With proof of work, _anyone_ can be a miner, even if they have no coin to begin with.

With proof of stake, you can’t win new coins unless you already own some. Moreover, the coins will be awarded mostly to validators with the largest stakes. In other words, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

Can someone explain if/how POS doesn’t…

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Zaher Kamel

Not to fault your logic. I wanted to bring up another ramification about letting people suffer until they rise up and demand change. Perhaps this is the most merciful way.

Unfortunately, it is very likely that when the downtrodden rise up, they will not ask for hard money or government/business living within their means. A much…

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You make a very persuasive argument. I have to think about it more, but I am almost convinced. You’re right, the only way we’ll get change is through a grass-roots movement that has a high impact.

OK – I agree with your argument with no reservations.

Thank you. I feel like I really learned something!

Hi Michal
Thanks for the post. I’m glad that you can at least see the problem I’m talking about. This isn’t a perfect world and idealistic solutions (the perfect) can be the enemy of pragmatic solutions (the good enough).

Logic tells us how a truly free market would operate, and if the market were truly free, then minimum wage would be…

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Hi Gonzalo
I don’t have much to add. Thanks for the link.
I would encourage you to reply to old comments. We are just getting started and there are few people willing to make the effort. Conversations will be helpful to all of us.

Thank you Gonzalo Coelho. I’m glad you restarted this conversation.

My response is that you make an excellent point. Minimum wage causes harm to inexperienced workers.

My point is that there are always positive and negative outcomes to any economic policy.

In his writing, Saifedean explains how fiat_distorts_the_labor_market. His conclusion is…

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It was on the second reading of Ch. 7 that I understood what Saifedean was saying about the misery industry. In the name of “helping out” third world countries with their “development,” the western world forced massive loans onto poor countries. Such loans were supposed to fund beneficial projects which would help their economies grow. But these…

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Ideas I missed:

Pacific sea otters

The Amazon rainforest!
Art moved from realistic to abstract for a good economic reason. The bottom fell out of the market for realistic paintings, which are both expensive and slow to produce. A better product came out: the camera (photographs).

Saifedean’s discussion of scarcity in natural resources is a rather ignorant perspective (not stupid, but ignorant in the sense of not knowing). When he says it is ridiculous to worry about overfishing the ocean, he is ignoring many historical cases of where humans have depleted or even made species extinct – for the sake of…

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If you don’t mind a very mechanistic perspective, maybe hiring people is more or less like acquiring capital machinery. Especially if you invest to train them.

That video is absolutely awesome! Wish I knew Portuguese, but the meaning is clear.

And I don’t disagree with the message, but you are kind of evading my point. I said that minimum wage may not be the best solution, clearly it has drawbacks, but that doesn’t change the negative effects of power imbalance in the employer / employee relationship.…

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I’m not a policeman for political correctness per se, but when there is solid research that certain word constructions can carry unintentioned harm to children / students, I will change my speech pattern. Here I’m referring to gender pronouns in teaching materials.

Despite being linguistically correct, we know that girls can be…

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When I read the Bitcoin Standard, I was floored by a couple of revelations that changed my world outlook. The most memorable of these is that WW1 and WW2 could never have been financed without the government’s ability to print money. Can you imagine a world where these wars never happened? I can not. There are many corollary effects, but that…

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I’m enjoying this book. It fills many gaps in my understanding.

1) The graph in chapter 4 needs a title on the y-axis. Not to be pedantic, but graphs always need scales (god help the scaleless graph) and those scales must be labeled. Because the graph must always be interpretable when taken out of context. If your graph is presented in a…

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To clarify. “…an obvious power imbalance…” I would add, “When applicant supply greatly dominates the demand for employees…”

Purist capitalist economists make a mistake similar to purist socialist economists. Socialists assume that in the absence of other forces, humans always choose altruism over self-interest. Capitalists assume, or rather elevate, self-interest to be the greatest virtue. But humans are not one-dimensional.

With that introduction, chapter 1…

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If every country inflated at the same time, that would still make the 99% into all paupers, no? Just checking.

In Ch. 1, Saifedean comments that economics can never be like natural science because it is impossible to construct a controlled experiment. This might appear to be obvious, but astrophysics provides a counter example. Celestial objects are at least light years away, and too distant to allow experiments today. Some very interesting objects…

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