knightly the Sneptaur

You’re not wrong, they need a union. Which is precisely why Facebook and Twitter pack their payroll with H1-b visas.

The US has a glut of skilled tech workers right now thanks to a quarter-million layoffs last year, the argument that they can’t find the labor locally is facetious. Also, every H1-b worker should be entitled to dual citizenship or full naturalization, whichever is their preference.

Blockchain currencies aren’t a bubble, they’re a scam.

The results aren’t worth the expense. So-called “AI” is the biggest bubble since the great recession.

Of course it does. A million validators on less than 15,000 nodes? The top 100 accounts already own 35% of the network and rising? The top 0.005% of accounts own more than 78%? A Gini coefficient worse than Ukraine? A Nakamoto index of 3?

Ethereum is only months from a level of wealth concentration that would give Lido and Coinbase a combined 51% of the stake.

“Or doesn’t have to”. So you admit it?

So you think cryptos “solve” the same problem as paper money? A distributed open network is just the same as some rich bros printing paper?

No and yes.

Money was created to improve upon the barter system by adding a standard unit of value. Paying salaries no longer needed stores of salarium, the state just prints money to pay for services and taxes it back to prevent the currency from inflating.

The problem that crypto solves is that rich bros don’t like the state monopoly on the creation of money. It’s not an actual problem, they just want a legal means of committing fraud.

Sometime the point is not to solve a new problem but to improve a fundamentally broken “solution”.

How is it an improvement?

Also, “Proof of stake” would just mean that the owners of the ledger are unaccountable random rich guys instead of the shareholders of the utility company. That’s a distinction with absolutely zero difference.

If you aren’t using a proof-of-work blockchain algorithm then why not just use a regular database instead?

I’m failing to understand what problem the blockchain would solve that isn’t already solved more efficiently by a regular database…

There’s application in responding to requests for information quickly, in a mesh network, perhaps in presence of malactors.

Online databases already exist and have been handling requests for information quickly for longer than there has been an internet, and always in the presence of bad actors. What problem is there, specifically, that the blockchain would solve?

For example the medical records of injured US soldiers are stored in and delivered using a block chain solution.

No they arent, the DoD did a study that said it might be useful for that purpose if they can solve the challenges with scaling, interoperability, and integration with legacy services.

There’s application in a hypothetical currency free from the corruption of governance. For example, an orange President couldn’t print gobs of money during a pandemic, devaluing your currency, then hand that money to corporations.

No there isn’t. Unregulated currencies are still subject to corrupt governance, the only difference being that the governance isn’t nominally accountable to the electorate. Literally nothing has stopped Elon from printing scam tokens for his pump and dump schemes and keeping the extracted value for himself.