How is art liquid? I don't know much about art but my gut feeling would be that it is very illiquid by default. Also very hard to value and difficult to know which pieces will actually have value 10 years from now.
> Compared to ruling by force, yes, democracy is inherently good for the people
I don't understand why people here see democratic system as a replacement for ruling by a force. Democratic countries also rule by force in the end. Democratic countries also need polices, guns, armies, prisons, tax inspectors, prosecutors etc. Those same institutions are also the tools for dictatorships, they are just governed in a different way.
(I also think democracy is good, but however in the end both democracies and dictatorships rely on violence to be effective. I think that's quite basic lesson on how society works.)
There are plenty of people who don't consent on a daily basis. The actions range from peaceful protests to traitorous acts. How does a democracy deal with them? Force.
So? It's still force in alignment with the majority. That is better than force in alignment with one central power that may or may not have public interest.
> What has been created by this half century of massive corporate propaganda is what's called "anti-politics". So that anything that goes wrong, you blame the government. Well okay, there's plenty to blame the government about, but the government is the one institution that people can change... the one institution that you can affect without institutional change. That's exactly why all the anger and fear has been directed at the government. The government has a defect - it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect - they're pure tyrannies. So therefore you want to keep corporations invisible, and focus all anger on the government. So if you don't like something, you know, your wages are going down, you blame the government. Not blame the guys in the Fortune 500, because you don't read the Fortune 500. You just read what they tell you in the newspapers... so you don't read about the dazzling profits and the stupendous dizz, and the wages going down and so on, all you know is that the bad government is doing something, so let's get mad at the government.
No, you're trying to speak for him. Consent to, say, physical assault being illegal, is a whole different ball game than manufactured consent to the Vietnam War, and all that is entailed in this wishy-washy stuff about "consent" in this context. Not to mention "democracy reacting by force to protest" -- as opposed to what, exactly? Non-democracies? Companies? People clicking buttons on HN? Nobody bothers to say, making it all an exercise in throwing shade at the one means of self-defense we have left.
> The neoliberal era of the last generation is dedicated, in principle, to destroying the only means we have to defend ourselves from destruction. It's not called that, what it's called is shifting decision-making from public institutions, which at least in principle are under public influence, to private institutions which are immune from public control, in principle. That's called "shifting to the market", it's under the rhetoric of freedom, but it just means servitude. It means servitude to unaccountable private institutions.
-- Noam Chomsky
> It is possible for both the government and the private sector to be corrupted
Obviously, but the private sector isn't "corrupt" when it's a tyranny, that's the best it can hope to be. The government is responsibility of the citizens in a democracy, not something purely external they get to just complain about.
Get off your high horse. Chomsky speaks for himself. We interpret his words differently.
I still don't see the obvious difference between consenting to "typical" law enforcement (read: "physical assault being illegal") and consenting to imperialistic wars all over the globe. In both cases the government employs its monopoly on legal violence and is empowered to do so by our consent.
Of course the distinction between reasonable law enforcement and horrible wars of aggression is obvious, but when the exact same mechanism used to manufacture consent for the latter is also used to manufacture consent for the systematic oppression of racial minorities through law enforcement, it absolutely is not.
> Obviously, but the private sector isn't "corrupt" when it's a tyranny, that's the best it can hope to be.
Is the officially accepted purpose of a private enterprise specifically and exclusively to create wealth for its owners, or have we just resigned ourselves to that reality? Isn't this supposed to be the most effective mode of production?
Yes, but you don't have to "manufacture" consent to, say, assault being illegal in anyone but sociopaths. That's the differnce. It's like saying "discussing in good faith and bashing our skulls in are actually both chemical and physical processs, I fail to see the obvious difference".
> Is the officially accepted purpose of a private enterprise specifically and exclusively to create wealth for its owners, or have we just resigned ourselves to that reality? Isn't this supposed to be the most effective mode of production?
> There are plenty of people who don't consent on a daily basis. The actions range from peaceful protests to traitorous acts. How does a democracy deal with them? Force.
Let's say for the sake of argument that I am an American citizen and that I do not consent to the tear gassing and pepper spraying of college aged young adults, nor do I consent to Chelsea Manning being jailed and Snowden being in exile. Does that make me a sociopath? I'm only scratching the surface here.
In any case, I recall saying that "much" of the consent was manufactured and not "all" of it.
Even in anarchy, humans form groups because it's better than being alone. Every group has rules. Members can choose to follow them and enjoy the benefits or leave the group and lose the benefits.
Governments don't follow this logic. Nobody consciously decides that they want to be governed, they just happen to be born on a particular territory. Most people can't just reject the laws and leave, and those that can are really just choosing between other governments. They can't simply create another country with their own laws and invite people over.
The social contract isn't really a contract, it's an imposition.
No, you voted at the democratic election. There is no question on the ballot asking whether or not you consent to be ruled by the resulting government.
Differences are astonishing. It's Ok for a despotic country to murder their property, or property of some other country when net effect is positive for them. For them, it's like a plantation: if we cut some trees, or cut grass, then net yield from field will increase, so lets do it. If you are good plant and in good place, you will be left. If not, you will be cut.
For example, it's Ok for Russian Federation to kill their own or foreign people (e.g. British citizens), or start a war just to increase their profit from their natural gas.
Are you positive western democratic republics don't murder and/or start wars for profit ? Last I heard the USA's army and secret services were pretty active.
What's different about their armies and ours ? I mean when was the last time citizens of a democratic republic gave their input on what assassination to carry out or war to wage ?
There is definitely a point about overt, extreme abuse against their own citizens being mostly prevented by representative democracy. But nothing about general consent or agency.
If you don't consent to democracy, you implicitly consent to non-democracy. That means you consent to being ruled without your consent. And that's what you got.
I'm not sure what the parent meant by consent, but you are in fact allowed to leave and resign your citizenship. So you aren't forced into the constitution.
In this case you also have the right to vote and get equal representation. I'm not saying it's an amazing position to be in, but I can't think of any way to make things more consensual on all sides.
In practical sense, voting in a democratic republic is simply choosing, very infrequently, between a set of pre-defined parties. Only the natural supporters of the most popular party are given real agency. Any other viewpoint is discarded by design.
That a candidate is elected, doesn't mean they have anything close to 50% real support in the population. They just need to embody the one set of decisions that the largest homogeneous group of people agree with. That could very easily be a low single digit percentage of the population.
Smaller scope, heterogeneous governments with protected passageways in-between them would be a way to make things more consensual. If people can chose between multiple governments while still staying in similar climate and language-speaking areas, then you could say they really "chose to live in their country".
The agency situation for the average democratic republic citizen is not great right now. Exercising the negative side of consent requires huge sacrifices that many rationally can't make.
It's less rule by consent and more rule by mob. Just because 50.5% of people vote for something I disagree with, doesn't mean I suddenly consent to it being law. I still don't have a choice and must unconsentually comply, otherwise "men with monopoly on legal violence" come and kill me or take me to prison. The only other choices are 1. convince the 1% (literally millions) of people to change their mind and get that vote to 49.5%, or 2. find a different place to live.
Dictatorships rely solely on force. Democracies mostly rely on a common agreement to follow a social contract. There’s not nearly enough police in the US to quell a rebellion of the people if they lost faith in Democracy.
Not necessarily. Some dictatorships do enjoy genuine support. (Obviously they make it easier for themselves it by controlling the media etc.)
> There’s not nearly enough police in the US to quell a rebellion of the people if they lost faith in Democracy.
By the same token it's also possible to topple a dictatorship. At some point even your security forces will say "no". A good example would be the failure of "Plan X" in East Germany, when Stasi agents boycotted the orders, since they realized the cause was lost anyway.
There might just be enough police and military to quell any feasible rebellion, seeing as pretty much every country is divided along ideological lines.
MAGA types would, for instance, would never participate in a syndicalist general strike.
> I don't understand why people here see democratic system as a replacement for ruling by a force.
I would hazard a guess that a lot of us, that see it this way, are from culture backgrounds that still have historical recollection of "not democracy".
The definition of state is it's monopolisation of violence. But the difference is if it uses violence to keep the specific section of the ruling elite in power ... or just to keep the state (i.e. the entirety of the ruling elite) in power.
It's not the alternative, democratic countries also rule by force in the end. The governments wouldn't work if they didn't have guns, prisons and nice interrogation methods in their toolset.
With democratic country everyone has some minimal effect on how those tools of violence are used, unlike in dictatorships or monarchies. So I think also it is a better system.
Probably meant: business should make profit, from that profit the business can save some money for the rainy day. And I agree.
However I don't know who are behind PINE64 - maybe they have some long-term investor backing them up, and they try price at this point as low as possible to get the community going.
Actually, I would be interested in investing to this pine thing.
Well, personally I would prefer them to make profit. I would be willing to pay a bit more since the product seems quite interesting - not actually in the current state, but what the product could be if the business actually flourishes.
Better would be something like "Disclaimer: the product can have up to 10 dead pixels which are not covered by warranty."
I hear what you're saying, but to be clear, Pine Microsystems is not operating a pizza shop. It is much more like a hackerspace or community workshop then a merchant. They offer a direct-from-manufacturer business model, where a non-membership based community of interested stakeholders directly contribute to most if not all of the products. Check out the engineering blog posts.
If you are looking for a turnkey solution, not all of Pine64's offerings are able meet your needs (but do snag a $1.99 CH340 Serial console.) and if you preorder the "Braveheart" phone, there is no stable off the shelf OS prepared for it. You cannot buy this and mail it to ahead your hotel and give a demonstration to the board by next Thursday.
That said, and I don't think this is superlative at all, Pine64's efforts currently exemplify the internet dream of a "Global Village" economy.
> Small numbers (1-3) of stuck or dead pixels are a characteristic of LCD screens. These are normal and should not be considered a defect.
And:
> [...] make no profit from selling these units. If you think that a minor dissatisfaction, such as a dead pixel, will prompt you to file a PayPal dispute then please do not purchase the Pinebook. Thank you.
me too! that's exactly what I'm suggesting, that they should charge more to cover the %age of jerks that will file paypal chargebacks rather than ask people to be kind
> Instead, all effort is going into a building a flawed second layer that is theoretically unsound and a usability nightmare.
I don't know much about LN and actually I'm quite sceptical about it. However I have tried it now couple of times with different wallets and it seems to work very fluently from user perspective. And saying this as a very old bitcoin user, so I'm used to sending bitcoin payments a lot, LN payments don't seem to differ that much from usability perspective. You scan the QR code/invoice and press send.
LN requires an on-chain transaction to open a channel and another to close a channel which means it'll take 70 years to open a channel for everyone on earth and then close it once, assuming the blockchain does nothing else. If an intermediate node loses power all your channel money is locked for over 48 hours. It's also not even Bitcoin and could work just as well with any other cryptocurrency or probably even dollars honestly.
Then of course there's the features people actually want like dispute resolution, the ability to charge back, and so on.
Is the argument here that Lightning, or Bitcoin, is useless because everyoneonearth can not use it at the same time? Isn't that moving the goalposts, even a little?
Even if only a couple of thousand people could use it, as long as it is useful to them it has a niche. It might not be enough to justify insane valuations, of course, but that's another discussion entirely.
Traditional banking serves pretty much everyone on earth, without running into performance issues, so if Bitcoin is going to replace those banks then yes, it must do the same. And it was Bitcoin fanboys who declared that Bitcoin is here to replace fiat money, so you set that goalpost yourself.
No. Traditional banking doesn’t even serve everyone in the United States, with 55 million people unbanked or underbanked: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unbanked
This is the biggest misconception in the space (and that's saying a lot). They're un-banked and under-banked because they don't have money, not because the services don't exist. You want to solve this problem, solve wealth inequality and income inequality, don't pretend magic beans that cost $1-3 to transact will solve the problem for you. That's more than it costs you to use an Amex Bluebird or even a Green Dot card at an ATM, let alone a T-Mobile prepaid visa. And it's dropped half its value in the last two years (generously). Those are the people you want to disadvantage with a massively fluctuating currency?
Not to mention the low-income folks are most likely to have smartphones and therefore access to online banking with Ally or Schwab, which require $0 minimum balances and refund all ATM fees. You need a phone to use BTC, which means those same people can access Ally or Schwab and be objectively better off.
This is again a social problem in need of a social solution.
Postal banking is a great way to solve the access problem where it exists, too, like is done in the UK, and was in the US until the 1970s.
Sorry, this talking point is debunked, unless there's something I'm missing here.
Not having a bank account doesn't mean that the financial system isn't being used. If I get a paycheck and take it to a check cashing place, I'm still relying on the financial infrastructure and the banks and crypto isn't a viable alternative.
It's kind of a straw man to talk about opening LN channels for 7.5 billion people, as if that's something to be concerned about today. Not every man, woman and child has a cell phone or computer right now, so that's not really a concern in 2019.
Dispute resolution is built into the protocol: it's a two-way channel; both parties have to agree that the transaction in question took place and either party can close the channel if they wish.
And because LN is under heavy development, there are all kinds of new features being developed, like watchtowers that can monitor the channel on your behalf, etc.
You don't need chargeback if you can claim your money and close the channel if thing you want to happen isn't happening, right?
Yes, other cryptocurrencies (such as Ethereum) can create LN as a layer-2 feature.
No, you can't do this with dollars; since there's no cryptocurrency representation of USD with the required blockchain and scripting/smart contracts language required for LN—at least not yet.
Your figures are about right, but 70 years is a long time to assume nothing else changes.
As to "it's not even bitcoin" you're flat wrong. Holding a valid Bitcoin transaction is definitely Bitcoin, and with Lightning you always do. This is why it can't be done without bitcoin.
And from a FOSS development perspective, bitcoin is the only project in the *cryptos" space I consider serious. I wouldn't base a project of mine on any of the other chains, and I think I've earned my graybeard enough in FOSS to make that judgement.
[Disclaimer, I work on Lightning standards and one implementation, since 2015]
There are over 10,000 LN nodes right now, with a capacity of nearly $8 million and growing quickly. The site is called “1ML” because the goal is to get to 1 millions LN nodes: https://1ml.com
You have nodes running on smartphones now; as soon as you launch a LN app, the channel is opened. There are billions of smartphones out there, so the 70 years you quoted is not a thing.
It is more about the general "conspiracy" tone of the article. It is like "OMG banks can create money, what a conspiracy" by some people who are surprised by the facts on how financial system works when they finally learn some basics.
There is strong demand for any kind of vehicle which allows transferring value digitally outside of the traditional banking system. I don't think tether users trust tether because they advertise on their website that it is "backed", but more because they have strong need for something like it and there are no alternatives.
Of course the huge demand has been spotted by many others and now there are loads of these "stablecoins". Some are more regulated and might take quickly over if feds decide to stop tether.
There is strong demand for any kind of vehicle which allows transferring value digitally outside of the traditional banking system.
Crypto supporters have been saying this for a decade, but outside of money laundering, drug sales, and hodle profiteering, no such demand has been shown to exist.
Of course the huge demand has been spotted by many others and now there are loads of these "stablecoins". Some are more regulated and might take quickly over if feds decide to stop tether.
If the "feds" go after tether, they will also go after the alternative stablecoins.
Debatable whether the feds would go after the competing stablecoins, but depending on the logic for the prosecutions/seizures, there are outcomes where they're economically inviable.
e.g. If Tether gets shut down because of fraudulent misuse of reserves, then the government might be OK with some aboveboard execution. If on the other hand they get shut down for money laundering via tether, well, stablecoins exist to enable that, and if they can't enable that they likely don't have a use case large enough to support the engineering/operational teams required to run them.
The good side of being ugly guy like me is that I always can spot these scams and never even respond to them - I just instantly block them. Because I know that no such a beautiful lady would actually approach me.
However I guess the scammers will soon figure this out and start using normal looking ladies in these contacts. Similar to those "bang ugly chicks near you" advertisements on porn sites.
Tether supply is 4.2 billion, Madoff defrauded 60+ billion, so tether is nothing compared to Madoffs scheme. Also, tether is stablecoin - people don't buy it for investment purposes. Patio11 is still sour that he was against bitcoin when it was $1 and it seems to be difficult to get over it, therefore the strongly negative bias towards everything crypto.
However if you take into account where the writer is coming for, the article is quite good at explaining the situation.
Tether has gigantic red flags including not being able to actually exchange it for dollars even though it is pegged to dollars. It's so brazen it's hard to even believe it.
You cannot withdraw your Tether balance. They literally do not allow that. The best you can do is get an intermediary coin that some places might let you change into cash or another crypto.
As I understand tether allows direct conversions to fiat, you just need big enough amount. Also it is very easy to convert to bitcoin, which is very easy to convert to fiat.
The minor difference is that you can withdraw your balance from banks, but you cannot redeem Tethers to what it's supposed to be backed by: U.S. dollars.
I'm not advocating for tether. But it is not a ponzi scheme. And I think that most of the users understand what tether is - they are not excepting returns, they also understand that it is unregulated vehicle where the backing can disappear any time if the issuers get into trouble. I would guess biggest use-case is moving fiat between exchanges without having compliance issues, which you would have with banks.
Correct, Tether is not a ponzi scheme, because a ponzi scheme is a specific type of scam vehicle in which earlier investors are paid their "profits" out of the investments made by later investors.
In Tether, only the original investors get profits, which they get form everyone else investing in Tether, so this is an entirely different type of scam.
It does fill a need, and no one expects returns from it, but it most likely is fractionally reserved by btc. This means that if the price of btc drops too low and too many people cash out then it's over, because each tether cashed out will mean more and more btc are required.
I think it is fractionally reserved with bitfenix's btc deposits. A while back you could see their master address, which hundreds of millions of USD worth of btc.
It's not fractionally reserved. Fractionally reserved banking implies that only a fraction of the reserve is in liquid cash (And that the remainder exists as independently audited, but not immediately liquid investments, backed by an insurance policy.)
Tether has never been independently audited, whatever non-liquid reserves/investments they have are not backed by an insurance policy. It is not a fractional reserve. It's a con artist's idea of "Hey, I can just open a bank, take 80% of the deposit money, do 'things' with it, and claim I am running a fractional reserve."
