Growth goes up and down, and it's a lot easier to grow when you are starting from a smaller number. China's economy has been running into problems lately that are bad signs for the future.

So what makes you think China is going to sustain that growth? What about their system, inherently, makes it so they will always grow faster than the US?

And China spends a greater percentage of their GDP on their military than the US does, so....

So China made Russia invade Ukraine? How did they pull that off?

Except that most of Trump's former staff said the opposite.

Isn't it weird how almost everybody who ever works with Trump eventually turns on him?

What makes you think China is so perfect? I would dub their government to be far less stable than ours.

Russia isn't waging a proxy war against Ukraine, they are attacking them directly, and suffering heavy losses. I have no doubt China would do the same.

The USA is a democracy and as such we can't get away with sending large numbers of our kids to needless slaughter.

Sure, based on certain attributes, you can create any sort of grouping. But under your definition here, in the USA, the Republican party is mostly "leftist" these days. And Democrats are often "conservative" (viz. their support of Ukraine or opposing Trump's corruption).

In the US at least (I don't know much about other countries), I tell people to just use the terms, "Democrat" and "Republican" because that's what drives the politics here, not some ideological made up in France in the 1800s.

And it's also worth understanding the history after they made up those terms in France: the "leftist" regimes of Europe and Asia (Russia, China, etc.) basically became... corrupt dictatorships that had nothing to do with ideology. Today, Putin is neither "left" nor "right", he's just... Putin. Same with China, North Korea, and so on. None of these dictators care anything about any ideology, they just do what they do each day to stay in power.

Most modern governments are not driven by any sort of ideology, or ideological spectrum, so if you want to understand what is really going on, it's best not to use big buckets like "left" and "right" because it will give you invalid results.

By the way, I think people are missing the forest for the trees here in terms of paying your monthly rent with Bitcoin: you cannot know how much to pay without making reference to some actually stable value source e.g. a sovereign currency, e.g. US dollars for instance.

In other words, if one were to rent a house to somebody only by referencing Bitcoin alone, how much would they charge? How would they discover the price? And most importantly, how could you even do this when the price of Bitcoin is so volatile?

I'm all for fun academic conversations--that's what forums like this are for  --but if you get real about this, you... pay your rent with good old US dollars (in the US for instance) or some mechanism that directly references them.

But here you underscore the futility of using the "left right spectrum" to understanding politics. It simply doesn't work these days. Trump has shown he will support absolutely anything if it means getting elected, even if it's an anathema to so-called "conservatives" or those on the political "right".

As I said in my original reply to this question: do not use "left" and "right". These terms are old and outdated, and will only confuse people.

My own company is an "off chain solution" (I guess), but I never considered this to be what people consider "blockchain".

Indeed, the design process for Haypenny was, "let's make blockchain faster" and then that finally evolved into the entirely new exchange paradigm that is Haypenny's split/combine single-block approach without PKI and a fairly centralized infrastructure.

So sure, I guess blockchain will scale really well as long as you remove the blockchain part .

So you're saying that unless you use Bitcoin for all of your transactions you aren't "free"? What does that even mean? And do you really live your life without using anything but crypto transactions? How does that work?

Oh come on. ARPANET didn't have billions of dollars surrounding it and was not a mainstream brand name like Bitcoin is, and that was before virtually every human on earth had a device connected to the Internet.

And exactly why would you adopt a technology that does the same one the existing one does but it's way slower and way more expensive?

It's already been more than 10 years. And billions of dollars have been poured into the problem. And Bitcoin is slower and more expensive now than it's ever been.

I'm betting the other way, personally.

But Bitcoin (and cryptos generally) suck at transactions . Maybe that's why people don't use it that way.

But people love investing in it, so... here we are.

The way I interpreted that post was, "HODL!!!" 

That is the "advice" I would give anybody who holds a financial instrument that I am invested in: hold everything and buy some more! Make my asset go up in value, damn you!

You know what's also a really, really, really long time in technology? 12 years  . And billions of dollars and the eyes of the whole world. And yet today Bitcoin is even slower and even more expensive to transact in than it was when it started. And blockchain architecture means it will only get worse and worse.

I completely agree with you that Bitcoin and cryptos generally don't need to serve as a currency in order to be useful. But people shouldn't make it out to be something it's not.

LOL, calling Bitcoin "non-inflationary" is like calling sports betting "non-inflationary".

I kept wondering why the Trump side of the political spectrum is so hot on the Epstein story even though the scandal, insofar as anything can be proven, will most certainly affect Trump's side much more negatively than the other side.

I can now see that Trump's side can just make shit up out of thin air and his supporters will believe it regardless, whereas the other side needs actual evidence so they can't use this scandal in the same way.

Hence in this world, Trump can throw all of the stones in glass houses he wants, because he'll tell his followers the windows aren't broken and they will simply believe him without question.

Cryptos are not technically Ponzi schemes, they are pyramid schemes that reward investors who get in early at the expense of investors who get in later.

Pyramid schemes, in various forms, have been around for thousands of years. In every society there was money and investment, there was some sort of pyramid scheme available to investors.

So as a product, cryptos don't need to be a practical means of value transfer in order to serve a purpose to the human race.



I have over 30 years experience in ultra-high-scale mission critical systems. My initial take on blockchain, as a technology, is that it could never scale even remotely close to what would be necessary to provide a mainstream payment system. As in, it could never get to even one thousandth of the scale and efficiency necessary to handle even world-wide credit card payments, let alone usurp other forms of payment like cash.

But being the old tech guy that I am, I was willing to be proven wrong because I know I don't always have all of the answers. I've repeatedly asked the question, and thus far nobody has been able to tell me what blockchain is being used for right now, in the real world for anything besides cryptocurrencies.

All of this tells me that my initial take on the blockchain architecture is right: it won't scale. It won't even get within four orders of magnitude of what is necessary to be a real currency.

I created a system that does scale to the level necessary to take over worldwide payments, and it's a paradigm that is simpler and more private that blockchain. The paradigm is so efficient that it allows anybody to create a currency and start using it in a few minutes, and I can give away the service for free.

But as you might guess, it's not decentralized, and it's not blockchain. That's the hard tradeoff until they repeal the laws of physics.

Well, putting aside that Bitcoin is a volatile asset that can also go down in value as well as up, the question would be, "what problem would this solve"?

In other words, how would this be any different than converting your Bitcoin to the sovereign currency and paying with that instead--something that could be accomplished in a few minutes?

In the real world, Bitcoin is an investment, not a currency. For transactions, no cryptocurrency can even remotely rival the efficiency of the worldwide credit card and banking system, let alone a pure digital currency specifically designed for efficient transactions.

The fact is that Bitcoin has been almost nothing but a speculation instrument for the last 10 years of it's existence, and it will never be anything else.

Blockchain is a needlessly complex technical architecture that will never allow Bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency to get even remotely close to scaling to the level necessary to rival other forms of payment. It's not even within 1000x the speed and price it needs to be to rival even credit card payments alone, and that's after 10+ years and billions of dollars of trying.

And 98% of crypto holders aren't going to care about any of this--they just want the price of Bitcoin to go up (in US dollars) so their investment does better, so they can convert it to US dollars at some point and buy stuff.

There's nothing "decentralized" about storing your private key in some app, which is sitting in some relational database at some start-up company like Binance or Coinbase, who follow all the government's KYC rules and connect your wallet to your entire life story.

Whatever the mythos was when Bitcoin was started over 10 years ago was, it's pretty much dead now.

The good news, however, is that cryptos have created something new and interesting: pure meme investments. There's nothing wrong with this, and indeed, investors have put billions of dollars behind these investments, so clearly there is a demand.

But it's time to get real about what cryptos really are...