No worries! Appreciate the reply. Amazing to me that, more than 20 years after the web's mainstream deployment, people still buy as much as they do offline at all.

Nice post! But I don't know if you you've fully captured the full extent of how retail is being disrupted. I've seen statistics saying that, in fact, more than 300 retailers have filed for bankruptcy this

Thanks!

I don't really fear "rogue, malicious, biased, or otherwise harmful AI" as that is projecting human emotions and tendencies onto something that is not human. Not necessarily. AI is learning from

Thoughtful as always, Scott. I've long followed your work and agree with this entirely. There's an excellent quote from Arthur C. Clarke for me that sums up the sentiment: "The goal of the future

Regarding the risks, it would seem that (1) we can mitigate the impact of automation through some kind of basic income and (2) we can prevent rogue, malicious, biased, or otherwise harmful AI through

Ah, true. I believe you receive the currency for nothing, but you can’t spend it unless other people trust you. So, yes, that’s a subtle nuance because if you have me a US dollar it’s already widely accepted

I would anticipate an even bigger increase in negative news now that you have professional short-sellers playing the market through Bitcoin futures. It would be interesting to analyze conversations about

As I understand it, coins are continuously minted for each user. And the value of each user’s coins is related to how much people trust them, and how many people trust them. So it seems, effectively, it

This is worth a read: Circles cryptocurrency basic income proposal.

I think this post raises a few issues, so want to deal with each independently: Cryptocurrency mania is like the dot-com boom: Having lived through the latter (I had, like, 48,000 options in a company

Sounds like you speak from experience. Noted.

Governments are struggling to regulate cryptocurrencies, so I don’t know how they would begin to tax them. I think the best they could probably do is tax exchange of real-world goods, such as real estate,

Thanks!

@michaelten have you seen Circles? It's a cryptocurrency for universal basic income that's designed to address the verification issue. I just discovered it today—I have no involvement with it. Their approach

Yes, housing prices are very high. Fortunately, we bought into the market a few years ago, and own our home. I'm often tempted to sell it, semi-retire, and move my family to a small town. But we're quite

PS: I didn't mean to upvote myself, but got a scary warning when I tried to remove it.

I haven't explored the intersection of basic income and cryptocurrencies much, but now I'm curious. I love the idea of decentralizing wealth without an intermediary, but I don't think many existing

Thanks. You've been on here a long time, it seems, so I could probably learn a few things from you! Curious to know if you're working directly in AI, or if it's just a side interest for you.

Thanks. Good to hear I'm not crazy—sometimes I just feel like a total pessimist! What's interesting to me is that the quantitative data is supported by qualitative evidence, as probably 25% of commercial