It's great that some Chinese private entrepreneurs (connected with the intelligence services or not) are doing the fiat. That by itself is reason enough.
> But there are countries in Africa who can already do better by simply leapfrogging to bitcoin and ditching their national currencies.
I doubt this would do any good for them.
* Their currency would be totally exposed to 3rd parties.
* They would loose the control over the rates, which are an important tool to attract investments, if are stable and controlled well.
* AFAIK some chineese private companies control large part of the mining network. Basically the central bank would be in private, and foreign hands.
* The slow transactions would make it totally infeasable for use in everyday life, aspecially as people there have limited access to necessary technologies (stable network connections all round the contries, stable elecric power everywhere), so daily transactions of the ordinary people would either fall back to barters, or use some fiat paper money, eg. USDs.
I totally don't get how could you reach tis conclusion, your whole post is a SV bubble wishful thinking with some trendy bullshit, eg. software eating the FED, fed is replaced by code. Bitcoin does better than centralbanks. If some currency looses 30% of its value a single day, that is not a sign of health, and this happended the very week with bitcoin. Actually Bitcoin does its job worse than an african dictatorship's currency, if its job is being a fiat currency, which is useful for the people in daily life.
I doubt its job is that, so it may do its job well, but for this task it is unsuitable.
I thought we were talking about this comment. You created a strawman, and now use derogatory comment toward me. This makes me end this discussion here.
I also don't like junkies. Is that also wrong? Why do you tell me what i should like, and based on what ethics do you tell me what is morally right?
What if I tell you that liking foreigners is morally wrong where I live? We don't hurt them, but we don't like them because they keep telling us what we should do, and keep trying to conquer us for a millennia? Still we live in peace since a long time, we treat our guests well, but we don't categorically like them. Each and every guest can become an individually liked person, and even unliked ones are treated fairly (given a fair trial before execution ;) Hint for autists: It was a joke)
Those safety checks need to be run continously, actually, or the software will not get the certifications necessary to be released on the roads. There are passive means: practices and coding guidelines, static checks, but also active measures: defensive coding, redundancy, continously active safety check logics.
So my original point was: it doesn't matter if you use direct drive or a transmission, as both will be controlled by software, and ultimately the safety of that software will determine whether the System is safe overall. The same design principles and safeguards will need to be implemented in both cases to provide the needed integrity.
But I doubt there are any patents on this. I guess it would be illogical to demand vendors to use patents by someone. But there are lots safety regulations on the topic.
Electric servos for steering wheels use safety critical code, with lot of safety checks, and use direct drive. No need for silly patent for common sense out of the United States.
Indeed I do, but also many other unnecessary innovations came out of SV, as well as some interesting Research, which end up used for solving problems which don't exist.
Most of the research coming out of SV tech companies nowadays is yet annother chat platform, and reimplementing broken C code in broken JavaScript code.
Is it making the World a better place? I don't think so. Is it making it a worse place? Only for other developers :)
> Like the hoteliers who don't allow gay people to stay ?
Even that is OK in my opinion. The market will sort it out. There are clubs where gay people can have a good time. If gay accomodation becomes a niche market, there will be people seizing that opportunity. The law shall not discriminate people, but telling people what to think and forcing them doing stuff they don't agree with is dictatorship.
Also, if it was xenophobic. So what? Doesn't a businessman have the right to choose who to do business with?
I believe free trade is a good thing, but seems like many americans mistook free trade for gunboat diplomacy (see opening of Japan). In my understanding free trade is free as in free will: both parties voluntarily take part in the exchange of goods and services.
Also one can be patriotic in a way that he/she (no xe!) wants to preserve the cultural heritage, which is not only buildings and artifacts in museums, but also customs. Customs can be preserved by people sustaining them by continuously acting according to them. Local customs can be ruined pretty quickly via a huge influx of tourists.
Example: In my younger day I could see elderly people sitting in the small parks around playgrounds and children playing at some parts of the city. Now in these parts of the city what I can see is playgrounds have been closed. Public places have been closed, no elderly talking, playing chess on a summer afternoon. Instead there are "party tourists" littering, being loud and drunk an sometimes acting atrociously as early as 2pm on weekdays. A local custom (socialization of the locals) has been wiped by tourism. Slowly locals are freeing the "party district".
I can understand why one wants to avoid such situation (even as Michelin -tourists are not this troublesome, but starts a trend, which can even lead here). Is this xenophobic, then be so. I understand why people want to be xenophobic then.