> The easiest way to get fuck you money is to reduce your consumption.
If you work at a very high paying job in finance or at a place like Google or FB, I might agree with this. Some people in those groups make a lot and spend a lot (sometimes more than they make).
For people with more modest salaries, I think that this is tragically wrong for fuck you money, but probably right for relatively modest “nest egg” money.
There is a limit to how much a person can gain by cutting, but that same person is essentially uncapped in earning potential.
The easiest way to get fuck you money is to start a business that solves business problems. Knowing sales, business operations, and tech is a relatively easy way to access this market. Not easy overall, but relatively easy compared to other options that lead to fuck you money.
Personally, I quit my job at a time I had $300/mo in income from my startup and lived in an old suv. Yes there is a bottom limit but it’s much lower than you might think. A big limitation many people have is their family, since if they aren’t onboard (mine was) then it cannot work out. But in that case it’s no longer fuck you money, since you’re trying to earn enough to maintain your family relationships first, an honorable decision to be sure.
And what exactly is wrong with a nihilism? If we don’t really know what’s going on, maybe we should accept that truth and move on with living better lives less swayed by political propaganda. Given how many relationships have been ruined because both sides were certain of their political facts, a nihilism seems simply better.
If you've gotten to Nihilism, you have a blank slate to build what you Do believe.
Ascribing meaning to things has value. For example, human life in Nihilism is unimportant, which may or may not be true, but we all benefit from the shared belief in the value of life even if it's technically wrong.
So don't stop at Nihilism as the conclusion but rather use it as a canvas and build up what's meaningful to you. With any luck, others will find the same things as you meaningful.
It was my way out of Nihilism. The pursuit of being good is more important and valuable than us all agreeing on what is good (or even that good exists at all). And given that goal, all you can do is try your best.
Broadly, nihilism rejects purpose and meaning. I don't see how one can justify we "move on with living better lives" within such a worldview (i.e. why act that way when nothing matters?).
What the last two comments are really saying is that "nihilism" isn't the right word for the state you enter when you give up on developing an accurate picture of the world from luridly presented tragedies in news stories.
There’s many forms of nihilism, and purpose nihilism wasn’t the subject of my comment.
A Nihilist is more stable than you think. A tree doesn’t need purpose to grow, and neither does a human. Instead they follow a process that’s expressed by the body in response to the environment. For humans we not only have physical sensation but also memories, ideas, and thoughts. Without a worldview these all still happen, and your body will still react to your thoughts and sensations without a purpose. A healthy Nihilist would not feel sad about having no meaning, since they never had one anyway; on reflection, they might feel happy that there’s no obligation to respond other than how their situation moves them to. A Nihilist can do what is morally right without the restrictions of a purpose that proscribes them to do otherwise.
I'm curious how you reconcile the explicit rejection of morality in Nihilism with your personal morality. I feel these are in conflict.
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Longer take:
Defining what is morally right requires value judgement, and Nihilism rejects morality. What Is (facts) can't tell us what we ought to do. [1]
To build a moral framework on what one ought to do, you must necessarily ascribe meaning and value judgement otherwise it can't claim to be moral and it would merely be actions you perform devoid of meaning.
There isn’t a fundamental difference between ought/is. Both moral judgements and facts are based on reasoned beliefs.
Why do you think meaning is required for making a value judgement? I can very easily claim that killing humans is wrong without relying on any metaphysics, just like I can claim the sky is blue. Both are beliefs based on reasons; meaning can be discarded.
The first thing that comes to my mind for d/acc is disintegration acceleration [1]. Anyway the big problem that’s never addressed is whether humans have political control over the process. There’s a strong reason to think humans don’t; because the neoliberal political system is dominant, and the emerging alternatives appear to be even more technocapitalist. Meanwhile the attempts from both the right (fascism) and the left (communism) to reign in techno capitalism failed.
P2P exchanges like Bisq use escrow and verification methods with dispute resolution for on/off ramp. There are other options as well for secure decentralize offramps, but bisq is much larger than any other protocol.
Ah, so someone can trick it into doing all the above (via bug or code push) and no one is 'on the hook', since no individual is responsible for everything?
And escrow isn't really escrow (in the sense of independently verified), but honor based? At least based on the FAQ.
Since things like 'USD arrived in a bank account' can't be verified by a third party.
The point is self custody. Even if a trade were to fail (it’s more difficult than you might think) the funds stay in you custody before and after the trade. That’s different from a cex where you’re trusting someone to hold all your assets. Someone like SBF could not do a similar fraud, even if such a party existed within bisq.
Regarding code, there have been attempts by people to take over p2p protocols before. Most famous was Justin Suns takeover of Steem. Since all the code was open source, most of the community forked the code over to Hive successfully. If a malicious actor tried something similar with Bisq, the community would just fork an older version of the code.
More fundamentally, these protocols work because people are incentivized to make them work. It’s quite different than the vc crypto with the big marketing budgets that most people hear about; most of those are just traditional finance reskinning itself.
Once people start receiving the scary and confusing 1099s next year from using Venmo et al. from Bidens new policy, crypto may seem preferable to some people. Pro taxists often underestimate the fear common people have of tax authorities.
Most of these 1099s are going out to people who owe little or no tax on the transactions, such as people who split restaurant bills worth more than $600 over the course of a year.
There are over 1.8 million crypto tokens. If the SEC is going to shut down the industry, they’ll need to at least start shutting down more projects per month than are starting up.
Do any of them reach even 1% of Binance's size? If crypto stays a bunch of niche projects that only enthusiasts invest in, isn't that the SEC's goal accomplished? I can't imagine they would care about a coin that doesn't attract either a lot of retail customers or big financial institutions.
Binance value comes from servicing those niche projects - it’s an exchange. As long as those niche projects exist, new projects will emerge to service demand. What will change is design; future exchanges will be less regulatable. Already dexes are waiting in the wings; UNI has been in a price uptrend due to these decisions.
A smarter strategy would be to do what the US Justice dept is doing; co-opt the biggest players, install plants, and cut down any upstarts. Government enforced monopolies have worked for hundreds of years as an effective way to control industries.
All of that's assuming that demand will continue. What this will do is remove crypto from the mainstream. And without paid celebrity endorsements, where will the new dumb money inflow come from? And if that dries up, how will the mining rigs pay their electricity bills?
A lot of people use crypto for utility, which is why it doesn’t go to zero in bear markets. Not everyone needs or wants crypto tokens, but those that do form the base of the ecosystem. You can call it dumb money if you want to be elitist, but it’s the same so called dumb as any consumer activity.
If you start an ICO, you are harmless until you get someone to buy into your token. For the SEC, you are harmless until you collect "millions" of dollars. Otherwise, you are just another one of these small scams that are happening all the time regardless of it using crypto or not.
Unless they do a complete and total eradication program, that will just create a selective environment for tokens that are able to avoid SEC fines. What you’re saying does seem to be the SEC strategy, and it is probably the profit maximizing strategy in the short term. It also requires the least effort; rule making that allowed for regular fee collection instead of sporadic ones might be profitable in the long term, but it would be a complex activity the SEC might not be capable of.
To make this palatable to the American public, those whistleblower rewards are not courtesy of the taxpayer; they’re courtesy of money seized from previous Bond villains. A portion of Binance’s settlement(s) will go to pay the whistleblowers at the next Bond villain. It’s a circle of life.
Usually this kind of enforcement attempts to reimburse victims, or failing that, goes to general funds. Anything else is a moral hazard for enforcement (eg, USA local police confiscations)
The SEC is largely self-funded via fees charged to financial institutions. Funding increased enforcement of crypto entities doesn’t have to require more tax revenue.
You're kidding right? The US government is one of the biggest holder of Bitcoin. They seized insane amount of Bitcoins. And the US is a country where capital gains are taxed. The US government is making a shitload of money when cryptocurrencies go up.
You cannot have it both ways: if you tax your citizens on their capital gains made on crypto, then you prosecute the scammers like SBF when they prey on US citizens.
I don't disagree, but you're arguing that the government gives a greater share of its tax receipts to the SEC. This is a question for Congress, not the agency. The usual assertion of "let's spend more money on x" results in the obvious question "instead of what?".
OP was suggesting that the SEC ramp up the rate of actions, which will need funding (at least, initially). I don't see Congress doing that?
The only registered cryptocurrency exchange is Prometheus, and it doesn’t have any trading activity. There haven’t been any rules published by the sec regarding cryptocurrencies or crypto exchanges. Since cryptocurrencies aren’t investment contracts, it’s not possible to comply.
