nootropicat

Not paying taxes is the single best thing anyone can do. You can get an average market return and you will still move up, relatively, because most people pay taxes. Often it's the difference between having to work or not.

Old money doesn't pay taxes through international arrangements. It's only for the working and lower middle class. Gifts from foreign people, companies and trusts are completely tax free in America for example. It's not talked about unlike bullshit minimum taxes on new money because same people controlling the media use it.

Income tax is primarily designed to keep elites in power and to prevent social mobility, they don't have to do anything special, not paying taxes over decades is an incredible advantage. If you start poor the only realistic option is to risk evasion until you make enough to start not paying legally, and the limitations period on tax evasion runs out.

No they don't, banks have accounts with the central bank. They also have their assets and liabilities. They have to manage the system so that they can manage external withdrawals. When assets outweigh liabilities it's a bankruptcy. When current demand for withdrawals exceeds short term liquid reserves it's a liquidity issue. At no point do banks create base money. A balance in a bank is just an iou for base (central bank's) money.

The only entity that creates money is the central bank. They may even accept mortgages from banks as collateral (including repurchase agreements) to inject new money into the system.

Regulations are supposed to prevent bankruptcy and liquidity issues, but even without any regulations regarding asset ratios, banks can go bankrupt or illiquid.

What he wrote is a popular myth that originated in a misunderstanding how fractional reserve works, it just means they have long term assets to cover short term liabilities. There's a lot of this stuff on youtube.

If it was true no banks would ever fail, qed.

Ultimately being fundamentally wrong in how the financial system works is extremely unlikely to impact anyone's daily life.

I used to be optimistic, but it's 2023 and the only non-ponzi use case of crypto are stablecoins. What people actually want is to easily trade and transfer US dollars.

Some tokens are pure ponzi schemes (like shib, btc) some are ownership in something that could have productive use (eth, some other smart contract platforms tokens). Yet that use isn't actually happening, so from a general pov it's all a ponzi. The most likely outcome is that nothing productive happens at all.

For an average buyer (esp. btc) mark-to-market returns are already underperforming stocks for years when looking even at previous ATH. So many people own some crypto there's no possible separate source of greater fools elsewhere - most current crypto owners will end up at a massive loss. The long-term underperformance compared to other assets will get even worse.

From the pure hype perspective, I think there's room for one last bubble. There's an army of bagholders (of every token) that will throw good money after bad when prices are sufficiently high again, giving up real wealth (again) in exchange for virtual tokens of either zero or much lower value. They still hold hope of at least going back to 0, or maybe even making money. After the next one, they won't. It will get really depressing.

A ponzi is any system in which the only way for older buyers to cash out is at the expense of later investors. How is 'supply is fixed' relevant?

The only issue with central planning is making people behave according to its rules - it's a problem of motivation. The calculation side itself is evidently better under central planning. Free market is an optimization algorithm and many other exist. It's extremely unlikely simulating prices is the most effective way to allocate, but even if it is, it can be done more efficiently by simulating the process without real world waste.

Everything is slowly centralizing already - some markets remain to provide motivation, but the trend is in the central planning direction.

Given better technology, free markets will definitely die. It could be solved as directly as by overwriting the internal motivation through some brain implant, making people happy to work for the good of the system.

Eip 1559 saved eth holders billions of dollars. It's not possible to perfectly design a system from the start, and in fact ethereum was explicitly started as a work in progress.

Bitcoin would need massive changes to even have a potential to become money. Currently it's the antithesis of money - not backed by anything, in fact the opposite - requires billions per just to function.

The actual cost of running ethereum is negligible, about $5k/day at the upper end. It's just the cost of running thousands of staking nodes.

I would have agreed with you in the past. Now, I have to disagree.

>the web was hard to navigate and you relied on webpages "befriending" each other and helping you navigate to similar pages. That was real navigation and it had terrible recall.

This is exactly why internet was decentralized. A network of social connections between small online spaces people congregated in was essential to find what you wanted. It was somewhat of a replication of the old world - where in order to find an answer, you first had to get into relevant circles (eg. a local club, university, etc). You didn't just get an answer to your question, you inevitably had to sift through a lot of other content and learn about new places.

Google cut through all of that. Ideally, you could just get the answer you wanted, and not even see the rest of the site. The first order effect was that everyone's life get better. The second order effect is that it killed the old decentralized web, because random discovery nearly died down.

LLM are only the next step on this, but I don't think they change much. I think it's mostly going to damage reddit. A lot of reddit questions are an attempt to find an answer to something that google is too dumb to find - but llms may be able to.

The defense to this - are chatrooms, like discord. Sometimes I see people complaining that so much information is now 'hidden' on discord. But that's the exact point. Making information hard to get means people are forced to interact with each other. This creates incentives to contribute.

That's the future. Chatrooms may be replaced by voice based vr, hard to say. We already passed the peak of public information dissemination, and are going back to old style "ask at the university", just more decentralized and online.

>ETH/BTC reached 0.1515 in June 2017

Yes, there were few weeks when ethbtc was higher, but that was over 4 years ago.

There were 6 months of free money during the second half of 2020 with three digit APR. Most active people in defi multiplied their eth holdings several times (4-6x). There was no risk because tokens to dump were received for free.

>Slow and steady wins the race.

No, it doesn't. Yield wins the race. This cycle had a once in a lifetime free money period. There's not making up for missing that. Current yields are single digit but still good.

Bitcoin has been an absolutely terrible bet for the last 4 years. On top of that most people in eth multiplied their holdings during defi summer.

All those arguments reduce to "humans have a soul, computers don't, checkmate atheists". Ironically, soon AI will be able to generate articles arguing that AI can't ever think, automating yet another job.

Any model capable of executing a turing machine (given infinite resources, so in practice bounded of course) can emulate another program, even if inefficiently. GPT empirically can execute a simple vm. At best the 'wrong model' argument would have to point out that specific design collapses once the program to execute becomes too big - no matter how much compute/memory is available, but then, it's only a technical claim about one specific design.

This specific article has another problem - it handwaves the definition of consciousness. It has to do it, because any attempt to actually define necessarily either defeats the whole argument (it's some property of a computable system), or reduces it to a magical claim about an external soul.

Those historical returns are ridiculously optimistic. In fact stocks aren't great once you look globally. Imagine investing starting from 1900 Germany or Russia. In both cases you would be zeroed out. It's a form of survivorship bias to look at American stock markets only.

I think a 0% after-inflation return for a normal investor (ie. no specialized domain knowledge, no insider info) over the next several decades is already mildly optimistic.