Everyone would be willing to buy a Laptop for $5 but pricing one at $500 doesn’t mean demand isn’t matched or the business model is flawed. It costs more than $5 to make a laptop. This is an extreme case but often I see the argument that it’s ok to pirate because it’s too expensive is a flawed argument. Lots of people want things that are cheaper but it isn’t always possible. That being said some companies abuse this and over charge a lot, but nonetheless the argument that free is because it’s too over priced is a flawed argument. Otherwise I could use the same logic and steal a laptop and say it’s he business fault for selling it at $500 instead of $55
The piracy argument is different to stealing because of the simple fact that there is an infinite supply of digital goods. If I steal a laptop, there is a real cost to the supplier, because they have 1 less laptop to sell. If I pirate a piece of software, they only lose out if I would have bought the software had piracy not been an option. "lost sales" are hard to quantify.
Disclaimer: I don't pirate, and I sure as hell don't steal.
There is a virtually (that bandwidth and storage aren't infinite) infinite supply of any digital good.
If nobody pays but everything else keeps costing money, there won't be any new digital goods. So you can't say there's an infinite supply of digital goods.
Yes but what he’s saying is that if you take that money from high executive pay then you can offer both. You have three variables rather then just two, most businesses ignore the executive pay. That’s where the example breaks down. Now if you want to keep executive pay high then yes a lot of people select price over service and you are correct. But those aren’t the only two variables then it’s a lot more variable. Pardon the pun.
We’re cobstantly dealing with environmental issues and global warming yet burn incredible amounts of energy and carbon compared to the value this gives us. It would probably be more environmentally friendly to not use crypto currencies then to stop using all the electricity you do each day...
incredible amounts of energy compared to the value this gives us
Note that the value of ETH is higher than the value of the energy needed to mine it; that's why people mine. So is your complaint really about mispricing of energy (externalities) or about other people having different values than you?
Well, the price of ETH is higher than the price of the energy needed to mine it. The energy consumed has demonstrable value, but that's yet not true for ETH. As many people have said here, it's experimental. And of course, there's a fair bit of financial speculation going on. But as far as I know, it's generating no significant value on its own.
If a person is willing to spend money (for energy, or for buying crypto on an exchange), we can say crypto has "demonstrable value" for that person, no matter what they want to do with that crypto.
I think something only has value to people if they purchase it repeatedly and end up satisfied with the outcome over the relevant time scale. People pay for speeding tickets, but nobody's very excited about them. You can ask many ex-smokers (and any emphysema patient) about the value of cigarettes. And as a kid I had to learn a lesson about ordering stuff advertised in comic books; I was willing to pay, but often didn't receive value.
"other people having different values than you" makes it sound like the value of ETH is purely a matter of personal opinion. It is, however, possible to fundamentally misprice an asset. I think OP is arguing that the ultimate real-world utility of ETH is not accurately reflected by its price.
It's about the price of generating the electricity in terms of the damage it does to the environment (rather than dollar amount) compared to the value the cryptocurrencies generate. Most people look just at electricity costs and not electricity costs AND environmental costs.
If we're going that way how about not having an economic system that predicates social stability on growth? The very essence of how our society is structured is antithetical to environmental stewardship, forget a few people playing around on computers.
Growth in the economy is not necessarily predicated on growth in consumption of natural resources. Those two things tend to be correlated in modern society, but they're not inextricably linked; we don't necessarily have to give up on the idea of economic growth in order to preserve the environment.
A core point was that economic growth has now decoupled from many resources. Computers are an obvious aid here; look at how much time we spend in front of one screen or another. My laptop is hugely valuable to me, but it took something like 1g of materials per hour of use to build it, and uses way less power than the lightbulb I previously would have read a book by.
I'm sympathetic to the idea that technology decreases the per unit cost of productivity output, but the whole point of stimulating economic growth (via factors like inflation) doesn't work if the stimulus doesn't outpace the improvement in efficiency.
Technology is fundamentally deflationary. So if you believe that inflation (and growth) is necessary for social stability, you must incentivise consumption beyond technology's capacity to improve efficiency.
I think we're talking about two different things: economic value and the price of currency. I agree that you don't want currency deflation. But over decades, I don't think that has much to do with the value to users of goods.
I can think of a few obvious places where they split. One is where we increase quality. A well-trained chef doesn't use significantly more resources than a bad cook, but the result is much better. There's also quantity; by 1980s prices, I have lost millions of dollars worth of data storage in my couch cushions. (Entertainment is a great example of both dimensions.) And it can be perfectly healthy for an economy to decrease hours worked for the same or better result, as in Germany: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2018/12/28/why-do-s...
So sure, we want currency stability, and we don't want recessions. But I don't think we face a Midas Plague [1] scenario.
> Yet when you have very low inflation, getting relative wages right would require that a significant number of workers take wage cuts. So having a somewhat higher inflation rate would lead to lower unemployment, not just temporarily, but on a sustained basis.
Just to be clear that we understand the policy here in blunt terms: The point of inflation is to cheat the working classes out of their income so that the ruling class can lay claim to high employment metrics. This is the price of currency stability.
I think of it more as a workaround for a cognitive bias. Rational actors would be ok with wage cuts as their comparative advantage declines. But humans aren't rational actors, so we instead allow for a little inflation to make adjustment easier. Then people stay employed and productive.
I don't think the ruling class gives a shit about employment metrics. As we saw with the fashion for "austerity" in Europe, they were positively gleeful about other people's suffering. And no wonder; high unemployment reduces labor's bargaining advantage over capital, thereby increasing their relative power.
My electric grid provider buys power from Hydro Québec. I'm happy they're using a differential rate tariff for crytpo farms. Maybe it will slow the escalation in my bills, which outrun my attempts to conserve electricity.
That being said, crypto farms are an almost ideal workload for a smart grid, as long as they can shut off when other customers draw peak loads. They are a predictable base load, drawing power all the time. A grid with a smaller difference between peak design load and base load has a better return on capital.
That means a grid charging more to miners than other customers acts against its own narrow self-interest. But, grids do it anyway. My local grid pays to retrofit city street lights (another nice base load) from sodium vapor to LEDs to save power, for example.
If we (collectively) embrace crypto, we must also embrace nuclear power because it's great for base load and emits no carbon. Is that a bargain worth making?
Just goes to show how short sighted some people can be. Make money now, or give up that chance so future me or my possible future kids might have a slightly better world to live in. Now multiply that by a lot and- it's hard.
I mined NiceHash for a bit. Made a couple of grand doing it (I also pay for 100% wind power), but I didn't really consider the impact it would have. I saw the $10 to $15 a day for little to no work and took it.
I feel as if the digital world is half drug and that cutting off will lead to a weird period of time until we can enjoy non electronics based good times. Still it may feel weird that such modern and sophisticated tech led to more problems than bonuses.
I’m amazed that your comment isn’t higher. That was my first thought as well. They may be great design wise but if they don’t covert at all it means very little. Many tv commercials than win awards are terrible at converting for example.
From a higher level maybe don’t start a software company. Just because I have an idea say on how to make a better oven I should not open one until I at least have some industry experience and knowledge first. In other words if your whole business model depends on a specific set of skills then you should at least have some knowledge or expert on your team as a starting point. If you start a plumbing business you don’t just open it up with zero plumbers on staff and no experience in plumbing. But for some reason this is fairly common in software...
The answers I read here are classic over engineering. Sometimes the simplest answer is the best answer, and you don't need to build a complex system. That is to say the same methods that are used to defend against a gun, either another gun to disarm the assailant (be it a person or drone) body armour. Killing the GPS, etc. are all good methods too, don't get me wrong, it's just that they may be more Factory.getFactory().getFactory().getInstance()... type of solutions. Initially just the same methods should work.
They have the choice to build their own OS. The reason they don’t is clear, it’s too expensive. Google instead of charging money requires certain licensing conditions. If they truly want full control they could build it themselves but obviously they’re prefer google’s licensing model.
That's the current local optimum for phone manufacturers. The anti trust regulations exist, in part, to help prevent companies from forcing a local optimum that ensures no one ever tried something different, and thus forces the industries to keep improving.
If the OS was so good on it's own then google would not need these licensing terms to maintain market share.
