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> Some banks have already begun dabbling in these areas without regulatory clarity. Earlier this month, U.S. Bancorp (USB.N) announced it was launching a cryptocurrency custody service for institutional investment managers.

This is fascinating. Within a mere 10 years, Bitcoin has gone from a toy to something now intersecting directly with the US banking system.

With each integration point, Bitcoin gets more difficult to legislate out of existence or destroy through capricious police action. Aside from Tether, this is one of the biggest risk factors cited by those who have studied Bitcoin in detail.

> It's extremely HackerNews-ish of you to propose that the author of the article ignores your pet theory.

What pet theory is that? All I did was to mention two historical episodes that preceded the event under discussion, and which the paper fails to mention.

> The author of the linked article is Barry Eichengreen, widely recognized as the premier scholar of the Great Depression.

So what? We're talking about the paper, not a person.

> The article references about 900 pages worth of other articles, believe me: your pet theory about the 1920's events is considered in the conclusion.

On what pages does the paper take up the issue of the speculative bubble leading up to the Great Depression?

> Governments don't work like a household. What matters is borrow costs and use of funds. If a government can borrow and the net growth generated is greater than the interest rate on the debt, it's a good thing to borrow. Like any business debt.

A main MMT talking point. Yes, I've read Kelton's book and yes, a government that prints its own currency is not like a household.

MMT is an experiment. For all our sakes, I hope its proponents are right.

> A government can be in debt forever, the only thing that matters is borrowing costs and growth rate (and how the growth is generated see eg. Chinese real estate for malinvestment).

What if malinvestment looks like investment until it doesn't?

> I wish I had a happier note to end this on, but honestly, my biggest takeaway from the whole experience is that maybe some puzzles just can’t be solved. We can try to attribute Jack’s problems to intrinsic biological/psychological issues (social phobia, migraines, etc.) or to environmental causes (super high rate of heroin use and OD in the community), but both sides seem fundamentally lacking in explanatory power. The vast majority of socially anxious people don’t resort to heroin, and despite the problems of these small towns, they are by no means among the worst places to live in America, let alone the world.

Earlier on, the author does speculate about what drove Jack:

> To put it another way, Jack was painfully aware that his future options were, “be a complete loser,” or “be a complete loser who feels really really good for a few hours every day.” He chose the latter.

What's striking about this is how it's possible to live this way without drugs. A brain-numbing job eight hours a day and a life-saving hobby for four. A toxic-family life but wonderful community.

It almost sounds like Tennis could have been this outlet:

> One time when Jack was in middle school, he walked off the tennis court after a well-played match, and his mother asked him how he felt. Jack said something like, “when I’m out there, it’s so nice… it’s like the rest of the world goes away and I don’t have any problems.”

> ... recently I’ve heard of some ships not even waiting to load empty TEU’s as they normally would and instead they are immediately leaving for China, literally empty.

If this is happening, what would be the consequences of allowing even more TEUs to be stored on the US side?

This article reminds me of every other article I've seen about blockchain voting. None of them start with a threat model. None of them talk about what's broken with voting. Mostly they just dive into technology, relying on the reader's imagination to address these points.

Here are some simple questions:

1. What are you trying to protect in a vote?

2. Why can't an SQL database with whatever levels of cryptographic assurance you'd like to add do the job?

3. What does a blockchain add to (2) that no other technology does, regardless of cost?

These questions are never answered, and indeed they are not answered here either. Instead, these articles lead with technology and rarely get around to what matters.

Often there's something like this included in the article:

> Blockchains are a technology which is all about providing guarantees about process integrity. If a process is run on a blockchain, the process is guaranteed to run according to some pre-agreed code and provide the correct output. No one can prevent the execution, no one can tamper with the execution, and no one can censor and block any users' inputs from being processed.

No. A block chain is a timestamping mechanism. Within certain very narrow boundaries, it makes certain guarantees about the relative ordering of events. A tamper-resistant log file? Yes. A solution to voting? Does that involve relative event ordering? If so, is that the central problem?

Electronic cash systems like Bitcoin will work work just fine without a blockchain, provided they can solve the double spending problem. Bitcoin solved it with a system for ordering transactions based on proof-of-work. There are other solutions, but all suffer from censorship pressures in ways that Bitcoin does not.

I'd be interested in a link to this legal theory and its application under US Law.

Barring that, what sections of the AGPL are you looking at to make that claim?

Not from what I understand. Your copyright (by default) gives you standing. If you hold no copyright, you have no standing to claim copyright infringement.

You're right. Deleting...

Oops, can't do that, it appears.