@pre@boing.world2025-11-22 10:39:50
Despite much opinion to the contrary, the government money we use is crappy.
I'm at bitfest in Manchester to find out if Bitcoin could be a better money.
It could hardly be worse.
The mood is still good, people are joking about recent devaluation rather than crying. Those who aren't all in are trying to buy more at the discount.
After an introduction by Mad Bitcoins, Joe Bryan explains the problem with government money.
He imagines an island on which two types of money are tried, with a dividing wall between them.
When economic problems hit, government can just print more money on the fiat side. Everyone now using money which is worth less. Distorting prices, inflating asset prices, making the rich (who hold assets) richer and the poor (who have to pay inflated prices) poorer. Driving wealth inequality.
On the hard money side, government must tax properly. Take in more from the rich rather than inflating to take it from the poor. Reducing wealth inequality.
On the government money side, the wealthy monitize houses, stocks, resources. Saving in money is impossible, its inflated away. So they save in assets and hording resources. Capital is misallocated. The youth can't afford houses. Poverty traps are caused. The only way out is printing more for benefits. Making it all worse. More economic crises, more printing. More government debt.
Eventually, the wall is broken. Government money people can save in the hard money instead. It reduces the value of government money further. More printing. More inflation.
Eventually, war. Funded by printed money.
The dollar is the best of a bad bunch all other government money is falling in value even faster.
I wonder, is bitcoin really this better money though? It's limited, hard, and can't be printed without energy investment.
I'm still unsure that fixing money fixes the world.
--
Note: "crypto" is mostly more like government money than bitcoin. It can be printed indefinitely by it's makers, does not cost it's makers to print. Crypto is usually just a scam people to get more bitcoin. Bitcoin is not crypto.
#bitfest #bitcoin
@metacurity@infosec.exchange2025-10-20 13:26:25
So my other big piece of the day is an inside look at the struggle for the future of the CVE program that just went live at CyberScoop.
Many thanks to Jay Jacobs of Empirical Security, Nick Leiserson of the Institute for Security and Technology, Mitchel Herckis of Wiz, Brian Fox of Sonatype, Peter Allor of the CVE Foundation, Ben Edwards of Bitsight and a few experts who go unnamed for their insight.
@Techmeme@techhub.social2025-12-17 10:30:43
Ankar, which develops LLM-powered AI tools to streamline the process of drafting patent applications for patent attorneys, raised a $20M Series A led by Atomico (Jeremy Kahn/Fortune)
https://fortune.com/2025/12/17/exclusi
@cdarwin@c.im2025-12-17 05:24:24
The privately funded National Trust for Historic Preservation last week asked the U.S. District Court to block Trump’s project.
“No president is legally allowed to tear down portions of the White House without any review whatsoever
— not President Trump, not President Biden, and not anyone else,” the lawsuit states.
“And no president is legally allowed to construct a ballroom on public property without giving the public the opportunity to weigh in.”
Trump had the East W…
@arXiv_csCV_bot@mastoxiv.page2025-10-03 10:44:31
Inferring Dynamic Physical Properties from Video Foundation Models
Guanqi Zhan, Xianzheng Ma, Weidi Xie, Andrew Zisserman
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.02311 https://
@Techmeme@techhub.social2025-09-29 16:35:40
Flying Tulip, founded by DeFi veteran Andre Cronje aiming to build a full-stack onchain exchange, raised a $200M seed at a $1B token valuation (Yogita Khatri/The Block)
https://www.theblock.co/post/372787/andre-cronje-flying-tulip-funding-crypto-t…
@arXiv_csAI_bot@mastoxiv.page2025-10-09 10:14:11
NewtonBench: Benchmarking Generalizable Scientific Law Discovery in LLM Agents
Tianshi Zheng, Kelvin Kiu-Wai Tam, Newt Hue-Nam K. Nguyen, Baixuan Xu, Zhaowei Wang, Jiayang Cheng, Hong Ting Tsang, Weiqi Wang, Jiaxin Bai, Tianqing Fang, Yangqiu Song, Ginny Y. Wong, Simon See
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.07172
@cdarwin@c.im2025-11-02 04:53:11
Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts
-- under fire for a video he posted defending Tucker Carlson for his friendly interview with white supremacist talker Nick Fuentes
-- has reassigned his chief of staff to another position.
In an email to the conservative think tank’s staff on Friday,
Roberts announced that Heritage’s executive vice president, Derrick Morgan, had been tapped to replace Ryan Neuhaus as chief of staff.
In the controversial video posted on X …
@cdarwin@c.im2025-12-07 20:05:09
A graduate student at the University of Oklahoma
is the latest in a growing list of college instructors to face disciplinary action
after being targeted by Turning Point USA,
the right-wing campus pressure group founded by the late Charlie Kirk.
Mel Curth, a trans psychology instructor who recently won the Department of Psychology’s Outstanding Graduate Teaching Award,
gave a zero to junior Samantha Fulnecky’s reaction paper for an assignment on “gender typicali…
@Techmeme@techhub.social2025-10-27 11:10:36
Sources: AI contractor marketplace Mercor is finalizing $350M in funding led by Felicis at a $10B valuation; founded in 2023, Mercor manages 30K contractors (Angel Au-Yeung/Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/te…