explodicle

Disclaimer: I support pigouvian taxes on greenhouse gas emissions.

Long ago, one libertarian solution to climate change was insurance. So you'd buy disaster insurance for your house, then the insurer would bet that pollution would go up. This creates a financial incentive to reduce emissions. Best case scenario, your insurance payments are a slight reimbursement for a voluntary reduction. Worst case scenario, your insurance payments essentially bribe their workers to sabotage.

However, the Coase Theorem says this only works while transaction costs are low. And you'd need long-term contracts that aren't realistic with today's interest rates. So it would take decades to establish the financial infrastructure necessary.

mostly

I believe that you're extremely qualified in math and cryptography. But thinking that cryptocurrencies are all p2p, and that Bitcoin dominates the market because they don't know this one simple thing, are both telltale signs of a novice. They're mostly centralized scams, and the concerns you're bringing up have been discussed to death.

Monero is a great example.

You're correct that it was originally forked off of Bytecoin, which had a premine. So Bytecoin was not peer-to-peer, because one user (the issuer) had a different set of rules than everyone else. If you had invested in centralized Bytecoin, you would have lost money because it was not p2p. They had to start over!

The problem with relying on "actual cryptography" for privacy is auditability, like I mentioned above. When there was a bug in Bitcoin that allowed someone to give himself a bazillion BTC, we were able to catch and revert it immediately. If there is a bug like that in Monero, we won't know until after it's circulated as much as the premined Bytecoins did.

Yes.

That computing power is necessary to secure the network, without introducing security holes or economic rent. And the rate of production gets cut in half every 4 years. The alternatives you've been told about are inferior.

The Lightning Network has onion routing like Tor, and drug dealers have been using mixers for literally a decade. If there's an inflation bug in Monero (like the value overflow incident), then that will be invisible too.

We still use steam power quite a bit, and aren't replacing it simply because it's old. Most new cryptocurrencies are like a Tesla, solving problems they didn't care to understand.

If you think every cryptocurrency is peer-to-peer, then I am literally begging you to slow down and look at how they actually work before investing more. They frequently have centralized issuance, security, development, governance... you name it. It only takes one centralized part to bring down a project.

The most popular crypto is one of the few that's p2p and well-tested.

"But in practice, I almost certainly vote Republican."

I have. Most people who say this IRL are very Libertarian and very not libertarian. If they like cryptocurrency, it's something new so they can feel smart.

They'd treat you the same way they treat people who throw back the gas canisters.

There isn't. The only hell they'll ever see is the one we create.

How is that definition useful? The USA and Israel both torture and have plenty of laws.

Why not both? We can automate the trains (more), the busses, and the occasional rural drive.

We should use assassination markets to pay their own men to kill them.