It’s a private company, it absolutely does not need to be neutral. They can choose any side they want. If you don’t like it, don’t use their platform. Gosh, when did the notion of private firms got so mixed up with so-called political neutrality? Are people this naïve?
When you have several groups of people who distrust and dislike each other, and you start using your business as a means to support the fight of one group against the other, you only increase the enmity between the groups and harm all businesses by starting a process that forces everyone to choose which group to support.
It does not matter whether the reason for initial distrust is religion, ethnicity, race, sexual orientation or political beliefs. You should not start such "economic war" unless your goal is complete elimination of the other group, which, i think, is a rather stupid goal to have.
You’re going to be really upset then to think about the business organizations that receive tax breaks in order to influence politics. Many non-profits exist only for this purpose.
The only reason abortion is a political issue, for example, is because of the outsized influence that tax exempt organizations have.
Are you implying that existence of these tax-exempt organizations and politicization of issues is a good thing?
I don't see anything positive in tax breaks and tax code complexity in general as it is a method to obfuscate spendings and evade taxes, which creates all kinds of unintended consequences.
No, I am not implying that. Just noting its systemic and may as well be an intended feature of the system. At the very least, it's an intended consequence.
I can see positives in having the flexibility to tax things to discourage them, or to encourage behaviors. That's one of the best tools the government has to influence the public's behavior! (EG cigarette taxes). No assessment of the net-net benefit, merely pointing out the complexity of taxes does enable some good things as well.
This is not to say that businesses should not do this, only that they have to position themselves to profit from this change in the market.
Selling to both sides can be a profitable venture, which encourages neutrality, but so is locking in customers by something other than the quality or price of your product
I am saying that if we condemn such behavior in all cases (even when neutrality is violated in our favour) we'll reduce the situations when that second strategy becomes profitable, and that will benefit everyone. We don't even need a very large percentage of people for this, even a relatively small group that always supports neutrality will be enough to keep the market neutral.
It's because Canadian politicians suggested they should... Thankfully there's enough people in the US who are rightly disgusted by it and GoFundMe is a US company.
Well, I commented it. Ofc it is my opinion, who else would it be?
It also happens to be how reality works. Private organizations have literally always chosen sides. It’s how the world works, and I’m sorry it doesn’t fit your likes. Nothing you can do about it mate.
>Well, I commented it. Ofc it is my opinion, who else would it be?
Your "point" doesn't stand for much if it's just your opinion and you refuse to justify the reason for it.
>It also happens to be how reality works. Private organizations have literally always chosen sides. It’s how the world works, and I’m sorry it doesn’t fit your likes. Nothing you can do about it mate.
The state can always send Men With Guns to quell dissenting speech. Should we also proclaim that the government "absolutely does not need" to guarantee freedom of speech? Corporations can ultimately coerce you into accepting terms that overwhelmingly favor them, by offering services under "take it or leave it" terms. Should we say that consumers "absolutely does not need" to be afforded consumer protection rights?
One can’t, for example, solicit donations for cancer research and then instead take those donations and fund swimming pools for dolphins or whatever… even if you’re a private company.
>Gosh, when did the notion of private firms got so mixed up with so-called political neutrality? Are people this naïve?
When all speech, commerce, and art became transmitted by the permission of a small number of private firms whose combined powers exceed that of any nation-state.
In a free society, businesses shouldn’t be able to suppress or punish customers for their political views. We already require businesses to not just do whatever they want in many ways. That’s what anti discrimination laws do, for example. We just need to make political viewpoint a protected class as well.
Apart from that, we also regulate a lot of private companies to be neutral. Your power utility may be private but can’t deplatform you. Telecom carriers are similar. Social media companies are just common carriers and public utilities that have avoided regulation so far with careful political donations. Payment companies (Visa, MasterCard, Stripe, PayPal, and yes, GoFundMe) are all just basic payment utilities and should also be treated as public utilities in many ways even if they remain private otherwise.
>In a free society, businesses shouldn’t be able to suppress or punish customers for their political views.
>We just need to make political viewpoint a protected class as well.
I have not gasped at the outlandishness of an HN post in some time.
GoFundMe is not a grocer, or a transit provider. It isn't a power company. It is a luxury service in a free market with low capital requirements.
Under no circumstance should arbitrary businesses be required to cater to people of all political persuasions.
Protected classes exist based on attributes of ourselves which are immutable. You can't change being a woman, being old, or being a particular ethnic group. You certainly "choose" your political opinions.
> >We just need to make political viewpoint a protected class as well.
> I have not gasped at the outlandishness of an HN post in some time.
How else can a democratic republic preserve the diversity of viewpoints required for such a society to function? This really shouldn't be a controversial idea.
Differences of opinion are not only okay, they are essential!
Should a conservative landlord be able to evict anyone who voted for a progressive? Or deny renting in the first place?
> Protected classes exist based on attributes of ourselves which are immutable. You can't change being a woman,
I can't phrase this any less provocatively... Are you saying that all rights against discrimination end if one has a gender transition because it's no longer immutable? I really don't think immutability is the right line to use to decide who gets rights.
Religious belief is protected, and also mutable. Ask me how I know. Political affiliation needs the same protection.
Should a conservative landlord be able to evict anyone who voted for a progressive? Or deny renting in the first place?
No, but housing is already protected. How can you possibly think GoFundMe and housing/food are the same thing?
I simply struggle to understand why a decent person should have to serve someone who wants to kill minorities, or who wants to end democratic government in this country.
Furthermore, you act like if you don't enact this protection you're defending, no one will serve people of different political opinions. The truth is you're making a mountain out of an anthill. Most places serve people of differing political views. I go to a bar with a "Fuck Greg Abbott" sign at the front of the bar, and they'll happily serve a Conservative as long as they aren't being hateful. I happen to go to a bar owned by a Trumpian, anti-worker, anti-vax conservative (I happen to respect some of the bartenders, and the food is good). I am allowed to eat there despite the lack of your proposed legislation.
P.S.
>How else can a democratic republic preserve the diversity of viewpoints required for such a society to function?
It's functioned for close to 250 years, and the more I read American history, the more I realize that the current tumult and animosity is actually the norm, and the "peace" of the postwar period was the outlier.
That's a misunderstanding of what the transition is - the transition is on how the gender is presented, not the underlying gender.
That's not to say immutability is a great method to determine rights. Mind you, I don't think political affiliation needs such protections. Freedom of expression and association already handle interactions with political affiliation. The government guarantees your ability to have a political opinion, but not for other people respect it or to help you promote it. What people do with their business is still part of their view points - the real solution is to decentralize power more, so that even if you get thrown out for your political opinion, you can always work somewhere else that likes your politics
Yeah, I despise general deplatforming, but "mandating that businesses accept everyone no matter the politics" is just as bad. Not everything needs a law.
As far as I know, "industrial society" will still last for another centuries so there's no "problem to this narrative" as you say. It's like saying "the problem with life on Earth is that it depends on the sun which will explode some time in the future"
Tbf, blockchain is the dark matter of technology. People are never allowed to criticize it without the same, repeated feedback “If that’s what you think blockchain is, then you don’t understand it.”
Why doesn’t someone, then, who actually understands their almighty blockchain god, illuminate us, mere mortals, on the wonders of blockchain and how it can be good for society in the foreseeable future.
You know what’s really tiresome? Having the promises of blockchain sold to us for years now without a single, useful purpose for it in sight other than, well, cryptobros.
In that article he conflates theoretical trustworthiness (software verifiability) with practical trustworthiness (system comprehensibility to a supermajority of voters). Blockchains might be made to work in a verifiable way, but they won't work for enough of the voting base to trust that they do in fact operate correctly.
The entire point of voting is to provide a way to pick something that virtually everyone can agree was fair. Blockchains are too complex for virtually everyone to understand, and so most people can't agree that they're a fair way to decide on things. They require trust in the programmers and cryptographers, *and most people don't have that trust*. And with good reason, programmers are notorious for making buggy, unreliable, confusing software.
Vitalik entirely ignores this argument against blockchains for voting, and pretends that the most important objections are the technical ones.
"Blockchains are too complex for virtually everyone to understand, and so most people can't agree that they're a fair way to decide on things"
Almost nobody understands any of the complex systems in their life (e.g. banking, software) but it doesn't stop people trusting them. People have trust in these systems because they reliably produce the desired output not because they understand how they work.
Blockchain is being used in supply chains (IBM tradelens) for immutable record keeping, NFT's (outside of selling URLs to jpgs...) are a good application for certificates of authenticity (some artists are selling their NFTs WITH a physical copy and using the NFT as the certificate of authenticity).
Any application where you need an immutable ledger is a good application for blockchain. Just because crypto enthuisiasts are trying to shoe horn this technology into anything and everything doesn't mean the above isn't true.
Any application where you need an immutable ledger, and
1. You can't trust any single known party, or group of parties, to attest the integrity of the ledger (otherwise, you could just use plain old digital signatures)
2. You need infinite pseudonymous accounts in this ledger.
3. You need it so badly that you're willing to forgo a significant share of whatever value having this ledger creates, regularly, forever (mining fees).
There have been attempts to rebrand blockchain as anything containing a chain of digital signatures, no mining needed. In which case it's old technology - but in that case I also agree that it has a use.
Artists are by their nature known parties, as are factors in a supply chain. They may have a use for digital signatures, but they have no use for a scheme including mining.
A merkle tree is an excellent way to represent an immutable record. Adding a cryptocurrency does nothing to the system that makes it more immutable. You only need the currency bit if you want to create a financial incentive for the strangers to store your immutable record for you. Which you only really need if you need to send said currency via strangers as a sort of courier. However that comes with it's own set of very real problems.
1. That currency is going to be heavily speculated because it's unregulated by design.
2. That currency is going to be used to bypass regulations that do in fact protect people.
3. That currency will be used to bypass an international system that is designed to allow nations to punish other bad national actors without resorting to war.
If you want to foster anarchy and to create an expectation that any individual is on their own and are actually prevented from getting assistance when they lose everything then a cryptocurrency is an ideal ideological fit. If you want something more balanced then merkle trees might be a useful tool but leave the currency aspect out of it.
> Any application where you need an immutable ledger is a good application for blockchain.
What's your definition of good? An immutable ledger is a good idea and useful. An immutable ledger where every write costs 50-200 USD isn't as useful, for example.
> People are never allowed to criticize it without the same, repeated feedback “If that’s what you think blockchain is, then you don’t understand it.”
That's because the criticisms are always the same talking points, all of which have been addressed multiple times ad nauseam. If Bitcoin advocates appear dismissive or opaque it may be that they're exhausted of debunking the same criticisms over and over again, particularly when there's a wealth of information out there to find. Though you have to be willing to leave the anti-Bitcoin media bubble. Perhaps all us Bitcoiners are sufferring from delusions reinforced by confirmation bias, but perhaps you are too?
> Why doesn’t someone, then, who actually understands their almighty blockchain god, illuminate us, mere mortals, on the wonders of blockchain and how it can be good for society in the foreseeable future.
This kind of snark also doesn't help with the above. But if you're actually curious I thought this did a decent job of explaining Bitcoin's blockchain, decentralisation, and trustlessness: https://dergigi.com/2021/01/14/bitcoin-is-time/
> You know what’s really tiresome? Having the promises of blockchain sold to us for years now without a single, useful purpose for it in sight other than, well, cryptobros.
Perhaps you should stop listening to the promises of "blockchain" and "crypto" and instead focus your learning efforts on Bitcoin only... cryptobros be damned. Bitcoiners probably dislike them more than regular folk.
with money everyone has an agenda.
the biggest thing i've seen from blockchain is the emergence of stablecoins.
we will definitely see digital currencies being normalised globally.
but since bitcoin doesn't have any central authority it's not really fair to conflate the purpose/value of btc, blockchain tech with idea of cryptobros/scams/ponzis.
blockchain allows essentially instantaneous completion of transactions between unrelated parties with no clearing house.
Today there are many transactions that take days to clear. For example if you buy stock, it appears instantaneous to you, but the scenes your brokerage, the other brokerage, and the clearing house have to make sure all the money is there, the stock is there, etc
Clearinghouses make a lot of money just guaranteeing transactions. That is friction in the system.
Wire transfers, ACH, cashiers checks, etc all have the same issues.
Even things like title insurance, transfer of title, deeds of trust etc have those issues.
Instead of NFT for a gorilla picture, think of NFT for your house that essentially represents your deed. Transferring your deed is a very complicated process.
Think about how social media or app stores are essentially controlled by the choices of a few CEOs. Imagine a distributed social media will allow everyone to ignore you, but no party can censor you. You own your data instead of an entity like facebook.
> Transferring your deed is a very complicated process.
For regulatory reasons, not for technical ones. You're using the word "transaction", but you should distinguish between legal transactions and what is essentially a database transaction.
> Having the promises of blockchain sold to us for years now without a single, useful purpose for it in sight other than, well, cryptobros.
the issue is that we show the things being made and hn calls them all scams and ponzis and fraud.
we show the rates adoption, and the growth in use and hn says its all speculation and fraud and needs to be made illegal.
we point out that crypto is in many ways doing better than other industries to represent marginalized communities and we all get labelled cryptobros and any of us who arent that get erased from the picture.
if we post anything positive linking to a twitter account that account starts getting endless abuse.
there are very few people who bother coming to hn anymore, pretty much everyone working in the space has given up on it.
We have automated stable currencies, permission-less loans and lending, streaming payments, UBI experiments, co-ops governing land use, automated taxation and public goods funding experiments, sybil resistance mechanisms for 1p1v governance, resilient p2p infrastructure that people are using every day to pay each other and run their businesses. Composability for all of these things to quickly build your own business logic on top of it. Standards for tokenising royalties/payments/tickets... All running on p2p infrastructure anyone can participate in. Thats pretty amazing imo.
At what point will what we've been building be considered useful?
If you took any of these things and wrap it in a saas startup connected to stripe hn would eat it up and claim its the greatest startup of the decade.
but because its built on crypto it can only ever be world destroying disaster capitalist alt-right incubating cartoon villain fraudulent vc led scammers right? its just so tiring.
Adoption... Bitcoin has roughly 500K transactions per day with an estimated 80% of them being trades (with an estimated 77% of those trades going through the "big three" exchanges). Visa has 1B transactions per day and virtually every single one of them is someone purchasing a good or service.
Credit cards were "invented" in 1951. By 1970 51% of US households had at least one. All happening well before the internet. Even with all of the hype an estimated 13% of American households even traded crypto last year. Want to guess how many households used it to purchase a good or service?
Globally we're more connected than ever. It's been 13 years - if bitcoin was actually superior for anything other than speculative trading people would be using it for something other than speculative trading.
Regarding the abuse here on HN - tweet something negative about blockchain and I think your perspective on the "abuse" coming from the HN community will change. By nature "cryptobros" and other people pumping these things are doing so for their own financial gain. People that are negative about crypto typically don't have any skin in the game and even if they do (somehow) their ferocity pales in comparison to the portions of the population that are expecting to retire with it.
> Adoption... Bitcoin has roughly 500K transactions per day with an estimated 80% of them being trades (with an estimated 77% of those trades going through the "big three" exchanges).
Source for this?
Also, all of these transaction numbers are for on-chain transactions. They don't include layer 2 solutions like the Lightning Network. Given that the Lightning Network is built for micro-transactions, where sats can literally be streamed to a creator, while someone listens to a podcast for example, it's possible (though impossible to definitively confirm?) that on-chain AND off-chain transactions already exceed credit card services.
You have to understand that Bitcoin (the blockchain network) isn't trying to be a credit card network. It's a settlement layer/clearing house. Traditionally for a transaction to occur with finality would take days, perhaps weeks to occur. When you make a purchase with a credit card that payment isn't occurring with finality in the banking system. It takes days to "lock in". On Bitcoin it takes 10 minutes and is completely automated and trustless.
The Lightning Network (enabled by the SegWit upgrade) allows for payments to occur instantly, with low fees, and can be used for micro-transactions. The tradeoff to that convenience is it's less secure. This is why you would have a Lightning wallet for your day to day usage, and your "savings account" in cold storage on-chain. You would only use on-chain transactions for big purchases, or to open a Lightning channel.
> Globally we're more connected than ever. It's been 13 years - if bitcoin was actually superior for anything other than speculative trading people would be using it for something other than speculative trading.
It literally is, you're just not paying attention. As already mentioned it is being used to stream payments in podcasts as your listen, it is being used in competitive video games, there are gift card services like Bitrefill,
The Lightning Labs blog does a good job of summarizing the state of the Lightning Network.
I understand and am aware of L2 solutions like lightning. My own startup uses Polygon (Ethereum L2) to store copies of user asset verification records.
Generally speaking, L2s are interesting because they all make compromises from the principals of blockchain (as you mention - but that's for another day). It's been interesting, to say the least, to watch some of the fundamental definitions and principals such as "decentralized" and "secure" get redefined over the years.
I use statistics for Bitcoin transaction volume in these comments for several reasons:
1) Bitcoin is more widely known than any other blockchain based technology.
2) It's (essentially) only used for payments so transaction volume is more easily directly compared to other uses. For example, Ethereum has roughly double the daily transaction rate of Bitcoin but it's not clear to me how to easily breakout payments for direct comparison to Bitcoin, Visa, etc.
3) I'd use Lightning transaction volumes if I could find them. Anywhere. I've researched this quite a bit and all I can find are posts like the ones you provided (from Lightning Labs themselves) or from places like the Dailyhodl, etc talking about how big all of the markets Lightning is going to take over are, how much potential there is, etc. The typical "by 2030 we'll be doing (insert astronomical number)".
If you have a reputable/reliable source for the number of transactions on the Lightning Network I'd love to see it. The amount of bitcoin on it, the number of channels, the number of nodes, etc make for some impressive looking graphs but I suspect the transaction volume (to me the only real number that matters in terms of adoption) is still extremely low. If it wasn't everyone in the blockchain sphere would be hyping that too.
Let's circle back - I use blockchain at my current startup. I had 200 GPUs mining Ethereum in 2017. I'm not anti-blockchain by any means. I bring up what I consider to be valid criticisms because the bubble inside a bubble wrapped in an echo chamber present in blockchain today isn't doing anyone any favors. The reality is that (zooming out) after 10 years blockchain is still a toy. If it has any chance of ever living up to the promise and hype at least some people need to step out of the bubble and ask themselves why it's actually been one of the most slowly adopted technologies in the last 100 years.
And "blockchain" is pointless outside of Bitcoin, which might explain why its adoption has been slow as a more general technology. The blockchain was created to solve a very specific problem related to Bitcoin's mission statement (as defined by Satoshi). With that problem solved by Bitcoin, what else is there to use "blockchain" as a technology on exactly? Ok, there might be some very niche use cases that are applicable, but those aren't going to see the technology widely adopted.
> If you have a reputable/reliable source for the number of transactions on the Lightning Network I'd love to see it.
I don't think it's actually possible to determine this. There's no way to see transactions that occur across the entire network. Nodes are only aware of the transactions that route through them. Maybe some clever people have determined a way to infer it, but I'm not aware of any. The metric most people use to judge growth of the Lightning Network is btc capacity i.e. how many bitcoin are "held" in channels between nodes, which is open information.
That's an interesting graph. They appear to have cherry picked data and used strange start dates for each. Based on numbers I've seen it looks more like this:
Bitcoin launched 1/2009 - as of now there are 100M users (your graph says 135M, which seems to be a very high estimate but lets go with that).
World Wide Web was released 4/1993 - 13 years later there were at least 700M users (very conservative estimate). Mind you this growth depended on everything from having a computer (22.9% of US households had a computer in 1993) to laying untold miles of fiber optics, undersea cables, building out physical datacenters, etc. Literally people digging ditches and ships circling the globe - many thousands of miles over.
By being essentially just another internet application (most people consider WWW = internet) taking advantage of all of this infrastructure Bitcoin/blockchain had/has a HUGE advantage over the WWW. To be a bitcoin user in 2009 you had to have a computer and install a program. To be a bitcoin user for the vast majority of its life you could/can hear about bitcoin at a bar, pull your phone out, and install an app on your smartphone to be a "bitcoin user" for next to nothing in under five minutes.
To be a WWW user in 1993 you had to have a computer that could handle it (Windows? Trumpet Winsock?, CPU, RAM, modem, etc) and a local ISP, etc. I remember in 1994 having to install a modem, a second phone line, and dial into an ISP that was LONG DISTANCE... It literally took weeks to get on the internet in 1994 and especially in my case, it was very expensive and very technically challenging (Hayes commands anyone? Chat scripts? PPP/SLIP?).
Then a little later America Online (still crazy expensive), maybe have it at work or university, or in the later years get lucky and have broadband in your area. I couldn't get DSL until 2004, for example (and it was still very expensive).
Even with all of these monumental challenges the WWW grew at least 5x faster than bitcoin (and it's really probably closer to 10x).
I suspected that was the case with Lightning. I'll keep digging into this because as I'm sure you can tell I'm fascinated with this. Overall I'm really trying to ask:
Why has adoption in the "cryptosphere" been so terrible (arguably the worst rate of any recent technology)? This is a question every honest blockchain advocate needs to ask themselves because there are clearly significant issues impeding mass adoption. Whatever these issues are need to be identified and rectified to the extent they can. I truly hope it's not the obvious answer - "It doesn't provide anything most people want or need".
> At what point will what we've been building be considered useful?
Can you share some of the numbers you're citing? Who is using what to run their businesses daily? What's the number of transactions relative to current financial systems? How many actual users do you have for these things? The problem is anyone digging deeper sees it's all marketing and bullshit.
It starts being useful when it's not motivated by VCs and others with a financial stake trying to get higher exists hyping up products with no utility and no users.
They were frank enough to tell me that their business could have done the same thing in a centralized fashion, but they wouldn't have gotten funding.
Cryptocurrencies don't have a "killer app". Something for the common person.
I suspect that even when they do, it will be incidental. Something that could have been developed as part of a centralized architecture, but built with cryptocurrencies because the financial support was there.
>... hn says its all speculation and fraud and needs to be made illegal.
This is the part that confuses me. What is the theory of value here? If you don't like it don't buy it. If you're not interested, don't buy it. If you don't see the benefits, don't develop cryptocurrency applications.
Nobody is compelling developers or users to use this technology. Meanwhile state run currencies are forced upon us. Walled gardens and browsers force tech choices on developers.
Isn't it enough to dislike something and avoid it entirely? Why advocate for limiting the choices of others? How is this not authoritarian paternalism?
Having a well articulated purpose, and being "centralized" are two sides of the same coin. We can agree on a purpose for government money because it has been deliberately molded to specific purposes: A medium of exchange, short term store of value, and instrument of economic policy. We can measure its performance against those purposes, and in fact, that measurement process is part of the technology of our money system.
Not knowing the purpose of cryptocurrency is its purpose. There's nothing wrong with having a general purpose technology, like computer programming, that is adaptable to specific purposes on demand.
Criticisms are okay, but this isn't a good criticism.
From the article:
> Let’s start with this: Venmo is a free service to transfer dollars, and bitcoin transfers are not free. Yet after I wrote an article last December saying bitcoin had no use, someone responded that Venmo and Paypal are raking in consumers’ money and people should switch to bitcoin.
Not everyone has access to Venmo or PayPal. For instance, sex workers are routinely booted off the platform in the US with their funds being frozen. People in developing countries also may not have access.
> In fact, I would assert that there is no single person in existence who had a problem they wanted to solve, discovered that an available blockchain solution was the best way to solve it, and therefore became a blockchain enthusiast.
How about people that want to hold western stable coins and they are legally prevented from holding dollars or similarly stable currency?
Do this actual person really exist? They were looking for a way to hold some dollars they had lying around, did some research, found blockchain and have now put the dollars into USDT or whatever?
There are people legally prevented from holding USD. Take a look at Argentina [0]. They're legally banned from holding USD and if they have an account with USD it'll get taken by the state and converted to quickly depreciating bonds. Of course there is a black market for USD but holding substantial amounts of USD under your mattress in order to preserve your wealth is impractical and dangerous.
This is the exception not the rule. Also making this as your main argument for why crypto is a net positive is telling because you understand that there are 0 uses for crypto in a functional democratic society.
You have a very limited view of the history of capital controls. In the history of the world, capital controls are very common. It's a cycle. The state controls the money supply, they debase it through printing (dilution during gold standard), the value depreciates and everyone panics. One of the first things they do is restrict the ability of people to transfer money out of their currency. When everything is stable, you don't see this happen. But when its not (i.e. what its most advantageous) capital controls are applied. You see this happening in Turkey right now:
> Turkey had an 80% foreign currency surrender requirement in place from September 2018 to late 2019 during a previous iteration of a currency crisis and has also used other “soft” capital controls including changing fees charged on currency conversions and adjusting the requirements for currency hedging.
There are financial assets I cannot hold due to the accident of geography. For instance, I can't hold Chinese stocks. I cannot easily and safely send money to family in Cuba, Iran or North Korea. There are a lot of places I cannot hold real estate.
Capital controls and monetary debasement are very much the rule on a long enough timespan.
Fiat currencies are used in literally every country on the planet and have been through the largest economic booms in history. Limited/hard currencies on the other hand, have a 100% failure rate with one ongoing experiment happening right now in El Salvador. Which would I rather bet on?
I bet we agree on many issues including, let people move freely between countries, have less rules, have smaller countries. But there is nothing wrong with the idea of a government backed currency even if you can point to failures like Turkey, Venezuela and many more.
Also are you seriously saying that because you can't rent seek land in Liberia there is a problem with the global economic order?
> Fiat currencies are used in literally every country on the planet and have been through the largest economic booms in history. Limited/hard currencies on the other hand, have a 100% failure rate with one ongoing experiment happening right now in El Salvador. Which would I rather bet on?
Something has existed for tens of thousands of years and in the last 50 years has been supplanted by something else. Which would I bet on surviving 1,000 years from now? Hard currency.
We are talking about a system that completely floundered under pressure from economic expansion (hard money) vs a system that has been presiding over the largest economic booms in history and is currently adopted by every government in the world (fiat) and your argument is "well look which is older".
1. I never claimed hard money was the earliest form of money. Read my original post more carefully. Gold has been used as a currency for at least 3,000 years. Likely earlier.
2. I never claimed fiat was invested 50 years ago. I stated that the global monetary system switched over from predominately hard money with fiat
> We are talking about a system that completely floundered under pressure from economic expansion (hard money) vs a system that has been presiding over the largest economic booms in history and is currently adopted by every government in the world (fiat) and your argument is "well look which is older".
It floundered because it was routinely debased and not adhered to. That was my whole point. I would also say that fiat has failed a lot. You google list of hyperinflation to get a sense of how bad it has been over time. Even today you have people living in countries in which they have to watch their wealth disintegrate every year by double digit amounts
It's not but its a lot easier and safer to hold digital currency than wads of cash in your floorboards. Easier to acquire, receive from abroad and verify as well. It allows for a form of civil disobedience against unjust laws
You can print out a seed phrase and hold it under your floorboards as well, or better yet, memorize it. It takes up less space. You can split the phrase up and give it to a few trusted parties. You can do multi-sig. It's easier to transport, etc etc etc
Various weights of gold or silver are the better comparison versus wads of cash, but your point is taken since I guess the completely digital acquisition is the difference.
My company operates in a highly international business area. The whole industry is moving towards using crypto for B2B payments. Every provider and partner offers payment by crypto - because international bank payments are slow, expensive and complicated (gets stuck, countries blocked, unclear KYC etc, opaque AML blockers etc).
except those KYC and AML laws still apply to the companies making the transfers. And some of the regulators are extremely aggressive in their enforcement.
so your company either has to set up its own KYC/AML compliance department (noting that this is often a regulated profession) or it is probably breaking the law.
International bank payments are slow, but they are also reversible and compliance is not your problem.
Ah, so you are saying we shouldn’t offer UBI because then we would have no excuse to keep degrading conditions in the workplace. So people should have to go through with bad experiences (see retail, “menial” jobs) in order to be worthy of their lives. Ok, got it.
Looks like your company praises doing useless, repetitive tasks. I’m pretty sure I do not want to apply there. Maybe if it was somewhere that actually prioritizes efficiency and meaningful work, you’d have a better way to do it.
