I used .NET for many years with Postgres on a huge project. Honestly, I don't know what you mean. Can you break down "Everything" a little. What is it that expects MSSQL? Who are the thought leaders pushing it?
I'd say Microsoft's revenue related push with .NET these days is to try to subtly nudge you into Azure (where MSSQL is rare and Windows is virtually non-existent).
But, I also think they know they will kill .NET if they go overboard with it as the competition is strong.
It is an interesting fact about Bitcoin in general. There are 21M tokens in total AND some percentage are lost every year. Run this simulation long enough and there will be very few active Bitcoins remaining.
21M is the theoretical cap. At the moment there are 20M and more are constantly being mined. Miners have to convert bitcoin into real currency to pay for their electricity both for mining and transaction fees. This means that there is always a supply of bitcoin for sale. Which is fine if there is still demand for new bitcoin, but who's buying bitcoin these days? It has underperformed both the S&P 500 and gold over the last 5 years. I expect bitcoin inflation to continue. (AKA the bitcoin price to continue to go down).
Worth pointing out that the monetary policy of bitcoin is not written in stone; all you need to change it is a majority of hashpower. The current chain of bitcoin mainnet includes hard forks, like this one due to miners' manual intervention over a software bug that was exploited: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Common_Vulnerabilities_and_Exposu...
> all you need to change it is a majority of hashpower
Or rather the majority of actual users. Hard forks occur because people install and use the updated clients. If 90% of the miners decide to mine on the “bad” chain, but 90% of users switch to the “good” one instead, the “good” would likely still win out in terms of market cap and recognition (and the miners would naturally have to follow).
Because difficulty does not adapt dynamically, if the miners do not move then the fork will be defunct because it will take literally days to weeks to mine a block, and to mine the 216 blocks that would trigger a difficulty adjustment would also take proportionately longer. So transactions would sit in the mempool and the currency would be mostly useless.
Agree. Bitcoin is more of a social concept / weighted democracy than an algorithm. If the participants decide that a new / incompatible hashing algo is needed (e.g. post quantum), it will be forked and everyone will use that.
The odd part is, the governance model is not defined. At the end of the day, some person or group has to decide what the new "real" Bitcoin is and the average holder just has to go along with it.
I think for most bitcoin users, the main usability concern wrt forks is being on the most secure chain; i.e. hashpower. If you're willing to trade being on the most secure, most historic chain for specific technical features then you're probably on an altchain already. In practice every hard fork in history the chain with the most hashpower has retained the ticker, meanwhile the users are never organized enough to do anything but follow that decision.
> every hard fork in history the chain with the most hashpower has retained the ticker
The opposite is also true – most miners have stayed on the “official” chain :-) I do agree that having more hashpower helps, but ultimately all users (including miners) determine the price on the market.
Deflation is a good thing, it rewards delayed gratification.
Those evil Keynesians have convinced the world a little bit of inflation is good. It isn’t. Losing purchasing power on your money is a bug.
Nothing wrong with putting money under a mattress for 100y if the value of money is not evaporating.
For most of human history the money was stable. It’s the disasters of 20th century wars that eroded the value, and 21st century lack of monetary discipline that keeps driving it down now.
It's nice when I do it. Not so nice when everyone else does it. If sitting on the money has better returns than running a supermarket, why run a supermarket? Any investment has to beat deflation. Why hire people? In fact maybe I should fire everyone to hold on to more capital and spend as little as possible...
> If sitting on the money has better returns than running a supermarket, why run a supermarket?
First of all, because not everyone starts with inherited wealth. Also because ideally running a supermarket should give you more money even in a deflationary world. Worst thing is that you gain less money on day N+100 vs day N, but it does not mean you lose money or stop gaining it.
> First of all, because not everyone starts with inherited wealth.
So how are you going to build the supermarket?
> Also because ideally running a supermarket should give you more money even in a deflationary world.
If it needs to give you more money than just saving the investment (which it should, you need to be rewarded for the risk or you would just save the money), obviously the profit margin has to be higher than it currently is, which would increase prices.
> First of all, because not everyone starts with inherited wealth.
So then you need an investment; you're going to have to return a multiple of the deflation rate since the risk of your supermarket shutting down is probably higher than the currency changing course.
But a deflationary system rewards inherited wealth. It's a pyramid scheme where the person at the top splits their big piles up into smaller piles, selling them to newer people, who then sell their smaller piles to newer people...
So you'd be working for 0.000000000000000001 coins per day at the amazon warehouse, while Bezos has 500000 coins because he was born with them. There would never be a way for you to get 500000 coins, because there are only 20m coins in existence.
The easiest thing for people to do in that situation is just create another Bitcoin. The person that has the 500K original Bitcoin is free to trade with themselves. This is why Bitcoin is much more of a social network than an algorithm.
> Also because ideally running a supermarket should give you more money even in a deflationary world.
Running a super market involves owning physical goods for some period of time. With deflation, the price you can sell those goods for drops while you are holding them. In fact most economic activity involves paying for inputs (labor, materials, etc) and then later getting paid for your outputs. Deflation directly impacts profitability and can cause losses.
Since deflation causes demand to drop as economic actors wisely choose to start hoarding currency and buying less, this causes a feedback loop where deflation can spiral.
Similarly, inflation causes demand to increase since holding currency is unwise and it is better to spend or invest that currency than hold onto it.
These two patterns mean that the neutral state (no inflation or deflation) is unstable as any deviation above or below starts a feedback loop until things fall apart. This is the boom and bust economic cycle that modern monetary management is supposed to ameliorate.
Given that you want economic growth, the best solution is to try to stabilize around a small fixed amount of inflation. Arguing for the end of inflation is arguing for the end of economic growth.
My family needs food though. Perhaps a supermarket is a poor example. I think people might purchase fewer luxury goods in a deflationary world which TBH I'm not sure is a bad thing.
To put it another way, the model you're presenting reads well in an economics textbook and I'm sure is exactly how we justify our MMT social policy but it doesn't fully account for actual human behavior. I'll buy necessities (house/food/water/electric/communication) even in a deflationary economy.
When was the last time you went to the grocery store and thought "I better buy this milk today because my money will have less spending power tomorrow"?
An economy driven only by spending on bare essentials would be worse than Great Depression level malaise and stagnation. Where are you imagining growth would come from?
The point of money is not to reward delayed gratification. The point of money is to efficiently tabulate human preferences, and deflation directly counteracts this by introducing potentially unbounded latency at every step. That's why it destroys economies, as it has throughout history.
The problems with using physical gold as currency are very well known. When population would increase, or when someone would hoard it, it would cause deflation. Likewise, when a new deposit of gold was found, it would cause inflation.
This is, in part, why there were expeditions to find gold.
The Japanese economy is not, in any sense, destroyed. It doesn't get the infinite exponential growth unhinged economists want, but life on the ground is stable, wealth inequality is low, cost of living is low, average quality of life is very high. It is the perfect counterexample to the doctrine of chasing line go up.
This is a almost entirely oversimplified take on the Great Depression to the point of meaninglessness
For a decade before Black Thursday,there had been many things that were signs that the economy was having trouble even if the "Roaring Twenties" made it seem like everything was fine.
IMO the largest issue was that American farm sector was teetering on the edge because of the dramatic drop in crop prices. This deflation screwed over farmers who mechanized with lots of debt, which because of said deflation, became impossible to pay off.
The fed also implemented rate hikes to curb speculation right before 1929 which froze up credit contributing to deflation
The problem of the Great Depression was NOT the stock market crash, it arguably wasn't even the real start, just the most "spectacular" one. The problem was that with the entire economy deflating, it caused a massive downward spiral that the Fed did not really have the tools to fix, because of Gold Standard and lack of legal authorization.
This was why the Govt went to extreme lengths to try and figure out how to raise prices, which is why you get programs to pay farmers to NOT grow food, and mass killings of pigs and cows and other farm animals, even as the farmers who raised those lifestock went hungry.
So no, speculation was not the problem, it just sparked the key issue of the fact that the economy was deflation uncontrolled, but was just hidden.
This is a complex topic and I think you have done a good job of summarizing the main issues. To add a little context:
>...that the Fed did not really have the tools to fix, because of Gold Standard and lack of legal authorization.
This was just bad policy by the Fed. The Fed had the legal authority to be the lender of last resort and could have prevented the bank failures. Many explanations have been given over the years as to why the Fed didn't provide liquidity. Because the Fed failed to supply emergency liquidity, the U.S. money supply plummeted by nearly 30% over the next couple of years, which essentially turned what likely would have been a recession into the Great Depression.
This is not to say the gold standard was not a problem. During the 1930's, leaving the gold standard was one of the few good moves done to help the economy by the federal government.
The idea that you can put away an amount of money under your bed that buys 1,000 loaves of bread or one GPU, leave it there for decades, and then have it buy exactly the same number of loaves of bread or GPUs is a fantasy. You can hold onto the shiny rock but you cannot stop the world rotating around you and changing all its relative prices.
> For most of human history the money was stable
Achieved by a combination of restrictions on trade, price stability laws, occasional crippling shortages, and quietly shaving bits off old coins. A much poorer world.
This would be more convincing if it wasn't from a site trying to sell me gold. Do people really believe that the mechanization of clothing production in the industrial era has made no difference to "real" prices?
I think deflation-based economy could produce some interesting capital-allocation environemnt. Investment offering a 2% real return becomes unattractive if cash itself earns 2% real purchasing-power yearly. You could argue this raises the hurdle rate for investment and eliminates low-quality projects. And the counterargument is exactly the same: it raises the hurdle rate for investment and therefore some potentially good projects would never receive funding. And thats probably where the intellectually interesting argument really lives, rather than in inflation good deflation bad
The right thing would be to have 0 change in the value of money as long as the right amount of money exists.
The right maount of money is the amount of money we as normal humans need to work with (buying and selling stuff).
Inflation and deflation are results of too much money or too little money in comparision to the production capability of a society.
If i save today for my retirement and money gets less valuable when i'm retired, i have to give more 'saved' capacity back to get the real capacity (people taking care of me) and if i have more value, the others have to do more for me.
Controlling this is 'work' from experts and is not solved by bitcoin btw.
The normal term would be “velocity” of money, btw. Its a key consideration in addition to total supply whenever you need to evaluate inflation or manias.
Why does everyone assume that we're the ones keeping money under the mattress, not the ones who would have been paid by money otherwise not spent? All transactions have two sides, no?
> Deflation is a good thing, it rewards delayed gratification.
"Delayed gratification" is also provided by investments producing returns. An economy with lots of investors will outperform one where people stuff their cash into their mattress, and deflation makes it very hard for potential investments to beat that strategy.
> For most of human history the money was stable.
[citation needed]
The Spanish empire was driven to collapse by hyperinflation. Even in the US, there were financial collapses in the 19th and 18th century. Bank runs have been a thing for as long as banks have: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_run
Your premise is based on faulty assumptions. The existence of credit itself is what causes monetary instability, and without credit the world would look very different.
Money is destroyed when a loan is paid back. Private credit does not expand the monetary supply permanently. Only the state can increase the money supply.
Your understanding of monetary theory is somewhere between 110 and 5,000 years off. Furness had a pretty cogent explanation of a monetary system without central authority or functional currency about 100 years ago with the Yap. They even managed to have bouts of inflation without the concept of a bank or state.
credit does provide a kind of flexibility that is sometimes needed, though. However, predatory lending, and the endless stacking of recursive loans, and government money printers are a massive stability issue that we're running into globally, and have (as you say) run into multiple times, historically.
My thought on this would be a dynamicaly stable currency. estimate debt and transaction activity, and the more debt and more liquid activity there is, the more deflationary currency should be. the less debt there is, and the less of a percentage of the money is actually in-use, the more inflationary the currency should be. this, though, is fairly off-the-cuff.
If you have a brilliant technical solution that requires throwing out all conventional economics, you don't have a brilliant technical solution. Bitcoin is rotten to its core and every excuse you make for it proves the point.
>For most of human history the money was stable.
Absolutely ridiculous. People have been counterfeiting and debasing money for as long as there has been money.
That only makes sense if money is a durable good destroyed by use. But money is improved by use and lost when put under a mattress. In economics terms, MV=PQ, and your proposal sets V low, which harms Q (goods available for sale)
No, no. The issuer of your money is really, really happy when you don't use the money. Because that means they can issue more money, without causing inflation to spike.
..and, you think that covers both individual and collective good?
..balance in all things. Neither being completely stingy, individually, nor being excessively spendy will benefit us, individually or collectively. ..but there are times for either.
I wonder if there's a way to quantify that and put a variable on the conditions, and have an inflationary/deflationary currencynthat is dynamically stable depending on conditions.
..i mean, individually, most people will eventually spend, if they have much saved and it benefits them to do so. but occasionally, we do need a kick in the pants. whenever the economynis in gridlock, that's the time for inflation. ..but when people are spending excessively, it's a time for deflation, which discourages taking on debt, and pushes the economy towards real wealth. rewarding long-term thinkers is valuable, and has a very broad effect on society.
This can be said about many conflicts between the individual and society, though. In many ways we are prevented from just taking what we want and “keep us in shape” because if everyone did the same it would be a problem.
Hahahaha, oh my. You think the world was some idyll halcyon pre bretton woods? My man Enmentrna is going to come back and declare a jubilee for your great revelation. When has any historic monetary system been “stable” for an appreciable amount of time. Debasement is a very literal ancient word and problem.
Even your straw man 20th century cut off is hilarious where you just kind of forget about 1873? Or maybe that decade is your shining example of the benefits of deflation. So much joy and global prosperity the peasants just forgot how to eat. Its cool, Bismarks destruction of the bimetallic system really helped usher in that age of stabikity from the international gold standards.
Wildly inaccurate, thanks to forgery and coin shaving - sometimes even governments officially reduced the silver or gold content to make more money out of their coin reserves. Even when proto-banks began issuing letters of credit, the quasi-fiat letters were subject to loss of confidence.
However, the availability and quasi-fungibility of other silver/gold currencies meant that if you didn't trust Edward's penny, you could use a Dutch penning instead. That provided an alternate path to dampen inflation, as long as the dominant currency was coinage.
But it was equally hard to buy a pig or a new suit with silver pennies by the 20th century. Bank notes, even when theoretically backed by exchange for their value in precious metals (the Gold Standard), were even easier to forge, and suffered from "loss of faith" inflation (runs on banks meaning they couldn't practically be exchanged for 14 pounds of silver pennies).
The idea that deflation is built into Bitcoin is exactly equivalent to saying "the real value of bitcoin will always increase" which is an absurd premise.
Bitcoin is deflationary only in a hybrid Keynsian - Austrian worldview. In the Keynsian worldview it cannot by definition be deflationary because that would mean that the value is always increasing which is just kind of a mad thing to believe. In the Austrian worldview it is not deflationary because the amount of Bitcoin is always increasing by design. Only if you accept the Austrian framing of "deflation is when you decrease the money supply" together with the Keynsian framing of "money supply is measured in real terms not nominal" do you arrive at the idea that it could be deflationary, and there are exactly zero economists who believe both of these things.
I suspect it was a deliberate strategy to create scarcity, allowing the original creators to massively cash out. If you make an inflationary distributed currency, it may work better but it's a bit harder to get rich on it.
During much of the industrial revolution, gold also rose in real price. But people still did business in gold standard countries.
(Hint: the gold might be under a mattress or in a vault, but you can still an almost arbitrary amount of gold denominated debts and loans and deposits.)
There is zero evidence that deflation has any effect on spending.
At the micro level, the change in price is too small for every day purchases. Would you starve yourself for one day because the pizza will be one cent cheaper tomorrow?
At the macro level, every interest rate will be adjusted based on the base inflation/deflation rate, so the net effect is zero. Banks will offer a higher profit rate for their savings account to entice people to deposit their money in the bank instead of their mattress.
It's not silly, it harnesses some of the mechanics behind ponzi schemes to encourage viral spread. Early entrants are incentivized to evangelize it to newer ones
I like how the nurse gets to check if the AI is doing the right thing as one of her new tasks. AI is going to have to get to the point where it can do things on its own or it will only transform problem domains where verification is fast and inexpensive. Otherwise something is getting traded and people will notice, eventually.
Reasoning is a strong statement here. But it is fair to say that it usually is not intuitive to us.
An example is if I gave you a huge sheet of thin paper (huge so that folding isn’t an issue) - how many times could you fold it in half until you couldn’t physically do it anymore? Could you do at least 10? Try this with random people and you’d be surprised how many say they could do 10 easily.
Or the chess board question. Works to rather get the financial equivalent of starting with a penny and then doubling it for every square on the board or a million dollars for each square? Again, if you ask people to pick one without giving them the time to work it out they will usually pick the million dollar per square.
But you're not reasoning yourself here. In face you're literally parroting what an LLM would do in this situation: you already know the answer so you think your comprehension of this is better than that if others, when in fact it's just simple pattern matching. It's not a measure of intelligence, it's a measure of memory.
I actually started by saying "reasoning" is a strong statement because as you note, it's really not reasoning. It's about intuition. And yes, if you've seen it before then intuition doesn't play a role. But if you haven't had sufficient experience with it, even if you know "double each square", and even if I walk you through the first ten squares on the chess board "OK, now we're at $10.24 cents... and we're at $10 million dollars with the other method -- it's not looking too good for the doubling method is it!?".
But a philosophical question is, with sufficiently large memory -- does almost everything just reduce to a measure of memory?
If something at rest is accelerating at 9.8 m/s^2, how long in seconds will it take to reach 10% of c? Answer to the nearest order of magnitude - will it take approximately 1000, 10k, 100k, 1000k seconds?
I’m sure you know this is an exponential growth question but have no intuition of the answer.
Knowing exponents and how to apply it is not the same as having any intuition about what the actual value of a certain exponential function will be at a certain point and when it crosses a threshold.
I like and use Arch daily. My "way" was just to get past the fdisk squirrel catcher. After that it was as easy as Ubuntu. I'm not bragging, I wish I'd read the manual but was too impatient for that. I suspect I'm not the only arch user that arrived at it using similar approaches. I might even be a target user for DHH's distro but the bloat (and to some extent the vibe coding) holds me back.
I thought that’s pretty much the way all technology goes. Just seems silly to take promotion an operating system that’s essentially a lot of config files atop existing work seriously from someone that made a popular web development framework 20 years ago. That’d be like me caring about a distro Gavin king made because he made hibernate in the 2000s at jboss.
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