I’m not defending this action from Microsoft, but for most people, they buy a Microsoft product and then happily use it for years, none the wiser to any of Microsoft’s other nonsense happening in the background.

A: gets scammed by company

B: You’re so stupid, you should have known that company was going to scam you.

I know many people think Trump is the best thing that’s happened since sliced bread, but I think it will still be hard to find someone who likes Trump more than they like money. Trump is merely supposed to be a conduit to the money.

UFC fighters might play the part of morons, but they aren’t actually idiots. There’s no way they would allow for that in their contracts.

Average functional AI agent workflow goes something like this.

User prompt: Water the plants at 15:00 on days when it hasn’t rained.

Agent procedure:

1. The AI agent checks the weather every minute.
2. If it is not raining, check whether the current time is 15:00.
3. Trigger the garden sprinkler system if the current time is 15:00 and it is not raining.

User seems happy with this and goes to work.

User returns from work at 18:00 to discover that the garden is flooded because the sprinkler has been turned on for three hours. All the plants are dead. At the end of the month, the user receives a bill from the AI company for consuming 1 million tokens and a water bill that is double what it normally is.

Old investing adage: The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.

and sanctions evasion

Thank you for repeating the same thing that I said

I like to compare the Bitcoin price chart to the stats on a roulette wheel. You can’t really predict what causes it to go one way or the other, but you do know that it will eventually go back.

I mean, Bitcoin is the one thing that just won’t die. Every time its price collapses, people declare it dead, but a few years later it somehow comes roaring back. If you think Bitcoin is worthless just because it has no utility and no person smarter than a chimpanzee would invest in it, by God you are overestimating the intelligence of finance and crypto bros.

This doesn’t prevent Americans from going to Cuba. I can book tickets right now online from New York to Havana for $550.

No, you do. You just don’t realise it. If you live in any developed country or even most developing countries, you have all of these. Your comment is really giving off the vibes of someone who doesn’t know what they have because they’ve never lived in a world without it.

When I say “access to cheap credit”, I mean that you can, if you want, go down to your bank and ask for a personal loan. As long as you are not already overburdened by debt and have a decent income, the bank will lend money to you at interest rates that medieval kings could only dream of.

Without the financial and legal infrastructure to facilitate, what are your options? Without the state to enforce debts and contracts through legal channels, people historically have resorted to threats and violence instead. And all that risk means interest rates get jacked through the roof. Triple digit APRs, baby.

When I say you have the ability to “transact business remotely”, I mean that you can pay money, be paid money, and conduct financial business without having to physically attend in person to exchange physical objects (like coins or banknotes). The financial infrastructure in place allows you to transfer money anywhere in the world from your fingertips. You can sell or buy almost anything online, pay, and have it delivered to your doorstep without ever talking to anyone or leaving your house. Without that financial infrastructure, your options are pretty limited. Either unregulated trust-based informal systems, or you have to go and bring physical goods or money to someone.

When I say you “have the ability to plan for your future financially”, I don’t mean you have the ability to plan yourself into a comfortable future. Being poor doesn’t negate this. You have a job (presumably), and every month you can expect some regular amount of money to appear into your bank account. You can plan on that happening. You can also plan on the fact that said money has a predictable value. You also can predict with good certainty what that money can buy. All of that is because the financial system has created an incredible amount of currency stability. Even countries with poor economies by modern standards are incredibly stable by historic ones.

When I say you “have the ability to save”, I don’t mean that you personally are guaranteed to have excess money to save. I mean that the very act of saving is not made impossible. If you have the money, you can put it in the bank, and you can reasonably expect to get that money back later, possibly with interest. In comparison, in a country that’s in a state of economic collapse, you can’t put money in the bank without risking not being able to get it back. You can store cash at home without the risk that the Government will just declare your money invalid or inflate away its value. You might not even be able to buy gold because the Government forbids “hoarding” gold. The act of saving, the accumulation of excess money, is literally impossible for the everyday person in that scenario.

This might not apply to you, but as a person whose family immigrated from a second-world country to a first-world one, I see far too many Westerners complaining about how bad they have it and how they wish everything would collapse. Buddy, if everything collapsed you’d have it even worse. This isn’t even “champagne socialism” or whatever the hell the reactionaries call it, it’s just plain ignorance of how the world works and what one shouldn’t take for granted.

What you think goes away when a financial system collapses: dodgy bankers, predatory financial institutions, money influencing politics, centralisation of wealth, rampant corruption

What actually goes away: access to cheap credit, the ability to transact business remotely, the ability to plan for the future financially, and your ability to save

What remains after the financial system collapses: dodgy bankers, predatory financial institutions, money influencing politics, centralisation of wealth, rampant corruption

I want to do a sanity check here. The six largest payment cards networks (Visa, UnionPay, Mastercard, American Express, JCB, and Discover) processed about 770 billion transactions in 2024 (source). That’s two years ago, and certainly as more of the world transitions to cashless payments that number has probably increased, but let’s just use the 770 billion number for the sake of calculation.

Bitcoin transactions are actually fairly inefficient in terms of transaction size because of their UXTO-based coin system. An account-based system like Ethereum can result in smaller transaction sizes. Let’s take the minimum transaction data that one would need to store for a payments-only network:

• The sending account number, which is usually 128 bits
• The amount, let’s say it’s a unit64_t so 64 bits
• The receiving account number, another 128 bits
• A digital signature generated by the sender. Let’s use Schnorr signatures, which are relatively short. A 512-bit signature will provide 128 bits of security.

We’ll ignore Segwit since witness data still needs to be stored, that’s just Bitcoin’s cheeky way of expanding the block size without explicitly declaring a larger block size.

To allow for indexing, let’s allow some kind of tree structure and say it has overhead of 32 bytes per node (it will probably require more, but let’s just roll with this for now).

Total: 136 bytes per tx

Multiplied by 770 billion gives 104.72 PB. Even if you had a block every 10 seconds like Ethereum does, the block size needed to process that kind of volume would be 33.2 MB.

Storing a blockchain that grows by over a hundred petabytes a year is impossible for all but the most well-funded organisations. That’s two orders of magnitude out of reach for the largest non-crypto open-source projects (the Wikimedia Foundation), four orders of magnitude out of reach for your average open-source project, five orders of magnitude out of reach for ordinary FOSS enthusiasts, and eight orders of magnitude out of reach of everyday users.

Blockchain is a cool technology and I grant that Satoshi Nakamoto was a pretty smart guy and a brilliant computer scientist, but it’s just not suitable for handling the types of volume we deal with in the modern financial system.

I’m sorry, but you’re describing an open-source, decentralised, peer-to-peer, permissionless digital payment network. Which is exactly what cryptocurrency is. But I think you know that if you openly advocate in favour of cryptocurrency here, you instantly get downvotes on Lemmy. So you’re doing it in a fairly roundabout way.

I don’t know where you get the idea that blockchains are no longer proof-of-work. Bitcoin is still the largest cryptocurrency and it’s still using proof-of-work. It’s not really what I’m getting at though, when I say that a decentralised system is 1000x the people each doing 100x the work. Even a proof-of-stake system will still have a lot of work that each node has to do, validation transactions, and that amount of data that has to be passed around serves as a ceiling on transaction capacity. Bitcoin is notoriously low at 1 (“virtual”) MB every 10 minutes. But even larger limits or Ethereum’s sharding strategy would be utterly overwhelmed by the transaction volumes of traditional finance.

J. P. Morgan is absolutely relevant in the modern day.

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Don’t forget, the Soviet Union was totally fine with the Nazis marauding in Eastern Europe until they started invading their territory. Only after that, they decided the Nazis had to go.

FYI, in case anyone hasn’t been keeping up with recent news, this scheme was too much even for the Republicans and Congress finally pushed back on it. Trump’s lawyers said they’re giving up on the idea, but we’ll have to see whether that ends up being true or another con.

Sometimes. But even if it is temporary, it’s still good while it lasts.

Nothing too deep about it. That’s the whole thought.

I feel like if you want to blame a company for creating the modern financial system, John Pierpont Morgan and the company which bears his name are probably 10x more responsible.