I'm very excited to see a guide that focuses on the process of the interview itself related to system design. There are plenty of "how to design twitter" resources out there, but for many of us, we really need to better understand the system design interview process itself. Thanks so much for putting this together, can't wait to see parts 3 & 4!
Edit: A slight twist on this is that Temple University is a public university and and the NLRB in theory does not have jurisdiction over other parts of the government. PA law, however, offers similar protection. This is off to court for sure.
Yes, but if you were a grad student your W-2 almost certainly didn't include your tuition rebate as part of your total income. And the university sure as hell didn't pay taxes on it.
I have been explicitly told by a tax accountant that I cannot. If a third party makes a payment to one of their own offices, even presuming that money exists at all to begin with, I can't claim it on my taxes as income or a credit.
If this income is not in your W2, then this is very-murky-grey-area-danger-zone stuff.
Students and Universities both could be accused of underreporting income or tax witholdings.
I suspect there are armies of education lawyers that vetted this, but in any other industry, this is simply a no-go zone. You report what you get and what you pay as comp, cash and noncash.
Grad students are Very Special in tax code. For example: guess how much grad students and their universities pay in FICA taxes for graduate stipends (can be north of $40K; typically 8% of gross for employee and 8% of gross for employer)? $0.00.
Tuition remissions in particular definitely do not show up on your W-2.
Now, to the question in this thread. If you choose to report tuition as income, you might be able to do that in certain cases, but it's probably because you have some strange reason for wanting to report a higher gross income. I can't even begin think of any reason why that might be. So, murky and likely to cause an audit? Maybe. But then the gov is complaining about getting extra $$$, unless your situation is really fucking weird.
Mind you, this is exactly why I find situations like this so reprehensible. Universities get tons of breaks in how they treat grad student labor. For universities to turn around around and fuck grad students like this, on top of the insulting wages, is beyond the pale.
I am haunted by the of things that caught fire and as a 8-9 year old I didn’t understand why. I don’t think I generally made it far enough that the plebs were in need because the whole city had burned.
Yeah 10 yr old me burnt a dozen or so cities before deciding the point of the game is humiliating me by burning my granaries/gymnasiums etc and moved on to Czar and ultimately Age of Empires 2.
I really liked Caesar III but I never seemed to be able to get service reach a reasonable amount of real-estate, presumably due to the left turn mentioned in another branch. So I ended up plopping way more temples and engineers/prefects than strictly required.
> PS In terms of mass media shared experiences, 120 MILLION people watched the series finale of the TV show MASH. Hard to imagine a similar event today.
The Super Bowl numbers will blow your mind then ;)
I should have clarified that I meant SCRIPTED mass media events.
This was based off the idea in the article that reality is a constructed game.
It's also funny that you mention this b/c when I usually mention the MASH story in person, I also share that the other events of that magnitude are usually Super Bowl/World Cup etc. Guess it slipped my mind this time.
For it’s time (meaning relative to the US population at that point) MASH is larger than basically every superbowl ever, except for maybe the last couple. I’m not hip on the current viewership numbers, but literally over half of America watched the series finale of MASH
> What will fly.io do? Probably what everyone else does, starts simple, becomes popular and then caves
No, mrkurt will not cave, I can guarantee you that. Fly will be a platform that says no to feature requests that don't make sense for their customer base.
I have no affiliation with Fly, other than I've used it on and off since the beginning of the platform's existence. They're a veteran team that knows how to build platforms. I definitely trust them to go in the right direction with their roadmap, and all my new projects go on Fly.
Not to break your rose-tinted glasses, I think fly.io is pretty cool too. But it's a for-profit company with outside investment, coming from investors who expect a return on their investment, one way or another, and they likely have some influence on how the company will act.
Same has been said for every company who taken outside investment ever. "But no, Heroku/Figma/GitHub/X are different, they really do care about their users and would never sell/go public/Y", and then a couple of years later we end up in the same position.
It might not even be up to the "bunch of talented people" in the end, what they have to do to survive or to grow. But grow they have to, unless investors are fine with getting their ROI over 10-50 years rather than 1-10 years. A growing usually comes with some pain.
This is a 10-50 year company. You're not wrong, though, we are either building something big or we're building something that will fail. Our bet is that a developer first public cloud is important and needs to exist.
Which means, there will be one of three outcomes:
1. We are correct, and manage to build the right thing. We'll get to work on this forever.
2. We are correct, but not the right group to build it. We fail.
3. We are incorrect, and the world doesn't need a public cloud for devs. We fail, and I become a carpenter.
We have the same incentives as our investors. That doesn't mean it'll work. It does mean that we all believe that we're building a product for developers.
We're pretty good at surviving, so far. And there are early signs that we're good at growing. There's reason to be hopeful. :)
this is wrong, even if today it looks right because the different incentives result in the same concrete things.
You have a company; your goal is to make the company succeed. Investors have a portfolio; their goal is to make the portfolio succeed. Your company succeeding is only one aspect of their portfolio succeeding, and one whose importance and externalities can change drastically for reasons outside your control.
Only issue stopping me from using Fly: bandwidth costs. I am spoiled by DigitalOcean's 1TB tier per droplet created (along with bandwidth pooling if you have more droplets).
That's true but Fly's PaaS is perhaps more comparable to DigitalOcean's App Platform (its PaaS). For that, DO include 100GB for free while Fly include 160GB. Beyond that, DO charge $0.10/GB while Fly charge $0.02-$0.12/GB. Cheaper bandwidth for Fly's Machines (more comparable to droplets, as far as I can see) would be neat though.
Yes I agree that Fly's PaaS is more comparable to DO's App Platform and definitely has better price model. However, I don't use DO's App Platform for exactly the same reasons as why I don't use Fly's PaaS. I like services which provide bandwidth for cheap (or even free — Cloudflare Images and Cloudflare R2 comes to mind). Ideally, I want to be charged only for features I use and not for egress which I have no control over. But I know that is not feasible from business point of view (unless you are Cloudflare).
> 1. We are correct, and manage to build the right thing. We'll get to work on this forever.
Maybe I'm too pessimistic, I apologize if that's the case. But I fail to see how the company could ever work on "the right thing" "forever" since there is outside investment in the company. Do these investor not want a return on their investment at one point? If it's in 1 year or 10, eventually they are gonna want you to either go public, or get bought by another company, both of which makes the mission goal change from "the right thing" to "the profitable thing" at that moment.
But again, maybe I'm just overly pessimistic based on bad experiences with VC funded companies.
Oh when I say "the right thing", it includes actually making money. We're not just building a dev focused cloud because it's fun (it is fun!). We think it's a good business with a very large market. An IPO would be fine!
Your snarky response actually proves my point. The responses from the individuals (including the CEO) are meaningless without action. The only action (beyond writing words) the company has undertaken is to take money from venture capitalists.
1.We are correct, and manage to build the right thing [developer first cloud]. We'll get to work on this *until we exhaust that market and are forced to grow beyond it"
That's a pretty big market. Heroku got to ~$500mm of revenue while they funneled their most valuable customers to AWS. Keeping those customers around (by, say, giving them lower level primitives) would have 10x'ed that, I bet.
That's a great point. I hope it's big enough for you to not reach its boundaries, because transitioning to a larger market will fundamentally alter the nature of the org. Speaking as customer of organizations that made the transition, and as someone who lived through one on the inside
Have other people invested money in them? If that's the case, sooner or later they don't call the shots, but rather who owns the capital and wants it to grow.
I think if you look at the companies you like, you'll notice that it's not the investors who call the shots. There are a handful of very large, very profitable, developer focused companies that investors love because they remain developer focused.
There are also companies that never figured it out because "developer focused" is not the right business model for them. Those are, I think, the companies that make us all feel burned.
Heroku is one of those companies where "developer focus" is not the right business model. Salesforce has a model, it's working very well, Heroku's doesn't fit.
What country do you live in? Because I know plenty of folks in certain countries with massive inflation and projects such as bitcoin are their refuge from 100-1000% inflation a year.
When you say “in 10 years” when did that 10 year time frame start and end? Are talking about the 1960s or the 1990s? Because most people I knew didn’t start using the internet regularly until the mid to late 90s or about 30 or so years after it’s inception. 10 years is still pretty early in terms of adoption. I know people who still have never used email…
- What portion of the population are benefiting from crypto? Is it a tiny portion of nerds or has it become more mainstream now?
- With the crash in cryptocurrency over the last few months are these people in those countries still glad that they used this, or are they regretting it?
I don't doubt that there exist individuals in countries with high inflation who have befitted from the crypto boom. I want more than just anecdotes about individuals: I want to understand if this is a widespread, sustainable trend.
Argentina does look like the most interesting country to dig deeper into here.
As always with crypto stuff, a big challenge is finding trustworthy news outlets. I generally don't trust stories from the crypto press.
Found this on the BBC from one of their foreign correspondents (hence someone who will be held to BBC editorial and conflict-of-interest standards): https://www.bbc.com/news/business-60912789
It does note that: "So far it is the preserve of a minority - largely a young, male, tech-savvy, and relatively affluent population. It's tech workers, not farmers, who are being paid in Bitcoin."
That story is also from April. I'd like to see updated coverage now that the crypto market has crashed. How many people in Argentina got burned badly by that?
I don't understand this "crypto market has crashed" narrativ. Ether is +60% in the last month... It's crypto. It never really crashs. A crypto crash would be something like -99.99%. Everything else is business as usual.
That seems obvious to me that they absolutely don't want crypto. If it's stablecoins they're after then what they really want is USD, so badly that they'll use whatever shady unregulated crypto bank sells it to them.
They will use crypto because it’s far more difficult to censor. The governments have been able to prevent individuals from storing and saving wealth, but this is becoming a lot harder and will continue to be ever harder.
I've never seen any reasonable explanation for that to be true. Crypto is very easy to censor, just ban the exchanges. Or if the government is really nasty, shut down the national internet.
And if you think they could set up a satellite connection and a mesh net in response to this, they could also use that kind of setup to transact strictly in USD, with an offshore bank. No crypto required.
> I've never seen any reasonable explanation for that to be true. Crypto is very easy to censor, just ban the exchanges.
You are correct. First thing that National Bank of Ukraine did when the war started is they banned buying foreign currency electronically (theoretically people could still buy actual physical foreign currency, but nobody would sell except for very high markup), transferring money outside of Ukraine, and _any kind of so-called quasi-cash operations_ including buying cryptocurrencies or transferring money to exchanges. And paying salaries in anything but national currency is of course illegal. So tech-savvy folks could still try to find local who owns crypto and would sell it for cash, but for regular people crypto doesn't offer any respite.
A lot of poor countries with socialist / corrupt governments like Argentina rely extensively on informal money transmitter networks as well as money remittances. Exporters earn hard currency which is stolen by the central bank and converted into disgustingly inflated fiat, and then politically favorited importers get access to whatever hard currency hasn’t been looted outright by politicians. Small people have to get dollars other ways.
Stablecoins are acquired in less-authoritarian countries and then sent to people in Argentina and other socialist / corrupt countries. They then circulate among the people just like paper dollars do. As this black market grows it is very difficult to shut it down.
Anything is possible but I think it’s more likely the socialists try to adapt to this new world rather than shut down the internet. It will be interesting to see what new theft they come up with.
Ok, you can think that, but there's still no explanation here as to why they can't do it. You should read some other comments further down in the thread, like this one:
If the hope is that they just won't shut down the internet, or the government will be too weak to stop it... what's the point of cryptocurrency? You could again just get them to use USD or Euro or something else.
It’s a bit of a leap to go from “sure we steal your money and everyone is poor” to “hey we are going back 20 years and stopping all communication”. I think it’s a bridge too far outside of North Korea. Even China has a die hard and widespread crypto base despite their “banning” of exchanges and their great firewall. I worked previously on tech to get around it (rapidly cycling domains that are registered often and flip when the neutral list blocks a domain temporarily) and that was so normal people didn’t have to get one of the easy-to-find VPNs.
If crypto skeptics on HN were right then crypto would have died during one of the prior busts like beanie babies did. But it has an ideology underpinning it (Austrian economics and individual freedom) that keeps it growing.
While there are many who get in for a quick flip there is a large, possibly the majority, who see it as a movement rather than a get quick rich scam. This is why it doesn’t die.
It's partially the ideology but also the fact that as a very weak fiat currency everyone who bought in early has no way to cash out unless they can convince other people to buy their tokens instead of something else. All of those VCs, early adopters, etc. have a massive financial incentive both to talk it up constantly and create pump-and-dump schemes around things like NFTs because the alternative is walking away from the money they initially spent. The sums in question will pay for a lot of promotion and human psychology tells us there will be plenty of people hoping they can promote it back up to what they think it's worth based on paper profits they didn't realize in the past. I'd expect even more volatility as the major players quietly cash out.
I am friends with people with tens of millions of dollars in crypto and they aren't cashing out. If you listened to people on HN none of them would have stuck by their investment. Crypto is a multi-generational project.
And some people like NFTs just like they enjoy baseball and Pokemon cards - it's for collecting, except they can also be used programmatically in software. NFTs are for entertainment.
I think you are just woefully misinformed and know essentially nothing about what is going on here, but the HN karma is pretty nice.
> The governments have been able to prevent individuals from storing and saving wealth
Do you have evidence for that? While the Argentinian economy is struggling, and the government has defaulted in the past few years, I don’t know of widespread, illegal government theft of private citizens’ assets. The opposite seems true: they want people to get richer in exports, so they get more in taxes.
Is your argument that taxation is theft? They do need taxation in order not to default again.
And those people who circumvent the censorship are faithful in their tax reports?
No, they are not. They are abusing cryptocurrency (the correct term, no matter how often you use 'crypto') to commit tax fraud. Which makes the government even more inefficient as it already is.
I’ve been in this space for a long time, know a lot of people. Lebanon is another country that is heavily using crypto. You will see a lot of countries with corrupt governments and central banks become bottom-up crypto centric, but this won’t be reported for a long time until suddenly the NYT will release an article and only then it is “actually” happening.
> Thomas Semaan is an ex-student of Saifedean who has been active in the Lebanese bitcoin scene. He joins us to tell us about the Lebanese fiat crisis, how bitcoin has helped him and other bitcoiners, and compare its effectiveness to political activism and delusions of reform.
This is the problem. Obviously bitcoin is of use and interest to bitcoiners. What we're trying to understand is if regular, non-bitcoiners are getting value from it on a large scale.
Is crypto in Argentina and Lebanon something that has a real impact on regular people who are not deeply involved in the technology?
This is why I only believe it when a publication like the BBC or the NYT cover it: crypto incentivizes people who hold it to boost it, so it's very hard to trust stories that don't come from news sources with strong conflict of interest policies and a long standing reputation for journalistic integrity.
I don't have time to listen to this podcast (I'll read a transcript if you have it) but just to respond to your comment: I've never seen the question of what happens after a society becomes "bottom-up crypto centric" get addressed. You have a country where the central bank is suddenly not doing anything, tax fraud is rampant, and the local currency is now further on the brink of collapse. All the citizens' money is effectively being funneled away into entities operating as foreign banks. The government is forced to accept crypto to avoid insolvency and now makes it so you have to pay your taxes in it. If they're still corrupt they'll force people to follow the same regressive restrictions again, and no one will be able to do anything about it because the blockchain is all public. How is this going to help anything? I'm trying not to be bleak here but the idea here seems to be disregarding any hope of reasonable reform.
I am a libertarian and I fundamentally believe the current central banking model is not only hopelessly corrupt but morally evil. Politicians have been able to steal from common people via inflation for a century while the rich are easily protected.
This is a long topic but to summarize I am quite hopeful that the ability for governments to extract wealth is limited greatly by the rise of crypto. If the government wants taxes they can do it by selling services to people who can pay for them if they agree it has value.
Of course I’m a minority but like all movements crypto is selling something to average people but the grand plan is only understood by a minority. Countries like Argentina have been basket cases for decades despite endless bailouts and IMF shenanigans. It’s time for something new that I believe is a valuable experiment with clear theoretic and ideological underpinnings that couldn’t possibly be worse than the socialist nightmare destroying billions of common people.
>I am quite hopeful that the ability for governments to extract wealth is limited greatly by the rise of crypto
I described a situation where this wouldn't happen though.
>If the government wants taxes they can do it by selling services to people who can pay for them if they agree it has value.
I'm sorry, this seems contradictory. I thought the possibility of this was already discarded when the idea of reform was thrown out. The assumption with the "bottom-up" idea seems to be that the government will always stay corrupt. If you take that approach then can't you see how this probably will end up like another failed bailout where nothing changes? Effectively all that's happening is more foreign money is being dumped into the system, except now it's just coming from offshore crypto speculators instead of from other governments. Try to look at this from a macro view.
Just my opinion: Crypto is pretty bad regardless of what your politics are. The ridiculous amount of fraud and scams in crypto, and other bad things like ransomware, are wrecking common people too. It can absolutely be worse. And, the theory and ideology of crypto doesn't actually stop a government from collecting taxes anyway.
Just my opinion: Central banking is pretty bad regardless of what your politics are. The ridiculous amount of inflation and corruption in central banking, and other bad things like telling society to stop using energy to "sAvE tHe PlaNeT" and be cold all winter (while I seriously doubt the rich politicians are keeping their thermostats low!), are wrecking common people too. It can absolutely be worse. And, the theory and ideology of central banking doesn't actually stop the individual from revolting anyway.
> I am a libertarian and I fundamentally believe the current central banking model is not only hopelessly corrupt but morally evil.
The problem is that your alternative has proven to be worse.
But also, lets assume that everyone in Argentinia is going to convert all of their currency into cryptocurrency.
What kind of repercussions is this going to have?
Well, for one, the currency in which people get paid is still the Argentinian one, not a cryptocurrency. Keep that one in mind, because its going to be affected by the rest.
What is going to happen next is massive tax fraud. People are not going to pay taxes over their belongings (you might agree with that as 'libertarian' but its going to hurt the government income for sure). This is going to result in a weaker government, and a weaker coin.
With a weaker government and a weaker coin, people get less value out of their currency. Remember that the people were paid in the national currency? Its worth less now. And also, what is going to happen when the government runs weaker? More crime, less public health, outsourcing to private entities, and defacto you will get something akin to some libertarian paradise where the top on the pyramid can actually survive and have opportunities, while the rest ends up on the bottom of cannon fodder.
With cryptocurrency, there's no such thing as accountability or paying your taxes. Such libertarian dreams are going to have the effect that the government becomes weakened and eventually you get that survival of the fittest in an unhealthy way. Without accountability and without taxes you'll get more corruption, not less. If you want an example of that, just look at Russia.
Meanwhile, all of these people are heavily dependent on? On what you think? Exchanges. Which, as proven by Mt. Gox, are not always going to be pure in their effort. So spare me the independence bullshit.
Centralized banking works, as long as there's accountability. You reach accountability by rule of law, by regulations. Cryptocurrencies try to avoid these, but neglects the reasons these were enacted in the first place. They're a massive step backwards in that regard.
> I want to understand if this is a widespread, sustainable trend.
Why? What if there is not widespread trend and it is only anecdotes? Why should every new technology be "widely adopted or bust" instead of simply being a new interesting tech which a hacker can tinker with just because? Blockchains, NFTs and smart contracts are far more interesting than yet another iteration of a web framework or yet another way to track user data.
Because if it's a widespread trend affecting real people then it's interesting to me. If it's a small group of bitcoin nerds doing what bitcoin nerds do but in another country then it's not.
I want to see evidence that the benefits of blockchains etc are outweighing the very obvious harms they are causing.
A genuine one I am concerned about is the energy consumption of Proof of Work chains. But the tide is shifting towards Proof of Stake, with Ethereum network achieving 2 significant milestones towards that recently (Ropsten, Sepolia) and a third penultimate one (Goerli) planned in the week of Aug 6th. So the main chain's transition towards Proof of Stake is likely to happen in September and Ethereum's energy consumption drops 99% or even more.
Other purported disadvantages (gambling, sucking in capital and brains etc etc) are totally non-obvious and highly debatable.
El Salvador uses it as a government enforced national currency. I struggle to understand how people still make the claim that it's useless or that it's niche - it's a recognized and enforced national currency now, not some neat project.
Who's using it? How many people did more than get that free starter wallet and cash out? How many transactions happen daily? How many businesses would notice if Bitcoin dropped off the planet tomorrow?
(Hint: the fact that people were rioting in the streets to _avoid_ it suggests the answer is not many)
Is bitcoin an investment or a currency? I don't think it can be both.
If the value of bitcoin as speculative asset is going to rise, then it is best to not spend it, but to hoard it. If everyone is hoarding bitcoin how can you use it to buy things?
If it is a currency then it needs to have a stable value. If the value stabilizes, then no one will want to invest in it. Since it does not have any "real" commodity value it would then death spiral. I don't know how you square this circle.
I agree that bitcoin needs to decide whether to be an investment or a commodity of exchange.
> If everyone is hoarding bitcoin how can you use it to buy things?
When people need something more than bitcoin, they'll trade for it. Food, shelter, medicine, etc. People will certainly trade for these things. But maybe they'll pass on replacing a phone that's only 2 years old or getting an xbox or 6 pack of beer.
It's fascinating to me that people say currency can't be deflationary or people will hoard it. You're so against people hoarding, i.e. saving money? People act like the economy will stop, but no matter how deflationary a currency is, people will still trade it for needs like food and shelter.
>You're so against people hoarding, i.e. saving money?
The problem with this kind of system: It's not just about saving. What's actually happening is those who have saved more are accumulating even more money by doing nothing, and everyone else who needs to spend it to buy food and shelter is suddenly losing more and more of their money. When it starts happening at a faster rate than the economy is producing actual value then you hit hyperdeflation and the economy spirals.
Is there not an entire currency speculation market? [0]
> When speculative investing involves the purchase of a foreign currency, it is known as currency speculation. In this scenario, an investor buys a currency in an effort to later sell that currency at an appreciated rate, as opposed to an investor who buys a currency in order to pay for an import or to finance a foreign investment.
Sure, I get the idea of currency speculation. You can speculate on anything including currency. The problem is when you try to make currency out of a speculative asset. In this case of bitcoin the value is highly volatile, so you would not want to use it as a national currency. I do know that bitcoin was originally envisioned as a currency, but most people are using it as an investment. You also have not addressed the issues I presented.
I don't think it's reasonable to think about it in such a simplistic way.
BTC has been subject to massive swings. Just looking at CoinDesk, it was easy to find a time where it doubled in value in less than a month. Why would any reasonable person spend that sort asset?
I think the dynamics of the market are as important as the technical features that some digital currency has.
But for the average crypto investor who isn't a whale and isn't insider trading on the whales, the dynamics of the market are effectively just random. This isn't like a stock where you can objectively look at the company, compare it to other companies and understand how it derives profit. It can't work either as a currency or as a reliable investment.
Lower counterparty risk, and harder to confiscate. Money can sit in a crypto wallet and be used for illicit transactions until favorable circumstances allow conversion out of btc. You can’t do that with cash in a bank.
With the amount of shady alt coins and defunct btc exchanges separating authentic vs bogus transactions is even tougher for regulators.
If you invested in bitcoin ten years ago, you are happy.
I invested in bitcoin five years ago and I an happy.
Ukrainians are heavily invested in crypto and consider crypto (at a governmental level) to be a significant contribution to their efforts in maintaining their sovereignty.
It's tiresome waiting for the unimaginative and uninsightful to open their eyes
I’ve heard people say this but when I’ve asked people from places like Venezuela they use dollars not bitcoin. Even places with not so good local currency will gladly accept Euros or Dollars instead.
The irony is even those deal in bitcoin, they have to quickly convert to USD now for fear of further drop. Their entire operation involve in converting their cheap electricity (vastly subsidized by their government) to USD with bitcoin as intermediary. And when ask, they only tell the story of their intermediary bitcoin as though as they really by potato eoth bitcoin at their local wet market.
"they use dollars not bitcoin" for their daily purchases. But how are they storing the money they have. Are they depositing dollars in a bank? How did they get the dollars? Are they banked at all?
They can't take a bitcoin out of their wallet and pay for something at their local store. They can't use their bitcoin like a credit card.
If you looked at my daily spending habits, you'd say "that guy doesn't have any crypto or stocks, look, he buys everything with a debit card which takes fiat currency out of his back account".
You can't see crypto with your eyes, but look at blockchain activity, and ask people what the source of their currency is.
Obviously it's a TINY TEENSY bit that is held in crypto. I'm not suggesting it is a majority. Crypto is hard to work with for the average person, it's volatile, and scary, but so was trading on the internet in the early days. Trust isn't there, the paypal of crypto does not yet exist.
… and that means that if cryptocurrencies ever see notable adoption, those same currency controls will be expanded to cover it. There's this popular mythology that cryptocurrencies are immune to regulation but in reality it's just that most countries don't spend time regulating things which aren't widely used. If that changes, cryptocurrencies are perfect for those governments to enforce since the public ledgers provide an easily-audited track record of all of your activity to compare with what you reported.
>>There is no entity that can prevent you from using it.
I feel that's a geek dream far outside of reality we live in.
Making it illegal to adopt or trade Crypto is possible and feasible. If your employer doesn't pay you in crypto,your landlord and bank and grocery store and public transport and health services don't take Crypto, then you're basically limited to the black market. Which tends to work well enough without complications of Crypto.
People envisioning dystopian future that needs Crypto, severely underestimate the ability of that dystopian future to prevent Crypto. Basically, their imagination of dystopian future is limited and naive. Humans can get bad and nasty and societies can get scary and Crypto is not the way out of such for ordinary citizens. Paper money, maybe. But Crypto requires so much equipment through so many telltales with so many ways for regular humans to reveal themselves accidentally that it's a totalitarian regimes' wet dream.
I think that's a bold claim from somebody who has not been tortured, whose friends and family have not been threatened for their personal actions, and who has not actually lived in a dystopian dictatorship (but possibly gets kicks out of fantasizing and "preparing" for one).
Worried about dystopian future? Go out and vote, run for a city Councillor, participate in your local school board, educate and spread awareness. Be a political activist. Engage others, be persuasive and empathetic. Promote understanding and openness and getting along. Be the change you want to be - open dialogue with neighbors, fellow parents at school, teachers, city service people - instill the habit and values of open society. Bitcoin is not going to prevent the dystopian future or save you from it, and your noble death on the altar of bitcoin will not move the needle for anybody else.
They can absolutely prevent you from using it to buy milk at your local grocery store. In practice having bitcoin is no help if you can't convert it into something else. The regulation won't happen at on the blockchain. It will happen at the grocery store, car lot, or any other place you do business. That is plenty enough regulation to make it a nightmare to use in practice.
Enforcing it is trivial for a sovereign nation that issues it's own currency and collects taxes in that currency.
Just as we've seen; they can regulate the on/off ramps between local currency and crypto.
If you've got a method to turn meaningful amounts of BTC into USD without being subject to KYC regulations; then the US government is probably already building a federal money laundering case against it.
What? If you think a government can’t enforce crypto bans, then you haven’t thought about it very much. MITM certs to snoop all internet traffic, tying all devices to real identities as a prerequisite for internet access, making it a crime for merchants to accept any payment but the national currency, etc, etc.
Unless you already had some BTC or onramp set up somewhere outside the country, they can make it hard to onramp(buying BTC ). You could also buy direct from someone but that is impractical. And then you have off-ramp to deal with once you need the cash
> There is no entity that can prevent you from using it.
As long as you still need fiat currency to buy regular goods -- or pay taxes -- entities can make it difficult for you to use cryptocurrencies. If you have to convert cryptocurrencies into something real-world in order to live, governments can make that difficult for you.
I am just not convinced that we will get to a place where you can live solely (or nearly solely) in a cryptocurrency world, without needing fiat.
> That is the whole point of bitcoin. There is no entity that can prevent you from using it.
This is a common marketing claim which doesn't hold up if you think about it even a little. It's like saying that no entity can prevent you from saying something because you define “prevent” as whether there's a cop following you around ready to punch you if you open your mouth — almost all real-world censorship happens after the fact or relying on third-parties, and Bitcoin is no different in that regard.
Bitcoin can trivially be blocked or tracked at the network level. If you have a hostile government, consider the risks of connecting to a well-known network if they've banned it.
If Bitcoin is not completely banned, a government can require everyone to report transactions for taxation or other purposes. That means that your ability to evade punishment for a transaction comes down to whether all of your earning and spending can be done outside of the country without leaving a trace of that network activity, and that you and everyone you make transactions with will never be compromised (think about how would you know?) or cooperate with the authorities (businesses will share their records because they have a legal presence which can't ignore local laws). Similarly, if you want to actually spend that money you have to be extremely stealthy to avoid the authorities wondering how you're spending more money than you appear to make, hope that someone you know never develops a grudge or is coerced to tell the authorities that you're, say, living lavishly on your trips outside the country, etc.
If _any_ of those points aren't true for you, Bitcoin is not safe to use — especially because the public ledger gives the authorities a huge data source of all of your historic activity so you have to consider not just whether they're watching you at the time of an illicit transaction (as is the case with cash) but also whether you or the the other party will at any point in the future have your wallet IDs leaked.
(Yes, I've heard of tumblers. Ask yourself who in this situation is going to risk being charged as an accomplice to the worst crime anyone else using that tumbler is involved with — or whether the police are running the tumbler to get criminals to self-identify their intent to do something illicit.)
The underlying concept to understand here is that sovereign states control their territory. If you live under an abusive government, you are only safe to evade their rules to the extent that the government is weak — if so, just use USD like everyone else. If not, all of the options are risky and there's no magical thinking about technology which is going to materially change that … but almost all of it opens up new avenues for fatal mistakes which are hard to recognize until after the fact.
This is like thinking that you can avoid paying taxes if you do all of your work using cash, except using something more easily traced by the authorities. You might think it sounds bold as internet tough-guy talk but increasingly it just means you're self-isolating as increasing fractions of the economy are unavailable to you. Since real businesses don't use Bitcoin, you're either going to lock yourself out of normal life or have all of this information at exchanges where the authorities set legal requirements.
The problem with this is the fringe libertarian fantasy of thinking that you can be a society of one. It's not just you reporting transactions but everyone you do business with, and these things chain — e.g. maybe you can do work under the table for a while but then you want to buy things like cars or houses and your lack of visible income catches up with you, or someone you do business with gets caught and opts for a lower sentence by identifying their partners. The level of risk and lifestyle restrictions mean this isn't appealing for most people, especially given the entirely philosophical benefits.
> What if they just turn off the external internet?
No government is capable of this. Even North Korea has people smuggling phones over the border. A single cell or satellite connection that can sustain 2-3 KB/s is all you need to keep the rest of the country connected.
Okay, now think about this a bit further. Bitcoin is banned in your country and it's extremely risky to make a network connection to either the Bitcoin network, the client applications (better hope you disabled automatic updates and telemetry…), or industry sites.
How are you paying for that sat-phone? That's expensive, so you need real money and amounts of it which are beyond, say, the average North Korean. If you have a way to launder that money and conceal it, why do you need Bitcoin?
What are you doing to get Bitcoin? Again, you need hard currency which the average North Korean doesn't have access to.
Who are you using those Bitcoin to transact with? Nobody in country can use it legitimately so you're restricted to the black market and very riskily exposed since your full history is available to the government if they ever identify you or someone you're doing business with. It's much safer to use a suitcase of foreign currency since in that case you're at least only at risk for the amount of cash the police find on you at the time you're busted.
I was just responding to the specific question I quoted. More broadly I agree with you that it's a risky idea to immortalize your criminal activity on a public, immutable ledger.
If your devices are compromised or you ever make a mistake, you can identify yourself.
Even if your opsec is perfect, any transaction partner can identify you.
The problem with the public ledger is that it is, well, public and permanent — maybe you're able to fly under the radar for years, but then your records turn up in an exchange's data breech or an investigation into the services you're using to launder real money, etc. and then your full history is revealed detailing exactly how much money you weren't paying in taxes.
Both. I do quite a bit of offshoring in Central and South America (and elsewhere). If I make payment to contractors in Colombia for example, the recipients have severe restrictions on spending that money outside their country if it is in USD or pesos. Hence crypto.
This does not even address the huge number of "unbanked" people in the US who have to pay a fortune in fees for their payments to family back "home" - crypto offers them a much cheaper alternative. They don't care what the crypto is worth as it gets spent again back "home" as a currency, not as an investment.
Crypto isn't helping there, that's just another form of regulatory arbitrage. If you're exchanging the crypto for USD or pesos anyway then what you're doing is still probably illegal.
I'm just paying independent contractors with crypto. How could that possibly be illegal? What the contractor does with the crypto is not under my control.
But if you could pay them in USD or pesos, you would? Can't you see how the government would take an issue with that, the very same issue that they have with USD or pesos?
It is not me as the remitter that is regulated. It is the contractor receiving the payment that is restricted on what they do with it in their foreign country. My understanding is that most of the countries involved have severe restrictions on hard/fiat currency transfers but not (yet) on crypto currencies.
There's something I've been curious about for a long time.
If your country's currency is in a state of hyperinflation and you want to buy crypto to shield yourself from it, who's your counterparty? Who is willing to sell you that crypto and expose themselves to that inflation, and how are they able to do so profitably?
Like a sibling poster, I hear this a lot too, but I don't see it as all that significant. Or, rather, these are excellent uses, but Bitcoin is a terrible way to accomplish this -- it's just a huge shame that there may not be better options.
An actual currency should have a stable value. Bitcoin will never have a stable value (at least not while it is popular) due to speculation. People who believe Bitcoin is a safer store of value than their country's fiat currency are in dire, dire straits indeed.
I do absolutely agree that people should be free from fear that their currency of choice/necessity should be safe from the possibility of 100-1000% inflation per year, but I wish we could do better than Bitcoin, of all things, as a "solution".
Increased popularity was supposed to make it more stable. Which indeed seems to have happened, with each boom/crash less extreme than the previous one ?
> I know plenty of folks in certain countries with massive inflation and projects such as bitcoin are their refuge from 100-1000% inflation a year.
Countries with hyperinflation lend to not have a ton of assets. Even if this were a use-case, it doesn't seem to justify anywhere near the valuation of BTC or other crypto.
And why on earth you would you use BTC as opposed to a stable-coin in that case?
If you live in a wealthy country, yes, but if you have limited bank access and consequently likely a country with unstable fiat, which assets would you suggest are more stable for long term holding? Certainly not physical assets, as people without banking access aren't likely to have vaults or some way to protect something like gold.
Usually in stone (buildings/sheds), farmland, or readily usable goods that keep well/provide value (rice, dry beans, generator, fridge).
Sucks if you need to run though. But usually if you're wealthy in an unwealthy/poorly banked country and can't leave for some reason, you keep your assets in the place you'd run to if you really had to.
all of those things are fine and good, but they aren't something you can easily put your savings into - you have to save up to buy most of that stuff, and you can't just horde physical items without necessary storage and protection. Further for some people these things all pose substantially more risk than bitcoin. If someone burns your sheds down or salts your farmland because you can't payoff the local rebels, you risk losing everything, with bitcoin, having poor timing on exiting the market is risky, but certainly not 100% wealth loss risk and that's without even considering the aspect that memorizing a wallets secret phrase is the only upkeep you need to hold bitcoin. All of those physical assets bear some form of time/energy to maintain/upkeep and as you mention have a strong downside of making you immobile.
I'm not saying everyone should store their savings in bitcoin, but I am saying it serves a very real, potentially life changing purpose for some people and that shouldn't be discounted.
That has nothing to do with bitcoin specifically though. What you're describing is either someone using another currency or using some kind of digital payment system. It doesn't have to be cryptos.
Cool, but the grandparent was specifically talking about inflation hedging, not about payments.
Regardless, the article you link does not actually claim what the title says it claims:
> PYMNTS research reveals that many consumers (24%) see the option to send funds in cryptocurrency as a key motivator in choosing a payment services provider (PSP), in fact.
That does not mean 24% of cross-border payments are made in cryptocurrencies. It means that 24% of people think that it's important that their payments provider supports cryptocurrency as an option (and says nothing about whether or not they exercise that option, or even have an account with such a provider).
Also, even if this were true, that does not mean you are correct in stating that cryptocurrencies are about payments. It's pretty clear that far, far more people use them for investing speculation.
> the grandparent was specifically talking about inflation hedging, not about payments
Their assertion:
> There are a lot of much better assets to buy as an inflation hedge
.. was in indirect response to a parent comment:
> Bitcoin is not really a 'young technology' anymore, and the only thing it has enabled so far is risky, unregulated investment strategies, and an staggering amount of crime.
I think clarifying that there is a material population of crypto users who use Bitcoin as a currency not an investment is material in this context?
My understanding, and I haven't been there in a while, but apparently Argentinians were using Bitcoin and other crypto's to store currency because the government had made it difficult to trade US dollars for Argentinian pesos. Even when I was there, a grey market existed for trading dollars. The gov't tried to keep very tight controls on exchange of currency.
However, recently Argentina has banned banks from converting crypto to pesos.
So, I think we can say that it was happening enough that the gov't took action. If it wasn't happening at all, they wouldn't have done anything.
Very few people here in Argentina actually hedged against inflation with cryptocurrency, it's always USD, EUR, precious metals or high-ticket items (like guns). Regarding the subset of people that actually engages with cryptocurrency, most of them are in it to make a buck, not prevent their money from losing value. Similar story for some Venezuelan folks i know.
To be fair, cryptocurrency as a way for transferring money is excellent; people here move money with Bitcoin, which can be immediately converted into foreign fiat, avoiding the absurd exchange rates and taxes the government imposes. In my opinion that is something that could be done with any black/grey market tool for transferring value, and as I see it, currently cryptocurrency is filling that niche because of network effects, not because of its inherent properties.
IMO Lex’s podcast is successful because his only agenda is to explore the conversations with his guests. Lex knows how to dig deeper into a conversation and bring more substance out. Some of these interviews last five hours and they’re interesting the entire time. That takes a lot of concentration & skill to keep a conversation moving for such a period of time.
I don’t always agree with the viewpoints of the guests, but I do believe we hear more from the guests as theirselves, and they seem to provide less corporate speak than the typical interviews.
It’s become one of my favorite podcasts because there aren’t “sides” in the conversation. You might get a few perspectives but the main objective is to actually learn the guests perspective which is harder to find from interviews. I would assume guests would enjoy a interview format where they get to talk about their self and their activities for as long as they want with someone intelligent.
> Lex knows how to dig deeper into a conversation and bring more substance out.
I've seen the opposite - he seems to care a lot more about saying his own things instead of listening to the guests, and a lot of the time he just follows his list of questions instead of talking to them.
Lex has like 3 or 4 canned questions he asks his guests and reiterates the things he learned in his own words. This is on a show run by a single person driven by authentic curiosity for an average of 2.5 hours/episode like 3 times a week.
There is a lot of negative opinion expressed in the other answers, so thank you for actually answering the question. Lex does a great job and probing the interviewee on their perspective. He is constantly readjusting his perspective to ask questions as a student of his guest to give them an opportunity to express their views as comprehensively as possible. If there is inconsistency in the argument, it is made apparent to the listener/watcher based on the questions Lex asks. If, as a listener, someone is able to discern an inconsistency, that is usually because of the questions Lex asked.
My defense of Lex is incidental of trying to achieve my primary goal of highlighting how juvenile the negative comments are.
This isn't the first time this question has been asked, and it seems like the question was asked earnestly. However, it's clear there is a lot of jealousy at the root of the negative opinions. I'm guessing this is because Lex has access to so many interesting people for such long periods of time. People responding that he's a wet blanket or that they don't like him aren't even trying to answer the question. What kind of format are they expecting to hear when interviewing academics? Jimmy Fallon meets Bill O'Reilly interviewing a Democrat?
Ask HN: "Why is Lady Gaga successful?"
Average response here: "Ugh, I can't stand her."
> What kind of format are they expecting to hear when interviewing academics? Jimmy Fallon meets Bill O'Reilly interviewing a Democrat?
This question suggests that you no longer have the intellectual curiosity to imagine an alternative to incredibly dull, surface-level questions even on subjects the interviewer claims to know about, except for... incredibly dull, surface-level questions.
The thing that completely invalidates what you’re saying here is that very little of the actual talking is done by Lex. I’m not an unqualified fan but he does at least create the space for knowledgeable guests to talk at length about their subjects - or put another way he generally gets out of the way.
I listen to a lot of his interviews, actually. A lot more of the talking is done by him than you're implying, and the questions he asks occasionally derail really interesting tangents a guest is on in favor of really dull, extremely generic questions you could get from anywhere. The Lenat interview, for example, was full of him doing it.
I agree he interrupts his guests, and he admits as much on almost every podcast. I also agree that sometimes it detracts from the conversation and it is a net negative, but you must also recognize the times that his interruption fills in gaps, as well.
Honestly? If a podcast sells itself as being an "AI" podcast, and the creator doesn't expect the audience to know what a computer is, I really do think that it is unimportant.
I think he pivoted from AI-specific content long ago. He may have started in that niche, but he’s expanded to include such a broad range of guests.
That said, this is a valid criticism, although a gross exaggeration of what the reality is. Sticking with the computer example, he digs in deeper on abstractions most people have zero knowledge about (RISC vs CISC, levels of caching in RAM, etc). He also talks about different kinds of computation.
You’re right to want him to do better, but I don’t think he will ever cater to you again. Even when he has people you might find interesting on his show (Jim Keller, Joscha Bach), he will still stick to a level that makes these geniuses works more accessible to the public. Broadening the appeal of complex topics isn’t a waste, although it may be for you. I ask that you reconsider your position and say that the show just isn’t for you and hope that you recognize the value he provides in introducing others to these fields. This is the pinnacle of podcasts, IMO
I’m curious, what shows do you like to listen to? I’d like to hear some examples of shows where there is a high expectation of the listener and people are discussing things so far over my head that it forces me to learn more.
We’ll have to disagree then. Not sure why you’re listening to so many of his interviews if you find the questions extremely dull and generic. Insomnia?
The questions are dull and generic, but the people come onto the show with an agenda. I like hearing about what they're wanting to talk about, between instances of boring questions.
I suspect there's a lot more preparaton behind the scenes to make it interesting and engaging. The guests are obvously highly intelligent, but they also are there to make a point. Not just a casual conversation. My only criticism is that they tend to go on too long. Who has the time to listen to a 2-3 hour podcast?
> Who has the time to listen to a 2-3 hour podcast?
You don't need to listen to them all at once. I'll usually listen over a couple of days. And I'm glad someone like Fridman doesn't feel bound to constrain the length of his podcasts to suite TikTok like attention spans.
