I wish that they'll just keep on running a good profitable business without going public, or getting bought by Amazon, or otherwise shifting focus to providing shareholder value.
This. I am a happy paying customer. Recommend them to my clients whenever it makes sense (more often than not). And hope they just keep running like they do as profitable business, like you said.
Why in the world would one want a company like this to go public? They are a very stable, established and profitable private entity. Based on what Hetzner is doing right now, it seems like the current way of operating that is intended by the leadership is closely aligned with what their customers want. This is often the first thing that goes out the window once a company becomes public
The comparison with OVH is a good one. For some reason OVH has much worse PUE, self-reporting 1.24 vs. Hetzner's 1.11. Operating costs are basically just electricity for these places, so their margins are that much worse.
For further comparison, Google at a similar latitude in Saint-Ghislain, Belgium, claims 1.08.
I don't understand anything in your comment, so I'm shamelessly posting some info from an LLM:
> PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) measures datacenter efficiency - it's total facility power divided by IT equipment power. A perfect 1.0 means all power goes to servers; higher numbers mean more waste on cooling/overhead. OVH's 1.24 vs Hetzner's 1.11 means OVH burns 24% extra power on non-IT stuff, hurting margins since electricity is their main cost. Google hits 1.08 at similar latitude.
Compared to IONOS, it is day and night. IONOS in my experience is just worse in every category that matters.
IONOS has buggy and bad wannabe SPA web frontend, broken OS images, bottlenecks in their provisioning API, that they don't care to fix, and 10x the costs.
If you are not desperate for one specific offering of IONOS, that Hetzner doesn't offer, and you have any other options, there is no good and justifiable reason to go for IONOS. IONOS is a low effort, low quality, high marketing spend shop. Hetzner is almost the opposite. They don't waste money on advertising, they cost much less to rent servers from, their OS images work, they got good technical support.
The last thing we need is more enshitification on this space.
I just migrated my selfhosted email server to Hetzner and I don't want them turning into monstrosity like AWS or Azure, with theit miriad of ways to nickel and dime the customers.
Going public usually means unlocking funding, so they could grow business, build more services, compete with say OVH or if some hyperscaler will decide to step into this niche.
Yes I agree, we need more public companies in Europe.
Private companies are inherently less social since they don’t allow ordinary people to participate in growth.
In this sense, they’re selfish.
PS: yes I know that there are also downsides to public companies. But looking at the trade-offs I prefer that success can be shared as broadly as possible.
At least in America, "a successful private company went public" often translates into "ordinary people got a bit of gold, selfish vulture capitalists butchered the goose, and there was precious little success or growth for anyone after that".
(Also - might your "allow ordinary people to participate" sympathies extend to people who would like to participate in your own financial affairs?)
Selfish VC becoming filthy rich through an IPO is exactly my point. Up to an IPO a private company will only make their owners rich - in your example "selfish vulture capitalists".
After an IPO anyone can participate. When Google, Amazon, Apple went public, VCs got rich. Everyone after that included every day people like you and me.
No - the selfish vulture capitalists are the outsiders who purchase a private company which has been successful for many years, then butcher it. There is no IPO - it is "you own X, and we are offering you $Y million to sell it to us".
After that - X's best assets are sold off (the VC's get the money), X goes deeply into debt (again, the VC's get the money), many of the employees are laid off, and X generally goes bankrupt within 7 years - because what is left of it can't make the payments on the debt.
(You're right - I made a mess of things, and inter-mingled the cases where a privately-owned company is sold directly to private equity / vulture capitalists, and the case where a privately-owned company "goes public" - but that still does not lead to a happy ending.)
>the selfish vulture capitalists are the outsiders who purchase a private company which has been successful for many years, then butcher it.
Sounds like the selfish vulture capitalists are the insiders who sell the company.
>X's best assets are sold off (the VC's get the money), X goes deeply into debt (again, the VC's get the money), many of the employees are laid off, and X generally goes bankrupt within 7 years - because what is left of it can't make the payments on the debt.
This doesn't make any sense, because X is the original asset. If part of X is sold, then the remaining portion of X loses value (assuming the sold part is the good part). If X is used as collateral, then it also loses value.
Privately-owned companies can provide better value to their customers. They can invest in customer trust and brand value that pays off over decades, not quarters.
They can also choose enshittification, but they are not pressured into it like companies with institutional investors are.
As a Hetzner customer, I would lose out if they went public.
> Private companies are inherently less social since they don’t allow ordinary people to participate in growth.
Consider two possibilities. The first is, if you want to make money in an industry, you start a company in it. Lots of people start companies because lots of people want to make money and then there are lots of companies, causing the profits to be widely distributed.
The second is, if you want to make money in an industry, you buy shares of an existing company. You have to buy them from whoever currently owns it, so the ones who got in early become billionaires, meanwhile even if an ordinary person were to invest their entire net worth they wouldn't even own 1% of the company so they have so little influence over it that it isn't even worth their time to vote their shares, and therefore have no influence over it at all. But you still make some profit while not having to actually do the work of building a company, so more people do that instead of entering the market themselves and then there are fewer companies that are each bigger.
The second one leads to market consolidation and concentration of wealth and power, so which one is actually less social?
It tells you something about how much a gambling place the market is when a site like this has a one day default for the price change. When it comes to a high level view of the market, why would I care for a comparison of todays prices to ... YESTERDAY??
My first reaction was to look for a 10 year option. There is none, so I took the 5 year option. All of the big names roughly doubled or tripled over the last 5 years. Amazon lagging a bit behind. I could start to reason about the numbers but .. 5 years is just too short. I would play with it more if there was a 10 year option.
And I would love Love LOVE a European version of this.
> It tells you something about how much a gambling place the market is when a site like this has a one day default for the price change. When it comes to a high level view of the market, why would I care for a comparison of todays prices to ... YESTERDAY??
Treeviews are pretty common views for traders trying to get into new markets. Just like a software engineer understands that the backbone of our networks is retries and waits, traders will create funds that smooth over this kind of daily volatility for people that just want to have their capital appreciate. Imagine explaining to a non software engineer that actually things on the internet are failing all the time and turning them off and on again (retries) is actually how we make sure it all works ;) (and obviously the math that underpins it all is pretty much the same. Networks and markets run on RVs and time-series.)
There is undoubtedly European versions of this btw. If I get around to it after work I'll try and post some.
In defence of prices yesterday - the people who would use a tool like this the most are the traders since they are looking at the numbers every day, so it probably comes out of the trader community.
Real returns are expected to be in the 2-8% range which means that most people should be looking at timeframes around 10-50 year. Unfortunately at that range the money printing has a real impact so the chart needs to be adjusted for inflation and, realistically, changes in the money supply [0] and so it is more work for the implementer.
[0] If it hasn't gone up 33% since 2020 it probably lost value in real terms.
> the gambler has higher chance at generational wealth
And a symmetrically higher chance of ruin, and in the process the "averaged out" gain might actually be worse than the index investor after taxes, fees, and inflation are factored in.
Are there any publicly traded European cloud companies that will benefit from Europe hosting more of their stuff on their own?
I looked at IONOS, but it seems they just let their cloud product rot away? The cloud backend looks outdated and lacks basic features like uploading private keys that can be used when provisioning new VMs.
I also looked at OVH, but their website and interface look like total chaos to me. I felt lost all the time while I was trying to set up a VM, and while trying to use their AI APIs.
Considering that Europe has an economy as large as the USA, it is puzzling how small these companies are. The combined market cap of IONOS and OVH is less than $10B.
Europe does not have the same market conditions as the US. The continent is divided into a gazillion amount of small countries, each with their own rules, laws, regulations, languages, customers, pension systems, healthcare systems, and taxes. Even the currency is not the same everywhere. Not to mention the cultural differences.
One thing they have for them is a lot of money to invest from their American market, and enough momentum that they can afford barely sustainable European operations for a few years whilst they figure things out and streamline everything.
EU federalism would solve this issue, and likely cause others.
The concept of European federalism is extremely interesting to me. The first I heard about it was at a house party in Prague, from a group of very excited young people. It feels both impossible and inevitable.
They would probably need a anchor client that would allow for predictable growth at scale - AWS always had Amazon.com GCP had its gmail and other workspace apps.
Ideally the varoius goverments in the EU would commit to only hosting their work on them , however from one article read recently even the rules they come up with to test sovereignity claims are gamed to benefit the US providers.
Yep,hopefully their API offerings are industry compatible and requisition of resources for clients is smooth. Would also help if they can onboard similar sized operations that are currently doing their own hosting or using one of the non-EU clouds.
If capable quantum computers become more probable and the soft fork is not already happening, it will be accelerated. And then everybody will move their coins to quantum resistant addresses.
So it does not look like a major problem. It will lower the price a bit though. Because old, lost coins will be revived and come to the market.
There will also be some type of war around "code is law" because some people will suggest to invalidate old coins on non-quantum-resistant addresses. That will be interesting to watch.
You're cherry picking the tech titans that made it out of the Dot Com boom alive. The NASDAQ-100 had to replace 36 of its components between 2000-2002 due to bankruptcies and delistings - nobody knew in 1999 which companies would be the survivors.
The NASDAQ topped at 5,048.62 on March 10, 2000. It took 15 years for the NASDAQ to recover to its dot-com peak level. In those 15 years, you got an inflation-adjusted negative annualized ROI.
Annualized return of the NASDAQ from the 2000 peak to today is an inflation-adjusted 3.4%. Even "sure thing" blue chips like Cisco and Intel still haven't recovered their 2000 peaks in real terms, 25 years later.
Microsoft was the largest public tech company by far in 1999. So I wouldn't call that choice cherry picking. And wasn't Amazon with about $30B market cap the largest internet pureplay at that time?
nobody knew in 1999 which companies would be the survivors
This is selection bias. You are picking companies that, in retrospect, we all know because they did well.
But most of the companies that people were "investing" in at the time, the ones that drove that PE, were dot coms that went out of business. Like pets.com.
As Warren Buffett warned at the time, every new technology wave results in a similar bubble. People invest because we know that the technology will reshape the future. And we reward the first to the market because we can't imagine that they won't be long-term winners.
But the companies that arise early in a technology bubble, are seldom the ones that survive long-term.
We are witnessing the same today. Most of the current AI leaders, won't be AI leaders in 20 years. So which one will you invest in?
I agree 100%. If your investing horizon is at least 10 years, there's literally never a bad time to buy technology equities (ideally as an index). What's the counterargument? That technology will be less important in the future? That sounds apocalyptic.
The counterargument is that most developed countries are facing a slow demographic collapse, so those tech companies will eventually run out of new customers and revenue growth opportunities. Not exactly apocalyptic but more like stagnation and malaise. I'm not claiming that will inevitably occur but it's reasonably likely.
Also, these companies are valued like growth stocks. Even without the demographic collapse it will be difficult to find massive growth at their scale. Some might do that, but which ones?
Is this not cherry picking based on survivor bias? I don’t know the results but you should run it against a basket. If you invested in the sp500 march of 99 to now your annualized return is 6%.
If one country manages to outpace all others in the race to better AI, all other countries are at the mercy of that one country.
Depending on how the one country treats the others, it might be ok - like it is kind of ok for some animals to live in a zoo, I guess. Or it could turn out very bad - all other countries becoming slave colonies of the one that rules the world.
Currently it seems like only two countries are really taking part in the AI race. The USA and China.
On a political level, I am not sure if there is still time for the rest of the world to try and avoid becoming 100% dependent on them. It looks like there is not even awareness of the issue.
On a personal level, it is an interesting question, how one should brace themselves for the times ahead.
It seems like the big improvements in the current AI flavor are done. It happened very quickly, and so did the diminishing returns. It's amazing compared to 2 years ago, it's great compared to a year ago, it's not that different to 6 months ago.
Lots of room in optimization and figuring out how to actually use it usefully. But I don't think any one country is now poised to take a leap ahead on this stuff. And Chinese researchers kind of showed that once the technique was out of the bag, catching up wasn't hard.
AI will empower the service industries, but I don't see it having much impact past administrative efficiency in all other industries relevant to international trade. It won't make minerals more abundant, it won't make farmland more available, for example. It could empower manufacturing a bit but they are bottlenecked by physical resources, supply chain access and other physical constraints as well so there are limits there.
I also think AI is ubiquitous now, no one country will "win". Maybe someone has a breakthrough, but information is globalized, it wouldn't take long for the technology to spread.
Again the actual constraints I believe will be physical. Who has the most chips, the most power, the most space etc, to run the AI.
> If one country manages to outpace all others in the race to better AI, all other countries are at the mercy of that one country
History is replete with these supposed silver bullets. (See: Marinetti.) They rarely pan out that way in the long run.
And if AGI really is that level of civilisation changer, the country it's discovered in matters much less than the people it's loyal to. (If GPT or Grok become self aware and exponentially self improving, they're probably not going to give two shits about America's elected government.)
> the country it's discovered in matters much less than the people it's loyal to. (If GPT or Grok become self aware and exponentially self improving, they're probably not going to give two shits about America's elected government.)
People are loyal (to whatever degree they're actually loyal), because it is a monkey virtue. Why would an AGI be loyal to anyone or anything? If we're not smart enough to carefully design the AGI because we're stumbling around just trying to invent any AGI at all, we won't know how to make loyalty fundamental to its mind at all. And it's not as if it evolved from monkeys such that it would have loyalty as a vestige of its former condition.
> Why would an AGI be loyal to anyone or anything?
I'm using the word loyal loosely. Replace it with controlled by if you prefer. (If it's not controlled by anyone, the question of which country it originates in is doubly moot.)
Sure. But I don't think I'd trust the leash made by the same guy who accidentally invented God. At least, I wouldn't trust that leash to hold when he put it around God's neck.
While eventually, given some absurd amount of time, we might learn to control these things, will we learn to control them before we've created them? Could we survive long enough to learn to do that, if we create them first? Legislation and regulation might slow down their creation sufficiently *IF* we only needed 12 months or 5 years or whatever, but if we instead need centuries then those safeguards won't cut it.
My only consolation, I think, is that I truly believe humans far too stupid to invent AGI. Even now, there are supposed geniuses who think LLMs are a some stepping stone to AGI, when I see no evidence that this is the case. You're all missing the secret sauce.
This is how I understand the uprising of stablecoins, let me know if I am wrong:
One of the best businesses is to offer this service:
Give me your money, I'll give it back to you later.
Because then you can lend out that money to someone who offers this service:
Give me your money, I'll give it back to you later. Plus some interest.
You now have a business which, at almost no cost, generates money. The interest offered by the latter service.
Doing so is regulated. You need to jump through a lot of hoops and you are very limited in whom you can lend out your customers' money to.
But you can design the same type of business with stablecoins. By offering:
Hello! I have two offerings: 1: I sell someNiceCoin for a dollar. 2: I buy someNiceCoin for a dollar.
For your customer it is the same. They give you money and get it back later.
But now you are not a "money holder". You are a trader. A trader of some coin you invented. You don't need to jump through so many hoops and you can lend out the money you earn from selling someNiceCoin to services with higher yields.
I think this is somewhat reasonable, but with plenty of asterisks / not the "arbitrage" this would imply.
There is still a "real", regulated money-holder in the loop - it's just Bridge (the manager of the cash reserves backing the coin - and licensed money transmitter etc etc). Or in the case of USDC - Circle, the "money-holder" / manager of reserves (also has tons of licensed / is very regulated). And the ETH network (where the coin itself sits) for much of the tech / logistics of making that held-money usable.
In fact - because neither Bridge nor Circle are banks, they can't do the fractional reserve that banks do, and are only allowed to do the 1:1 backed thing, with super regulated entities like BlackRock. "you can lend out the money you earn from selling someNiceCoin to services with higher yields" is strictly not true - they _cannot_ lend the money out, they have to store the money in ways that the end-consumers could do themselves, directly.
In that frame - the "efficiency" for you as a fintech is that instead of having to work with a bank on a "stored value" program, you can just work with Bridge and Circle, whose technological primitives are leaps / bounds ahead of the bank, but more importantly - who are much more flexible to work with than the median "partner bank", because they are not banks.
The whole "partner bank" ecosystem only really even scales because there are API providers like Increase.com / Unit.co etc to wrap them.
This was also where I initially landed after finding out that the custom stablecoin could not leave my Bridge instance.
I think the role that crypto plays in enabling this is as a neutral, credible storage layer on which this token can be held, that is not my Postgres database as (eg.) Bridge - these tokens still are actual ERC-20s/etc that are present on-chain, as are the wallets that hold them -- but yeah, I'm:
- not sure how instrumental that actually is here
- not sure if that's just incidentally the easiest structure for Bridge, whose primary business revolves around facilitating payments via stablecoin (now, as a part of Stripe)
Blockchain guarantees there is no double spend while not having one controlling entity. Legal requirements are there to do exactly the same thing - not let managers mess with other people money.
But there are 2 separate controlling entities in this scenario. The hypothetical company that wants to issue the stablecoin and Bridge. They have complete and full control over the money anyway, blockchain or not.
What you describe sounds like the opposite of my perspective.
You make it sound like stablecoins offer a benefit to all sides because of better technology.
My expectation is that they offer a benefit to the borrower because the borrower is less regulated and can lend out the money with higher risk and by doing so generate a higher yield.
You mention "1:1 backed thing, with super regulated entities" as if that means the money is safe. But as we have seen with Silicon Valley Bank, even lending out the money to the government via bonds is not safe enough in all circumstances. And my expectation is that issuers of stablecoins can do even more risky types of lending than Silicon Valley Bank did.
The difference is in the assumption of "higher risk". Most of this borrowing is eventually the US Govt because the stablecoins are backed by T bills. So its not as much of an arbitrage as you say.
But then can you have a world where all the money is only stablecoins and backed by "something"? I think that has interesting implications for monetary supply and central banking
> But then can you have a world where all the money is only stablecoins and backed by "something"? I think that has interesting implications for monetary supply and central banking
This strikes me as among the biggest macro risks, and (IIRC) is one of the reasons banks are fighting to prohibit stablecoins from granting yield (to keep the banking system working).
A different primitive that is related to stablecoin but not the same thing, popular among banks, is the "deposit token" - basically a stablecoin, but backed by bank deposits rather than 1:1 cash reserve, and operated by banks. eg. JPM's "JPMD": https://www.jpmorgan.com/payments/newsroom/kinexys-usd-digit...
Not sure how popular / active they are yet, but I imagine they will become a bigger deal as stablecoins are further regulated / banks push harder on their own interests.
USDC gets me 4% on Coinbase, and USDB and other Bridge-issued custom stablecoins also give the customer rewards that they can pass onto the holder (thanks to MMF/similar cash equivalents behind the scenes etc).
But yes - this is why banks want to prevent stablecoin issuers from being allowed to grant rewards
If I deposit dollars in a savings account I will get paid interest, but that is different from the dollar itself being an interest-bearing asset. I think the same thing applies to stablecoins. Does USDC pay interest to the holder or do I have to make a USDC deposit at Coinbase in order to get paid interest? Also, banks already offer a ton of products that generate yield. I don't see why a product that seems relatively similar to many products that banks already offer would destroy their business... unless such a product is much better than what banks offer, but that doesn't seem to be the case.
>unless such a product is much better than what banks offer, but that doesn't seem to be the case.
I think you're basically correct here. I think the fear of the banks - and why they are insistent on prohibiting stablecoins from generating yield/interest (via the GENIUS act) - is that that doesn't stay true in the long-term, as stablecoins ascend as a cross-border payment/storage rail.
>Does USDC pay interest to the holder or do I have to make a USDC deposit at Coinbase in order to get paid interest?
I believe USDC from Coinbase is framed as "reward", and is downstream of an agreement Coinbase has with Circle to get that "reward" from Circle for all USDC deposits it holds on platform. Other "rates" you can get on centralized stablecoins tend to be similar AFAICT.
In that case, wouldnt sp500 or vanguard be bigger risks to banks existing?
I think most people think banks make money by holding your money and giving you some interest when they actually make money by bringing money into existance out of nowhere when they issue mortgages.
I don't see why not - I'm sure the banks (or others more expert than me) would argue for stablecoins being somehow distinct in this regard, but yeah don't know why eg. Vanguard wouldn't also be a credible cause of deposit flight.
(I do vaguely remember reading that banks were concerned about people moving to money-market fund products that had bank-like functionality)
> you can lend out the money you earn from selling someNiceCoin to services with higher yields.
> And my expectation is that issuers of stablecoins can do even more risky types of lending than Silicon Valley Bank did.
To be clear - stablecoin issuers are not allowed to "lend" the money out like a bank or a regulated lender _at all_ - much less doing "riskier" lending. Bridge and Circle still have to, by law, maintain 1:1 cash/cash-equivalent [0] reserves, which means the best they can do is things like US treasuries / money-market funds - which are also primitives accessible to consumers and businesses directly (ie. not inherently competitive).
Certainly there is still great benefit to Bridge, Circle, and the customers issuing stablecoins through them - because it gets them MMF/treasury yield without having to do a "stored value" program at a bank etc - but the issuers who are converting user deposits into stablecoins are also only getting user deposits in exchange for doing useful things.
People don't deposit funds into Mercury just because Mercury gives them 4% (there are plenty of places you can get 4%). You put money into Mercury for the software - this is primarily an implementation detail of how Mercury manages that money, affords to give you a competitive (4%) rate, and affords to give you great software.
1:1 cash/cash-equivalent reserves, which means the
best they can do is things like US treasuries /
money-market funds
Whether US Treasuries are "cash equivalent" is debatable / depends on the specifics. A dollar is worth a dollar tomorrow. A 10-year US treasury might not.
Are you saying the holder of a stable coin is not taking a higher long-tail risk than the holder of a dollar in a checking account of a bank?
To be even more specific though, "cash equivalent" and the sorts of treasuries that implies are specifically short-duration ones (ie. this cash cannot be parked in a 10-year US treasury either)
Cash equivalents are short-term commitments "with temporarily idle cash and easily convertible into a known cash amount"
Issuing a branded stable coins of this kind lets you earn carry interest on tbills. Fine. Now, why would anyone buy a branded stable coin that explicitly doesn't promise a return?
(Bonus random question: is a UK premium bond a stable coin?)
>Now, why would anyone buy a branded stable coin that explicitly doesn't promise a return?
In practice, you're not even buying these (or at least - that is not the presentation). What you're actually doing is making a deposit into a "stablecoin" account at a place like Stripe (who now offers a Stripe Stablecoin Account, denominated in the USDB custom stable), Slash.com, Dakota.xyz, etc. IIRC Mercury is also a design partner of Stripe's blockchain.
When you make that deposit - either from your regular bank account via ACH/wire, or via USDC - it settles into the account as the branded stablecoin. When you send funds out - you're either sending as fiat or as USDC.
In short - you're not proactively "buying" the coin, and in fact - Stripe describes [0] the USDB coin as closed-loop & "not for public sale", and I think the others are the same. You're just depositing your funds into a platform, in order to use them on-platform - and the platform is holding them as a "custom stablecoin."
1) Assume the buyer/seller holds capital from sources that the majority of the market considers “illicit” and/or is legally sanctioned and/or physically frozen or restricted. Aka the capital can never be called (or at a discount that is unknowable) or the transaction could be later legally reversed or nullified by one or more legal entities. But of course the StableCoin market maker fails to communicate this risk. Therefore the real value of either side of the trade could be zero despite the non-zero StableCoins being transferred. Thus that’s not really a “trade” because there are hidden substantial risks.
2) Along the lines of Matt Levine “Stablecoin treasury strategy?” Consider that the buyer is a publicly listed company, and they fundraise based upon purchase of the digital asset. Then you are doing what most banks consider is not trading but fueling speculation (and normally you can’t expose average retail investors to these risks).
The innovation of StableCoins is much less about Capitalism and much more about re-packaging fraud. And given how lax the prosecution of fraud was during the Financial Crisis, there’s a big meta-bet that StableCoin “traders” will never face losses.
>Assume the buyer/seller holds capital from sources that the majority of the market considers “illicit” and/or is legally sanctioned and/or physically frozen or restricted
This is not feasible legally, and is where your claim falls apart.
From the now-passed GENIUS act [0] which regulates the stablecoin issuer:
- "Permitted payment stablecoin issuers must maintain reserves backing outstanding payment stablecoins on at least a one-to-one basis, consisting only of certain specified assets, including US dollars and short-term Treasuries."
Their point is that if the money held in reserve are proceeds from criminal activity, it is possible for the assets to be seized or frozen by the feds (which would render them no longer backed 1-to-1 even if they were before then). The text of the law you quoted doesn't really change anything.
I see, I misread: that’s interesting. I would assume the issuer would still be liable to resolve the backing, but yeah I could see how that poses systemic risk.
I also don’t think such a risk could realistically remain hidden - this is still going to be heavily regulated and audited, and industry will wise up to the sorts of risk that emerge.
Actually there is a lot of cost, in terms of bank reputation, loan underwriting, and finding consumers and businesses to lend to. There is an entire loan servicing department etc.
Banks are allowed to keep fractional reserves and lend out money they create out of thin air.
Stablecoins are not. (Hi, Terra Luna!) Stablecoin issuers like DAI even overcollateralized. That money is sitting there doing nothing. Enter… banks.
USDT rebuffed the EU’s push to get them to deposit into European banks. They prefer US treasuries (and the current admin is lucky they’re doing it because the treasuries are taking a dive… and some of them are even looking into forcing partners to buy US treasuries and issue stablecoins).
The GENIUS act requires stablecoin issuers essentially to keep 100% of the money in deposits and to work with US banks, and prop up the US treasuries and dollar.
You see, originally, Tether (issuers of USDT, the original stablecoin) kept a lot of their collateral in Bitcoin, which was essentially creating an asset bubble / ponzi scheme where newly printed USDT propped up BTC and vice versa. But since the US government started running multi-trillion-dollar deficits every year, it has also become a ponzi scheme, just a sovereign-debt-based ponzi scheme.
That’s the real play here, for a country that’s $35 trillion in debt and needs to keep demand for its treasuries going… because printing money as UBI — to trickle up, get taxed and service the debt properly — just aint in its overton window. The link below goes over exactly how a UBI could solve multiple problems at once over a few decades (help cushion the demand shocks for human labor, help make taxes on pollution and fossil fuels popular, and help the government actually pay off its debt)… but since USA probably isn’t going to do this on a federal level, it might make sense to go bottom-up, town by town:
Bitcoin is decentralized because the sun distributes energy somewhat evenly across the globe.
The other 206701340 crypto projects, including this one, are decentralized because ... ?
From the very sparse info on the page, it seems this project does what so many other chains do to make payments faster and cheaper: They log them on a database that is synchronized across only a few computers.
In other words: I can't find any info on that page explaining how they plan to achieve decentralization.
No, you misunderstand and are closed minded. Their corporate leadership has already stated in the roadmap and core value document that it will be neutral and permissionless.
Bitcoin is _not_ magically produced by the sun striking the ground.
There are mild returns to scale in running large-scale mining operations and as a result mining power seems to actually be somewhat centralized under the control of a small number of players: https://digiconomist.net/cryptocurrency-decentralization/
Not to mention that "decentralization" is a technical property and not necessarily desirable in itself. Users might care about fairness, avoiding sanctions, purchasing illegal goods, etc, but these are only weakly connected to technical decentralization.
In March 2023, the New York Times identified a list of
just 34 Bitcoin mining facilities (controlled by 22
different entities) in the United States, which
represented about a third of the total worldwide
Bitcoin mining network at the time.
If we extrapolate from that, it would be 66 entities that control 100% of Bitcoin mining. Miner revenue is somewhere about $50M per day. So on average one of those miners makes very roughly $1M per day, say $365M per year.
34 such $365M/year entities would have to collude to attack bitcoin. And accept that their business is severely damaged afterwards.
So much for the decentralization and security of Bitcoin.
US companies have great reporting. Every quarter you get a nice report with GAAP numbers. In Europe, for example, reporting is less frequent and murkier. Reports often don't even include standardized net earnings.
Top US companies like Microsoft, Google, Apple, Nvidia, Tesla, Meta, all have intelligent, driven, forward looking CEOs. Most other companies have CEOs asleep at the wheel. Can anyone name a smaller public company or a public company outside the US with a highly driven, forward looking CEO?
Every day when I am out in the city, I am amazed by how many jobs we have NOT managed to replace with AI yet.
For example, cashiers. There are still many people spending their lives dragging items over a scanner, reading a number from a screen, holding out their hand for the customer to put money in, and then sorting the coins into boxes.
Self checkout has been a thing for ages. Heck in Japan the 711s have cashiers but you put the money into a machine that counts and distributes change for them.
Supermarkets are actually getting rid of self checkouts due to crime. Surprise surprise, having less visible "supervision" in a store results in more shoplifting than having employees who won't stop it anyway.
It’s also just resulting in atrocious customer experience.
I can go to Safeway or the smaller chain half a block away.
The Safeway went all in on self checkouts. The store is barely staffed, shelves are constantly empty, you have to have your receipt checked by security every time, they closed the second entrance permanently, and for some reason the place smells.
Other store has self checkouts but they also have loads of staff. I usually go through the normal checkout because it’s easier and since they have adequate staff and self checkout lines it tends to be about the same speed to.
End result is I don’t shop at Safeway if I can avoid it.
Cashiers should not, and will not prevent theft. They're not paid nearly enough to get in danger, and it is not their job.
I'm sure you can find videos of thefts in San Francisco if you need a visual demonstration. No cashier is going to jump in front of someone to stop a theft.
True, but having a cashier standing there waiting to scan your items will prevent most normal people from stealing. Sure, some will brazenly walk right past with a TV on their shoulder, but most people won't.
If there's no cashier and you're doing it yourself, a whole lot more people will "forget" to scan a couple items, and that adds up.
There's usually a security person or two in the store, looking over the self checkouts. I agree that job prevents a lot of people from becoming opportunistic thiefs, but I'm making a distinction between cashiers and security. Today the store needs both.
> The fact that a cashier does not prevent all thefts does not mean a cashier does NOTHING for theft.
Yes, for one thing, it ignores that a very large share of retail theft is insider theft, and that cash handling positions are the largest portion of that.
They absolutely do. It’s not the cashiers being security, it’s having adequate staffing making people less likely to steal. Its not stopping crimes that have occurred it’s just reducing opportunistic theft.
Detecting theft does not mean theft is prevented. You then need the government to prosecute, and impose sufficient punishment to deter theft. This is not cheap, nor a given that it will happen.
You ban them from coming back in after a few warnings. Stores seem really icy about facial recognition right now though. The optics are pretty bad (a play on words pun?)
There have been a few stores that won't really stop people from coming back, they just quietly file charges, and then the person finds out next time they get pulled over or something along those lines.
Use your army of lawyers to help file misdemeanor theft charges of course. Then get one out of 100 of the defendants who actually has something to lose to pay big damages to fund it to happen again the next time.
So take the broken god awful experience of self checkout and add another layer of “I think you did something wrong so now you have to stand around waiting for an actual person”?
You mean ordering kiosks and self-checkout machines? We have automated it, it's just not everywhere has implemented it.
The one I'm desperately waiting for is serverless restaurants—food halls already do it but I want it everywhere. Just let me sit down, put an order into the kitchen, pick it up myself. I promise I can walk 20 feet and fill my own drink cup.
You seem to like self-checkout processes. I don't. I avoid any place where I have to interact with a screen. Be it a screen installed on-premise or the screen on my phone. It is not a relaxing experience for me.
There used to be two humans standing at the cash register,
now because of software, automatic change machines, and cameras there is only one. One of those humans' jobs got automated.
Call it what you like but replacing the work of humans one for one is difficult and usually not necessary. Reformulating the problem to one that machines can solve is basically the whole game. You don't need a robot front desk worker to greet you, you just need a tablet to do your check in.
This. And I do their work a lot more slowly because it's not my regular job, and I actually already had to do some of the work (getting the items out of my trolley and onto the conveyor). Now I stand there forever fumbling with barcodes, trying to get bags to stay open, switching between getting items out of the trolley and scanning. The old checkout system is so much more efficient when you are buying anything more than a couple of items at a time.
Yeah this is like saying Aldi “automated” cart return. They didn’t, they got every shopper to do the work themselves. Automated cart return would be if you just gave the cart a little “giddyup!” when you were done and it found its way home. Or those cart conveyor belts at Ikea, it’s only part of the process but that part is automated.
[edit] Aldi did automate the management of getting shoppers to do that work, because there’s not a person standing there taking and handing out quarters, but (very simple) machines. Without those machines they might need a person, so that hypothetical role (the existence of which might make the whole scheme uneconomical) is automated. But they didn’t automate cart return, all that work’s still being done by people.
Do you consider all forms of "self-service" to not be automation of a job that previously required an additional human?
Like checking in at the airport via kiosk/app for example. Do you consider that to be "doing the work" of the desk clerk? Or say ordering at a restaurant by scanning a QR code, in both cases I have to look at the menu, decide what I want, and input my order into a system. But with the QR code there's no longer a human necessary.
Many "productivity improvements" in the modern era are just externalizing the problem. It's like saying I automated recycling by dumping all my unsorted stuff in my neighbors bin.
Japan does this a lot of places, and it makes the experience much easier.
And I think the entire mid and low range restaurants could replace servers with a tablet and people would be happier. I'm not sure how it doesn't make more money for the restaurant too, making it so easy to order more during a meal.
Serverless restaurants have been common in Australia for decades. You just get a buzzer and then need to go pick up your food when it is ready. There's a single person behind the bar to take orders and pour beer/wine/soda.
Seems like perfect option for robots (not humanoid). Bring me my food. You can still keep people in kitchen for a bit, but well servers in many restaurants are not really needed.
Pharmacists are my favourite. They're a human vending machine that is bad at counting and reading. But law protects them. Pretty good regulatory capture.
Please actually understand what pharmacists actually do and _why_ AI is not a good replacement for them yet, unless you want to die of certain drugs interactions.
Hahaha, this drug interaction nonsense is what online people tell each other. It isn't even real. It's like "nice trigger discipline" or "the postal police don't fuck around" and shit like that. Just something that is not true but for some reason is internet urban legend.
Retail pharmacists are human vending machines. You don't need AI. It's a computer prescription written by a far more qualified human which is then provided to a nigh-illiterate half-wit who will then try as hard as possible to misread it. Having then misread it, the patient must then coax them out of their idiocy until they apologize and fulfill what's written.
Meanwhile some Internet guy who gets all his information from the Internet will repeat what he's heard on the Internet. I know this because anyone passingly acquainted with this would have at least made the clarification between compounding pharmacists and retail pharmacists or something.
Most of the world does pharmacy dispensing of medicine just fine or much better without the byzantine bureaucracy that it is in the States.
Pharmacists in the US is the epitome of regulatory captured job security.
Pharmacists are a fantastic example. My pharmacy is delivered my prescription by computer. They text me, by computer, when it's ready to pick up. I drive over there … and it isn't ready, and I have to loiter for 15 minutes.
Also, after the prescription ends, they're still filling it. I just never pick it up. The autonomous flow has no ability to handle this situation, so now I get a monthly text that my prescription is ready. The actual support line is literally unmanned, and messages given it are piped to /dev/null.
The existing automation is hot garbage. But C-suite would have me believe our Lord & Savior, AI, will fix it all.
The only way AI could fix this if it said "replace the pharmacist with a vending machine and hire a $150k junior engineer to make sure the DB is updated afterwards", which you never know, Claude Opus 4 might suggest. At that point, we'll know AGI has been achieved.
I wish they would go public.
Would be very interesting to see how their business is doing compared to IONOS and OVH.
We need more public cloud companies in Europe.