I have news for you all of these exotic and toxic investment vehicles that these investment banks cook up, largely because a previous loophole was close are essentially high flying risky startups inside the context of the bank.

Deposits and retirements savings did not survive in the last financial meltdown and this had nothing to do with fintech, these were white-glove investment houses. So yeah people do want protection, protection against this established racket. The established racket is the largest offender.

Yes it did. Nobody lost money in their savings or current accounts in commercial banks (Except Iceland)

What happened in the stock market was different but the core of the FSA/FCA is about protecting customer's money which they did. (See how they were able to ensure none of Northern Rock's customers lost money in the UK).

You mean the Glass-Steagal regulation that was repealed prior to the crisis?

Glass-Stegal would however further my point, its the regulatory capture in the financial industry that allowed that to happen, and by that I mean appointing an investment banking executive from Wall Street to head the Federal Reserve.

In my opinion, bitcoin will be overtaken by another coin, most likely ethereum. This is because while bitcoin has many issues, the underlying tech (blockchain) is sound.

The reason ethereum will succeed is because it is not just a currency. It's not even mostly a currency. It is a decentralized network that gives users the ability to engage in trustless programmatic contracts.

Decentralized, meaning that no one person has the ability to tamper with important documents or files.

Programmatic in that contracts are actual programs that get run at a predetermined time.

And trustless in that some third party mediator isn't required to enforce terms. This point is the most important because it means that organizational structures that simply would not be feasible otherwise are possible.

Organizations as we know them today are necessarily built like pyramids (governments, large corporations) or they are kept very small for mobility (startups). With trustless organizations, this won't (always) be true anymore.

And with the momentum of these features, I could see Ether (Ethereum's currency) dethroning Bitcoin. It's already got a fifth of the market cap that BTC has.

Can you wrap your head around getting rid of the system completely? 'Money' is an artificial numerical system of tokenised management that fundamentally limits our progression as a race. We can't repair roads, fund disease treatment, build structures to house our sick or educate our children, distribute food to the needy because the 'numbers' don't let us. The concept of finance is thrust upon us from birth and we're all but incapable of seeing what a stupid system it really is.

Example. I work x hours and get paid y tokens. y tokens thus equals x hours of my work. I now go and buy a cutlery set. That was produced by n people over m hours, and is sold with p profit. My y tokens is equal to n * m + p, which is equal to x * y.

Money exists to make the n * m + p = x * y things workable. It's an abstracted barter system, where rather than having to work in Sony's programming department to earn a new TV, I can write code for other people, get paid something, and then pay it to Sony, who can equate it to the cost of a TV.

The doing all the things you talked about in the second paragraph is a management and distribution of labour issue, which is down to society and governance. There's many nations that manage those things fine, and have financial systems. The issue is with a society that isn't able to provide those things, because the values held and the outcomes desired are fundamentally opposed.

If you want to fix something, get involved in local politics and make a difference.

The monetary system, is an attempt to use money, and market price setting to solve the problem you describe - and that problem is essentially NP complete, so what markets and market price setting, in conjunction with an enormous number of local decisions made in response to those price signals are doing is trying to find a reasonably efficient approximate solution.

It's an untested assumption that the monetary system can actually do that without any regulation. There are good reasons to think that it can't, especially over long periods.

Completely agree about the involvement in local politics - it's easy to be an armchair economist, and ignore the reality that at the end of the day the single most important government function is that the garbage is collected regularly.

That's a massively oversimplified perspective on the completely broken political systems most of us in western psuedo-democratic nations live in, whereby resolving a lot of the systemic issues requires a lot more than a single individual getting involved in local politics.

Better to be involved and work towards the change you want to see, than to throw your hands up and despair over the "broken political system of our western psuedo-democratic nations".

That's the point of democracies - they only work when people effectively engage. Most people don't, but that's not a failure of democracy, it's a failure of society. History is rife with examples of single individuals and small groups who made massive change over time. The American civil rights movement, the Indian independence movement, the anti-Apartheid movement in South Afica...

You can work to make change and then bemoan anything you want, but if you choose not to engage, your words lack authenticity and merit.

Not quite:

"Money's a matter of functions four,

A Medium, a Measure, a Standard, a Store"

How does that translate to the billions that hedge fund managers "earn".

Overthrowing the system isn't on my bucket list, but it makes for an interesting debate - eg: https://medium.com/@RickWebb/the-economics-of-star-trek-29ba...

Additionally, if you do have over-abundant capacity to pre-manufacture well above that required "spike", then you need to a) use logistics to get it there and b) foresight of knowing where you need to get it to, and how much of it.

Otherwise, you'd have to have the ability to produce any arbitrary amount of it at the desired location when the need requires. By it, I generally mean all products.