bitcoinbutter

What is the purpose of acquiring wealth perpetually until death? The implication by the author is that non-essential purchases are a complete waste of money.

Going out for a nice meal with friends is an experience. Experiences are valuable. Saving a giant pile of money for your 70s and beyond accomplishes very little.

Sure, we don't want to ever run out of money. But we also don't want to avoid experiences in our lives to build up a pile of money in old age.

Enjoying experiences while you are young and healthy is important for a fulfilling life. You're going to have more fun with $100 at 25 years old than $100 at 65 years old, inflation adjusted.

Enjoy your youth and find a balance between spending and saving. Lifestyle creep absolutely can be a problem, but so can living so frugally that you avoid valuable and unique experiences.

You're guilty until proven innocent on nearly every regulated financial service platform. Prepare to explain with evidence how you got the money, why it's being sent, and who it's being sent to, at a moment's notice. Otherwise expect to be separated from your balance on said platform indefinitely.

You can try to write all the laws you want, eventually it boils down to manually reviewing a ton of transactions and everyone loses. The bank needs to pay for growing compliance departments, customers are scrutinized on a growing number of transactions.

Small businesses who are in higher risk industries, however that is chosen to be defined, become inundated with KYC tasks. Every transaction needs an accompanying stack of documents showing the entire trail.

Finance is becoming a bureaucratic hellhole which disproportionately affects lower income people and small businesses. If you don't have a hired compliance agent you will spend your time as a business owner complying to endless demands for onboarding/KYC/transaction reporting.

What you don't see in this article is that HSBC has tons of false positives and the scrutinization of transactions slows everyone down. The more strict they need to be with money flow, the more regular people suffer from crippling KYC and financial reporting.

Do we want every transaction we send out to require an accompanying invoice and paper trail? Payment reviews, account freezing, in-depth explanations for every transaction?

Moving money has become tedious and a bureaucratic nightmare. I doubt HSBC is doing this on purpose, they just have so many obligations already from their transaction volume that it's nearly impossible to comply with regulations.

The Federal Reserve seems primarily focused on keeping asset prices high. Their policies seem to react directly to downward pressure in the equity markets.

When you consider that the appreciation of these markets only serves to widen the wealth gap, it becomes clear that the Fed's mandate is to preserve the wealth of the rich. They're pursuing "trickle down" economics at full speed, despite the overwhelming evidence that "trickle down" is a myth.

The US population is too busy arguing over race issues and partisan politics to realize the financial system is stealing from the poor and giving to the rich.

It's crazy to me that if I want to buy Ray Ban sunglasses off Amazon, I am routed by default to random third party sellers. I have purchased these once before and I'm almost positive that I received a fake product.

How can I know for sure though? How does Amazon know for sure? Since that experience I have looked at Amazon in a different light, and I've realized how difficult it is to source name brand products with confidence.

This is as good a time for blockchain as any. Register genuine products on a blockchain and have them scanned once they hit the Amazon warehouse to ensure they are authentic.

They'll need to survive for 10 years losing billions annually if that is their goal. And it will take them years to scale up automated rides/food delivery even after it becomes available.

Bitcoin has really settled down in terms of price swings over the last year. It did have a major covid crash, but aside from that it's been very stable for the past year.

Keep in mind that the price moves also attract attention, and act as a sort of advertisement of its existence. It wouldn't get any mainstream coverage without the price moves.

The market seems to be pricing in the best case scenario here. They're saying that almost everything is back to normal by Q3.

This would be 4 really bad months (March-June) total. The reality is that the future is very uncertain at this point. The market drastically underestimated the virus in early February, and it appears the same phenomenon is happening now.

The stimulus packages seem more focused on ensuring that asset prices remain inflated. The idea that the average person will see any major impact from the S&P500 dropping to 2000 points is laughable.

How many people do you know that truly had their lives ruined by the 2008 crash? Allowing the markets to find a bottom and recover creates opportunities for social mobility.

The people who don't want asset prices to drop are rich people. They are the ones who own the assets.

I mean, if there is proper 2 factor authentication set up, it would be much more difficult for this scam to work. Most banks in Asia issue you a physical security token, which if you lost you'd need to get it replaced in person.

Well the solution is to have some sort of emergency fund which activates in black swan events to rebalance the portfolio. It's just something to factor in. Adds some costs to operations but only fractions of a percent.

Yes, the people arguing that blockchain has it figured out for regular transactions are fools. Blockchain has a long way to go and many serious challenges to overcome before it can compete with payment networks like Visa.

It does a disservice to say the technology is already there, because it suggests that the current version is as good as it gets. To me, blockchain or something that incorporates its best features (decentralization, immutability) will need to process transactions for:

- Fractions of a cent - Confirm in seconds

So far that is not possible, and there is no clear way to achieve it, but with blockchain as a base there is no doubt that it will eventually be done. At that point, if you have not sacrificed decentralization or immutability, you have something truly amazing.

Big amounts, like 25M+ are usually done OTC. Several big companies in the space offer this service and are able to link you with one or multiple buyers to offload 9 digits.

You can easily offload 10M USD worth over 10-20 minutes without having a big effect on the overall market.

This is such an important concept for negotiations of all sorts. If you are negotiating the hard way, then people are going to be put off from interacting with you in the future.

There is a social element to all relationships, and the Trump-style win or go home strategy only works if you have massive leverage, and even then it will leave a sour taste in the mouth of the other party.

You want the other party to feel satisfied with their part of the deal. Not just because it's good for business (which it is), but because we are human beings and we should not be trying to squeeze every last penny out of each other.

The investigation is on Iranian soil. There is no access to the FAA or similar agencies. Iran would have every reason to want to cover up an erroneous missile launch.

In Ukraine, there was a cooperative effort to investigate the crash, and it was found to be a Russian missile.

It wouldn't take very long for the relevant parties to know whether they accidentally shot a missile at a 737. For a mechanical issue, there would be much more uncertainty (although it's possible the pilot reported the issue to ATC).

And on top of that, one might argue that humanity is highly self-interested by nature, and people with the greatest self-interest will be much more likely to obtain power.

Credit card companies also make a huge amount of revenue from merchant fees. Every transaction carries a fixed and percentage-based fee. Often something like $0.29 + 2.5%.

Payment companies like Alipay have much lower fees to the merchant, from what I recall.

The problem is, it also includes anyone who has ever logged into a US VPN. There is no doubt that this will catch some Americans who are abroad, but if you are getting 3-4 non-US clicks to get 1 American abroad click, you are effectively paying 4-5x for that one useful click.

Crypto is cash 2.0. It has many flaws, but it also does certain things cash can not. Some examples are high value transfers, long distance transfers, and easy accessibility across borders. You can go ahead and tell me this is only useful for criminals, but you'd be wrong.

Yes, one big issue is that payment processors are incredibly centralized and massive. These two combined means that they are incentivized to de-risk their platforms and stop serving customers they determine to be "high risk".

"High risk" is often mistaken for illegal, but that's incorrect. Many industries that are completely legal are still viewed as high risk and become deplatformed. Small companies are at the highest risk of being deplatformed.

Crypto currency allows anyone to send and receive money, without depending on the blessing of a third party which can decide whether or not to serve your business. Access to the financial system is not seen as a basic human right.

Ethereum's smart contracts are obviously more developer friendly and easier to implement. Ethereum smart contracts are the go-to for dapps, despite having a significantly smaller userbase and market cap than bitcoin.

To say Bitcoin smart contracts are equal to Ethereum smart contracts would be akin to comparing Myspace to Facebook.

You're looking at humanity through the lens of an individual. The reality is that the threats to people in extreme poverty are not going to threaten humanity as a whole.

I am defining humanity as the progression and prosperity of the human race. Climate change could ultimately threaten the entire human race. It could even result in extinction in the worst case scenario.

I disagree with the comment that because of this, all minds should be focused solely on this issue, and that all other problems should be ignored. But the reality is that a small subset of humanity living in extreme poverty does not pose an existential threat to civilization or the human species.

You could argue that SoftBank alone has greatly impacted #2. Before they came around these types of investments were quite rare.

Disaster is certainly hyperbole. It would imply their business is in jeopardy or something. All this means is a lower P/E ratio in the future. Apple has an absurd amount of cash on hand, and are still earning huge profit.

It's unfortunate the way that sexual relationships are intertwined with finances. Gone are the days where women have little/no earning opportunities.

People should be allowed to keep finances separated unless explicitly deciding otherwise.

The other thing is that "winnings" feel like a different type of money. If I win at the casino, I cannot wait to spend that new money. Whether it's buying my friends drinks or buying some item that I wouldn't buy with regular money.

It's really fun to spend money that you feel just fell from the sky. If you employ the right strategy you will still come out ahead 40-45% of the time, and those times can be quite memorable and fun.

You will definitely take losses in the long run but if you play well within your means, they won't have any impact on your life.

Interac "works" but has many pitfalls. Some examples:

- Inability to issue refunds

- Lack of 2 factor authentication

- Non-unique payment addresses (receiving emails are not bound to one account or even one person)

That's not arbitrage though. Kraken has a market rate. The only way to arbitrage the USDT / USD rate is if you have a reliable place to sell USDT at 1:1.