If you own Bitcoin, you have a major incentive to spin everything as good for BTC so that they price rises. You are also incentivized to convince others to buy BTC so that the your investment in BTC pays off.
Given there is no intrinsic worth of BTC, rather just the collectively belief it is worth something, these incentives are very strong with BTC.
The ability to buy something? BTC is not a currency at least in the US. With cash you can actually buy something. BTC is a collectable investment where the seller gets taxed on every transaction. And the only value to BTC is that there are sometimes, depending on the market, a Greater Fool out there to buy it from you. See Tulip Mania.https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania. Possibly BTC a way to store value between investments or during a currency crisis but the extreme volatility makes that extremely questionable. It seems it's mostly a gamble that a greater Fool will buy from you or, outside of investment/gambling a conduit for illicit transactions, though the publicly available tracking aspect of BTC puts that role in question also.
The USD or practically all fiat currencies are an abstraction over barter. Obviously they are only worth as much as we all collectively believe, but that belief is anchored by what the currency primarily is used for, which normally is obtaining goods and services. That's not intrinsic but relatively stable, and central banks try to steer things in a stable way.
Meanwhile BTC currently only serves as an abstraction over fiat currencies. It's practically only exchanged from and to fiat currencies, and that's not stable, as popularity is then the only mechanism dictating the price. BTC is much more like gold this way than the dollar.
The value of the USD is that it's a currency that can be used to buy goods and services. The same is largely not the case for BTC.
To the extent that any goods and services are for sale with prices in BTC, they are (in my experience) priced consistently with trading out of BTC into some currency (say USD) and then purchasing the product with proceeds of the sale.
The USD is equally worthless but at least people don't pretend that it is a store of value (some people want it to be one). You can't eat USD or BTC.
The primary difference is that people have to pay taxes and monthly payments on their debt. Every dollar created has to be returned one day. This ensures the continued existence of USD as a medium of exchange. Once something turns into a "store of value" it ceases to be a good medium of exchange.
> The USD is equally worthless but at least people don't pretend that it is a store of value (some people want it to be one). You can't eat USD or BTC
The ability to eat something is not what makes it a store of value. Milk is a TERRIBLE store of value for time frames greater than a few weeks, for instance. The USD is a store of value as it is relatively stable and so you know that you'll be able to leverage its value in the future; gold does the same. The beauty of USD is that unless you think the United States of America is going to cease to be, it is the only thing accepted for tax payments and so a few hundred million people along with countless businesses and institutions are going to need USD to pay the government every year.
Literally every stable currency is a "store of value"; the predictability of the value is what makes it stable. This is precisely why BTC is not stable, nor a good store of value. It is an asset whose primarily uses are speculation and illicit financial flows.
> Once something turns into a "store of value" it ceases to be a good medium of exchange.
I fail to see the connection. Sure, not all stores of value are good mediums of exchange, but this has more to do with the physical properties of the underlying commodity rather than the fact that it holds its value stably. Gold is too heavy to carry around in your pocket, and securely storing a lot of it requires specific infrastructure that most people don't want to maintain. These things are true regardless of whether or not the value of gold is relatively stable over time.
It's a system that matches up quite well to the price of goods and services over time. Though it declines in purchasing power, it does so very gradually and predictably. It's the best money that's ever been created.
Yes, the value of USD value is proportional to the power of the US government (and its judiciary/police/army)... The power to let the private sector flourish, mainly.
The value of Crypto comes from the decentralization (no need for trusted third parties), and is proportional to the hashing power of the network. Upstarts can easily be 51%ed by an incumbent with a large mining infrastructure of the same kind... But this holds as long as people with destructive power let them run.
It's the word's reserve currency. You could pick literally any other fiat currency to compare against and make a marginally better case, but you picked the currency in which about 60% of the entire world's reserves are kept, which has value established by a large collection of national governments.
Notably the world’s reserve currency has lost literally 100x in purchasing power since 1933. That’s right, since moving off the gold standard the USD has lost 99% of its purchasing power relative to gold.
In 1933 $20USD would buy you 1oz of Gold. In 2021 it would take $2000USD to buy the same oz of gold.
It seems that the world’s reserve currency leaks approximately 99% of its value per century through the process of debasement which leads to inflation.
I would argue the world deserves a better store of value.
You are comparing currency (dollar) against assets (gold.). You are complaining that a currency is acting like a currency (inflationary) and not an asset (relatively resistant to inflation.)
I am so confused by this argument.
I think you are right though that Bitcoin isn't acting like a currency, it is acting like an asset. Although it is highly speculative, more so that gold, as evidenced by its wild swings.
> You are complaining that a currency is acting like a currency (inflationary)
I challenge the assumption that a currency is naturally inflationary in nature. Though it is very tempting to politicians to print money and debase the currency if they can get away with it, there is no inherent law of currencies that makes them inflationary. In fact, throughout hostory the only way fiat currencies could be inflated was through debasement. Bitcoin has a fixed supply and cannot be debased but those properties do not make it less of a currency.
>> Explain how this is any different from the US dollar?
> explains how this is very different
>> Launches a completely unrelated complaint about inflation which seems to serve mostly to highlight that BTC compares poorly to gold; the original answer is unacknowledged
all forms of money are worth something because people collectively agree that they are worth something and trade them for goods.
the USD is not special. BTC is not special.
People getting on their high horse about the USD and the faith in the US economy seem to forget that all things have a lifecycle and eventually everything goes away / is replaced. There is immense immediate pressure to keep the USD valuable and the thing that is used for international trade, but my guess is given 20-30 years a lot of things can happen.
Israel currently will use that as a public excuse, but Israel will clamp down on non-violent protect and violent protest fairly equally. There is always an excuse for why Israel has to take land and also why it has to have racist laws.
The problem is that if you look into it, it is a demographic battle to ensure that Israel keeps the West Bank and also that there is a Jewish majority in that region at whatever cost.
And here is an Israeli ambassador making the case that Jews are reproducing more than Arabs and that is a great thing (although he excludes Gaza, which Israel hopes that Egypt takes over): https://www.jns.org/opinion/blinken-is-wrong-on-israels-demo...
Israel is a really strange nation these days. It is very racist and openly so.
As someone who has dealt with this I suggest you figure out a way to avoid the patent. Read through the claims, figure out what combination of features they have patented and then change your product to avoid those features in that combination.
You likely can either do something more advanced or something less advanced -- if you have the choice do the more advanced solution as you are then likely pushing your product even further.
Fighting patents is for rich, established companies. You do not have the luxury.
You should change your product immediately to avoid infringement, or even close to infringing. If you do this you can avoid damages/claims against you.
Because you didn't know you were possibly infringing, you can avoid all claims/damages by immediately changing your product.
When you respond to them, you should say you didn't realize you were possibly infringing as you were not aware of the patent, you should say that you do not believe you were infringing, but anyhow you have modified your product to clear up any possibility of claims of infringement going forward.
You do not want to admit any guilt in anyway (actually the rule is NEVER admit guilt, always claim you believe you are not infringing), and you want to get away from these people because they are not worth your time.
But if you do need to use this tech, you should try to license it, but while claiming you are not infringing and there are alternative methods you can adapt. This gives you the most powerful stance. Make sure they understand you are very small and thus not worth dragging this out. Offer them something for a one time fee if possible and get than done and move on.
But avoiding the perception of infringing going forward is best.
Absolutely do not take any of this advice of the parent. I am an IP litigator. I kill patents as my day job.
The parent’s advice assumes the players are reasonable people acting in good faith. In the case of patent trolls, they are often not acting in good faith. Most of the allegations are not good faith interpretations of the patent. There is no “perception of infringement” to begin with. They just want a quick payout and found a cost-efficient way to state a claim against a widely used technology so that they can threaten and file lawsuits in volume. Instead, find a good patent lawyer or a pro bono resource (like EFF or a colleague with experience) that can give you resources or advice to quickly dispose of it cheaply (or even for free), if you cannot afford fight it. Sometimes, it can even be cheaper to hire an excellent patent lawyer that can win the case early than it would be to pay off the patent troll. I have written many a response to a patent licensing demand letter, knowing exactly what to say for much less than settling, where they disappear and never sue. And if they have sued, sometimes they disappear as soon as lawyers they do not want to be up against show up in the case.
In the instance of a good faith claim by a patent owner (even if wrong), there will be enough money at stake that it would be worth the cost to consult a good patent lawyer before doing a single thing.
You are not a lawyer, do not give out legal advice. I’d almost hesitate to suggest you should stop giving out advice all together, given your ignorance…
I understand the money transfer problem. Cryptocurrency seems like a good idea in that case.
I question though why choose Bitcoin? I guess a lot of people support it. But it is far from stable, so no one in the right mind, especially poor people should hold significant Bitcoins because it is speculative rather than stable.
I guess stable coins do not have the wide acceptance that bitcoin has? Why not USDC or similar to solve the money transfer problem?
Your respond suggest that Bitcoin is going to the moon, but that suggests you want it to stay the speculative instrument it is now. But if it is going to work in El Salvador you want it to be stable no?
USDC is controlled by US, which has been playing geopolitical games with El Salvador (and other countries) already.
People El Salvador didn't get the $1200 checks that US citizens got from printing more USD, even though they both use USD in theory. The president tried to get a deal with the IMF, but they couldn't agree on the terms, so he decided to give a choice to the people between a safe but inflating currency and a volatile / experimental but deflating currency.
Luckily there are enough market makers in both countries that transferring USD and recieving USD through the Bitcoin / Lightning network is cheaper and faster than using the traditional banking infrastructure.
I have a girlfriend in Colombia, and in addition to the 10% remittance fee she always has to go to the city from her village (1 hour bus ride) just to get money. I wish I could just send her money through Lightning network (she has internet + iPhone, so installing an app is not a problem).
The rest of your comment makes sense, but this sentence is disconnected from reality:
"People El Salvador didn't get the $1200 checks that US citizens got from printing more USD, even though they both use USD in theory."
Are you seriously saying that 5% inflation a year, maybe a bit more worse case, is bad compared to Bitcoin just lost 40% of its value in the last 2 months? Oh no, better not use USD then and switch to Bitcoin!
Maybe we need a stable coin that is a mix of the major currencies if you are against USD in particular? It could be pegged to some ratio of Chinese, US, Euro (and UK or Japanese?) dollars? This would be quite nice and stable.
As most Bitcoin advocates would say Zoom Out. Yes Bitcoin looks volatile if you look at the past 2-3 months. However if you zoom out to 1 year Bitcoin is still up almost 300% y/y. Zoom out 2-3 years and the numbers look even better. As for USD, depending on what you want to buy inflation is 3-30% y/y - think asset price inflation.
Zoom out further and USD looks even less attractive as a store of value. In 1933 $20usd bought 1oz of gold. Today it would take $2000usd/oz of gold, netting out to a 100x decrease in purchasing power in ~90 years. Bitcoin meanwhile has grown in purchasing power by 200% per year on average since inception.
What El Salvador has done is brilliant.
Citizens can chose between a short-term stable unit of account that loses most of its value over a long time period (USD) or a short-term volatile but long term deflationary currency designed to increase purchasing power over the long-term (BTC).
Remember that no traditional bank in the world will ever again pay you sufficient interest on savings to preserve your purchasing power over time - not one. Fiat is a terrible long-term store of value.
>As most Bitcoin advocates would say Zoom Out. Yes Bitcoin looks volatile if you look at the past 2-3 months. However if you zoom out to 1 year Bitcoin is still up almost 300% y/y.
Either you don't understand what volatility means, or you think volatility only matters when it's towards the down position. Either way, you're wrong.
Volatility in a currency is not a good thing. Even if some people are making money, other people are losing money due to the volatility. Value stability should be one of the top goals for any currency.
A currency that constantly loses value in terms of purchasing power over time is not stable.
Again, zoom out and the picture looks different.
The US Dollar loses approximately 100% of it’s value per century.
Bitcoin maintains or increases its purchasing power by many orders of magnitude per decade.
While the market rate on offer for Bitcoin at a given moment fluctuates, sometimes wildly, over a multi-year period the value always tends to go up.
This is by design as Bitcoin is the scarcest asset ever invented - giving it the property of hard money which unlike fiat is immune from debasement.
> Value stability should be one of the top goals for any currency.
Per my comment above the US dollar’s value is not stable. It falls by ~100% per century and because of the Fed’s 80 year long policy of continuous debasement the value of US dollars will never be stable over time and will always go down.
By contrast, while Bitcoin is volatile today, as it matures in its price discovery Bitcoin is likely to become more and more stable (read less volatile) in the future.
The point of a fiat is that it slowly loses value, so wealth holders can't get bigger and bigger just by holding the fiat, they are forced to invest to break even.
Bitcoin is not "fixing" anything here, a currency that deflates forever is a dumb idea.
So you consider it a feature of fiat that it is impossible for a saver to maintain their purchasing power over time unless they risk their capital on volatile assets such as stocks or real estate?
Why is is a good thing that widows, orphans, those living in poverty or on a fixed income have no way to save without having to Risk their principal?
The only ones who benefit from inflationary fiat currencies are those closest to the new spending - via the Cantillon effect - namely bankers, politicians and their friends in the military industrial complex.
> So you consider it a feature of fiat that it is impossible for a saver to maintain their purchasing power over time unless they risk their capital on volatile assets such as stocks or real estate?
Some cryptocurrencies may (in some cases, based on past performance) be good on average as long term stores of value, but even those that are good at this are extremely volatile assets, much more so than, say, blue-chip stocks. So they certainly don’t solve any problem of “you need exposure to volatile assets to not lose value of savings” that you might imagine exists.
> Why is is a good thing that widows, orphans, those living in poverty or on a fixed income have no way to save without having to Rick their principal?
People without surplus income have no way to save by definition, with or without risking their income. That people with surplus income need to participate in wealth generation to recurve additional wealth from storage of their surplus income is obviously a feature.
> Some cryptocurrencies may (in some cases, based on past performance) be good on average as long term stores of value
This is a straw man. The argument was not for some cryptocurrency.
It was for Bitcoin. Bitcoin alone has the potential to become the reserve currency of the internet.
It is the only crypto designed from the ground up to withstand attacks from nation states. Bitcoin is the scarcest asset ever created. It is the most decentralized and censorship resistant, and it is secured by the most powerful super-computer in the world.
Therefore it isn't just about past performance, but rather past performance combined with a fundamental analysis of the unique properties of Bitcoin that make it the best performing asset in the history of assets over it's lifetime.
Bitcoin is a unique snowflake. If you cannot tell the difference between Bitcoin and other cryptos you ARE missing the point.
> People without surplus income have no way to save by definition
Poor or rich, most people can find a way to save some of their income for the future. It may not be much to you but giving them the option to access a store of value that grows on average at 200% per year is a revolution for these folks who often have fewer options to grow savings.
You are cherry-picking poor people to suit your argument. Not all poor people have zero surplus income.
Some simply have too little or too insecure surplus income to escape their plight. I for one applaud giving these people more choices for a better life.
> widows, orphans, those living in poverty or on a fixed income have no way to save
This has got to be the laziest rebuttal - think of the orphans!
Those living in poverty, definitionally, have less money than the not-impoverished. A deflationary currency gives value proportional to whomever is holding it. There is no incentive to loan money, as holding this deflationary currency is risk free growth.
Certainly, the government printing fiat could direct those funds in undesirable or corrupt ways, but this is possible whether the fiat currency is deflating or inflating. A currency that is always deflating will be subject to the tyranny of wealth holders, who now have no incentive to put any of that wealth back into the economy, absent a wealth tax or something.
Fiat already has momentum, it can purchase goods and services, which can be used to create value. It can pay taxes. It does not also need to be self-compounding through deflation.
> This has got to be the laziest rebuttal - think of the orphans!
I'm sorry you felt my argument to be lazy. Allow me to elaborate. Widows and orphans is a common trope in finance that refers to the most vulnerable members of society, those without the pricing power to keep up with inflation. Typically it means those on a fixed income such as pensioners. These 'widows and orphans' are the worst hit by inflation since high earners can pressure employers for a raise or switch jobs for more pay while the idle rich can keep their assets in inflation-resistant holdings. Pensioners suffer disproportionately - that was my point.
Orphans are children and wards of the state. They are not laboring (I hope). The government could print fiat money and give it to them, and their wealth would still grow with inflation. With deflation, their 0 dollars do not increase, and it is impossible for them to find jobs when the grow up.
The modern monetary system, which is inflationary, is obviously biased towards wealth holders. This does not imply that a deflationary system would better help the poor and downtrodden. Deflation imparts wealth directly to holders of the currency, directly proportional to the quantity of currency held. Money velocity goes towards 0 as the idle rich lose all incentive to do anything but hold it and watch their purchasing power increase relative to everyone less rich.
Again, ‘widows and orphans’ is a well established term when referring to the impact of inflation. It generally refers to those on fixed incomes - i.e. those without the pricing power to fight for increases in income to combat inflation.
You seem to be stuck on the word orphans, let’s use ‘those on a fixed income’ instead.
If you can get past the word orphans, may I ask you to address the core point of my argument?
> What is the problem with the government providing subsistence incomes indexed to inflation ..
There is nothing wrong with the idea except it does not exist. Show me a country where governments provide subsistence income indexed to the official inflation rate, let alone the real rate of inflation. Show me a gov that allows minimum wage to increase at anything approaching inflation. Or show me a traditional bank account that will allow them to save at a rate that keeps up with inflation - It doesn’t exist.
> and letting wealtholders fortunes get inflated away?
and show me a wealtholder who’s fortune is held in cash instead of scarce assets so as to be inflated away - doesn’t exist.
> How does deflation, which proportionally rewards holders of currency, help those with a fixed income more than inflationary handouts?
Watch the bottom 70% of El Salvador’s citizens over the next decade for a real world example. They now get a decentralized savings account denominated in a currency growing at 200% y/y instead of one that is constantly being debased (USD printed 50% of all dollars ever created during the pandemic) - except for crypto no bank account will ever again pay enough interest to keep up with inflation.
> Your core argument has, from my view, morphed from "inflation hurts the poor and downtrodden" to "inflation hurts those with a fixed income".
No, my argument has always been that inflation disproportionately hurts the poor more than the rich.
You are either misinterpreting my words or intentionally being misleading. Again the ‘widows and orphans’ or those on a fixed income references were simply examples. My argument applies to those on low incomes, middle income or even high incomes.
Only those wealthy enough to live entirely off investments have the potential to suffer a little less from inflation.
I say suffer a little less because even the idle rich suffer from currency debasement - just less than this who are less well off.
It appears to me as though "magically" the wealthy always seem to manage to store their wealth in some form that isn't devalued by inflation (real-estate, ...) whereas the poorer people are, the fewer possibilities to do something similar they have (in the traditional money system).
So systematically, inflation hits the poorer people more. Yes, a deflationary currency would maybe benefit the already wealthy more than the poorer, but somehow I don't need to hesitate which one (inflationary, deflationary) I'd rather choose.
I completely agree, systematically, inflation his poorer people more. This is not a prerequisite for inflationary money systems in theory, but it is the state of Earth's inflationary money systems.
A deflationary currency does not maybe benefit the already wealthy, it directly imparts "real value" proportional to held currency. If you have ideas for a deflationary system that solves this, through wealth taxes or something, I am all ears.
> somehow I don't need to hesitate which one (inflationary, deflationary) I'd rather choose
Because relative to most people, you are wealthy! How are young people supposed to find work in a deflationary system?
5% inflation a year (which is closer to 20% for people who want to own their own house) is devastating long term.
People in the US can just buy S&P stock in their 401K to defend against it, but most people in the world don't have that privilege.
I agree that volatility of bitcoin is really hard to stomach (I have been through 85% downturns and it sucked, and people have made fun of me many times, I just got used to it). But there are enough people who have so bad pension systems in the world, that they see the huge volatility of bitcoin as a better option than trusting their government.
Network effects. No better option which is universally agreed as the _next_ best option. It will get easier and faster to send. Email used to need a C compiler and 2 days to send.
No it isn't. When I'm sending money to Colombia and WorldRemit app takes 10% of my money, it means 10% less food to cook for my girlfriend and her family. She can't get a job since the pandemic, and I have other friends in Colombia with the same problem, they are desperate... some times I just send $40, and they say that it saves their life, it's so bad there right now.
Money is a just a row in an SQL table. We can update it for less than a cent. Everything else is a social problem, Bitcoin does nothing to help here. Exchanges over Bitcoin are no better or worse in principle than existing financial infrastructure.
The reason for high fees are the risk in sending the money across borders. Due to fraud there are risks. Bitcoin does nothing to fix this and seems to even enable more scams.
> The reason for high fees are the risk in sending the money across borders. Due to fraud there are risks. Bitcoin does nothing to fix this and seems to even enable more scams.
Bitcoin eliminates counter party risk and international transfer risk. Lightning eliminates cost, latency and transaction volume limits. In every way that matters, Bitcoin via Lightning eliminates high fees and addresses all your concerns.
As for the idea that Bitcoin enables more scams, please provide citations. I am not aware of any scams introduced by Bitcoin or Lightning.
Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer network that does not rely on any third party to function - hence no counter-party risk. Bitcoin operates based on rules, but has no rulers, only participants of various flavors.
Bitcoin doesn’t understand or recognize borders. There is no country-code input field in a bitcoin transaction. Bitcoin doesn’t care if you are sending Bitcoin to your friend across the street or North Korea, Iran, <insert scary nation here> - international transfer risk is non-existent for Bitcoin as Bitcoin does not recognize political borders.
Any human anywhere with a computing device and internet connectivity can create an address and transact with anyone else in the network.
Bitcoin is a censorship resistant monetary network open to all 7.5 Billion humans. No bank can compete with Bitcoin on this dimension.
Yes but I provided an logically consistent explanation instead. Perhaps you would prefer I cite the Bitcoin Whitepaper which explains the peer-to-peer censorship resistent electronic cash as explained by the inventor Satoshi Nakamoto [1].
> Exchanges over Bitcoin are no better or worse in principle than existing financial infrastructure.
In principal maybe not but in reality, Bitcoin for international exchanges is a game-changer especially if you can keep the money in Bitcoin and spend it as the recipient.
Fees on remittances to El Salvador were up to 50% in some cases. With Bitcoin they are effectively zero.
If you are sending 40$ over Bitcoin the fees will
Be far more than 10% (4$). Checkout Nano or Stellar Lumens if you want to send small amounts of money without fees.
That said, Bitcoin is almost purely based consensus reality for most of its existence. It is worth something because others feel it is worth something.
Working hard but doing so for someone else can often not lead to significant gains. Many services like Uber or InstaCart or even McDonalds or Amazon Warehouse or Walmart or Retail Sales or call center, you can work hard but there is no where to progress to. Your rewards are capped.
You need to find a way to work hard such that your rewards are not capped artificially. Startups were you get equity. Large companies where you can progress to high salaries if you are able to rise. Starting your own business and being competent at it. Working on commissions in an area where the commissions can be large -- true sales, or real estate. Being a professional, e.g. doctor, accountant, lawyer, has traditionally had high wages and you often run your own business.
You need to work hard in a way that has unlimited rewards, or at least high rewards possible, and that aligns with your aptitudes.
You need to not work hard at a minimum wage job if you can get something better.
And if you are stuck in a minimum wage job, maybe you can organize with your fellow employees to demand better wages and benefits? This is also another way of working hard in order to get more for yourself.
IMHO, this misses the point. How the fuck can Elon/Tesla buy bitcoin, do a pump and dump, and walk away with enough money to cover 300 lifetimes of me working. Or some kid in a basement that bought GME options gets to retire and not work a day in their life. Also the guy that VC gifted 6 figures (multiple years of me working) of equity just because he wanted more money from the acquisition.
Watching people get a bunch of money over and over for no work starts to make you question things. All these people get a bunch of money by gaming the system so why not try that instead of working? It does make me a bit salty and that's someone who in the grand scheme of things gets a lot of money for not much work. I can only imagine how a wage-slave busting their hump feels.
It's not gaming the system, it's having money. That's the system. People with money can get more of it. Start with it, and you can get more of it. Lots more of it if you know what you're doing. If you don't, you'll die with about the same millions you started with.
Elon can pump and dump because he has a massive following and can manipulate the market. Some kid in a basement can buy GME options, but for every one of those you see on Reddit, you'll not see 10 or 50 people who lost money on the bet, or it'll be a large corporation who lost out on the meme stocks, but they just use the tax system to write off the losses.
It seems that mass media and culture is revealing some truths, that there are extremely wealthy people at the top 0.01%, far above even surgeons or lawyers or engineers, who work very hard and are just as smart as the ultra-rich (if not more smart/hardworking). The difference is those professionals optimized for interesting, impactful work that also pays nicely, and the ultra-rich are optimizing for maximal wealth creation, or they're simply inheriting it or getting lucky on risky bets.
In any case, I think lower-wage workers will slowly get a better lot, since our employment rate is increasing and people after the pandemic are realizing how exploitative many jobs are.
> far above even surgeons or lawyers or engineers, who work very hard and are just as smart as the ultra-rich
I've been seeing this assumption float around quite a bit around HN. Where is this coming from? Where is this belief that "ultra-rich" or "having interest in money" implies intelligence?
Not saying one way or the other. Just genuinely curious.
Oh I was going to question the other two assumptions, that surgeons, lawyers, and engineers work very hard, and that they (as an averaged group) are just as smart as the ultra-rich (as an averaged group)
People who are highly skilled in one area run the same range as anyone else in other areas. Sometimes it even seems like people who focus hard in one area are the least balanced in depth and accuracy of general knowledge. I want to see the experiments testing the wisdom of the crowd done on experts in one field.
> Watching people get a bunch of money over and over for no work starts to make you question things.
You're ignoring risk. Do you feel the same way when people win lotteries? Because everybody has access to Robinhood, so nothing is stopping you from gambling on penny stocks or random crypto and you just might get retirement money or lose it all.
I see where you're coming from, but people earn without risk, when I go to work from 9 to 5, I'm getting my paycheck, I know exactly how much it's going to be, I know exactly what time it's going to be deposited into my account, etc.
When I put my capital to work, I might earn, but I might also lose a lot (ask anyone who bought Bitcoin at 63k$ for example). Obviously, in a capitalist society, capital is the most important thing (I'm not saying that's right or wrong).
Also, if you have millions of people "investing" in the stock market, even in penny stocks, a few of them are bound to get right, you just don't hear too much about people that lost it all.
Yes, except there has been a concerted effort by monied interests in the upper strata of society to convince those below that organizing to demand better wages is useless at best or un-American at worst. It's an uphill battle.
> Startups were you get equity. Large companies where you can progress to high salaries if you are able to rise. Starting your own business and being competent at it. Working on commissions in an area where the commissions can be large -- true sales, or real estate. Being a professional, e.g. doctor, accountant, lawyer, has traditionally had high wages and you often run your own business.
This is all great if you have an aptitude for participation in the knowledge economy. That's not everyone. There used to be much more high-wage blue-collar work available to those who didn't fit that mold, but that has been ebbing away over time as America's manufacturing economy has been hollowed out.
Stronger unions and collective bargaining in the dwindling blue collar work that still exists is my only idea for how to improve things, but I'm not an expert.
> Yes, except there has been a concerted effort by monied interests in the upper strata of society to convince those below that organizing to demand better wages is useless at best or un-American at worst. It's an uphill battle.
Then you have to fight against this by organizing better and more widespread. Sometimes I do worry that all this information on Fox News and others about bogeymen distractions us from trying to better the things we actually can.
It may be that we are too easily distracted / disorganized / disheartened to better our position. And then we will not better our position.
But if you believe you can not change your fate, then you definitely can not. So I do suggest being like Obama and starting with community organizing and solidifying ones position locally and taking that larger. There are effective strategies to engage in. But they are not watching TikTok or YouTube all day.
I'd argue that moving from a capped track to an uncapped track requires much more than hard work. It requires at the very least an expensive investment, sometimes expensive credentials. Worst case, you need to be of a certain class to do it, and not even money can buy you the uncapped track.
If you're flipping burgers at McDonalds, you can't just "hard-work" your way to owning that store. Even if you pull 3 shifts and are the best burger flipper in the state, your boss is never going to say "thanks for the hard work! you now you own the store." This track switch is gate-kept by requiring a capital investment.
If you're 3rd junior engineer from the left at your tech company, you can hard-work your way up to senior, maybe even principal engineer, but you will statistically never be able to hard-work your way to CEO, where the rewards are truly uncapped. Nobody hard-works their way to CEO anymore--that track is reserved for a separate non-employee CEO class, gate-kept by credentials, and the good ol' boy network.
If you're working as a start-up employee, you're never going to hard-work you way to founder, where the rewards are uncapped. You think you're going to be the best developer on the team, and then the board is going to say "congratulations! we now deem you a founder with founder equity!" No way. The company already has founders. If you want to be a founder, you need to make a capital outlay and risk your own business.
If you're a nurse, you're never going to hard-work your way to being a doctor. They don't promote nurses to doctors after years of hard work. You need to, again, spend money on education and pass the credential gatekeepers in order to switch to that track. And even when you're a doctor, you're working for the hospital, and are not uncapped. You can't hard-work your way to owning the hospital. You need to spend capital to own your own practice.
You contradicted yourself. Many companies like McDonald's and Walmart promote from within. You can be successful at those companies by working hard and getting promotions.
Theoretically possible yes. But the pyramid is very very bottom heavy at McDonalds and Walmart where 90% of all employees make close to minimum wage. It would be better to start in corporate at Walmart and work your way up there, rather than to start as a restocker or cashier or warehouse worker -- all of which are at risk of being further automated.
There will never be post-scarcity, because we'll never have enough. Using cutting-edge technology always requires people to work hard to build said technology. If it didn't require work and just wishful thinking we'd already have it. The builders and engineers will always want _something_ in exchange or they won't make said tech accessible to you. The curiosity of nerds only gets you so far (see open source UX).
Maybe you won't have to work/pay for food if accounting for it becomes more work than producing it (if sufficiently automated and not resource-constrained). But if you want to live in a hip neighborhood (by definition there is limited availability), have your own flying car, go on vacation on the moon once a year where real people service you etc. you'll have to work for that. Because the ingenuity and work necessary to make this all happen will still be enormous.
Maybe you think you'd be happy with your today's lifestyle, which might be attainable for ~free. But I think the reality for most is that they'd grow jealous of their friends posting selfies from the moon and resent "the evil rich" again.
The small amount of work necessary to _survive_ today would sound marvelous to someone from even 100 years ago (clothes, food, shelter outside major cities). Mowing one lawn for 1-2h every day would probably be enough for that. But surviving isn't the point of being human, it's about stretching the limits of what is possible and that will always take as much work as we are willing to put into it.
The greatest kings of history had a worse standard of living than much of humanity has today. Certainly the average American has a vastly superior standard of living.
Think of things the ancients could only dream of that are available to most people in developed nations:
- Fast transportation
- Antibiotics
- Instant global communications
- All of human knowledge in your pocket
- Climate controlled buildings
- Access to the global supply chain for goods
Yet scarcity persists, and people want more because wants are relative.
A thousand years from now, people will be jealous of others who have an annual off-world holiday, a family jet, life-extension therapy... And even then, lots of people will work hard because they want to improve their standard of living.
As long an human minds remain bound to human bodies, then we are limited by the finite resources of the physical world.
It never actually seems to come though. I wouldn't count on it.
I believe that getting something for nothing is usually not sustainable. Just because you serve no purpose to those giving the things away for free. Something will give (some type of resource constraint will arise, even if it is just competitive/alternatives) and it will fail if you are not providing value.
If you think in terms of money, then yes. But people can certainly provide value that cannot be measured in money and profits. And for me that's the whole idea of have a post scarcity society where you don't have to work.. I'm fairly sure that most people would actually start providing value on their own and for the good of society if they weren't forced to think about money.
It's only been, what a few hundred years since the industrial revolution began? We haven't given it enough time for the innovators to figure out how to manufacture the needs of society in an overflowing plentiful way that's also automated & low effort. Some things never will be of course.
On the other hand, here in the US we throw out something like 60% of the food we produce and have an obesity problem. One could argue that we've kinda already reached post-scarcity for feeding people, yet people still go hungry.
Post-scarcity is a pipe dream. Even amoeba understand that life is a competition for resources. Stand still and you die.
Even if the whole world lived in a post-scarce global society, there would be wars fought over who controls the supply chains, who lives downtown and who lives uptown, who eats veal and who eats chicken, etc. And there would be entrepreneurial types who are willing to trade food for lumber, or land for sex.
I don't like what I'm going to say, but post scarcity can't come without either a worldwide culture change or an exploding population that would lead back to scarcity.
We are still animals, and evolution is still a thing. We're clearly a k-selected species, but in post scarcity, what's to stop a portion of us from becoming r-selected?
What’s malicious about only being able to cut 50 heads of hair per day or being government mandated to only watch 5 kids per adult?
Nothing. The reality of cutting hair curtails the first mans ability to be a billionaire and the needs of the tiny humans out way the desire of their watchers to maximize their income (which would still be far below billionaire status because the ability to watch a kid is limited by nature as well).
Capture the signup cost of a new onboard to your software? Capture the profit of selling toilet paper to the west coast? Grab a percentage of sales from everyone sales man hired after you?
Those things can scale by their nature and so the people in control of them will scale their capital accordingly.
I would argue the very existence of the tech giants prices there is no malicious entity out there holding down the little people. Just the facts of life. There are only so many scaling jobs (millions of singers, only a few hundred like Beyoncee) and competing against an entrenched interest means you bear the full cost of switching me from my chic fil a tea addiction to your bucket-o-chicken branded one. Good luck with that, I’m headed to chic fil a right now because just thinking about it was enough to remind me of all the good memories and want another one right now. It’s not the tea, I’ll drive past 20 people selling sweet tea to get there, it’s the chic fil a sweet tea.
Your haircuts are a strawman response, but a fine point independant of my own I suppose if you like to tell coal miners to "Just Learn to Code". I guess I'd like to see the hair dresser demanding they become a billionaire from cutting hair.
Here's the quotation's context:
> You need to find a way to work hard such that your rewards are not capped artificially. Startups were you get equity. Large companies where you can progress to high salaries if you are able to rise. Starting your own business and being competent at it. Working on commissions in an area where the commissions can be large -- true sales, or real estate. Being a professional, e.g. doctor, accountant, lawyer, has traditionally had high wages and you often run your own business.
I read the artificiality being the fact that CEO salaries are XXX% in excess of workers' pay, or workers getting unlivable wages requiring multiple jobs while Csuites getting bonuses in excess of an entire division's wage budget, or the fact that HN recommends quitting your tech job every 2 years because your yearly bonus will pale in comparison to the % increase over your salary a new hire in your divisioin will get, or the many documented effects of systemic racism, or unjust tax laws, or any miriad of heinous shit that goes on in our current economic system.
> I would argue the very existence of the tech giants prices there is no malicious entity out there holding down the little people. Just the facts of life.
Bozos 'committing' 1B$/y to a space pissing contest with some dude he worked with a lifetime ago while the people who enable that wealth are peeing in bottles and lying dead and unnoticed for 20 minutes are 'facts of life' to you?
Makes me wonder if your chicken tea addiction is actually politically motivated.
>Many services like Uber or InstaCart or even McDonalds or Amazon Warehouse or Walmart or Retail Sales or call center, you can work hard but there is no where to progress to. Your rewards are capped.
Having worked at Walmart/Retail/Call center/Franchised food service earlier on in my life and I would have to say "there is no where to progress to" is not exactly true.
Excluding food service where I worked directly for the owner, management team, at least at the store/region level, all came through the ranks. Don't get me wrong it's likely very competitive and not trivial to become a store/regional manager, and presumably some hard work/luck were needed in all cases. However, that's no different from any other careers.
This is a naive set of statements, even the ones without tone-deaf conditionals like "if you are able to rise" and "if you can get something better".
Here's a run-on reality of your statements.
"Startups were you get equity." ... that gets watered down and most of which goes to investors and founders, who will force a sale after 5-7 years when they get into a pinch and all you get is a $75k retention bonus that doesn't offset the opportunity cost of not having gone to work for an established company, if you're not let go after being acquired.
"Large companies where you can progress to high salaries if you are able to rise." ... based upon your ability to play politics and join the right factions, if you're the right skin color and social class and age group, and ignore that fact that by sticking around "to rise" you're limiting your salary increases that would come from jumping ship every 2-3 years, if you're in an area where there's a dense concentration of businesses that require your skillset.
"Starting your own business and being competent at it." ... which requires capital that a bank usually grants you in the form of a loan because your parents aren't rich, but if you're the wrong skin color or social class, you don't get that loan and your business ends up being mostly an expensive hobby because you're still working a 9-to-5 (or 2 part-time jobs) so that you don't starve and become homeless.
"Working on commissions in an area where the commissions can be large -- true sales, or real estate." ... where you discover that you simply can't pick up any high priced asset and sell it, because someone is doling out the leads while also taking a sizable cut of your commission despite you "working hard" to obtain it, especially if you're not the same skin color as and part of the in-group of the persons giving you the sales leads.
"Being a professional, e.g. doctor, accountant, lawyer, has traditionally had high wages and you often run your own business." ... that require years of specialized schooling during which you aren't earning much money and are likely going into massive 6-figure debt, because your parents aren't rich and are also in debt and then you hope and pray that you can overcome the various artificial hurdles that professional associations put in place to enforce scarcity and exclusivity and then after all the "hard work" you get to either join a company of professionals and play out one of the previously stated scenarios or try to start your own business, which require various forms of legally required insurance (malpractice, etc), acceptance into various trade networks, leasing an office.
But I do agree you are correct that switching jobs every couple of years is an effective way of raising your salary often faster than if you stayed in the same place.
I don't feel that way, but as someone who has personally been through most of these scenarios your statements come off as blithe and without nuance. Becoming successful really isn't as easy and hand-wavey as you make it out to be.
the author of the lib pushed the code by a PR to Home Assistant, a project that is packaged by multiple distribution, including ubuntu, fedora, arch and more, all of which will repackage the library.
The author should ask for removal from HA, not going to all packager for all distro requiring to be removed
Given there is no intrinsic worth of BTC, rather just the collectively belief it is worth something, these incentives are very strong with BTC.