Singlelunch

if you genuinely are interested in an answer to your question, I recommend this blog post by Matt Ranger: https://singlelunch.com/2020/10/21/badeconomics-putting-400m-of-bitcoi…

Tether, which is the most used so-called "stablecoin" (As its value is pegged to the USD) is extremely seedy at best and has had brushes with the law already [0] or is outright a Ponzi scheme [1] and plenty of people arguing for/against crypto know and have said so already. Personally, even though I'm a proponent of cryptocurrency in general, I wish it'd disappear in spite of any short and middle-term calamitous consequences on perceived value if that means one less "dumbed-down club" (Using dang's words) when it comes to discussing crypto. [0] https://ag.ny.gov/press-release/2021/attorney-general-james-ends-virtu… [1] https://www.singlelunch.com/2021/05/19/the-tether-ponzi-scheme/

First of all, a Google search query isn't a "debunking." https://singlelunch.com/2023/09/13/the-bad-economics-of-wtfhappenedin1… is not a rebuttal but a dismissal by someone unwilling to engage with the evidence. The dude tries to clown on the idea that ending the gold standard wrecked the economy, but his whole argument is just cherry-picked stats, strawman takes, and straight-up ignoring how money actually works. First off, he mocks the divorce rate thing like "lol goldbugs think couples fight about monetary policy." Nah, fam. It's about how fiat money led to inflation, stagnant wages, and financial stress that actually strains marriages. No-fault divorce laws came after the economic chaos started, but he acts like they are the only factor. Weak. Then he claims the wage-productivity gap didn’t start till the 1980s. Even the EPI data he cites shows the split beginning in the early '70s. And yeah, healthcare costs eat into wages, but that doesn’t explain why real compensation (including benefits) still lags behind productivity. Fiat money let corporations and Wall Street siphon off wealth while workers got screwed but he just shrugs like "idk, must be computers or something." On inflation, he’s like "lol inflation just exists, stay mad." Nah, pre-1971, inflation was stable and low. Post-1971? Wild swings, 14% peaks, and a permanent erosion of purchasing power. He acts like floating currencies = stability, but the "Great Moderation" was just Volcker slamming the…

I've talked about this before on my blog: https://singlelunch.com/2020/12/28/why-im-lukewarm-on-graph-neural-net… Basically, language models are already graph neural networks. To understand why, go back to Word2Vec/GLoVe: word embedding distance represent co-occurrence frequency of words in a sentence. Note how this is the same as a graph embedding problem: words are nodes, and the edge weight is co-occurence frequency. You embed the graph nodes. In fact, this is stated in formal math in the GLoVe paper. The LLM architecture is basically doing the same thing, except the graph is conditional occurence based on the previous contextual words. This setup makes for a graph with a truly astronomic number of nodes (word|context) and edges. This huge graph exists only in the land of abstract math, but it also shows why LLMs require so many parameters to perform well. In any case, 4 years on, I'm still pretty lukewarm on the current gen of graph neural network architectures. Case in point: the OP paper is pretty much the classic ML paper mill setup of "take some existing algorithm, add some stuff over it, spend a ton hyperparameter searching on your algo and show it beats some 2 year old baseline".

People have been concerned about this for quite some time. It seems the answer that question is definitely not. Here is a somewhat dramatic write up: https://www.singlelunch.com/2021/05/19/the-tether-ponzi-scheme/

Given this is "according to an email viewed by Bloomberg News", I can't help but be reminded of the "An Anatomy of a Bitcoin Price Manipulation" article that was posted here recently. [1] https://www.singlelunch.com/2022/01/09/an-anatomy-of-bitcoin-price-man… https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29966533

They did. https://ag.ny.gov/press-release/2021/attorney-general-james-ends-virtu… Also: https://www.singlelunch.com/2021/05/19/the-tether-ponzi-scheme/

Note that apparently attestations just validate that a certain bank account had a certain number at a certain time, which obviously does not account for loan obligations. In Tether's case > https://www.singlelunch.com/2021/05/19/the-tether-ponzi-scheme/ > [Tether was] Failing to complete an audit and settling on an attestation “for transparency”. The morning of the attestation, tether moved $380m from sister company bitfinex into a bank account to pass the verification

And this https://www.singlelunch.com/2021/05/19/the-tether-ponzi-scheme/

Here's a good, up to date primer: https://www.singlelunch.com/2021/05/19/the-tether-ponzi-scheme/

Because she's one of the biggest proponents of Modern Monetary Theory and most economists view it as snake-oil. MMT claims to offers a fix/cure all our economic problems - everyone can have limitless money to spend as long as "sovereign" governments are the ones handing out the free money. And like snake-oil theories it collapses under the mildest of empirical tests. I could go on, I guess (random google) an article like this sums it up for me: https://www.singlelunch.com/2018/10/01/bad-economics-shame-on-you-plan…

Well it's simple. - Cryptocurrency market is a scam.[0] - It spends inordinate amount of electrical energy that can be better spent maintaining existing bank/credit card infrastructure [1] - It's a scam[2] - It contributed to overall graphics card shortage [3] - It has another scam (NFT) growing on top of an existing one [4] Have I mentioned it's a scam? What irks me the most is people are acting as if crypto currency is real/usable or a sane solution for a problem it can't dream of solving. It feels a bit like yelling "King is naked", but the rest of the populace is "No, it's just spider silk.", and "Would they waste all that effort to just make nothing?" [0] https://www.singlelunch.com/2022/01/09/an-anatomy-of-bitcoin-price-man… [1] https://fortune.com/2021/10/26/bitcoin-electricity-consumption-carbon-… [2] https://www.theverge.com/22620464/tether-backing-cryptocurrency-stable… [3] https://medium.com/geekculture/cryptocurrency-graphics-card-shortage-a… [4] Just use your brain for 5 min and realize that NFTs don't work.

> Far from 'weakly enforced regulations' most Western nations have very well and strongly enforced regulatory regimes. There are rules upon rules about what is allowed and what is not. They are as regulated as the system will allow. That is, companies dump lots of money into Congress to increase the chances of existing regulations being weakened and new ones neutered, and it works (see: Dodd-Frank [0]). And sadly, I don't see things changing anytime soon, as the American political landscape is basically divided into those who talk big on progress (but who, upon gaining control of Congress and the presidency, just barely uphold the status quo) and those who want to deregulate things even further. > The fallacy of 'Hard Currency' is that people think we can avoid these problems with some extant construct, like 'Gold' or 'Digital Proof' but that doesn't solve the problem at all. This is accurate. While cryptocurrencies might not allow for spending more than you have in your wallet, there are many ways you can trade on margin and "stable"coins which only have a fraction of their issued volume backed by any assets [1][2][3], including propping up an exchange with stablecoin funds [4]. I would not be surprised if someday there was a "bank run" on these unsecured stablecoins which caused huge knock-on effects. I think that the fundamental problem is greed combined with people who might not be very greedy but who are desperate to improve their financial situation. And unlike…

Wolfram's framework is unfalsifiable and contains no new explanatory power. That alone should be sufficient to show you why folks are so skeptical of the claims. Combined with the fact that he introduces new terminology and refuses peer review, this should give you reason to expect that there is a simpler, more canonical, already-explored branch of theoretical physics which covers the same stuff. I wish that you had linked to the material that you didn't "get anywhere with"; without it, it's hard to actually examine the quality of the underlying arguments. I found writeups like [0] which seem extremely well-argued; the formal ideas come from [1], and the core idea is Bell's theorem [2]: there is some essential non-locality to QM, we can experimentally see it, and so we can't just say "oh, it's all a big computer", even if it's a computer with interestingly high dimensionality or interconnections, without further justification. [0] https://www.singlelunch.com/2020/04/23/why-stephen-wolframs-research-p… [1] https://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/nks.pdf [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell%27s_theorem