"The "It's not X -- it's Y" pattern, often with an em dash. The single most commonly identified AI writing tell. Man I f*cking hate it. AI uses this to create false profundity by framing everything as a surprising reframe. One in a piece can be effective; ten in a blog post is a genuine insult to the reader. Before LLMs, people simply did not write like this at scale."
This one hit home... the first time I ever saw Claude do it I really liked it. It's amazing how quickly it became the #1 most aggravating thing it does just through sheer overuse. And of course now it's rampant in writing everywhere.
Keep in mind stablecoins aren't a product built for Americans, they're built for people outside the US financial system to give them access to some of the benefits of the US's relatively solid money.
If it's a fraud, then it's one with a working product.
In 2022 when confidence in stablecoins plummeted after the Terra collapse, $20 billion in Tether was liquidated in a month - $10 billion of that in a single day: https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/tether
Through that black swan event Tether did its job, processing redemptions for collateral dollar for dollar.
People hold dollar-backed stablecoins because they believe the US dollar to be the most durable unit of account on the planet.
All the proof you really need for that is that most crypto users outside the US still consider the value of their crypto tokens in terms of how many US dollars it’s worth.
The author of this article talks about this being a “parasite” to the US monetary system, but it’s hard to think of a better thing that could’ve happened for the US. Not only has it reinforced that dominance… it’s also driven hundreds of billions of dollars of US treasury bills purchases from providers like Tether and USDC.
I can’t really think of a better, more concise pitch for cryptocurrencies than “ideally you could just have a foreign bank account that your country cannot touch.”
As someone from the US who's traveled all over the country for fun, I can assure you there are loads of delightfully unique places and rich communities that think and act quite differently from each other.
But yes I could see how work travel only could make them feel like carbon copies - both from the mindset you'd be in and from the types of places you might only go for work.
If you want to celebrate your birthday at the moment earth reaches the same spot around the sun as when you were born, then we’d all have the same issue - we’d have to celebrate it 6 hours later every year, reseting every 4 years.
February 29 is very much a new day… which simply doesn’t exist on non-leap years.
there's a (small) chance that the moon landing was the first time a living organism successfully chose to visit another celestial body in the entire history of the universe.
"basically a photo op" is such a strange way to think of that.
I’m not saying fiat currency doesn’t store value… just that, of the functions of money, it’s better as a medium of exchange + unit of account where you care way more about price stability and liquidity.
A good store of value is scarce, durable, transferable and divisible - and I think most people agree that you compromise scarcity to get price stability.
We don’t have to take anyone’s word on this though you can just look at what endowments and wealth funds hold to see what people believe are the best stores of value: https://www.nbim.no/en/the-fund/investments/#/
I think you're confusing store of value with medium of exchange... most people don't really store value in currencies long term - usually they just keep enough to pay near term bills.
Stores of value are things like stocks, bonds, treasuries, real estate... and yeah commodities like gold and bitcoin. People don't care so much about volatility if they're planning to park their value there for a long time.
Ahhyeah I see now it only has a few upvotes - there must've been an algorithm glitch because it was the #5 story on the front page when I clicked on it.
The topic is relevant, but the format of long Q&As with a lot of info on the people and the company, which to me as a random HN reader feels irrelevant, plus the click-baity title, made it look out of place on the front page.
This comes up near the top when you search "Google Maps My Saved Places" and now a random list with 1 saved place - the USDA Cereal Disease Lab in Minneapolis, MN - has a whole bunch of views.
When Tether started, most financial institutions weren't open to working with cryptocurrency companies, but the fact that it's still the top stablecoin by value is troubling since there are plenty of better options now.
Yes I 100% agree Lightning Network solves a lot of the medium of exchange issues and in a really cool way too.
I don't see the volatility stopping though. And being volatile upwards might be good for the spender who's been saving that money long term, but probably not for the seller who needs to count on that revenue to cover its monthly expenses.
A good medium of exchange should have:
- Little to no transaction fee
- Near instantaneous transaction time
- stable value
The characteristics of Bitcoin that make it such a good store of value make it really bad at these. Computation-heavy proof of work creates a secure and immutable network, but also makes it more expensive and slows down transaction times. It's scarcity makes it a speculative asset prone to booms and busts, but gives it the best chance of long term value growth.
But I guess what you're saying is that as a buyer, why would I not want my money to live as a strong store of value up until the point of transaction, which I think I agree with. It'd be nice if you could own Amazon stock and then pay at McDonalds with USD taken out of the value of those stocks (though tracking capital gains would be annoying). In that situation though, Amazon stock is the good store of value and United States Dollar is the good medium of exchange.
This one hit home... the first time I ever saw Claude do it I really liked it. It's amazing how quickly it became the #1 most aggravating thing it does just through sheer overuse. And of course now it's rampant in writing everywhere.