This is fascinating. Within a mere 10 years, Bitcoin has gone from a toy to something now intersecting directly with the US banking system.

With each integration point, Bitcoin gets more difficult to legislate out of existence or destroy through capricious police action. Aside from Tether, this is one of the biggest risk factors cited by those who have studied Bitcoin in detail.

What pet theory is that? All I did was to mention two historical episodes that preceded the event under discussion, and which the paper fails to mention.

> The author of the linked article is Barry Eichengreen, widely recognized as the premier scholar of the Great Depression.

So what? We're talking about the paper, not a person.

> The article references about 900 pages worth of other articles, believe me: your pet theory about the 1920's events is considered in the conclusion.

On what pages does the paper take up the issue of the speculative bubble leading up to the Great Depression?

> Governments don't work like a household. What matters is borrow costs and use of funds. If a government can borrow and the net growth generated is greater than the interest rate on the debt, it's a good thing to borrow. Like any business debt.

A main MMT talking point. Yes, I've read Kelton's book and yes, a government that prints its own currency is not like a household.

MMT is an experiment. For all our sakes, I hope its proponents are right.

> A government can be in debt forever, the only thing that matters is borrowing costs and growth rate (and how the growth is generated see eg. Chinese real estate for malinvestment).

What if malinvestment looks like investment until it doesn't?

> ... The constraints of the gold-standard system hamstrung countries as they struggled to adapt during the 1920s to changes in the world economy. ... Central bankers continued to kick the world economy while it was down until it lost consciousness.

What this article ignores, like countless articles before and since, is the Roaring 20s. Articles like this treat the Great Depression as an event that hit the US economy out of the blue. But even superficial study of the ten years prior reveals something obvious: a massive, compounding, technology-fueled asset bubble.

The article also ignores the event that kicked off the Roaring 20s: the depression of 1920-1921:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depression_of_1920–1921

This depression resolved itself under a gold standard regime and with minimal intervention by the Federal Government and Federal Reserve.

50 years ago the US abandoned the last vestiges of the gold standard. Today we find ourselves in the middle of a technology-fueled asset bubble. The US president talks, without a hint of embarrassment, about the need to borrow to continue to service debts. This is, of course, the very definition of a Ponzi scheme.

Whatever this comes to, we won't have the gold standard to kick around. It's been out of the picture for decades. What happens when the world's governments decide to outdo each other on how much currency they can conjure into being?

Earlier on, the author does speculate about what drove Jack:

> To put it another way, Jack was painfully aware that his future options were, “be a complete loser,” or “be a complete loser who feels really really good for a few hours every day.” He chose the latter.

What's striking about this is how it's possible to live this way without drugs. A brain-numbing job eight hours a day and a life-saving hobby for four. A toxic-family life but wonderful community.

It almost sounds like Tennis could have been this outlet:

> One time when Jack was in middle school, he walked off the tennis court after a well-played match, and his mother asked him how he felt. Jack said something like, “when I’m out there, it’s so nice… it’s like the rest of the world goes away and I don’t have any problems.”

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28983436

Points: 159

# Comments: 36

If this is happening, what would be the consequences of allowing even more TEUs to be stored on the US side?

The author makes this claim without proof. The circumstances may be consistent with the explanation, but maybe others are as well. Also, the source of the claim is not clear. Did he glean all of this information from the boat captain, or someone else?

The problem is that the claim is central to the entire thread and the proposed solution.

If the root cause is wrong, then allowing containers to pile up in yards 6-deep could cause yet another bottleneck - a lack of containers to return back on ships, for example. This could happen, for example, if yard computer systems were never designed for this kind of use and records start going to paper.

This article reports that the port has processed record numbers of ships:

> In June, the Los Angeles port became the first in the western hemisphere to process 10m container units in a 12‑month period. The Long Beach port will likely process more than 9m container units this year, exceeding last year’s record of 8.1m units, the most in the port’s 110-year history.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/oct/20/supply-chai...

Nowhere does the thread mention this record-high ship traffic.

Here are some simple questions:

1. What are you trying to protect in a vote?

2. Why can't an SQL database with whatever levels of cryptographic assurance you'd like to add do the job?

3. What does a blockchain add to (2) that no other technology does, regardless of cost?

These questions are never answered, and indeed they are not answered here either. Instead, these articles lead with technology and rarely get around to what matters.

Often there's something like this included in the article:

> Blockchains are a technology which is all about providing guarantees about process integrity. If a process is run on a blockchain, the process is guaranteed to run according to some pre-agreed code and provide the correct output. No one can prevent the execution, no one can tamper with the execution, and no one can censor and block any users' inputs from being processed.

No. A block chain is a timestamping mechanism. Within certain very narrow boundaries, it makes certain guarantees about the relative ordering of events. A tamper-resistant log file? Yes. A solution to voting? Does that involve relative event ordering? If so, is that the central problem?

Electronic cash systems like Bitcoin will work work just fine without a blockchain, provided they can solve the double spending problem. Bitcoin solved it with a system for ordering transactions based on proof-of-work. There are other solutions, but all suffer from censorship pressures in ways that Bitcoin does not.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28962208

Points: 6

# Comments: 0

Barring that, what sections of the AGPL are you looking at to make that claim?

Oops, can't do that, it appears.

What standing does the Software Freedom Conservancy have to do pursue this in court themselves? Are they authors of Mastodon?

AFAICT, unless one of the Mastodon authors gets involved, this is not going to amount to much.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_(law)

This article doesn't even establish whether a commercial license to Mastodon (which would render the AGPL moot) had been obtained by Truth Social or not.

Strangely, the original story ran on Bloomberg itself, which isn't mentioned in the article. Fortunately, the archive.md trick works. https://archive.md

This is a space to watch closely. Pensions are tragicomically underfunded in the US:

https://equable.org/state-of-pensions-2020-national-pension-...

To make up for the shortfall, they're after any asset that moves. Bitcoin's well-known supply cap places it uniquely among all assets.

It's not hard to imagine a near future in which all of the world's largest pension funds own Bitcoin, directly or indirectly. Then what?

NYDIG itself appears to be a company dedicated to making an even more sweeping version of this idea reality:

> A provider of Bitcoin-related technology and investment services, NYDIG also said it would be launching “Bitcoin-powered solutions for U.S.-based life insurance and annuity providers.” This comes as the firm announced the addition of reinsurance company TransRe CEO Mike Sapnar, who will be joining NYDIG as the global head of insurance solutions.

https://cointelegraph.com/news/nydig-raises-100-million-and-...

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28938296

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28936509

Points: 5

# Comments: 0

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28932996

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

I'm surprised the article doesn't mention Default:

https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/default/trait.Default.html

It can be combined with the rest pattern to yield something very similar to the solution the author is after.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/19650265/is-there-a-fast...

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Value_overflow_incident

The DAO hack resulted from a poorly-written contract. Concerns about the quality of the contract were ignored by the team. The DAO itself wasn't even part of the Ethereum protocol, just an application running on it.

The DAO was like a Bitcoin transaction that spent all output value to miner fees, which has happened a lot. But at no time did that ever result in a rollback of history.

The response to the DAO was the Ethereum community slapping a giant asterisk on the motto "Code is Law." And the community is quite all right with that.