> they may be contributing very little to society (or maybe a lot), but regardless there's a sense of superiority

A sober individual's brain is operating on standard (often societally installed) reward mechanism, including "succeeding" on certain self-evaluated measures like "contributions to society"

It's commonly said that weed makes you "OK with being bored". i.e. standard reward mechanisms mentioned above don't really matter much when you're high.

It has nothing to do with narcissism or sense of superiority as you call it, just that their reward mechanism doesn't include things like "how much am I contributing to society". Apathy is a better word for it.

well apathetic individuals still rely on the society they are in, most of the time anyway. I think this is where the narcissism perception comes in.

Most stoners in particular people who smoke a lot and for a long time at least in my experience become apathetic and to a degree dependent on their environment. They rely on others to organize their lives, even get simple chores done, they become sort of lethargic. And when you have an individual like that who also acts indifferently towards it you create (I think a justified) negative perception.

Be careful not to over-generalize from personal experience... Maybe you've just met a few examples of lethargic, dependent narcissists who smoke a lot of weed?

There is selection bias at play, as someone with an admitted negative perception of stoners you probably haven't put yourself in many situations where you might meet counterexamples.

In my experience, I've met many stoners whose driving force is empathy and compassion and not narcissism and apathy.

Anyway, keep in mind any substance abuse is often an amplifier of issues that already existed.

Most of the lethargic narcists I met were weed (and other drug) users. Most weed users I know are not lethargic narcists. People who swing in the direction of personality disorders already have a predisposition to "anti-social" behavioral patterns, and frequent risk-taking. It's just as likely that they get into drugs on account of existing personality constructs as they develop personality constructs on account of using drugs.

I did qualify that I'm talking about heavy users but I don't think I'm over-generalizing. Any heavy drug use, or addictive or dependent behavior in general crowds out other things. That's just a fact of substance use.

Occasional recreational use is one thing but people who are high every day, they aren't able to be as present as they would be if they were sober, and in changes them in I think usually negative ways. Not even because of the particular drug they're using, but because of the patterns of behavior that come with those levels of consumption.

There are still many barriers to that "first class" status, taxes are mentioned most often.

Taxes are paid in fiat. Holding non-stablecoins would add even more of a tax headache because you'd have to track capital gain/loss as you enter/exit fiat for taxes / fees / vendors that don't accept crypto

Also the fact that general adoption has been slow so far may be a sign that there is not enough obvious value added for the average person to consider using crypto over fiat.

who would pay with non-stablecoins though? The oath seems to be cbdcs that are compatible with public smart contract blockchains

There's also the risk that stablecoins aren't actually stable but just claim to be such: https://www.coindesk.com/tether-first-reserve-composition-re...

An investment is not a donation to your idea or cause.

If you "need money to make it big" you can bootstrap, take donations, or look for investors.

It's easier to raise investment than donations, because an investor expects a return in an economic/probabalistic sense(not hopes for a return)

You can't have your cake and eat it too though; once you accept investment you can't cry foul when they don't sit back and act like a donor.

It is yet to be proven if it is "as secure" because no PoS network has operated at scale.

It also certainly defeats much of the original purpose of decentralization when a few stakeholders have total control of the network because they hold the most coins...

Regardless if the network has "correct incentives" or not, things can happen to those stakeholders outside their control, or other incentives could easily develop to act in bad faith against the network.

> It also certainly defeats much of the original purpose of decentralization when a few stakeholders have total control of the network because they hold the most coins...

As opposed to a few stakeholders that have total control of the network because they hold the most computational power?

And before you bring up mining pools, you can replicate that in Proof of Stake by creating staking pools.

Have a look at cosmos.network for successful decentralized dPoS network. Also Binance chain is built using Cosmos SDK, one could argue it is not decentralized enough, but it is certainly secure enough.

I'm not sure what you mean by "at scale" but ETH2 PoS has been operating for several months now, and currently has over 100,000 validators with over $6 billion staked.

A deed? You mean, a legal document which is enforced through a centralized power i.e. government....

What advantage is gained by tying it one-to-one with an NFT or storing it on a blockchain at all?

Well, if you tie it to an NFT, you can make it easy to lose or be stolen, which is helpful because...<why again?>

> Imagine if you could transfer car ownership without having to deal with the government or anything else? Just a transaction away.

uh you still have to register with the government, for good reason. and that's not going away.

Sure, it makes sense from an "imagine a world where..." perspective. Sounds convenient.

I'm looking at it from a "why would any government on Earth choose to use a 'decentralized' blockchain as a source of truth to keep track of property deeds in their jurisdictions" perspective.

> Imagine if you could transfer car ownership without having to deal with the government or anything else?

Even if there wasn't any value in registering a car with the government, people buy how many cars in their lifetime? I expect that the number of cars that I'll ever sell in my life is less than ten. So this would save me like 30hrs in my entire life in DMV trips.

Maybe there is some utility here for dealerships who are dealing with a lot of government paperwork involving titles, but for a general population this seems like an incredibly tiny benefit.

1. Bitfinex processes a USD deposit and dispenses USDT

2. USDT holder purchases BTC with it

3. Bitfinex purchases crypto (mostly BTC) with the USD, instead of holding it as promised

Thus the original USD of the person buying BTC at the exchange has effectively double the buying pressure on the BTC market because Bitfinex is actively investing all their USD holdings that "back" Tether into the market as well.

Good explanation. Why do they do step (3)? Aren't they just opening themselves up to massive legal liability?

Some believe this is an intentional Ponzi scheme to print some money for the owners of Tether and Bitfinex, others believe they had good intentions at first, but through bad investment or otherwise got underwater, and started "investing" their USDT-backing dollars to claw back up.

Bitfinex originally denied relation to Tether but it's been proven that was a lie.

The worry is, at some point there could be a "run" on Tether, when the curtains are pulled back, where all the USDT-BTC traders who happen to have USDT holdings and they suddenly become worthless because nobody wants to trade USDT-BTC anymore at 1-1.

As long as "public confidence" in USDT continues, the charade will too

Another dumb question: If they've been buying assets like BTC using the USD that they were supposedly keeping as reserves, shouldn't they have made massive amounts of profits since 2018, and be in a position to now return the USD reserves so that it's 1:1, while keeping billions in profits for themselves?

If they haven't exited the BTC position, then selling the BTC to convert back into USD may not be possible without dramatically affecting the price. And if it's still in BTC and they don't bother converting back into USD until the last minute, then a run on USDT may make it impossible for them to convert enough BTC to USD fast enough to redeem USDT.

It's hard to analyze Tether/Bitfinex's risks here because, well, they have been fairly opaque about what their actual financial situation is, so people are relying on their gut instincts to guess what it is.

USDT has a market cap of $35bn, let's say that 30 percent is unbacked and the corresponding USD was used to buy BTC. That's a position of at least $11bn. It's probably worth more than that now, since the price went up after they supposedly bought in, but they only need to liquidate $11bn to return the USD to their reserves to make it 1:1 again.

The market cap for BTC is $1000bn. Wouldn't they easily be able to unload the position over a 1-3 month period without too much price impact? They own 1 percent of the market cap, and in the stock market we often see larget stockholders than this unload their whole position without a catastrophic impact.

You couldn't liquidate that much BTC without tanking the markets... it's a game of chicken if it's true that the USD backing tether is gone.

Whether or not it's a DEX doesn't matter at all.

In this hypothetical world of regulation which has made some BTC "tainted" through surveillance, it will always be in the BTC receiver's best interest to verify the coins are "clean". Only a fool (or fellow criminal) would transact with tainted coins; most people would probably not use a DEX, or else use one which verified clean coins anyway without being regulated to do so.

Hmm, i think we have different thoughts about what a DEX is. Decentralized exchange allows me to conduct exchanges anonymously. I can convert back and forth between many different coins and wallets. Although it still goes on the ledger each time it's transacted, verifying who it went to, who is came from, and how it was traded is impossible. I can use a VPN to connect to the DEX, I can push my trade through a mining firm and many other ways. Any government 'Banning Bitcoin' is just a giant advertisement for bitcoin and will only lead to that nations fall as other nations take the cue to 'Stick it' to the nation that banned it by investing.

The point is, a government can make it illegal to sell goods for crypto. As well as making it illegal to transact crypto anonymously. So unless you find some black market for all your material goods, you will be FORCED to "exit" some of your crypto into fiat at some point. It is at this point that the design of BTC in particular makes it impossible to hide this "exit", because a government can easily surveil the blockchain and keep track of "verified" coins / addresses.

Any time a transaction is spotted between a registered and unregistered address, just send a friendly police van to the address on file and seize the registered wallet. Rinse and repeat until unregistered wallets can virtually only transact between each other.

I'm not sure what you mean about "understanding" crypto, the concepts here are dead simple, there's not much to misunderstand.

In this scenario it doesn't matter that you can transfer some coins from a DEX to your "hard wallet". If you haven't registered your hard wallet's address with the government and linked it to your identity, you will be unable to use those coins for anything other than trading with other unverified wallets.

If you want to exchange the coins in your hard wallet for any valuable or material good whatsoever, without disclosing your actual identity to the government, you'd have to find someone willing to do so illegally i.e. a black market.

And the receiver of your "dirty" bitcoin, which is verifiably dirty because the transaction came from your (unverified) wallet, would then have to solve the same problem of laundering the BTC if he wanted to use it to pay for his costs / employees / etc.

And if we're talking about a large economic power, I'm not sure how banning crypto and making its transactions more difficult would help anyone; if anything it would negatively impact that crypto since it is less usable as a medium of exchange.

It may seem outlandish that a government would even go to these lengths, but I'd argue that wielding a centralized currency is too powerful for governments to give it up without a fight.

Really? I program Python for over a decade now and compared to other language it was always the one where style somewhat was the smallest issue with that language (compared to the C, C++, C#, Javascript, Java I have seen).

Might be that the whitespace indentations focus the mind. Also: PEPs already act as style guides. And if you are worried to do it wrong, just run it through a code formatter like black. It really isn't that much of a problem IMO.

I think grandparent is talking about something else. Large C++ codebases often have a guide that says which parts of the language to use and not to use. That can be useful if you have a team with people with different levels of expertise in the language, or expertise in different parts of the language. C++ has grown to be a language with a lot of different parts to choose from.

And it looks like Python is heading in the same direction. It's not difficult to imagine a future where some Python projects are going to want such guides too.

Thanks for the clarification.

grandparent?

The parent comment of the parent of my comment, and by extension the writer of that comment.

No flipping on the Moon since it provides no advantage there (No aerobraking)

That's a very good point. Looks like my brain also had a major malfunction ;)

If you actually wanted a fair(er) comparison, you can filter your benchmarks by Python. People choose FastAPI if they want a Python web framework, there is little use in comparing it to Rust and C++ frameworks or whatever...

That said, this list looks pretty bogus anyway, many of the tools listed here are not really frameworks to begin with. uvicorn for example is an ASGI server (you can run a FastAPI application ON uvicorn) so I'm not sure how this benchmark is "comparing" uvicorn and FastAPI.

If you filter the list to just Python you can see Starlette and FastAPI are the fastest.