zmaurelius
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3 years ago
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on: Let crypto burn
Before Bitcoin, there did not even exist the possibility of programmable money because no unit of account could ever be guaranteed to actually exist since there was no way to verify said existence. After Bitcoin, we now have a fundamental change where programmable money is now a possibility. So what if we have not found all the possible use cases of programmable money? That's going to be a work in progress for a long long time. You can assert that programmable money doesn't have any real use and you are welcome to have that opinion. Personally I think programmable money will have many uses and will allow for the creation of a more robust and more efficient financial system.
zmaurelius
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3 years ago
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on: Let crypto burn
If that's the lowest fee you can find, you are probably sending some money to a few Nigerian princes on the side and investing in SBF's next venture.
zmaurelius
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3 years ago
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on: Let crypto burn
It looked like Gensler was trying to secure a monopoly for FTX in the US, so making sure Coinbase didn't have a competing product was a cornerstone of that game plan.
zmaurelius
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3 years ago
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on: The world has reached 8B people but soon we'll hit a decline we'll never reverse
As a society, we are quite good at keeping people alive for a long time but not so good at addressing chronic illness. With the massive increase in autoimmune disease, obesity and other chronic illnesses, I would contend that overall we are less healthy on average than just a few decades ago and this trend will continue indefinitely until massive changes occur in the medical and food industries.
zmaurelius
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3 years ago
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on: FTX hacker identity discovered by Kraken Exchange team?
I believe only Coinbase publishes total liabilities at the moment. In my opinion, Coinbase is the gold standard due to being a publicly traded company and Kraken carries more risk.
zmaurelius
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3 years ago
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on: FTX hacker identity discovered by Kraken Exchange team?
It is kind of strange how unsophisticated the hack ended up being. I feel like SBF would have pulled off something with a bit more finesse.
zmaurelius
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3 years ago
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on: FTX hacker identity discovered by Kraken Exchange team?
Kraken regularly publishes proof of reserves. I don't recommend keeping funds on exchanges as a rule, but I don't feel stressed out leaving a percentage of my holdings there for an extended duration.
zmaurelius
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3 years ago
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on: Do not rug on me: Zero-dimensional Scam Detection
That's the thing with decentralization, since anyone can participate you will always get a bunch of gamblers because most people are not in it for ideology but rather to make a buck. That's just human nature. Is it possible to create incentives to keep the gamblers way? I haven't come across any great ideas so far.
zmaurelius
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3 years ago
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on: Is algae the new kale?
Organ meats such as beef liver provide a significant amount of B12. If you are just eating muscle meat, then you will have to eat a lot.
zmaurelius
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3 years ago
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on: US annual inflation declines to 7.7% in October vs. 7.9% expected
High dividend stocks have been a good bet and hedge in previous downturns. Individual stocks will have high variance, but a basket of high dividend stocks would be worth looking into.
zmaurelius
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3 years ago
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on: Crypto.com Halts Solana USDC and USDT Withdrawals
I don't think fair distribution of cryptocurrency in the bootstrap phase is a solved problem. We got a long way to go if we are to come up with a fair system. Satoshi went with the best that he could come up with which is a no premine solution.
A slightly better solution would be a no premine coin with a global announcement for 5 years before the mining begins so everybody gets a fair shot at participation. I am sure we can develop even more fair forms of distribution with sufficient research.
zmaurelius
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3 years ago
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on: Crypto.com Halts Solana USDC and USDT Withdrawals
It also enabled about $60+ million dollars to be donated to Ukraine and that's just one data point. Whether these other problems are a small price to pay will depend on who you are talking to. To the Ukrainians that benefited from these donations and to those that have food, weapons and shelter from these donations, it is most likely a small price to pay.
Perhaps a portion of these donations could have come from other sources if cryptocurrencies did not exist, but there isn't really a good way to quantify that, so I won't go into that discussion.
zmaurelius
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3 years ago
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on: Crypto.com Halts Solana USDC and USDT Withdrawals
Bitcoin only solves the problem of manipulation of the underlying money supply. It does not solve the problem of fraud and scams. Maybe one day we can also solve that problem with exchanges existing only as smart contracts, but with exchanges that are not completely transparent you always run into the risk of getting defrauded because you don't really know what's going on under the hood.
zmaurelius
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3 years ago
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on: Crypto.com Halts Solana USDC and USDT Withdrawals
I think people are too hyper focused on the price aspect of cryptocurrencies. The experiment that is Bitcoin shows that people do not need to rely on a monetary system where a cabal of rich and powerful individuals can arbitrarily modify the money supply without any regard to all the participants in that monetary system.
The genie is already out of the bottle and there is no way to put it back. There will always be those especially in the younger generations that want something better than the current system. Bitcoin shows that you can have a completely transparent monetary system based on code that is available to be audited by anyone. Bitcoin may or may not survive, but the idea behind it will.
zmaurelius
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3 years ago
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on: Crypto.com Halts Solana USDC and USDT Withdrawals
At the end of day, this entire fiasco really drives home the point if its not your keys its not your coins. Shady exchanges/banks can always collapse and take your entire portfolio with it, but if you have a securely backed up wallet, then your coins will be untouchable no matter what kind of shady shenanigans goes down in the wider cryptocurrency landscape.
zmaurelius
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3 years ago
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on: India lifted 415M out of poverty in 15 years, says UN
zmaurelius
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3 years ago
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on: US Attorney Announces $3.36B Cryptocurrency Seizure in Connection with Silk Road
They could, but then the IRS would have contend with an army of lawyers to claw their money back. In this case, going after a small time criminal with no connections is an easy win, so it makes sense from a resource allocation perspective for them focus on cases like this instead.
zmaurelius
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3 years ago
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on: US Attorney Announces $3.36B Cryptocurrency Seizure in Connection with Silk Road
Holding a large amount of cryptocurrency without multiple backups spread around various geographical locations is foolish. So ultimately to store cryptocurrency securely, its never actually easy when you get down to the nuts and bolts of it.
zmaurelius
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3 years ago
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on: Up to 30% of online reviews are fake and consumers can't tell the difference
Unfortunately, fake products have infiltrated just about every product segment. Even though there are relatively fewer fake products in some categories, the overall percentage of fake products is uncomfortably high and only getting higher over time it feels like.
zmaurelius
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3 years ago
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on: Up to 30% of online reviews are fake and consumers can't tell the difference
It also depends heavily on what exactly you are buying. If you are buying health supplements, expect way more than 30% fake reviews and expect a lot of products to be fake themselves. On the other hand, if you are buying something like a rice cooker, you won't run into many fake products and the number of fake reviews will be closer to 30%.
For that reason, I avoid buying supplements on Amazon unless it comes from a few brands that only use one trusted seller to push their stuff.
