quantumBerry

If all "legitimate" platforms ban hate speech, then users wanting to engage in hate speech will all go to some platform that radically allows all speech with disproportionately this undesirable speech. They will intermingle disproportionately with those spreading sexual abuse images, drugs, insurgent propaganda and instructional material, and other undesirable material. Facebook likely makes the problem worse by forcing these "hate speech" and "disinformation users" to be completely surrounded by people with repulsive content, instead of having their repulsive content critiqued and shamed by other users.

Having people with bad, hateful ideas out in the open I would argue is preferable to concentrating all these bad thoughts together with people that will reinforce that it is normal.

I apologize, maybe you are not familiar with the details of the silk road. Ross Ulbricht was the administrator and creator of the silk road, allegedly. It's quite probable that without his arrest, it would have persisted even if on newly acquired hardware. I would argue his arrest was integral in these violent thugs "moderating" silk road away like the mob "moderates" away their competition.

Instead, after his arrest the content ended up on new platforms rather than the Silk Road platform.

biases from creeping in and causing you to misunderstand posts and/or lash out at others.

Yes my bias is in complete, unrestricted free speech. Every single piece of content, regardless of how damaging or vulgar anyone thinks it is and regardless of if it portrays even the worst of crimes. I admit I am colored by that bias.

lash out at others.

What are you talking about? You feel attacked because your poorly constructed argument was laid open. Your case is pretty clear. Even if the system of the internet has no useful filter of content (whether that is true or not), if a third party such as DEA comes along and decides to seize equipment and throw the operator in jail, you consider that content moderation. And I'm willing to admit from a practical perspective, that could be considered a form of moderation by a violent third party.

---------------

Edit due to waiting on timeout to reply below:

His arrest is hand and hand with the shutdown. It was integral. You can't say you weren't mentioning Ulbricht's arrest when that arrest WAS, in part, the takedown of Silk Road. The very fact that you said you weren't speaking of the arrest lead me to say you "may not be familiar" (note the uncertain words, that your bias clouds you from understanding did not speak in certainties.)

s, and then angrily respond to them as such.

I think you're projecting. If there's any anger, it must be yours.

Yeah, again, you're injecting your own biases as you create assumptions about my comments

Your comment appeared to be a rebuttal to my statement that "The internet itself is unmoderated in any useful sense for conten." If it wasn't actually a rebuttal but actually an agreement, I apologize for misunderstanding you were actually supporting that argument.

See how I used "moderated" in quotes in my very first response? That suggests that I'm using the term rather loosely.

If something's illegal - even if you and I think it shouldn't be - then it's typically going to be removed at some point, even if it takes a while because something like Tor makes it difficult. And in that sense, yes, the internet is "moderated" for that content. That's all I've said/argued, and I truly don't understand how that is so difficult for you to grasp.

The illegal content has only progressively proliferated since the advent of the internet, and we've yet to see an effective mechanism to moderate the content of the internet as a whole. Virtually every category of content has not only not been removed but increased.

That's all I've said/argued, and I truly don't understand how that is so difficult for you to grasp.

Yes and I'm arguing that this is incorrect, it hasn't been moderated. At best it has passed from platform from platform but no effective mechanism has managed to censor the internet as a whole.

Sometimes I wonder with all this speak of anger, misinterpretations, and clouded judgement is just you repeating to me what your own psychologist told you.

Oh hello, strawman.

Glad to know you finally admit that being kidnapped by a 3rd party is not really what most of us think as "moderation", and thus you have made a straw man. Although in the strict sense I guess it is true that moderation could merely mean some 3rd party entity came along and violently kept me away from communicating. If you don't like me posting cat pictures on reddit, you could crack my skull or lock me in a cage and steal my PC and you would have "moderated" me but I wouldn't call that reddit moderation.

I suppose in the sense that Gabby Pettito was moderated off the internet, Ross Ulbricht was moderated off of the internet and into a cage permanently for the heinous crime of facilitating voluntarily peaceful trade. Tor marketplaces were definitely not gone for years, the same content just moved under new banners. You can literally find the same content and more on WHM today as you did under Ulbricht's banner before he was kidnapped by government thugs.

The internet is not moderated in any useful sense for content. Drug markets like white house market, and before that silk road have perpetuated for years. Tor and other darknet websites host content that is nearly universally disdained by governments and even most individuals, which I hesitate to even name here what that heinous content is (you and I both know some examples).

We assume NASA's site has NASA-posted content. We assume Apple's site has Apple-posted content.

Trust in identity is not the same thing as useful moderation of content. That's useful moderation of identity.

Sites with different standards for what they'd publish have been around for decades (for gore, for porn, etc) but many of these still exist in a traditional curated-by-someone fashion, or are more open to UGC but still have some level of moderation.

Those sites _choose_ to moderate their content, that doesn't exclude others that don't.

As late as 2018, torrent traffic has been quoted as the fifth in internet traffic [1].

[1] https://torrentfreak.com/netflix-dominates-internet-traffic-...

Trying to stop sexual abuse and child pornography isn't weird moralization.

How does moderation of content prevent sexual abuse or CP? If anything I'd argue it creates more, because those that seek the images instead have to produce their own if they cannot find them.

The internet itself is unmoderated in any useful sense for content, yet it has lived longer than most of these cheesy "moderated" products that seek to impose their morality on you.

maybe enough "Notes" to pay my stay out of jail money, and the rest in hard currency :)

This idea has been explicitly stated by those who oppose a $15 federal minimum wage, arguing that people making current minimum wage, or close to minimum wage, are not actually poor,

Again, you claim was that it was said that those who make minimum wage are not actually poor. I am quoting you verbatim. Apparently you suffer from amnesia or disconnection from reality. Cato did not say this.

People work "gig" jobs (e.g. drive for Lyft) for extremely varied reasons (some even do so in addition to other jobs, in fact, your source says most Uber drives do this).

Ignoring all your disengenous obliviousness to your straw man and refusal or indifference at any source that shows concrete effect of wage regulations, I'm glad at least you've come around to admit that many people working low wage jobs are doing it in addition to other jobs and for extremely varied reasons, one of which may be to use the job as a bridge. Which is exactly what Cato was saying. You've at least admitted now that Cato was correct.

Preferably, yes. "Concrete examples" are also called "anecdotes," and are not at all convincing of large-scale, job market-wide, patterns or effects.

So where is your citation that minimum wage is good for people who cannot offer value reaching minimum wage? I've seen nothing at all from you showing these people who can't offer enough value to gain a minimum wage job benefit at all from raising the wage.

That is another assumption. You "presume" that gig workers would choose non-gig work if given the option... With no actual evidence of that being the case at a meaningful level. People work "gig" jobs (e.g. drive for Lyft) for extremely varied reasons (some even do so in addition to other jobs, in fact, your source says most Uber drives do this).

I said I "presume" that many would choose. Not all would choose. In fact, I don't even have to presume at least one would choose because I was a gig worker once that would have liked to make minimum wage but at the time had nothing to offer yet that got me a minimum wage offer. I absolutely would have liked employment protections but did not get them, although after several years I was awarded some money in a class action lawsuit along with many others who made the same claim as me that we wanted and believed we should have been afforded employee status. So I guess I didn't presume at all, as it was born out through claims in the court system. Would you like a picture of my check as part of the class action of the many who wanted to be classified as employees?

Your constant dismissal of evidence whenever it suits you is little more than the dictatorial activity of a narcissist, a lying one at that who makes false claims about the statement of Cato.

It's treated as temporary as part of a justification for lower wages. This idea has been explicitly stated by those who oppose a $15 federal minimum wage, arguing that people making current minimum wage, or close to minimum wage, are not actually poor, or won't be in the long-term, because their current wage is temporary (the Cato Institute makes this exact argument and gives the example of "working students").

In particular, note you said that the Cato makes the argument that those making minimum wage are not "actually poor." In fact they make no such claim that there are not poor working a minimum wage job. Yours was a straw man.

No, the article you linked is meaningless specifically because it tells you absolutely nothing about those individuals (and also because it's purely anecdotal). When discussing wage increases (or hazard pay in this case), we typically care about the outcomes for workers. Not to mention the fact, as I said, that QFC has a vested interest in blaming regulation.

Only if you're oblivious to the fact it tells you exactly what happened to the individuals, which is that they were forced to either lose their job or compete for hours with the established staff at other locations. Were you looking for a theoretical paper? I found a long one with all sorts of mathematical scribble about probalistic black markets and unemployment but I thought it would bore you and the lack of concrete examples wouldn't be terribly interesting nor convincing.

Do you have any evidence that this occurs at any meaningful scale? This theory, while occasionally toted by conservative/libertarian think tanks, seems to rely on only 1 example (a New York city car wash that was already cutting jobs through automation), which was covered/written by a libertarian think tank.

One example of those who end up engaging in independent contractor / self employment for less than minimum wage is gig workers, who often earn less than minimum wage and yet voluntarily choose to do so anyway [1]. Presumably if jobs numerous enough for the number of people working these gig jobs existed that offered them employment protections, many would choose that over independent contractor status where they are on their own if anything goes wrong.

[1] https://illinoisepi.files.wordpress.com/2021/01/ilepi-pmcr-o...

we, as a society, have already decided that the benefits of eliminating $5/hour jobs was worth whatever effect it had on unemployment.

We have eliminated some, but others we've simply relegated them to the black market so that those engaging them either do it entirely without unemployment insurance and other labor protections, or they do it as an independent business or contractor. Now a good deal of those jobs are instead taken by illegal immigrants (and I'm not judging these immigrants at all here, just noting what the effects are). What we really "decided" was it was worth making those jobs black market or self employment jobs -- and that is an opinion held by the tyranny of the majority against those who suffer under this regulation.

With this is mind, it's obvious, that QFC closing two stores is completely meaningless

Somehow I doubt it was meaningless to the individuals who had the choice of move to a store not offering the hazard pay or lose their job. But meaningless from your priveleged perspective of not being immediately affected by the loss.

I'll just also add that it's very hard not to take what you're saying as simply constructing a straw man (as opposed to misreading or misunderstanding), given how completely unrelated anything you wrote was to my other comment.

Rich from a person leading off with the straw man attacking Cato with the false argument that they had somehow claimed there weren't poor people making minimum wage.

Of course you can get rich by buying dollars. Ever seen a street money changer? It's big business in places like Iraq, Argentina, and other places where dollars are desired. You can make a cut out of every dollar you sell for less desirable local currency, and then another cut when you use the less desirable currency to buy dollars from people who need local currency. Does that mean dollars are an investment?

There are certainly influencers as well influencing you to start FOREX trading changing dollars back and forth to get rich, or leveraging dollar exchanges in a zero sum game attempt to strike it big. This blog boasts a man made $6M trading USD and NZD [1].

You use circular logic that bitcoin is an investment because it is a pyramid scheme which is by your definition an investment. Then you say dollars are not an investment because "everybody knows you can't make money off dollars" (which is patently false.)

Some people may view bitcoin as an investment. Some people may view dollars as an investment. There is no requirement it be treated as one. Again the bitcoin whitepaper, and open implementation of it which you can readily acquire the source code to, makes no promises of returns, stability in exchange rate, or appreciation. Any pyramid scheme is the fault of some swindlers who could create a pyramid scheme in any number of currencies -- not "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System." You seem bitter at bitcoin because you chose to take the word of swindlers rather than the actual white paper and public implementation which made no such promise of profits.

[1] https://forextradingstrategies4u.com/millionaire-forex-trade...

1) I feel like you know that is an oversimplification,

No it really is this simple. Jobs that have negative economic value (wages do not cover value) are not maintainable in a free market for anything more than a short period of time. I'm sure some exist but jobs with negative economic value are not in any way plentiful compared to ones with positive or break even value. If I have a job that gives me $14/hr in value it does not make sense for me to offer it under a $15/hr minimum wage.

The ones actually acting in "bad faith" are those who fail to disclose to the ofter marginalized people working low wage jobs that their policy goals are to eliminate the only jobs available to these marginalized people, forcing them to operate on the black market or let their skills and work history decay in unemployment. The farther you slide the minimum wage bar right from zero, the more people you eliminate from the labor market: the nuance being if it is low enough it only destroys the earning power of the most marginalized that some of us are happy to forget about.

We, as a society, are okay with, going by your own argument, eliminating all the $5/hour jobs (with state minimum wages being $7.25+) because it does not lead to significantly less overall employment

Well it does lead to significantly less employment for anyone who cannot provide minimum wage in value. But what happens is a mixture of elimination of those jobs and the pushing of those jobs to the black market, where those persons (including many illegal immigrants) just have to work in the shadows without any unemployment insurance or labor protections and have to live in constant fear the IRS will find out and also get them for unreported income. So they're definitely a lot worse off.

elimination of jobs is not equivalent to unemployment

It is if there is no alternative job because you can't offer enough in value to make the minimum wage cutoff.

Do you have evidence this would not also be true with a $15 minimum wage?

Do I have evidence that employers will have to eliminate jobs if the position doesn't create enough value to cover the wage? One example is when QFC had to close a couple Seattle stores due to mandated 'hazard pay' [1]. Simple logic tells you the jobs generating under $15/hr in value will either become black market or be gone, if it's illegal.

If you're in retail and can't find anyone to pay $15/hr, and think you are worth that, why not try it on the open market? You can come to my border city, where mexicans engage in retail without any boss whatsoever selling retail snacks and elotes. If you can really produce over $15/hr in value then go ahead and do it for yourself. I'm sure many of these street retail street vendors make more than that, and at least in my city the police don't care at all if you have a license or not.

[1] https://www.supermarketnews.com/issues-trends/kroger-s-qfc-c...

And what if that prophecy is not fulfilled?

If you've gained no skills vs a fresh person with no experience that you can use to gain a better paying job, then you're doing the best you don't benefit financially from your job being outlawed.

What if, because you work 50 hours a week but make poverty-level wages, you can't bridge your way out?

If you work 50 hours a week in a capacity where you are offered the most available to you and you are incapable of starting a business that offers any more value, then you're doing the best you can. Many people strive to earn the most they can, and if that is dead end retail that's ok.

In my youth in the wake of the 2009 recession I used to wake up drunk out of a ditch and show up at the day labor agency with a completely unverifiable employment background (read between the lines there) making $17/hr alongside felons and drug addicts moving drywall for the oil worker camps, but I guess there are a lot less enterprising people than me out there -- but I don't think their job should be outlawed. I know there are some people out there that can't even be bothered to wake up drunk out of a ditch and walk to the day labor agency and move some drywall.

What if you spend four years of your life being treated as disposable trash, and for some reason that has an impact on your self-esteem and work ethic?

What if you choose to find meaning in life somewhere other than work, like your family or friends. What if you find one of the other 10,000 employers also offering shit wages and work for them instead. I used to work at a taco shop for $7/hr, and even though the job sucked the boss at least was pleasant and offered me a shot of tequila at the end of the night. What if you take pride in yourself for not your job or earnings but by engaging with the community, or playing with your children, or worshipping your chosen deity or playing basketball on the corner. What if you sign up to be apprentice roofer, a job always hiring even in the worst of economic times and offering full time plus benefits.

Markets are doing what markets do, and that is maximize profit, not optimize for human life.

And yet there has been unprecedented life expectancy, total wealth of society, educational offering and attainment, and medical breakthroughs in the past 200 years thanks to markets that optimize for profit.

Glad to know you think anyone who can offer under $15/hr in value just a "nuance" worthy of unemployment.

one consequence of federal minimum wage hikes can be job or hours loss for low‐ wage workers, as we’ve seen, which can create poverty.

If the minimum wage has no effect on unemployment, then why stop at $15? Make minimum wage set at 20 pounds of gold per hour. Lets maximize our wealth.

No the argument is that if you outlaw all jobs under $15, then you've just outlawed employment for anyone who can offer less than $15/hr in value, and relegated that person to unemployment and cut their ability to climb the wage ladder.

It's treated as a bridge for those who need some life skills before moving onto something else. A lot of jobs requiring responsibility don't want to hire a kid who has no experience other than smoking dope and video games, and retail will give them some proof they can deal with some progressive responsibility.

Not a bridge for others. It's fine that it's a bridge for some and not one for others. If stores decide retail is a career job, then they will pay career ladder wages, otherwise market forces make retail as a bridge a self fulfilling prophecy.

The issue is if the government dictates a certain minimum wage for retail workers, then they've just outlawed any jobs that provide less value than that wage. You don't gain jobs by outlawing jobs, and those desiring the bridge to something more will be hurt the worst.

Why are you wasting so many 'watts' sending this out? Every watt you use for debating on HN is a watt not used for something more productive. [ Personally I prefer units of energy like joule, power is not a measurement of wasted energy. If I wasted 10 kW for 1 minute it's not as bad as wasting 1 W for 11,000 minutes]

If it looks like an value gaining asset, and people treat it like a value gaining asset, then it’s a value gaining asset. Not a currency.

I’m not sure how you’ve ended up deciding that you think I treat crypto as an investment, not a currency, after I’ve explicitly said the opposite.

Again you go on contradicting yourself whenever you find it convenient. You are possibly the most disingenuous, contradictory, hypocritical person I've met on HN. Fine to waste 'watts' on social media news sites but not to send a payment to your unbanked cousin in El Salvador. Have fun thinking like a person who only looks for ways to fail, rather than ways to succeed.

Not a biblical person myself, but I'm going to take a note out of the bible on this one : " Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest you be like him yourself."

Have a good one.

Read the white paper about bitcoin. Does it say anything about it being an investment, guaranteeing stability of exchanging rates to fiat, providing interest, or any appreciation? I'll be waiting for you to cite that.

There's a lot of disingenuous people out there, that for some reason believe bitcoin or other cryptos are "investments." I guess they missed that they are called crypto-CURRENCIES and not crypto-investments. And then they get upset that they are not, and go on to berate a currency for not being an investment. It's fine to be upset at any swindlers calling a zero-sum or negative-sum game like most crypto an investment, but if you actually read the white papers many cryptos make no such claims.

And there are certainty people telling you that you can get rich off dollars, just look at the FOREX trading peddlers telling you to get rich by trading fiat and leveraging fiat exchanges. I don't attack dollars for that!

And yeah, you can apply your idea to dollars, because one of the biggest way for the government to profit off of dollars is to print more out of thin air, therefore debasing the "investment" of the rest of the dollar holders. You can choose to not apply the idea to dollars, and rather bury your head in the sand if you like, that's your prerogative.

Ad hominem attacks undermine your arguments and suggest that you don’t actually have very strong argument, instead you’re forced to attack the character of the person your discussing with, due to an inability to attack their argument. Try harder.

I did attack your arguments, including many other points and I never called you a loser. Quit being so defensive. I said those who continually look for ways to make something not work, rather than finding the ways they do, think like losers. And I back that 100%! The only of the two of us who had made an ad hominem against the other is you, by saying I have an "inability to attack their (your) argument." Thanks hypocrite!

Unfortunately crypto has descended into little more than get rich quick schemes that take advantage of naïve investors, or produce profit by externalising all of the negative consequences of crypto mining (such as CO2 emissions). Forcing the rest of us to bear that long term cost, for a grifters short term profit.

I'm not a fan of stable coins, but how many people you reckon are buying DAI or USDT with the idea of striking it rich? I hear this sad sad false diatribe over and over, completely ignoring that crypto-currencies are currencies and not investment, with people getting mad that crypto is not an investment that is going to provide returns for naive "investors." And then they go on to attack crypto for not living up to being an investment!

I used be a fan of crypto, did plenty of trading, bought plenty of pizza etc with it. When to meetups, evangelised crypto to friends and family. Back then it looked realistic that crypto could be a genuine currency, and the concept of DAG was incredibly.

So you were a dogmatist for, and then apparently now a dogmatist against. Try being a neutral pragmatist that doesn't believe crypto is an investment utility but rather one possible financial engine that allows electronic transactions without KYC or centralized authority.

Clearly you do not. You continually peddle lies and myths about crypto-CURRENCY (not crypto-investments, which you seem to think they are). You continually make the false presumption that cryptocurrencies are investments, and then proceed to berate a currency because you expect it to behave as an investment when there is no requirement anyone consider them as one (I certainly do not, and think only a moron would consider cryptocurrency is an investment. I wouldn't "Invest" in yuan or euros either, although I would happily use them as a currency.)

When I buy crypto, I EXPECT to lose at the very least the exchange fee(~0.25%). Why on earth would I expect any gains on a currency, or expect there to be little or no risk on something so new and relatively untested versus something like gold?

> High returns with little or no risk.

This is not a requirement of cryptocurrency. And there is no guarantee they will have a high return. There is certainly no guarantee in anything like the bitcoin whitepaper that you will have no risk to fluctuations in exchange rate with fiat. [1]

> Unregistered investments.

Currencies are not synonymous with investments. Cryptocurrencies do not have to be peddle as investments, and only a moron would use them that way. [1, look anywhere for the word investment, interest, or appreciation -- you will not find it].

> Unlicensed sellers.

Whether the government approves of something has no bearing on whether it is a ponzi scheme or not.

> Secretive, complex strategies.

The implementation of a number of cryptos are both open implementation and open white paper [1]. Hardly secretive. I do agree the closed source ones could certainly be ponzi schemes, and perhaps you could also make an open source ponzi scheme.

[edit2] So with that in mind, it meets many (but not all) of the classic definition elements.

1. All returns are generated by bringing new money into the system. The only way someone can make money on Bitcoin is if a new person invests. That money is then distributed to the earlier participant, net of miner fees.

Currencies aren't meant to provide a return. Some people even consider currencies more useful if they're slightly inflationary. But lets examine your statement anyway. All other bitcoin holders appreciate their asset when someone loses their keys (deflation). An individual can make a return at the expense of the others by mining (inflationary creation). Or I could make fiat money on bitcoin by arbitrage and work, like selling coffee for bitcoin in a circumstance where people want it and few others are offering it except in fiat.

2. There is no actual business underlying.

Just as there is no actual business underlying commodity money? This doesn't make commodity money a ponzi scheme either.

3. The constant flow of new money is required to keep the price from collapsing because miners extract something like $50M in welfare from the system per day.

Not at all. A constant confidence in the crypto we examine is required to keep the price from collapsing. If no transactions are happening, then we are simply slowly inflating. Some currencies have infinite tail emission (infinite slow inflation) like monero. For bitcoin most coins have already been mined, so the amount of remaining inflation is finite. Even under the fiction that 50 million per day were extracted, it would take about 54 years for the price to collapse (care to imagine how much you would lose on USD if you stuck it in a mattress for 54 years?)

4. The entire space is unregistered investments hawked by unlicensed sellers.

Crypto-currencies are not generically investments. Yes I know some scam artists promise returns, but this is not a necessary feature of cryptocurrency. For instance, bitcoin and litecoin do not promise any sort of returns, and thus cannot be considered investment vehicle by anyone but speculators (speculators can call anything an investment, including USD).

It's a negative sum wealth redistribution scheme the takes money from new entrants and gives it to miners and to old entrants. The miner portion is what makes it negative-sum.

The same is said of gold, all the way up to gold miners paying for electricity and workers by liquidating some of their gold which makes it negative sum. Yet gold has been a legitimate store of value, and often currency, for thousands of years -- certainly no ponzi scheme.

[1] https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

Property taxes don't go to the federal government or national military, at least in the US. Lots of myths here.

dollars are created through work.

[citation needed]

You seem to have a fairy tale level of knowledge about how dollars are created. One of the Fed's favored way of created more money is simply buying treasury bonds with newly created money. Care to explain what work is done there (other than the work done by individuals at the Federal Reserve)?

including turning those digital funds into spendable cash.

Crypto can be spendable cash. You can buy a coffee or a bar of gold with it, even bullets. Sounds like it can be used as a currency to me. It only takes a willing counterparty.

Crypto is not more energy efficient than existing financial infrastructure.

That depends on the place and circumstance. I concede that Kenya was a poor example and I should have used someplace like Central African Republic instead.

Additionally Kenya has digital banking infrastructure. Send a SEPA payment instead, no need to Western Union.

Assuming you are one of the one third of Kenyans who have a bank account. And assuming the one sending the money has a bank account. Both of which involve documentation and KYC, something not necessary in most crypto transactions.

because your ignoring all the infrastructure need to do that fiat conversion

Not really, crypto to fiat can be done informally. There's several people in my city who buy and sell it and all they need is a cellphone and local currency.

It's only from the perspective of someone that thinks like a loser, always trying to find something wrong, that you can find zero uses where using crypto is more energy efficient than other financial options. And not all cryptos use the same energy or transaction cost as others.

For an example of transaction efficiency, I can buy a bar of gold from some established bullion vendors in litecoin much cheaper than with a visa card due to lower transaction risks for the merchant and lower transaction fees. If you can't wait multiple days for an ACH transaction and have to buy precious metals online, crypto is actually the cheapest way in the US.

Of course! If the US Army switched to massively inflating Venezuelan Bolivars for use and its share of tax collection, it would have no impact whatsoever on the army or its size!

Clearly the one arguing in good faith is the person leading off calling all crypto a ponzi scheme because of several myths you misunderstand. Or given your financial literacy, probably intentional disingenuous portrayal.

What the tax money is spent on is irrelevant and doesn’t create the demand.

The maintenance of the army doesn't create demand for taxes? Are you aware this is one of the most significant historical reasons for the collection of taxes?

Could you remind me again of when the Army was abolished in Japan and why, and whether the US military (which drives part of our demand for taxes) had any role in that?

Japan pays for the Army. The US army [1].

[1] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/2/17/japan-us-extend-agr...

That's an interesting and totally irrelevant statement that ignores the fact that taxation to pay for the army in your own words creates "base demand for dollars." Change in demand on the supply-demand curve means change in value, or perhaps I'm not up to date on your version of economics.

Happily.

"Base demand for dollars is created due to taxation" [1]

Which of course completely contradicts: "The (mostly paid for by tax) army has nothing to do with the value of a dollar." [also 1]

[1] comment by 'arcticbull' on 'Hacker News'