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blusterXY commented on Bitcoin Blows Past $9,000   gizmodo.com/bitcoin-blows... · Posted by u/ourmandave
jeremyt · 8 years ago
The backing of fiat is illusory.

I always posit this question, to which I have never received a satisfactory answer: What, exactly, would the US do if the world suddenly decided that the dollar was worth nothing?

Massive buybacks of dollars by the Fed would be seen as an ineffective and desperate move. Besides that, what other recourse do they have?

blusterXY · 8 years ago
They would do the opposite of quantitative easing: jack up the Federal Funds rate and reverse open market operations to pull liquidity away from banks. Higher interest rates would encourage people not to dump USD, while also counterbalancing the cheap-money boom created by the influx of USD.

If the influx of USD was higher and faster than could be addressed, the economy would naturally get inflation that would force interest rates even higher up (since no banks will lend at a loss, so borrowing costs get pushed up first by the fed, and then by the need to cover for expected inflation). This would be a death blow to many indebted and highly-leveraged businesses that are dependent on low interest rates for operational purposes (including those in the financial sector) and so they would go out of business. The need for the financial system to write-off the debt held by these companies would also eliminate a certain amount of money in circulation. Eventually enough money has been destroyed/absorbed and the economy is back in equilibrium.

On a less than academic note: this is not a totally unlikely scenario since the flight-to-crypto is a de facto process of de-dollarization, with crypto assets essentially replacing fiat both as store of value as well as medium of exchange. Put another way, the increase in the value of cryptocurrencies is really just a loss in the purchasing power of everyone holding fiat, and since these additional assets are now competing to purchase the same pool of goods, what people think of as bubbles in assets like housing are really just reflective of inflation in the underlying supply of money-that-can-buy-things. And it will get worse when you can sell your house for crypto.

blusterXY commented on Bitcoin Isn’t Tulips, It’s Open Source Money   blog.evercoin.com/bitcoin... · Posted by u/rbanffy
neilwilson · 8 years ago
"and one reason for this is because banks won't have the capital to lend you because people won't deposit their money there anymore."

That's not how banks work. Banks are factories not warehouses.

Banks create money out of thin air. The loan comes first and that causes the deposit - which is then trapped within the banking system for that denomination until it is used to discharge a bank or government liability in that denomination.

As the Bank of England explains: http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Documents/quarte...

blusterXY · 8 years ago
> Banks create money out of thin air.

The ability of banks to leverage deposits into fractional debt is restricted by the size of their deposit base and the need for fiat assets to earn competitive rates of return. This is not a "one way street".

Once people start shifting capital to crypto, banks will sell assets to cover withdrawals, and the cycle to which you refer starts to spin in reverse as the worsening terms-of-trade for fiat/crypto exchanges triggers a fall in the real value of assets in terms of fiat. In short, we are going to get more inflation as crypto spreads because there is less stuff being sold for fiat and more stuff being sold for crypto or held because people don't want to trade it for something likely to lose value.

At that point banks will have to raise interest rates to ensure they are not lending at a loss. Higher rates will weaken borrowing and push more borrowers into bankruptcy, at which point your expansionary cycle reverses until enough loans are written-off and the debt overhang is reduced and/or inflation eats up the implicit increase in the money supply relative to actual underlying GDP.

blusterXY commented on Bitcoin Isn’t Tulips, It’s Open Source Money   blog.evercoin.com/bitcoin... · Posted by u/rbanffy
beaconstudios · 8 years ago
at no point in this article is a value proposition actually defined. "Open Source Money" is a nice soundbite, but unless you can define what that actually means and how it will benefit mankind, it's as useful as "facebook for cats". I'm in the anti-cryptocurrency camp (despite having read the satoshi paper and comfortably understanding the algorithms behind bitcoin) because I've seen it morph into the exact thing it was meant to oppose - financial speculation and paper-shuffling by rich investors purely for the sake of profit. It's somewhat ironically hilarious that ICOs are now a thing given the anti-corporate/anti-banking message of the bitcoin genesis block.

Right now I see no value to cryptocurrencies besides black market transactions and hacking around with financial instruments in a very closed system. I'm open to the idea that I'm missing the whole point, but I've not yet seen a compelling argument for that.

blusterXY · 8 years ago
Look past the ICOs and drug sales -- you only notice these because they are salacious and thus reported on. What you aren't noticing are the people who are eliminating financial intermediaries in pretty much every industry that matters, from international shipping to remittances to supply-chain management.

Let me give you one example that might make you reconsider what is coming. In the future, you won't go to the bank to get a mortgage. One reason for this is because banks won't have the capital to lend you anymore because people won't deposit their money there: why accept a 0.5% interest rate on savings when you could be holding a mildly-deflationary token or staking a proof-of-stake security scheme? Or investing in solar power farms....

So what will people do when they want to buy a house? Instead of going to a bank, they will talk to the real estate company that showcases the property, and that company will take a 20% downpayment and then issue a token to collect funds for the rest. You will pay off your mortgage directly to the broker in cash or crypto (and all payments are recorded on the blockchain, along with the purchase contract -- a transparent template so you will know your rights in full) and the funds will be automatically transferred to token holders, who are splitting the savings with you: they get higher interest payments and you get a cheaper mortgage. Win-win. And if people need cash they can sell those tokens on any number of 24/7 decentralized peer-to-peer token exchanges, because who won't buy a token like that at a slightly discount?

The real estate agency will probably also be plugged into a decentralized AirBNB operation and have various other ways to monetize real estate. So if you ever fail to make a payment, they will take responsibility for monetizing the property such that token holders are paid-off in full. Systemic risk is thus split between the real estate company (that issues the tokens and guarantees the ROI) and the token purchasers (who take on the risk of the property company getting liquidated before they redeem the tokens in the event of a foreclosure -- not a big risk since their financials are mostly visible directly on the blockchain and your token is legally backed by the property in any case).

Where are the banks in this? Good question. We don't need them anymore. And this is just one small part of the financial system.

blusterXY commented on The Problem of Doctors’ Salaries   politico.com/agenda/story... · Posted by u/sus_007
stephencanon · 8 years ago
I didn't write either of the quotes you're replying to, so I'm not sure why you're replying on this thread.
blusterXY · 8 years ago
Scroll up, Stephen. These quotes are in the thread at the heart of this discussion, and they are pulled directly from the article.

I mean... I appreciate getting downvoted for reading the article and addressing it directly, but if there are indeed adequate residency spots then you are disagreeing with the article and would be better served to focus on what it gets wrong instead of attacking me for making rather rudimentary observations that follow from its core premise.

blusterXY commented on The Problem of Doctors’ Salaries   politico.com/agenda/story... · Posted by u/sus_007
stephencanon · 8 years ago
Residency at an ER isn't necessary for someone to become a pediatrician. Pediatricians do a pediatric residency. You seem to be very, very confused.

> Why have you elevated some bottleneck guild requirement into a general license to write prescriptions? Or sign-off on an STD test? Or allow patients to get blood tests? Or to inform them of said test results?

Literally everything you listed here can be done by a mid-level (i.e. non-MD), and commonly is (though the scope of prescriptions they can write is limited by states, IIRC).

> by reducing the argument to this level you are only suggesting you have no adequate response to the actual problem

I have no idea what you're talking about; I posted a minor factual correction to someone else that has nothing to do with this point. Again, you seem to be very, very confused.

----

In your edit you say:

> I would actually think that "residency" is a poor way of measuring competence in that field as well

Residency is not a tool for measuring competence. It is the means by which that competence is acquired[1]. You demonstrate competence by passing the written and oral boards in your specialty.

> "residency" hasn't been necessary for almost any of the medical care I have received.

May this continue to be true. If everyone were so lucky, the medical system would be much, much simpler.

[1] Foreign doctors who may already be competent are required to go through residency in the US as well; there probably should be a way to short-circuit that and allow them to demonstrate competence.

blusterXY · 8 years ago
> In recent years, the number of medical residents has become so restricted that even the American Medical Association is pushing to have the number of slots increased.

This does not sound like a system where students can fulfill their residency requirements working at general care facilities with trained doctors who have years of experience.

> The major obstacle at this point is funding. It costs a teaching hospital roughly $150,000 a year for a residency slot.

So why exactly is there a slot shortage if people can literally fulfill their residency requirements pretty much anywhere? There are plenty of hospitals that could easily use the labor.

blusterXY commented on The Problem of Doctors’ Salaries   politico.com/agenda/story... · Posted by u/sus_007
stephencanon · 8 years ago
> Well, to be pedantic, neurosurgery requires a post-residency fellowship.

Doubly pedantic: further specialization within neurosurgery (complex spine, vascular, tumor, peripheral ...) is done via fellowship, but plenty of practicing general neurosurgeons ended their training with residency. Source: wife is in her final year of neurosurgery residency. Of the folks in her program who have graduated while she's been around, about 1/2 did a fellowship, the other half went straight into practice.

(I hesitate to post this extremely minor correction, because everything you've said in this thread is absolutely spot-on and a very welcome dose of facts.)

blusterXY · 8 years ago
Now that we are discussing facts... please tell us how many doctors you have personally visited that have been required to perform neurosurgery on you? I can't think of a single incident where that has been necessary in my own experience, and yet every doctor I have seen has been required to have residency experience. Rather counterintuitively, most of the time that has seemed unnecessary, and the work was done by a low-paid nurse or technical staff with the doctor waltzing-in at the end to "sign-off" on the results in order to fulfill the requirements of the insurance companies and ensure the hourly-billing rate was well-above what it would have cost to pay a private clinic staffed by the same nurses to do the same work.

So please enlighten me instead of just slamming what seems a fairly obvious point without adding anything of actual substance to the discussion. Because from the perspective of an actual patient it seems rather silly that a nurse can't take a blood test, and a paediatrician-in-training can't study with a family doctor or another paediatrician in a private practice. And it seems absurd that extensive state funding is now accepted as necessary simply to certify someone to oversee tasks like prescribing antibiotics, or signing-off on STD tests, or allowing patients to get blood test results.

No-one is suggesting that neurosurgery should be done by people without specialized training (I would actually think that "residency" is a poor way of measuring competence in that field as well, fwiw). And by reducing the complaints to this rather silly level all you are really suggesting you have no practical answer to the question of why "residency" is a reasonable bottleneck blocking the certification of doctors and keeping the costs of general medical care far above what is actually needed to deliver the vast majority of it that doesn't involve cutting into people's brains.

EDIT: I love the downvotes people, but you would be better off answering the question since I have karma to burn and enough experience with the US medical system to know that "residency" hasn't been necessary for almost any of the medical care I have received.

blusterXY commented on The Problem of Doctors’ Salaries   politico.com/agenda/story... · Posted by u/sus_007
sjg007 · 8 years ago
Or you know, hospitals with residency programs could just use of the massive insurance money they make to fund residency positions. It's not like the residents aren't employees or something.. Even the medicaid/medicare procedures are reimbursable.
blusterXY · 8 years ago
Or allow people to do internships with normal, non-ER doctors.

Or provide alternate ways for people to demonstrate equivalent competence.

Or eliminate the residency requirement completely.

blusterXY commented on US committee votes $30,000 increase in minimum salary of H1B visa workers   businesstoday.in/current/... · Posted by u/randomname2
blusterXY · 8 years ago
The original headline is written by someone with an axe to grind, because this change does not hurt Indian IT professionals at all. Restrictions on importing low-cost labor will raise wages for workers in India. The restrictions will also raise wages in the United States for obvious reasons as well.
blusterXY commented on TechShop shuts down all U.S. locations, declares bankruptcy   techcrunch.com/2017/11/15... · Posted by u/wizardforhire
chimeracoder · 8 years ago
> As an American this is what I truly hate about corporations. They are afforded person-hood and "citizenship" where it benefits them but are treated as a company / corporation / non-living entity when that benefits them most.

As an American, I detest this meme, because it perpetuates major misconceptions about corporate law in the US.

Corporations are not granted "personhood and citizenship". People are citizens. People can exercise their rights. Both of those statements are true whether they do so as individuals or whether they do so as a group. In other words, a group of people has the same legal rights collectively that they do as individuals.

This concept is often abbreviated as "corporate personhood", which is unfortunate because it's a seriously misleading term. It's not that corporations become people - it's a way of referring to way individuals can exercise their rights through a group. Corporate personhood isn't even a single provision; it's a way of summarizing a collection of unrelated case law in a short phrase.

blusterXY · 8 years ago
The problem is that companies can spend their money on free speech without undergoing double-taxation. If the same money was allocated to an individual first it would be taxed.
blusterXY commented on Cryptocurrency Evolution   blog.ycombinator.com/cryp... · Posted by u/rrecuero
kobeya · 8 years ago
It has not. You have been misinformed.
blusterXY · 8 years ago
It has had forks which have produced blocks which: (1) would not have been produced by any previous nodes in the network, and (2) forced the updated software to ignore the original majority chain. If you check the software, you'll see explicit checkpoints at which the client is told to ignore certain blocks (identified by their hash).

Breaking the ability of the network to follow a valid majority chain is breaking backward compatibility. It's disingenuous to claim otherwise simply because the forked version eventually ended up with the longest chain.

u/blusterXY

KarmaCake day163November 16, 2016View Original