341–350 of 561 posts
Note that this post includes a major spoiler for the show The Good Place . The show is fantastic, so I'd suggest not reading unless you've already finished season 1, or have decided it's not for you.
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Crypto was initially interesting to me because scarcity based economics is failing us and crypto give us a way to explore alternatives. But so far, nearly everything we've built with it has just been a clone of some scarcity-based thing that already exists outside of crypto. Since then I've come to the conclusion that it's never worthwhile to buy crypto with fiat. Any scheme which asks that of its users creates too m…
> scarcity based economics is failing us and crypto give us a way to explore alternatives The entire field of crypto was an attempt to create scarcity where none existed, by turning scarce electricity into special numbers.
I've been deep into crypto for years and I was a big stablecoin supporter. I was fascinated by the tech and I still am. But everything outside the tech itself is just trash, scams, and gambling. I've come to believe that "pure" decentralization is neither practical nor particularly convenient. The only real use case that makes sense to me is giving people in developing countries access to a stable currency they can a…
I'm not into it but I'm fascinated by the cryptographic aspect and the legal aspect of it all. > Outside of that, as an EU/US citizen I don't see why I'd hold stablecoins instead of fiat. Especially as an EU citizen: in the EU it is illegal, by law, to have stablecoin yield. So for example the HN unicorn Coinbase can give 3.5% yield annualized (or whatever the current yield is), automatically, to anyone in the US tha…
"money market fund". If they're yielding, they're holding bonds. Normally this distinction doesn't matter, but we're deep into financial plumbing here.
OTOH i think it damaged the ecosystem that US president decided to be "the most pro-crypto president". Obviously nobody wants that.
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Isn't the whole point of an economy a method of resolving scarcity? Money is a proxy for participation; it keeps me from having to agree to paint the miller's fence in exchange for some flour.
That's the perspective that our current systems are based on. And back when the majority of the problems that people were up against had to do with there being not enough of something to go around--when it took half of us working in the fields just to feed the rest of us--then the system worked relatively well. 9 times out of 10, when somebody got a loan (which is the event that injects dollars into the system) it ha…
Something like Amazon is a partnership between the capital class and, to zeroth-order, everybody else, to screw over a small slice of the proletariat (their own employees and retail / warehouse workers) and the bourgeoisie (brick-and-mortar store owners).
It sucks when the capitalist Eye of Sauron focuses on however you make your living as a thing-to-make-more-efficient but when it lands on how someone else makes their living shit gets cheaper.
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So is bleach, that doesn’t inherently justify anything past a warning label.
People rarely die from taking bleach (except when they want to). About 100,000 die annually from drugs in the US alone. And people "high" on bleach never killed or injured anybody.
> About 100,000 die annually from drugs in the US alone.
A single substance vs all drugs including prescription, over the counter, and hard drugs while including suicide etc is hardly the support you think it is.
Further actually using the correct numbers and then trying to justify US drug policy based on hard drug overdoses fails when you look at hard drug overdoses in other countries. US numbers are high not because it’s an hard problem, but because our policy is bad.
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The fundamental structural problems from 2007-8 are still here. The system has been running with paper over the cracks in the foundation for almost 20 years.
Every system ever has been a patchwork. Dodd-Frank and it's orderly liquidation rules are a genuine benefit. We had a commercial bank collapse a few years ago and there was no contagion.
Isn’t this related to financial nihilism where normal people can’t invest or earn enough to grow money for basic life costs like housing and college with standard investments or jobs. They need a moonshot, hence gambling has become normalized. It isn’t even about the White House or crypto per se, it’s a desperate embrace of risk to catch up.
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I use crypto for exchange between friends (US + EU) and myself (SE Asia). Our options are IBAN (slow!), WesternUnion (fees, denials, hassles) or crypto (10min, cheap). We chose crypto - because it’s the practical path from their bank to mine. CashApp and Coinbase interface with my actual bank accounts, on my end. If you don’t do international banking, then much of the utility is diminished — so I’m not surprised by y…
This actually applies to the US as well. Anytime you need to send $1k+ to a stranger the process is a pain in the ass. > ACH, most bank does not allow send to stranger, and it takes 1~3 days for settlement among those which allow. > Wire, expensive ~$30 per transaction. > Paypal/Venmo/CashApp, Schrödinger's fraud trigger you never know it's gonna work or not. Plus they report to IRS so more paperwork during tax seaso…