This is a fun book, but it famously embellishes, exaggerates, and sensationalizes the tulip bubble [1]. The efficient markets people obviously don't like the story, but there doesn't seem to be much evidence that it happened on the same scale that Mackay portrays it.
This is where non-financial use of blockchain could really shine, IMO. Self-sovereign identity management with a smart contract-based process for recovering ids if keys get lost or hacked. Blockchains are pretty out of favor these days, but I really don't see a better solution for decentralized identity management.
No, people are still trading them for some reason, and there's pretty good liquidity. The highest offer right now is $15.2k, which someone can dump any of the 10k apes for that. And there were 16 sales (totaling $271K) in the last 24 hours.
I agree as it relates to bitcoin: It's positioning itself as a store of value... and it kind of works as long as the collective delusion that it _is_ a store of value holds up. But that sort of self-fulfilling prophecy is kind of flimsy. Governments get to decide what money is based on charging taxes and demand how it gets paid.
Legal contracts are similar. They 100% are reliant on social and institutional forces for enforcement and meaning. But I think smart contracts are different because they are self-enforcing. It would be very difficult to use a smart contracts as a replacement for legal contracts in most circumstances. But when the contract relates to state and digital assets on the network then it's a great tool. And if you end up with a network that hosts a lot of these important contracts, then the native crypto asset (which is used as gas to power said contracts) has value as a commodity. And if that commodity also shares all the properties of good money (fungibility, durability, portability, etc.) then all of a sudden you have money.
Author here. Gas costs have actually come down a lot over the past few years. It only costs me a few dollars to run the transaction. It's more that scheduling, setting up, conducting, and tearing down each burn session is a huge pain in the ass. So if I can burn 10 bills an hour, then I'd clear maybe $450 an hour after gas, which doesn't feel crazy for providing boutique financial services.
That's not really a valid criticism. You can say that same thing about any protocol. Who's to say that the majority of btc hashing power isn't single force or conspiring group?
It's a federal crime a federal crime pursuant to United States Code Title 18 (CRIMES AND CRIMINAL PROCEDURE), Part I (CRIMES), Chapter 17 (COINS AND CURRENCY), Sec. 333 (Mutilation of national bank obligations):
Whoever mutilates, cuts, defaces, disfigures, or perforates, or unites or cements together, or does any other thing to any bank bill, draft, note, or other evidence of debt issued by any national banking association, or Federal Reserve bank, or the Federal Reserve System, with intent to render such bank bill, draft, note, or other evidence of debt unfit to be reissued, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than six months, or both.
The math here doesn't really work out for a couple reasons.
First... sure, if you spend $500,000 on buybacks instead of paying dividends, then large shareholders might make trillions of dollars. But individual investors make money also. In fact, every shareholder will make money in proportion to how much stock they own! The little guy isn't really getting screwed here.
Second, the stock price is determined by supply and demand. Stock buybacks increase the price by reducing supply. But, if we take the example mentioned where the company blows its entire bank account on stock buybacks (thus, harming the actual business)... the stock becomes less valuable, demand goes, and the price goes down.
Stock buybacks are functionally the same as if the company pays a dividend, and then every shareholder decides to reinvest. Except doing it as a buyback is (I believe) more tax efficient since the investor doesn't get hit with income tax before the reinvestment.
There are different flavors of stablecoins though. There's the ponzi scheme flavor that is propped up based on hand waving alchemy, and there's the boring (and now regulated) flavor that's actually backed by real money.
Yeah, but so can PayPal and Visa and Mastercard. The issue here is that payments is essentially a duopoly. Itch doesn't have any alternatives because they're locked into traditional payment rails. Stablecoins at least let someone else decide "Hey, you know what, I'm going to create a coin that can be used as payment for porn games." And executing on that is fairly straightforward.
There are a lot of people mentioning crypto as a possible solution to this, and a lot of people responding that crypto is a ponzi scheme, and they're not interested. But congress recently passed stablecoin legislation that could possibly fix this problem. Recipients would have a straightforward way of receiving money, and they wouldn't need to gamble on the price of bitcoin. Most people would probably still use a third part payment processor to handle the rough edges of managing money on the blockchain. But if any of them try to pull something like this it would be incredibly easy spin up a new processor and migrate accounts.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania#Modern_views