ucha

Wait till they learn what a Megabit means in French...

I agree with this and on top of it, the GDP per capita of the EU grew at the same pace as that of the US over the last 20 years only because poorer Eastern European countries are catching up to Western Europe. The GDP growth rates in France, Germany, UK etc have been anemic during the same period.

The EU did a great job at distributing wealth eastward, the GDP per capita of Slovakia for example doubled in the last 20 years, far outpacing the growth in the US.

There are so many misconceptions on this thread about what makes a good quant trading strategy.

First of all, if you're shorting US equities and making 25% annually, that would be awesome. Heck, even being flat would be great because a strategy that is long SP500 could also short your equities and be delta-neutral and likely have a much lower volatility for the same return.

Second, so many people are mentioning commissions, trading fees, taxes and so on. Commissions and trading fees are much less than 1 basis point per trade if you use reputable brokerages. That would, at most, amount to a 1-2% in fees per year. Market impact matters but opening and closing auctions are very liquid and represent respectively more than 1% and 5% of the daily volume, probably even more for these kind of ETFs. Shorting fees are also quite small, in the range of 0-2% for liquid ETFs. If you don't hold positions overnight which is your case, you also don't pay to short!

Finally, here's what really matters. Returns by themselves don't matter. If you want a very high return strategy, you can short a long VIX ETF like VXX but every once in a while, you will be down more than a 100% ; it will bankrupt you if your available capital is less than the value of your short. You also need to look at your Sharpe ratio and maximum drawdown. Anyone somewhat experienced could tell you if the strategy is valid by having a look at plot of returns. If it's not too volatile, it could be a good strat.

Edit: addressing shorting fees

There is no spread when you trade at the open and the close. There could be slippage (you can create a market impact) but it would be minimal on sectorial ETF because they are extremely liquid.

It's one of the reasons why dividend tax is much lower that income tax.

IIRC ESTA only asks for 5 years of travel history so maybe it wouldn't affect people who don't plan to visit the US in the next 5 years...

I'm not sure we understood the parent comment the same way but you're right, you can't get your money back if sent to someone uncooperative. However, you can call the authorities and prove that you sent funds to that person and let them recover it if possible. I only addressed the question of attribution.

Attribution is important but you don't need the government to be able to do it without your authorization. You can very well have private unattributable transactions that you decide to disclose to the authorities only if you need and want to.

If you send your coins from wallet A to wallet B with CoinJoin, it's not possible for a third party to identify this transaction, but you can disclose the seed of wallet A and sign a transaction from wallet B thus proving ownership of both.

I'm quite surprised that some mineral sunscreens contain benzene too... I thought the only use of benzene would be as a reactant in the synthesis of some of the chemical sunscreens only.

They run quite a number of routes between smaller cities than no other airlines does.

I never heard about the limit of foreign restaurants. Fast food chains like McDonalds are absolutely everywhere. The food there however is significantly better than in the US.

I'd say more like a tariff, because you pay a 80% tax when you buy foreign goods (or pay an 80% tax when a foreigner sells good to locals).

My company has remote employees in a 3rd world country who prefer to be paid in crypto rather than on their bank account. Resident nationals are prohibited from owning foreign bank accounts. The value of freely convertible currency is 80% overstated by their central bank. If I pay them in the local currency, they lose 45% of the value of their labor to a corrupt government.

It's close to impossible to get a bank account in less reputable offshore jurisdictions which limits their use to holding physical assets or IP etc...

The not so funny part, is that the US isn't a member of CRS to they don't automatically send bank account of foreign citizens to their countries of residence. Major offshore centers aren't always where you expect them to be.

With Georgism, the government doesn't even need to track how much you make or have in your bank account.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism

The public underestimates the huge efforts that have been accomplished to prevent tax evasion in the last few years.

FATCA forces all signatories to report US tax payer info to the IRS no matter the country in which they have a bank account.

CRS signatories do the same thing for pretty much every country in the world and automatically exchange bank account information with the tax office of one's country of residence.

Pretty much every offshore center requires identification of the UBO - Ultimate Beneficial Owner - of any tax structure in place.

It's so so so much harder to open a bank account in a country in which one is not resident because the US has a very long reaching arm and frequently punishes sanctions banks or entire countries for failing to have proper anti-money laundering controls in place. Yes, banks can be fined, not because money laundering took place but just because the regulator decided that the controls in place are not sufficient.

Where does that leave us? On one hand, tax evasion is much harder. On the other, money has become a system of control. The government knows by default who has how much in their bank account. Banks are deputised with government powers and can lock your account merely on suspicion of a fraudulent transaction. When they freeze your funds, they are legally prohibited from telling you why. You essentially don't own your money and there is no due process to have it seized. Developing countries are pretty much excluded from the modern financial system. It's close to impossible to process financial transactions if you're a software developer trying to sell your products but have the misfortune of living in Nigeria or Cuba.

It's a modern aberration that the internet is so free yet the financial system isn't at all but most people in developed countries aren't affected by this so they simply don't care. What's the point of crypto when I can use venmo, right?

[edit] typo

Yes, your article says that both the poor and the rich are more likely to be targeted which is true but it doesn't negate my claim. The very rich are much more likely to be targeted than any other category.

https://taxfoundation.org/irs-audited-12-million-households-...

People who declare (or don't declare) $0 income and high income tax payers are disproportionally likely to be audited. And if you make $10mm+ for a number of year, you're almost certainly going to be audited and anecdotally, that has been what I've seen.

https://taxfoundation.org/irs-audited-12-million-households-...

It's not as simple as that... The wealthy are, justly, disproportionally targeted by audits, 10x more likely to be audited if you make more than $10m vs less than $100k.

Vast ressources will not necessarily prevent you from being convicted of tax evasion cf. Charles Kushner who evaded low 5 figures in taxes while being a centimillionaire.

Sardine or mackerel balls. Just remove the spine add an egg, some lemon juice and spices and boom, no bones and still delicious.

"Accuracy remained high (69%) even when controlling for age, gender, and ethnicity."

The pricing page says you can only share it with 5 users for the $10/month package. Am I missing something?

Back when WhatsApp's business model relied on subscriptions rather than ads, it sold for $1/year. What justifies this being 120x more expensive? Is it just economies of scale?

Almost certainly a false positive. You can't have a virus propagating with a R0 of 2-4 and a cycle of ~1 week start in September 2019 yet have almost no cases by December 2019.

People would only mine on the shorter blockchain if they think it's valid and good luck adding a country firewall in an undetected fashion. It will be directly visible in one of the two forked blockchain that a lot of the hashpower has vanished.

If a country is behind a firewall, most likely, almost no new blocks will be mined because the hashrate difficulty will stay constant while the computational power behind the firewall will become too low. Blocks will be mined much more slowly for a period of time inversely proportional to the hashpower behind the firewall. Most likely, that chain will enter into a "mining death spiral".

Ok, interesting... I think your general point is valid, which is that, transacting in USD with a bank is, under certain circumstances, simpler and faster than transacting in bitcoin on-chain.

But you always have to rely on a third party, transactions can be reversed, your funds can be locked etc... It's completely different from say, transferring actual bank notes, or actual gold bars or any kind of transaction where a third party is not needed, you can't be censored and it can't be reversed.

And again, everything you do with USD, you could do eventually do with bitcoin. If banks decide to hold bitcoin, they'll let you send bitcoin wires with all the issues associated with fiat wire. Bitcoin wires don't exist but they could. Permissionless, uncensorable, irreversible, under 1-hour USD transactions don't exist and they never will.

Yes sure, it takes 30 mins to send wires in a best case scenario it is executed immediately when you send it but that's not what happens in practice for most people. I do that regularly and it takes me a couple of hours.

Venmo and co aren't "real" transfers of asset, it's an update to a "permissioned" database. You can make immediate transfers on coinbase too but they could be reversed, or your account could get locked just as with venmo. It is just as easy to have banks hold everyone's bitcoin and instantaneously update a database so that feature is not an advantage of fiat over bitcoin.

As a store of value, bitcoin does not compare to fiat but to other forms of hard money such as gold. During Bretton-woods, the US dollar and other currencies were redeemable for gold and no one was saying that the US dollar was polluting the world because gold mining is polluting.

Comparing the environmental impact of gold and bitcoin is an open question. Gold mining pollutes the world in ways bitcoin never will. It creates ocean waste [1], long-lasting mercury pollution [2] and more.

As renewable become cheaper than fossil fuels, bitcoin will create additional demand for cheap renewable and accelerate the green transition. Because a mine could be moved essentially anywhere, it can be placed exactly where cheap renewable source of energy can be collected, thus maximizing the return on investment for renewable power plants, for example with geothermal in Iceland [3].

[1] https://www.earthworks.org/blog/drawing-the-battle-lines-ove...

[2] https://theconversation.com/gold-rush-mercury-legacy-small-s...

[3] https://www.wired.com/story/iceland-bitcoin-mining-gallery/

Buying US stocks takes 2 days to settle.

Sending simple wires in the US takes hours.

Last time I tried to send significant funds from France to the UK, it took me a whole week of back and forth with the bank to complete all the AML/KYC paperwork.

Let's not even talk about how long it would take to move gold from one part of the world to another cf. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-30/iran-is-h...

You can buy or send bitcoin in seconds if you're not trying to do it on-chain, the same way you can do it with stocks and other assets. But definitive settlement of a bitcoin transaction is faster than pretty much any other asset.

I've experienced some serious bugs on ProtonMail, one of them being that a saved draft from the desktop web app subsequently sent from the iOS app doesn't show up in the sent mails.

I've since switched to Tutanota which I'm very happy with and is in some ways more secure. It doesn't support third-party clients for security reasons but theirs is open source.

And to top it off, it's significantly cheaper...