Well, you have different players now... working at a different scale.
They are purchasing crypto infrastructure for a huge premium, importing massive turbines from old generation facilities, making huge personal investments in nvidia stock for "preference", and acquiring companies that happen to have an order.
It went from we need to make a data center as cost efficient as possible to we need a data center at all costs.
> this will never work because governments will never allow for disintermediation of their currency because it’s one of, if not THE, primary sources of control over a population
So, has trump coin and world liberty financial proven your friend wrong? What about El salvador or the cayman islands?
It seems that it was you who misunderstood human nature. Greed always wins.
Keep in mind the definition of 'work': Bitcoin was originally intended to be a day-to-day medium of exchange, not a 'long term store of value'. It's much more of a threat to governments as the former but that really hasn't actually panned out (including in the places you mention), and it's just a random speculative asset which financial systems will toy with like any other.
> So, has trump coin and world liberty financial proven your friend wrong?
No:
1. That's not being implemented as a permanent replacement for typical currency, that's cryptocurrency as a specialized temporary vehicle for accepting bribes and fleecing the gullible.
2. Even if #1 were not true, it's rather hard for a democratic government to react when key positions in that government have (temporarily, I trust) been taken over by a cult that profits from the scheme.
> It seems that it was you who misunderstood human nature. Greed always wins.
That's an inaccurately nihilistic view of what "human nature" encompasses. If greed always won, nobody would have pets, charities would not exist, parents would enslave their children, life-insurance would just be an invitation to filicide, etc.
okay, well i've been hearing this "Gov would never let crypto live"... but i keep waiting? All i see are more and more govs and entities like blackrock being co-opted.
What would actually convince you this line of reasoning is wrong?
> i've been hearing this "Gov would never let crypto live"... but i keep waiting?
I think the first step is to narrow what role/purpose of "crypto" we're trying to consider, that a government would or wouldn't permit to "live".
For example, imagine there's a 100% government-run system with only "official" transaction signing nodes and everyone's public key is on-file along with their real identity. That would be "cryptocurrency" in a technological sense, but clearly not the political change some people are interested in.
Next there's the economic distinctions like the unit of account [0] versus medium of exchange [1] versus store of value [2], which are all different roles. For example, gift-cards might be a medium of exchange in some sketchy places, but the unit of account is the dollar-amount on them. Which roles would cryptocurrency be actually taking?
> All i see are more and more govs and entities like blackrock being co-opted.
The way I see it, the optimistic utopian dreams of cryptocurrency are going nowhere. Meanwhile, big banks banks--or by upstarts trying to replace them in the same basic game--are trying to use "crypto" to grow while dodging normal laws and regulations.
TrumpCoin and WLF are obvious grifts by parties associated with Trump and not actually part of government policy, and the president is not a rational actor trying to maintain a capable government.
El Salvador's experiment was generally a failure for various reasons, and they agreed to start rolling back the policies as part of an agreement with the IMF for another loan.
These projects happened because, yes, greed wins and destroys everything in its wake.
What about blackrock etf's? Tether being a huge buyer and holder of US treasuries for like 8 years straight? How the US and other countries are paving the way for stablecoin legislation. Tether is one of the most profitable companies of all time working with major banks on decreasing settlement times by days into seconds....
El Salvador did not roll back their policies... they have been a continual buyer, they just rolled back their "Required by law to be accepted", they added a bunch of special cases where you don't have to accept it, but alot of tourist destinations like el zonte still accept it (or atleast they did when i was there in late 2024).
That's not true. The money you use to buy stocks gets you an ownership interest in a company that creates value. The money you put into crypto gets you a line on a distributed spreadsheet.
The money that comes out of your ownership share is tied to the success of the company, through dividends and buybacks.
Well, because crypto has been a crime for it's entire lifetime. Any of my friends who got funding to work on crypto got debanked, fined, jail time etc. Throughout the entire Obama-Biden era. Only under the latest Trump admin are there new VC funding and things like ETF's, stablecoin settlements, and crossborder regulation being "Accepted" even though we have no legal framework.
So... Crypto is illegal so anyone using is defacto a criminal by definition.
Also, for this particular instance this is the best bug bounty program i've ever seen. Running a monero node that hits your daily budget cap is not that bad... It could be way worse like steal you DB creditials and sell it to the highest party... So, crypto actually made this better.
At federal minimum wage, you make 15k a year. NASDAQ 100 is on average 14.6% per year. It only takes 100k to passively earn more than the vast majority of labor.
We have arrived to the point where capital is vastly more important and productive than labor. AI has only make that worse. Historically, there has been a balance because it was Capital and labor that were required to generate outsized returns. But once you strip out incremental cost with software, and tack on an AI "service" layer, where are the need for employees?
The one saving grace, is that this will also break the VC model. When one youtuber who has 100k subs can spin out 20 different apps a year, we fragment the app space, allowing alot of micro businesses to form around "brands". But "brands" will just be social media influencers.
Employment stats are designed to measure economy-wide shifts, not early, localized, white-collar disruptions. The sampling will smooth those effects away until they’re large.
CPS samples 60k households per month to represent ~150+ million workers. Households stay in the sample 4 months, out 8, back 4.
Copywriters will get smoothed out in the aggregate, and the definition will mask this. Even if you work one hour, you are technically employed. If you are not actively looking for work for more than a month, you are also not technically unemployed.
Unemployment data is a lagging indicator for detecting recessions not early technological displacement in white-collar niches.
from my perspective, this is exactly where we are. Have you ever watched starter story? There's hundreds of people with 5,6+ apps making 100k+ MRR. The VC model is broken because of it.
So, all these clauses where changed back in Feb/ March. They definitely had to agree to the amendments on their grants, and they still had funding until October 1st. So, I feel like this is revisionist history because they would have been notified way before today to renew thier grant.
So they signed the amendments and spent the money...
> In January 2025, the PSF submitted a proposal to the US government National Science Foundation under the Safety, Security, and Privacy of Open Source Ecosystems program to address structural vulnerabilities in Python and PyPI.
> It was the PSF’s first time applying for government funding.
It doesn't seem to be a renewal, and they seem to have applied before the clauses were added.
- - -
Additionally, on September 29, 2025, the NSF posted
> The U.S. National Science Foundation announced the first-ever Safety, Security, and Privacy of Open-Source Ecosystems (NSF Safe-OSE) investment in an inaugural cohort of 8 teams
Implying that until that point, there was no distribution of funds as part of Safe-OSE, so no prior years of funding existed
It's not a renewal, it's their first application for government funding, and they turned it down without accepting the terms. This is all quite clear in the blog post.
That's way too simplistic. When a tariff raises the price of competition, everyone else raises their prices too. It just increases costs to consumers, and raises government revenues.
You have to look at the elasticity of demand across every component to determine the correct ratio.
What i can tell you, as a GSM, from a CapEx perspective, sensors, motors, cables, and batterys made in the US just got significantly more competitive. It was already trending that way due to JIT demands and rapid factory buildouts, but the tarrifs were a huge marketing boon for american supply chains.
And i can tell you for the first time as someone in the supply chain business i can confidently ask the question "Should we be buying this bolt from Insert country here?".
It's almost like i've been given the authority to source products from the United States even if we are paying some percent higher.
You'd be correct in an economy not tumbling towards recesssion due to said tarrifs being universal, and not just focusing on specific industries to make american ones more competitive.
As it is, American spending is way down and hurts everyone. A small stock crash (the thing propping the US up as of now) would truly hit with a 2nd depression at this point.
The very short of it is that a lot of bus bull market is propped up by AI. To such an extent that the top 10 companies of the S&P 500 have half the value right now.
Combine this knowledge with some maneuvers as of late that reflect the Dotcom bubble and we're rife for a crash that will take the world economy with it once the bubble pops. Its a bull asset market right now, but its certainly not a healthy one
And that's just the economic side of it.When you consider the history of such extreme wealth inequality, ignoring rising unemployment and disresr among the working class can get ugly quickly. That can also go down an expensive route if taken to the extreme.
These companies are absolutely money printing machines at the scale we have never seen.
Some of the individual standout figures:
Apple’s trailing 12-month net income is around US$99 billion.
Microsoft’s trailing 12-month net income is about US$101 billion.
Alphabet (Google) is estimated around US$111 billion net income.
On revenue, one list shows: Amazon ~$670 billion, Apple ~$408 billion, Alphabet ~$371 billion, Microsoft ~$281.7 billion.
Have you ever read the soverign individual? He kinda predicted this. Tech companies will rise into unfathomably rich while the countries inability to tax foreign revenues will lead to the collapse of the nationstate.
This assumes there are competitive domestic alternatives. For the vast majority of tariffed products, there are not.
For one example, the domestic PCB manufacturing industry is a joke. Even with tariffs, China is literally ten times cheaper than domestic. I recently sent an order to both, and the China fab had my boards in production inside a week. The US fab took three weeks to give us a quote, which was five times higher than China for half the quantity, in twice the time.
The US is not independent. We don't have a domestic industry competing on the global market. We make very little and rely very heavily on imports. What we do make is heinously expensive and not any higher quality than the much cheaper imported goods.
The current trade war also doesn't spur domestic industry growth because all the materials and equipment to build out industry.... is tariffed. Plus the tariffs change too frequently for any sane person to make any kind of long term investment.
Industry will wait to scale until economic forces stabilize.
They are purchasing crypto infrastructure for a huge premium, importing massive turbines from old generation facilities, making huge personal investments in nvidia stock for "preference", and acquiring companies that happen to have an order.
It went from we need to make a data center as cost efficient as possible to we need a data center at all costs.
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