My _kitchen_ remodel in 94087 cost over $100k

Not "the only way", perhaps, but AFAICS the only way that makes sense. Sure, "the law is an ass" and "the querns of law grind exceedingly slow" and all that... But still, it's the worst alternative except for having no law, right?

So if you want the rule of law, the law needs to have the biggest guns. And why would anyone want anyone but the law to issue the tokens of lawful commerce?

So I still have to wait at least 2023 (2025 or 2026 for a realistic possibility of merchant adoption) for ETH 2.0 to be used?

I don't think merchants would want to wait for something that is not complete and unregulated.

You do realise that ETH 2.0 has nothing to do with lowering fees? So all the DeFi apps using it will still be unusable anyway.

> If you have an internet connection, no one can stop you from using these protocols (and many other protocols)...(just tens of thousands of Ethereum nodes which are responsible for settling transactions).

Aren't most of these Ethereum nodes and DeFi exchanges on AWS like dydx? It went down a few months ago no? [0]

That doesn't sound decentralised to me.

> Use protocols that have been around for a long time...That decreases chances of you losing funds. But it is a problem

So I can't get my money back then? I see DeFi hacks everyday and not getting my money back doesn't help either.

Makes robbing a bank less attractive for criminals and instead target DeFi projects.

[0] https://twitter.com/dydxprotocol/status/1468293558360805381

- Long term vs short term

- different rates

- state capital gains taxes

In this case, with the receiver being a CA resident, he pays almost certainly more than 50% in taxes on this bounty.

There’s also pro and anti arguments for being in control of your assets.

All the balances and stuff are public on the blockchain. It only takes one person to write a script to verify that the locked up amount matches the number of tokens out there. and when it doesn't, alert.

That then means any attacker will have to be very quick with their theft, and if so, there is still a good chance whatever coins they get will end up blacklisted or the transactions reversed by a sufficiently large army of upset users who fork the eth network or the L2 network.

(They have administrative controls for now during development, at some point they're supposed to turn it completely permissionless...)

Even if the government figures out that you have unexplained assets, that isn’t the same as getting caught. Having unexplained assets is generally not a crime, and monero can make it impossible for the government to figure out where you got that money from.

Currently people are pessimistic about stock market returns going forward so it could be lower (3-3.5%). And even lower if you want it to last longer than 30 years.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinity_study

The market historically has been going up, so at least historically it's been reliable to get a fixed income. I don't think $2M is sufficient to retire very early, mostly because of bad years and that your initial capital loses value over the years, but it can generate a nice income and most people can have something on the side that generates some extra money as needed. With $4M I would be more comfortable retiring at 40 let's say, depending on cost of living of course.

Oh, so it can only be exploited indirectly. Yeah, wow, that makes it oh-so-secure.

But with ETH we have the community patting themselves on the back for it. It’s madness.

You are making a false equivalency when you compare crypto with usd.

The way that the credit card system works in the US is fundamentally biased towards consumer protection, because that's an explicit policy objective. The same with the Direct Debit guarantee in the UK, or the various laws which limit the maximum exposure due to fraudulent use of payment cards.

And when exchanges break trades, they undo the entire transaction - you don't end up with one party out cash or shares.

Over a decade later and I still cannot use any of them at the restaurant or without waiting in the queue for the transaction to settle and paying more for the fees than the goods itself.

Never mind that the entire threat class doesn’t exist in traditional finance?

The strike app (which uses Lightning) is not available worldwide which really doesn't give the image that Bitcoin lightning is decentralised at all.

And even if you did, there’s no way for them to ever prove where your monero came from unless you fucked up during either the hack or the swap to monero.

Even if the IRS suspected that you’re lying to them, how could they prove it?

I just think it is also worth noting that, even if we do accept the false dichotomy, I would not be an effective criminal... which seems to continually disappoint some people ;P. (I'm sorry to be such a let down! lol)

Better would be to have whatever secret authorizes spend (private key) be separate from the account identifier (public key) and to push money, rather than sharing a symmetric secret which authorizes whoever has it to pull money.

I was in jail with a guy who was a total mess. Nice, but seemed pretty mentally-disabled.

One day a new guy came on the block. "Wow, what is George doing in here?" "You know him?" "Yeah, I know him. He is one of the greatest musicians I ever met. He can play any instrument like a savant. I knew him a few years ago, just after he inherited $4m when his father passed. He ended up getting in drugs and everyone would hang out at his house." "Wow, who was his dealer?" "Who was his dealer?! EVERYONE was his dealer!"

I'd been keeping George in coffee, because he didn't have a single cent on his commissary account (which is rare in jail, even the worst criminals usually have someone out there). Poor George had snorted or injected $4m of drugs and everyone had sold them to him and partied with him until all the money was gone and George's brain was cooked and he went around shaking his fist at the sky until he was arrested. And not one of his hundreds of "friends" would put a cent on his account.

This bankruptcy thing is a myth that seems to have been made up and won’t die. I’ve looked into this in the past and the only stats I could find that back it up are based on small winnings, not large winnings, contrary to your redditor’s claims, and the bankruptcy rates were temporary. Get this: the bankruptcy rates went down 2 years after winning between $50k-$150k, and then 3 years after that they returned back to normal. The returning back to normal from a low point was cherry-picked and reported widely as bankruptcy rates going up. Misleading, right? Here’s the Florida study this misinformation was based on: https://eml.berkeley.edu/~cle/laborlunch/hoekstra.pdf

The National Endowment for Financial Education has issued a press release about this bankruptcy misinformation: https://www.nefe.org/news/2018/01/research-statistic-on-fina...

https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Managing_a_windfall

I am grateful for this insight.

Except that

1) a lot of them are Dodge Chargers which are terribly unreliable

2) they spend incredible amounts of time idling, which isn't good for the engine of a sports car

Just like all the other coins, the only use case is burning up the planet by using Ethereum, BTC, etc, racking up high fees and being used by speculators while everyone else who invests in the ponzi scheme lose their money when it all crashes.

Nothing has changed.

Like all the others, most people are just speculating on the token price, asking if it is a good investment, etc. You would have to be lying to yourself to believe that people care about the technology.

Could you tell me why does this project needs a token attached? Even if we were to look at the price, the painful truth is that most (if not all) people who invested lost most of their money on this shitcoin, and this is excluding the punishing gas fees so it could be even worse. I hope this doesn't include you as well.

As I said, querying blockchains can be done without the need to attach a token to a project. BitQuery is an example of this without trying to burn up the planet with Proof of Waste.

If you are in support of the Graph you are also in support of the ponzi scheme.

Well get in line, the backlog for receiving hotspots across all distributors is 6-9 months long.

Aside from the problems of this statement being a completely vague and unspecific and extreme hypothetical, isn’t there a problem with switching from talking about incentives to talking about threats? Being threatened with death isn’t the same as being offered money, and this ground has been well covered by philosophers who point out that there are things wrong with “admitting that” as you call it. Calling it a price tag seems misleading at best. There’s further a massive problem with suggesting a person’s ethics might be based on what someone threatening them with death wants them to do, no? If the action isn’t something you are choosing to do, and isn’t something you would do if not threatened, for any amount of money, then why would you consider it your actions or part of your ethics?

Compare “kill this person to save your son’s life” with “kill this person to earn $1 million.” They’re not equivalent, even if both might be metaphorically referred to as a price.

OP branched here: "it's not as if the choices were 'commit crime / get bounty'."

Any example relevant to OP's branch cannot end with the subject in a river. The very fact that you are discussing it proves we've jumped to the other branch of the conditional-- the one where the choice is exclusively between `commit crime / get bounty` (by threat of death in your example)

tldr; goto considered harmful on HN

Most people who are the poorest are usually the ones who know exactly where their dollars are going. They can tell you exactly how much a carton of eggs and milk are.

You're making the assumption that everyone plays the lottery because they think it is a smart financial decision.

It's easy to say "well, lotteries have a negative expected payoff". And that's true, but it can still have a less negative payoff than a payday loan or having your car repossessed.

You are asking what I would personally do. But it’s better to think of limit cases that everyone would do — such as lie to their wife for a billion dollars. Since it’s guaranteed you fall into the bucket of “everybody”, that means you can locate your ethical price tag.

It’s helpful for people to do this mental exercise. At least, I find it comforting knowing my own price tags in advance.

The way I view it is that it’s important to seek out yours ahead of time -— to game out different scenarios, and to consider whether you would do X or Y if forced to choose. That way, when you’re in a situation where you feel like compromising, you’ll remember your limits.

In other words, I was less tempted to act unethically in the moment than I would have been if I’d been surprised by the opportunity.

This is especially important in scientific circles. It’s often trivial to falsify data, and the rewards for doing so are generally high. It’s also not always an active, conscious decision; it’s easy to make small mistakes that have favorable outcomes for yourself.

The exercise has helped me steer far away from any of those. I’ve watched peers fall into a trap that I’d label “scientific hype,” i.e. claim that you’re doing something impressive when in reality you’re nowhere close. This is a very easy mistake to make, and if I hadn’t mentally found my boundaries ahead of time then I’d have been vulnerable to making the same error. Or I may have stayed silent when my peers were doing something naughty.

Yes, it is.

> It is a transfer of resources from one entity to another. It's a zero-sum game.

All real gambling consumes as well as transfers resources, and is, therefore, negative sum.

All I've said is that you, nor I, should be responsible for making this behavior possible - you seem to have misinterpreted my intent completely if you think the absence of a right is the same as a mandate against someones ability to participate freely as they wish with other consenting adults.

Like without getting into nits, you can actually directly effect the direction and value of a company, but you can't affect the roll of dice or the output of a random number generators.

Risk in and of itself doesn't imply the entire thing is gambling; that said, investing by itself would be way closer to gambling in that context, imo

I'm saying the opposite of what you seem to be implying. I'm saying anyone can gamble or start a business, but it's no ones responsibility to make sure they have the option to do so.

Whereas in fact it is anything but pedantic.

"The whole assumption that ethics have a price tag attached is faulty"

For everyone.

> But we’re past the point that readers are having a nice time reading this.

You seem to be in a habit of projecting your own feelings onto everybody else.

> If you’d like to continue, I’m happy to do so, but we need to restrict ourselves to a high caliber of debate, if only for HN’s sake.

Suit yourself.