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Not paying taxes is the single best thing anyone can do. You can get an average market return and you will still move up, relatively, because most people pay taxes. Often it's the difference between having to work or not.

Old money doesn't pay taxes through international arrangements. It's only for the working and lower middle class. Gifts from foreign people, companies and trusts are completely tax free in America for example. It's not talked about unlike bullshit minimum taxes on new money because same people controlling the media use it.

Income tax is primarily designed to keep elites in power and to prevent social mobility, they don't have to do anything special, not paying taxes over decades is an incredible advantage. If you start poor the only realistic option is to risk evasion until you make enough to start not paying legally, and the limitations period on tax evasion runs out.


No they don't, banks have accounts with the central bank. They also have their assets and liabilities. They have to manage the system so that they can manage external withdrawals. When assets outweigh liabilities it's a bankruptcy. When current demand for withdrawals exceeds short term liquid reserves it's a liquidity issue. At no point do banks create base money. A balance in a bank is just an iou for base (central bank's) money.

The only entity that creates money is the central bank. They may even accept mortgages from banks as collateral (including repurchase agreements) to inject new money into the system.

Regulations are supposed to prevent bankruptcy and liquidity issues, but even without any regulations regarding asset ratios, banks can go bankrupt or illiquid.


I suggest taking a look at what an actual central bank, The Bank of England, have to say on this rather than a lot of stuff on YouTube: https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/quarterly-bulletin/2014/q1/m...


That document completely agrees with ‘nootropicat, except for a difference in terminology— What ‘nootropicat calls “money” the BoE calls “base money.”

(And, for the record, this is also what I’ve been meaning by “currency”)


So if someone pays you using a credit card, or using money they derived from a bank loan, presumably you don't accept that money because it's not a loan from the central bank - it's not "base money"?

Incidentally, the only claim you as a lowly individual ever have on central bank money in most (all?) current currency areas is as physical currency, and even then for the most part you only ever get to exchange it for commercial bank money. For the purposes of this discussion, all digital money between most normal entities is commercial bank money. Commercial bank money _is_ money.


I trust that my bank is well-enough managed to provide me with physical currency up to the amount of my account balance, so I’m happy to accept any form of payment that results in an appropriate increase in that number— Just because I draw a distinction between currency and commercial money doesn’t mean that I don’t believe that the latter is money.

And I rarely exchange physical currency for digital money these days— Usually I’m exchanging it for food instead.


> I trust that my bank is well-enough managed to provide me with physical currency up to the amount of my account balance

It (probably) is, but if all of your bank's account holders asked for that at the same time it would be what's known as a "run on the bank" and you'd very quickly find out that they don't have anywhere near enough physical currency to cover even a fraction of their account holders.


It must be peculiar living in such a backward nation that still relies on physical currency to buy food.

I just wave my phone at a terminal.


That's a silly comment.

It's important that you _can_ get physical currency on demand. It's not nearly as important whether you personally actually make that demand.


> At no point do banks create base money.

This is true, and most of the rest of what you are saying is also true.

> The only entity that creates money is the central bank.

This is not true. Banks really can take arbitrary assets and turn them into money. Just not base money!


What he wrote is a popular myth that originated in a misunderstanding how fractional reserve works, it just means they have long term assets to cover short term liabilities. There's a lot of this stuff on youtube.

If it was true no banks would ever fail, qed.

Ultimately being fundamentally wrong in how the financial system works is extremely unlikely to impact anyone's daily life.



This topic and thread is a great example that HN'rs often have very little understanding of certain subjects that get posted here.

If it is VC or SF Tech related, I usually learn something. Anything around Banking, Finance, Trading, Crypto etc... not so much.


And as usual, 'modern monetary theory' rears its ugly head, too.


There's a type of people that considers good living a sin and they invent 'solutions' like these. The solution to water shortages is to build desalination plants. They are surprisingly cheap - $0.28 per m³.

https://www.meed.com/desalination-tariffs-and-the-race-to-th...


I used to be optimistic, but it's 2023 and the only non-ponzi use case of crypto are stablecoins. What people actually want is to easily trade and transfer US dollars.

Some tokens are pure ponzi schemes (like shib, btc) some are ownership in something that could have productive use (eth, some other smart contract platforms tokens). Yet that use isn't actually happening, so from a general pov it's all a ponzi. The most likely outcome is that nothing productive happens at all.

For an average buyer (esp. btc) mark-to-market returns are already underperforming stocks for years when looking even at previous ATH. So many people own some crypto there's no possible separate source of greater fools elsewhere - most current crypto owners will end up at a massive loss. The long-term underperformance compared to other assets will get even worse.

From the pure hype perspective, I think there's room for one last bubble. There's an army of bagholders (of every token) that will throw good money after bad when prices are sufficiently high again, giving up real wealth (again) in exchange for virtual tokens of either zero or much lower value. They still hold hope of at least going back to 0, or maybe even making money. After the next one, they won't. It will get really depressing.


> non-ponzi ... stablecoins

Erm... https://youtu.be/-whuXHSL1Pg


A ponzi is any system in which the only way for older buyers to cash out is at the expense of later investors. How is 'supply is fixed' relevant?


The only issue with central planning is making people behave according to its rules - it's a problem of motivation. The calculation side itself is evidently better under central planning. Free market is an optimization algorithm and many other exist. It's extremely unlikely simulating prices is the most effective way to allocate, but even if it is, it can be done more efficiently by simulating the process without real world waste.

Everything is slowly centralizing already - some markets remain to provide motivation, but the trend is in the central planning direction.

Given better technology, free markets will definitely die. It could be solved as directly as by overwriting the internal motivation through some brain implant, making people happy to work for the good of the system.


Eip 1559 saved eth holders billions of dollars. It's not possible to perfectly design a system from the start, and in fact ethereum was explicitly started as a work in progress.

Bitcoin would need massive changes to even have a potential to become money. Currently it's the antithesis of money - not backed by anything, in fact the opposite - requires billions per just to function.


The actual cost of running ethereum is negligible, about $5k/day at the upper end. It's just the cost of running thousands of staking nodes.


So the cost of storing all the data and doing all the computations is only $5k/day? Where do you get that from, if I may ask?


I would have agreed with you in the past. Now, I have to disagree.

>the web was hard to navigate and you relied on webpages "befriending" each other and helping you navigate to similar pages. That was real navigation and it had terrible recall.

This is exactly why internet was decentralized. A network of social connections between small online spaces people congregated in was essential to find what you wanted. It was somewhat of a replication of the old world - where in order to find an answer, you first had to get into relevant circles (eg. a local club, university, etc). You didn't just get an answer to your question, you inevitably had to sift through a lot of other content and learn about new places.

Google cut through all of that. Ideally, you could just get the answer you wanted, and not even see the rest of the site. The first order effect was that everyone's life get better. The second order effect is that it killed the old decentralized web, because random discovery nearly died down.

LLM are only the next step on this, but I don't think they change much. I think it's mostly going to damage reddit. A lot of reddit questions are an attempt to find an answer to something that google is too dumb to find - but llms may be able to.

The defense to this - are chatrooms, like discord. Sometimes I see people complaining that so much information is now 'hidden' on discord. But that's the exact point. Making information hard to get means people are forced to interact with each other. This creates incentives to contribute.

That's the future. Chatrooms may be replaced by voice based vr, hard to say. We already passed the peak of public information dissemination, and are going back to old style "ask at the university", just more decentralized and online.


I don't think LLMs will replace Reddit. Reddit is mostly a social network for people with similar interests, or for funny cat pictures. LLMs don't provide that human connection.


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