Notwithstanding the other awful aspects of all of this, there’s a certain vibe of, “people who don’t understand how a system works attempting to act like they know how the system works and are too cowardly to admit they are breaking everything.”
This just reads like “Character Limit” except replace Twitter with the federal government.
To repeat popular quotes, there's a lot of walking up to fences gaily and then tearing them down, and a lot of "Government doesn't work, vote for us and we'll prove it"
Not much to say. If anyone is truly on the fence, please remember this and vote against it in 2026. Vote early, vote often. Vote local. I promise that killing trans people and defunding science is not going to make gas cheaper or anything.
It reminds me of the Gordian knot myth. All these sages had tried and failed to untie it. Alexander the Great, a true jock, sliced it in half with his sword.
Trump and Musk style themselves after Alexander. They see the complexities of geopolitics, security, culture and economics, and they have contempt for that complexity. They give simple, brutal solutions for hard problems: War in Europe? Force Ukraine to surrender! Slow to change government policy? Fire Federal workers and consolidate power! Too many illegal immigrants? Send them to Guantamo! And it feels active, it feels efficient, it's cathartic, and so their base cheers them on as they take swings at the load-bearing walls of our country. The fulminant narcissism, impulsive mania and willful ignorance are adaptive, to them.
And the names of the sages are forgotten, but Alexander is still known as one of history's great leaders and founder of an empire. It seems the personality traits one would look for in a productive citizen or a nice neighbor are almost antithetical for making it into history books.
Sometimes the only way to know something is important is to shut it off and see if anyone complains. For example, lots of stories in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9629714. Now certainly the Trump administration could have been more careful, but they only have 4 years so the Facebook motto of "move fast and break things" applies.
> the Facebook motto of "move fast and break things" applies.
That’s seriously begging the question of whether a website started to rate the attractiveness of Zuckerberg’s classmates has the same consequences for society if it fails as the government. When you work on something which actually matters, there are virtues other than speed. What the Republicans are doing is like clearing your lawn by setting it on fire, saying they didn’t have time to do anything slower.
It’s estimated that just the USAID cuts alone are on the order of hundreds of children being born HIV positive every day, not to mention the impact of food aid disappearing during a famine, or shutting down the last option for afghan women to get educated:
The science funding has a lower death toll, of course, but it profoundly disrupts careers and pushes people out of the country. Someone educated in the United States who returns to their home country ends up competing with us and probably won’t come back. The grad student getting cut now will probably end up leaving science entirely (people need to make rent and student loan payments) so we’ll be missing out on their lifetime achievements and also the later-career guidance they would have given the next generation.
The federal government as a whole becomes less efficient because fewer top people will be willing to work for lower pay without job security and every contractor will be pricing in future disruption.
Thats fine for a sofrware startup because it fundamentally doesn't matter. Who cares if your silly website fails after you experiment, no one gets seriously hurt.
Shutting off the government means that things can be irreparably damaged. Losing a generation of scientists because of random cullings at the NSF will have effects for decades.
In the worst case, "moving fast and breaking things" with the government will kill people. For example, many patients were kicked off clinical trials during the NIH funding freeze. Abroad, the end of PEPFAR could kill untold numbers of people.
To be rather abrasive in my response: I believe your view is a waste of air. In case I'm correct how about we cut you off from air for a week and if there's a problem we'll restore it then.
That is how a large portion of the internet works, e.g. in most subreddits certain viewpoints will be instantly banned without any discussion. HN is kind of strange in that respect.
I figured it was a rather apt example of how the turn it off and wait until someone complains doesn't work if the damage done in the wait until it's restored time isn't repairable. The abrasive personal example is because he's ignoring that this view has many people's lives at risk when we talk about programs like usaid.
All of the important programs have temporary restraining orders. That's actually the standard the judge applies, "is there a possibility of irreparable harm?" (e.g. lives lost). It's not perfect but no system is.
> but they only have 4 years so the Facebook motto of "move fast and break things" applies.
Except with the federal government “things” in many instances refers to people’s lives. What’s the acceptable body count to you, as we approach haphazardly and unconstitutionally reducing the deficit?
> Sometimes the only way to know something is important is to shut it off and see if anyone complains.
These government programs aren't stray servers in a closet.
Even if you believe that these programs should be stopped, it's entirely wasteful to abruptly end them and let their work in progress just crash out and burn.
But it's still a very bad idea to operate this way. There is no rapid feedback loop. The negative effects can be subtle and take years to ripple through the economy and science world.
Startups have nowhere to go but up. Large established companies have nowhere to go but down. Why do you think large organizations are so conservative? It's because getting new customers is much harder than losing existing customers. The US government has flaws, but it is phenomenal overall.
This is like taking over Apple and tearing apart its culture and management. Only bad will come out of it.
Have you been paying attention to Republicans over the last 40 years? They don't care if it's useful or important. They don't want government programs to exist.
There's certainly an argument that anything the government can do, the private sector can do better. That argument would conclude that the government should indeed not exist, and consequently have no programs. The reality is more complicated, something like the microkernel vs. monolithic kernel debate, but it is hard to say that the current distribution between private and public sectors is optimal.
Why would anyone use words spewed on the Joe Rogan show as some source of evidence where the host spouts wild conspiracy theories and inane ideas while cosplaying as an open minded average Joe?
General Motors and Standard Oil, through Ethyl Gasoline Corp. shared critical leaded gasoline / anti engine-knock technology with Germany, in order to enable their blitzkrieg. "In 1935 Ethyl Gasoline Corporation transferred its know-how to Germany for use in the Nazi rearmament program. This transfer was undertaken over the protests of the U.S. Government."
Are you able to point to a single case where Bitcoin was used as legal tender in an every day business transaction? By this I mean, can you give an example where someone ordered a cup of coffee with Bitcoin directly and not through a proxy?
Food, medicine, transportation, education, and everything else at or near the bottom of Maslow's pyramid of needs still cannot be directly purchased with bitcoin.
The other punchline to the Bitcoin joke is that it's finite. In 120 years it will begin to evaporate from existence as more and more wallets are simply lost to time.
It is highly divisible though, there’s 2.1e15 satoshi and 2.3e14 cents in the world (re google). It can lose 90% of itself before being unable to replace cents. Also, the network can just agree to change the protocol to fix this issue, should it arise. Countries do redenominations all the time.
What it really is is basically a consensus between participants. Once the consensus about a change gains critical mass, that change just happens, by someone coding it into the software and people updating to it. The change (fork) becomes mainstream and the old version becomes fringe. And vice versa, if consensus never achieved. There will be people who stay on old version anyway. It’s up to who believes in what, based on available software based on ideas that are worth new code.
How can anything ever be changed once 51% is abandoned?
I also think there will be a gold rush of hacking old wallets one day when the encryption is broken. Not sure if that will happen before or after btc failure though. You can’t upgrade security on lost wallets.
I think you're confusing proof of work with proof of stake. The integrity of the Bitcoin network is enforced by the miners agreeing on the rules, not by anyone staking their ownership for governance.
That would be terrible for the economy and everyone not sitting on piles of bitcoin.
It’s hard to imagine a financial instrument that’s less suited to be used as an actual currency than bitcoin. Even going back to the gold standard would be a better idea.
I mean, what I'm about is really the same, just the other way round. Countries usually erase zeroes after hyperinflation adds them, cryptocoins can just add extra zeroes due to deflation. No change in value, just higher granularity.
The rest left me puzzled, can you elaborate? Why should the money holder do anything productive? Why getting richer and richer becomes something bad when we go crypto?
> Why should the money holder do anything productive? Why getting richer and richer becomes something bad when we go crypto?
This question works better the other way round. Why should people that do all the work and take all the investment risks to make the riches get continually decreasing returns on their efforts whilst the people that sit and HODL get continually increasing returns on doing nothing?
Because people are willing to pay more. Why should I make money because my house is worth more than it was? Because people are willing to pay more. There's no more "should" required than that.
Um... if the only legal tender around was an asset with fixed supply, people holding it wouldn't be willing to pay more, (or invest it in making more stuff) that's the whole point.
But you see my point, right? I'm challenging the question of "why should someone buy that thing for more than the seller paid for it?" The answer is: because the new buyer is willing to pay that for it.
Because starting a business might still lead to higher returns for you than hoping that your money will be worth more.
One thing i’ve always wondered: If something like Bitcoin was the only currency, then it would be like a direct mapping of 21 Million Bitcoin <-> all global economic activity and goods and services. In that case, shouldn’t its price be relatively stable, and might actually even go down sometimes? Like in big natural disasters increasing the cost of certain goods?
I’m not a crypto zealot, but I’m not a big believer in the idea that the economy needs to be stimulated and I need to be forced to spend my money before it loses its value. I just want to buy what I need or really want.
And in the hypothetical case of having a mapping of “all economic activity” <-> “21M payment units”, then the relative stability of this money might still make investments more lucrative than just hoping for my money to be worth slightly more tomorrow. In this hypothetical scenario it would be more like “my money is worth 1000 eggs today, next month it might be 1001 (if others grow the economy) or 999 (if something unforeseen happens halfway across the globe). So if an investment looks like it might yield the value of 1100 eggs there would still be people to take the risk of investing, no?
Any type of economic activity in USD involves paying rent or huge surplus to those who hoarded real estate (which doesn’t go away any soon). I don’t see the big difference here. Doesn’t mean it’s a good thing, but let’s at least apply the arguments symmetrically.
Why would someone invest into or try to start a business when you can become richer by just sitting on your _property_ pile with no risk.
Well that implies that you are more or less economically illiterate. I’m not talking about property and even renting residential/commercial property (as relatively safe as it is) does provide an actual service.
Anyway.. a very basic example, imagine you have $1000000, you can:
- keep it under your bed and lose 2% every year
- invest it into real estate etc. and make e.g. 4% every year.
- invest into the stock market and make 6%.
Now with a deflationary currency like bitcoin (or gold back in the mid to late 1800s) you can just hoard it and conservatively make 2-3% every year* invest into safe bonds and gain another 3-4%. Business would need to grow at an extremely fast pace to be able to attract much capital in such an environment.
* of course it’s only hypothetical. You’d need the economy to grow and productivity to increase YoY for this. That would be unlikely in any economy that used Bitcoin as its primary currency.
>The other punchline to the Gold joke is that it's finite. In 120 years it will begin to evaporate from existence as more and more gold chests are simply lost to time.
That's because it's actually quite sane; relying on commodity backed currencies - especially those which are _finite_ leads to deflation. You see that with BTC, where the value keeps rising and you need more and more fractional denominations to make sense. With gold (and historically, more so silver), it was _very rarely_ used for actual trade because it ended up being like five gold coins == someone's entire life savings. It was always silver, copper and unit of account.
Debased currency - a problem every large state eventually faced - is a consequence of deflation.
>Debased currency - a problem every large state eventually faced - is a consequence of deflation
Inflation in the monetary supply, not deflation, leads to the debasement of a currency. An example is how the influx of gold from the conquistadors into 16th century Spain led to inflation, due to the increased supply of this means of exchange resulting in the debasement in value of a given unit of this means of exchange.
Edit: I'd remembered wrong. It was silver, not gold, that Spain experienced an influx of.
> Inflation, not deflation, leads to the debasement of a currency. An example is how the influx of gold from the conquistadors into 16th century Spain led to inflation, due to the increased supply of this means of exchange resulting in the debasement in value of a given unit of this means of exchange.
No, that's not debasement - in fact it was the opposite, the huge supply of silver (not so much gold) meant those Spanish coins were good-quality bullion. Inflation happened, and while that can commonly be caused by debasement, that wasn't the cause in this instance.
I was more thinking in terms of the modern conception of currency debasement resulting from the increase in the monetary supply, though I think I must have just been thinking of the real, not the escudo. Several years ago, I read a couple of books on the conquistadors, where the details of the devaluation of silver was discussed, but it's been a while since the information was fresh in my mind.
Interesting take. Therefore they needed a bridge between the deflationary BTC and a low-inflationary day-to-day note. Is there an obvious fix, my liege?
I used to pay my dish network bill with it before they stopped accepting it. I've also used it to send money to friends and family, and to donate to open source projects and other things.
If the fees were lower I'd use it for plenty of other things too.
With all due respect, why not Bitcoin Cash or some other coin? Bitcoin Cash is the exact same thing as Bitcoin - same protocol, same 21 million coin limit, same Satoshi whitepaper, same everything, except bigger blocks and thus, much lower fees. If you are using a coin as an actual currency, and not as a speculator, why stick with high-fee Bitcoin?
Took a lot of scrolling to find a mention of Bitcoin Cash.
I used to believe in Bitcoin in the beginning, but the high fees make it impractical to use as everyday currency.
Bitcoin Cash is much closer to what I had hoped Bitcoin would become. It’s the same as Bitcoin, except that it ideologically split exactly for the reason that some people wanted it to behave more like an actual currency, while others invented the “digital gold” narrative.
Gresham's law says that "bad money drives out good". Due to the dynamic this describes, it is unlikely bitcoin would commonly be used to buy and sell things even if it did not suffer practical obstacles.
Bitcoin experiences less inflation than regular currencies. Some coins get created now, but over time we know its character will become deflationary: no new coins will be created, and some will be lost at times due to poor wallet management.
As a result, people will chose to spend other currency in preference to spending bitcoin. This is self-reinforcing. The infrastructure will not be in place to use it on the odd occasion that someone wanted to.
You could create a blockchain currency which had a natural and continuous rate of inflation, to encourage people to spend it. You could bootstrap this by mutualising it across an industry. e.g. imagine if the largest datacentre groups got together to create ModestlyInflationaryCoin, and then said they would offer discounts to customers who paid in ModestlyInflationaryCoin, as a means of bootstrapping it. Other groups might start to use it, and it would stay in circulation because people would want to be rid of it once they had it.
Even if such a currency existed, it would probably be short-lived. /Once it was bootstrapped/, its stakeholders would have strong incentive to change its contract to be non-inflationary. Making that change would convert their holdings from Bad Money to Good Money, and as a result the character it would significantly increase its value.
But the datacentre groups could then mutualise a new currency in place of the old one. It is possible that there is a virtuous loop here, and that there will be a race to quality in currencies in our future, grown from how easy it is to create new currencies. We might start to see the identity of currencies a bit more like the way we see futures contracts in our current era.
Society needs at least some inflation for things to keep moving, but an individual usually wants the opposite.
The elected government serves the society of its citizens, while inventors and holders of unofficial currencies are individuals who ultimately serve only themselves.
There is a legitimate role for both things: to have some non-inflationary things that serve as a store-of-value, and then some inflationary things to serve as regular currency.
It is worth emphasising here: non-inflationary currency does not grow its value, so it would be unusual for people to want to put their wealth exclusively into store-of-value. Rather, most people will want a mix of inflationary-currency, store-of-value, and investment in growth-generating businesses.
When people talk about wanting to use bitcoin as a day-to-day currency, I feel like they are missing the best benefit if could offer us.
We already have effective day-to-day currencies. But we have not had a reliable store of value. The US, UK and Australia each have a history of denying ownership of gold when it suits them, which is when people need it most.
The lack of reliable store-of-wealth has made it too-easy for governments to fleece wealth-generating people in order to buy votes. This is not the long-term strategic path, but it creates a race-to-the-bottom due to short-term incentives. Perhaps blockchain will change that, by allowing the creation of an easily accessed utility that sits beyond the easy influence of the nation state.
To be effective it does not need to be perfect, just better than the options we have now. It has been encouraging to me to see the CCP struggling with blockchain, and then outlawing it because they cannot control it.
An argument can be made that if there is a 100% reliable, maybe even deflationary, store of value, it would have a similar effect to currency deflation: since it is worth more tomorrow, then you are disincentivized to spend your wealth, and not spending wealth (not investing it in some value-producing enterprises, buying things and services) seems like a recipe for stagnation and wealth gap increase.
Is it even possible with BTC? I mean, how long does the transaction take to completely confirm? 30 mins? I guess if you paid way in advance; or loaded up a prepaid wallet.
If bitcoin utility is storing value outside of tax jurisdiction and moving it without obstruction, globally – then the question is Why should that even matter? Former is every rich person's dream, and latter enables a lot of things, good or bad.
A counter-example: can you come up to a coffee shop with a gold collectible coin, chew a piece out, and use it to pay for your coffee directly? You need a proxy in form of a pawn shop for that.
Instruments are instruments, if it is not used for every day business transactions doesn't mean it is not heavily ab-used inside it's niche
There have been stores which accepted bitcoin as payment. Webhallen.com is an electronics store in Sweden which at least used to accept bitcoin (not sure if they still do).
As a general rule it's not very convenient to do so though since the value can fluctuate. (Which naturally all currencies do, but it would be kind of like paying with USD in the EU. You could do that, but most stores are not interested in the extra hassle of keeping track of multiple currencies.)
It is also not uncommon for services like VPN or IPTV streaming ("pirate streaming") providers to accept crypto.
The post you're replying to is about Bitcoin being "used", not specifically "used for everyday transactions". Bitcoin has so far been a decent asset to hold as a store of value if you don't want to or can't store your money in the traditional financial system. Lots of everyday people in countries with high inflation or strict controls or how people can store money hold Bitcoin (or perhaps more commonly, stablecoins) for a very practical purpose other than speculation.
Bitcoin has only failed so far as a replacement for Visa and Mastercard. So no, nobody's using it to buy coffee.
>Bitcoin has only failed so far as a replacement for Visa and Mastercard. So no, nobody's using it to buy coffee.
It not being "used" in this context is referring to it not being used as legal tender. The law that was walked back was one which had made bitcoin legal tender throughout the country. As others have mentioned, it seems to have largely failed in being adopted as such, as surveys seem to indicate that less than 10% of people
in the country had used it as legal tender in the previous year.
Trying to use bitcoin like this is like trying to use certificates of deposit to buy coffee. Bitcoin is a store of value, it’s nonsense to try and use it like this. Look at Ethereum if you want a medium of exchange fit for the digital age.
It can work as a day-to-day currency, but it compromises the decentralization that is key to Bitcoin's usefulness as a store of value:
+ By allowing 8x larger blocks (unless it's even larger now?), if in widespread use with full blocks, the blockchain would be 8x larger. Bitcoin's blockchain is already the better part of 1TB, though you can still fit that on a cheap SSD. Imagine if it were 8 and growing fast.
+ Because BCH uses the same hash algo as Bitcoin, but is much less popular, it's at risk of 51% attack.
+ Because there is no pressure on block sizes, fees are very low, which means that as halvings continue the block rewards for BCH will get extremely small. This will result in hashrate continuing to decrease, putting it at even greater risk of 51% attacks. Bitcoin's high fees allow it to remain profitable for miners even without inflation. Miners have to be paid to keep the network secure, and that's either going to come from tx fees or from inflation. BCH aims to have neither and that puts it at risk.
And anyway, there are much better solutions for day to day payments, such as Monero and Ethereum.
> By allowing 8x larger blocks (unless it's even larger now?), if in widespread use with full blocks, the blockchain would be 8x larger. Bitcoin's blockchain is already the better part of 1TB, though you can still fit that on a cheap SSD. Imagine if it were 8 and growing fast.
This has always felt like a completely weaksauce argument to me. Even with Bitcoin, very few people other than dedicated miners download a full blockchain (like it or not). 1TB is already too large to keep on your phone or laptop, but 8TB is at most a minor inconvenience on a server or dedicated mining rig. What's the demographic where a measly factor of 8 makes a difference?
> very few people other than dedicated miners download a full blockchain
I'm gonna have to ask for evidence on this one, I strongly believe most full nodes are not mining pools. http://bitdash.io/ says there are ~10,000 running full nodes, yet there are only ~100 mining pools that have produced a block in recent history: https://miningpoolstats.stream/bitcoin
> 1TB is already too large to keep on your phone or laptop
On your phone, sure. But my desktop already has a few TB of storage. But not 8. And Bitcoin Cash supporters usually seem to indicate that they'd increase it beyond 8 if the 8mb blocks filled up.
Every Bitcoin Cash transaction is on the chain itself. Bitcoin is increasingly reliant on off-chain "Lightning" transactions. An extra few TB of data or majority of transactions not on the chain at all? I'll go with more data & transparency, thank you.
Disney Animation is based out of Burbank. I think the writing was on the wall when John Lasseter took over as head of basically all of Disney's animation groups which includes Pixar.
This just reads like “Character Limit” except replace Twitter with the federal government.