Housing and pay diverged because we opened the border in the middle of the last century: supply for labor went way up along with demand for housing and other essential services. Combine that with some poor decisions by the Fed and you have high inflation with low wages. I don't know why you think immigration would have any other effect, the results have been extremely clear if you look at historical data.
Yes, note how the immigration diverges from the domestic population growth in the late 60s, the same time house price growth diverges from wage growth.
The US is dead; she was dealt a mortal blow in the late 60s and succumbed to her injuries around 2004. What's left is the slow decay that will take many decades. That people continue to volunteer and fight for the country surprises me but I guess not everyone has noticed yet.
Last time I sent money to someone internationally Etherium really was pretty convenient. The Coinbase fees were a little high but otherwise it was near instantaneous, I already had some anyway, and I didn't have to deal with any real hassle.
Crypto is a planet-destroying ponzi-scheme, but in a collapsed economy like Russia, I wonder if everyone can just have virtual wallets where you can buy goods by sending the seller some "coins". Which is basically the WeChat payment system, or how the Brazilian Real got established: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2010/10/04/130329523/how-...
We already just exchange "coins" electronically, but with the Visa or MasterCard network getting involved...
The phrase "ponzi scheme" has been thrown around liberally in regards to cryptocurrency, especially on this forum, but I've never heard a convincing argument that it actually fits the definition.
It's weird because it seems like you can point to various aspects of crypto and maybe identify them as being a pyramid scheme, but I don't feel like that definition holds up as it gets sufficiently large and self sustaining. Otherwise you could point to a number of other very large money machines like the stock market or even money itself and say it is also a pyramid scheme. Maybe it is though. Perhaps the entire economy is a pyramid scheme that is dependent on an infinitely growing population.
As soon as we hit a population limit on the planet there will be no bigger fool to sell to in the future and the economy becomes stagnant.
As for the literal definition of ponzi scheme I don't think it holds up because everyone is fully aware, or should be of what it is they are buying and where the money is coming from if they want to sell.
The same can be said of any startups. They are pyramid schemes until they finally offer utility to customers.
What is sometimes up for debate is whether something is serious utility, such as “owning” a picture anyone can look at, or a digital experience in the metaverse with artificial scarcity.
But then again, under the capitalist system, we need to introduce scarcity even where it’s not easy to do so, in order to recoup initial venture capital. So for example, I remember stories about SWAT teams raising grandmas for downloading movies illegally, or about manufacturing companies all forced to cripple their software with DRM, or the blowup at the W3C, or crackz of popular software that kiddies handed out until all these companies like Adobe went full SAAS. It’s an antipattern that is the direct result of any capitalist system.
By contrast, open source, creative commons etc. doesn’t have that issue.
"Bitcoin doesn’t really meet this broader definition of a Ponzi scheme any more than the gold market, the global fiat banking system, or less liquid markets like fine art, fine wine, collectable cars, or beachfront property. In other words, if your definition of something is so broad that it includes every non-cashflow store of value, you need a better definition."
You know they'd have a point if they were talking about Bitcoin and gold, but they're not - because if you don't get understand what underpins the value of fiat, or pretend it's the same - then you have an agenda to push.
Fiat has value because it's legally recognized by governments that issue it: it extinguishes tax and debt obligations in those jurisdictions. This makes it markedly different to any other of the commodity items listed: my government will only ever tax me fiat currency, which is sufficient to extinguish those taxes and fulfill debts. I can't be ordered to pay them in gold, or bitcoin.
Imagine if every merchant came up with their own currency and forced you to pay them in it only. Wouldn't a global currency be a lot more efficient & frictionless?
As soon as I hear something like “planet destroying” within the crypto context, I stop reading because that tells me the person knows nothing about the current state of crypto.
I'm curious about this, I try to stay up on what's going on in the crypto world and it's my understanding that the vast majority of crypto blockchains are still using proof-of-work, which is what I imagine "planet destroying" is in reference to.
The biggest proof-of-stake blockchains by market capitalization in 2021 were Cardano, Avalanche, Polkadot and Solana. Other prominent PoS platforms include Tron, EOS, Algorand, and Tezos.
There have been repeated proposals for Ethereum to switch from a PoW to PoS mechanism. In April 2021, the Ethereum Foundation announced that it planned to switch to a PoS system by the end of 2021. This has since been pushed back to the second quarter of 2022.
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So if most of crypto transactions are conducted on proof-of-work chains, which do require burning large amounts of electricity, why would this make you think someone doesn't know about the current state of crypto. What exactly about the current state of crypto is incompatible with this critique?
>>What exactly about the current state of crypto is incompatible with this critique?
Ethereum is by far the most widely used cryptocurrency network, and while it consumes a lot of energy relative to the number of transactions in processes, and a lot of energy in absolute terms, it consumes on the order of a thousandths (0.1%) of the world's energy output.
It will have switched to Proof of Stake long before it grows large enough for it to account for a materially significant portion of global energy consumption. So the rhetoric used above, which makes the generalization that "Crypto is a planet-destroying ponzi-scheme", is entirely hyperbolic with respect to the environmental criticism (and a blatant mischaracterization with respect to the ponzi-scheme allegation).
Ethereum is now estimated to consume energy equivalent to or greater than mid-sized countries like Greece[1]. You can paint it as tiny, but 0.1% of world energy output is still enormous, for providing what is for the most part a highly speculative set of financial instruments to a limited audience.
It's been "about to go PoS" for several years now. The fact is it hasn't. When it does, you can tell people their concerns are out of date. About Ethereum. Bitcoin isn't even going there and its consumption is as bad or worse.
I don't disagree with most of your comment, but I do want to point out that the code to power Ethereum's switch to PoS is actually built out now and is in its final stages of testing. The latest Kiln test network is effectively a release candidate. At no point in the past several years has that been true, so it's comparing apples to oranges to say it's been "about to go" for that long.
I will welcome it when it does, don't get me wrong. That honestly removes a major issue I have with cryptocurrency (at least with Ether, anyway). There are a host of more theoretical reasons I'm not buying into the ecosystem, but remove that negative externality and hey - you do you, not my bag but you aren't hurting others.
I'm sure it is closer than ever, if it wasn't then there's something wrong with the development process! I sincerely wish the various people involved good luck in this venture and a speedy success in moving it to production. In the mean time I'm still going to get pissed off at people saying that energy concerns are outdated, especially when they're referring to the whole cryptocurrency ecosystem.
Don't forget that traditional banks consume lots of energy as well. Their armies of employees and tellers are required to drive an hour or so every day, they maintain tons of physical buildings, truck around piles of physical currency etc. Traditional fiat is given legitimacy based on government's monopoly on violence inside their borders which often result in wars. Nothing is free and I'm fairly certain that crypto will end in less energy consumption, not more.
Exactly. Proof of work is costly in energy and affordable in labor. The energy consumption of labor-intensive industries obfuscates the real energy requirements of those industries, by effectively outsourcing the energy consumption to the workers.
I still prefer Ethereum's variation of Proof of Stake over Proof of Work, but it's by no means clear to me that Proof of Work based blockchains are less resource-efficient than traditional financial systems, and I would wager a comprehensive analysis would show in fact that they have the potential to be vastly more efficient, if they're allowed to scale up their transaction throughput to amortize their energy consumption across
more numerous transactions.
Proof of work does not replace labour though. There is not really an equivalent outlay in tradtional banking. And blockchains don't provide the services that the labor provides in the banking sector.
Proof of work completely replaces the bureaucracy that maintains trust in traditional ledgers..
A bunch of automated nodes, strewn across the globe, and connected via the internet, maintain the network, with the network being able to seamlessly/autonomously manage nodes joining/leaving.
There are no legal contracts that need to be drawn up, filled out and signed for someone to start submitting PoW, or validating and propagating transactions, to the network. There is no HR department. No payroll. Just machines, and a deterministic compensation mechanism, managed by a fault tolerant network of machines.
No offence, but for you to see zero parallels between the contract enforcement that decentralized blockchain-based networks conduct, and the function of traditional legal systems, suggests to me you would benefit from taking your own advice.
0.1% is huge, but in no reasonable terms can it be called "planet destroying", when it's slated to be mostly eliminated within 6 months with the transition to Proof of Stake. The characterization is hyperbole.
As for the transition to PoS, the first phase of the transition was implemented on December 1st, 2020, with the launch of the Proof of Stake Beacon Chain. The Beacon Chain has been running without problems for over a year now.
The testnet for the second phase of ETH2 - which is when the execution chain is merged into the Beacon Chain so that Ethereum can fully switch from PoW to PoS and reduce its energy consumption by 99.95% - was launched on December 20th, 2021:
The difference between now and then is that now Ethereum has had the Proof of Stake Beacon in operation for over a year, and the next phase, which merges the execution chain into the PoS chain already, has a running testnet.
The projections on the completion date of the switch to PoS is now far less speculative / more reliable.
Emissions on a par with Greece. And just for one coin. Ethereum is still going to PoS any day now, totally, just a few months off. Like it has been for several years.
So what is it about "the current state of crypto" that you think you know better than these?
The ETH PoS chain is already in beta with the expectation of transition (the merge) later this year.
BTC mining is creating new business models for renewable energy [0][1], BTC uses less energy than many other activities that don't get the same flack- AC usage, Data Centers, etc [1]
> Finally, if energy is one of your biggest expenses, you're economically incentivized to reduce those costs as much as possible.
Unfortunately, with Bitcoin (and other Proof-of-Work blockchains), the economic incentive is the opposite: to use as much energy as possible, until the return from the block rewards and transaction fees is smaller than the price you pay for that energy. Reducing the energy costs only allows you to use even more energy before reaching that limit, increasing the total costs again.
Pointing desperately at other things doesn't change the argument at all.
> Finally, if energy is one of your biggest expenses, you're economically incentivized to reduce those costs as much as possible.
So? This doesn't make bitcoin clean?
There is already huge demand for clean power in this world, adding to it with PoW systems doesn't actually help, and as we can see by the power plant and by the article linked above about a fall in renewable use in BTC, we're not in the "Bitcoin has incentivised green energy and helped the world get cleaner" stage, we're in the "Bitcoin is adding pressure to an already over-pressurised system and is making the problem worse at a critical time" phase.
Even your own linked article is sub-headed "Cryptocurrency mining has the potential to address the obstacles to more widely adopting renewable energy" - not that it has or is, but that it could.
These pseudo-intellectual economic arguments about "helping the world move to renewables" are tripe.
If your only goal is to send digital value across the planet why would anyone use Ethereum or Bitcoin? There are a ton of alternatives that cost fractions of a penny in transaction fees.
Large cryptocurrencies have more liquidity, meaning it's less likely you'll get large price differences between exchanges in difference countries, and more likely that any given exchange will support trading in that digital currency. For large trades, more liquidity also means less price slippage upon buying or selling the cryptocurrency.
What services are the best for transferring large sums of money cheaply, safely, and quickly? In my experience, you can only choose one. I would prefer to chose two: cheaply and safely. I am not as worried about time. Recommendations?
Which kind of bank transfer are you talking about? A few days ago I got paid through ACH transfer and the transaction took 2 business days to execute, albeit with no transaction fees. Now I'm at the mercy of the bank regarding what I can do with that money.
Compare that with using something like UST (Terra), which took only ~1 minute with a fixed fee of ~1 UST for a similar transaction. I also have total control over my money.
SEPA (instant) transfers between European banks are, as the name suggests, instant. There are also no transaction fees for the users of these transfers. e.g. all major Belgian banks support SEPA instant, so transfers between KBC <-> BNP Paribas <-> ING etc. are instant.
> Now I'm at the mercy of the bank regarding what I can do with that money.
This is going off-topic, but you are with crypto as well. Unless every merchant you use supports your cryptocurrency, you're going to have to convert it back to fiat.
Internationally, between currencies? The best offer I've found for transferring $200,000 USD to AUD is 0.4% ($800). At scale, that's not exactly cheap. I'm referencing the original parent comment which suggests it's possible for fractions of a penny, as I would love to find this service:
> There are a ton of alternatives that cost fractions of a penny in transaction fees.
Algorand, Avalanche, Solana, Cardano and Terra are all cheap and safe, but like that other guy said. I have no idea what kinds of crypto are listed on foreign exchanges. I'd imagine anything sufficiently popular though.
BCH is essentially the same protocol as Bitcoin (BTC), but possibly safer (in that your transaction is never relegated to a 2nd-layer protocol like Lightning, with private nodes) and much cheaper, so if you are familiar with Bitcoin, you don't have to learn a new system or any funny quirks. And it's pretty universally accepted at every exchange and wallet.
Not saying it is better than the other options presented (and definitely not recommending it as an investment) but BCH does work quite well for transacting.
Housing in SF is crazy expensive, commuting takes ages (and we've shown it's a complete waste) and a lot of people probably don't even want to live in California.
Forget snacks, the amount of money you save by not living there and not commuting could pay for an in house chef.
If the last 3 years are any indicator, living in SF and the west coast in general means putting up with 2-3 months of choking, dangerous wild fire smoke every year too. It was a novelty for one summer but is slowly going to poison and cause serious long term harm the more it continues. I don't think people realize how unlivable the west coast is quickly becoming.
This year, the smoke from the California fires was actually much worse in Colorado & Utah than the bay area proper. You can't necessarily escape this by moving.
True, but it's going to be bad some years. This year I expect an outright disaster, considering we've had the driest winter in 150+ years of recorded history. Probably it's going to be unbreathable at certain points.
On rethinking my statement I've realized I should encourage the Californians to stay in California and not spread communism to the rest of the country. So yeah, you can't escape the bad things by moving, stay there.
I think it's not only possible, but that the US government has been infiltrated by people who want it to happen and are doing their best to push Russia into a nuclear war.
How do you do shared secret authentication in this model? I know cert based auth is far better but today many apps rely on some kind of shared secret auth. Don't you by definition trust eg LDAP/IPA servers then?
EDIT: In case it's not clear: I'm talking about employee facing software inside an organization where you might have some kind of single sign on system or a distributed account system (like IPA or LDAP.)
The SP never sees the credentials. The SP only sees a token which includes the username (NameID) and other attributes passed from the IdP through the client.
But with SAML you're trusting the cert/key pair on the signing end of the connection. If you say "well, we can use the cert provided by the server by getting it over HTTPS every time we need to auth with SAML," then you're trusting the Root CA Cert/Key pair for the TLS connection that underlies the HTTPS protocol. (Source: I've written two SAML SPs.)
With ZT, you basically have to bootstrap trust from the factory. I don't think of ZT as "don't trust anything" - it's more like "trust our supply lines".
Think about the failure modes of ZT: if the NIC, the CPU, the OS, and the bootloader are deemed secure at boot time, there has to be something that starts the bootloader and loads its keys. If you compromise _that_ piece, then you can compromise anything further up the stack and not worry too much about security alerts. The only way to make sure that all machines are secure/uncompromised is to XRay all of the bootloader chips and verify them down to the ~100um level (got this figure by talking to a guy doing grad work @UofM when he was in SV around 2017-2018, I want to say).
Yes, they're definitely self-sustaining at a pre-1980 or so level. They have raw materials, abundant energy, the ability to feed themselves, and a decent IQ pool to pull from to design and manage what they need.
But they still need precision machine tooling, optics, semiconductors, etc to exist as a post-1980 economy.
That's really not a great idea on Linux. A ton of stuff is handled in userspace. There's really no better way to distribute Linux apps than source code.
