This doesn't sound like communism to me. Rather it sounds like an attempt to proselytize capitalism. The stated purpose of the book is to "to create an elevated vision for capitalism in which everyone gets richer from capital". The author goes on to state that they are researching things like equity incentive structures and profit sharing models.
Capitalism is all about aligning incentives. Those of us who have experienced startups know just how important it is to have your employees aligned with the interests of the company in the form of equity grants. I've always personally wondered why this isn't more common outside of Silicon Valley. I respect the goal of researching these topics more deeply.
>Those of us who have experienced startups know just how important it is to have your employees aligned with the interests of the company in the form of equity grants.
I actually experienced two successful startups (one YC funded even), stayed few years past acquisition in both, seen those rsu and such, and also seen communism with my eyes a little bit. I had some close relatives who paid party fees to soviet communist party for about half a century too, true believers if you can say so. Heard the stories, recognize the pitch.
It does sound very much familiar to me. Maybe RSU grants work a little better compared to having a trade union or a literal commune, more transactional maybe, more appropriate for inherently bourgeoise knowledge work as opposed to working on a steel mill, but I have a deep suspicion it's all the same both in intent and sometimes in the end results too.
I see this quote repeated here often, but working in the industry I've never heard it said unironically by any of my peers or thought leaders in the space. Best I can tell it is a sort of lazy straw man repeated by skeptics. Does it have an origin?
I suppose so, however Ethereum Classic is a fork of Ethereum that failed. I don't think it's generally well regarded in the space. I doubt many of the newer entrants to the ecosystem have even heard of it.
This would be like finding a quote from some old poorly maintained Linux distribution and attributing quotes from the maintainers as being representative of all kernel developers.
Thanks for a good faith response. This is what makes this website excellent.
While I must admit that I have some anti-cryptocurrency biases, I am also not that familiar with the cryptocurrency world. I really appreciate you sharing your knowledge.
The original idea with crypto was that the "code" was so strong, it removed the need for physical banks, tellers, FDIC, law enforcement, etc. The theory was, we can have everything the banking system has, but cheaper, because the only way to steal money was to break the crypto itself, hence "code is law".
The industry cannot appeal to the protections of law enforcement, civil tort, and other features of the regulated banking system, without simultaneously undermining the "crypto" part. If you're going to summon authorities when hackers hack, you're no better off than if you just acted like any other bank and stored the client's balance in an excel sheet.
The Bitcoin paper pretty heavily alludes to this, though behind the guise of censorship resistant currency, which is exactly the same concern.
I personally know of at least one person who was able to escape Russia at the very beginning of the Ukraine war because cryptocurrency was a viable way for his brother in America to fund his escape despite sanctions and other hurdles.
I enjoyed it, though for my taste it was maybe a little too simplistic and easy. The original rogue is before my time, but at one point I got very hooked on brogue (https://sites.google.com/site/broguegame/) and this reminded me very much of that.
The consensus seems to be that the gain is caused by the Bank of Japan raising rates on July 31, hinting at more raises. Yen has had historically low near-zero rates, so this raise strengthened their dollar.
On top of that, many traders were involved in a "Yen Carry Trade". Meaning they were borrowing Yen (because of the near-zero rates which beat out the 5% USD rates) and were using it to trade equities, crypto, whatever.
When the Yen started gaining against the dollar, these traders were actually losing money (since they were short Yen due to their Yen-denominated debt). This caused an unwind, meaning the traders wanted to close their positions (sell their equities, crypto, whatever) and buy back Yen to repay their debt, which pushed the Yen up further.
That, plus the trade was highly leveraged, so when yen rates went up the traders were asked to provide more margin. To meet the extra margin required they needed to unwind at least some of their position.
My understanding is that he wrote the code for the smart contracts and open sourced it on GitHub. The contracts were compiled and deployed to the Ethereum network. There was no infrastructure/service controlled by him responsible for running the code or processing the transactions. The core contract, once deployed to Ethereum; could not be modified or deleted by anyone.
The only "infrastructure" in the traditional sense operated by him was a static website hosted somewhere online (which was eventually taken down at the request of law enforcement). The static website offered an optional interface to the Ethereum network for convenience in interacting with the deployed smart contract. The network requests from this website were made to a public Ethereum API provider specified by the end user through their own general-purpose Ethereum wallet browser extension.
I think deploying to the etherium network and providing the api is probably the murky area. Who is responsible for knowing the users - etherium or the provider of the contracts.
If he had not deployed anything and it was just code in his repo I would have said this is a really dangerous ruling. It opens up every open source dev to be on the hook for any use of their software.
On the other hand if this was something deployed then it becomes much more subjective.
Not only network transaction fees but slippage, front-running, LP fees. I'm not saying that wash trading doesn't occur in DeFi, but Uniswap would be one of the more inefficient places to do it.
So which is more likely?
1. Uniswap Labs, a Delaware C Corp based in NYC, is risking everything to burn millions or billions of dollars in order to place fake trades and bolster volume numbers.
2. Uniswap, the top on-chain exchange on Ethereum (a network where the primary use-case is creating and trading assets, and which has an ecosystem market cap of something like $800B) has over the course of over 5.5 years, done $2T in all-time volume (~1 billion / day on average)?
Are there any practical advantages to high yield savings account, then? Or do they only exist for people who don't understand how to buy money market funds?
Money market funds are not protected by FDIC. Savings accounts or CDs from banks are protected by FDIC. Your choice is likely to be made around risk. Granted, I don't think money market funds actually losing value or going to 0 is very common, but with FDIC insurance you have true 0 risk for <$250k per bank.
The simplicity of CDs draws me to them. Sure I can eke out another 0.5%, but if it takes me three hours a year to figure out what the hell is happening, and it would be hard or risky to unwind if I'm incapacitated and my survivors need to pick it up, it's not worth my time.
If the spread was 5%, the calculation would be different, of course.
Agreed. I've been building CD ladders for the past year or so with shorter term CDs which are all paying higher interest than the money market accounts. CDs also have FDIC insurance. Many CD brokers allow you to buy and sell CDs on a market, so they have some liquidity now.
I've been really enjoying Monarch money. It's not free, but they offer an introductory discount for Mint users.
I'm not a power user. I used Mint mostly for a window into the current state of my accounts, and to check recent transactions. I find the Monarch UI to be snappier and less laggy than Mint, which makes sense given it seems like Mint was not a very well-funded project at Intuit.
I've toyed around a bit with Monarch's transaction tagging and grouping features and they seem to do what I expect. I've also played with their budgeting feature which is helpful as a way for me to try to keep tabs on my spending per-category month-to-month.
Personally I do prefer the idea of paying for a service like this, but that's because I know it will probably decay if it's not supported monetarily by users. I also prefer my data _not_ be sold to third parties (which Monarch promises.. for now). Unfortunately I suspect the end goal for Monarch is to get acquired by one of the FinTech giants which probably sadly means it sees a similar fate to Mint down the road.
I tried Monarch for awhile, and I really wanted to like it. Like you said, the UI is much better, and the team does seem to be working very hard to improve it.
Unfortunately the importers were just terrible compared to Mint's. I had to re-login to each account on Monarch every time I used it, and I would get constant spam SMS notifications from my bank as their importers would run in the background - often throughout the night.
I know that Monarch uses 3rd party importers, so its technically "out of their control" - but it is a key aspect to the usability of their product.
I also understand that there are security trade offs here - in terms of 2FA, but ultimately on the user side here - I need something that is usable, and "just works". Especially if I am going to pay a premium for it.
I'll second Monarch. I had issues with connections when I first started a month or so ago, but they've since been resolved. They seem to have a very active customer service team AND a roadmap (which is something Mint hasn't had in years). Budgeting is much better than Mint. Transactions are much better than Mint. Rules are much better than Mint.
You have to subscribe to it, but you get to try it out for a month for free and in that time I genuinely felt a subscription would net me more than my money's worth.
This is cool. I notice it does not seem to come with any presets, or am I missing them? I was curious what the settings were for the examples on the landing page.
Capitalism is all about aligning incentives. Those of us who have experienced startups know just how important it is to have your employees aligned with the interests of the company in the form of equity grants. I've always personally wondered why this isn't more common outside of Silicon Valley. I respect the goal of researching these topics more deeply.