IronIvan

This type of thinking is pure toxin because it essentially reinforces exactly what you don't want.

If Peter did in fact work hard and now he's stripped of the results of his labor while being told that probably he only managed to accumulate capital because he was just exploiting others, what incentive landscape does that create.

Is a lot of profit a function of factors much less commendable than creating value for others? Sure. But by lumping in the productive people with the parasites, you are undermining those people who deserve your protection the most.

Can confirm. Lived a very frugal early retirement lifestyle in Austria because it was practically impossible to build wealth (high taxes, comparatively very low tech salaries, little entrepreneurial support/incentives).

Moving to the US I was able to 5-6x my income (from what I could have realistically made) , while reducing my tax burden by 15 percentage points, and so I've been happily living a workaholics' lifestyle since.

Looking back, it really boggles my mind how much engineering potential is squandered in Europe. You'd have to be an idiot to want to work hard given how raw of a deal you are getting (work for almost 2 decades as an engineer just so you can afford the average one family home - what a joke!) and people understand that intuitively (hence pushing for ever fewer work hours or even days because what else is there if your salary is essentially capped and you quickly hit a 50 % tax rate (when combining income tax and social security) for every additional hour worked).

</rant>

Inflation all by itself is already effectively creating a cashless society over time, at least if no new notes with larger denomination are being printed (and historically speaking, the trend has even been the opposite, namely there used to be 500, 1.000, 5.000 and 10.000 dollar bills up until 1969 [1]).

So this has been a long time in the making, really.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_one-hundred-doll...

https://odysee.com/@3Blue1Brown:b/how-secure-is-256-bit-secu...

or more briefly: never

Any application that could be done on a blockchain could be better done on a centralized database. Except crime.

After all as we all know: If you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear.

And look at how inefficient all these permissionless, trustless protocols are! What a waste! Let's just all trust a central authority and think of the savings and the children.

I was really puzzled for a while, trying to figure out how a different floor could at all effect the cooking (and whether I would want to eat any food from a shop where it does) until I figured out that it was a typo and that it was supposed to spell floUr... :)

Of course, the above assumes that risk of death from injury won't drop as medical technologies improve, which is wrong, but as long as it's non-zero, there is still going to be a statistical limit on the length of life. No hanging around till the heat death of the universe for you.

Technically, this is not correct.

If your chance of dying drops exponentially (perhaps not very realistic, hence 'technically'), your probability of survival converges to something greater than 0.

E.g.: If your probability of dying in the first year is 1/2, then 1/4, then 1/8 and so on, then your probability of living forever is roughly 29 % ( https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=product+i%3D1+to+infin... )

A good explanation!

I made a rather long (2 hours) YouTube video that explains the fundamentals of our current economic system - perhaps it is helpful to someone who wants to get a better understanding of the issue:

http://youtu.be/t8_sjmRBGPE

Here are statistics for germany:

http://www.heise.de/jobs/artikel/Wer-verdient-wie-viel-98184...

From my personal experience I can tell you that colleagues at the company I previously worked for in Vienna, Austria made about 42 k / year with a several years of experience and a masters in computer science. But pay was always an issue there.

Hey, I am also living in Vienna (or at least close to it) and I want to get self employed as well - any tips how to start? (already have a few years of programming experience under my belt and soon a master in mathematics)