You're forgetting about difficulty adjustment. Every time mining gets more expensive large number of miners drop out. This causes the difficulty target to drop. The remaining miners then start mining more blocks and profits rise. As a system it has built-in economic incentives to keep in in homeostasis.
I read this comment in the spirit of "you might not have known that K did much more that write awk, but he's a genius." Which I didn't know, so I appreciate the context.
> Blue lets you post really really long tweets. Thats potentially interesting and useful
You mean degraded the user experience. People used to split their long-form thoughts out into a series of tweets ("a thread 1/8 -->") which I could read by simply scrolling down.
Now they still do this, but half of the tweets are too long to fit above the fold. I'll get to tweet #3 and have to click into it to read the text. Then scroll to tweet 4 and do it again. By the time I'm done I have to click back half a dozen times to return to my feed.
That or they post an essay in one tweet which is just terrible. Bad font, hard to read. And besides, I didn't come to Twitter to read long-form content. Make it concise.
It's amazing how one little change can ruin the UX. It's almost as if Elon didn't think through the downstream impact of his change, or why tweet limits existed in the first place.
> If crypto poses a legitimate threat to that power and control, it is much easier to remove the threat than to adapt your system to it.
In fact the opposite of this is happening. We are in a discussion about how the SEC was ordered by the courts to further integrate Bitcoin into the existing financial system. Despite their protests and attempts to impose their own will on the rights of the people.
> None exist and unlikely any will exist in the future (at least not the type of countries many people would want to live int)
El Salvador has already made Bitcoin a legal tender. I assume your no-true-scotsman addition of "any country somebody would want to live in" is meant to disqualify it? That's rather disrespectful to the 6 million people who live there in addition to being wrong.
In my opinion more countries will adopt it in the coming years and convert a small portion of their reserves to Bitcoin. Time will tell which of us is correct.
To the contrary, as long as you can hold through the volatility window of about 4 years, you are better off holding Bitcoin.
The price of a house used to be 100 bitcoin, then 10, now it's 5. Wait 10 years and it'll be 0.5. Meanwhile, hold dollars and the price keeps going up. You are defacto forced to put your saving in an investment vehicle to keep up with inflation, taking on risk.
Which shows that it was the impact of pretending their currency hadn't been devalued that dragged them through a prolonged depression. Had they simply priced gold at its true value in pounds, they would have gotten through it as quickly as France.
Why wait? It's been 15 years of Bitcoin outperforming every other asset. Nobody has found an exploit making the tech worthless, nor have competitors stolen its market share. Bitcoin is here to stay and the only ones shouting at it are too stubborn to ever admit it has value.
Heroku is great until you need to do something non-standard in your deployment, like compile node and configure a python virtualenv in the same deploy. Then you have to learn their Buildpack framework and that is a nightmare. It's a hugely complicated abstraction layer that, like one of the parent comments says, requires me to learn 200%. I have to learn all the steps to install/configure nodejs, then python, then how they decided to slap together a layer on top of it that made assumptions like you would only be doing one of these things.
Doesn't a circuit breaker imply human intervention? The point of DeFi is that you get some code running on a blockchain then release control. No central point of control. How this is going to work is beyond me. But without it a blockchain is just an expensive database.
They are trying to build a physical/digital bearer instrument. Not a company, pure cash in your pocket. Of course the standards for security are higher.
I don't understand your point. If a stablecoin issuer has trouble compiling a list of their assets that's a red flag. If a competitor comes out with simpler accounting I'll switch to them.
In reality, only 13% of our planet’s population is born into the dollar, euro, Japanese yen, British pound, Australian dollar, Canadian dollar or Swiss Franc. The other 87% are born into autocracy or considerably less trustworthy currencies. 4.3 billion people live under authoritarianism, and 1.2 billion people live under double- or triple-digit inflation. [https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/check-your-financial-pri...]
A little deflation discourages spending, a little inflation encourages it. A lot of either is ruinous. Your example is one with deflation at an average of 120% for a decade straight. How well would an economy with inflation of 120% work out? Just ask Argentina.
Maybe a little inflation is good for us, the problem is how often it becomes a lot. Since 1920, at least 55 hyperinflation events have taken place, destroying savings and creating economic hardship [1]. Such events generally result from the mismanagement of financial systems and the economy by central governments.
Bitcoin offers an alternative in which sound money exists outside the control of governments and central banks. Who knows where it'll go, but it's an interesting experiment.
The ponzi part was not the root cause, it merely sped up asset accumulation until it became a ripe enough target.
The root cause was the flawed arbitrage mechanism. It relied on always being able to redeem 1 UST for $1 equivalent of LUNA, and that relied implicitly on LUNA having value. Without that, whenever somebody cashes out UST they also cash out LUNA causing both prices to enter a death spiral.
And what value did LUNA have? Nothing more than the promises of the development team that you were getting in early on a soon-to-be-burgeoning ecosystem. "Hundreds of developers! Amazing new protocols!" In other words, vaporware. Which during a bull market can work for a time.
I agree with you that a functioning algorithmic stablecoin would be "genius". However I prefer calling it the Holy Grail of stablecoins. Powerful, if it exists.