Bitcoin Secures a $1 Trillion Market Cap for First Time Ever 202
The price of Bitcoin (BTC) has reached a new all-time high of $53,670, pushing the coin's total market capitalization above $1 trillion, according to crypto metrics platform CoinGecko. Market capitalization is the total number of coins currently in circulation multiplied by their current market price -- basically, the combined worth of all existing BTC. From a report: By various estimations, the value of all money in the world is around $95 trillion -- and now Bitcoin represents about 1% of that. While it's not totally fair to compare Bitcoin to money (it can be seen as an asset instead), it provides one way to put it in perspective. Speaking to Decrypt, Quantum Economics analyst Jason Deane noted that for people who were involved in the crypto space from its early days, the $1 trillion BTC market capitalization may have been a long time coming but it was inevitable.
Tulips (Score:5, Funny)
Re: BTC > Gold > USD (Score:4, Interesting)
Governments abandoned the gold standard for some very good reasons, the same reasons they won't embrace a Bitcoin standard. Mass adoption can't force them any more than all the gamblers and gold bugs who can't leave gold alone have been able to force them to go back to the gold standard.
Gold continues to be both a poor investment and a poor inflation hedge. So if the search for the greater fool finally ends and Bitcoin stabilizes after replacing gold that's what we have to look forward ... enthusiast and gamblers pushing Bitcoin around fairly uselessly. With more malware and emissions, but less mercury dumping in the Amazon.
Re: BTC Gold USD (Score:2)
Actually, Gold is pretty nice compared to any crapcoin. Because Gold actually has about 50% of its market price in industrial application value. i.e. it will not drop below that. It is still a bad investment.
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> Actually, Gold is pretty nice compared to any crapcoin. Because Gold actually has about 50% of its market price in industrial application value. i.e. it will not drop below that. It is still a bad investment.
Do you have any source to confirm that 50% number? It sounds extremely high to me given that platinum is also needed for industrial applications, is far rarer, and has a lower price than gold.
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Dude, you provided the reference in your own god damn comment.
Jewelry is an industry.
Good lord has the level of discussion fallen around here...
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You seem to be saying that 48.5% of the buyers in the market could support the price to 48.5% of its current value. Without demand from central banks and investment it's entirely possible gold would be worth around 5% to 10% of it's current price.
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I think you need a lie down in a quiet room.
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I can assure you that many cryptocurrency enthusiasts are equally tired of opening up a discussion on Bitcoin, especially on this site, and being called criminals, subjected to rants about tulip bulbs, or having OUR world view trashed.
The answer is more kindness towards people we disagree with, not less.
Re: BTC Gold USD (Score:2)
Re: BTC Gold USD (Score:2)
Printing turned out to be a far better option compared to deflationary spirals and internal devaluation ... so good on them.
Re: BTC Gold USD (Score:5, Interesting)
But eventually the industrial revolution made it impossible for us to find, let alone dig up gold fast enough to keep up. We could have certainly added other precious metals but in time those wouldn't be enough either. A deflationary currency isn't necessarily bad since you basically have a retirement account built in to any money you keep, but it does make investment in anything less desirable, which consequently may be far worse.
Fiat currencies work reasonably well as long as the government doesn't try to print it's way out of debt.
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The long depression of 1873 is a good example of the inflexibility of the gold standard.
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Additionally any use of fractional reserve lending can ultimately create a depression regardless of what kind of money you have because it enables to creation of additional money that doesn't yet exist. If enough
Re: BTC Gold USD (Score:2)
They have only a very tenuous control over their population, most of them don't even use native banks. Western economies have far more power.
If the US or the EU bans their banks from doing electronic transfer with exchanges (and any intermediary which tries to act as a proxy) cryptocurrency is kill.
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Yes, that's what humans do as part of being an intelligent, social species. We exert control over external forces like intrinsic value in physical things in order to buffet and manage violence and suffering that results in sudden and unpredictable change.
It's a layer of abstraction to facilitate flexibility and adaptability. You'd think programmers of all people would recognize that.
Re: BTC Gold USD (Score:2)
So if the search for the greater fool finally ends
There are still a LOT of fools left. You can make a lot of money exploiting idiots, especially while the media attention is white hot. The skill (and luck) is timing when to get out.
Bitcoin can't stabilize. Maybe another coin (Score:2)
Bitcoin is designed so that it can never stabilize.
Maybe another coin will.
For a stable price you need the ratio of supply to demand to be stable. For example, in the last 12 months the fed increased the supply of dollars by 24% to match the increased demand.
The supply of Bitcoin is preset, so it can't ever be matched to demand. If it appeared stable for a month, more people might want to use it, which would be more demand, which would send the price up.
If it drops and people want to get rid of some Bitco
Re: BTC > Gold > USD (Score:4, Interesting)
I used to believe in the gold standard.
Nowadays I know that there is no such thing as an absolute standard of worth, and gold is just as volatile and subject to gamblind and manipulation.
The only non-deludes usable measurement of worth that I found, is work, compared to other work. If that work is highly standardized, that is Like how many potatoes according to norm 953734729 do you get for one chair according to norm 384482828.
Re: BTC Gold USD (Score:3)
The number of potatoes a chair costs is extremely volatile. Potatoes are worth much more in some seasons than others, and some markets than others. Chairs have almost arbitrarily random values according to whether the viewer thinks it looks stylish or matches their room, or whether they feel like paying a huge premium for hand-crafted chairs or prefer a mass-produced walmart chair.
Work is valued as arbitrarily as anything else. That's why some people get paid five times as much as other people for doing the
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I'm guessing you are jealous because other people make money while you did not. If you don't like BitCoin just stay away from it, you don't have to drag the rest of us down to your level.
BTC is inevitable (Score:2, Informative)
You should remember that Satoshi is still anonymous. Bitcoin is fully private when used properly.
Monero (XMR) and ZEC are useless tokens playing with an experimental cryptography unsuited to be used on the base layer. If you think that scaling BTC using layers is hard. With this experimental cryptography, the problem is 10x, 100x harder. Something like XMR works only because nobody uses it. All you get is a lot of space wasted for each transaction, and the equivalent of the 'UTXO set' growing to infinity be
Re: BTC is inevitable (Score:2)
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There are tricks to Bitcoin laundering as well. There are tons of mixing/tumbling services out there, and the cost overhead of using them is far less than the cost overhead of typical money laundering (as in setting up a business). However, good luck if the coins are flagged as tainted, because most services have some check in place for tainted coins, so their wallets don't get sullied.
Yes, one can send their currency to XMR... but a lot of currency traders have AML/KYC stuff in place and require a ton of
OK (Score:4, Insightful)
Curious to see how much of that 1 trillion you can cash out if you start mass selling instead of getting more people to buy in...
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It's like the longest running, most successful ponzi scheme ever.
Neither record (Score:2)
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Except that the average Ponzi scheme doesn't have the carbon footprint of an average country.
Re:OK (Score:5, Informative)
It's also worth mentioning that 1/5th of the global hashpower is in a single Chinese province, Xinjiang, whose electricity is generated by the XPCC - a state-within-a-state under sanctions by the US for using Uighur slave labour.
Re: OK (Score:3)
Don't get me wrong, I would like a better currency than fiat currency, bit Bitcoin is not that. It is still fiat, as "mining" does not add value, but without any stabilizing regulator, so it will never be stable.
And most omportantly, it doesn't have utility without people falling for it. That's the textbook essence of a Ponzi scheme right there.
Compare the humble carrot. The one you can actually reach. And eat.
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Don't get me wrong, I would like a better currency than fiat currency, bit Bitcoin is not that. It is still fiat...
Practically speaking, that's true. Bitcoin may be a better fiat currency than US or Zimbabwean dollars because the supply is constrained. Politicians and bankers can't arbitrarily increase it.
If you want to get all literal, I don't know it's a fiat currency because no one has issued a decree saying you must accept bitcoin. It's only in circulation because people want to use it, not because they must.
Re: OK (Score:5, Insightful)
Why? Fiat currency does exactly what you want it to. It's a convenient symbol of value that can be adjusted as desired.
Inflation is the big thing people talk about. What's wrong with inflation? It's a tax on keeping your wealth in the form of currency. That's *good*. Currency is not supposed to be a store of wealth (cough, bitcoin). A bit of inflation keeps people from hoarding the currency and encourages them to instead do things with their wealth: make goods, provide services, or at least loan their wealth to others to do so on their behalf.
Deflationary currency is good for the extra lazy rent seeking type. I've got money so tomorrow I should have more money, without actually having to do anything.
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And most omportantly, it doesn't have utility without people falling for it. That's the textbook essence of a Ponzi scheme right there. Compare the humble carrot. The one you can actually reach. And eat.
I could well be wrong, but my impression was that having no particular intrinsic use was actually advantageous for a currency. If your currency has an intrinsic use then you pay an opportunity cost to forego that use and use it instead as a currency. eg it would be wasteful to have carrots that hungry people could be eating sitting in some bank vault.
That being said, I think Bitcoin is still mediocre at best as a currency.
Re: Money is not a collective hallucination (Score:2)
PROTIP: Delusion of worth is not actual worth. Defining it that way is insane and intentionally harmful.
Actual goods have actual worth. No matter if other people exist. Actual work has actual worth.
Glass beads that allow you to rip off money ae not true worth. They are subject to Ponzi scheme growth, and then inevitable crashing a soon as people can't believe the reality distortion bubble any ore becsuse it has become too over the top.
But go ahead, justify your lost worth. You will never be able to buy a si
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Not a lot. The people holding most of that "Trillion" of hot air know that and carefully bleed out the real money.
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Curious to see how much of that 1 trillion you can cash out if you start mass selling instead of getting more people to buy in...
Curious how you have a mass sell-off without getting more people to buy in?
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By causing the price to plummet. Which is exactly what would happen if people decided to sell with nobody there to buy.
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It's still almost completely based on suckers selling crap to each others, and investors who think they are able to read or even manipulate
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Re: OK (Score:2)
There are circumstances where you can raise prices indefinitely iff no one buys in: I have a rock, which I claim is worth $100. You buy it, I transfer ownership, hand you an invoice. But before you pay invoice, I ask to buy it back for $200 tomorrow. You agree, shred invoice, transfer ownership, hand me invoice for $200. Before I pay invoice, you do same the next day for $300, and on it goes. We never had any money and the rock never had any value. We can get away with it until someone from the outside buys
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What happens when everyone starts mass selling of stocks? Alarms go off and trading is halted.
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Which is wrong. Stocks should be allowed to rise or fall at will. Even if everyone is piling out of stocks and the markets are plummeting, there should be no collars to prevent the decline.
If there are no collars on the upside, there should be none on the downside. Let the market determine how far something falls.
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There are collars to the upside, as well as downside, for listed stocks in the US. It's called Limit Up Limit Down [luldplan.com] and it's regulated by the SEC and implemented by the primary exchanges. GME is a recent example of LULD kicking in on both directions; it also happened to SNOW on its IPO day. You can go to NYSE's site and see all historical LULD trading halts they issued; it happens fairly often.
The market wide circuit breakers in the US are the only ones that work to the downside and are based on declines in
The pop is going to be glorious (Score:2)
Re:The pop is going to be glorious (Score:5, Insightful)
You probably said that when Bitcoin reached a value of 1$USD.
Then you probably said it again at 10$USD, 100$USD, 1000$USD and 10K$USD.
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Even though these tulip bulbs have gone up to a value of $750,000.00 each, all the naysayers were saying not to buy at $500,000.00, so we can safely ignore their naysaying without even considering their logical argument at all!
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I really don't get the pointless comparison with tulip bulbs, since they cannot replace fiat money the way crypto-currencies do.
And not only can crypto-currencies replace fiat money, they do a better job at the same time by being faster and decentralized.* Think physical mail vs email. To send physical mail you need either the government (ex: USPS, Canada Post, etc) or private companies (UPS, FedEx, DHL, etc) because of all the infrastructure needed**. To send email, you only need to set up a mail server**,
Re:The pop is going to be glorious (Score:4, Interesting)
You can’t argue with these autists. Look how brilliant they try and sound with the tired tulip comparison. They were wrong with the iPod, wrong with Tesla and now wrong with bitcoin.
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Bitcoin, from a technical standpoint, probably could. But for so many reasons that are obvious and numerous enough to not worth enumerating here, it won't. So there's that.
Re:The pop is going to be glorious (Score:4, Insightful)
Why not? Tulip bulbs are real, physical objects. You can make more, but they are non-trivial to produce. Very much like gold. There's a Pacific island where they used to use big rocks brought from other islands as currency. The rocks were way too big to carry around so people essentially traded options on them. One day a cargo of them sank near the island. They were irretrievable, but it turned out they could still be used as money. You can use anything as money, including nothing.
Cryptocurrency isn't based on a real, physical object. You can make more, both "coins" and whole currencies, whenever you want. While making some coins is non-trivial, anybody who has a computer and can read some simple instructions can make a whole new currency with as many coins as they like (and have done so).
"Fiat" means by arbitrary decree. There's no fiat in tulip bulbs. Cryptocurrency has quite a bit of it.
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"Fiat" means by arbitrary decree.
Not arbitrary. If a group of people decide that their rocks are worth a cow each, but find out after a while that it takes 100 rocks to buy a cow over in the next village (and that they can get 100 rocks for selling a cow there), then the value of rocks will adjust itself accordingly, provided that there's enough trade between those villages. What is happening is that these people are trying to convince the other village that their rocks are really worth a whole cow each. And it may even work if all you'
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That's the arbitrary decree, and it's why "fiat" currencies are called that. Actually, more accurately, the fiat is usually more along the lines of "rocks are symbols are value" although there are places where they have tried to decree the actual value. It typically doesn't go well. You're completely correct that not all arbitrary decrees will have the effect you desire.
You might also note that "hashes ending in a particular pattern of digits
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As for doing it 'better', BTC and other coins were designed to be as efficient as possible. They don't do anything well. Expensive to produce, expensive to use, slowly, and it costs extra to convert them into something that is actually backed.
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And right now there are people in the possession of $1 trillion on paper. Why would anyone give them their hard earned cash? F*** them. What you apparently don't get is that 1 trillion dollar = number of bitcoins times price of last trade, which has nothing to do with the va
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participating in discusssions about bitcoin at slashdot is extremely frustrating because you'd expect the technologically minded audience to not be so closed minded and resistant to change, but there's a ton of dead brains here that are completely unwilling to engage in critical thinking beyond repeating the "ponzi scheme" "uses energy uselessly" other things.
they literally cant see what's happening as they age and a new generation comes in with their ideas and so on. its so weird and doesnt fit with my exp
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Yes, why do people keep saying this thing is completely unusable for its intended purpose and listing all the specific ways??
I'm certainly not against the concept in general but as is, the only thing it's good at is making the miners and the people who got in early rich.
Re: The pop is going to be glorious (Score:2)
And it still has a value of $0.
Or are you the type who says glass beads had inherent value because you could rip off native americans with them?
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Do you mean cash out?
There is way too much money available in economy (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: There is way too much money available in econo (Score:4, Insightful)
Every time we tried deflation and creative destruction to get rid of debt overhangs last century we got world wars. I'd rather they print.
Re: There is way too much money available in econ (Score:2, Interesting)
PS. And ban bitcoin and raise taxes on real estate other than primary residences.
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Yes yes, we have been living in hyperinflation ever since the warning was first sounded in the 90's. It is terrible, I have to cart heavy loads of banknotes and coins to even buy a single loaf of bread. Life is so hard in the post-QE world!
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Are you Danish? it's the USA that's doing the currency debasement.
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>But it's gonna hurt so damn much when my 401k loses half its value,
You just have to plan around that.
I *assume* that a 50% drop is in my future (and also realize that there will likely be a complete recovery within a couple of years).
I have the advantage of a 75 year planning horizon, however, which has let me be far more aggressive. At this point, if the 50% happens tomorrow, I will *still* be far ahead of the "prudent" approach.
If I *wasn't* planning for such a drop, I would already be retired . . .
Re: There is way too much money available in econo (Score:2)
That's up to 50+% of the miners.
Just like gold's tradition of currency, the lack of hard forks is also just tradition (except for the Bitcoin hardfork needed to increase database limits we have to pretend never happened).
Biggest bubble ever! (Score:2, Insightful)
1 Trillion of absolutely nothing. Impressive.
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There is way more than 1 Trillion of "absolutely nothing". Pretty much the whole money on the planet is made of "absolutely nothing". Even cash is made of almost nothing (a dirt cheap piece of paper). So this isn't a good argument since the notion of currency was invented.
Re: Biggest bubble ever! (Score:4, Interesting)
The local monopoly on lawful violence underlies most currencies.
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Then you're a wuss who can't deal with reality and the real world. Force is necessary for protection and maintenance of law, there are those that can't be dealt with in any other way. You can't show me any other system in use that works.
More on Bitcoin (Score:2, Interesting)
Here's a couple of good Twitter threads [twitter.com] by Stephen Diehl (@smdiehl) about what Bitcoin really is (with an earlier one further down below).
*** TRIGGER WARNING The Bitcoin boosters might want to avert their eyes! ***
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Here is one counter-argument. By the end of this decade we may well have "free" almost unlimited solar power.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PM2RxWtF4Ds
Presumably all the extra and unused solar power will be used to mine cryptocurrency.
"new all-time high of $53,670", err, no 54k+ (Score:3, Insightful)
At this rate we'll see the fireworks soon enough.
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and....a mere 3 hours after your post and it's already at 55k. Nope, no bubble here.
We need a new economy. (Score:3)
A economy where somebody can just make up money, and then pay me with that, is not acceptable.
Worth must be based on actual work exchangable for equivalent actual work.
Because I'm not working my ass off to get paid by somebody who didn't, so I can pay someone else who didn't.
That includes bitcoin "mining", almost all business in the stock market, imginary property, interest, "I'm the boss", physical property and any other form of profit. (And obviously excludes the construction and maintenance of physical things, like houses, or the cost of running a business, or paying a *fixed* amount to compensate for losses from lending money.)
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Bitcoin mining is work, just maybe not what you'd
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I've been told that backing the currency strictly based on labor tends to lead you towards Marxist economics--with all its inherent flaws. I'm not sure why that is, because the big argument against Marxism is usually it's reliance on revolution for establishment (heavily destructive to the economy) and central planning once established (proven to be less efficient than a well regulated market).
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Marx was very much into labor theory of value.
What tends to lead labor-backed currency thinking to marxism is the notion to measure labor in time, rather than output--so an hour of super-specialized brain surgery by a surgeon with 40 years experience is the same as an hour of a teen flipping burgers on his first day.
At that point, since that's not the way people exchange labor even under a barter system, the only way to make the system work is coercion, forcing the surgeon to work for the same "price" as th
I've never heard of a currency having a market cap (Score:2)
I've never heard of a currency having a market cap. Does this make any sense?
I guess it is the sum of the price and the coins in circulation but it seems like a useless number.
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Sure it makes sense. The market cap of any currency is just the money supply multiplied by the exchange rate. It's calculating the money supply that usually gets a bit tricky. Counting the number of physical British Pound notes, for example, is easy for them. OTOH, counting the number of Pounds on account is a bit more tricky due to the way credit works, but economists have found reasonable ways to estimate these numbers and add them to the physical money supply. Add it all up, multiply by the exchange
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Sure it makes sense. The market cap of any currency is just the money supply multiplied by the exchange rate.
No, it doesn't make sense.
The US reports on the money supply, yes. But there is no report on the USD "market capitalization".
Here's the current fed US M1 report https://www.federalreserve.gov... [federalreserve.gov]
You can find a similar report for every other currency - but not bitcoin. Because it's not a currency.
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You can find a similar report for every other currency - but not bitcoin. Because it's not a currency
Yes you can and it didn't take me very long. [bitinfocharts.com]
Criminals benefit (Score:4, Insightful)
So, several years ago some misguided nerds decide to run a public experiment trying to create a new kind of money. It's a flawed experiment, with wild swings in value, hard limitations on the amount of transactions and stupendously high transaction cost (620 kWh, or over $100 per transaction, 10^6 times higher than that of credit card transactions, which are more expensive than debit card transactions).
Criminals are the first to see the unique properties of this currency and become the largest user. From criminal transactions to money laundering to fraudulent exchanges, crime flourishes.
A few years on, low-knowledge small-time investors with too much time on their hands start buying into this weird currency, sending the price through the roof. Who benefits? The criminals who see the value of their holdings spike, and who benefit from the increasing transaction volume as it makes it easier to hide their transactions.
The nerds who were so eager to escape government oversight have played right into the cards of the people who's business it is to escape government oversight.
Secures WHAT?!? (Score:2)
Barter System (Score:2)
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I'll write a mobile app to promote your company's business for 1,732 ears of sweet corn.
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Every year 150 million individuals are added to this world, most of them barely able to support themselves. We must prevent them from ever coming into being.
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Educating them will not lower their impact on the limited ressources available to us.
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Education, particularly female education, is by far the best method to reduce birth rates.
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Education, particularly female education, is by far the best method to reduce birth rates.
For those adults barely able to support themselves, just how much "education" does it fucking take to understand you also can't support a child?
And that statement applies anywhere on the planet.
Re:Bitcoin owners must be so happy (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, you don't understand what you're talking about. Poor people have more kids so the kids can work, support the older generations, etc. Kids == financial burden is a weird oddity of your weird, rich society.
It turns out that the best way to decrease population growth is to educate people. *Not* educate them about having kids, just send them to school. It turns out that makes people richer, causing them to create weird rich societies more like yours, and come around to the weird rich person opinion that kids == financial burden.
There is a *lot* of research on this. Use that weird rich person invention called the Internet and do a bit of research.
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If only I had mod points. This. It is an absolute fact that when women are educated the birth rate declines. This CDC release [cdc.gov] outlines this fact. Note we're not talking about the rate of pregnancy but rather, the number of children. A similar study from Canada [thesil.ca] found the same thing:
Results indicate that education compresses fertility, meaning that extra education (higher CSL) increases the chance that a female will have any children by age 40, but it decreases the total number of children she will have. These findings apply to larger family sizes, meaning in the case that a female would have seven children, with higher education it is likely that she will only have four or five.
Needless to say, this is why Republicans and Christians (the two tend to overlap) don't like educated women. Without all those ch
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This simple fact is incredibly well supported, through all kinds of research, including some pretty dramatic demonstrations. For example, Bangladesh: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.go... [nih.gov]
It's also very well known, by anyone who knows the first thing about world demographics. Anybody who doesn't know it hasn't even casually sampled the topic and is just spouting off random ignorance.
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Oh come on, Bitcoin only causes 0,2% of global emissions in order to conduct... checks notes... 5 transactions per second, three orders of magnitude less than Visa alone.
This is surely totally okay and totally not a problem....
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No. Visa averages over 2000 transactions per second, typical daily peaks of about 5000 per second, and can handle up to 65000 per second.
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I'm hopeful for proof of stake, but I'm dubious as to its attack resistance.
If a proof-of-state system can prove itself to be less attack resistant and more reliable than major fiat currencies, then that's one of my pillars for gaining my support. Personally I'm more for proof-of-personhood (with certificates-of-personhood signed by authority servers), because that's easier to build a reliable system out of, very fast / low energy, and allows one to associate other "useful to share encrypted data " (such a
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when your government gives out money willy nilly to foreign nations, prints money out of thin god damn air -- tax avoidance becomes a political statement.