Comment by Drakim | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Drakim | Hacker News Reader

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In the world of cryptocurrency, even the wrist slap isn't a given.

To me, cryptocurrency has been a very cool social experiment in what pure unregulated free market capitalism would work like in practice. Supposedly in place of regulations, companies would live on reputation and trustworthy business practices. If you use poisonous lead in your soup cans, people will stop buying your soup when word gets out, no need to regulate, companies will self-regulate to stay profitable and relevant.

Reputation and trust is probably the most important thing Coinbase can hoard, it's the one way a legitimate company that acts like an exchange and/or bank for cryptocurrency can use to rise above all the scams and dubious services that's going on in the cryptocurrency world. And yet here they are pissing it down the drain for easy short-term profits. Surprise surprise.

The truth is, trust, reputation and even human lives are just input values in the big equation of profits. The free market will always optimize for the best option, even if that option is an overall net loss for humanity.

The experiment wasn't even necessary - the Gilded Age was a libertarian's paradise with the gold standard and very little government regulation. What do we most associate with this era? Robber barons, utility monopolies screwing people over with ruthless business practices, confidence men and literal snake oil quack medicine.

I genuinely can't think of a good (ie moral) reason to support the idea given how it is predicted to, and has been shown to, play out.

>The experiment wasn't even necessary - the Gilded Age was a libertarian'paradise with the gold standard and very little government regulation. What do we most associate with this era? Robber barons, utility monopolies screwing people over with ruthless business practices, confidence men and literal snake oil quack medicine.

The rate of economic growth and improvement in people's living standards was much higher back then than it is now.

Similarly the average adult back then was much healthier than the average adult nowadays, who is likely overweight or obese with some chronic illness. In spite of the vast amount of pills modern people take. So healthcare hasn't necessarily improved much either.

So we can ignore that cancer used to be a guaranteed death sentence, polio was a thing, children got rickets, a septic wound could kill you, an ulcer wasn't a course of pills to get rid of, tuberculosis was rife.

The gilded age was no paradise and rose tinted views of the era just don't hold up to scrutiny.

Most of this was eradicated by simple increases in hygienic ability, not some overpriced medical miracle.

Polio was solved by vaccines, and sepsis was partly solved by hygiene and partly by antibiotics. Modern medicine has helped with many conditions.

I don't know what the Gilded Age was (and too lazy to search) but, I quote "Over the past 160 years, life expectancy (from birth) in the United States has risen from 39.4 years in 1860, to 78.9 years in 2020"[1] so please do show some support for the affirmation "the average adult back then was much healthier". Unless you mean they all died healthy around 40 years of age - as in, they were totally healthy until 40 then the first illness killed them clean.

[1]https://www.statista.com/statistics/1040079/life-expectancy-...

While your point is absolutely true, note that life expectancy shouldn't be taken as the literal age most people die. It is the expected value of your age at death. Just like the expected value of a coin flip being heads is 0.5, but no coin is ever 0.5 heads.

Life expectancy at birth in the times before modern medicine has always been dragged down significantly by the huge rate of infant mortality. It was more common for a family to have 1-2 dead small children in their past than not. People who lived past 5 or 10 or so would often live to see 70 or so, and 80 or 90 year olds were not unheard of.

That's the nice thing about statistics, we will always have outliers to cherry pick. One can play with the graph at will, but also US men life expectancy at 5yo increased from 55 to 80 in the last 150 years: https://mappinghistory.uoregon.edu/english/US/US39-01.html. That's without infant mortality.

> The rate of economic growth and improvement in people's living standards was much higher back then than it is now.

During the industrial revolution? I would expect so. At this point we're on the tail end of those improvements.

> Similarly the average adult back then was much healthier than the average adult nowadays, who is likely overweight or obese with some chronic illness.

Life expectancy has been going up for a long time, but on the obesity front the advent of highly sugary foods thanks to food giants is a result of profiteering, not regulation, and people driving everywhere instead of getting exercise is not because of regulation (though it is due to city planning).

> So healthcare hasn't necessarily improved much either.

Are you sincerely arguing that modern medicine isn't much of an improvement over snake oil medicine? The discovery of penicillin alone has saved literally billions* of lives, to say nothing of painkillers, modern surgical hygiene, pharmaceuticals, vaccines, just so so many improvements in healthcare. I can't take this argument seriously I'm afraid, I can only assume it's a post hoc rationalisation.

* hundreds of millions, I misremembered the number.

>What do we most associate with this era? Robber barons, utility monopolies screwing people over with ruthless business practices, confidence men and literal snake oil quack medicine.

Speak for yourself. Most well read people associate it with urbanization (made possible by industrialization of agriculture) and huge standard of living improvements that came with the long tail of industrialization. Such "luxuries" as off the shelf clothing, meat products, electric lights, etc. etc became readily available to the common man at a price he could afford at that time.

Okay to clarify, I meant the excesses of the age. It was also a time of expansion driven by the inventions and discoveries of the industrial revolution and the discovery of oil. But when people make the argument that libertarian policy would lead to the market moderating companies' and entrepreneurs' worst instincts, I think the Gilded Age shows otherwise.

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