heartbeats

David Graeber argues in "Debt: The first 5000 years" that trade started out as being based on debt, and then this turned into a medium of exchange. Barter was never widespread.

This article is very strange. It describes CSW as a "polymath," and more or less uncritically gives his side of the story:

> Contrary to what the email to Hearn seems to indicate and what the Sourceforge trail appears to show, Wright claims he did not agree to the transfer of power. He says a new crop of Bitcoin developers, including Wladimir van der Laan, the former lead maintainer of the code repository, circumvented the administrator controls Wright used to manage the codebase when they moved the software to Github and then changed the license there. Essentially, Wright claims, bitcoin was stolen. “What I didn't expect was people to redo everything like that to bypass my administrator control,” he says. “So they set up completely new sites, and moved me out.” In an email to Forbes, van der Laan denied moving the codebase. He also denied changing the license. “This was done by Satoshi,” he wrote.

I can see they use the word "claims," but it's not exactly something that the author of the article should have a hard time double-checking.

Aligned how? If you download the code, it won't change under your feet.

Banks are usually liable for that.

> The country’s two mobile phone networks sent messages to people asking them to change the settings of their clocks to manual instead of automatic in order for the time not to change at midnight, although in many cases the time advanced anyway.

> While public institutions, in theory, are bound by the government’s decision, many private institutions, including TV stations, schools and businesses, announced that they would ignore the decision and move to daylight savings on Sunday as previously scheduled.

> “I had an 8am appointment and a 9am class, which will now happen at the same time,” she said. The 8am appointment for her residency paperwork is with a government agency following the official time, while her 9am Arabic class is with an institute that is expected to make the switch to daylight savings.

Developers already hate time zones. But have they tried using two of them at the same time?

> No they can't.

What do you mean "can't"? My bank certainly has the information, since I can see it online if I log in. Of course they would have to change the law, but this also goes for the digital pound.

> Great, except each country is tiny and cross-border commerce common, so you end up having to implement all of them…

Yes, and this can be done by software firms. You don't need to roll your own solution, but taking the payment networks' fees out of the equation drastically reduces costs.

> I'm not aware of any payment provider that gives me all European networks, but not credit cards.

That's true, since most sellers can access credit cards. But for EU-only sellers of "sensitive products", of course there is a market. (It's an open question if people on the MATCH list can use those payment providers as long as they don't accept cards.)

> Together with 95% of your customer base, realistically.

Most people where I live are comfortable using mobile payments and use it on a regular basis. I see mainstream retailers offering to take it (alongside cards) very often.

Yes, but this is first-order thinking. That's common. The mechanism here is:

"Content X directly makes TikTok/Amazon/etc more money [better ads]" -> more profitable -> show it more.

Second-order thinking is much rarer, and looks something like this:

"Content X makes people more reluctant to buy stuff from other places" -> less profitable for someone else -> ??? -> shut it down.

This is much rarer. TikTok can run ads on both sorts of content, so we shouldn't expect this to be totally clamped down on.

> Economists would surely love the anonymised spending data, were it to be made available.

They could get this from banks already.

> Retailers would presumably save by not having to pay fees to Visa, MasterCard, Stripe, etc.

These are already low in Europe due to regulation.

I don't think anyone is that advanced. As long as people watch it, they don't care.

And yet nobody uses them. I wonder if there's some reason for that?

> Some central server needs to be the arbiter of randomness

What, no? My hash-based system is entirely random. The only issue is that draws are done with replacement, so two players may both have e.g. six of spades in their hand. This is aesthetically unappealing, but doesn't alter the actual maths of the game. (There are more complex solutions to this, however)

> not to mention being the actual escrow service for the money in the pot

FHE doesn't solve this, since FHE can't actually interface with your bank. Even if it could, I could just log in on my phone or physically walk into a bank branch to freeze my account before I have to pay out, so you still need a solution for the money layer.

> you can trust their generation of the hole cards

You can do trustless generation of hole cards already, as described in my post.