1,201 karma · joined February 11, 2019
Maybe the board really is ignorant of it content and only exist to quibble. If they are actually motivated to keep their kids ignorant, there is no way in hell they are going to say so in public! Either way, they are doing their kids a huge disservice.
And, regardless of intentions, this is a poster-child example of dubious book-banning. You might as well re-write '1984' because you think kids can't handle mean characters. Or, similarly: https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/26/media/china-fight-club-ending...
Anyone is free to make a fork of any chain that does whatever they like. That's the easy part. The hard part is getting anyone else to care.
So, you can make your metaverse service, I can make mine, and we can both interoperate by supporting each other's APIs. But, some of our services cost us significant money to provide and have market value to our users. We can make with work out for everyone by recognizing ownership of certain NFTs as decentralized verification that a given user has rights to things of value in our services.
We don't have a lot of examples of this so far because corporations are incentivized to wall you off from their competition and the public has not the means to securely control and verify value outside of the blessings of the corporations. But, now we can do it without them.
Paranoia, drug dependence, coping self-delusion, self-destructive pride and sometimes genuine personal need cause a huge number of homeless people to outright refuse housing when offered.
1. They have a lot of unrealized gains. 2. They have losses. 3. They take out loans against those gains. I assume the play there is "I'll deal with it later (after 20 years of inflation-rate interest)." 4. They set up charities. 5. They lose money owning sports teams.
Did I miss anything?
Smart contracts can’t observe anything but time, crypto and signaling from users/automated services. For disputes you need an independent third party to cast a deciding vote. A government judge is common option. But, you and I can agree to grant that vote to a non-government agent instead.
Legal rental contracts are non-trivial. A rental smart contract would similarly require more rules than we care to spell out here. But, “If the tenant and the notary both vote that there is bullshittery going on with the property, rent is suspended.” sounds like a reasonable thing to include.
For common situations like rent, open-source contracts are inevitable. This will give people who could never afford lawyers (think 3rd world) access to much of the results middle class Americans take for granted.
That means I can’t spend the $100k directly for six months. But, I can easily take out a six month loan against it. That way it’s liquid for me and still safe for you. The loan agent is taking on the risk in exchange for the interest.
You have three fundamental tools to worth with: money, time and signaling consent. The only way to enforce consequences without lawyers is collateral.
So, you could have a contract that requires two months rent as a deposit to start. From there you can have simple rules: if the contract expires, the tenant gets the deposit back. At the end of the contract, the landlord can take up to 1 month’s rent from the deposit to cover damages. If the contract is canceled, the tenant does not get the second month-worth of deposit back. The contract is canceled if the rent is not paid on time or if the landlord + some notary-like third party sign off on cancellation. Etc...
Bitcoin is basically a giant IOU distributed throughout the world without the involvement of any country or company. The tiniest bits of that trillion dollar IOU can be transferred and traded between the lowliest individuals around the world without restriction, without involvement from any bank, without interference from any government. A homeless man in LA can perform international trade with a programmer in Russia and an artist in Cuba completely by themselves without requiring the blessings or assistance of Citibank, Western Union, Biden, Putin and Díaz-Canel. And, with smart contracts, this extends out from payments to loans, collateral, corporations and all kinds of financial instruments. All without borders or lawyers. Basically any rules you can imagine based on money, time and signalling consent.
It’s turning out that Bitcoin and Ethereum aren’t great on their own for buying lattes. But, they are turning out great as a foundational layer for a whole new financial system. Rather than basing a macro-scale credit system on the federal reserve or stock/real estate derivatives, we can now use tiny or huge chunks of BTC and ETH as collateral, as a loan basis, as a settlement layer, etc and build up from there.
There's the group of anti-white haters who need to be called out. There's the vast majority of people who don't want any form of racial hatred. And, then there's the white supremacist trolls (and just plain trolls) who want to trick the vast majority of people into fighting themselves and in the process make it look like anti-white hatred is much, much more common than it really is.
"It's OK to be white" is a troll campaign that is actively being used to bait people into fighting each other and to have both sides come out thinking the other is far more racist than they really are.
Yes, there are some people out there in social media who have taken to hating white people for being white. That's not OK. Call it out. But, don't dance for the trolls in the process.
But, it has been established that chan trolls came together to figure out a slogan that they could use to stir up heated arguments exactly like you are making. They settled on "it is ok to be white" and started using it to troll people into saying things that can be interpreted as hating white people. Then the arguments based on misunderstanding start and trolls laugh at you while they feed on your outrage and frustration.
Revenue go up? You pay your bills. You make more stuff people want. Everyone is better off. Good outcome.
Revenue go down? You can't pay your bills. You make less stuff even though people want what you are making. Everyone is worse off. Bad outcome.
In the end, we want more good outcomes and less bad. There is a lot of conversation around piracy's relationship to the bad outcome. But, a lot of it is armchair-CFO arguments and based on looking for excuses. People directly affected by piracy report that the relationship is either quite clear or that they have given up and don't bother fighting or even measuring it.
Should piracy be legal? Maybe? Doesn't really matter at the consumer level. There is it de-facto unenforced 99.9% of the time anyway. What matters for producers and consumers in practice is the practice of DRM. In practice, the vast majority of software work these days is on server-side products and a huge component of that is the implicit DRM aspect.
Desktop software has relatively been in a terrible lull since the consumerization of the internet. A lot of it is due to the awesome features of the interwebs. But, a whole lot of it is that it's a lot harder to actually get paid for desktop software vs server-based. It's a damn shame. But, no one knows what to do about it.
From the consumers: Piracy doesn't matter. Pirates were never going to buy anyway.
From the AAA producers: >50% of lifetime revenue for a game is made in the first 3-6 months after release. During that time, they sit and wait in dread for "Crack Day". The exact day the DRM crack is released, revenue permanently drops hard.
I've read similar stories from small non-game desktop ISVs here on Hacker News. That they can clearly see on their revenue graphs the release dates of updates that contain DRM changes. Of course, most people on HN work on web-based software. Web based software has pretty much completely overtaken desktop software because of it's many advantages --such as being impossible to pirate.
I wonder how many people here have actually worked on a pirate-able product? Phone apps are technically pirate-able. But, like console games, pirating is such an inconvenience (compared to desktop piracy) that it is relatively rarely done. But, even on phones, most of the revenue is to unlock server-based features. I can say from experience that app hacking for client-side features in phone apps happens quite a lot despite the inconvenience.
Meanwhile, Minecraft was a story of someone in exactly the opposite situation from a AAA developer. Having zero reputation and zero marketing budget, it made complete sense for Notch to give away his game for free at first and slowly increase the price as consumer awareness and confidence grew. At all points Minecraft was the Indie Dream Story of starting as a nobody and gradually growing an audience who hands you money out of respect for your product rather than as a requirement of transacting with you to attain it.
You can have everyone work hard to reduce their energy usage. You can have tax-funded subsidies to motivate green supply increase despite targeting reduced demand. And, that's all lovely and great.
At the same time, you can have a voracious, highly mobile demand for the cheapest energy around. You know, the kind that solar and wind is supplying, but sometimes in mildly inconvenient locations. This does not actually reduce the supply for everyone else. It's not a zero-sum game. Supply follows demand. This horrendous cadre of buyers directly pay for increased production of cheap green energy that otherwise would not have been set up at all. Thus, ramping up equipment production and economy of scale. And, motivating the creation of supply that otherwise would have been too risky to invest in.
Bitcoin is not invulnerable. It was bootstrapped from nothing and is still fledgling. Thankfully, it becomes harder to kill as it becomes more of a threat. Right now there is a trillion USD worth of distributed motivation to keep it running. Politically killing Bitcoin would be easier than politically killing Google. But, not that much... First major nation to do so could score some short-term political points. But, all nations are balancing concern about missing out vs. the threat to their own power.
1. Wind/solar energy are being trumpeted around the world as the cheapest source of electricity available. 2. Bitcoin miners' profits are directly `sale price of BTC - buy price of electricity`. Other costs are marginal in comparison. 3. BTC mining is a extremely competitive, trivially mobile, trivially liquid, global market. 4. Given 1, 2 & 3 there is a lot of fretting that BTC is creating a coal-powered financial system.
With the recent spike, the currently reasonable cost for a fast, median-sized transaction is $10.46 [1] [2] According to the fretting articles I read, that is enough to power an average home for a 23 days and motivates sending over 300kg (700lb) of C02 into the air [3] That's 35 gallons of gasoline at 20lb CO2/gallon.
:/
For what it's worth, I get the concern. But, I also see equal shares of BTC hate|BTC fanboyism everywhere I go. Latching on to the environmental concerns of BTC is trendy right now. It's hard to argue against without sounding like an asshole and it's not entirely false. But, it's not entirely honest either. Everything I read and calculate shows that BTC makes total sense as a defacto green energy subsidy. But, that does not spark outrage. So, instead there is a lot of fretting about the second rise of a coal-powered economy.
IMHO, the way Ethereum is going is great: Bootstrap with POW then switch to POS after enough investment is built-up that staking actually means something. It's arguable that the best use of BTC at this point is to burn them all to bootstrap more POS tokens. We just need alternatives that inspire enough confidence to motivate people to convert their BTC over.
[1] https://awebanalysis.com/en/convert-satoshi-to-dollar-usd/ [2] https://bitcoinfees.earn.com/ [3] https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/
1. Global poverty is lifting. People around the world are starting to make more money. 2. A big point of pride when your family starts making money is literally putting meat on the table. 3. Our current meat production process cannot scale up to meet that demand.
But, good luck convincing billions of people coming out of extreme poverty that they're simply too late and they should give up on the dream that they can finally have meat too --for the sake of climate change. They are going to demand something. He believes plant-based meat can reach that scale at a tiny fraction of the impact if they can make it acceptably close in quality.
That's something I can cheer for.
> Are you really going to claim that there isn't a demand for green energy already?
Is a disingenuous argument. Of course there is already demand for green energy. Meanwhile, Bitcoin increases the demand so much that people are apparently outraged by the increase.