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The CEO doesn't own a publicly traded company, the shareholders do. And if they don't think a sale is a good idea they can just not sell their shares at the offered stock price.

I'm being a bit intentionally naive, but I don't understand who the "they" is that is supposed to have a valid worry about losing control.

Taxes on corporate profits are generally seen as reasonable in the abstract, and they're common all over the world. I could see setting an unusually high tax rate being problematic, but that doesn't appear to be what happened.

And it doesn't appear that the state was seizing anything. They were buying up shares off the public market. This doesn't seem more objectionable than any other hostile takeover. If a business owner wants to maintain control of their company then it's trivially easy for them to do so. All they have to do is not explicitly sell it, which is what an IPO is after all.

And I'm having trouble seeing where the creeping socialism concerns come in. The end goal, according to the wikipedia page, was that the companies would be owned and operated by their own labor unions, which isn't an uncommon or inherently controversial corporate governance model. The state appears to have merely been facilitating the transfer.

With perfect hindsight we can of course see that it didn't work out, but I doubt I would have been able to predict that in advance with any confidence. Would this have been fine if the state used a different taxing model? Would it have been okay if the labor unions managed to do it of their own initiative? Is it that broadening ownership of a corporation is inherently objectionable for some reason?

What am I missing?

So there are a handful of assets (gold, silver, jewels; generally stuff you'd expect to find in your average pulp fantasy treasure chest) that are essentially ancient speculation bubbles that never popped. They're valuable because there valuable. The optimist view of Bitcoin is that it's going to be the newest member of that august club.

The bad news is that most of the list predates money as we understand it. It's not entirely clear if new gold-class assets even can be created anymore.

The worse news is that the list is getting shorter. Aluminum used to be the stuff of kings, now we make candy bar wrappers out of it. Indigo, spices, pearls, turquoise. They all spent centuries as treasures until they weren't. Diamonds are starting to fall off, although it'll probably take a few decades.

All of these were once extremely scarce and became a lot more common for one reason or another. And Bitcoin itself is limited, but any idiot can fork off their own altcoin.

It's possible that in a few hundred years a Bitcoin will be just as much "treasure" as a bar of gold, but that's still far from a certain thing.

It doesn't even require that assumption to go awry.

Assume there exists a stereotype, say "people with freckles are more likely to be criminals". It doesn't actually matter if the stereotype has any basis in reality, just that it is widely believed.

People will, on the margin, be less likely to hire freckled people. This reduces the legitimate employment opportunities available to a freckled individual, which tends to make the illegitimate opportunities more attractive by comparison. So the stereotype becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: by assuming that freckled people are more likely to commit crimes, society actually causes freckled people to be more likely to commit crimes.

An expert system will notice this and begin using "has freckles" as a weighting factor in predicting recidivism. It's important to note that the expert system is not wrong. Freckles are in fact, at this point, statistically correlated to recidivism. But the expert system can't know why the correlation exists. All it can do is tighten the vicious feedback loop, noticing a statistical correlation that strengthens the existing stereotype, which exacerbates the real world impacts, which increases the statistical correlation, which strengthens the stereotype, and so on.

I write some words in an unpronounceable, inhuman tongue. I speak these words to a special stone covered in tiny, intricate runes too small for the eye to see and animated by bottled lightning. If either the words are the runes are off by even a single stroke, then nothing happens.

But if I get it exactly right, then I can see through eyes which are not my own. I can communicate across countless leagues as easily as across the room. I can bind daemons to watch over the world around me and act on my behalf. I can gaze with godlike clarity over the past, and even discern shapes and motions in the clouds of the future. I can bind my work to an inanimate physical object and give it false life under my command.

We teach these Arts to small children, and often use them to show how cute our pets are to one another. It's so easy and so commonplace in our world that we've ceased to register it as Strange. But computers still let us do real, honest to goodness Magick and anyone who tells you differently isn't paying attention.

This is, I think, the place where the metaphor shear between technical limits and legal limits actually happens.

Legally, we treat reasonableness as the salient divider. To a first approximation, everyone agrees that some searches and seizures are reasonable and some are not, and we've developed a well-defined social technology (warrants, judges, courts, etc.) to distinguish the two cases.

But technically the dividing line is possession of the backdoor. Third parties without a backdoor cannot perform a search, no matter how reasonable it may be, and third parties with a backdoor can perform even the most unreasonable search. There is no mechanical way to introduce a hole for reasonable cases but not unreasonable ones, no matter how well we formalize the decision making process.

Software does kinda work like a form of law, but one without recourse to human judgment. There's no judge, no jury, no prosecutorial discretion. It appears that, without a bit of hands on experience with technology, legally minded folks have a hard time really internalizing how constraining that fact is on what's actually possible.

With other assets, there's a clear causal arrow leading from outside the system back in. If Google the company performs better, Google the stock will overwhelmingly tend to perform better. If Google the company folds, Google the stock will overwhelmingly tend toward being worthless. The asset is a proxy for something that isn't the asset.

Bitcoin doesn't appear to work the same way. There's no obvious not-Bitcoin that demand for Bitcoin is a function of. It's a proxy for itself, after a fashion. That doesn't mean it has no value, but it does feel uncomfortably self-referential when compared to almost any traditional asset class.

With stocks, for example, I can make a prediction about a company's future performance, buy or short accordingly, and expect that if I am correct I will profit.

I may be wrong about my prediction, but if I am correct then I've got far better than chance odds of also being correct about the future price of the asset.

Without making any further predictions about the state of the world I can equally easily imagine the price of Bitcoin in 5 years being $100 or $100,000. Neither price feels "wrong" the way it would if, say, Google's stock price rose or dropped by an order of magnitude without the company changing anything.

I can imagine a lottery where usually nobody wins anything but every now and then everyone who bought a ticket wins collectively. It's still a lottery.

The supply is mostly a function of time, as defined by the blockchain's algorithms.

The demand is a function of what, exactly?

Still looks mostly like luck to me.

It seems to me that if I have any obligation it would be to advocate for those that cannot advocate for themselves first.

When net migration into and out of the US approaches zero. Until that point it's about how fast we can acculturate newcomers, which judging from history is "pretty damn fast".

The writing has been in the wall for anyone to see for decades in most of these industries. An American factory shuttering is a disappointment, but I doubt it's a surprise to anyone, including it's workers. We can make some long term sacrifices to slow the process, but to what end?

How slow is slow enough?

First, they're not opposed to a lower corporate rate per se. They are opposed to a corporate tax rate cut that isn't offset by some tax increase elsewhere.

Second, the de facto tax rate is well below the de jure tax rate, due to the giant mess of loopholes and tax incentives we've accumulated. There's support for bringing the rate down and closing enough loopholes to keep the actual tax burden more or less constant, but that doesn't appear to be what's happening.

Third, their view of the European model is of broad based individual taxes coupled with relatively aggressive income redistribution. Their view of the American model is of very top heavy progressively weighted taxes coupled with minimal redistribution. There's a lot of support to moving toward the European model, but only as a holistic transition. European taxes with an American welfare state is seen as the worst of both worlds.

Policies which are, on net, good can still have some bad effects. Policies which are, on net, bad can still have some good effects. Cherry picking a single microeconomic effect in isolation isn't strong evidence for or against either macroeconomic conclusion.

That said, this is good news for Starbucks's workers, and I hope this does become a trend!

I worry about getting screwed over by any of a dozen vendors, including but not limited to our payment processor. I also worry about getting scammed, about losing all our money due to a bug, about costly human errors, and about getting priced out of the market by competitors who take shortcuts I'm not willing to.

On balance, we feel that the benefits of sitting behind a payment processor outweigh the drawbacks. Our trust isn't absolute, but we feel the risk of trusting a third party is smaller than the risk we would have to incur by not trusting a third party.

I don't currently take any steps to try and obscure my transaction history from the authorities, and I presume that most if not all of the merchants I transact with keep some form of subpoena-able records. I'm not certain why I would expect that to change just because we switched currencies. I don't personally have any desire to violate any financial regulations, so why should I go to all the extra effort?

Anonymity protections aren't of much use if your counterparty isn't also using them, and they're worse than useless if they make you pop out of the statistical background noise for one reason or another.

We don't want to handle the mechanics of refunds. We don't want to handle the mechanics of disputes. We don't want to get scammed because we screwed up some small detail of our payment layer. We certainly don't want to do our internal accounting in more than one currency, crypto or otherwise. We're a tech company, not a financial services firm.

From our perspective trusting a third party is a feature not a bug. It means less work for us and less surface area that we could conceivably screw up, and I for one am happy to pay a small premium for the extra insulation.

We ended up offering free shipping to a bunch of disgruntled customers.

The short version is that Stripe guaranteed a USD <=> BTC exchange rate for an hour, after which they would automatically cancel the transaction. Given that most transactions now take well over an hour to be verified on the blockchain, that means basically every transaction fails.

Also relevant, there are no functioning democracies in the world today. There are a bunch of republics and parliaments and representative democracies and such, but without exception they empower some relatively small central institution to make broad, sweeping decisions on behalf of the nation.

Thank you for putting words to an idea I've had for a while.

I agree that central banks are imperfect and that they sometimes abuse or just misuse their power. When they abuse the trust we place in them it creates real, specific problems. Cryptocurrencies have no trust, but they have even worse versions of the same specific problems.

This shouldn't be surprising. The entire reason we created central banks in the first place was precisely to attempt to manage these specific problems. The implicit argument is that centrally managing a currency isn't just imperfect and corrupt, but that it's so incredibly imperfect and corrupt as to be worse than nothing.

I don't know why I have to keep explaining this, but cryptocurrencies can and will be regulated using exactly the same mechanism that basically everything else is.

The government makes some rules, asks you politely but firmly to follow them, observes carefully to see if and when you break them, and then beats you with a (usually, but not always, metaphorical) rubber hose until you choose to comply. Nothing about crypto interferes with this process, even theoretically.

In an explicitly enumerated category, blacklists and whitelists are logically equivalent and can be used interchangeably. In almost every other case blacklists are insufficient because new items can generally be created, either maliciously or just accidentally as the size of the category grows, which are not on the blacklist but which share whatever bad trait you were hoping to protect against.

I'm sure there are a few exceptions, but generally speaking any problem that can be solved with either a blacklist or a whitelist should use the whitelist, just to be safe. A problem that can't use a whitelist is probably not actually solvable by a blacklist either, and trying to use one is likely to fail in the long run.