for interest in hopes they can collect it at a later time.

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

#170
post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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”.

No, no, not at all.

Communists can say "oh, it wasn't real communism." Classical liberalism and neoliberalism can make much stronger claims: a bit more neoliberalism (stochastically) gives you a bit more prosperity in the long run. You don't need the whole thing 100% to reap partial benefits.

I say stochastically, because in the real world there's a lot of noise from other factors, of course.

And in this case at hand: Canada had much lighter and more sensible regulation in this sector, and they did better. As expected.

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