vijayboyapati

I can't guess the tone of the letter. Could have used some love.

Because smart contracts are (often) contractual obligations on real world things, they only hold as much power as the apparatus of coercion (usually the State) will allow them to hold. That is, you must trust the political authority first and foremost before you trust the contract. This is very different to bitcoin, which operates purely in the digital realm, where you can trust the ownership of the btc without requiring trust of the political authority. So bitcoin solves a trust problem and this makes the less efficient distributed architecture worthwhile (it would be much cheaper and far faster to operate a digital currency in a centralized way). But if you have to trust the political authority for digital contracts on physical goods, what is the point of the extra cost? I'm dubious there is any real benefit.

This is one of the great economics canards of the 20th century. The gold standard was dropped because western nations accumulated too much war debt during the Great War (world war I) and weren't able to inflate it away under a gold standard. That's not the fault of the gold standard but of the war and the governments that refused to acknowledge their insolvency. The 19th century saw perhaps the greatest rise of living standards in history and it was all achieved on a gold standard, which greatly facilitated world trade. As Keynes wrote, in The Economic Consequences of the Peace:

"The various currencies, which were all maintained on a stable basis in relation to gold and to one another, facilitated the easy flow of capital and of trade to an extent the full value of which we only realize now, when we are deprived of its advantages. Over this great area there was an almost absolute security of property and of person."

It should be pointed out that US operated as a democratic republic for over a century on the gold standard - which bitcoins shares a lot of properties with, except that bitcoin can be transmitted at distance easily, whereas gold cannot.

AKA donating to Edward Snowden is now a crime.

One of the things I found frustrating about Nextdoor when I used it a year ago was that it defines the neighborhood for you. I have a mailing list I created several years ago for my street which has been a very effective way of communicating with each other, especially since we have a street block party every year and a lot of families on the street have kids who play with each other. But there's not way to create a micro-neighborhood where messages only go to other folks in the micro-community (unless they've recently added that feature). When I look at my defined neighborhood now I'm not even sure how they chose the boundaries. It doesn't correspond to neighborhood in the normal sense (capitol hill in Seattle), or to zipcode. It seems like some arbitrarily carved out chunk of my zipcode... weird.

Reminds me a little of the Declaration of Independence where the famous line would have been "We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable" if Thomas Jefferson hadn't been "touched" by Benjamin Franklin with his edit to "self-evident".

Sadly the Stackoverflow community seems to have become a lot more officious in the last few years and the number of petty bureaucrats has skyrocketed. I asked a genuine question which I didn't know the answer to and which I was hoping someone else may have come across. It was immediately downvoted for not having a proposed solution. Eventually it was upvoted and became positive because it was a genuinely useful question. That kind of officiousness is completely unnecessary and needlessly turns people off participating in the community.

I think Sam is incorrect when he writes "The great technological revolutions have affected what most people do every day and how society is structured. The previous one, the industrial revolution, created lots of jobs because the new technology required huge numbers of humans to run it. But this is not the normal course of technology"

Jobs were not created in the sense that people were previously doing nothing. Jobs were transferred from low skilled occupations such as tending to farms, to higher skilled occupations which more closely resembled the salaried jobs of today.

The industrial revolution was the same as other technological revolutions and not distinct from them in that it reduced the exertion and strain put on workers. The industrial revolution gets a really bad rap, but compared to the work and life expectancy that preceded it, the condition of workers improved dramatically in the 19th century.

The tendency in all technological revolutions is to reduce the amount of exertion performed by workers and increase the wealth available for consumption (and correspondingly reduce its price). So today "work" often means sitting at a desk, while occasionally checking facebook. Whereas to our forebears just 5-6 generations ago, this would have seemed extremely leisurable, if not entirely magical. Not to mention the average worker can now quite easily afford to keep a device in her pocket which lets her access all the world's information and connect with almost anyone else on earth for less than a day's salary.

There are two major problems with this article (although they're not specific to this article and are more generally applicable to Keynesian economics).

Firstly Prof. Krugman writes: "Why is deleveraging a problem? Because my spending is your income, and your spending is my income, so if everyone slashes spending at the same time, incomes go down around the world."

This model entirely ignores capital theory. It creates a simple closed system where if spending goes up, everyone is better off, and if spending goes down, everyone is worse off (because they have less income). But this has almost no relation to whether more or less wealth is being created. Are there more cars, iphones, loaves of bread, new medical technologies? It is the creation of new capital that makes everyone better off, and increases the standard of living, not more spending (although more spending often follows the creation of new goods)

Secondly Prof Krugman writes:

"You can see that misunderstanding at work every time someone rails against deficits with slogans like “Stop stealing from our kids.” It sounds right, if you don’t think about it: Families who run up debts make themselves poorer, so isn’t that true when we look at overall national debt?

No, it isn’t. An indebted family owes money to other people; the world economy as a whole owes money to itself. And while it’s true that countries can borrow from other countries, America has actually been borrowing less from abroad since 2008 than it did before, and Europe is a net lender to the rest of the world.

Because debt is money we owe to ourselves, it does not directly make the economy poorer (and paying it off doesn’t make us richer)"

The problem isn't who the debt is owed to, the problem is whether the debt is serviceable or not and is used to create new wealth. This all gets confused by the introduction of money into the discussion. But imagine a situation where person A loans person B a shovel with the understanding they will receive the shovel back in a week, along with 10 potatoes. This is a loan that is likely to be serviceable. Now instead imagine a loan where person A loans person B a shovel with the understanding that person B will return the shovel along with some produce. Now instead of digging up vegetables, person B uses his shovel to excavate some rocks on his property to create a nice looking rock garden. Person B is now going to get into trouble paying back his loan. The debt he has incurred has been used to work on a project that is unlikely to be profitable. This is akin to people going into debt during the housing bubble to fund their consumption (big house, fast cars, big TV etc) rather than fund more production. That is the kind of debt that is not going to be serviceable and will eventually need to be written down, or in the case of the US, handed over to the taxpayer.

We ARE better off writing down that debt because, in general, we want people to use debt to work on projects that generate new wealth and capital over time, and if we do not write that debt down, people will continue to work on unproductive, unprofitable projects.

Sure, but all those businesses will have to deal with large amounts of incoming cash, so they too will have an incentive to take bitcoin. The secondary businesses wouldn't even need to keep any bitcoin as they could use something like BitPay or Coinbase to immediately convert bitcoins to dollars.

But for the primary growers/dealers, having a way of storing their profits without the risk of robbery would be a huge benefit (and probably lower storage costs substantially)

I found this super interesting, especially the stuff on the early evolution of the game and how various cheating ("trick") plays were used, such as hiding the ball under a player's jersey and running away with it, or suturing ball like patterns on the jerseys of players so it wasn't obvious who was carrying the ball.