SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Everyone Is Getting Hilariously Rich and You're Not
Recently the founder of something called Ripple briefly became richer than Mark Zuckerberg. Another day an anonymous donor set up an $86 million Bitcoin-fortune charity called the Pineapple Fund. A Tesla was spotted with a BLOCKHN license plate. There's a surge in people looking to buy Bitcoin on their credit cards. After the Long Island Iced Tea company announced it would pivot to blockchain, its stock rose 500 percent in a day.
In 2017, the cryptocurrency Bitcoin went from $830 to $19,300, and now quivers around $14,000. Ether, its main rival, started the year at less than $10, closing out 2017 at $715. Now it's over $1,100. The wealth is intoxicating news, feverish because it seems so random. Investors trying to grok the landscape compare it to the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s, when valuations soared and it was hard to separate the Amazons and Googles from the Pets.coms and eToys.
The cryptocurrency community is centered around a tightknit group of friends — developers, libertarians, Redditors and cypherpunks — who have known each other for years through meet-ups, an endless circuit of crypto conferences and internet message boards. Over long hours in anonymous group chats, San Francisco bars and Settlers of Catan game nights, they talk about how cryptocurrency will decentralize power and wealth, changing the world order. The goal may be decentralization, but the money is extremely concentrated. Coinbase has more than 13 million accounts that own cryptocurrencies. Data suggests that about 94 percent of the Bitcoin wealth is held by men [archive], and some estimate that 95 percent of the wealth is held by 4 percent of the owners.
There are only a few winners here, and, unless they lose it all, their impact going forward will be outsize.
They also remember who laughed at them and when.
Related: 1600 Vine Street (similar story, we'll see if it makes you just as mad)
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday January 16 2018, @05:19PM (5 children)
The Federation uses money; that stuff about them laughing about it was a combination of propaganda and the fact that aboard a Federation military vessel, you don't need money if you're part of the crew.
(Score: 2) by theluggage on Tuesday January 16 2018, @06:01PM (4 children)
Citation needed?
They have a post-scarcity economy (replicators + an apparent abundance of energy) and liberal social attitudes (which suddenly become way more practical in a post-scarcity economy) - if they use money, something has gone very wrong. There's not even much talk about trade between planets (again, replicators!)
Unless you're trying to tell me that replicator software isn't distributed under the GPL... :-O
OK, Deep Space 9 got a bit confused about having alien traders on a Federation outpost (almost like they'd cut & pasted a load of concepts from another show that was set on a space station in a far less utopian society that operated a port to subsidise its diplomatic mission.... Nah...)
Oh, and the whole thing about Federation military vessels is a bit of a sore point (we come in peace, shoot to kill!)
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Grishnakh on Tuesday January 16 2018, @06:21PM (3 children)
Citation needed?
I can't give you a good citation because the only canonical sources we have are propaganda pieces from Starfleet Command. We don't have almost anything that shows life in the Federation outside of Starfleet, so this is mainly conjecture.
They have a post-scarcity economy (replicators + an apparent abundance of energy)
Do they? Or does the military simply get all the cool stuff and all the energy they need, while the planets are forced to supply it?
and liberal social attitudes (which suddenly become way more practical in a post-scarcity economy)
Do they? Or is that just what you're seeing on the human-crewed military starships?
There's not even much talk about trade between planets (again, replicators!)
Or maybe it's because the military doesn't get involved in trade? Where's the records showing life aboard the freighters, or in the colonies, or even on the main planets? All you see is what life is supposedly like on a human-crewed military ship. They don't even show what it's like on ships with Andorian, Tellarite, or Vulcan crews, though they'll occasionally make a reference to one of those.
Remember, however, that in Enterprise they did show a freighter in at least one episode. Life didn't look quite so nice there.
Oh, and the whole thing about Federation military vessels is a bit of a sore point (we come in peace, shoot to kill!)
Well to be fair, they do seem to be pretty reluctant to open fire. But again, these are likely propaganda pieces, so of course they're going to depict Starfleet in the best light, and show the Romulans, Klingons, and Cardassians as always the aggressors.
Star Trek is just like Lord of the Rings: propaganda for the winning side. LotR covers up the real story, about a peaceful society entering an industrial revolution being attacked and brutally annihilated by a war-mongering, imperialistic faction led by Gandalf and the Elves. They even go so far as to make up the name "orc" as a slur for foreign men, and describe them as literal monsters.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 16 2018, @07:35PM
That reminds me of "The Last Ringbearer", great read! http://ymarkov.livejournal.com/280578.html [livejournal.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 16 2018, @08:11PM
Enterprise was set before replicators were a thing (early on, they explicitly pointed out that the ship had a cook/chef). It is therefore logical to assume that Enterprise is set during a pre-post-scarcity period, so can't really be used as example.
(Score: 2) by theluggage on Wednesday January 17 2018, @06:30PM
Oh god, who let the fucking Maquis in here? I say, send them back to that shithole Bajor and build a wall around the planet. Make the Federation Great Again!
(What, no! I've never even visited the Mirror Universe - fake news! )