roblev's comments

For many organisations there is a real risk that a browser update will unexpectedly break a key internal application, which could have a catastrophic impact on operations.

The vast majority of large companies will control and test key software updates, balancing the various risks (security patches, obsolescence, operational incidents..).

Not allowing auto-updating to be controlled basically means that the software is not intended to be deployed in enterprises.

clearly case sensitivity is a decision by the language designers. Many languages are case-insensitive.

from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Case_sensitivity

Some computer languages are case-sensitive for their identifiers (C, C++, Java, C#, Verilog, Ruby and XML). Others are case-insensitive (i.e., not case-sensitive), such as Ada, most BASICs (an exception being BBC BASIC), Fortran, SQL and Pascal.

> Far from it. They are not deposit constrained, no matter how much mainstream economics likes to think so.

But there are important constraints - from the overview in the article you linked to:

"Although commercial banks create money through lending, they cannot do so freely without limit. Banks are limited in how much they can lend if they are to remain profitable in a competitive banking system. Prudential regulation also acts as a constraint on banks’ activities in order to maintain the resilience of the financial system. "

The main constraint is called Capital Adequacy, and is based on the requirement for a bank to hold some of its own money in reserve compared to the amount of loans it issues. And importantly this money held in reserve must be money that is not pledged to anyone or anything else - i.e. cannot be money from depositors or from issued loans. The banks cannot easily increase this amount of unpledged money (which is called Tier 1 Capital) and hence it acts as a real limit on the amount they can lend.

Yes, I'm sceptical too.

I think the article is mixing up banking with payment processing (payment processing is an important but small part of retail and wholesale banking).

Retail banks make most of their money by charging for loans - either individual overdrafts, personal loans or coporate loans. For apple to be a profitable bank they would have to start assessing businesses and individuals for creditworthiness. It seems quite far from their current business model and not obvious why they would want all the regulatory oversight that comes with it.

Although a similar argument could have been made as societies industrialised, that once the value of farming work fell (which nearly everyone did), then there would be mass unemployment. It didn't play out that way.

The idea that loans can never be paid back is a myth. I can lend someone money, and have it paid back with interest without more loans being necessary or more money being created.

Well the banking model is to take demand deposits to issue longer term loans. Is that bad? People want loans, people want to deposit cash... Why should banks not operate this way?

Would it be better not to have deposits and loans?

99.26% correlation is observed between the Divorce Rate in Maine, and the Per Capita Consumption of Margarine

http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations

You say this implies causation... I have my doubts in any sense of the word implies.

For sure, a correlation could lead to something to investigate, but look at enough data and you will find plenty of correlations that mean nothing. A lot depends on how the correlation is discovered (number of variables involved etc.).

I read the bank underground blog post. It is fine and interesting, but it is talking entirely about bank money creation (loans/deposits) and not about base money or capital ratios. That's OK, no reason for an article to talk about everything. But just because one article doesn't talk about capital in the point it is making, doesn't mean that capital is not an important constraint in banking.

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

There is a reason why bank CEOs have been in recent years judged heavily on their Tier 1 capital ratios, and why they consider it difficult to adjust these ratios. Issuing a new loan makes the bank's capital ratio worse not better.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2015/03/06/a-l...

Capital is absolutely not unconstrained! It is one of the most difficult things for a bank to increase its capital base.

Base money is a low percentage compared to bank money - its true - but all bank money is a claim on base money. Pull out the base money and every bank has a liquidity crisis and would in turn have to recall every loan. More than parking meters would feel it; a bank cannot issue a loan without appropriate capital base, and only high quality liquid unencumbered assets can be considered capital, which cannot be created by a bank (a new loan/deposit is not an unencumbered asset). In practice capital can only be increase by a new share issue or by retaining profits over years.

A lot of the confusion comes from the fact that there are two sorts of money that are in circulation: base money and bank money. This blog post is only talking about bank money, and does not reference base money.

Base money (dollar bills, Euro notes, pound notes etc.) is controlled entirely by the central bank and base money can be created and destroyed by the central bank, whenever they like. Think of it as like digging some more gold or creating some more bitcoins.

Bank money is created by people either depositing base money with a bank, or indeed by a bank issuing a loan as described in the blog post. A deposit can be seen as a loan to the bank: all deposits are loans, all loans are deposits when looked at from the other PoV. Anyway, bank money has similar characteristics to base money - it can be used by purchase goods, it stores value etc.

I can buy a book with base money, by handing the merchant a few dollar bills. Or I can buy the book with bank money, by handing my bank card to the merchant and after some settlement magic my bank will stop owing me some money and will instead owe it to the merchant. The IOU is the bank money, it is a claim on base money that was previously deposited. Base money and bank money act similarly from my PoV, they are both denominated in dollars (or Euros or pounds or...) and they are normally interchangeable at a 1:1 rate. Sometimes they are not.. e.g. if my bank was nearly going bankrupt with no deposit insurance, I might be happy to get my base money back at 80 cents on the dollar from my bank money. Bank money has credit risk of the bank, base money has no counterparty risk.

Banks do need to have reserves of base money relative to the amount of bank money they are allowed to create; this is called Capital Adequacy and is a primary restraint on bank money creation. A bank has a limited amount of capital (its own real base money that is not owed to anyone else) and it cannot easily create more capital. If a bank is lending out too much to borrowers, then its Capital Adequacy Ratio will get out of line and it will have to stop lending.

linux on the desktop failed for the same basic reasons many startups fail. They didn't listen to their users or focus on making a product that their users wanted.

By users I mean the core market of Windows - the business desktop. How often did linux outreach staff come to a large business and listen to the concerns of the customers? Never (in my experience). How often did Microsoft do this? Often (again in my experience).

Hi,

Fiat currency is simply currency that is not backed by something physical - in itself it has nothing to do with debt.

In modern economies, a central bank can and does create fiat currency out of nothing - literally declaring it into existance. This has nothing to do with debt. And yes it is an advantage for the central bank / government to be able to do this - this advantage is called seigniorage.

Usually the central bank creates money to increase financial liquidity in the banking system, and as such it wants the newly created currency to enter the financial system. The most common way to do that is for the CB to buy something - usually a bond, but it could be anything. The person selling just gets the market value for their product - no special advantage in selling to a central bank vs anyone else. But the total amount of fiat money in the system goes up. In this way the creation of money is often seen to be linked with debt but is not a fundamental link.

Then there is a second, entirely seperate kind of money that is not fiat money which is called bank money. Bank money is entirely based on debt - it is the debt of fiat money. And bank money is the most common sort of money we use, much more common than fiat money e.g. I typically buy larger purchases with bank money (a bank card transferring the IOU of my bank to a shop) instead of with fiat money (notes and coins).

I agree this stuff is entirely not too obvious & the misconception that all money is based on debt is incredibly common.

debt does not equal money;

there is money that is not debt (e.g. gold coins, fiat currency)

there is money that is debt (e.g. bank account money, IOUs)

Sorry but I do disagree with few things you say.

> A bank (or any entity) is allowed to lend as much money as they want to someone if they are actually lending money that they have.

No they are not. There are supervisory limits on what a bank can lend (leverage ratios, capital adequacy rations etc.).

> By definition fractional reserve is lending more currency than you have.

No it is not, it is lending a fraction (less than 100%) of the money that has been deposited with you.

I think the confusion comes from that in todays banking system there are two sorts of money that seem very similar - the base money (federal bank notes) and the bank money (loans/deposits of federal bank notes). The loans/deposits can also be used as money but crucially they are NOT the underlying money even if it is very easy to convert one to the other (depositing or withdrawing the base money). Example: I can buy something with the fact that Chase bank owes me bank notes (with the loan I made to it), by changing the ownership of that loan to the shop I want to buy something from. I have a bank card that makes that transfer very simple.

The 10:1 ratio is a limit on bank money (loans / deposits) to base money (federal bank notes). Both sorts of money are denominated in dollars, but they are different and have different supply and demand.

To recap, by keeping careful records of the loans / deposits, and making systems to easily transfer ownership of the loans and deposits, these loans end up also having characteristics of money - they can be used for transactions, for accounting etc.

> You can't do that with Bitcoin by design

You absolutely can. The loans/deposits form of bank money could work with bitcoin as the base money, and you could have the same rules around fractional reserve, capital adequacy rules, liquidity ratio rules etc. that the normal banking system has.

Yes I agree, and personally I would trust a bitcoin bank even less given the repeated security problems that bitcoin businesses to date.

Well as I see it there are only really two possibilities: full reserve or fractional reserve, and I've never really seen full reserve banking (i.e. demand deposits cannot be lent).

But please explain if you mean something else.

Fractional reserve banking can be done with bitcoin just as with any underlying "base asset" such as gold or Federal Reserve Banknotes. It just means that the banks can lend most of the asset, and must keep back a fraction for liquidity purposes (in case a depositor wants some of their asset back).

In many ways Fractional Reserve Banking would be much more risky with bitcoin than with banknotes; with banknotes at least there is a lender-of-last-resort central bank. The central bank can create additional money at will to lend to a bank that is in a liquidity crisis, to see it through the crisis. With bitcoin, there is no such operator.

Now if nobody ever lends or borrows bitcoin, then there will be no issue - but lending and borrowing has been quite central to commerce over the last couple of centuries, with mostly decent effects. Personally I'm not sure bitcoin economics are that well thought out!

I would think jblow knows what he's talking about here, he's delivered at least one great game to the world (to me, Braid had the perfect difficulty ramp and an awesome level of inventiveness).

As a buyer on Steam actually I didn't feel I had a direct relationship with jblow as the developer, but I would have been very happy to receive his marketing material, especially if it was programming tips!

http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-5-tips-of-a-productive-dev...

(...looking forward to The Witness)

For me the main problem with the "if the demon says TV then I listen to the radio" paradox is that it asks the demon to predict its own computation.

Take as an example COnways game of life. It is perfectly predictable in the future - given current state, I can easily predict the state N steps in the future (I just run the simulation on my side computer). And clearly my side prediction will have no impact on how the game-of-life evolves. I can even insert my prediction into the game-of-life by changing the value of my cell (alive=watch TV, dead=listen to radio). Even if a "perverse" in-game character chooses to do the opposite of my prediction, it doesn't alter the fact that I can perfectly predict future of the game universe.

But if I am asked to make that prediction inside the game of life using a program embedded in the game-of-life, then that is a lot harder. It seems very unlikely that I could encode the state of the universe in a way that allows my prediction program to run in any way more efficiently than just letting the game-of-life play out. I'm pretty sure that the Halting problem could be used to demonstrate this.

So for me it makes a big difference whether you constrain the demon to "in universe" computation or "out of universe" computation.