carleverett

"The "It's not X -- it's Y" pattern, often with an em dash. The single most commonly identified AI writing tell. Man I f*cking hate it. AI uses this to create false profundity by framing everything as a surprising reframe. One in a piece can be effective; ten in a blog post is a genuine insult to the reader. Before LLMs, people simply did not write like this at scale."

This one hit home... the first time I ever saw Claude do it I really liked it. It's amazing how quickly it became the #1 most aggravating thing it does just through sheer overuse. And of course now it's rampant in writing everywhere.

Let’s see:

- 12 months runway - $100k/mo. burn rate - 4% APR

Gives you about $25k interest.

Seems worth it to me.

No one is speculating on stablecoins.

Keep in mind stablecoins aren't a product built for Americans, they're built for people outside the US financial system to give them access to some of the benefits of the US's relatively solid money.

If it's a fraud, then it's one with a working product.

In 2022 when confidence in stablecoins plummeted after the Terra collapse, $20 billion in Tether was liquidated in a month - $10 billion of that in a single day: https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/tether

Through that black swan event Tether did its job, processing redemptions for collateral dollar for dollar.

This is a great pitch for digital privacy as a global standard as well.

But stablecoins are backed by real dollars.

People hold dollar-backed stablecoins because they believe the US dollar to be the most durable unit of account on the planet.

All the proof you really need for that is that most crypto users outside the US still consider the value of their crypto tokens in terms of how many US dollars it’s worth.

The author of this article talks about this being a “parasite” to the US monetary system, but it’s hard to think of a better thing that could’ve happened for the US. Not only has it reinforced that dominance… it’s also driven hundreds of billions of dollars of US treasury bills purchases from providers like Tether and USDC.

https://tether.to/en/transparency/?tab=reports

I can’t really think of a better, more concise pitch for cryptocurrencies than “ideally you could just have a foreign bank account that your country cannot touch.”

As someone from the US who's traveled all over the country for fun, I can assure you there are loads of delightfully unique places and rich communities that think and act quite differently from each other.

But yes I could see how work travel only could make them feel like carbon copies - both from the mindset you'd be in and from the types of places you might only go for work.

But 1 day is still 24 hours.

If you want to celebrate your birthday at the moment earth reaches the same spot around the sun as when you were born, then we’d all have the same issue - we’d have to celebrate it 6 hours later every year, reseting every 4 years.

February 29 is very much a new day… which simply doesn’t exist on non-leap years.

there's a (small) chance that the moon landing was the first time a living organism successfully chose to visit another celestial body in the entire history of the universe.

"basically a photo op" is such a strange way to think of that.

I’m not saying fiat currency doesn’t store value… just that, of the functions of money, it’s better as a medium of exchange + unit of account where you care way more about price stability and liquidity.

A good store of value is scarce, durable, transferable and divisible - and I think most people agree that you compromise scarcity to get price stability.

We don’t have to take anyone’s word on this though you can just look at what endowments and wealth funds hold to see what people believe are the best stores of value: https://www.nbim.no/en/the-fund/investments/#/

I think you're confusing store of value with medium of exchange... most people don't really store value in currencies long term - usually they just keep enough to pay near term bills.

Stores of value are things like stocks, bonds, treasuries, real estate... and yeah commodities like gold and bitcoin. People don't care so much about volatility if they're planning to park their value there for a long time.

> I do think that cryptocurrency is nonsense and should be banned

A good definition for "real" cryptocurrency is whether or not it's possible for it to be banned.

Ahhyeah I see now it only has a few upvotes - there must've been an algorithm glitch because it was the #5 story on the front page when I clicked on it.

The topic is relevant, but the format of long Q&As with a lot of info on the people and the company, which to me as a random HN reader feels irrelevant, plus the click-baity title, made it look out of place on the front page.

Hope this is constructive.

Looks like some upvote farming going on here... this isn't the type of story Hacker News usually finds interesting.

This comes up near the top when you search "Google Maps My Saved Places" and now a random list with 1 saved place - the USDA Cereal Disease Lab in Minneapolis, MN - has a whole bunch of views.

Tether is using Deltec Bank and Trust in the Bahamas. Deltec's CEO actually did an interview where he responded to the Tether fraud claims: https://unchainedpodcast.com/is-tether-a-fraud-its-bank-says...

When Tether started, most financial institutions weren't open to working with cryptocurrency companies, but the fact that it's still the top stablecoin by value is troubling since there are plenty of better options now.

Yes I 100% agree Lightning Network solves a lot of the medium of exchange issues and in a really cool way too.

I don't see the volatility stopping though. And being volatile upwards might be good for the spender who's been saving that money long term, but probably not for the seller who needs to count on that revenue to cover its monthly expenses.

A good medium of exchange should have: - Little to no transaction fee - Near instantaneous transaction time - stable value

The characteristics of Bitcoin that make it such a good store of value make it really bad at these. Computation-heavy proof of work creates a secure and immutable network, but also makes it more expensive and slows down transaction times. It's scarcity makes it a speculative asset prone to booms and busts, but gives it the best chance of long term value growth.

But I guess what you're saying is that as a buyer, why would I not want my money to live as a strong store of value up until the point of transaction, which I think I agree with. It'd be nice if you could own Amazon stock and then pay at McDonalds with USD taken out of the value of those stocks (though tracking capital gains would be annoying). In that situation though, Amazon stock is the good store of value and United States Dollar is the good medium of exchange.

"Store of Value" and "medium of exchange" are 2 separate functions of currency that shouldn't be served by the same asset.

I don't think you could ever find the "true price" of a pure store of value asset like Bitcoin. Gold has been around for thousands of years and is still volatile enough that no one would want to use it for daily transactions.

The characteristics of a great store of value are different than that of a great currency - it seems naive to me to think that Bitcoin would ever act like a fiat currency that way.

Neat! Would you mind sharing the company you work for?

This chart shows the amount of BTC that's locked into the Lightning Network over time, one measure of adoption: https://embed.theblockcrypto.com/data/on-chain-metrics/bitco...

It hasn't grown much in the last year and a half. Personally I don't see Lightning Network winning the battle for high-bandwidth, low-cost transactions against all the other protocols.

Fun anecdote:

A couple years ago I was at a bar in Marfa, Texas - a small art-centric town that gets a lot of tourism for things like it's fake Prada store (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prada_Marfa) - and overheard a few guys celebrating a birthday. They were all clearly gay, which isn't unusual in Marfa. I started talking with them and it turned out that one of them, who was black, had just bought a ranch a half hour north of Marfa outside the town of Fort Davis. Fort Davis also has a bit of a touristy feel with its exaggerated "old western town" look and because it's right outside Fort Davis State Park, but culturally it's no Marfa.

The fact that an openly gay black man felt comfortable buying farmland in a small Texas town was pretty awesome. I have a hard time believing that would've happened even 10 years ago. In fact, he might be the first.

I hope he still likes it there.

I highly recommend "A Blank Slate of State" by Chris Burniske: https://unchainedpodcast.com/chris-burniske-a-blank-slate-of...

He makes the same argument that I think you're making, that these new types of "more accessible" financial markets in crypto can corrupt people if they only use it to seek out money for money's sake.

TLDR: it's a tool, that can be used for good or for bad, but like any tool it's better to have it than not.

God was supposed to have created men not the other way around.

Decentralization isn't really the point - it's going from non-tradable Reddit karma to tradable ERC-20 tokens.

Reddit definitely could have built a marketplace that let people trade karma from different subreddits, with a way to deposit and withdraw USD. Like you mentioned though there's the legal challenge of getting licensed as a money transmission service if you do that. But also, why do all that work when all that infrastructure already exists on Ethereum? Plus you get the added benefit that Reddit's tokens can be traded every other asset on Ethereum too.