I disagree that America was intended to be a melting pot. That idea came later. It was intended to be a federation of Christian, culturally English states.
132 karma · joined November 12, 2018
There's absolutely no need to artificially incentivize spending. Humans naturally require and desire goods and services. Allowing people to store their economic energy without risk of devaluation would actually help bring people out of poverty. Inflating the money supply incentivizes high time preference behavior like excessive spending and borrowing. This leads to boom and bust cycles, and an increasingly growing wealth gap.
All inflation does in terms of growth is increase the nominal value of things in the economy. It does not encourage the growth of real wealth. The increase of wealth we experienced is due to the markets functioning despite an inflationary monetary policy and excessive regulation.
The real reason why the government is in favor of a "slightly inflationary" monetary policy is because they're incentivized to do so. They can spend it before price adjustments due to the new inflows of cash can happen in the wider economy. Its essentially a hidden tax. Governments, central banks, and their political/economic allies can benefit from this effect at the expense of everyone else in the economy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Cantillon#Monetary_the...
Its incredibly fallacious to measure the cost of electricity per transaction on Bitcoin. Blocks can be completely full or utterly empty and still use the amount of power. You're also missing the point of the power consumption. Its not used to move capital from one person to another, its used to secure the network from attacks and preserve its integrity. Measuring the cost of electricity per transaction is like measuring the amount of energy bank vaults and the US army use per dollar transaction. Stats like the one you quoted don't take into account the number of Lightning network transactions happening off-chain but is secured by a past on-chain transaction.
> No, it is not. Projects like that may be branded with bitcoin, but bitcoin miners are buying the same electricity as everyone else. The rising cost of electricity is causing new sources of power to be exploited.
> Instead of being used for something useful, that electricity is being turned into waste heat.
One, value and usefulness is subjective. Because something is "useless" for someone like you doesn't mean its useless to others. I, and many people around the world, find Bitcoin to be incredibly useful and worth the electricity. Secondly, if oil and gas companies could profitably monetize flared methane, they would have already. They don't because trapping and transporting the methane would lose them money. Its an industry standard to simply release or burn the methane instead. So Bitcoin IS useful in that respect.
Bitcoin has been doing 24/7 payments since 2009 and instant payments since at least 2018. Not to mention Bitcoin is decentralized and not reliant on government and bank bureaucracy to function.
The Fed is a little late on this one.
Core devs and exchanges do not entirely control the project direction. Non-backwards compatible changes cannot be made to Bitcoin without the miners AND node operators adopting the new client. It takes the cooperation of the devs, miners, and node operators to make a hard fork. "The Blocksize War" by Jonathan Bier documents a bunch of failed hard fork attempts that were backed by a good number of devs, large miners, and large exchanges. They failed because the node operators were not on board.
>Advertisers and crooks already have under-the-counter access to our private data (via Equifax, etc.), but we don't get to benefit from it.
We shouldn't throw away the concept just because we haven't executed it well.
The actual problem is our obsession with free stuff and knowing who to trust. Trust should be with family, friends, and the people you know. Then the trust reduces the further someone is from you in the socal graph. That's why I'm big on Web of Trust. You can't (and shouldn't) make people trust those you think they ought to trust. People should choose for themselves.
Posting comments and content should have skin in the game, you're absolutely right about that. Being able to post things consequence free is what leads to more trolling and spam. It shouldn't be contingent on your identity though. Micropayments are a great for this. If you had to stake a tiny amount of money for each comment, I think it would reduce spam and trolling.
What's valuable is purely subjective. That's what makes markets work. Its also why planning economies from the top down doesn't work. What seems like wasted energy or capital to you is very useful to another person. Many people (myself included) believe that a decentralized, digital, hard money that is tied to the real world through energy is extremely important. So to those people its not a waste of energy, far from it.
“This gas is unable to be sold to a pipeline, so otherwise they’re either venting or flaring the gas. If you are venting the gas you’re just literally venting the methane into the atmosphere,”...
There's probably too much distance between the nearest town or pipeline for the gas to be sold. If not, there's likely some other reason why its not economical for the gas to be used. Otherwise these companies wouldn't be burning away free money. So Bitcoin miners act as a buyer of last resort.
As for it being wasted. What's valuable is purely subjective. That's what makes markets work. Its also why planning economies from the top down doesn't work. What seems like wasted energy or capital to you is very useful to another person. Many people (myself included) believe that a decentralized, digital, hard money that is tied to the real world through energy is extremely important. So to those people its not a waste of energy, far from it.
"Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon." - Milton Friedman
/s
In the story, Lot and his family were one of the few people to escape the city before its destruction. God told his family to not look back at the city as it was being destroyed. Lot's wife looked back and turned into "a pillar of salt". Maybe this is a metaphor for the people who went back to the site and couldn't grow food there due to the hypersaline that was spread across the region by the airburst.
An interesting use for NFTs is having objects "know" who owns them by seeing which address holds its NFT. The object can then perform tasks or give access only if you can provide a signature. Here's a pretty good video on NFTs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-i9Jsm95ro
> SD Cards won’t last 100 years but the code to talk to one will.
It seems like the article implies that family that owns an heirloom computer would have to backup their data every decade or so, assuming the storage medium lasts that long.
Are there any data storage options that can go decades without being used? From my admittedly cursory research, it seems like M-Disc or solid state storage are the best options so far.
> Thank your obsessions with Childish Gambino and christian rock for that.
> Based on your listening habits, I can also tell you your spotify was...
> awkward-beatboxing bad
Bruh