craigc

Good to know, but my question really has to do with if the extra cost for doctors, hospitals, drugs, etc. is used to offset R&D costs.

What I am getting at is that in theory, it should still be possible to do a lot of great R&D work while still providing affordable health care to citizens. I don’t think they are necessarily tied together.

Also more patents is not necessarily a good thing since they can create more legal hurdles and red tape for other pharmaceutical companies who may want to build on top of the ideas and inventions.

Do you have any sources/data for this? I would be very curious to see it. The mentioned costs in this article only point to

> higher drug prices, higher salaries for doctors and nurses, higher hospital administration costs and higher prices for many medical services

I’m not sure if R&D costs are factored in at all for this particular study.

Mmm I should have clarified my comment. I understand that, but in this case the prices also increased in the US.

I totally understand that. I should have clarified that I meant in US markets. Cause the iPhone prices also increased in the United States IIRC.

I totally agree with you. This also does not make any sense to me:

> US dollar strength-related price increases

A weaker dollar (due to inflation, etc.) is the reason that consumer prices increase. A stronger dollar in theory should make the prices decrease.

EDIT: I understand that a stronger dollar means the prices in other currencies will increase, but I was referring to specifically the price in US markets. Pretty sure the iPhone prices in the United States increased as well.

That’s an interesting idea. How could you see that working in practice?

Thank you. I think you are right. I think it’s impossible to reach any sort of consensus when two groups have fundamentally different views.

I’m going to just try to stay out of it from now on. Not worth the time or energy. Especially when my view is the minority view.

FWIW I don’t believe it is any sort of quest towards immortality. My biggest problem is how Keynesian economics tends to favor the central banks who are able to create money out of nothing.

I understand that that is the driving force behind Keynesian economics, and I think you have a valid point.

That said, when you consider the way inflation actually works most of the new money pumped into the system disproportionately benefits big businesses and banks at the expense of the rest of the population. It is essentially a hidden tax on the rest of us.

Central banks pumping more money into the economy actually helps them because it equates to more interest payments they can collect and puts more people and governments in their debt. Also they don’t have to do any work to create the money so could you explain how that is considered a fair system?

Some elite bankers are able to just summon new money out of thin air to serve their interests but money that I worked hard to earn is going to lose its value if I hold onto it for too long?

Why do you think there is such a huge gap in income inequality that began as soon as we broke off completely from the gold standard in 1971?

Thanks. I am well aware of all the things you pointed out. I think we just have a different opinion of what stable is or should be.

I think a currency that has $1.00 worth of purchasing power when I am given it should not lose 99% of its value over the next 100 years if I do not spend it. I am aware that that is impossible due to inflation, and that is why things like gold are much better stores of value than the dollar.

Can you please point out the false facts to me?

Thank you for posting this. Not surprising to see you getting downvoted to oblivion here, but this is something that people really need to keep an open mind about.

Right, and how is that going for them? The average home cost around $3,400 in 1913 (when the FED was created), and today is around $200,000. And $1 is still worth $1.

Gold isn’t valuable because of its utility to industry. It is valuable because of its scarcity.

I think it means they are open to doing it, and will be happy to do it in the future as long as they don’t get caught.

Those were three separate ideas. A bank run would most likely be a result of deflation, yes, but it is not guaranteed that if that were to occur that the bank would be able to stay solvent.

The inflation example can already be seen in Venezuela, where the people there have been using cryptocurrencies as a way to survive.

> Ultimately the US dollar (and other fiat currencies) are backed by something: a government with an effective monopoly on violence over a particular territory including all the people and assets therein.

Are you suggesting that the US military will use force to ensure that people use the dollar and that is its backing? I am not saying you are wrong, but that is not exactly a friendly thought. Sounds more like a dictatorship than a free market economy.

I totally agree with your sentiment, but I will say one thing. If there is some shock in the world economy crypto could be a way out.

Imagine

- A bank run where every bank goes under and it is not possible to easily bail them out

- The government has to increase inflation and we far exceed the 2% target

- The existing financial system gets hacked and records get destroyed

Not saying any of this is likely, but it could happen.

The US dollar has only been backed by nothing since 1971. That is a very short amount of time in the history of the world. You can see that in that same period of time debt has skyrocketed and production output vs. wages have diverged significantly. It would be somewhat presumptuous to assume that the existing system is going to last forever.

That said, it doesn’t mean that crypto currencies are THE answer, but they are a possible answer.

Finally “the most economically stable nation on the planet” is $21 trillion in debt.

I think if something like Bitcoin does end up reaching mass adoption it won’t be because people CHOOSE to use it, it will be because they are FORCED to use it because no one wants to accept dollars anymore.

> We can solve the scalability problems of blockchain. The thing that keeps me up at night is not scalability, it is user adoption beyond the use cases which Bitcoin already successfully fulfills.

Fair point. But none of the biggest chains right now are nearly as scalable as using something like AWS or Azure or Google Cloud. Unless they are able to handle the same amount of traffic, there is no reason for someone to use them for typical applications.

On the development side it will be more cumbersome to develop for, and on the user side it will be slower and/or more costly to use.

I didn’t say that all the problems have been figured out, but I feel like you are being a little close minded with regards to the idea. Maybe properties would use some form of multi signature transactions so a single person hacking it would not be able to take over ownership. Perhaps there would still be some sort of intermediary.

I am not saying just add a blockchain on top of the existing infrastructure. That does not make much sense. I’m saying replace the existing infrastructure completely.

Ten years ago people didn’t think solving the double spending problem was possible. It’s silly to try to imagine the future of blockchain innovation when thinking about it only how it exists today.

That’s like in 1995 saying that no one would ever want to watch videos on the internet because the download speeds and quality would be so poor.

The biggest problem is that blockchains are inherently not scalable. That is more or less by design, but it limits the types of applications that can run on top of them.

I think a more likely outcome is that most types of payment infrastructure and settlement/transaction layers move to blockchains and not actual applications. For example, it’s not too difficult to imagine the stock market switch to tokenized stocks to buy and trade shares of companies. Or perhaps deeds to property in the real estate world could be issued on top of a blockchain.

I think the real value is removing intermediaries and allowing people to control their own finances, shares, land, etc where you can cryptographically prove that you own it. Building a decentralized Uber that is slower and more difficult to use does not make much sense to me.

I think we will see these things develop. Remember TCP/IP was developed in the 1970s so it took almost twenty years before HTTP came out, and another 5-10 years before people really started using it.

I agree, but if you had financed the operation with Bitcoin would you have left a trail of hundreds of emails specifying each Bitcoin transaction and what they were used for like the indictment claims?

Only saying that if they were dumb enough to do that they may have been dumb enough to go directly too.

I wouldn’t say it is embarrassingly incorrect. Nothing in that article proves that the report I referenced is not a possibility.

I agree it makes it less likely because the files could have been copied multiple times which could change the metadata, but that doesn’t prove definitively that they were.

First of all, I was not presenting it as fact. Merely as a possibility and something to consider.

Second, I read the disclosure, and all it does is point out that it is a possibility and not a fact. It also points out that the intelligence agencies have not provided any hard evidence that Russia was behind the leak, and they are the same groups who lied to the public about WMDs in Iraq to justify that invasion.

This article also says that the original reports were published by Consortium News, the source I linked to.

Two other points worth noting

1. The FBI never had physical access to the hacked servers and were relying completely on the report from a third party company, CrowdStrike:

http://thehill.com/policy/national-security/313555-comey-fbi...

2. The former tech director of the NSA, William Binney, claimed that the data could not have been copied remotely because the download speed was around 22 MB/s (176 Mb/s) which he and a team concluded was not possible for a remote hack with servers in Russia and routing through a commercial VPN service:

https://consortiumnews.com/2017/07/24/intel-vets-challenge-r...

The only problem is there is no way to prove that that address actually belongs to the GRU.

The transaction referenced in the indictment clearly happened, but Mueller and his team could have easily searched through the Bitcoin blockchain to find any transaction that paid for a VPN, hosting, or domain registration using Bitcoin on or around the date of the hack.

The indictment makes it sound like the request for 0.026043 BTC came via email. I think that is a bit strange. If you are Russian Military Intelligence about to hack the government of the United States, why would you include references and payment info related to your Bitcoin transactions in hundreds of emails? Surely just keeping track of the Bitcoin addresses on the blockchain would be enough since that is the entire point of the Blockchain. Keeping a reference via email sounds like a good plot for an episode of America’s Dumbest Criminals, not the Russian military.

It is certainly possible that this is exactly what happened, but I think the American people deserve to see some evidence.

Username checks out

Okay cool so that confirms what I said that mining was not the sole source of the funds

I would be very surprised if mining was the sole source of the funding simply because mining hardware is so expensive, and it would take a long time to mine $90,000.

The Bloomberg article says

> the defendants conspired to launder the equivalent of more than $95,000 through a web of transactions

So while they may have done some mining, I think the majority came via other sources.

That is certainly an interesting perspective though – that the increase in hash rate is due to people wanting to evade traditional currency systems to fund their illicit activities. It would not surprise me at all if some governments were involved in this too.

Good point. I was assuming that it would be a surplus of energy that you are not able to sell.

What I would love to see is a breakdown of locations of miners over time. I wonder if the increase is in places where electricity is cheaper and/or subsidized.

I do not believe the increase has anything to do with better mining hardware since the top mining hardware has not really changed much in over two years.

My guess is either:

1. Most people have already invested in the hardware and are therefore okay mining at a loss with the hope that the Bitcoin price will rise again in the future.

OR

2. A lot of miners are using renewable energy in which case it wouldn’t make sense to stop. For example, if you are using wind or solar or hydro energy, then the energy is still going to be available even if you turn off your mining hardware.

I don’t think that explanation makes sense. It isn’t about regular computing power, it is about the hash rate of the mining hardware. They use specialized hardware (ASICs), and if you look on this page you can see a breakdown of the hashrates:

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison

The top one (other than the Dragonmint miners which are not listed) is the Antminer S9 which you can see was released over two years ago.

If you are aware of some new mining hardware that is much faster please let me know.