Zaskoda

My Boss: "I'm convinced this is the right architecture."

Also my boss: "Now how do we break this app up?"

He was certain we needed to shatter our monolith into lots of little pieces, but had no clear vision as to what those pieces would be. From my point of view, the "architecture" he was certain of wasn't an architecture at all. It was just a general notion of doing what he thought everyone else was doing without considering anything about our app. Total cargo cult mentality.

"Banks only need to keep a specific amount of cash on hand and can create loans from the money you deposit. "

So a bank can loan out more money than it has to loan. In addition to creating money out of thin air, that loan will accumulate interest fees.

It gets even worse when these loans are made to another bank who will loan that money out again.

No, let's look at this system, as I said, "from a distance." The entire system has X number of dollars in it and Y amount of loans. It doesn't take long and the amount of debt exceeds the amount of actual dollars that exist in the system. That is to say, there isn't enough money in the system to pay all of these loans back.

It's worse than a Ponzi.

This would require heavy regulation of the housing market. For example, we could add a hefty tax on any home that isn't owner-occupied. Otherwise, housing will remain one of the better places to invest earnings and the cost of housing will continue to rise with earnings. However, such a tax would likely increase the cost of renting.

From an adequate distance, fraction reserve banking looks a whole lot like a ponzi scheme.

TLDR: I wanted to travel the US and explore national parks in a camper van. I'm handy as a builder and knew that I could, technically, build everything. Turns out that the challenge wasn't in the technical aspect but rather the sheer volume of work involved.

A little more detail: Having grown up around 4x4 vehicles, I wanted something four wheel drive. No full-sized American made vans come from the factory as four wheel drive. Even if you find a new 4x4 van on the lot, it will be an after market conversion. This means that they're harder to find and, thus, cost a bit more than your typical 4x4 truck. But I was determined. I found a 1987 Ford Econoline in rough shape for around a grand. I bought it, named it "Polar Bear," and set to work on it.

One of the biggest setbacks for the project was the ongoing expense and hassle of repairing an old van with a custom conversion. I learned more about automotive mechanics with this vehicle than anything else I've owned. Still, a lot of repairs were well beyond my scope and I ended up spending tens of thousands of dollars rebuilding various components. Repairs were a near constant problem and this drastically slowed my build process.

Another hitch in my plan was fuel economy. Polarbear would take me a mere 9.5 miles on a gallon of gas. With a 3-speed transmission, the engine was always running at a high RPM. The alternative factory transmission with an overdrive wasn't as strong as the 3-speed and the gas mileage was only nominally better. After extensive research, I learned that a manual 5-speed swap could be done and would increase my MPG to over 20. However, with all of the expense and hassle of installing a clutch, I never took on this endeavor. Ultimately, I never did that national parks tour. I did, however, go a whole heckuvalotta cool places.

The camper conversion, which was supposed to be the focus, took me a solid ten years to finally complete. There are a lot of rather sloppy looking camper vans in the world and I really wanted mine to look good. This meant taking time on the details. And oh my, where there details. Unlike a box truck, a cargo van's walls are all continuously curved. Cutting wood to smoothly fit the curves of the walls is tricky and takes time to figure out. I also learned a ton about automotive and RV electrical systems in the process. When I began, I imagined a very complex system. I quickly learned that the more simple the design, the better the design. Everything has the potential to break and the more complex it is, the more likely it is to break. In the end, I decided to entirely skip water pumps and simply went with a gravity based system. And despite having a propane tank mounted to the van, I opted to use a portable camping stove instead of running more propane lines. In my opinion, these were good decisions.

Over the course of ten years, I spent enough money to have bought a nice completed rig right from the start. At the very least, I could have purchased a completed 2wd camper and had it converted to 4x4 for far less money. This would have also given me a more modern 4x4 drive train and suspension.

Still, I have no regrets. What I learned was priceless and the adventures I had along the way are some of my best memories in life. I finally sold the van last year for almost 10x what I paid for it - but far far less than I had invested in it. The following link is the build thread I posted to the Sportsmobile Forums for anyone who may be interested in seeing what she looked like:

https://www.sportsmobileforum.com/forums/f24/polar-bear-1-a-... (the last page has the final pictures)

edit: although, as I look more deeply, I may be misunderstanding and this may not be something that would benefit existing SVG browser rendering in any way...

I have had this same wish. I often find myself wondering why something is a certain way and I'm not even sure how to go look it up.

There's a bigger paradigm here that I believe few people understand and that I will desperate attempt to explain. I may be about to write a word salad, but here's hoping.

When the Internet was young, before e-commerce was a thing, it was a delightful space where you could publicly post your e-mail address and never worry about the repercussions. If you ran a server and a hacker gained access, it was on you to improve your security.

Eventually, commerce found the Internet and everything changed. Once money was involved, bad actors started to get involved. This is when we started to experience the delights of e-mail spam, a problem we never really fully solved. And something changed about how we handle those hackers. Now that money is involved, if a hacker gains access to your system, instead of being responsible for your own server you can just call the police. And wow, did they crack down on hackers in the early days. They were bad at catching them, but when they did the punishments were disproportionate. It made things safe enough for commerce to grow, but it didn't make us nor the Internet much "better" in the long run. Rather, it put us in a rut.

Compare that with introduction of Bitcoin - which was money from the moment it was created. Because Bitcoin was about money since the beginning, it also attracted those bad actors from the beginning. However, the Bitcoin paradigm is different. Instead of being connected to the existing financial system, it's a self-contained Internet-native system where the responsibility of security is put (to some degree) in the user's hands. But we users are a bit lazy, especially after being hand-fed dumbed-down UX for decades. That makes us vulnerable because we trust instead of verify. But Bitcoin teaches us to learn, to understand, and hopefully to be more responsible.

I believe that Bitcoin and it's derivative technologies have created something akin to a bug zapper. It attracts bad actors like nothing ever has before. And the only viable retort is to improve technology and educate - the opposite of the traditional system where we give the state a monopoly on violence and then ask them to fix it for us.

If you look over the history of cryptocurrency, you'll see a history of rising and falling value and popularity tied to hacks, exploits, crimes, scams, etc. Often, the news declares the end of the entire enterprise. Yet, each time, the scene not only comes back - it comes back stronger.

What I see is greed and wealth attempting to exploit Bitcoin the way the traditional system gets exploited - but always failing in the long run. And with each failure, the wealth in play gets absorbed into Bitcoin. Meanwhile, we continue to harden and improve Bitcoin and the ecosystem around it. In my mind, it's like a worm that is slowly eating the world's wealth through an ongoing interaction with bad actors. I do not believe it can nor should be stopped.

So this idea that crypto is inherently a scam is the result of scammers being drawn to crypto. It's easy for the public to believe this. But Bitcoin and things like it are, in my opinion, the medicine we need to move through this and on to something else.

Email is similar and now most people get their e-mail from one of a few providers who exploit their data for advertising purposes. This is exactly the problem we wish to distance ourselves from in regard to centralized social services such as Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, etc.

If you're not the customer, you become the product.

Mastodon and the Fediverse made decentralized software that people want to use - but they didn't come up with a way to make it sustainable. Web3 has a model of financial sustainability, but they've yet to come up with any other decentralized software that lots of people want to use. These two communities focused on decentralization should really collaborate more.

https://orbiter8.com/play

"The idea is to talk like a small child or intellectually disabled person"

That's effectively an ignorant description of the entire doge meme.

RationalWiki's "source" for this information is a Reddit post with 6 upvotes and 5 comments. It's remarkable that anyone on hackernews even knew about this.

What is this subculture that watches for any slang to be used by an objectionable group so that it can be proclaimed a cultural characteristic of said group?

This is a common misconception. I've never understood why people have had such unrealistic expectations of Bitcoin's price performance during the initial phase of inflation.

There are two types of people who buy Bitcoin: one that holds it for the long term and the other that treats it as a speculative investment, perhaps even swing trading with it. Access to cheap borrowing and a dramatic increase in the money supply has overpriced Bitcoin as speculators buy in. It has to correct.

Now, as the money supply begins to shrink and access to cheap debt comes to an end, speculators are forced out of the market. They need cash to cover their debts. Thus, as all markets begin to fall, Bitcoin is going to fall with them. A lot of us have always expected this to be the case. Eventually, once the speculators are washed out, we'll hit a floor. We might be there already. We might have a way to go. But there will be a floor.

The correction across all markets we've seen so far is just a market adjustment back to reality. Meanwhile, the debt bubble hasn't really started to "pop" just yet. We've seen record levels of debt lately, corporate debt in particular. Now we will begin to see over-leveraged companies begin defaulting on their debt as they head into bankruptcy. This will be the real crash. The full scope of this is unknowable. But there's reason to believe it will be historic.

Meanwhile, Bitcoin has no debt. Bitcoin doesn't care. Bitcoin will just keep on being Bitcoin. At some point, people will begin to notice that Bitcoin is the only thing that's not falling anymore. This will be the moment of change.