Marcel Popescu

Going from abstract to concrete: Private currency: good. I would love to have lots of them, just as I love both gold and silver. Blockchain: not so good, more of a solution in search of a problem. The only advantage it has compared to an append-only database is decentralization… and I don't see a need for that. I would much rather have many private currencies. Also, in practice most coins are actually centralized, or at least a very small oligarchy. Bitcoin: nah. Really bad. Incredibly slow to initialize, slow transactions, easy to control by a sustained state-level effort, very low cap on number of transactions per second, plenty of bugs, hard-forks which means the code is actually controlled by a small group (which in turn means that I can't trust that the currency itself is decentralized)… nah. In conclusion, I like the initiative, and I'm 100% behind the idea that we need to separate states and money, but we're nowhere near yet.

While watching a concert I started thinking about the amazing cooperation needed for such a task - there are dozens of people on stage, playing various instruments in very specific ways, and hundreds of people in the audience, whose only responsibility for a successful concert is to stay quiet during performances and maybe applaud in between. The performers are rewarded financially if they perform well, and they risk being fired if they don't. The audience risks being fined or even jailed if they don't behave. Given all that distinction - disassociation on one hand, jail on the other - who do you expect to cause more intentional trouble on the average? My money is on the audience, of course [grin]. Market incentives work a lot better than force incentives. To me, this is a beautiful example of capitalism versus socialism. Even though the risks of disobeying the state are much greater than the risks of disobeying an employer or a business associate (there's no meaningful di...

I was deleting some spam and reflecting on the whole issue... as I was telling someone a few weeks ago, the problem with spam will be stopped when it will become a serious issue. Right now, the problem is distributed: a few benefit and a lot have to pay for it. (Just like in politics [grin].) Worse, there is a socialism of sorts in the relationship between internet providers: the sender doesn't have to pay the carriers for the traffic it sends through them. This messes up the incentives completely. A simple scheme like a hundredth of a cent per email would make it too expensive to send bulk emails ($100 per million emails) while not affecting regular users in any way; legitimate companies would have already a large enough internet subscription that any email charge would be drowned in the noise; finally, large, voluntary mailing lists like RISKS would need something on the order of maybe a few dollars a day - again, irrelevant when compared with the price for the actual equipment a...

While reading Snakes on a Plane (I'm a big fan of Buffy, and of Buffy crossovers) I got to this part : Did they even have stores selling clothes and groceries and stuff back then, or did everybody make their own clothes and grow their own food? That seemed like a lot of wasted effort to Buffy. If you were good at making clothes or something, shouldn't that be, like, your job? And then you could sell the clothes you made or trade them to somebody who was good at growing things. This is something that most people seem to understand intuitively. If you're better at making bread, and I'm better at making clothes, we should specialize and trade with each other, instead of each of us trying to make both. We'll have products of a better quality (or a greater quantity, depending on the meaning of "better" in the previous statement). This is why, for example, it makes sense to grow corn in Kansas and bananas in Kenya and trade, instead of each trying to do both. W...