Sorry for getting so far off topic but check out Massimo@rainmaker1973 's other tweets. Fascinating content showing remarkable engineering feats, the wonders of nature and various other scientific/engineering phenomena.
Sorry for getting so far off topic but check out Massimo@rainmaker1973 's other tweets. Fascinating content showing remarkable engineering feats, the wonders of nature and various other scientific/engineering phenomena.
Probably for the same reason that Japan hasn’t seen it: consumption. The driving force for inflation is demand. During the Great Recession there was demand destruction. People cut back on spending (mainly discretionary spending) and actually increased savings. It doesn’t matter how much money is floating around if it’s not chasing goods or services. Prices don’t rise. It’s the problem Japan has. They just don’t spend that much and save a lot.
Very important point you make. This would explain why putting checks directly into consumers hands would be more inflationary than pumping money into businesses and banks to keep the economy running and employers hiring. The 64k question is how do you design economic interventions that will prevent recessions and/or abject poverty during a pandemic while not simultaneously increasing wealth disparities or causing rampant inflation? Designing economic interventions that are both effective and fair isn't easy.
Have you read the story about Amazon’s Alexia being able to recreate voices from a couple of sentences. When the machines do take over you will never know because they will sound just like us.
Because that would control demand, the primary factor of inflation?
Sorry Wheat, just saying ‘bitcoin’ doesn’t make recessions due to pandemics or over leveraged bundled security collapses go away. And simply “not printing more currency” isn’t the cure all you seem to think it is. In fact there is a lot of historical evidence that such monetary “austerity” policies prolong recessions and may cause recessions to sink into depressions where widespread poverty becomes the norm. I’ll say it again - economics is hard.
Cryptocurrency may help with some issues but acting like it cures all that can go wrong in an economy is akin to recommending bleach as a medical cure all because it works well for some things.
We don’t supplement low wages to create living wages. We supplement no wages to create low wages.
We don’t reward college graduates by paying off their student loans.
If our key social programs rewarded positive behavior, then our economic interventions could more easily and quickly replicate the approach.
That is how I have read Hoover and his Republican advisors tried to cure the stock market crash of 1929. What they managed to do was create the depression. FDR really didn't know what to do either, but he tried a lot of different solutions and some worked better than others.
Also, as I remember, while we were trying QE, many European countries were going the austerity route and thus delayed their recovery by years. Greece, I think, only just got back on its feet in time for the pandemic. Not that it was the Greek's fault, the rest of the EU forced austerity on them.
Again, from memory, please correct as needed.
Yeah there’s a good deal of evidence that shows investing into your lower and middle class reaps great economic benefits. “Giving money away” isn’t giving it away like many claim, it’s an investment into your main customer class that usually pays back. Hence why trickle down economics creates cyclical economic crashes at a predictable rate.
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge" -Stephen Hawking
Buffet and Munger (sorry if this has been posted before):
https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTR199k32/?k=1
Well it’s the Greek’s fault in that the fudged their economic numbers to get into the Euro in the first place. They didn’t actually meet the benchmarks. They then complained about having to abide by the rules of the group they fudged their way into. Also Greeks have a history of tax avoidance. It’s like a national pastime going back to the Ottomans. The black money economy is huge. They actually have to use satellite maps to make sure people pay the taxes on pools. People now try to keep them covered with floating tiles to avoid the taxes.
Going back to the purpose of Bitcoin - i.e., is it trying to be a currency or a store of value (or something else), here's where I've settled on the currency front:
With the current state of the protocol, operating on just the base layer, it is woefully unsuited for global scale transactions. Satoshi's vision of a "peer-to-peer version of electronic cash" fails at both speed and volume.
Which brings us to the Lightning Network, which I've now read quite a bit further about (sampling of links below).
The problem here is that you either have:
1) A fully decentralized, trustless architecture that ends up not working, not scaling, and runs into the same liquidity problems as L1 Bitcoin or
2) A centralized (with serious security and availability concerns) architecture with many more complex pieces added which relies on several trusted third parties and basically ends up re-creating the exact same banking structures we have today... and you can no longer even say "but it's on a blockchain."
Thunder And Lightning In The Bitcoin World
Reddit - Lightning network sounds a bit wack. Is it?
Lightning Network May Not Solve Bitcoin's Scaling 'Trilemma'
The Fundamental Conflict At The Heart Of Bitcoin
From the last one, as it relates to my initial point plus the current monetary discussion:
In any system of money, there is a trade-off between value and liquidity. Restricting the supply of money helps to ensure that it holds its value, which is important for those to whom money is primarily a store of value. But for the economy as a whole money is a flow, not a stock. Money lubricates the flow of transactions between people. We could say that money is the lifeblood of an economy, and the payments network is the circulatory system. When the circulatory system is working well, money flows, and the economy is healthy. But if money becomes "sticky", congealing in stagnant pools, the circulatory system is unable to transmit it efficiently, and parts of the economy sicken and die. Similarly, if there simply is not enough money in circulation, parts of the economy are progressively starved of funding. Pools of money that are never spent do not make for a vibrant economy. For an economy to run sweetly, delivering prosperity for its people, money has to flow.
This is the fundamental problem with Bitcoin. It is intrinsically illiquid. This is not a bug, it is a feature. It was designed to be illiquid, because its designers and early adopters care more about value than they do about liquidity. They have never understood the critical importance of liquidity in a mainstream payments system.
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As it stands, Bitcoin is unsuitable as a main medium of exchange. It simply does not have the capacity or the structural features required to support significant economic activity.
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We have played this scene many, many times before. When hoarders are in the ascendant - as they usually are after financial crises - we design impossibly illiquid systems such as full reserve banking, strict gold standards and Bitcoin. History shows us that they don't survive for long. In the end, the economic need for money to flow eventually overcomes the desire of hoarders to store it in a vault. This time is not different.
A text without a context is a pretext.
The Lightning Network is growing….and working today?
Scalability. Capable of millions to billions of transactions per second across the network. Capacity blows away legacy payment rails by many orders of magnitude. Attaching payment per action/click is now possible without custodians.
Lightning Network Explained
Happy 4th, a good day to remember freedom is not free.
Keep a watchful eye on the future developments of the digital world, especially when it comes to your personal monetary freedoms.
Good ‘ole Guy has a video here that should make you think about the future of money.