Exactly - just a Linux box, mounted with SSHFS. To be fair, I have spent some time over the years writing my own scripts for SMART alerts, but the end result is better monitoring and alerting than a NAS would provide.
I agree, if the lender makes cheaper credit available, and if borrowers are automatically provided with drops in their loan rates. If borrowers have to shop around for a better deal and pay fees in the process, this would dull the effect of a lower base rate.
Some other reasons that the ECB wishes to fight deflation are described here:
Euros exist in physical form (notes and coins). There is a digital form of Euros already, called "reserves". However, only banks and other financial institutions are able to hold these reserves (they are allowed to have reserve accounts at the ECB).
What you have in your bank account is "credit" from the bank to you. You can currently ask to withdraw this credit in the form of physical Euros.
A "Digital Euro" would mean that regular people could hold digital Euros at an account they hold with the ECB, just like the large financial institutions do.
This could be useful to allow the ECB to fight price deflation, because:
1. The ECB can directly credit the accounts of hundreds of millions of Europeans (without having to go via banks). This would mean they could fine-tune policy by depositing small amounts every single day in every single account. This solves the "pushing-on-a-string" problem of the ECB making it cheap for banks to lend, but finding that the banks are still unwilling to lend or that people are unwilling to borrow. The ECB could also decide to only top-up the accounts of people with low balances, so that aid is targeted.
2. The ECB can more effectively increase money velocity by enforcing negative interest rates. You can currently avoid negative interest rates by simply withdrawing physical Euros from your bank. But if the ECB discontinues or restricts the availability of physical Euros, you will only be able to withdraw Digital Euros from your bank. If your Euros are digital, you cannot avoid a negative interest rate.
Although price deflation is great if you have money or are owed money, price deflation makes it difficult for people who owe money to repay their loans. This is because their labor is earning them less money each year compared to the debt they owe. This is why the ECB and other central banks are very concerned about price deflation.
It's important for the US dollar to maintain reasonably constant and predictable purchasing power from year to year. This is part of their dual mandate. Their target is just under 2% inflation per year, as measured by the Core-PCE index. If the dollar didn't have reasonably constant and predictable purchasing power, people would be afraid either to issue or to take out loans denominated in USD.
Manipulating the supply of the dollar via interest rate adjustments, along with open market operations, is how the Fed attempts to control inflation.
I notice that the OpenJDK build is only available as a .tar.gz and not as .rpm
This means that to upgrade from Oracle JDK10 -> Open JDK11, you'll have to write a script yourself to modify the symlinks e.g. to redirect the existing "/etc/alternatives/java -> /usr/java/jdk-10.0.x/bin/java" to the new installation. There are 46 of these symlinks that need changing (for javac, jstack, etc etc).
I hope that's the only change that is required and that I'm not missing something. Anyone know if there is anything else necessary?
Edit: here is the script I just wrote to print out the commands required to change the symlinks:
#!/bin/bash
existingJdkBinPath=$(dirname `readlink /etc/alternatives/java`)
newJdkPath="/opt/jdk-11"
find /etc/alternatives -type l | while read link; do
target=$(readlink "$link")
targetPath=$(dirname $target)
targetFile=$(basename $target)
if [[ $targetPath = $existingJdkBinPath ]]; then
newTarget="$newJdkPath/bin/$targetFile"
echo ln -snf "$newTarget" "$link"
fi
done
> Why is it so crucial to their business model that the customers' deposits are deposited directly with the Fed
Note that whether interest was earned via IOER or via the Fed Funds market, the funds would be deposited with the Fed either way (whether in the bank's own Fed account or overnight in the Fed account of the counterparty of a Fed funds loan).
It wouldn't be possible to accept transfers from other banks, to send funds to other banks or to participate in the Fed Funds market unless the bank had an account with the Fed.
On the point of "risk-free", the TED spread was north of 1% for much of the 20 months between August 2007 and April 2009, and peaked at over 4%. So it's not always what I'd call negligible risk. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TEDRATE
Because then you have counterparty risk, which means you then have greater regulatory/compliance costs and have to pay up to 0.4% on assets for FDIC insurance.
The "Confidential Transactions" scheme for cryptocurrencies uses homomorphic encryption.
The idea is that you can prove that the encrypted input and output amounts in a transaction balance to zero, without having to actually reveal what any of those amounts are.
That is absolutely not true. OneTab has never, ever transmitted any information about your tabs outside of your browser, and will never divulge them. I'm the developer. OneTab has never made a penny, and absolutely does and always will deliver on the privacy promise.
The situation is confusing, because of the difference between physical and financial assets. It's possible for everyone to simultaneously save physical assets, but mathematically impossible for everyone to simultaneously save financial assets.
Imagine two people alone on a desert island. Both can save up firewood (a physical asset) during their entire working lives. They can then both retire and enjoy their savings (firewood) during their retirement. So it is possible for everyone to simultaneously save physical assets.
However, financial assets are reciprocal. One person's financial asset is another person's liability. That liability can be thought of as an 'obligation to perform'. In the desert island example, they both cannot save up obligations from each other and then retire, because there would be no one working to perform the obligations.
If everyone has 'saved' as many obligations owed to them as they've accumulated obligations they owe to others, then that's the equivalent of no one having saved at all.
So it's mathematically impossible for everyone to accumulate savings in the form of financial assets. Either everyone has net zero savings, or some people have financial savings and other people have financial debt.
Therefore the healthy approach is for people to work while they can to accumulate financial obligations owed to them by the next generation, so that when they retire there is someone around to fulfil those obligations.
Therefore everyone saving prior to retirement is certainly virtuous, because it means you've done work for others so that when you retire, they're not just forced to provide for you for free. It would have been a fair deal where you did something for others and now they're doing something for you.
So just because not everyone can save, that doesn't mean it's not virtuous to save during your working life.
Can there ever be a mechanism that prevents people from reverse engineering the protocol to announce to the network that they're viewing ads, so that they can earn BATs for doing nothing? Their incentive would be to use these BATs to pay for premium content. This would undermine the value of BATs and damage the ecosystem.
FYI this functionality is 'automagically' implemented by specifying just a web site URL within the http://www.protopage.com RSS reader. It scans a web site and figures out which are the article headlines and links.