> it nevertheless solves universal problems related to something everyone uses -- money.
You know what is a simpler, more energy efficient, universally accepted, easier to use, time-tested, fungible, stable, and better in almost every way form of money is?
Money.
All the tulip mania or dotcom stocks or Florida swampland or whatever bubble fueled by something valueless without any underlying guarantees will never supplant actual money.
I work on bitcoin, and am very involved in the community. Every single person I have interacted with, core developers included, dismissed bitcoin on first exposure, at least in the early days.
And I suggest that you sometime look into how national currencies work and the systemic risks involved. Bitcoin solves a real problem of trust and institutional moral corruption.
> Every single person I have interacted with, core developers included, dismissed bitcoin on first exposure, at least in the early days.
I was exactly the opposite. I was entranced by how cleverly the blockchain solved the n-party Byzantine Generals problem.
Then I realized the while bitcoin is a neat technical solution, it doesn't solve any real-world problems except committing crimes and fueling a bubble.
> Bitcoin solves a real problem of trust.
No, it doesn't.
For the vast majority of people on the planet, a stable fiat currency is more trusted and stable than e-tulips. Rational people trust banks more than they trust Mt. Gox.
Can you give me an example of a common situation where trust is lacking, where normal people would have been better off using bitcoin than say... VISA or Mastercard?
> Can you give me an example of a common situation where trust is lacking, where normal people would have been better off using bitcoin than say... VISA or Mastercard?
I guess that depends on whether you consider the 2+ billion people worldwide without access to payment networks like Visa or MasterCard "normal"...
I think the better question is whether cryptocurrencies are a better fit than existing options for those people.
> I guess that depends on whether you consider the 2+ billion people worldwide without access to payment networks like Visa or MasterCard "normal"...
how is bitcoin, a "currency" that fluctuates wildly in value, requires a decent computer (or modern smartphone) to hold a wallet, has very high transaction costs, and is incredibly easy to lose (though corrupted wallet, hacking, fraud, etc.) better than say... M-Pesa (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-Pesa) or PayTM (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paytm) which are widely accepted, runs on a cheap phone, has significantly lower transaction costs, and is significantly better at protecting individuals against fraud and hackers.
> I think the better question is whether cryptocurrencies are a better fit than existing options for those people.
Are they? Seriously, are they? I'm pretty sure the answer is no, (at least not the Bitcoin that exists today) but people who are bullish about the Bitcoin bubble keep trying to force that square peg of crypto-currencies in that round hole of micro-payments.
> consider the 2+ billion people worldwide without access to payment networks
Why is a blockchain a good solution for this problem? Operators like M-Pesa have made digital payments mainstream in underbanked Kenya, without any crypto. Seems like the hard problems involve cash-to-bit conversion, building up a network of users, and building trust. None of these are fixed by Bitcoin.
Great example, if bitcoin suddenly developed magic powers that could unseat a dictator, write a new constitution, educate the electorate, and protect the rule of law.
Seriously though, two things.
One, Venezuela has significant problems that magically giving everyone a bitcoin wallet isn't going to solve.
And two, currently the biggest use of Bitcoin in Venezuela is to evade currency controls. Which is criminal activity. Which is one of the only two things Bitcoin has a usecase for (the other being speculation)
So yeah, while a lot of people might be better off if they engaged in criminal activity, you can't use Venezuela as an example of a legitimate use-case for bitcoin.
You'd probably be hard pressed to find a home for less than $250K even there today. And I've seen more than a few wetlands filled in with dirt to build apartment complexes and neighborhoods on in Florida. To be fair, there are several huge over-sold neighborhoods in Florida that never met the hype, but for every one of them there are real success stories too.
My point is the majority of speculators lost most of their money in the short-term, and didn't live long enough to see the value of their investment appreciate, and for most people that would qualify as a failed investment.
> No thanks. Cash is king. Money should never be traceable, and you should be able to buy with anonymity.
If you believe that, you're going to be shocked when the vast majority of people switch to cashless systems, and cash will only be used for criminal activity, and then cash will become criminalized.
The solution isn't to preserve cash. That's doomed to failure.
It won't happen if enough people fight it. You should value privacy and have a healthy distrust of both banks and governments.
Here are the heartening results of an EU survey conducted earlier this year about restricting payments in cash[0]. In short, 94.9% of respondents oppose restrictions on cash payments. 86.9% believe that paying anonymously is an essential personal freedom. That's the spirit.
> the problem turns out to be, people don't want to pay, not even that tiny amount.
No, the problem is it didn't work with adblockers. I really want to pay for the content I read, I just am not willing to risk being outbid on the chance to view a page without spam by someone trying to deliver malware.
My current solution is to buy pre-paid visa cards to pay for online news subscriptions, which is a huge pain, but necessary after finding out that newspapers will continue to charge even expired or cancelled credit cards. Even after I explicitly cancelled a credit card to try to stop recurring billing, the credit card company will helpfully keep accepting those charges.
I'm desperately looking for a solution to support journalism that simply lets me pay to read articles for exactly what advertisers would pay to bombard me with crap.
Google Contributor was SO close to being a solution. All it had to do was work with ad blockers.
> No, the problem is it didn't work with adblockers. I really want to pay for the content I read, I just am not willing to risk being outbid on the chance to view a page without spam by someone trying to deliver malware.
That's a big issue. Another is that I want sites without any ads to be able to get a share of the money too.
But it's also that the bidding model is a poor way to allocate the money. I don't want the word "insurance" to randomly trigger a $50 ad slot. It's okay if there's some influence from ad slot prices onto how the money gets allocated, but the main influence should be how much I use each site.
> But it's also that the bidding model is a poor way to allocate the money. I don't want the word "insurance" to randomly trigger a $50 ad slot. It's okay if there's some influence from ad slot prices onto how the money gets allocated, but the main influence should be how much I use each site.
Using the normal bidding process was a clever shortcut to get Contributor working as a 20% project, with minimal manpower. Seriously, it was just two guys at first.
It's not currently just two guys. I'll let you read that how you will.
This is one of my biggest pet peeves (Looking at you NY Times) If you allow me to subscribe to your site/service online, then you better fkn let me manage my subscription (update payment method, deactivate recurring billing, etc...) online as well. You can't even email them. You have to call them, so they can push you onto their retention specialists. FFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUU
"My current solution is to buy pre-paid visa cards to pay for online news subscriptions, which is a huge pain, but necessary after finding out that newspapers will continue to charge even expired or cancelled credit cards. Even after I explicitly cancelled a credit card to try to stop recurring billing, the credit card company will helpfully keep accepting those charges."
1. I haven't resorted to pre-paid Vias cards, but it's a good idea.
2. There has been so many times when I'm thinking about signing up for a website, or service, but the fear of them being "cute", like not charging the correct amount, recurrent billing, making it difficult to quit, and lousy security prevents me from giving money to anyone, except the current monopolies., and only for stuff I really need. As to really need--I don't need that much in all reality.
3. I get those Wall Street Journal offers for $1 for so many weeks. I don't care if it was .01 cents; I don't want to have another thing in the back of my mind to worry about.
It's not about the money, it's about Trust. If I feel this way about WSJ, how are the littler sites suspose to gain trust?
4. I don't have a solution as to how online companies can make money. I just know the minute you hire the MBA, or the "expert", and start underestimating your customers; you're screwed.
Every website should give the customer the option of an immediate purge of all credit card data on the servers, at the time of registration;
"We will sign you up today, charge you $10, and purge you from our database. We would not sell your information. We won't bother you ever again. You have my word--sincerely, the Founders."
You will need to re-register next month. Big deal? Most people will opt for the easy way(keep all info on the customer on the servers), but their will be people like me, that don't want you to have that information on file.
I was just about to sign up for Republic Wireless. It might me the cheapest cell phone service out there. Then I noticed their "new, and improved" billing. It's not new and improved, it's just more money per month. I didn't bite. One lost customer, at least for now.
It's about trust, at this point, for me. I don't think getting certain people to pay is an insurmountable problem, but work on trust, and make the content something they need to pay for? In my youth, I needed quality porn, and that was my last subscription. Pathetic, I know, but even then I made sure they didn't get cute with my Credit Card.
What will be the next website I really need? Yea, it's a problem, but trust should be taken for granted.
Checkout Privacy.com, I use it for exactly these kind of scenarios. You can generate card numbers that are locked to a single merchant, and you can set transaction limits and delete the card whenever you want. Or you can set it as a "burner" which will only work for a single transaction.
Some banks have a e-card option for internet payment.
The most extreme can give you a unique card number with an expiry date of your choosing, whenever you need one. That does wonder against shady practices.
> the websites I frequented the most frequently [...] still received only pennies.
And what I don't understand is when I decide I want to subscribe to a newspaper, it's hundreds of dollars a year. They take pennies to serve me spam and malware, but if I want to pay them, it's 1000x the price.
And don't get me started on how the Washington Post gives a $70 annual discount on a digital subscription if you agree to receive a print copy of the Sunday edition. It sounds incredibly stupid and backward until you remember, advertising.
Netflix was massively popular because the price was anchored against the price of cable. Americans were used to paying $100/mo or more for a collection of channels of which the majority were never watched. (because... ESPN? I never understood that) So $10/mo looked like a bargain.
Currently, online journalism is anchored against the price of free. So if I want to sit down with my coffee and read an article from the New York Times, another from Washington Post, and a counter-point from the Wall Street Journal and the Economist, and follow that up with a long-form piece from the New Yorker, I can either pay $500/yr, or remember to right click each article and open in incognito mode.
Yeah but if it was like 1$ a month each or 10$ for all newspaper problem solve customers would pay.
They just haven't figured out yet that on the web no-one is ready to pay 15$ for access to a single news source given that no-one is able to actually read all available content produced in one day.
New potential news customers born in the 1990 are like bees that fly from sites to sites.
Loyals customers that relly on one newspaper and are paying high fee are elderly people and they will stop paying when they unfortunately dies.
It all about not getting the demographic of you potential customer base...
I, too, am waiting for a cross-publisher content network. I'd easily pay $30/mo, instead of the $0 I'm paying now.
But, for the individual publisher, this would mean the end of their current subscriber base and 70%+ of revenue. I'm pretty sure the NYT has a spreadsheet somewhere, and currently it's still saying that they are likely to lose out in such a model.
If they get, say, 10% of my $30, that's $3 x 12 = $36, which is about 1/10 of their current price. Could they increase their subscriber base by an order of magnitude with such a model? I'd say it's possible, but it's just too big a risk right now. And the numbers may be less favourably for smaller outfits.
Netflix creates tons of original content so it is both a producer and distributor. If Netflix really believed that the marginal value of DRM was zero they wouldn't use it on their own content since it has a nonzero cost on the distribution side.
The only other possibility that I can come up with is if Netflix's original content has multi-party rightsholder situations with contacts that legally require them to apply DRM even to "their own" content (IANAL and don't know much about how these things work, but it wouldn't surprise me).
Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice. Tolerance in the face of tyranny is no virtue.
> Treason is the alternative?
Correct. It is the rational and moral choice. Just as you must defy the orders of your superior officer if ordered to commit war crimes prohibited by the Geneva Convention, so must you defy the President to preserve the aims of liberty and equality expressed in the US Constitution.
Intelligence agencies attacking a democratically elected head of state is no defense of liberty. You're attributing noble motives to people just because they're doing what you want them to do.
It all depends on what said democratically elected head of state is trying to do, and what they're trying to prevent him from doing. Being democratically elected does not give an automatic grant of immunity to legal and, more importantly, moral limits on one's actions.
And you're correct that we don't know the motives of those people. Just as OP doesn't know that they aren't noble, you also don't know that they aren't.
Good grief dude, turn off the TV for a couple of days. The Trump has been president for like a month, and literally nothing has happened. Unless you have a burning desire for war in Syria and Russia, why would you strain to find noble intentions in intelligence agencies, of all places?
* Within the first week of his Presidency, a de facto Chinese government press organ threatened military action against the USA.
* Legal US residents were detained and turned back at US borders, as a result of an executive order of questionable constitutionality.
* Trump has challenged the legitimacy of US courts and judges, and threatened to remove them from power.
* Trump has declared all the country's major news agencies as enemies of the people. Maybe you have trouble understanding just how serious an accusation that is.
* Having been threatened with a 20% import tax and after the scrapping of the TPP, Mexico as one of the US' major trade partners is scrambling to improve its trade relations with China and other countries that are not the US.
* Trump has fired one of his advisors over allegations of treason he called fake. Whatever the truth is, Trump put himself in the wrong in this matter.
That's an astonishing set of mis-achievements for just a month in office.
Within the first week of his Presidency, a de facto Chinese government press organ threatened military action against the USA.
Bluffers gonna bluff. What're they gonna do, invade Taiwan over a phone call? Maybe start a nuclear war? Trump's complete non-reaction to these goofy empty threats was one of the few unambiguously correct foreign policy moves he's made so far. Call back when you have a real navy.
Legal US residents were detained and turned back at US borders, as a result of an executive order of questionable constitutionality.
Presidents have been trampling on our rights for decades at least. Obama was particularly fond of extrajudicial assassination by drone, and it appears Trump completely agrees, but I haven't seen any protests about that. Happily, this overreach was overruled in a matter of days.
Trump has challenged the legitimacy of US courts and judges, and threatened to remove them from power.
Like FDR did, right? Except he actually did more than, you know, threaten...
Trump has declared all the country's major news agencies as enemies of the people. Maybe you have trouble understanding just how serious an accusation that is.
Is that a direct quote? I do have that trouble, along with anyone else who has observed these "major news agencies" for more than a minute. They only care about eyeballs, and they will say anything to attract those eyeballs. Criticizing them is not an attack on the First Amendment, but rather an exercise of it.
Having been threatened with a 20% import tax and after the scrapping of the TPP, Mexico as one of the US' major trade partners is scrambling to improve its trade relations with China and other countries that are not the US.
Elections have consequences, but those consequences have yet to occur. Threats and scrambles have no short-term effects. In the long term, they might cause some supply chain modifications, but we ain't there yet.
Trump has fired one of his advisors over allegations of treason he called fake. Whatever the truth is, Trump put himself in the wrong in this matter.
Hiring-and-immediately-firing could be a definition of "nothing happening".
I'm not a fan of CIA et al in the slightest, but I would consider US involvement a major war anywhere to be far less likely with them running the show, compared to the likes of Bannon and Flynn. So from that perspective, the former is still preferable.
Funny thing is, I don't watch TV - at all. And the single most used app on my phone is Kindle.
So, in the same spirit in which your suggestions were given, I would suggest that you stop playing psychologist on the Internet. You're clearly not good at it.
Sure, but that's not the situation we're dealing with. No war crimes are being ordered, in fact, it doesn't seem anything is being ordered at all. They're just betraying their superiours for ??? private reason. Whose liberty are they defending?
> In the meantime, let's bring the manufacturing chain back here so we can build up the automation expertise ourselves
How? There's obvious long term financial value in having local supply chains and manufacturing expertise. Therefore state capitalist systems will subsidize local manufacturing in the short term, while anarcho-capitalist systems will flock to set up shop there to capture convert those short-term subsidies into short-term profit.
Do you have a solution that will work to build high-tech manufacturing infrastructure in the United States with no corporate incentives and no US government intervention? (I mean besides tweeting brags about job creation)
Sure, dramatically lower the corporate income tax rate and substantially reduce the massive over-regulation in the US economy. Check out the various regulation registries at the Federal level, the US is choking to death on thousands of unnecessary regulations (growing rapidly for decades) that are almost always written solely for the benefit of protectionism or for fake the-government-is-doing-something purposes (which happens at all levels).
The US corporate income tax rate has been a bad joke for a long time. Countries like Sweden at 22%, understood decades ago that it was bad economic policy to have a high rate. You tax the income of the wealthy as the offset. The US for example already has an extremely progressive personal income tax rate. For several decades the corporate income tax rate has been falling around the world; the world's average rate has fallen from near 30% to 22% in the last 12 years. The US isn't competitive, you see that in how we've been bleeding pharma & biotech companies off to Ireland. Over time, you start seeing R&D & operations offshoring because of that. Give it time and you've artificially created a lot more global competition through bad policy.
If you're a small to mid size manufacturer in the US, paying a 30% effective income tax rate is brutal if you want to compete globally while everyone else is paying far lower rates. Germany for example lowered their top rate by about 9 points a decade ago. Finland and Iceland have a 20% rate. Korea is at 24% and China at 25%. The European average is about 20%.
The US effective tax rate for corporations is pretty much comparable to other developed countries' effective rates [1], because the US has more deductions, write-offs, and tax holidays.
If you're talking about cutting the statutory rate while also eliminating deductions and simplifying the code, I'm all for that (ditto for personal income taxes). A huge complicated tax code benefits big corporations more than your small business owner, because tax lawyers and accountants are largely a fixed cost.
But let's not keep repeating the misguided fact that US corporations pay unusually high taxes -- they simply don't.
When looking at effective tax rates, one might want to include the cost for all the experts employed to get to the difference between nominal and effective tax rate, and the brain drain these careers impose on more productive disciplines. But you will have a hard time finding a country where people are not convinced that their tax system is the worst, so maybe the US is not particularly bad in that way either.
The observation that a complicated makes the big guy part a lower effective rate than the small guy should be much more popular, I wish someone established a good name for it.
> Sure, dramatically lower the corporate income tax rate and substantially reduce the massive over-regulation in the US economy.
That's a great way to destroy the environment and increase corporate profits, but I was asking about how to get companies to ignore the profit of offshoring; how to convince them to act in direct opposition to their shareholder's interests, and not take advantage of the subsidies provided by state capitalist systems and locate manufacturing overseas.
All cutting the tax rate is going to to is make offshoring more profitable. At no time in US history has a tax cut been correlated with business growth and job growth. Quite the contrary, The Bush tax repatriation holiday gave many businesses the working capital to invest in closing plants and moving factories overseas, resulting in the net job losses in many industries. But if you have hard data on examples of cutting taxes below a top marginal rate of 40% in western countries having any effect other than increasing income inequality, I'd love to see your peer reviewed study.
And is there a particular regulation that you can think of cutting that would have more of lure for for domestic manufacturing than China dumping trillions of dollars into currency manipulation and building infrastructure and manufacturing subsidies?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias