Instead of punishing greed we can use it to benefit those in need. Instead of FEMA or some other inept agency, government can just pay greedy price gougers and then distribute the supplies in whatever way it thinks is fair. Why insert an unnecessary and incompetent government agency when it isn't needed? The fairy tale is that government does a better job than the free market. Sadly, emergencies are always the excuse for intervention, when the efficiency of the free market is needed most. They used COVID as an excuse to print trillions of dollars. Government is the ultimate price gouger, but no one ever talks about that. Instead they focus all the attention on one guy selling hand sanitizer.

I'm for getting supplies to people who need them as fast as possible. The government (or anyone else) can buy the gouger out, and so encourage them to restock. Other people will see the opportunity and join in, bringing even more supplies to market and bringing down prices. This would be more efficient and cheaper than whatever centrally planned fiasco the government does. I'm all for decentralized solutions, like bitcoin for example.

The advantage of high prices for in-demand goods in emergencies is that people will be less likely to buy more than they need in a panic, and the person who had the foresight to stockpile, or sees an opportunity to bring supplies to an affected area, deserves to be rewarded. This behavior should be encouraged so competition will bring prices back down quickly and people will get the supplies they need.

There is so much incentive is to push USD stablecoins on the world, and the demand is insatiable. We should focus on making the bridge to bitcoin as easy as possible because stablecoins are happening no matter how much we dislike them.

And to be honest with myself, I must acknowledge that access to USD has made my bitcoin journey immensely easier. I can't deny someone else the same advantage as long as it's still possible to buy bitcoin with fiat.

Thanks for posting an interesting philosophical problem! Maybe there is an issue with the word "luck". It seems to be used in two ways. 1) in regards to initial conditions or things outside our control, and 2) in regards to good outcomes of decisions we make in the past. I totally agree with #1 that luck is involved, but #2 is a problem especially when I see people using it to diminish someone's ability to make a good judgement call, which was what I was getting at in my little thought experiment. For #2 I think it's not fair to call it it luck as there was clearly some choice involved. But honestly I'm not totally sure.

Good points, but this makes me wonder if everything is "just luck". By your logic it seems like any good decision could be "just luck" in someone else's view.

Imagine two people, Alice and Bob, heard about Bitcoin at the same time, and both had the same means and opportunity to buy the same amount. Alice was curious and intrigued by the idea and bought some while Bob dismissed it as a ponzi scam. Several years later Alice is very happy with the result and believes more than ever in bitcoin's potential, while Bob still claims it's a ponzi and likes to point out that Alice "just got lucky". Do you agree with Bob about her getting lucky in this scenario?

Turns out if society turns men into emasculated sensitive little bitches women lose interest.

Oh no, France will discover the 49th gender before us!

Middle East terrorists were the new boegey man well before 9/11. Almost immediately after the USSR fell, I'd say they barely skipped a beat. The Six Day war and then the Iranian revolution primed the pump. But 9/11 took it to a whole nother level of course.

It's both, which is the whole, correct, point of Parker's article. Gold was money. Minting (standardizing supply, weight, and unit by a trusted authority) made it currency. Gold coins were property, capital, and currency. So is Bitcoin, except the trusted authority is the system itself. The standard unit (currency) is inseparable from the money. It's all combined together which is why people have a hard time understanding this.

When is the time and place if we are constantly days away from funding running out?

The critics always have a shitcoin to sell.

I haven't heard anything about bluesky in a bit, forgot it existed.

It's never made sense to me to work a job all day just to pay someone else to raise kids. It's crazy that raising your own children isn't seen as the noblest profession. The government hates it because it's tax free labor.

Are people committing fraud, or are they "bypassing banking oversight"? Those are not necessarily synonymous.

No. The might be really annoying and then we won't be able to kill them off because they'll be this great scientific achievement and endangered.

There is an asymmetry where the government can pass any tyrannical law with zero repercussions, and unlimited resources to defend it, and the citizens must spend limited resources to fight back. This inevitably leads to dystopia.

Unfortunately I think societal collapse and/or war is the only way anything changes.

It can be forked at any time by anyone. The question is when will a marketing campaign succeed in getting enough people to follow. We can only know this happened after the fact.