Yeah I was just being cheeky. I have an account at a US credit union, they probably use my money in investments that touch BlackRock. I work for a US company and the health insurance I receive through them probably comingles with BlackRock assets at some point. I rent in a nice neighborhood, BlackRock’s involvement in rental price fixing has likely affected me monetarily in an indirect fashion.
If you’re an American and have any sort of pension or retirement fund, Blackstone likely has a piece of it.
Oh thank god, I’m safe.
Ozzy wrote songs about how powerful people send poor people to die in nonsensical wars.
Lonely Mountains: Downhill is a low poly third person camera downhill mountain biking game in the spirit of Ski Free where you progress and unlock stuff by improving on your past runs in specific ways. Great vibes and a lot of fun to come back to repeatedly. Really captures that “sketchy” feeling of descending on single track.
You speak of Gresham’s Law, which is “bad money beats good money”. For payments, people would rather part with an inflationary asset than deflarionary because of future value. Definitely the thing that has settled the argument over Bitcoin’s primary use case.
Agreed re: the faux anticapitalism. I mean, ideologically I think of myself as anticapitalist. But I have to afford things to not be destitute within this economic regime, so I “play the game”. But I wouldn’t delude myself into thinking that advocating for one sort of money over another is in any way a stance against capitalism. In most cases it isn’t even a stance against status quo.
That’s actually one of the matured parts of the crypto ecosystem that has existed for years already, as it was one of the most immediate needs. Last I checked Stripe and Bitpay were the most popular options for vendors.
Very useful addendums. I agree with pretty much all of this, I just didn’t say most of it for the sake of brevity. Overall though yes, when taking apart individual arguments quickly like I did one does lose the whole picture in order to be exacting about specific points.
As for crypto being more harmful than beneficial overall? I agree with that too. It’s just that I feel that way about all money under capitalism. For me that kind of goes without saying. Money under capitalism is overall more harmful than beneficial. However, is crypto less beneficial to the average individual than fiat? …In most cases still, also yes lol. But there are plenty of edge cases.
Yeah good point, they’re not discounting the credit increase for the crypto buyers. That might even be against their credit processor contract.
I think the best thing we can do is create long-term alternatives. But I do think that the most reasonable, effective, productive thing we can do is to just collectively harass the credit card companies harder than some outspoken religious nuts do to prevent them from caving to censorship demands.
Sadly, this is probably true. Unless they’re trying to steer customers away from more troublesome payment providers.
Oh you’re definitely paying the credit card fee too, but since it’s the vendor who gets billed it’s just priced into the product. That’s why the product costs 10 Stanly nickle instead of 9 Stanly nickle.
I mean either you care enough about payment processor censorship to go around them or you don’t. If the extra dollar isn’t worth it to you then that is what it is.
Meanwhile the US military’s energy budget eclipses global crypto mining essentially to maintain petrodollar dominance and American residents pay for it.
“Insane fluctuations in currency value”: Someone who makes most of their payments in crypto is likely doing it with a stablecoin, which is a cryptocurrency pegged 1-to-1 to a fiat currency, like the US dollar. So, no more wild fluctuations than the 10% decrease in value the USD has experienced over the past year. Speaking of which, the 100% increase in BTC value this past year certainly is wild, but I don’t think any of it’s holders would consider that a problem.
“Immense inefficiency of the whole system”: If you consider the US military to be the value security for the world’s dominant fiat currency [which you would be foolish not to] Proof of Work security is a large improvement on energy use. Proof of Stake security, which most stablecoins use these days, doesn’t really use any energy worth noting.
“All the fraud”: Credit cards suffer far more fraud than crypto. Perhaps that’s a product of their wider adoption, but that’s where 99% of the fraud is happening.
“The lack of regulation”: One of the hottest topics in US congress over the past several years, for both Biden and Trump regimes, has been crypto regulation. It’s a moving space right now but it seems myopic to call lack of regulation when it’s certainly going to be a moot point by 2028.
Sorry I don’t really consider myself to be some crypto warrior but I do really dislike these decade+ old off the cuff relatively low-information talking points. This is not how you argue against crypto, if you want a strong argument against crypto come at it from an explicitly anti-capitalist lens and accuse it of accelerating global financialization, which it is, like a gas can poured on a campfire. Go big or go home. If you don’t oppose capitalism and you’re just looking for a better money, crypto is not your boogeyman.
Yeah it’s a personal level of comfort sort of thing. Some people value one side of the equation while some people value the other side. Strong case for vendors accepting both cards and crypto instead of just one.
I’ve had my debit card information stolen before. My bank knew before I did, cancelled the fraudulent charges, and refunded my money without any action on my part. Doesn’t seem like a credit card would have been any advantage in my [admittedly anecdotal] case.
IMO Kotek has been mostly a lame duck, but these proposals aren’t bad. I would invert the 50-30-20 revenue split between state, county, and city because it’s almost always cities or counties that are creating and maintaining bike and transit infrastructure, while today the state’s largest initiatives are still highway expansions. Highways are so very money-hungry.