I'd agree with you that the blockchain can perform a role, as a register. The concepts behind it can help us do things, like the concept of an IOU and the concept of money helped us perform financial transactions over millennia. Technologies are useful, they help us do things faster / easier / differently. Bitcoin though? I'm unclear on how Bitcoin helps any communication... to me it's not a technology, it's the application of a technology.

As for the energy spent on Bitcoin to make it safe, that doesn't give it value, that means we spent (or in my words, wasted) something of value. At the end of the day, if people refuse to accept your Bitcoin as having value, it will not be used for anything, no matter how secure / distributed. The Bitcoin itself is nothing, it's just a virtual construct that does nothing. Gold can be used in semiconductors or jewelry, bacon/wheat can be eaten, oil is required to power our cars, etc. Those commodities have intrinsic value because they have usage. A piece of rock has value because at least it can be a paperweight (it's just low value because they're so easy to get). Bitcoin, even if rare, remains virtual and does nothing by itself. It's a virtual currency not used as a currency, hence the OP saying it's a solution looking for a problem.

100% agree with what you said. Currency typically has little intrinsic value (paper bills as bad toilet paper, coins for metallic content).

Doesn't negate the OP's point though. Fiat money is useful because it's commonly accepted as a currency, and in fact its usage as a currency is mandated and enforced by the government, through the use of force if necessary. Bitcoin and its peers are not used as a currency today, they're simply commodities, and unlike other commodities (e.g., gold, or bacon) it has no intrinsic value because it has no intrinsic use case. Unless Bitcoin becomes a real currency, it's completely pointless, and with the transaction cost attached, I don't think it should be a currency. Buyers of Bitcoin today do so for speculation purpose, not to use it as currency. It's a big waste of energy for nothing.

There are things that a president can impact directly, within their term, and things they cannot. Deaths and overall policy during Covid? Trump's problem. Stock market performance (which has been stellar the last few years), businesses going bankrupt, largely due to a pandemic? Not his doing. Overthrow of the government? Yep, that's his.

I agree he's a con artist, but economic performance in the short-term (and 2-4 years is short-term) is not assignable to a particular president.

Absolutely nothing, you're right. However, neither do the others. I mean Disney+ has great franchises with Marvel, Star Wars etc., but I'm not going to pay just for that channel. I wanted the goddamn aggregator, which is what Netflix was. Now that it's hard to get a decently-costed, legal aggregator... guess what. Couchtuner and the likes exist, it's not as convenient, but then I don't need to pay 4 different streaming services.

In the end it just feels like an eternal cycle. We'll live through many years where every type of content becomes increasingly segregated, piracy will increase and sales will decrease, then someone will reinvent cable (or old Netflix), etc.

You're correct in almost all your statements. Netflix went up during the pandemic because 1) subscribers went up as people had nothing to do except watch TV and 2) there was (is) a lot of money floating in the system, in some part due to government action, and that money had to go somewhere (i.e. investments like stocks) because it's not actually being used.

Now Netflix is down for the reasons you mentioned, and yes while the drop in value is only on paper, it still reflects, more or less, what people think Netflix is worth as a company. If someone were to bid for all the shares, they typically offer a premium over market price, but if the loss in sustained (i.e., this is the new plateau / normal price for Netflix), an acquisition offer would be much lower than what it would have been in 2021. The question is whether this is the new normal for Netflix or not, and the answer is who knows! If I did I'd be a billionaire.

I mean.. yeah I agree Hasbro is monetizing very (too) heavily, and risking the long-term success of the WotC business. They're printing too many things for MtG, and adding too many variants for players to keep up with. MtG Arena's economy is also predatory, to the point you're either a whale or F2P, and players are quite vocal about how bad it is (check MTGA Reddit).

I don't disagree with your conclusion, Hasbro will probably run MtG into the ground in the medium to long term. D&D could be similar, but the good thing about D&D for players is you don't need to update your rulebook or buy anything; if you have a DM and a player's guide, from an edition that works for you, you're good. Sure D&D Beyond may be screwed, but at least that franchise / concept should survive.

It's unfortunate, but they simply behave like a standard public company that must report ever-growing revenue/income. It sucks. It has nothing to do with SJW or woke stuff, it's just business and short-term thinking, as opposed to being a company made by and for fans.

Nah.. as a member of that generation you describe (the one that grew up from NES Mario to Warcraft 3), I think this is just "old person speak". Yeah of course I hate microtransactions. I also never buy skins on F2P games because I just don't get it.

However, there are plenty of games out there that work and that have young people play (Fortnite?), or even stupid phone games (Bejeweled-like) that millions of moms play. The industry evolves and adapts, and while these games don't look fun to me, objectively many people play them so they must know something I don't.

As for the death of the industry, the advantage of game development is that it doesn't need to be expensive. You can have small studios developing quality games, and you can have individuals developing games with great gameplay, with the only thing you lose being amazing movie-like graphics. All of these can be found on Steam, which makes publishing dead easy compared to movies, so I'm not too worried about the death of the industry.

I'm sure it's a cost measure more than a customer experience measure, though the latter is a nice plus and better for PR.

I've bought cards on eBay before, and received fakes. What happens every time is I file a complaint, sometimes have to send it back, and eBay refunds me. I'm sure in some instances, the seller cashed out the money from PayPal and disappeared, leaving eBay to deal with the cost. On $100 cards like I was doing (over hundreds of transactions), I'd see a fake maybe 1-2% of the time? For me it was just annoying, but for eBay, that may be significant, especially on $750+ transactions.

You just said most don't have a PC, dryer machines, bathtubs, etc. You can say that's not a big change in QoL, but people in the US have that. Give everyone in China a bathtub (or maybe a bathroom that is big enough to accommodate a bath), and then ask them if their life hasn't improved. Heck, and cars? There's more and more cars in China, but to get a license plate in some cities, you need to win a goddamn government lottery. That means the demand is still artificially controlled, which also suggests to me overall QoL is not the same.

And all of this is a city-centric view. What you say is true in cities, but rural areas don't have the same amenities. There are houses less than 100km away from Beijing that have just recently started getting asphalt roads close to them. That's lower QoL (or maybe you call that relative poverty).

That's the crux of it, and that's what LuckyPee was getting at. Right now, emissions are correlated with quality of life, because energy used is correlated with quality of life (or modernity), and we don't have enough clean energy production generally speaking.

Both China and the US (or any other country) should drop their emissions. The problem is China is rapidly modernizing, with a population much larger than the US or European countries. If they reach the same standard of living, without a drastic change in methods of energy production, global CO2 emissions will go through the roof. Now, who are we to say they shouldn't reach our standard of living? That would be hypocritical. The only real answer is to adopt cleaner energy production, which is doubly hard when you're trying to increase overall energy production as it requires you to phase out current methods. They still need to do it, mind you, but that's a problem of such scale that I can understand why they're failing, even as I wish they were not.

And that's not even touching the production of "stuff" that we've outsourced to China, or the fact that the only reason emissions in India are relatively low is because their quality of life is low, and that they'll become as much of a problem as China at some point...

Did you miss the part where they just return the device after? It's a hassle but they're not out $300. ... Though I'm sure some people would willingly spend $300 just to get their Facebook account back, I guess.

You can argue the stock market also a zero-sum game, if no dividend is being paid. However, even if no dividend is being paid, the company hopefully makes money, and so the value of that company increases as they make profits and reinvest in themselves. If the entire company gets sold, all current shareholders make money (based on the internal reinvestment and profits made over time) and the new buyers pay fair value for the asset.

The difference with cryptocurrency is that it's not a working asset, it's a commodity (and one that has no practical uses). I think the fair comparison would be people playing the forex market; if one person makes money by exchanging USD to GBP and GBP back to USD, someone else must have lost an equivalent amount. You could argue then that crypto has succeeded, it's as good as government-backed currency at the FX zero-sum game, and you can still use it to pay hackers and other illicit activities, just like fiat money!

Step 3 feels unnecessary. Every single country has a fiat currency, it works flawlessly and needs to be used for all business transactions. Why complicate it with crypto?

Or, God forbid, gets their number ported away maliciously, which is possible nowadays?

If it's a bank asking for 2FA and I suddenly lose access, I can go in branch and get it fixed. Does Google offer a customer support in case this happens? That's what freaks me out the most about 2FA for everything. Instead of having me in control of which password I use for which website, and therefore limiting how much I lose if one gets hacked, now everything relies on a single point of failure which is my phone number. I'm not a security expert, so to me it just feels like I went from 25 points of failure to one. Am I freaking out for nothing?

Ehh. I suggest you read up on BRK.A and BRK.B. What you said is blatantly false.