zmaurelius

Before Bitcoin, there did not even exist the possibility of programmable money because no unit of account could ever be guaranteed to actually exist since there was no way to verify said existence. After Bitcoin, we now have a fundamental change where programmable money is now a possibility. So what if we have not found all the possible use cases of programmable money? That's going to be a work in progress for a long long time. You can assert that programmable money doesn't have any real use and you are welcome to have that opinion. Personally I think programmable money will have many uses and will allow for the creation of a more robust and more efficient financial system.

If that's the lowest fee you can find, you are probably sending some money to a few Nigerian princes on the side and investing in SBF's next venture.

It looked like Gensler was trying to secure a monopoly for FTX in the US, so making sure Coinbase didn't have a competing product was a cornerstone of that game plan.

As a society, we are quite good at keeping people alive for a long time but not so good at addressing chronic illness. With the massive increase in autoimmune disease, obesity and other chronic illnesses, I would contend that overall we are less healthy on average than just a few decades ago and this trend will continue indefinitely until massive changes occur in the medical and food industries.

I believe only Coinbase publishes total liabilities at the moment. In my opinion, Coinbase is the gold standard due to being a publicly traded company and Kraken carries more risk.

It is kind of strange how unsophisticated the hack ended up being. I feel like SBF would have pulled off something with a bit more finesse.

Kraken regularly publishes proof of reserves. I don't recommend keeping funds on exchanges as a rule, but I don't feel stressed out leaving a percentage of my holdings there for an extended duration.

That's the thing with decentralization, since anyone can participate you will always get a bunch of gamblers because most people are not in it for ideology but rather to make a buck. That's just human nature. Is it possible to create incentives to keep the gamblers way? I haven't come across any great ideas so far.

Organ meats such as beef liver provide a significant amount of B12. If you are just eating muscle meat, then you will have to eat a lot.

High dividend stocks have been a good bet and hedge in previous downturns. Individual stocks will have high variance, but a basket of high dividend stocks would be worth looking into.

I don't think fair distribution of cryptocurrency in the bootstrap phase is a solved problem. We got a long way to go if we are to come up with a fair system. Satoshi went with the best that he could come up with which is a no premine solution.

A slightly better solution would be a no premine coin with a global announcement for 5 years before the mining begins so everybody gets a fair shot at participation. I am sure we can develop even more fair forms of distribution with sufficient research.

It also enabled about $60+ million dollars to be donated to Ukraine and that's just one data point. Whether these other problems are a small price to pay will depend on who you are talking to. To the Ukrainians that benefited from these donations and to those that have food, weapons and shelter from these donations, it is most likely a small price to pay.

Perhaps a portion of these donations could have come from other sources if cryptocurrencies did not exist, but there isn't really a good way to quantify that, so I won't go into that discussion.

Bitcoin only solves the problem of manipulation of the underlying money supply. It does not solve the problem of fraud and scams. Maybe one day we can also solve that problem with exchanges existing only as smart contracts, but with exchanges that are not completely transparent you always run into the risk of getting defrauded because you don't really know what's going on under the hood.

I think people are too hyper focused on the price aspect of cryptocurrencies. The experiment that is Bitcoin shows that people do not need to rely on a monetary system where a cabal of rich and powerful individuals can arbitrarily modify the money supply without any regard to all the participants in that monetary system.

The genie is already out of the bottle and there is no way to put it back. There will always be those especially in the younger generations that want something better than the current system. Bitcoin shows that you can have a completely transparent monetary system based on code that is available to be audited by anyone. Bitcoin may or may not survive, but the idea behind it will.