You can program anything up to and including judicial oversight and interaction rescission into a smart contract. Not all existing laws make sense or have a positive effect on this ecosystem. Many have a negative effect, speaking from experience.

I will not be able to convince someone who’s stubbornly ignoring everything I’m saying. Go waste someone else’s time.

You can mimic any existing setup for tracking deeds and similar, or invent new ones, with the added quality that they can’t be doctored. Once something is recorded, it’s recorded for good.

What do they “make”? They control for the risks in social economic interaction with potentially adversarial parties. Ethereum is proof of stake, it doesn’t burn up tons of fossil fuels. And the contracts aren’t subject to human interpretation after being authored, they’re deterministic at the protocol level (save for the entire network deciding to revoke the contract).

Why are you making fundamental mischaracterizations of the technology while acting like an expert? What you’re doing is dishonest.

Yes, work. Smart contracts are designed, programmed and, if they’re done right, rigorously audited for correctness. Then you have user-facing interface and everything surrounding that as well. Look at the documentation of AAVE, for one example.

And this isn’t even getting into the protocol level (L1 or L2) work either. Bitcoin was relatively simple, Ethereum is not. They’ve spent years crafting these systems to function for PoS, L2 support, sharding, rollups, etc., at scale.

Yes, for the limited subset of ERC20s or whatever you describe as “ponzicoins”. Things that actually do nothing, particular not doing anything more than L1 cryptos but “this is yet another token”, are not really adding any value. But I would be really surprised if you can name any more complex contracts than ERC20s (or ERC721s), which is where the work in the space actually goes.

I reckon most of that already is. A real estate escrow smart contract is maybe 200-300 lines long in Solidity, depending of course on what it supports (contingencies and such). You may want to actually go look around, because there’s I don’t know how many millions of lines of Solidity already written. It doesn’t all get as much publicity as NFTs.

“Greatest fool” description relies on the precept of its utility or demand returning to zero in a near-future timeframe. If people have utility for “the thing”, that won’t be the case.

Also they have some smart contract capabilities which I suppose Ethereum people think are important. But I’ve never seen any practical use for that stuff.

Anything you need complicated multi-party interactions for that you want guarantees on. Real estate escrow comes to mind first. Depository accounts with yield. An immutable archive of records. Multi-signature corporate treasuries. Whatever. It’s programmable money. It’s not even necessarily monetary, because smart contracts can just deal with arbitrary data.

Never impressive to see a technical audience shit all over Ethereum for internet points. By far the least scammy crypto people have actually dedicated years into building something real on.

According to…that woman with a book about his wealth? Article says 70 to 200 btw, not 200. Sources elsewhere guess much lower (tens of billions).

US GDP is 27.72 trillion. That’s the movement of money annually.

Yes, Putin’s in charge, with his one hundred million dollars (sarcasm, not exact figure) and zero sway over the entire Western economic establishment.

If you look at the entire span of all cultures and all history, I think there’s tons of random examples of essentially one form or another of religious or ideological thinking that caused massive atrocities. Genghis Khan comes to mind as someone responsible for millions of deaths through, as the author of your first link puts it, a kind of “mouth with a bottomless pit” mentality of devouring everything. Hitler is distinguished in part by the mechanization of his efforts, but that is true of every imperialist genocide of the 20th and 21st centuries. The people he killed in open genocide don’t even scratch a tenth of the total killed by both sides in that same war - which really begs the question, what is the distinction between war and genocide? Combatants vs. non-combatants? If someone is talked into fighting, does their life suddenly stop having any value? Is it less a crime in ethical terms, not legal terms, to kill an average soldier? It gets justified by saying the other side of a conflict had some devastatingly evil ideology, but is killing someone actually the best way to deal with them having evil ideas? I’m more inclined to take the stance uh, I think Steinbeck said, “All war is a symptom of man’s failure as a thinking animal.” The deepest evil is the people leading us to slaughter each other, not the people we’re slaughtering.

Bro… Not historical Nazis? You mean the ones that committed the most despicable evils in all of humanity’s written history?

Just reading that a few times and I think, how exactly do you determine that? The number of deaths? Because the genocide of indigenous people in the “Americas” exceeds it several times over. You think about the “Congo Free State”, it had deaths on the same order of magnitude and a system of total enslavement and mass mutilations/executions based on failing to meet work quotas. Not to trivialize one, but to make sure others aren’t ignored. When it comes to the genocide conversation, it seems like European imperialism in Africa just gets completely left out.

Increase the number of participants in an economy, increases both supply and demand for labor, long story short. “Immigrants taking our jobs” is the stupidest talking point in human history.

I only see one country bragging about influencing U.S. election outcomes, and it’s not Russia. You guys constructed Pepe Silvia-level theories about Russian influence and ignored the domestic corporatocracy and entire U.S. empire in favor of the media’s chosen explanation of “Russian influence”. As the saying more or less goes, nobody is immune to propaganda, including you. Modern propaganda narratives include accusations of propaganda leveled at the propaganda narrative’s scapegoats.

History will look back at the American empire and judge all its complicit civilians equally. It’s Democrat vanity that makes them think they’re not in the same genocidal boat as Republicans. You may think of yourselves in another class, but your politicians were complicit in the same crimes.

Had that same conversation with a coworker many years back. He pitched the “time is money” theory. Really, I’m salaried, this is off-hours work, I actually find it interesting and enjoyable, and save a fortune doing it, so that theory doesn’t apply very well.

Just practically speaking, hard work alone doesn’t cut it. You need to figure out how to get enough money out for the labor you’re putting in. Goes without saying, for many people that’s impossible, especially with no financial wiggle room. On top of whatever inequalities are inherent to capitalism, the government’s also gone out of their way to completely rig the rules of the game.

You’re kinda stretching it there.

Right, so up until the point the USDA PLC programs get exhausted (afaict ~$25B/yr), they compensate for the difference between the price floor (not sure if we’re above or below that now) and market price. But that’s a subsidy to the farmers, not an effect on the market price - the expense comes to taxpayers. And sometimes, they scoop up surplus through CCC, then remarket it elsewhere, an indirect/artificial market mechanism, which can include exports.