Absolutely agree; having spent the better part of 2 decades imagining, architecting and testing alternative solutions to global-scale monetary system problems -- the operation of central-bank money is essentially incomprehensible to most people. Including most "nerds".
This appears to be, unfortunately, by design.
The blaring fire-alarm klaxons are going off, all over the system. "Whistling past the graveyard" is only going to serve us for so long.
It will be considered sad, I think, that so many smart "nerds" spent their lives optimizing click-through rates, instead of helping empower the world to have reliable, globally available solid money.
No, it's the result of learned lessons that the simple solutions run afoul of problems. That the resulting system is complex is not the result of adversarial behavior - it's the result of handling many complex interacting pieces in a decently robust and predictable manner compared to anything tried previously.
Cryptocurrencies and proponents tend to ignore centuries of reasons why currencies and monetary systems are what they are now. A simple example is the benefits of a central bank to smooth inflation compared to previous systems, which no cryptocurrency can do. (Notice how volatile crypto prices are compared to say USD or any first world currency).
When I downloaded the original Satoshi paper and reference implementation, I recognized most of the deficiencies you relate, here and elsewhere. Tragically, that is why I never bothered to install and run it... Oops. "The best is the enemy of the good".
The problems with global-consensus cryptocurrencies run much deeper, and you are correct that they will never be a money substitute.
It is surprising, however, that so few technical people bothered to ask "why", and look for the solution. Perhaps it was my decade of work prior, wrestling with distributed monitoring and control systems, that made me inquisitive about general solutions in this class of problems.
One class of solutions broke quite recently, and has received little recognition. I dropped everything, and went all-in, and have been developing with the team since.
As the parent has observed -- I see very little substantive discussion, and plenty of unfortunately cringe-inducing dismissive "aktualy, ..." statements, paroting trivial and obvious "deficiencies" as proof that cryptocurrencies are a dead-end.
You seem quite interested, though. Reach out, if so.
1) A consistent global ledger balance doesn't require global consensus; only local agreement, with global enforcement of rules. See: holo.host. Result: linear scalability (think: billions of agregate transactions per second), and CaP (Consistency and Partition-tolerance, with limited availability: any node you can see, you can transact with). Non-repudiable instantly, and finality as soon as one participant node in any transaction rejoins the larger network.
2) Direct monetization of assets with a market price; Dynamic issuance of credit based on price of monetary units vs. a basket of commodities. Sorry, word salad: your money maintains a perpetual, immutable value relationship to a large basket of commodities. No uncorrected inflation/deflation. Dynamic issuance/withdrawal is automatic and system-wide; no "first spender" pissing in the punch.
I so 100% agree!! I need more friends like you :-)
I want to help people become more independent from control systems using technology to empower them.
Increasing click-through rates for advertising behemoth like google or facebook? Just no. I like money on the table but I would rather starve than do that. It is the polar opposite of all my beliefs.
Nerds used to be pro freedom. Unfortunately at some point we became the minority.
What leads you to believe that a cryptocurrency that is a viable money substitute is deflationary?
The current crop of global-consensus CA AP and CP systems underpinning fixed-issuance (deflationary) or clumsy dynamic issuance (eg. USDT, etc.) are nothing like the systems that will eventually provide a humanity-serving monetary system...
Everything you see now is "Pre Model-T", in automobile terms. You'll see little if any of it in use in a few years as "money", but cryptocurrencies are going to Tear the Doors Off the financial system.
I do not believe that a crypto that would be a viable substitute would be deflationary. I am observing that the most popular crypto today is bitcoin, that it is deflationary, that (many of) its fans like that property, and that it would be a poor basis for an entire economy.
I would genuinely like to hear more about how these future crypto currencies will "Tear the Doors Off the financial system". I got into cryptocurrency in 2012 and I have been hearing claims like that since then, but I have not found any of them plausible.
Seems like it would be good for elections, where you need to verify the identity of voters and then be able to verify that your vote was counted properly.
Working in elections I am very skeptical of this. The reason is that electoral systems support the transition of power by creating a publicly trusted mechanism to measure support. People have to believe their votes are being accurately tabulated for such a system to work. Introducing software to the electoral process-- any software -- undermines public trust in the system because most people are not software engineers and are not personally capable of verifying code.
Most computer scientists who study elections are personally opposed to even electronic voting and prefer paper ballots, which I do too. That's because they can be physically counted and intuitively understood in a way that software cannot be by most of the population. That simplicity is a strength in building trust.
Seems like a verifiable, open voting ledger is a lot more transparent and obvious, regardless of the code and method of vote collection, which are orthogonal issues. No reason you couldn't use paper inputs and an ID into a public ledger. In fact, it should be much more consistent.
But a simple search on the internet shows that there are a lot of folks who don't want something like this.
Well, I'm the head of this family and this family supports the republicrats, so I'm going to be looking at your phone honey, to make sure you don't make a mistake.
Or, I'm offering $10 to you, junkie, to support my party. But if you want to be paid I'm going to use your device/private key/one time code to do it myself. Or maybe you're my employee and we'll have a voting party where I can see you all wisely agree with me.
The privacy of a voting booth where neutral officials who are supervised by all candidates doesn't allow either of these scenarios work.
That is not true. See work by Andrew Neff on verifiable shuffles of secrets. It is practical to produce a proof that can be verified by the voter but not useful in proving which way the ballot has been cast to anyone else.
I skimmed through the paper here (http://web.cs.elte.hu/~rfid/p116-neff.pdf) and it doesn't appear to solve the problem. Any time you can see your vote, so can anyone looking over your shoulder.
The described method seems to prevent voting authorities from seeing specific voter's votes, which is useful, but it doesn't solve the "show me you voted for X, or I break your legs" problem.
There is a simple solution: generate a random public key as part of the voting process and print it out for later verification but also include plenty of other people's public keys in the printout.
The voter can remember the position of their own key if they choose to for later validation against the open ledger and can use the others for deniability (if needed).
I don't feel like I could create trust in democracy with something as complicated as a private key for a mostly non-technical nation such as Canada or France.
A more or less open voting ledger already exists without a blockchain. You can go to your Secretary of State and buy the record of voting in your state for somewhere between 0 and a few thousand dollars. You could also buy it from a private company which aggregates and resells that data. The only information not available is how particular individuals voted.
I'd be interested to get your take on this concept of an electronic voting system:
1) Each voter enters the booth and a computer immediately generates a random number, let's call it a transient voter ID. The computer then prints out their number shuffled in with 10-20 other (real) transient voter IDs. User takes the printout and notes the position of their number.
2) Voter makes their selections, and their vote is recorded by the software.
3) At the end of the election, the ledger of all transient voter IDs and the accompanying vote is published.
Voters can confirm that their ID is present in the list, along with the correct candidate choice, and that the final totals were summed correctly. The general public can also spot-check that the appropriate number of votes per precinct are present. Yet since the printout includes 20+ other IDs, no one can prove conclusively who they voted for. The computer could ensure that at least one vote for each candidate is included on the printout.
There's really no need to trust the software since the vote ledger is fully published (also no need for blockchain).
They'd have to publish the ledger in real time and/or instantly show how those 10 to 20 voters voted, to the voter, for this to be effective. Otherwise whoever is paying or blackmailing that voter can ask the voter to mark their id and hand or transmit it to them immediately. They can later verify that the vote was given to the right choice once the ledger is published and take appropriate action for or against the voter. Voter cannot easily fake their choice, and in the case of blackmail, consequences for bad luck can be bad.
Edit: If you do show all 20 votes, you'd have to have votes for all candidates on them.
Also if someone is trying to manipulate a bunch of votes, they'd run into dupes and know one is lying.
Right, you would have to include a vote for each candidate in the set returned to the voter and generate the set in near realtime, at least for the first voters in each precinct.
Neither of those however should be difficult with electronic voting systems.
It's not that helpful for elections. The ballot is secured by ensuring that people can't vote more than once and that they can't be easily coerced into voting a certain way. Allowing significant remote voting destroys ballot secrecy no matter what. Blockchains don't help either problem: The former is an issue of voter registration and the latter requires ensuring nobody physically watches ballots being marked.
There are verifiable voting protocols that allow for accurate counting. That is, verification by the voter that the ballot is accurately recorded without allowing the voter to prove which way they voted to a third party. They require complex infrastructure and they don't hold up against total corruption of the process any better than paper anyway.
US is amazing when it comes to voting. People constantly trying to fix electronic voting while the rest of the world does perfectly fine with pen and paper. You don’t need computers for elections.
Decentralized consensus between untrusted parties is a world-changing concept.
The fact that Central Banks / Governments have "chained the fire exits shut" to keep people in their explosively bankrupt monetary systems is not a long-term viable situation.
There are a multitude of problems with global consensus systems as monetary systems. But, something to consider is this:
Two-thirds of the global population are not served by the present system. Focusing on how cryptocurrencies are "used by criminals" is astonishingly wrong-headed. Once the world's population has uniform access to viable, stable and useful money -- then I might start to consider how to help keep "bad people" off of cryptocurrencies.
However, I think that the Gold Standard in international malfeasance will continue to be "suitcases full of USD or EUR $100 bills". As it is today. But, you don't see governments or central banks falling over themselves to fix that problem. Yet, they are actively preventing the unbanked from having access to viable money substitutes.
>The fact that Central Banks / Governments have "chained the fire exits shut" to keep people in their explosively bankrupt monetary systems is not a long-term viable situation.
The systems before them, where each local region, each business, each actor, could coin money via IOUs or other forms and trade was much more costly and corrupt than the current system. Local failures, actors running off with capital, low liquidity were rampant.
There are decent empirical reasons the entire world moved off systems tied to how fast they could dig up metal - such systems have an impedance mismatch with productivity, for example, hindering growth when useful and flooding the markets with new gold finds when the markets don't have matching growth. These led to boom and bust cycles.
With the introduction of the US Fed, recessions became less frequent, less damaging, so much so that the period called the Great Moderation still has economists working on exactly how come the previous boom and bust cycle got so smoothed.
After the Great Depression and the resulting solid evidence that non-fiat exacerbated the problem across dozens of countries, every economy in the world move off them. The evidence was that solid.
>Focusing on how cryptocurrencies are "used by criminals" is astonishingly wrong-headed.
Yet it's backed up by factual behavior.
>Two-thirds of the global population are not served by the present system.
Citation? I can find nothing near this claim to be supported by any evidence I can find. From what I can find, a large majority of the world's population has access to and uses bank accounts, and the vast majority of the rest use cash to transact wages and purchases. If pretty much every person on the planet uses some form of govt issues money, how is that not being served? They're pretty much all capable of local barter, yet choose this other system. Maybe it's better for them? At least they're choosing it.
It is true that a decent chunk of the world has no access to a cell phone or internet. How will cryptocurrencies serve such people?
>Once the world's population has uniform access to viable, stable and useful money
Which cryptocurrencies are anywhere near as stable as a modern first world currency? By stable, I mean the usual financial measure of price volatility against a reasonable basket of goods. Last I checked, BTC, for example, was about the least stable investment one could make. Volatility has serious costs throughout the economy - predictability is vastly better for making contracts like employment or rent or mortgage.
> With the introduction of the US Fed, recessions became less frequent, less damaging, so much so that the period called the Great Moderation still has economists working on exactly how come the previous boom and bust cycle got so smoothed.
Well, this was the narrative up until 2008.
> From what I can find, a large majority of the world's population has access to and uses bank accounts, and the vast majority of the rest use cash to transact wages and purchases.
All of which are at the mercy of whoever is in power at the time.
In the past few years:
- 80 million turks have lost 80% of the value of their cash savings
- 40 million argentines have lost 90% of the value of their cash savings
- 30 million venezuelans have lost 99% of the value of their cash savings
Many other countries have high single digit or double digit true rates of inflation. Even the US rate of inflation is likely double what the official measures are.
Do you care to contrast your implications to periods without the Fed? How many depressions? How many wars?
The Great Depression showed pretty conclusively the folly of a non-fiat currency, since the Fed was still tied by the gold standard, as were many other countries. The distinction between length of depression with and without fiat money was the nail in the coffin for things like gold standards. The results of modern monetary policy during the Great Depression is what led to every single country in the world dropping the gold standard.
Evidence beats speculation in the long run every time.
It's still the narrative. 2008 was the biggest since the GD in 1929. Here's a list [1] of all US recessions. There's no question volatility has been reduced since the introduction of the Fed. And the same has been demonstrated in dozens countries.
>80 million turks have lost 80% of the value of their cash savings - 40 million argentines have lost 90% of the value of their cash savings - 30 million venezuelans have lost 99% of the value of their cash savings
And billions of people have not lost their savings, and billions have been removed from poverty. Cherry picking outliers does not make your case very persuasive.
There's 7+B people on the planet. Demonstrate that your tiny number is worse than before central banking then you will have some room to complain.
The vast literature on this shows the evidence to be otherwise.
>Even the US rate of inflation is likely double what the official measures are.
Yeah, this is nonsense, propagated by places like ShadowStats. There are ample other groups measuring inflation, such as the Billion Prices Project [2], and they obtain the same numbers. If inflation were lied about, there would be ample ways to game various commodities and make a pretty hefty profit. Yet no one I've known in trading has ever heard of such a thing, despite many people trying to do so.
And the most compelling way is you can check it yourself. Take BLS reported inflation for the past few decades. Pick a basket of goods similar to theirs. Measure local prices in a spreadsheet. Now go to your local library or the web and find old ads from decades ago, which is easy to do now. Compute the basket value then.
Even a percent off over a few decades would vastly skew prices. I've done this legwork out of debunking ShadowStats to someone I know that believes their nonsense. You can do it, and disabuse yourself of such unsubstantiated conspiracy nonsense.
>Many other countries have high single digit or double digit true rates of inflation. ... You think this is good?
Yes, it's better than a deflationary spiral. Single digit inflation, if somewhat stable, is vastly better than previous boom bust cycles.
Perfect timing as I sat through a 'for the first time ever blockchain is changing the coffee world' presentation in a room full of poverty stricken farmers and coffee buyers.
Stereotypical sales guy telling these farmers how blockchain is going to make sure coffee is traceable from seed to cup and revolutionize the industry. Everything is immutable, no one in the world is using blockchain for coffee, we are the first and announcing it here today! (just don't google it)
I'm out of the loop on how blockchain would actually help or be truly immutable in a case like coffee. I doubt independent associations are running nodes to prevent data tampering for this private company, and the process from seed to cup has long periods of time between each step. At what point do you enter all the immutable data? If you enter it little by little how do you 100% guarantee the association is correct and you're not mixing up plants, bags of beans, who shipped it, or the 30 other blocks of data we quickly scrolled through?
I sat through a similar presentation that was just crops in general rather than coffee specific last year. At no point did they address why you would want to do that or why it's not possible with non-blockchain technology. Just like all of the other presentations.
I've always been agnostic on blockchain stuff. One of those 'flip-a-coin to determine its future' type of mentalities. On that note, my humble, unsubstantiated hypothesis is that IF it ends up not being a dud technology, then a couple of potential things that make that so might be...
(1) Something to do with the growing number of people not participating in the current traditional financial system (the unbanked etc) together with some sort of negative event in current traditional system (recession/depression etc).
(2) Something to do with future A.I. systems and processes requiring a historical snapshot of everything that happened within the system or process and blockchain somehow ending up being more reliable, secure, and accurate than a traditional database in recording the history of an A.I. system or process.
(3) Something to do with the ability to monetize certain things at scale that either could not be monetizable at scale before or could have been but no tech existed that could have made the project/business profitable.
I am honestly surprised you did not put up there self-sustainable economic systems. Systems where people would exchange real goods and services but would not necesitate a central arbiter.
Think of things like Uber or Airbnb. I could theoretically imagine a system with the proper incentives between users, providers and a incentivised system of decentralized arbiters or oracles that could be self-sustainable. You would lack a central authority but they would all work within a framework. But the fact that you lack this authority could potentially make it un-bannable. It would effectively be a system of peer to peer transactions that could offer come form of settlement in case of conflicts.
Blockchain is 12 years old and yet few if any great applications have been implemented. It only took a few years before PCs had great killer apps, what's the deal with blockchain? The deal is hype, a hype that has become very common for new technologies in today's world. https://issues.org/behind-technological-hype/
44 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 60.3 ms ] threadMeanwhile, working in the field puts good money on my table and helps create a different future.
This appears to be, unfortunately, by design.
The blaring fire-alarm klaxons are going off, all over the system. "Whistling past the graveyard" is only going to serve us for so long.
It will be considered sad, I think, that so many smart "nerds" spent their lives optimizing click-through rates, instead of helping empower the world to have reliable, globally available solid money.
No, it's the result of learned lessons that the simple solutions run afoul of problems. That the resulting system is complex is not the result of adversarial behavior - it's the result of handling many complex interacting pieces in a decently robust and predictable manner compared to anything tried previously.
Cryptocurrencies and proponents tend to ignore centuries of reasons why currencies and monetary systems are what they are now. A simple example is the benefits of a central bank to smooth inflation compared to previous systems, which no cryptocurrency can do. (Notice how volatile crypto prices are compared to say USD or any first world currency).
The problems with global-consensus cryptocurrencies run much deeper, and you are correct that they will never be a money substitute.
It is surprising, however, that so few technical people bothered to ask "why", and look for the solution. Perhaps it was my decade of work prior, wrestling with distributed monitoring and control systems, that made me inquisitive about general solutions in this class of problems.
One class of solutions broke quite recently, and has received little recognition. I dropped everything, and went all-in, and have been developing with the team since.
As the parent has observed -- I see very little substantive discussion, and plenty of unfortunately cringe-inducing dismissive "aktualy, ..." statements, paroting trivial and obvious "deficiencies" as proof that cryptocurrencies are a dead-end.
You seem quite interested, though. Reach out, if so.
1) A consistent global ledger balance doesn't require global consensus; only local agreement, with global enforcement of rules. See: holo.host. Result: linear scalability (think: billions of agregate transactions per second), and CaP (Consistency and Partition-tolerance, with limited availability: any node you can see, you can transact with). Non-repudiable instantly, and finality as soon as one participant node in any transaction rejoins the larger network.
2) Direct monetization of assets with a market price; Dynamic issuance of credit based on price of monetary units vs. a basket of commodities. Sorry, word salad: your money maintains a perpetual, immutable value relationship to a large basket of commodities. No uncorrected inflation/deflation. Dynamic issuance/withdrawal is automatic and system-wide; no "first spender" pissing in the punch.
I want to help people become more independent from control systems using technology to empower them.
Increasing click-through rates for advertising behemoth like google or facebook? Just no. I like money on the table but I would rather starve than do that. It is the polar opposite of all my beliefs.
Nerds used to be pro freedom. Unfortunately at some point we became the minority.
The current crop of global-consensus CA AP and CP systems underpinning fixed-issuance (deflationary) or clumsy dynamic issuance (eg. USDT, etc.) are nothing like the systems that will eventually provide a humanity-serving monetary system...
Everything you see now is "Pre Model-T", in automobile terms. You'll see little if any of it in use in a few years as "money", but cryptocurrencies are going to Tear the Doors Off the financial system.
I would genuinely like to hear more about how these future crypto currencies will "Tear the Doors Off the financial system". I got into cryptocurrency in 2012 and I have been hearing claims like that since then, but I have not found any of them plausible.
Most computer scientists who study elections are personally opposed to even electronic voting and prefer paper ballots, which I do too. That's because they can be physically counted and intuitively understood in a way that software cannot be by most of the population. That simplicity is a strength in building trust.
But a simple search on the internet shows that there are a lot of folks who don't want something like this.
Or, I'm offering $10 to you, junkie, to support my party. But if you want to be paid I'm going to use your device/private key/one time code to do it myself. Or maybe you're my employee and we'll have a voting party where I can see you all wisely agree with me.
The privacy of a voting booth where neutral officials who are supervised by all candidates doesn't allow either of these scenarios work.
The described method seems to prevent voting authorities from seeing specific voter's votes, which is useful, but it doesn't solve the "show me you voted for X, or I break your legs" problem.
The voter can remember the position of their own key if they choose to for later validation against the open ledger and can use the others for deniability (if needed).
1) Each voter enters the booth and a computer immediately generates a random number, let's call it a transient voter ID. The computer then prints out their number shuffled in with 10-20 other (real) transient voter IDs. User takes the printout and notes the position of their number.
2) Voter makes their selections, and their vote is recorded by the software.
3) At the end of the election, the ledger of all transient voter IDs and the accompanying vote is published.
Voters can confirm that their ID is present in the list, along with the correct candidate choice, and that the final totals were summed correctly. The general public can also spot-check that the appropriate number of votes per precinct are present. Yet since the printout includes 20+ other IDs, no one can prove conclusively who they voted for. The computer could ensure that at least one vote for each candidate is included on the printout.
There's really no need to trust the software since the vote ledger is fully published (also no need for blockchain).
Edit: If you do show all 20 votes, you'd have to have votes for all candidates on them.
Also if someone is trying to manipulate a bunch of votes, they'd run into dupes and know one is lying.
Neither of those however should be difficult with electronic voting systems.
There are verifiable voting protocols that allow for accurate counting. That is, verification by the voter that the ballot is accurately recorded without allowing the voter to prove which way they voted to a third party. They require complex infrastructure and they don't hold up against total corruption of the process any better than paper anyway.
I think simple paper ballots are superior.
The fact that Central Banks / Governments have "chained the fire exits shut" to keep people in their explosively bankrupt monetary systems is not a long-term viable situation.
There are a multitude of problems with global consensus systems as monetary systems. But, something to consider is this:
Two-thirds of the global population are not served by the present system. Focusing on how cryptocurrencies are "used by criminals" is astonishingly wrong-headed. Once the world's population has uniform access to viable, stable and useful money -- then I might start to consider how to help keep "bad people" off of cryptocurrencies.
However, I think that the Gold Standard in international malfeasance will continue to be "suitcases full of USD or EUR $100 bills". As it is today. But, you don't see governments or central banks falling over themselves to fix that problem. Yet, they are actively preventing the unbanked from having access to viable money substitutes.
The systems before them, where each local region, each business, each actor, could coin money via IOUs or other forms and trade was much more costly and corrupt than the current system. Local failures, actors running off with capital, low liquidity were rampant.
There are decent empirical reasons the entire world moved off systems tied to how fast they could dig up metal - such systems have an impedance mismatch with productivity, for example, hindering growth when useful and flooding the markets with new gold finds when the markets don't have matching growth. These led to boom and bust cycles.
With the introduction of the US Fed, recessions became less frequent, less damaging, so much so that the period called the Great Moderation still has economists working on exactly how come the previous boom and bust cycle got so smoothed.
After the Great Depression and the resulting solid evidence that non-fiat exacerbated the problem across dozens of countries, every economy in the world move off them. The evidence was that solid.
>Focusing on how cryptocurrencies are "used by criminals" is astonishingly wrong-headed.
Yet it's backed up by factual behavior.
>Two-thirds of the global population are not served by the present system.
Citation? I can find nothing near this claim to be supported by any evidence I can find. From what I can find, a large majority of the world's population has access to and uses bank accounts, and the vast majority of the rest use cash to transact wages and purchases. If pretty much every person on the planet uses some form of govt issues money, how is that not being served? They're pretty much all capable of local barter, yet choose this other system. Maybe it's better for them? At least they're choosing it.
It is true that a decent chunk of the world has no access to a cell phone or internet. How will cryptocurrencies serve such people?
>Once the world's population has uniform access to viable, stable and useful money
Which cryptocurrencies are anywhere near as stable as a modern first world currency? By stable, I mean the usual financial measure of price volatility against a reasonable basket of goods. Last I checked, BTC, for example, was about the least stable investment one could make. Volatility has serious costs throughout the economy - predictability is vastly better for making contracts like employment or rent or mortgage.
Well, this was the narrative up until 2008.
> From what I can find, a large majority of the world's population has access to and uses bank accounts, and the vast majority of the rest use cash to transact wages and purchases.
All of which are at the mercy of whoever is in power at the time. In the past few years: - 80 million turks have lost 80% of the value of their cash savings - 40 million argentines have lost 90% of the value of their cash savings - 30 million venezuelans have lost 99% of the value of their cash savings
Many other countries have high single digit or double digit true rates of inflation. Even the US rate of inflation is likely double what the official measures are.
You think this is good?
Do you care to contrast your implications to periods without the Fed? How many depressions? How many wars?
The Great Depression showed pretty conclusively the folly of a non-fiat currency, since the Fed was still tied by the gold standard, as were many other countries. The distinction between length of depression with and without fiat money was the nail in the coffin for things like gold standards. The results of modern monetary policy during the Great Depression is what led to every single country in the world dropping the gold standard.
Evidence beats speculation in the long run every time.
It's still the narrative. 2008 was the biggest since the GD in 1929. Here's a list [1] of all US recessions. There's no question volatility has been reduced since the introduction of the Fed. And the same has been demonstrated in dozens countries.
>80 million turks have lost 80% of the value of their cash savings - 40 million argentines have lost 90% of the value of their cash savings - 30 million venezuelans have lost 99% of the value of their cash savings
And billions of people have not lost their savings, and billions have been removed from poverty. Cherry picking outliers does not make your case very persuasive.
There's 7+B people on the planet. Demonstrate that your tiny number is worse than before central banking then you will have some room to complain.
The vast literature on this shows the evidence to be otherwise.
>Even the US rate of inflation is likely double what the official measures are.
Yeah, this is nonsense, propagated by places like ShadowStats. There are ample other groups measuring inflation, such as the Billion Prices Project [2], and they obtain the same numbers. If inflation were lied about, there would be ample ways to game various commodities and make a pretty hefty profit. Yet no one I've known in trading has ever heard of such a thing, despite many people trying to do so.
And the most compelling way is you can check it yourself. Take BLS reported inflation for the past few decades. Pick a basket of goods similar to theirs. Measure local prices in a spreadsheet. Now go to your local library or the web and find old ads from decades ago, which is easy to do now. Compute the basket value then.
Even a percent off over a few decades would vastly skew prices. I've done this legwork out of debunking ShadowStats to someone I know that believes their nonsense. You can do it, and disabuse yourself of such unsubstantiated conspiracy nonsense.
>Many other countries have high single digit or double digit true rates of inflation. ... You think this is good?
Yes, it's better than a deflationary spiral. Single digit inflation, if somewhat stable, is vastly better than previous boom bust cycles.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_recessions_in_the_Unit...
[2] http://www.thebillionpricesproject.com/
Time will tell who is correct.
Stereotypical sales guy telling these farmers how blockchain is going to make sure coffee is traceable from seed to cup and revolutionize the industry. Everything is immutable, no one in the world is using blockchain for coffee, we are the first and announcing it here today! (just don't google it)
I'm out of the loop on how blockchain would actually help or be truly immutable in a case like coffee. I doubt independent associations are running nodes to prevent data tampering for this private company, and the process from seed to cup has long periods of time between each step. At what point do you enter all the immutable data? If you enter it little by little how do you 100% guarantee the association is correct and you're not mixing up plants, bags of beans, who shipped it, or the 30 other blocks of data we quickly scrolled through?
(1) Something to do with the growing number of people not participating in the current traditional financial system (the unbanked etc) together with some sort of negative event in current traditional system (recession/depression etc).
(2) Something to do with future A.I. systems and processes requiring a historical snapshot of everything that happened within the system or process and blockchain somehow ending up being more reliable, secure, and accurate than a traditional database in recording the history of an A.I. system or process.
(3) Something to do with the ability to monetize certain things at scale that either could not be monetizable at scale before or could have been but no tech existed that could have made the project/business profitable.
This is what we're doing here -> https://www.grassland.network
Think of things like Uber or Airbnb. I could theoretically imagine a system with the proper incentives between users, providers and a incentivised system of decentralized arbiters or oracles that could be self-sustainable. You would lack a central authority but they would all work within a framework. But the fact that you lack this authority could potentially make it un-bannable. It would effectively be a system of peer to peer transactions that could offer come form of settlement in case of conflicts.
Hard to pin down, but not impossible, I think.