https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_Bubble_of_1769

The point is that I don't think irrational exuberance in stocks is a recent thing.

That's still very highly celebrated. Interestingly enough, people with Mediterranean backgrounds also feel this way (there's lots of crossover here btw).

Owning your own business is one of the best things one can do in that culture. There's a story in a Taleb book about a Lebanese (I think?) man who went on to become one of the execs at Mobil or some other oil company, and his mother was still disappointed that he didn't own his own company.

The US, by having bad worker protections and privacy abusing tech companies, etc. have been able to pave the way for extreme amounts of innovation that just wouldn't happen anywhere else. The rest of the world then effectively has innovation subsidized since they import the finished product.

Honestly, I see this as a way for the powers that be to force explicit KYC. You want those coins? You prove they're yours, you stick your name on that wallet and all the liability that comes along with it. Otherwise the government (some government) holds onto them until you can definitively prove they're yours. I dont think this scenario is likely, but I can see it being something that is proposed or tried.

That said, I don't know how you could even do a roll back, you're not rolling back to a 'safe' state since the keys aren't safe at that point.

The first is the fact that many things are centralized. Things like Signal already have quantum-resistant encryption, and if they don't, they're able to implement it relatively quickly because it's centralized. BTC is not centralized and needs to jump through a bunch of hoops to get anything done.

The second is that because those things are centralized or close to, you can roll back changes with ease. For instance, if you hack a bank and steal a bunch of money from an account you're far more likely to be able to freeze those funds and get other banks to help stop everything before they're gone forever. You can't do that with BTC.

I'm disappointed in you today, HN

This is the key point a lot of people miss, the vast majority of equipment needed to actually use renewables requires Chinese products. If you go 100% renewables, you're only replacing one form of dependence (oil) for another,

I mean nobody argues that the FED governor is voted in, right? In reality a lot of people argue that they're unelected and yet making decisions that affect everyone.

Because the people voting it down are the elected MEPs, whilst the people putting it up to parliament are the European Commission. The EC are appointed, rather than elected. Which means the powers that be just appoint people who are going to push through laws like this, that they want. The MEPs can't put up bills to be voted on.