littlecranky67

Your business competes against other businesses. If hand written code is superior, that business will win.

None.

In the macroscopic view of civilization it is a total outlier, yes.

So you claim that in the last 6000 years of history we had stagnation? I would claim the world economy did nothing but grow on asset-backend currencies - sure, there is some localized, small (as in relative to the timeframe) outliers that don't matter.

That is bs. Before 1971 we had a gold-backed monetary system and no record of deflation in the history of mankind (individual outliers notwithstanding when looking at the last 6000 years as a whole).

The cost of that reversible fiat system is ongoing inflation that is put as a hidden tax on everyone. I’d rather have those 6bn from speculators going to NK if that means we go back to sub-2% inflation for a while

USDT comes in many forms (technical side). You literally can trade USDT as one of the only major stablecoins over bitcoin+lightning network but that is not the entirety of all USDT in circulation. If you look into how this works (because it is fully decentralized running over bitcoin, not some proprietary blockchain) you will find out you can exactly get the market cap, which bitcoin wallet hold how many coins etc. Now lightning distorts that a bit, but market cap is not affected by that.

But it is in the nature of stablecoins that you cannot check their vault. You have no idea if they actually store the assets they claim to store. And whether they will honor their promise to exchange that asset for their tokens.

Example of cargo culting in HN is people claiming that there are no tokens possible in bitcoin (false since taproot assets landed in 2021), not anonymous (false also since lightning layer 2 network existed) or not able to "pay for your coffee" in bitcoin (again, bogus since layer 2 networks). This is all cargo-culted knowledge once learned and true in 2017, never to be revisited.

> People are not so knowledgeable about the other coins because the whole point of magic internet money is that it can't be controlled by anyone

Your problem is treating it as magic internet money. It is not - you literally have the sourcecode to truly assess how it works. Your account is not with some entity. Magic internet money is your bank account - if your bank decides to set it to 0 tomorrow it is "magic" - you have no idea how that happens, and you have no guarantee that it doesn't happen. Or when your credit card is suddenly blocked because your bank decides is "suspicious activity" - again, that is black magic.

Bitcoin is the opposite of magic internet money. It is deterministic to its core. As for other cryptocurrencies - well they are mostly open source so you can check them.

Stablecoins are centralized and of course rely on trust - you need someone to exchange whatever asset they promise to guard for your tokens. I find them fascinating (in conjunction with the lighnint/taproot assets over bitcoin) and not necessarily unsafe.

In the freebanking era that the US had (before the FED was founded) every bank emmitet their own dollar. And, of course, there were banks over-issuing and bank runs left people without their assets. But that was before we had free flow of information and the internet. In todays world you can monitor and trade stablecoins, market cap, exchange rates in a freebanking system in sub-seconds. Any erosion in trust will immediately result in price fluctuations. We need a digital freebanking era, and it is a shame the genius act fell through. Exporting the dollar to people without access to banking would benefit the US (but I get that it currently mostly benefits trumps family).

It is a tradeoff. When using secure enclave, you need a second backup keypair in cold storage that needs to be secured.

I am always amazed how little knowledge and cargo culting of 2017-era bitcoin knowledge is prevalent on HN. Whatever you monetary feelings towards crypto is, the technical aspects are fascinating. But most of the time HN gets it wrong.

we will see if they do.