> Buying Bitcoin isn’t so much a hedge against inflation as it is a bet that demand will continue to rise.
While I do agree with majority of your points, I think people are missing a crucial point why Bitcoin was made in the first place: the 2008 bank bailout. Buying Bitcoin isn't a bet that demand will rise, to BTC maximalists, it's a bet that a Central Bank will screw up. That spills over to mainstream hype, scams, and all the sleazy things people associate with Bitcoin.
It's not appreciated by majority of people right now. The USA, with the might of the dollar and the Feds, will keep seeing Bitcoin as a nuance, it's not surprising. The only places where a globally liquid asset like BTC is appreciated right now are countries with a weak central bank. Either the central bank is being cut off by trade sanctions and local businesses cant acquire USD so they go through BTC [0] or just the plain inability of a government to pay debt, and the currency devalues due to the mistakes of a few and ordinary people suffer [1] [2].
But right now with all the QE, that 2008 spirit lives on with that price ticker as Central Banks are bound to screw up somewhere in this economic uncharted territory.
People did the same thing with gold long before Bitcoin was invented. They still push the same narrative.
QE and inflation fears aren’t new. We had “goldbugs” pushing gold as the one true store of value, safe from QE and inflation, for decades.
It’s slightly ironic that among these concerns about inflation, crypto currencies continue to introduce entirely new asset classes that print coins out of thin air. The cryptocurrency supply is only fixed if we put blinders on and pretend that there is only one cryptocurrency in existence, that it never forks, and that it always existed.
Bitcoin proponents like to share stories about Venezuelans or Zimbabweans rushing to Bitcoin, but they ignore the fact that they’re also rushing to USD, or to local assets. They’re simply rushing to be in anything but the failing currency.
Bitcoin proponents also like to draw false equivalencies between failing countries like Zimbabwe and modern countries like the United States. Normally any such comparison between two obviously different situations would draw criticism on HN, but for some reason this false equivalency that all inflation is equally bad or risky gets a pass among those with Bitcoin investments that they want to see go up up up.
> And there are a ton of articles that talk about how microservices save you money over a monolith, but none include hard numbers.
Yeah, you can do that by collecting a ton of data related to development though. Breaking down sprints, correcting estimates, deriving cost from time per feature and salaries, comparing it over time across architectures; having to collect all these data from team members during development is way too tedious. It may hamper actual productivity just to produce a more accurate report that says "hey we saved money".
I'd bet there's a large co-relation between successful micro-service migrations and teams that don't squeeze metrics from every single action that each team member makes just to make more accurate reports.
Also, I have no data to back this up, as far as personal experience goes the reason why "hard numbers" are rare for "microservice vs. monolith savings" are because of 2 reasons:
1.) majority of software companies usually don't aim to put effort on collecting metrics for optimizing "savings"; they aim to collect metrics on growth/acquisition, churn rate, market share, customer service, etc. If a large organization wants to optimize savings they'd rather think of taxes, restructuring debt, moving server locations (cloud/baremetal) and other larger items. 2.) majority of software companies are not at that scale where it warrants a report with hard numbers.
Usually development teams subconsciously quantify microservice migrations due to severe violations of DRY. Resolving DRY, opens you up to more business opportunities (both internal and external). A microservice allows you to move from just being an app, to being a platform. Customers and other teams in your company build on top of you. The move is not necessarily decided upon because it increases savings (this is also mentioned in that article from Netflix).
If 3-4 apps have a similar feature that needs building and maintaining, that feature warrants to be pulled out in it's own microservice.
I managed the transition from monolith to microservices at Netflix. :) That is why I was asking. Because I know we never quantified it with numbers and I was wondering if anyone else ever had.
> I simply can't answer what BTCs and other crypto coins are actually good for.
Everybody here is missing out why Bitcoin was made in the first place: the 2008 crash.
The benefits of a globally liquid asset (not USD) will only be appreciated if you're living from a country that has a weak Central Bank.
- Nigerians use it to import goods from China. This guy can't source USD to purchase imports for his mobile phone business, so he uses BTC [0]
- Venezuela remote workers getting paid in BTC, because their central bank clamped down on USD inflow. They also didn't want to be paid in the worthless local currency. [1]
- Remittance shops in Hongkong are using BTC to settle remittances by batch. Buy and sell to the last mile instantly, no exposure to volatility. This gives them way better FX fees and faster settlement (30mins vs. 1-3 business days). They pass the savings down to their customers as marketing spend, or they pocket the change to increase profit [2]
- Argentina Central Bank is hoarding USD due to dwindling reserves. So they imposed a $200USD/month cap on individuals transacting with USD. People are flocking to BTC for remote settlement. [3]
- Iran hit with sanctions cant use USD. So they're working on laws to use BTC for settling imports with China. They even issued BTC mining licenses for private companies. [4]
I come from a country, where if you remit more than $10K outbound you'd have to: pay big fees ($200+), suffer bad FX rates, wait for 2-3 days, do a physical appearance at the branch for and pay documents/notarial stamps, sign forms, present and print out government ID's, just to say: "This is my money, I just want to send money to my dad overseas for medical purposes".
December 2020, my mom had received USD in her dollar account. She wanted to withdraw and convert it to help build float for the family business, the local bank didn't have enough USD. They told her it was a 6-week wait, lots of people lined up. Lol.
10-20 year horizon: Battery Technology. Manufacturing improvements, improving density and cooling requirements, recycling economy, etc. There's a huge race first-mover race that Japan has made a government-backed consortium tackling on batteries.
Most visible effect would be smartphones and laptop charging times and charging cycles.
For cars and work trucks: aside from cheaper cost, it'll also solve range anxiety and charging times.
For solar powered homes, you can opt to store cheaply in your home for night-use instead of sending excess back to the grid.
Lighter batteries on drones would have a multitude of uses from industrial to space exploration.
Longer time horizon: electric-powered flight and electric-powered freight. It will drop supply chain expenses on a macro perspective.
> Apart from saying you're a "generalist", how do you best sell yourself when you don't have a specialisation or a specific area you are focused on?
"I have a talent and process for evaluating new technologies at a systematic pace. This will allow me to produce the necessary POC that would help you to decide if a piece of new tech is the right fit for your business problem."
Usually that's the job description of an Enterprise Architect or a Solutions Architect. They usually start coding stuff for a POC, or put in initial devops tools/processes, dabble with new tech but not deep enough to be a specialist.
That's a really good description of what I tend to do a lot of the time. I do enjoy playing with and evaluating "things" but rarely get to the point of "expert" with them before the next shiny thing comes in. I had some reservations about posting this question, but given the really helpful and insightful replies I've had, I'm glad I did. Thanks
> Bitcoin has been in an upward trend since early September for no discernible reason (to me at least).
I think it's mainly due to purchases from institutions that believe that Bitcoin is a safe haven asset during the lockdowns. The spiel is: it's protection from currency debasement due to Central Banks everywhere printing out at low interest rates for the pandemic.
- Square spread 50MUSD worth buys @ 10K USD early October [1]
- Microstrategy spread 425M buys from 9-10K USD around August - September [2]
I got around 300+ kills, I did that just by standing at the corner of the map and waited for them. Since they move slow, the turn rate was good enough not to be killed no matter how many spawned.
2 things for improvement:
- Demand more mechanical skill from players: Scale spawn and movement speed higher every 30 seconds, as timer nears 0. Make bullets finite. You could also implement day/night cycle + fog of war.
- Addressing repetitiveness: Shorten to 2-3 minutes. Unless I missed something, give the game an objective other than accuracy and score (find and collect X pieces to win or capture the flag, etc)
For personalities try Jason Friedman. Martin Fowler's Refactoring is a nice read too.
But personally, I'd like to ask what business goal are we looking to solve? Because regardless of how murky a codebase can be, if that codebase keeps hitting a business goal, then we really can't drive a change in practices.
So, we first present business goals. Here's a few examples:
If the business goal is to give better estimates for fulfilling custom features faster, then testing would be the first in the list. Not even the release process. Tests lessens cognitive load for developers when they're asked "how long can we make this feature?". They'll have an idea that it'll probably break a bunch of services, etc. a.) If you're in leadership, ask for tests when people make a PR. b.) If you're not in leadership, look for the smallest part of the monolith. Write 1 integration test, add a CI integration, put it in a PR. Co-workers would probably like that.
If the business goal is to give better SLA's (turn around time for addressing breaking bugs, scaling better), then the release process would come first.
Regarding technical debt: One way to address technical debt is to slowly address it by folding in the effort of cleaning and refactoring inside a feature request. ex: making a new form about 2FA takes 3 days, but you can say 7 and explain that we'll setup a CI test build, then hit and address some debt regarding User Authentication along the way.
It'll introduce as a "Clean As You Go" culture in the legacy engineering team, which will pay off in the long-run instead of having a huge amount of time just dedicated to addressing technical debt.
The danger of separating "address technical debt" as a separate effort is it sometimes results into some unnecessary abstractions and over-refactoring: i.e. trying to make certain things too generic, bordering on building a framework.
But then again, if the business goal was to make a framework for a business goal (maybe something the bizdev can sell), then it can definitely be made as a separate effort. Otherwise, it'll be seen in the bizdev as someone just "playing" around with tech.
> I think scientists have made an overwhelming convincing case climate change is real and it's from an increase in co2, but I have seen no models that I can play with specifically predicting how it will affect certain regions..... I guess my point is the first step is better forecasting and modeling tools.
> Otherwise we really don't know what we are fighting, other than higher temperatures.
Pretty important to fight higher temperatures too though, wet-bulb heatwaves can kill even under shade. "Some people" won't "suffer"; they'll actually die. https://www.pnas.org/content/114/33/8746
While I do agree with majority of your points, I think people are missing a crucial point why Bitcoin was made in the first place: the 2008 bank bailout. Buying Bitcoin isn't a bet that demand will rise, to BTC maximalists, it's a bet that a Central Bank will screw up. That spills over to mainstream hype, scams, and all the sleazy things people associate with Bitcoin.
It's not appreciated by majority of people right now. The USA, with the might of the dollar and the Feds, will keep seeing Bitcoin as a nuance, it's not surprising. The only places where a globally liquid asset like BTC is appreciated right now are countries with a weak central bank. Either the central bank is being cut off by trade sanctions and local businesses cant acquire USD so they go through BTC [0] or just the plain inability of a government to pay debt, and the currency devalues due to the mistakes of a few and ordinary people suffer [1] [2].
But right now with all the QE, that 2008 spirit lives on with that price ticker as Central Banks are bound to screw up somewhere in this economic uncharted territory.
[0] - https://asiatimes.com/2020/10/iran-to-use-bitcoin-to-fund-im...
[1] - https://www.bbc.com/news/business-47553048
[2] - https://www.reuters.com/article/us-crypto-currencies-africa-...