zmaurelius

Before Bitcoin, there did not even exist the possibility of programmable money because no unit of account could ever be guaranteed to actually exist since there was no way to verify said existence. After Bitcoin, we now have a fundamental change where programmable money is now a possibility. So what if we have not found all the possible use cases of programmable money? That's going to be a work in progress for a long long time. You can assert that programmable money doesn't have any real use and you are welcome to have that opinion. Personally I think programmable money will have many uses and will allow for the creation of a more robust and more efficient financial system.

If that's the lowest fee you can find, you are probably sending some money to a few Nigerian princes on the side and investing in SBF's next venture.

It looked like Gensler was trying to secure a monopoly for FTX in the US, so making sure Coinbase didn't have a competing product was a cornerstone of that game plan.

As a society, we are quite good at keeping people alive for a long time but not so good at addressing chronic illness. With the massive increase in autoimmune disease, obesity and other chronic illnesses, I would contend that overall we are less healthy on average than just a few decades ago and this trend will continue indefinitely until massive changes occur in the medical and food industries.

I believe only Coinbase publishes total liabilities at the moment. In my opinion, Coinbase is the gold standard due to being a publicly traded company and Kraken carries more risk.

It is kind of strange how unsophisticated the hack ended up being. I feel like SBF would have pulled off something with a bit more finesse.

Kraken regularly publishes proof of reserves. I don't recommend keeping funds on exchanges as a rule, but I don't feel stressed out leaving a percentage of my holdings there for an extended duration.

That's the thing with decentralization, since anyone can participate you will always get a bunch of gamblers because most people are not in it for ideology but rather to make a buck. That's just human nature. Is it possible to create incentives to keep the gamblers way? I haven't come across any great ideas so far.

Organ meats such as beef liver provide a significant amount of B12. If you are just eating muscle meat, then you will have to eat a lot.

High dividend stocks have been a good bet and hedge in previous downturns. Individual stocks will have high variance, but a basket of high dividend stocks would be worth looking into.

I don't think fair distribution of cryptocurrency in the bootstrap phase is a solved problem. We got a long way to go if we are to come up with a fair system. Satoshi went with the best that he could come up with which is a no premine solution.

A slightly better solution would be a no premine coin with a global announcement for 5 years before the mining begins so everybody gets a fair shot at participation. I am sure we can develop even more fair forms of distribution with sufficient research.

It also enabled about $60+ million dollars to be donated to Ukraine and that's just one data point. Whether these other problems are a small price to pay will depend on who you are talking to. To the Ukrainians that benefited from these donations and to those that have food, weapons and shelter from these donations, it is most likely a small price to pay.

Perhaps a portion of these donations could have come from other sources if cryptocurrencies did not exist, but there isn't really a good way to quantify that, so I won't go into that discussion.

Bitcoin only solves the problem of manipulation of the underlying money supply. It does not solve the problem of fraud and scams. Maybe one day we can also solve that problem with exchanges existing only as smart contracts, but with exchanges that are not completely transparent you always run into the risk of getting defrauded because you don't really know what's going on under the hood.

I think people are too hyper focused on the price aspect of cryptocurrencies. The experiment that is Bitcoin shows that people do not need to rely on a monetary system where a cabal of rich and powerful individuals can arbitrarily modify the money supply without any regard to all the participants in that monetary system.

The genie is already out of the bottle and there is no way to put it back. There will always be those especially in the younger generations that want something better than the current system. Bitcoin shows that you can have a completely transparent monetary system based on code that is available to be audited by anyone. Bitcoin may or may not survive, but the idea behind it will.

At the end of day, this entire fiasco really drives home the point if its not your keys its not your coins. Shady exchanges/banks can always collapse and take your entire portfolio with it, but if you have a securely backed up wallet, then your coins will be untouchable no matter what kind of shady shenanigans goes down in the wider cryptocurrency landscape.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...

I think it would be naive to think similar programs are not being enacted in the present day.

They could, but then the IRS would have contend with an army of lawyers to claw their money back. In this case, going after a small time criminal with no connections is an easy win, so it makes sense from a resource allocation perspective for them focus on cases like this instead.

Holding a large amount of cryptocurrency without multiple backups spread around various geographical locations is foolish. So ultimately to store cryptocurrency securely, its never actually easy when you get down to the nuts and bolts of it.

Unfortunately, fake products have infiltrated just about every product segment. Even though there are relatively fewer fake products in some categories, the overall percentage of fake products is uncomfortably high and only getting higher over time it feels like.

It also depends heavily on what exactly you are buying. If you are buying health supplements, expect way more than 30% fake reviews and expect a lot of products to be fake themselves. On the other hand, if you are buying something like a rice cooker, you won't run into many fake products and the number of fake reviews will be closer to 30%.

For that reason, I avoid buying supplements on Amazon unless it comes from a few brands that only use one trusted seller to push their stuff.

Upon closer examination, it may not be. There is some force multiplier there that I am not accounting for and cannot because there isn't really a good unit of measurement for technological progress or research speed. What seems intuitively obvious is that a country with zero STEM graduates isn't making much headway in research unless they recruit immigrants, so there should be some correlation with the number of STEM graduates and speed of technological advancement.

Thanks for sharing this, I had no idea it was already this prevalent.

Ultimately it comes down to a numbers game which we can roughly estimate by looking at the number of STEM graduates generated by each country assuming the research output of each individual is roughly equivalent.

The US does have the advantage in that high performing individuals on the level of Einstein have a higher chance of emerging due to much more personal freedom and social mobility, but that is difficult to account for because someone like Einstein may or may not emerge in the next 100 years.

By your logic, Congo should be topping that list for introducing HIV to the world and causing more than 40 million deaths. That sounds ridiculous to me, but hey whatever floats your boat.

I am really surprised that there haven't been even more malicious packages distributed in the past couple of years considering the rise of cryptocurrency. Seems like a determined and malicious actor could score big by targeting the more popular wallets.

Can you show some data to back that up? Post 9/11 US wars have displaced more than 38 million people and directly caused more than 900,000 deaths. China and Russia both have terrible records when it comes to human rights, but where are you getting the numbers that they have caused more deaths?

I'm not well off like most people on here, I can survive 4-6 months with no salary

For a more extended break, you can stretch that out by going somewhere much cheaper and living like a digital nomad. Consider places like Kuala Lumpur, Manila and Taipei since you can live there for a few years on your current savings. If those places aren't your cup of tea, then check out https://nomadlist.com/

Unfortunately, politicians in the US lack the foresight and willpower to enact any of those changes because that would necessitate foregoing short term gains. Even if we pulled another $31 trillion out of thin air, none of these problems are getting fixed. Anything that takes longer than four years has a hugely diminished chance of getting traction and that is not going to change in the foreseeable future.

How do you define 'high-tech' here? Would a 'low-tech' nation be able to build a space station like this?

China has a lot of systemic issues stemming from corruption and nepotism, but they also have a large population and a culture of investing in the education of their children. It isn't a coincidence that there is a huge number of Asians at elite US colleges, which would be even higher if affirmative action wasn't so prevalent. Its only a matter of time before China will catch up to the US and reach technology parity.

So how did they manage to complete this space station at all when R&D is 'almost impossible'? There is no doubt that China did not develop everything from the ground up, but to disregard the progress that they have made on top of existing technologies is rather shortsighted and disingenuous.