Your thought experiment is assuming that $1T is permanently locked "in a vault", therefore it is not actually part of the monetary supply, since it can't be spent without violating your assumption.
Not quite, it's not permanently locked, I have just decided not to spend it. Ditto money people squirrel away in mattresses or vaults. It is an analogy for a change in behavior of market participants over time which must by necessity be included in any complete model of an economic and monetary system. Broadly speaking, "velocity."
This system remains at equilibrium because supply went up, and velocity went down leading to neutral price action.
I think what you're ignoring here is that as any individual gains access to more liquid wealth, they become increasingly more likely to spend some of it.
As your access to supply increases, your demand for more monetary units decreases. As your demand for monetary units falls below your demand for other goods and services you want in life, you spend some of it.
This is how markets function, right? This is why bubbles pop for example, eventually holders of an asset reach a price where they want to take some off the table.
That's the point though, inflation depends a great deal on the velocity of money, as much or even more so than the total amount printed.
Money in a vault has zero velocity, money being spent dozens of times a day has a very high velocity, most situations lie between, we need a meaningful way of discussing this that "monetary supply" does not capture.
There is a common idea that high monetary velocity (GDP divided by broad money supply) is needed for inflation. However, the data show that this is not the case.
I believe this is misinformation, because it assumes that the energy usage is not being well spent - that Bitcoin is a waste - but that assumption could not be further from the truth.
Bitcoin's value lies in its absolute scarcity and immutable monetary policy - it preserves your time spent working in a money that cannot be debased by anyone, ever. There will only ever be 21 million bitcoin.
If your savings is constantly at risk of being debased, not only do you lose purchasing power over time, but you're also incentivized to spend it and invest it as quickly as possible, rather than waiting thoughtfully for the best purchase or investment. You're being forced to have an extra job, as an investor, to even remotely come close to making a good investment. This is assuming that's even an option and that you have access to financial institutions in your country.
Technology is advancing exponentially - it should bring abundance and higher quality of life to everyone in the world. People will get more for less money, i.e. it is exponentially deflationary. With an inflationary monetary policy, where markets and assets prices are supported by the printing of money and will immediately crash if the printing stops, many nations will be forced to print exponentially to fight the deflation caused by technology. In other words, technology should be saving everyone time and energy as it raises productivity, but inflation forces everyone to work harder to keep up.
How can a finite planet support an economic system that demands infinite growth? A money with absolute scarcity solves this by allowing for deflation in prices as technology drives abundance. Fiat and inflationary monetary policy is the root problem driving climate change, and likely many other complex negative externalities.
In addition, I would point out that energy usage is not intrinsically bad. Higher per capita energy usage leads to higher quality of life. The climate issue energy poses is within how the energy is produced, and the majority of that problem lies in the emissions from coal power.
The good news on the energy production side is that a monetary network using Proof-of-Work incentivizes competition between miners globally. As cheaper (or even free, stranded) energy is made available to miners anywhere in the world, miners anywhere else who pay more for energy are pushed out of profitability and have to shut down shop. The difficulty adjustment in Bitcoin mining means that as more miners compete, those paying the most for energy are forced out of the market. This creates a clear incentive for miners to find the cheapest possible energy, which is predominately green and renewable and drives innovation in the space. Cheaper energy is great for humanity. Check out the recent work by ARK / Square exploring this.
Overall, these developments have made me hopeful and optimistic about the future again :)
Small, fairly predictable amounts of inflation don't matter too much in the long term because long-term savings is typically not saved as cash, but in a productive asset. That's a feature, not a bug. Why should we reward people if they don't invest their money in something useful?
And this is why it would be better to figure out how not to reward people for buying cryptocurrency. It's not a productive investment, it's just holding.
> Videogames are no less useful than Bitcoin. Like, if all videogames disappeared tomorrow, humanity would fundamentally be all right.
1. What you said, when we normalize logic, is: videogames are just as useless as bitcoin. If videogames disappeared, humanity would be allright. Same goes for bitcoin.
I wonder if that is exactly waht you were going for.
2. Videogames are not useless. You could start with the fundamental need of humanity for games in general. Yes, if videogames disappeared, we would find other things to replace them with. I wonder if someone would then pop up and say something inane like "BTC is not an ecological disaster - just like Gaelic football [1] is not an ecological disaster."
Secondly, videogames are increasingly found to reduce stress. They are used to treat various patients [2]. They broach the subjects such as "games as new medium" and "games as art". They create vast online communities.
Bitcoin (and blockchains in general) laboriously appends entries to an append-only log using the power-equivalent of several countries at a speed of a paraplegic snail [3]. And in ten years it hasn't found a single niche where the same operations can't be done faster and more efficiently (and are usually already done faster and more efficiently).
Since we're speaking about videogames, in 2006 Eve Online had 150 million DB transactions per day. To do that, Eve Online needs something like 6 database servers: https://www.eveonline.com/news/view/tranquility-tech-3
Bitcoin would need the heat death of the universe to handle a comparable load.
> I wonder if that is exactly waht (sic) you were going for.
Yes, it was. If you agree that Bitcoin is just as useless as videogames, and agree that videogames are not useless, you must also agree that Bitcoin is not useless.
I personally have no use for videogames, but I don't deny that many people do. I do, however, have use for an extremely resilient distributed timestampping service that takes several countries' energy to disrupt (which is what Bitcoin's blockchain is -- a public timestampping service). Turns out many people do, since running it is profitable.
> If you agree that Bitcoin is just as useless as videogames, and agree that videogames are not useless, you must also agree that Bitcoin is not useless.
Seems you missed that he disagreed on the first part. At least I read his "and videogames are useful because of this, and this, and ..." as saying that "as opposed to Bitcoin, videogames are useful because ..."
This is why I don't like it when people call it a waste or meaningless. In my opinion, it's not a waste, but it is "excessively energy-consumptive". Sure, a lot of value is generated, but is that value commensurate with the cost? In the limit, what's the cap on this? Will Bitcoin mining consume 5% of the entire world's electricity in a decade? Is that really the best way to create a secure cryptocurrency? In addition to the potential environmental impact, what's the opportunity cost of that usage?
If Ethereum 2.0 rolls out and runs a PoS network without any issues for a year, 2 years, 3 years, what then? (Rather than debating the probability of that happening, for the sake of argument let's just hypothetically assume the transition does succeed and things run soothly for years.)
I suspect the community and devs won't even consider itas a topic for debate, though, which makes me think the cryptocurrency wars are going to get much more heated over the next 5 years. The cryptocurrencies you choose to use will be much more of a philosophical and ideological identity statement than it already is. Bitcoin-only vs. Ethereum-only vs. never-coiners. I'm genuinely pretty concerned it might reach the level of pro-life vs. pro-choice (vs. anti-natalist, I guess).
As trust is spread across the network to an increasing number of people running nodes, the trust assigned to any individual participant approaches zero.
This can be observed in the resilience of the network, as it self-heals against any attacker or alternative fork from the consensus.
Bitcoin has democratically ossified into a store-of-value with absolute scarcity, deterministic monetary policy, and a priority on decentralization. It's extremely unlikely that those attributes will be compromised.
> As trust is spread across the network to an increasing number of people running nodes, the trust assigned to any individual participant approaches zero.
If only we knew this was true.
An increase in the number of people running nodes does not guarantee that the maximum trust assigned to any individual participant approaches zero. What is the size of the largest Bitcoin whale? What is the size of the largest Bitcoin cartel? How do you know that the share of the largest Bitcoin whale or cartel isn’t increasing? What prevents China from deciding to eliminate the Bitcoin threat to its control by taking over the Chinese miners and launching a 51% attack?
Even if you are willing to believe that trust is well distributed across many independent entities, you still need to have greater trust in your own security and IT skills. When your wallet is hacked or you lose your credentials, there’s no number to call to recover your Bitcoin.
Bitcoin still requires significant trust, which is often overlooked.
> What prevents China from deciding to eliminate the Bitcoin threat to its control by taking over the Chinese miners and launching a 51% attack?
China isn’t stupid.
If they 51% attacked Bitcoin (completely contrary to their self interest), everyone would switch to a different hash algorithm and now China has burned tens of billions of capital, hurt their reputation, and achieved nothing.
You trust China to not attack Bitcoin because you consider it against their self interest.
China just launched its own digital currency.[1]
“In order to protect our currency sovereignty and legal currency status, we have to plan ahead,” said Mu Changchun, who is shepherding the project at the People’s Bank of China.
China isn’t the only major power that needs to monitor transactions and maintain control of its money supply. There are plenty of capable parties that could launch a 51% attack and they’re unlikely to take responsibility for it afterwards, so reputation is hardly a factor. The fact that another hash algorithm could be used later doesn’t matter. A government doesn’t stop defending its interests just because threats change.
Certainly, there may never be a 51% attack, but it will not be surprising if it happens.
Trust approaches, but never reaches, zero. In practice though, so few people run full nodes relative to the whole that trust is still not nearly as decentralized as it might appear. A few rough estimates from simple searches indicates that only 10% of about 1 million miners actually run a full node.
Further, while this article is about 2 years old, it indicates that many miners use outdated software that may have vulnerabilities. [0] Even assuming those expressed in the article have resolved, it may very well be the case that similar proportions of miners today aren't running the most recent software & are vulnerable to newer attacks.
Finally, while bitcoin may have ossified, I don't think that is has done so as a store of value (at least not year). A solid store of value should not fluctuate in value by 5%, 10%, 15% on a fairly regular basis.
If I wanted a good store of value, I would still be looking at the traditional option of gold or, at least over the long-term, real estate. Though I suppose if the world economic system every goes belly up, neither bitcoin, gold, or real estate will be of much use. In that case, the best store of value would be long-term shelf-stable food.
> A solid store of value should not fluctuate in value by 5%, 10%, 15% on a fairly regular basis.
What do you think it should look like when an asset monetizes from nothing to one of the world’s largest assets in under 15 years? A nice smooth geometric curve?
Not OP, but if you inspect the overlay, just right next to it there's a <script> with a closeOverlay function. OP probably tried to inspect/delete DOM element and found that function.
Wait what? That's so Apple, take a standard feature, claim they pioneered/invented it, and then do it wrong.
I purposely shop for big batteries (over 3500mAh) and my current phone lasts up to 2 days 15 hours on a single charge, and the previous one was similar when new
Fourth Camp: You are a tinker and a smithy. You build tools for other developers to use.
* Source Code: Your code is clean enough for you. Your top priority is thorough documentation and intuitive API design.
* Execution: Critical around bottle necks, like large batch processing and build times, otherwise it doesn't matter. Iterate and optimize based on feedback from your devs.
* Correctness: The program should function exactly how it's described to function in documentation. If something unexpected happens, the error is clearly and concisely exposed to the developer so that they can understand what they did wrong.
* UI: Usually not a thing, but when it is, your users are developers and they should be able to figure it out ...
Personally, I'm a gamedev, super in Camp 3. I've worked with a lot of folks who could care less about product and polish, but love making their colleagues lives easier. It's pretty similar to Camp 3 in the sense of "making for your users", but the skillset and priorities are very different.
Favorite languages: TypeScript
Hangouts: npm, github, anywhere open source code is distributed
I was going to post a comment like this if I couldn't find one! As a DevOps-type engineer who writes mostly internal tooling - I really couldn't relate to any of the 3 camps that the author mentioned, but I can relate to what you wrote. Tooling for developers and opearations / SRE types in general all follow a similar paradigm to what you mentioned.
I'd add to add:
Fav languages: Whatever is already installed and easy to deploy and maintain/debug on your target system. For linux systems, this might mean Python, Bash, Go.
> * UI: Usually not a thing, but when it is, your users are developers and they should be able to figure it out ...
There is still an interface that the developers are using, whether it be command-line based, graphical, an API, or something else entirely. And hopefully it is well-designed!
OP - I've been working with the Game Closure team on the HTML5 devkit for quite a while now, and we have yet to find an engine that gets better performance out of 2D JS games on native. The view hierarchy, rendering, and animation are written in both JS (web builds) and C (native builds), connected by a Java Android stack and an Objective-C iOS stack. The docs are a bit out-of-date but the tech is really powerful. It supports WebGL and canvas rendering in web builds, but there's no 3D support yet.
Does Game Closure provide / require you to use its own game engine, or just provide a canvas-compatible rendering context?
I'm trying to improve performance of my ImpactJS-based game on Android, but none of the other canvas reimplementations I've played with (e.g. Cocoon, Crosswalk) are meaningfully more performant than a regular old web view.
If Game Closure will let me drop my existing canvas-based game into an optimized canvas context, a la Ejecta on iOS, I'd be super interested in checking it out. The docs are making it hard for me to figure out what it actually provides.
That would be tough; the accelerated piece in native is mostly coupled to the JS API - specifically the view hierarchy and animations. It's pretty straightforward to port games to it though, and it's generally easy to pick up and move fast. The easiest way is to take a look at some example code. Here's a game I built for the Global Game Jam 2015. Cheers!
Can confirm, awesome person. She is always full of energy because she loves her work; she rallies all of her team members to strive for success, and she goes out of her way to care for those around her.
In this statement, Tyson is referring to science as an objective reality. Science in human terms, as he often admits, has flaws that need to be explored and solved. However, in this quote, I understood him to be describing the pursuit of the objective truth, which is the primary mission of science in the first place. Scientists believe in an objective reality that can be described by thorough investigation and experimentation. Over the long-term, human science asymptotically approaches the truth, and to that truth, Tyson's statement refers.
LinkedIn also sets some very annoying traps for its users.
A few days ago, I received an email from LinkedIn displaying an old friend who wanted to connect. I was excited to see an old familiar face, so I logged in and eventually found a way to connect with him. Today, I received an email again for the same person, saying my invitation to connect was still standing. I clicked through the links in the email this time, and was walked through a multi-step tutorial, that tricked me into sending 16 invites to random people I have never met before. They had a list of potential connections, only one of which I wanted to make, so I took the time to uncheck all the other boxes beside strangers. When I hit their continue button, it told me I had sent 16 invitations ... apparently the list I had just seen was actually scrollable, but by design, it was very difficult to tell that there were 16 hidden users I had to scroll down to see. Very frustrating.
