Not quite the same. A lot of “give money away” programs look the same. But the incentive design is important. This program is over 3 years and is monthly. This means a few things:
1) if you make a mistake a blow 1k on stupid things, you have a chance to learn next month
2) it is over a 3 year period, which allows the recipient to make decisions like try go to school to improve their overall productivity in society in the long run
When you do cash relief in lump sums and without any long term reliability, the above effects are diminished.
The money is also being given to people who are enrolled in the "General Relief Opportunities for Work, or GROW, program, which provides employment and training services for young adults who face employment and educational barriers and often come from vulnerable backgrounds, including being unhoused or unsheltered."
So, it might be the case that these are exactly the people who are motivated and can realize huge benefits from a little extra cash as they're trying to start their career. The obvious negative alternative is that they're coming from vulnerable backgrounds, and having easy cash in their pocket might lead them back to the same troubles that they are trying to escape from. Well, I guess that's the reason for the pilot program!
Assuming the Gen 1 lives to 100 and each Gen has 3 kids every 25 years, then at the end you have 120 mouths to feed.
100 years of 4% growth above inflation would be rough 50x so 500M. But that assumes no consumption over the 100 years. Either way the growth of people overcomes the growth of resources over time.
Why would you assume 3 kids for every generation when birth rates are currently below replacement level? Also, add in rich people marrying people of similar socioenomic status, and you end up with quite wealthy families down the line.
For the wealthy when people refer to growth versus consumption the context is almost always against the return generated from their portfolio, and the two are separate figures. That "4% growth above inflation" does not include what the capital owner is drawing for his own income. It's almost certainly more like an 8% - 10% return gives 3% to taxes and inflationary pressure, 3% - 4% for income, and the rest to growth.
And, yes, it's quite easy for the wealthy to get investments that return 7% - 8% with low to modest risk of loss. It's much harder to get more than that, but it's not difficult to generate substantial returns from even a modest portfolio in the low 7-figure range.
Year 0: 10m
Year 25: 33.8m. 3 kids, give them 10m each, leaving you with 3.8m for the rest of time
This repeats as long as you want.
Over 100 years at 5% you have 1.315 billion over 120 people, which is 10.95m each.
At 4% you'd have to have a 29 year generation, which is certainly more realistic (I know very few people who had the first kid under the age of 30). And would everyone have 3 kids? Don't forget to account for kids who die before they reproduce too.
Re environmental costs, I have yet to hear anyone make an analysis of the environmental cost of the banking system or an equivalent; that is, how much to warm all the offices, the computers and servers, the transportation costs of cars & planes for all the employees.
Also, proof of stake will reduce 99% of the environmental cost.
But there are over a billion daily credit card transactions alone - 3000 times as much.
So if each credit card transaction were replaced by a Bitcoin transaction, we'd use 30 times as much electricity as the entire planet produces.
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These numbers are so grossly lopsided and so widely bandied about that when I hear someone say, "I have yet to hear anyone make an analysis of the environmental cost" I think, "Perhaps you don't want to hear it."
The banking system _exists_. It's what powers all our daily transactions. It's what has been tried and tested for hundreds of years, and got regulated. Even if Ethereum or coin-of-the-week takes off, this existing banking system will not go away. What you're doing is a well known crypto-lover tactic to distract from the fact that cryptocurrencies are an ecological catastrophe.
Meanwhile, we're burning coal to produce bitcoin whose only value is that number gets green and goes up. Eth is slightly better on that point, but still wasted multiple TWh of electricity while it was in PoW mode, and it still is today.
I strongly disagree with this loaded characterization of mining as "waste". Converting power into value is the opposite of waste, and that's not even addressing the network security that it provides. Mining provides useful work. If you don't like cryptocurrency, fine, but don't pretend that no value is being created or that no purpose exists.
Waste would be an incandescent bulb that throws away the majority of its energy generating heat that isn't used for any purpose.
The issue isn’t the useful product of light or a functional crypto system, the issue is the amount of waste heat produced by the light bulb or data center.
This should be obvious when you consider proof of work systems that generate less waste heat by using a memory bound rather than a computationally bound algorithm. They both operate on the principle of wealth destruction as all proof of work algorithms do, but you get different externalities.
Interestingly, if you found something really useful to do with the waste heat of crypto then the systems would become roughly equivalent.
PS: The idea of a memory bound algorithm is 1 million dollars of RAM consumes less energy than 1 million dollars of ASIC’s.
the issue is the amount of waste heat produced by the light bulb or data center.
..which in the case of the average crypto, is overshadowed many times over. One block mined equates to $333K worth BTC generated alone, and that's not counting the value of every transaction included in that block. A block happens every 10 minutes give or take, so in an hour, that's about 2 million worth of coin generated and 13K transactions.
There's no way on earth every bitcoin miner, combined, is using $2M+ worth of electricity every hour, even factoring in negative environmental externalities (which in the case of crypto mining, will be lower than most people think given their proximity to renewable, hence cheap, energy.)
Coal power plants generate more value in the from of electricity than they lose value as waste heat. Otherwise they wouldn’t operate. But, clearly the creation of value is independent of something being wasted as you can have more or less efficient power plants that generate the same value using more or less fuel and thus more or less waste heat.
Similarly, as I just pointed out different algorithms would use more or less energy and therefore be more or less efficient. Thus the heat produced is a waste byproduct mining, and electricity is the fuel. A more efficient process simply uses less fuel though it may have higher capital costs.
The same is true of say cars, you’re burning gas because driving is useful. But, increasing efficiency means less fuel while creating identical value etc etc.
But that heat you speak of applies to any kind of long-running computation. Whether that be render farms, ML model training, distributed computing like BOINC, or anything else with similar properties.
It seems to me that crypto is being unfairly singled out. Things that are digital have meaningful existence.
Increasing efficiency is a huge aspect of every other field in computing with companies literally spend 10’s of billions of dollars increasing efficiency of software and hardware every year.
It’s directly offensive to many people in the field that an inefficient first implementation is maintained because people’s investments in hardware are considered more valuable than anything else. Not latency, not transactions per second, not environmental costs, just maximize the value of their hardware investments.
Comparing the banking sector to crypto is wildly optimistic. Crypto is still smaller than just the Gold market both in number of transactions and total stored value of 9.4 trillion. Gold transactions, mining, and storage still produces significantly less CO2 while also being useful in industry.
That’s not meant as an attack, it’s simply a ballpark comparison. For those pro crypto take it a sign of possible future growth.
The banking system does a lot of other things than transaction processing. Mortgages, loans commercial banking, trade finance, acquisition financing etc are 95% of what banks do, and cryptocoins won't replace them in any way.
Of course even if you count all that, the power consumption per transaction will be at least five orders of magnitude lower than the 0.6MWh per transaction in BTC.
This whataboutism ignores the logic of the question: the banking system is not incentivized to burn power. You would expect each node to try to minimize their input costs to maximize returns. For a given unit of compute, putting in more energy does not increase profits for any participant in the traditional banking system. This isn’t the case for cryptocurrencies, so they are asked a fair question.
1) you could just post the last block ID to an active blockchain or centralized data store if you must, then anyone can download the blockchain via a torrent for example and verify the entire chain; this just requires some trusted data store. If you don’t have one, then you are screwed anyhow and probably shouldn’t have shut down that blockchain.
2) if there is utility in the blockchain, chances are it won’t shut down.
It adds a new potential way monetize the web. Currently, the prevailing model is to offer a “free” product, where user data is being collected and sold to whoever is willing to pay.
Brave introduces the ability to pay per use and if you want to, you can opt-in to ads that are targeted based on anonymized data for targeting and you can earn BAT for doing so.
It basically changes the incentive model the ad industry and arguably a lot of the internet.
When you do cash relief in lump sums and without any long term reliability, the above effects are diminished.