That's also the essence of the stock market because you are getting paid in money, not in products/services produced by the company that you hold stock of
Gold has a use case in the real world. We can't manufacture it, so every time it is used to plate a printed circuit board, or XYZ other real application someone needs to purchase it from someone else. Some amount gets recycled, but certainly some not.
Crypto has zero fundamental use case in the real world.
Yes I know but... is that use case what really drives the price in the real world? I'm really asking. My intuition would say "no, the main driver is people trading it as a financial product", just like Bitcoin.
In the 1960s and 70s European countries became nervous about the US economy and sent dollars to NYC in exchange for gold.
The US even dispatched some high ranking officials to Europe to stem the tide. It predictably had the opposite effect.
So America had the option: stop printing money because gold reserves are finite or end the gold standard.
Yes, gold is very similar, but it has the benefit of being centuries old and not dependent on complex infrastructure.
Specifically, there is value in a global peer to peer and agreed upon standard of exchange of a guaranteed scarce resource that can't be double spent, such as gold and some cryptos.
Imagine a war, a natural catastrophe, societal collapse or upheaval.
You have to pack up, go elsewhere, or you're suddenly occupied.
Basically you have to ask yourself, what's more likely to be worth something in the future or elsewhere that I can park my money into until I need it?
Since Gold has such a history of being accepted by various cultures and people around the world, and it is very resilient, it doesn't require power, infra, computers, nodes, won't get easily destroyed to environmental incidents, can be stashed away for centuries without degrading, etc. It is arguably more likely to still be used as an exchange of value in the future.
Crypto, well, you have to be specific, let's say Bitcoin BTC, how likely is it that your wallet on your hard drive if you migrate from a war and find yourself in a new world order at the other end of the world, you can still use them to trade for goods/services and they're worth close too or more of what they were before?
It's hard to predict, but arguably it seems less resilient than Gold and therefore less likely for it to hold its value over time. That said, it may still appear better than USD, Euros, or shares in some company, etc.
That's why people say BTC is a "store of value", like gold. You use it to stow away value for when you need it later (even generations later), because it appears to be good at holding value even through geopolitical shifts, passage of time, and so on.
But, if people aren't actually using it for storing value, but instead for speculative bets, it means they are taking money out of it and not leaving it in, it becomes volatile, and volatility is a bad "store of value", because when you might need the value if it's at a "low" it's gone, and it failed at the use case.
If you go outside BTC, it becomes even less likely the other cryptos are good stores of value, and more and more they become speculative bets and a game of chicken.
And even BTC has high volatility and is used for speculative bets a lot. And gold isn't immune to his either.
There's no good answer here, nobody knows the future for sure, but that's the idea.
When people defend crypto as a store of value, now you know what they mean. They're basically hoping it'll hold value through borders, time, and so on.
no it really isnt. the value of crypto as it relates to FIAT is in trading volume over time, and it does not mean anyone needs to be a fool left holding the bag unless the trading volume decreases and doesnt return.
I want to buy something and use BTC as a medium for exchange. I take $10,000, buy BTC, send BTC to the seller, the seller takes the BTC and exchanges it for $10,000
However, we are not the only buyers and sellers and it takes time for the transfer to go through. So you have a variable amount of $ being held against the fixed amount of BTC, albeit with a variable amount available for purchase.
so i buy some BTC to make my trade, the amount of BTC decreases, the cost to buy more goes up. another person buys for the same reason. they spend more $ per BTC, but it doesnt matter - the value of what they are buying is the same so they buy less BTC. this happens for many people all concurrently.
the seller receives my BTC and then one of two things happens.. if trading volume has increased since i sent it to them then the BTC is more valuable and they make extra money. or if the trading volume has decreased since i sent it to them then the make a little bit less money.
there is a minor gaming of the system that happens with people trying to buy while trading volume is on the rise and then sell back while trading volume starts to decrease. this is why it looks like an MLM / scam - because this obviously doesnt scale, it isnt objectively valuable to increase competition for the resource while its needed to then try to release all that was purchased back into the trading pool while no one needs it. It is just a situation that is gameable in small doses if only a few actors do it.
People buying BTC for no reason other than to sell it back creates a gap in value on the other side for the sellers who need to sell the BTC they received in exchange for goods they valued at a specific $ value. The burden will be distributed across all the late sellers as trading volume decreases.
However, they dont need to sell the BTC if they would take a loss. They could just hold it until trading volume goes back up again, assuming trading volume is just fluctuating with standard customer behavior and not a change in belief of the stability of the currency.
Ultimately, the burden only really needs to be felt by those people who are buying the coin near its peaks who are trying to flip it and then missing their sell window. Actual vendors have wiggle room, as they only lose their COGS - even though they have their Revenue tied up in BTC, so they are still making profit if they sell, just a little bit less. the traders trying to game the system short term, however, are the ones who have more at risk as they have bought the BTC with after-tax liquid funds and need to sell it at enough of a higher price so that they make more profit after transaction fees as compared to alternative investments. As the price of BTC drops, they are the ones who are forced to sell at a minor loss and move the funds to other investments they believe are gaining value to avoid keeping the value tied up beyond their investment window waiting for the price to come back up.
The value proposition for holding BTC long term is basically a claim that the use of digital currency as an exchange of value will be so much more common in the future and BTC will be used for it, such that even times of "low trading volume" then will make current all time highs (in active trading volume) look tiny, even when accounting for the increase in tradable BTC that will come with all the BTC not currently in circulation do to people holding and waiting for that time to come.
So the traders rug pulling each other is kind of just a subplot going on with crypto and completely avoidable while still investing in crypto.
The part that was spun off was "Infrastructure Services" (from the Wiki article.) Outsourcing and operations, not the business consulting organization that provides high level strategy to coding services.
Reminds me of the Twilight Zone episode where the aliens visit Earth and someone on Earth snags a book from them with the title "To Serve Man." The rest of the book is written in the alien language. Everyone is excited because they think it means "we are here to serve you to make your lives better." At the end of the episode someone figures out the book is a recipe book about how to cook humans.
If you look around the table and don't know who the mark is it's probably you.
"we built a tool using other people's copyrighted content and now they're suing us and want to know how much use the customers of our "other people's content" tool made of the copyrighted content we used to train the model. Thank you for your attention and outrage over this matter."
Silicon Graphics was still viable in 2006, mostly used for engineering (and maybe video production) graphics. Sun and IBM also competed in this space. SGI went bust in 2009 due to competitive pressures from Windows/x86 workstations. 2006 was probably the last hurrah for this type of workstation.
The issue is the gun goes off by itself without the trigger being pulled. Remember that all this type of gun has the firing pin under spring tension all the time. The only thing keeping it from firing is a latch mechanism that is supposed to only activate when the trigger is pulled but if the mechanism is defective and too close to the edge the latch can disengage without the trigger being pulled or touched. There are numerous YT videos of this occurring.
There is no evidence of this, no reproduction of it firing without the trigger being pulled, and not even a good theory on it. The YouTube videos are involve pulling the trigger far enough to disengage the internal safeties.
I 100% agree it is concerning, but in this video you can't see whether the trigger is pulled or not. Holstering the gun creates a risk of the trigger being pulled. The gun goes off while it is being pushed in, which suggests the trigger is catching on something.
If the gun was able to fire by itself, without the trigger being actuated, then someone should make it happen on video. Shake the crap out of it, bang on it. Take it in and out of a clear plastic holster 1000 times until the supposed defect happens.
It goes off as the holster he bends over and bumps into the officer next to him. The holster is clearly being moved and touched.
Regardless, if there is a defect in that particular gun, they should just demonstrate it. If it isn't the holster, or something in the holster pulling the trigger, make it happen outside the holster.
It's important to add some context to the "hand count" idea in the US. It was part of a larger scheme to overturn the results of the 2020 election which involved creating doubt about the validity of results in key states. The larger scheme involved various extra-legal attempts to have state legislatures invalidate the election, have the Supreme Count step in, or have the counting of Electoral Votes disrupted and the final decision on the presidential election made in the House of Representatives. Calling into doubt the machine counts and asking for hand counting of ballots is part of that scheme.
Not one official who was elected in 2020 at the state legislature level called for invalidating their own election and recounting their race.
And one county in Arizona that was considering hand counting, a county that voted overwhelmingly across the board for the party attempting to overturn the election, looked at the practicality of a hand count and decided it was too expensive and problem prone.
https://www.naco.org/news/numbers-stack-against-hand-count-m...
You let machines count your money don't you? Who insists on a hand count of the currency to verify your monthly checking or brokerage account? They don't even count cash by hand, it's all done via machines.
What many people outside the US may not realize is that ballots here may include 40-60+ races. The presidential race appears on the same ballot the races for Senate, House of Representatives (both national races,) state wide positions like governor, attorney general, superintendent of public instruction, state treasurer and secretary of state, and state mine inspector. In some states superior court judges are on the ballot for "retention" as well as State Supreme Court positions. Then come the state legislature races. Most states have two houses so a state-level Senate and House. Then come county positions, Sheriff, Board of Supervisors, Recorder, Treasurer, County Attorney, Justice of the Peace and constable. Then the school board races so you may have a high school district board and an elementary school district board. Then come the referendums and initiatives that either the state legislature put on the ballot or citizens gathered enough signatures for; these typically change state law but sometimes implement or remove new taxes. In 2024 in Maricopa County, AZ we had a two page ballot because the legislature added 20+ initiatives to try and implement laws the governor had vetoed.
In any case, the idea that these ballots can be accurately hand counted is absurd. In some of the hand count examples in the states mentioned in the article only one or two races on ballots with 10's of races were recounted and even those recounts were problematic.
What's really telling is that none of the people elected in 2020 or 2022 or 2024 at the state legislature level are calling for recounts of THEIR races. Machines are fine when the right party wins.
Machines are the only way to deal with a ballot with 60 races. There are other parameters that could be put in place to help improve people's faith in the system. San Francisco makes ballot images available via a web portal. It's entirely possible that an AI model could be trained to rapidly recount any and all of the races to validate the official results. Tighter ID requirements would be OK, it's 2025 and even people in the hills and reservations should have IDs.
Air Cadets appears to be a part of the Canadian Armed Forces and intended to provide an on-ramp for young people interested in different aspects of the Armed Forces (Army, flying, Naval.)
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