As brought up by someone else, the money could also be sent to that country's government instead of being burned. You would have even less incentive to vote on laws of other countries.

Also, I think that the huge disparity in the different countries' power/wealth are unfortunately very hard to fix by anything... This reminds me of Bitcoin criticism that goes something like "rich people can just buy a lot of btc and stay rich": yeah it's unfortunate but there's not much we can do about it, it's an issue deeper than Bitcoin/the voting system... Still a stepup IMO

As written elsewhere I don't think that's an advantage :^)

I did not know the term, interesting! The similarity lies in being able to vote in "variable amounts" , the difference is that it costs you actual money and not credits specifically created for that purpose, making it more costly to the voter

Then you would not vote and that seems fine

Debatable + doesn't address the previous points

The fact that the majority is retarded is literally why I thought of this in the first place. The clueless masses are easily manipulated and that's the cause of many of our problems: winning the vote democratically is just a contest of who will convince the clueless people lying in the middle of the bell curve. If it suddenly costs money to vote, it will drastically reduce the weight of people who vote without having a clue.

Your second sentence implies that a costly vote would incentivize worst decisions than a free vote, why would that be the case? I think it's literally the opposite

Btw I assume that you're not Greg Maxwell (nullc)

True, that would be the more "state-centric" option and totally valid as well

That's already the case now though right? At least here the fact that you're ignoring the results would be even more obvious

I thought it was very clear in my original post that I already hated altcoins and heavily suspected that the parts of DeFi I ignored were also bullshit... Now with supertestnet's reply this is no longer just a suspicion

Second time supertestnet comes up and blesses me with the ultimate answer. 100% clear now, thanks!

Based

Valid use cases indeed but they can all already be done on Bitcoin right? Maybe I was not clear with my original wording. When I used the "DeFi" term, what I had in mind was specifically what is happening on the Ethereum DeFi ecosystem that can't be found on Bitcoin.

As you can tell I'm really just looking for anything useful that Ethereum does that could not be done on Bitcoin

Well, do you know of any DeFi application that is actually useful and where the decentralization is justified? Which application(s) do you have in mind with your bank/central party example? I have a hunch that such things could be done on Bitcoin too, but Im interested to read more

I don't see a convincing argument for the hypothetical massive shakeout once rates are cut. We also need to take into account that the market is becoming smarter over time: the mind-games of the Fed are less and less effective as years pass.

Anything can happen but on average you're better off holding. I would agree with the "don't buy on margin" advice however