You also don't see car manufacturers change their designs so that they will accommodate drivers who've decided to remove their steering wheel, nor do car manufacturers design their cars for some possible future world without gasoline.
I like how it starts you up instantly and how simple mining, helping the network and transactions seem to be. Really well done. I found a quick block too and sending/receiving transactions and getting the confirmations seems nice and fast. As a user it makes me pretty happy.
However, turning your coins 'permanent' somehow doesn't seem nearly as intuitive. I have no real idea how these coins are now tied to me. I found my block on chrome, and launching the site in incognito mode / firefox doesn't show the funds in my wallet. This would make me worry about deleting my browser history/cookies/etc and I'd have no idea how to access these coins on another computer. How do I go about making these coins tied to me beyond some form of browser storage, and why isn't that process explained somewhere? Right now it feels like a mild breeze might erase my wallet and the coins in it. Is this something that'll be dealt with in the future?
Besides externalized costs, which is gigantic issue that is not easy to solve. These problems are also clear market failures:
Large scale goals with large public benefits but which come at high costs will not be achieved without high level cooperation. For every individual market participant, the public education system, the public highway system, the public energy system, etc. have costs far exceeding their means. Yet every market participant benefits enough that they are happy they exist. The level of cooperation needed requires organization at the scale of at least local government.
Dealing with external factors, such as other nations -especially if they're hostile- or natural threats. Individual market participants can not muster armies (unless they are at the scale of governments), cant bargain with foreign governments on equal terms and will not provide (preventive) care for disasters/diseasese/etc. Would microsoft or walmart vaccinate everyone?
I had a longer response written out, but my phone browser crashed and I have to go soon. This will be brief.
> externalized costs
Coase theorem and strong trespass law.
> Large scale goals with large public benefits but which come at high costs
Assurance contracts.
> public education system,
Private schools perform better across the board. If public schools didn't exist, I would expect to see more parochial and charity schools.
> public highway system
Replacing the IH system with privately operated toll roads is well within the reach of US investment banks, and it would be a safe bet. Plus they would be incentivized to actually do repairs quickly, unlike on public roads. Wins all around!
> public energy system,
Sure, this is a hard good to privatize due to line easement requirements. There are ways around this, but I think practically libertarians would agree with the government managing things like water pipes or electrical lines. This will become less of an issue in the near future as being off-grid on solar becomes practical for more people. (Or if we end up with small-scale community nuclear, like some are working towards.)
> Yet every market participant benefits enough that they are happy they exist.
If you think they'll still be happy after being made aware of how much they're paying (instead of it being obfuscated via taxes and respending) then there's no problem.
> armies
PMCs and military insurance. This would almost certainly be more efficient than the current bloated military we have in the US.
> disasters/disease
Insurance again.
> Would microsoft or walmart vaccinate everyone?
Does the government vaccinate everyone now? (No, they do not.)
Yeah, the slow and steady rise of stock prices across the board is in large part just an effect of increased money supply. Sure, lifting along with that passively is cheap and reliable way to make money. But since these types of passive investments care little about how efficiently the beneficiaries make use of these investments, there's the danger that inefficient companies end up with too much capital.
If that happens, you end up with resources such as labor being wasted. The efficient usage of the available resources is of course a much better indicator for the quality of the economy than the rise of stock prices.
> there's the danger that inefficient companies end up with too much capital
I can't see why this is any kind of danger. Companies end up subjectively with "too much capital" all of the time in this market without being part of a large index. Look at tesla.
