181–190 of 318 posts
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But at much lower rates. Taxes as a % of GDP didn't exceed 10% in the USA until WW1: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/37/Federal%... You can see other spikes related to other wars. Wars sure are great if you want to expand Government power and taxation over your own citizenry!
Also if you want to build and maintain infrastructure and social services.
> It seems if you want to do crypto things without burning the planet down, you can. Right, but what if you consider it a bad thing to introduce an economic incentive for other people to burn the planet down? This is beyond a matter of personal choice, until and unless we all get our own personal planets.
I agree, but our problem is with proof of work, not crypto. I don't buy/use bitcoin any more because of this. Ethereum is moving (the sooner the better), and the only other PoW crypto I have a bit of is innovating PoW and (hopefully) becomes more environmentally friendly as a result. To be honest, I'm still unclear on if this is even possible, and if energy usage becomes significant relative to what it does, I would…
Hybrid systems like Ethereum, bootstrapping with PoW and then switching to a PoS system afterwards seemingly solve this problem, but such a switch implies that the social structure around the blockchain is centralized: Ethereum is technologically decentralized, but politically very centralized (you can also see in their way of handling the DAO “hack”, violating the Ethereum protocol and rolling back the blockchain) and that's why the developers can just go “screw the miners and their hardware, we're moving to PoS now”.
You couldn't do this kind of switch for bitcoin, because it's really decentralized, with stakeholders having deeply unaligned interests.
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Well, commodity-based currency had non-zero value because it was an abstraction of a physical process somewhere. Proof of work. I have to spend time mining gold, so gold has value, so gold coins have value. But that wasn't sufficient alone to give it utility . And without utility, there is no buyer of last resort, and no floor under value. Hence taxes. Fiat currency removed the proof of work, and replaced it with pro…
The difference, though, is that the proof of work is qualitatively — physically! — a different type of work. The value of money is derived from moving against thermodynamic equilibrium. Cryptocurrency’s value comes from moving towards thermodynamic equilibrium. The conversion of work into heat — not heat into work! I’m not talking about taxation or apps. Those are things built with the axioms of crypto-evangelism. I’…
The thermodynamic direction is less important than the fact that people didn't want to do it.
But proof of work was always a transitory, bootstrapping phase. Even among the crypto evangelists, I can't believe anyone saw a long-term future in that.
Crypto needs to solve a problem. I think cryptocurrencies should focus on making a cheap currency that people can actually use. requirements: - low transaction costs - low volatility - many places where you can pay with it - secure - privacy - no tax problems - fast transactions - handle fraud - scalable If a crypto currency can solve above points by cutting out the middle man and making transactions virtually free i…
looks like cash has solved (most) of this some time ago: - V. costs nothing to exchange a bill - V. link to a real economy so little volatility (except when the real economy implodes) - V. accepted everywhere within a currency zone - V. mostly secure (ofcourse theft is as old as humanity) - V. private (only your counterparty knows about it) - V. fully integrated into financial accounts / tax systems - X. fast (local)…
NFTs in the current form might be pretty useless as such (just a proof you "first purchased" a jpeg). But I think in the gaming space this will become huge and actually makes sense - use elements (items, characters, stats,...) and their history in different and independent games if the developer wants to integrate them. No lock-in and portable, not tied to game-specific accounts.
It helps to think about this more clearly if you forget the NFT bit and think about just doing this with standard tech. What stops developers today from implementing publicly documented formats for in-game elements? What stops other developers from writing code to import these elements from one game to another? All an NFT adds is a verifiable signature and a pubic database. The signature bit seems completely irreleva…
The primary use case for crypto is simple: (1) People buy crypto because it keeps going up in value (2) It keeps going up in value because people keep buying it. (3) For why people keep buying Crypto, see (1).
That's the logic of a Ponzi scheme. All previous Ponzi schemes failed because either (a) sooner or later the scheme runs out of new suckers, and/or (b) the authorities intervene and shut it down, and/or (c) The founders cash out and 90% of the money just disappears into thin air.
The truly fascinating thing about crypto is that neither (a) or (b) appears likely in the near future. It's a Ponzi scheme with fungible shares.
For (c), as with other Ponzi schemes, the founders make a lot of money, the later entrants lose a lot of money. Sooner or later, the founders of BTC (for example) will start to cash out. At the moment, they seem to be cashing out gradually, so as not to cause a crash in their remaining holdings. That is one reason BTC prices are so volatile.
At the same time as the BTC founders are trying to find the optimum point in their cash out equation, there is another use case for crypto which continues to drive demand: crime and money laundering. Crypto is a great way to move money between jurisdictions. For some criminals, it is well worth the risk of volatility.
Ponzi logic and money laundering logic will continue to drive the price of established cryptos upwards. I suspect it might be quite a while before the game stops. That makes cryptos like BTC an interesting short term speculation. But to paraphrase Gurf Morlix: stay in too long, you're gonna get cut, and you're gonna bleed.
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Governments collected taxes on cash and non-fiat for millenia (and still do so), they will have no issues taxing crypto if they need to.
But at much lower rates. Taxes as a % of GDP didn't exceed 10% in the USA until WW1: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/37/Federal%... You can see other spikes related to other wars. Wars sure are great if you want to expand Government power and taxation over your own citizenry!
Also some stuff of much more dubious value, like TSA and heavily militarized police
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It helps to think about this more clearly if you forget the NFT bit and think about just doing this with standard tech. What stops developers today from implementing publicly documented formats for in-game elements? What stops other developers from writing code to import these elements from one game to another? All an NFT adds is a verifiable signature and a pubic database. The signature bit seems completely irreleva…
NFTs are always brought up for game items but I don't understand the non-fungible part of it. A game item or cosmetic is the example par-excellence for a thing that anyone can have a copy of - I don't get why there has to be artificial scarcity in that at all.
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> in much of the world private healthcare is accepted and efficient. It is accepted in many parts of the world, unfortunately, but in what part of the world is it "efficient"? Can you give an example? Is "basic medicine costing $500 (see insulin) to the few that can afford it and the rest dying because they can't access it" what you define as efficient? > I'd rather euthanize myself at age 80 and pay much lower taxes…
> So the rich should get clean streets and running water while the poor walk on their own shit? That's a pretty accurate depiction of the US. Seattle at least
but then I remembered some stories I've heard about Seattle and San Francisco.