- I can send someone 1 million USDC for 0.000001 US cent with confirmation in <1 second.
- I can send any twitter user address money by tweeting (eg. Send 100 USDC to @randomuser)
Couple examples that have come up recently for me personally. I can agree that there is something comparable (i.e. international wire) but the cost and speed is in a different ballpark and international wires are not available to some parts of the world.
Name one Crypto chain that takes hours to confirm a transaction. Bitcoin has a blocktime of 10 minutes and Ethereum is 10 to 20 seconds. More modern networks process transactions in orders of magnitude less time, eg. Solana has a slot time of 0.5 seconds and time to finality being 1 or 2 seconds.
Positive, you are averaging out the risk by spreading out your purchases and averaging into your position.
Negative, time in the market beats timing the market, therefore you are better to have all your money you intend to invest in the market right away so you can enjoy appreciation, dividends etc
If you have a large lump sum to invest it can be better to buy in one go or in a shorter period. However if you earn money over time and look to invest, it makes sense to DCA each month you receive your salary rather than waiting to time the market.
> I want my transactions to be private to the world but it's reasonable that law enforcement has a method to investigate criminal behavior.
If law enforcement has a method to investigate your behavior, its not private. You want to have your cake and eat it too. Either you enjoy privacy (and so do criminals) or criminals do not (and neither do you).
> None of these are experiments with the concept of money. You still transact in the exact same fundamental way as with traditional online payments, just 1000x worse.
How involved are you in the space to make this claim? Are you staying informed? What is your highly confident language based on?
Can you tease out how you come to "1000x worse"?
You are incredibly confident, it leads me to believe you have some big blind points.
Putting my bias at the front, I own crypto and am "pro" crypto if we can boil it down simply. I'm also deeply skeptical of a lot of projects in crypto, most OG's are because there is a lot of vaporware and scams and ponzis.
Nonetheless, the vision of having a shared consensus truth that the whole world can rely on for transacting I find very compelling.
> Okay, provide some evidence for that claim. Because again, that's the claim of "Well crypto is doing amazing things" but it needs actual evidence. I know it theoretically could happen if you ignore all the glaring problems in practice. But does it actually happen?
Which part of the claim are you refuting here? It is a fact that one can send very large sums of value between two addresses for a trivial transaction fee. This value can be swapped across other tokens with low slippage in the millions (denominated in USD).
> What has cyrpto provided that you can't provide via Paypal or bank transfer? Hell - here's a paypal address for a bunch of guys who want to buy Ukraine a fighter jet - [email protected] . Here's the donation page for the Kyiv school of economics https://kse.ua/support/donation - you may notice a small bit of text right above the crypto addresses for you donation - that small bit of text is a form for card transactions, 8 different ways of doing a bank transfer and a paypal address.
I spoke with someone yesterday who lives in Nigeria, they were moving to Rwanda and needed to pay a deposit in advance. They were unable to pay via MoneyGram, Western Union etc. - one provider offered to handle the payment and requested many documents for a few days and in the end rejected the transfer. This person then had to send money to a friend who lived in the US who then forwarded it to Rwanda. This experience made the person feel isolated and outside of the system. This is an anecdote however my guess is if you think PayPal is "good enough" you don't live in a country that is marginalized by the status quo payment system.
> So what has Cryptocurrency acheived here? You donate crypto to these charities, and then what happens? They convert it back into fiat currency to actually spend it. You've literally just added more steps to something that was already solved.
So that's your take, global finance is a solved problem? No todos? No improvements needed we can pack it up? This is a stunning poverty of imagination in my estimation and a denial of the very real struggle many people face day to day in transacting.
> What's the alternative? Someone commits a felony, and then you...?
The US is the OECD country with the highest per capita % of incarcerated individuals. By orders of magnitude. So it seems other countries have found other approaches?
> Source: Half of the OECD countries have less than 100 people in prison
per 100 000 inhabitants. Thirteen have between 100 and 200. Two
countries exceed this – Poland with 230 and the United States with
more than 700. The US rate is the highest in the world followed
by Russia with about 600 per 100 000 inhabitants. Except in the
United States imprisonment rates for women are negligible.
> Either violation of a nation's sovereignty is a crime or it isn't. If being an authoritariann dictatorship is the criteria when is Saudi Arabia getting invaded?
Ah but here you are changing the goalposts, the OP never said it was a crime, they said it was different. And it IS different. I marched against the Iraq war and was against those wars from the beginning, and I still would argue that they are being fought for a very different reason, a reason that is a big cause for concern. Afghanistan and Iraq, for all the folly, were not attacked with a clear goal of expanding territory and maintaining long term control of each country. US and allies were only too eager to get out if they could get some stability and not have it look like a big L. They were attempting to allow the locals to vote in a self determined government, however miserably those attempts ended up.
Russia is very clearly expanding its territory at the cost of a peoples right to self determination.
Now you can say, well in terms of the consequences, what's worse? If many more civilians die in the first case, maybe it's worse?
My counter would be, we don't know where this ends, and I don't think we can measure impact only in civilian deaths.
Additionally, I would recommend the R2P (responsibility to protect) doctrine as a good rule of thumb for when we may consider it necessary to overthrow a totalitarian dictator.
I can resonate with this. What I remind myself when I have these thoughts is:
A) Life is like an evolving game with many rounds. Some doors close in your 20s, other doors open in 30s and so on. See what interests you outside and off the screen, once you find this, connect with other people who like to do it. For eg. in my city a lot of tech workers are into bouldering and hiking. You will see as you make friends in your age group, there is a whole bunch of new doors opening now that you are in your 30s.
B) Actually most of the things you list are totally still doable even _if_ you did want to do them. School as a typical student maybe not, but why be typical? I've met backpackers in their 60s, age truly is just a number.
> This won't be fixed by web3, ad monetization and tracking won't magically stop. They exist because there is a demand.
Saying it is this way because this is the way people want it strikes me as a bit fatalist. Is it this way because it's what "people" want or because there is no viable alternative?
Nothing is being "fixed" per se, an alternative vision of how things could be is being experimented with. Key tenets of this are trying to better align user and creator / provider incentives.
> I think he was commenting on other’s misinterpretation and misapplication of the original point.
He is dead-on.
Other's *Imagined misinterpretation, or is there some evidence to go on? To my knowledge, the recent push back against consumption was against the traditional life pattern of accumulating new things on the rat race track (new car, house, upgrading your tastes, expensive clothes to keep up with your peers). Having read some pop psychology books (no expert) there seemed to be some academic support for pushing back on this arrangement and rather prioritizing relationships with people around you and experiences / shared experiences.
I'm not sure how the wires get crossed and people take from that narrative, to own less and buy more prestigious items and experiences like an expensive haircut.
> So I would, if anything, reverse the maxim: “Buy things, not experiences!” Sure, the Lambo might still be a waste of money, but thoughtfully chosen material goods can enable new activities can enrich your life, extend your capabilities, and deepen your understanding of the world.
certain goods can "enable new activities". It seems like the author is still prioritizing experiences, just acknowledging that some experiences require things. Camping is a good example.
I think the author misunderstands the original point though. Overconsumption generally leads to having a big collection of stuff, ever larger houses to store it. Having a reasonable collection of items that the user can leverage to have higher quality experiences, that are built to last where possible makes absolute sense. What is reasonable? That's for everyone to decide themselves. I don't find "buy things, not experiences" to add much to the discussion though.
Couple examples that have come up recently for me personally. I can agree that there is something comparable (i.e. international wire) but the cost and speed is in a different ballpark and international wires are not available to some parts of the world.