Going from a Democracy to a Communist State is not a matter off flipping a digital bit from 0 to 1…what you see happening is what happens in the transitory stage!
That's a symptom of the poor signal-to-noise ratio in the space, not that it's a correct assertion.
The cypherpunk thing is happening now, not in the 90s like you might have hoped. It's startling to me how poorly received it is on HN from people who would ostensibly be a part of it otherwise.
The signal-to-noise ratio is a symptom of there not really being any significant signal to begin with. You keep posting vague statements about how valuable the technology is but haven't shown any examples of how it is doing anything useful that isn't a) a hype-to-money scheme, or b) easily replaceable by existing technologies, as far as I can tell.
I see what you're saying, but really the problem there is that Gates didn't even really get the internet (Microsoft was famously late to the party) and was a poor evangelist for it as a result. He wasn't good at explaining its benefits and Letterman was rightly skeptical. I'd have asked the same questions and I had used the internet in 1995!
There are a lot of people promoting Web3 who can't explain why it is any good in such a way that anyone can see the potential. That's on them, not the skeptics. If there is actually some real value to the concept, then someone out there should be able to explain it. And if that's impossible but the benefits are real, then who cares? It'll eventually make its value clear just like the internet eventually did and why care about that now? Oh right... because the scam doesn't work without the FOMO part.
I was skeptical when someone explained Ethereum to me in 2015, and a friend told me to invest in crypto in 2014 when Bitcoin dropped from $1,000 to $300. I looked at it again in 2017 and found cross-border payments an attractive proposition and started paying more attention to the space. Started working full time on blockchain projects on 2019. I’m still skeptical of a lot of projects that come out but there is something there. Programmable money is really interesting. Random things I’d like to do, such as buying a gamertag for my Xbox account that’s already taken from a stranger, suddenly have viable solutions. Atomic transactions allow pretty interesting things too - imagine payments like SQL transactions where your own custom logic has to be met for the transaction to occur. The issue is it’s still a really new, complicated, and fast evolving domain. It is really hard to convey years and years of skepticism turned understanding to someone in a comment on the internet.
I admit it is possible I'm just unable to see the value of these things, but I also have a lot of company in that with people who are way smarter than me.
> Programmable money is really interesting.
Why would I want to "program" money? What does that actually do for me?
> Random things I’d like to do, such as buying a gamertag for my Xbox account that’s already taken from a stranger, suddenly have viable solutions.
Yeah, see, I can't see much reason to want to do this other than to use it as part of a scam. I don't have a gamertag, but nearest I can figure it's just an online identity. Why would you want to buy someone else's identity? I suppose they might have some kind of vanity username that's being squatted? So what are we promoting here? Just a useful tool for black markets? Sure, that has some utility, but it is hardly what I would call exciting new world changing technology.
> Atomic transactions allow pretty interesting things too - imagine payments like SQL transactions where your own custom logic has to be met for the transaction to occur.
I'm imagining that, and I can't see what it does that I can't already do today in the real world without having to know any over-complicated technology.
> The issue is it’s still a really new, complicated, and fast evolving domain.
The complexity is part of the reason I don't have any trust in it. When people are trying to sell me something by saying "it's complicated, but trust me it's great!" I am immediately suspicious. They call it 'confidence' artistry for a reason.
And christ, whenever people talk about this stuff it is always about money. Does it have any uses not related to financial trickfuckery? Theoretically this is supposed to enable decentralized youtube and the like, but nobody talks about that. This makes the whole space very untrustworthy.
> I admit it is possible I'm just unable to see the value of these things, but I also have a lot of company in that with people who are way smarter than me.
I feel like there has to be a name for the fallacy here. If you looked at the cryptocurrency space, especially the blockchain builders, you'd likely find a lot of people who you'd be willing to accept are smarter than you working on it. Silvio Micali and Vitalik Buterin are 2 big names that come to mind (I don't hold/use algorand FWIW, but Silvio seems like one of the brightest minds in the field solely based on accomplishments).
Sure, but equally there are plenty of smarter-than-me people who think it's all a giant scam, so I'm inclined to trust my instincts. After all, just because they're smarter than me doesn't mean they aren't trying to scam me or haven't got caught up in some bullshit fantasy.
Besides, if the technology is actually valuable in some way I cannot yet perceive but that will become obvious over time, then I can just wait until it becomes ubiquitous and reap the benefits without risking anything.
Absolutely, and the tokens don't need to have multi-trillion dollar market caps for this to happen either.
The tokenization of everything is a mixed bag. On one hand it leads to perverse incentives that result in an incredibly low signal-to-noise ration. On the other hand it enables types of consensus that don't exist when there's not a penalty for misbehaviour (specifically for proof-of-stake and staking, the token makes it possible to reward network participants, while making the cost of attacking the network higher than the market cap of the network).
> Why would I want to "program" money? What does that actually do for me?
If you are outside of the financial industry, you probably don't. Maybe you can do some amateur high-frequency trading on the side. It's not "programmable money" in the sense of "please send $30 to the gas company every month".
As I see it, the main application is financial derivative products i.e. investment products. You can make any kind of "ownable thing" based upon other ownable things on the blockchain. Remember the mortgage-backed securities that caused the 2008 crash? Now anyone can create their own variety with some coding effort and a $100 fee. And if you pay another $100 fee, they will automatically become tradeable on major exchanges.
It's peak capitalism, basically. From a purely technological point of view, I think this is pretty damn cool. From an economic point of view, it's going to be our downfall.
This is what puzzles me. Taking your Xbox gamertag on the blockchain as an example. It doesn't provide any decentralization, Microsoft is the central entity that gives the gamertag it's value. There's 0 incentive for Sony or any other competitor to honor the ownership, because why would they. It's more beneficial for them to let you register an account (with a potentially duplicate name). Since your NFT is in reality tied to a central entity, I'm having a hard time understanding why you need the blockchain in the first place, at the end of the day it's MS that calls the shots. The reason why Xbox & Sony don't interop isn't a technical problem, but a political one and blockchain does nothing to address the issue.
And from the looks of it, everything crypto is centralizing extremely fast, see Binance/Coinbase for exchanges, Opensea for NFTs. So at the end of the day you're still at the whims of large entities.
Where did the Cybertruck go? Late 2021 to late 2022 to now early 2023...the sheer volume of $100 deposits totaled $20MM, just 3 days after announcement.
Also, now that Tesla has had approx 14 years since its first sale, has anyone performed economic analysis of personal impact on environment vs maintainability of the vehicle? A few of my personal friends who bought their Tesla around 2015-2016 recently got rid of their vehicle for pennies on the dollar becuase they didn't want to pay $23-28k for a new battery installed. How is this better than paying $3-4k/year on gas and having significantly less maintenance expense over lifespan of the vehicle?
Tesla has done this before and it's an easy way to raise a lot of money quickly without doing any stock dilution or loans. The only thing that separates it from Fyre Fest who did the same trick to get money is so far Musk has eventually delivered.
It is very common for the government to use its various arms to institute large data collection efforts in the name of national security. A selfie video of yourself on a modern day phone provides for the government a high definition facial recognition vector for identification purposes. I'm sure you can imagine all of the use cases of having this critical data.
Personal Story: My wife and I travelled abroad right before COVID in early 2020. On the way back, we didn't interface with any customs agents at the airport. Instead, there was a portable robot that took our pictures and advised us to proceed to exit. I can only imagine which image database it referenced for a perfect match to allow entry (passport, driver's license, social media?, etc). From a security standpoint, I would assume that the matching capability/requirement of such system had to have been best of the best.
Isn't the bigger story here that you were able to enter a country without a photo ID? Or did you not make the connection that it could simply compare you to the photo on your passport, like a person would do?
US is set to collect approx. $3.86 trillion in taxes this year and 18.5% ($715 billion) of it is allocated for military budget and 1.3% ($51 billion) of it will be handed-out as Foreign Aid to other nations while another 8% ($300 billion) will be used to pay interest payments on our national debt. Only 3% ($115 billion) is allocated to modernize the bridges, highways, roads, and main streets that are in most critical need of repair. Maybe the government is the largest/legal ponzi scheme after all.
Edit: I provided a wrong figure earlier for Foreign Aid. As per @whatkim, the correct amount should be approx. 1.3% ($51 billion) for 2021.
Most U.S. foreign aid is credit to be spent with U.S. defense manufacturers. In other words, "foreign aid" is a way to hand out U.S. hardware to allies or those for whom it's an effective bribe. The best example of this is Egypt, which has enjoyed ~$3B annually in U.S. gear as the payoff for making and keeping peace with Israel since the Yom Kippur war in 1973.
I don't really consider money going from my pocket, to Egypt, then to the US military industrial complex as "staying in the US." My taxes should go to things that benefit me and other regular citizens, not war profiteers.
You definitely should question it. The US had the highest foreign aid budget in the world but little to show for it.
If you are an effective altruist and want foreign aid to benefit the world, you should be concerned that it's funnelled to defence contractors instead.
If you just think the US wastes too much money on it's military you should be concerned that they are sneaking more money to defence contractors under the guise of humanitarianism.
US citizens enjoy a lot of wealth that was extracted (sometimes very violently) from the rest of the world, and you could make the argument that maybe the US citizens should give something back to the people whose exploitation they enjoy.
But in this case "foreign aid" seems to mean mostly "weapons for dictators", so it doesn't look like a constructive use of the funds.
What is your source for the foreign aid number (or any of your numbers, though defense and interest sound right to me)? Quick googling hasn’t let me confirm that, and it sounds high, my recollection was that it was more like 1%.
It really is sustainable, though. This take has been going around for some time and I think it is pretty wrong headed. (1) we seem to pay more for roads than any other industrialized nation and (2) infrastructure of all kinds, including roads, is criminally underfunded in America, as the parent was pointing out
Sprawl has thinned out development to the point that tax revenues from low-density cities can't support the crumbling infrastructure that has been built for it.
Over the past 50 years, Pittsburgh and other similar cities have tripled their developed areas while the region's population remains flat. That's a lot of additional infrastructure - roads, sewers, power, water and gas lines - to maintain without new revenue to maintain it.
Strong Towns has referred to this as the "growth ponzi scheme" and it's only going to get worse as population growth slows in this country.
Strongtowns is just wrongheaded too. I have seen several articles debunking this one recently. I don't think it is a growth ponzi scheme for several reasons. It gets referenced here a lot, but it isn't very credible when you dig into their figures and math.
Would you happen to have the rebutting articles? I'd be curious to hear their criticism.
To me it adds up. I live in the a city that's sprawled without growth. I see the lifecycle
1. Used to be a dense city with most houses being doubles, and 3-5 story apartment buildings.
2. Built area has tripled since 1970 into mostly SFH suburbs, but population is the same
3. Outside the very newest suburbs, infrastructure has decayed tremendously. Taxes haven't really increased, the only time sewers or roads ever get repaired is with grants from the feds.
It happened to the city and now it's happening to the post-war suburbs.
Your $300 billion number just isn't true. If you're looking at that Forbes article, well, it covers 6 years. So it's only $50 billion a year. About 30% of that you're counting twice because that was money from the US military budget they spent on foreign aid. So, a bit under a whopping $35 billion a year, or less than 1% of either tax receipts (which are actually over 4 trillion) or less than 0.5% of the US budget itself (6.8 trillion)
0.5% not 8%. These numbers are very different.
Although this bridge seems disconnected from the highway system, so I'm not even sure the US government even funds it at all.
I must of missed the actual argument because I can't find where it was made other than complaining about a 3% allocation which is explained due to the large state & city budgets for this type of thing.
If you ever own a condo, you will realize that an extremely large number of people won’t even vote to fund the infrastructure that supports their bedroom.
Infrastructure is theoretically already popular but most would put it off for a few extra dollars.
Curiously, the MSDS indicates SilverShield gloves but does not specifically call out latex gloves as permeable and counter-indicated. This seems like a disastrous error of omission.
I read somewhere that in professional dealings with toxic and caustic substances no latex glove would ever be considered impermeable but immediately replaced upon contact with a new pair. The trick is to systematically avoid anything splashing by applying best practices.
