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jhh

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Inside .git 2 years ago

Awesome content, and Julia is very good at recognizing what people need to know to understand the whole thing

I've never seen such a big protest. The transit system in Hamburg was completely overloaded. People standing around Alster lake, you couldn't even get close to the actual point where the protest was scheduled to happen. Those protests possibly may be ineffectual and what not - they certainly weren't small.

Hamburg: https://image.stern.de/34382826/t/ud/v2/w960/r1.7778/-/19-ha...

Both Hamburg and Munich protests needed to be canceled in the middle of the thing because the huge crowds were considered dangerous (I think rightly so).

Just to clarify, not trying to correct anyone here, the third attendee was Bob Sproull, author of "Principles of Interactive Computer Graphics"?

Makes a lot of sense to me. Intel's production cannot keep up and so it's only TSMC and Samsung with a big gap. I think some people will be surprised when TSMC starts taking more and more of the profit from the value chain in the next few years.

So I think it is certainly _very_ unsure that Bitcoin will become the dominant crypto asset. I think there's some reason why it might.

Kind of subtle and hand-wavy, but I think it's dysfunctionality in terms of leadership and "emergent nature" may be features rather than bugs.

For example a crypto asset sanctioned by a government is based on that government's legitimacy. This kind of means that the government could decide to "turn it off". And with Bitcoin, it's not clear at all who could do this.

But yeah, that's very unsure, I guess.

So I feel the "Bitcoin is undesirable as a store of value because it's so volatile" point is not too fair.

Firstly, fiat money can often experience instability which is quite extreme. Moderate instability, mostly in form of inflation, is even normal in large parts of the developing world. And just because the Dollar has been reasonable stable for a hundred years or so, people assume that this is the natural state of affairs.

Secondly, is it a reasonable expectation, that a new store of value would be stable from the start? For example, platinum has become more common as a store of value in the last 30ish years, and its value has sprung up and fluctuated quite heavily (see here for example https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/57/Pt_price...). A similar argument can be made regarding storehouses being less trustworthy than traditional banks. This sort of thing would be expected with a new type of value.

It's so odd that he would make these statements in an interview without the data or a press release published. I mean this should be information subject to mandatory publication with regards to their shareholders. Astra has been by far the least trustworthy of the major companies so far. I just hope their jab works anyway.

I think about Bitcoin (and similar systems) primarily as a long term store of value.

I think they are a pretty fundamental innovation in that space.

What are good alternatives? Gold, cash, or ETFs have substantial drawbacks - especially in situations where property rights are insecure and inflation runs wild (or just eats up savings at a somewhat moderate pace, as is the case in many developing countries).

Of course Bitcoin is also a human system, eventually, but what you are trusting is an emergent, non-hierarchical order which should be more resilient than hierarchical systems. The technology facilitates the emergence of such a system.

I actually think the flawlessness of the technology is not a necessary condition of Bitcoin's success. If bugs are found then consensus in the social system can emerge which can minimise damages

All of that being said I think the use case for blockchain is probably quite narrow.

In practice our infrastructure costs for scale-to-zero technology like Lambda and DynamoDB has been a lot lower. So much of the cost in reality comes from idling non-prd instances.

I like diversity, but "Fck white dudes lol" likely isn't helping anyone.

Promoting diversity using affirmative language only should be possible. And white guys's feelings are important, too.