Yes, because it would make the Mac worse. Nvidia GPUs are comically inefficient.

EDIT: tech illiterate shit-for-brains downvoted this comment.

We are so lucky Nintendo sells shitty video games instead of health insurance. It could always be worse, folks.

OpenAI has entered the chat^

FOREX is explicitly the market that compares the strength of competing currencies.

I’m aware of how the bond market works. What is your problem with the bond market?

Since we are discussing dollars and not houses, that would be the FOREX market. The dollar is very strong at the moment.

The thing is… the market disagrees with you. For now. But hey, put your money where your mouth is! I’ll give you a hundred rubles for a hundred dollars. If you really think the US government is impotent and on the verge of collapse…

That’s not the point. The US has the power to extract rents; it doesn’t have to use it.

Absolutely. Speculation on the stock market used to be illegal until the 80’s, meaning that investments had to be based on a company’s tangible performance. No options (until 1973), no stock buybacks (until 1982), even the rules for short selling were different.

Investments put your money to work by recirculating it through the economy in a productive fashion (theoretically anyway — I share your skepticism about the usefulness of the modern stock market). Investing in a company provides for the operating cost of that business. Putting cash under the mattress is not an investment. It’s just your savings.

The disappearance of crypto would have no downsides is what I meant. People could then invest their savings into something other than a pyramid scheme. Such investments would be good for the economy.

Exactly. Now they’ve metastasized into our government. Fucking orcs.

You’re absolutely right, and I have no idea. Maybe wait another 100,000 years for the 30% of humanity that lacks abstract moral reasoning to exit the gene pool.

Nah, it didn’t, but I had written it elsewhere. I didn’t think going on and on about how bitcoin represents nothing was helpful.

Again, this is incorrect. The reason dollars are not “backed by gold” (an arbitrary metric since gold is kind of useless — guns or bread or even puppies would make more sense) is that the US dollar is a currency, an IOU, not some sort of finite resource.

Dollars represent public trust in the power of the US government to extract taxes from its citizens. That’s tangible.

Bitcoin represents nothing; or if I’m being generous, I could say that bitcoin’s value represents people’s faith that the game of musical chairs won’t end tomorrow.

No one forces you to accept an IOU, but that’s how “money” is created.

If you want a beer and have nothing suitable to offer in exchange, you might give me an IOU, which I then hand off to someone else in exchange for goods and services, until one day someone asks you for goods and services in exchange for the same IOU that you had used to buy a beer months ago.

These things actually happened^

That’s not how money works. Fiat currency is just IOU’s, literally, which are discharged when the promissory note returns to its originator (in the case of dollars, the US treasury). Check out Debt the First 5000 Years for an anthropological look at the origins of money.

Whereas I would prefer to live in a moneyless (i.e., debtless) post-scarcity anarchist society, which is how small tribes and communities were organized for tens of thousands of years before the rise of nations, fiat currencies are used to maintain the modern (unimaginably huge) marketplace, whose ostensible purpose is to allocate scarce resources.

1. Personal debt is risky. If I issue an IOU, I might die before I can fulfill that promise. Governments are more permanent, which removes the speculative aspect of currency (at least for most purposes, though Forex trading is a thing).
2. A central bank can balance inflation and employment numbers to ameliorate the natural volatility of the market (with good regulation lol).
3. Fiat currency can be synchronized with economic productivity, avoiding the deflationary pressure that is anathema to any currency.

Dollars represent faith in the power of the US government to extract taxes from its population. Crypto represents nothing. It stands for nothing. “Coins” come and go, and if you’re the last one standing in the zero-sum game of musical chairs, you lose your savings. For that to happen with dollars, the US government would have to implode, which is unlikely.

Crypto is, quite possibly, the purest form of speculative trading (gambling) we have ever concocted. The only reason I don’t think it should be illegal is that I have no interest in saving people from their own cupidity and greed.