One of the main selling points of cryptocurrencies is decentralization, of not needing to trust a central party in order to use the currency. But the cryptocurrency doesn't actually eliminate that trust, it simply moves it. It moves it into trusting the protocol design, trusting the implementation of the clients, trusting your local hardware and OS to not be compromised, and in the case of smart contracts, trusting the smart contract to not be buggy. What's worse is in the centralized case, as long as the government continues to function you have lots of options for what to do if a transaction goes badly. In the cryptocurrency case, for the most part you're SOL, because cryptocurrencies by design don't allow anyone to e.g. void a transaction.
> It moves it into trusting the protocol design, trusting the implementation of the clients, trusting your local hardware and OS to not be compromised
These are not central parties and they present risks with anything one does with a computer on a network.
> what to do if a transaction goes badly. In the cryptocurrency case, for the most part you're SOL, because cryptocurrencies by design don't allow anyone to e.g. void a transaction.
Transaction finality is a feature not a bug. Whatever conveniences that are enjoyed int traditional banking can be implemented in a layer on top of the base protocol.
> These are not central parties and they present risks with anything one does with a computer on a network.
If someone compromises my OS and steals my credit card details, the bank sends me a new card and handles the fraudulent charges on my behalf. I'm not out any money
If someone compromises my OS and steals my bitcoin private key, they can drain my entire wallet and I've lost everything, and have zero recourse.
If I'm a merchant and someone uses a stolen or cloned credit card, or simply performs a charge-back, they get my goods for free and I have basically zero recourse.
If I'm a merchant and someone pays me with bitcoin, I'm not out any money regardless, nor do I have to expend time/money/legal resources to ensure I keep that payment.
This potentially resonates with me. Blue light is a problem for me and most others I work with, but we can't use f.lux due to the color alterations (graphic designer). Are your lenses completely clear?
Yep! Occies are designed to be completely clear. We want it to be the reasonable alternative that people would actually want to use. We distinguish ourselves from computer glasses that have the yellow tint.
"He proposes a global tax on wealth to help address the problem of inequality today"[0]
"Mr. Piketty is a well-known public intellectual in France. He writes a column in the left-wing daily Libération and served as a top economic adviser to the Socialist presidential candidate Ségolène Royal in the 2007 election"[1]
I exhort you to read up on Piketty and reconsider your position.
The words "tax" and "inequality" each appear once, in completely different paragraphs, in the NYT article cited by the Wikipedia entry on Piketty for the sentence you're quoting, and "global" zero times.
Your second quote is an ad hominem, specifically "guilt by association" — and comes from the WSJ, not exactly known for its own unbiased stance on capitalism.
I quoted Wikipedia as it appears you have not read the book: you must of course read all the citations for the paragraph.
Had you been interested in actually considering the validity
of the sentence I quoted, as opposed to nitpicking, you would have found that the 2nd citation refers you to http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/en/capital21c2 where you can find a table of contents[0]. Chapter 15 - "A Global Tax on Capital" stands out.
Your ad hominem claim is ironic.
You posit that it is "unambiguous that the FT editor [holds an agenda]".
You further posit that the WSJ is biased.
Yet when Piketty "writes a column in the left-wing daily Libération and served as a top economic adviser to the Socialist presidential candidate Ségolène Royal in the 2007 election[1]" you are not convinced that he holds an agenda.
Either you too are guilty of ad hominem, "specifically "guilt by association"", or you are logically incoherent, subscribing to double standards.
Your political prothezlysing - and downvoting - is not conducive to the discussion. Again, I exhort you to read up on Piketty and reconsider your position.
First of all, I'm not proselytizing. I've never once in this discussion stated, or even alluded to my political opinions, let alone tried to convince anyone else of them. I offered opinions about the politics of the editorial staff of both the Financial Times, and the Wall Street Journal, neither of which should be terribly controversial, and both of which are utterly orthogonal to my beliefs; and I offered an opinion about whether Piketty wrote his book in service of a pre-existing agenda, as distinct from a belief. That, too, is irrelevant to my politics.
Second, my claim of ad hominem isn't "ironic" in light of my other statements. Nowhere did I say the positions of the FT or WSJ editors were wrong; I said they were biased. One can be biased and correct, just as one can be biased and wrong.
I don't think it's much of a stretch to posit that the author of your WSJ quote meant it to convey something about how correct Piketty could possibly be, because "socialist". Note, too, that the quote doesn't say Piketty, himself, is a socialist; it just says that he keeps their company (or, more specifically, that they — but mostly, just this one, really, really icky one — keep his): guilt by association.
Contrarily, I'm not saying they're wrong because anything; I'm not saying they're wrong at all. I'm saying, "Capitalists don't like something that points out flaws in capitalism. Film at 11." Inferring anything further is projection and fabrication. Sorry, but I'm not your straw man.
Finally, if there was any downvoting, it wasn't on my part. You can't downvote direct replies.
EDIT: And I have the book already. It's in my queue. I just had to buy another bookshelf, however, so you can probably guess how deep that queue is.
This does not lend credibility to whatever argument it is that you are trying to make.
>>I read the FT article when it appeared. What seemed remarkable was that, even though it took Piketty years to compile and work with the data, it took the FT editor weeks to come up with a rebuttal [1]. That by itself should tell you something.
This is an absurd and daft point. It is obvious that the process of compiling data and producing a book presents a more time-consuming task than working with the same data, already compiled, in order to complete not a book, but a newspaper article.
As a corollary to your statement it is further worth noting that The Economist also bring up scholarly defense of Piketty's data:
"Scott Winship, a scholar at the Manhattan Institute who disputes Mr Piketty's overarching narrative about inequality wrote on Twitter last night: I’ve spent time with Piketty U.S. wealth ineq[uality] spreadsheet and LOTS of time with his income data. He's not up to funny business."
As made apparent, your passive-aggressive political proselytizing does not offer a constructive contribution to this submission. Please understand this.
"[146] I find on a balance of probabilities that the growing by the defendants in 1998 of canola on nine fields, from seed saved in 1997 which was known or ought to have been known by them to be Roundup tolerant, and the harvesting and sale of that canola crop, infringed upon the plaintiffs' exclusive rights under Canadian patent number 1, 313, 830 in particular claims 1, 2, 5, 6, 22, 23, 27, 28 and 45 of the patent"
