Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[scourge728]

As bad as that is, the thought of people trading pokemon for food made me laugh if I'm honest, just imagining someone trading a original holofoil charizard or whatever for a bag of something.... (the image in my head doesn't say)

[smjjames]

Wasn't that when the pokemon trading card game fad was at it's height? I wonder what the context was of that since it sounds like one of those silly things politicians say when musing out loud.

Though obviously it assumes EVERYBODY has them and that everybody understands how the values and rules work, etc.

[WealthyRadish]

That sounds like the expected behavior during hyperinflation. Everyone is eager to dump their currency before it depreciates into nothing, while also keen to hoard goods that are appreciating as quickly in value. The usual solution would be to address whatever triggered it, such as price controls or international sources of devaluation (which may only be directly effecting a tiny part of the economy), and then adopt a new currency. The immediate deflationary effect from demand for a new currency plus some interest rate manipulation should be enough to cool the speculative hoarding if the initial trigger for hyperinflation was resolved.

[smjjames]

Yeah, that's the usual solution to hyperinflation, but for whatever reason, Maduro and his allies are refusing to address it.

As for a new currency, I've heard that they tried to do a new cryptocurrency based on oil, but AFAIK, it doesn't appear to have taken off.

[Reelya]

Googling it, they are introducing a new base currency, called the Sovereign Bolivar.

https://www.finder.com.au/venezuela-to-use-petro-as-accounting-unit

The first-ever national cryptocurrency, along with the Bolívar Soberano, will become an economic measure.

Venezuela will begin using its controversial, US-banned Petro cryptocurrency as an authoritative accounting unit from the beginning of next week, according to the country's President Nicolás Maduro.

ABC International reports that during a recent televised interview Maduro revealed Venezuela and its state-run oil and gas company Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA) will use the digital currency and the South American nation's new Petro-backed sovereign bolivar currency as mandatory accounting units from Monday 20 August.

So, the current plan is that they mined a bunch of crypto-currency token and they're going to use them as a form of government accounting. To be honest, it's a good idea, because cryptocurrency tokens aren't that easy to forge or embezzle, since there's a permanent ledger. For an internal accounting system for a large organization, it's a concept with merit. According to this the new setup is starting on August 20th:
https://venezuelanalysis.com/news/13997
It's hard to say what's going to happen here, the language used by Maduro isn't really confidence inspiring: "detailed explanations of the salary system and the prices based on the Petro will be forthcoming on August 20" which sounds like some sort of price controls again. But one possibility is that people informally exchange the old money for the new money, if the new money is more stable (even if relatively). That would help to maintain value for the new money.

As far as the "Petro" crypto-currency goes I came across an article claiming the Venezuelan government has sold zero of them. So there's some sort of missing fact here. If they were a "money raising" scheme as is often suggested, why haven't they sold even one of them? Even a really shitty kickstarter gets a couple of backers. So, if they sold none then it makes a lot more sense that they were actually intended to be an internal form of accounting for the government, and that does seem to be what they're doing: "pegging" the new Bolivar to the Petro but using the Petro exclusively for internal accounting.

[LordBaal]

The problem is how do you say "my coin will have it's value tied to the petro" if the petro itself is worth nothing. I believe the Sovereign Bolivar will simply become a internal (national) exchange token that will be accepted by no one but among ourselves.

Fiat money is back up by a number of things, internal product, valuable resources, military might, and of course the credibility itself of the coin.... one of the most common critics against cryptocurrency is that they are worth nothing beyond the technology itself and the willingness to be accepted and used by others. So this jerks are combining the most weak aspects of both kind of currency into one.... of course their accounts are in dollars/bitcoins so they don't really care. As I said, this is only to lockup us from the rest of the world economically (even further than we already were).

[Reelya]

If they only use the Petro for internal government budgeting and it's tied to oil, then the coin's "market" value would be meaningless - it's not floated on a market, it would then only be used to track interdepartmental spending.

In a situation like that, the strength of blockchain is used - the immutable ledger. Having an immutable ledger is beneficial since you can't actually forge transactions without the private keys, and presumably, each department that has a budget measured against Petros will have their own private keys. Meanwhile, the public keys allow transparency in terms of actual transactions. If they're really trying to do sneaky money dealings, then a blockchain is a very poor choice for that: it's public and can't be easily cheated on. They would have created an internal database driven system if they wanted to make it all secret and centrally controlled. Managing government accounts in a blockchain actually has a lot of benefits if you e.g. live in a country where there's a lot of corruption or embezzlement. The immutable public ledger makes that much harder to hide.

[George_Chickens]

Have a lighthearted terror.

Several emulation sites have been served with serious copyright strikes and have been forced to remove all of their games. This is understandable, but with them have disappeared tens of romhacks that you cannot find anywhere else, and so many rare niche games from defunct companies that aren't popular enough for torrents and will never be sold again.

I know all is not lost as of yet, but this makes me seriously worried for archival purposes of old games. The copyright holders are playing a game they cannot win, but every time people have to reorganize is a time that these little things are likely going to be missing. The thought of media being lost permanently is not a pleasant one.

[SalmonGod]

Have a lighthearted terror.

Several emulation sites have been served with serious copyright strikes and have been forced to remove all of their games. This is understandable, but with them have disappeared tens of romhacks that you cannot find anywhere else, and so many rare niche games from defunct companies that aren't popular enough for torrents and will never be sold again.

I know all is not lost as of yet, but this makes me seriously worried for archival purposes of old games. The copyright holders are playing a game they cannot win, but every time people have to reorganize is a time that these little things are likely going to be missing. The thought of media being lost permanently is not a pleasant one.

Whenever stuff like this happens, I want to buy a bunch of hard drives and impulsively hoard everything remotely interesting I find on the internet.

[hops]

The thought of media being lost permanently is not a pleasant one.

Oh boy you have never studied art history then.

Media has been destroyed needlessly since the dawn of time and I doubt the digital era will eradicate it. The cure of canceer may have been thoguht of but lost when the researcher destroyed their work in a fit of anger. Wondrous, beautiful things are created and destroyed before meeting the public all the time.

And I think it's beautiful that our modern society has inadvertently turned all media into trash. Not like, low-quality trash, but still trash. Because when we connect to the near totality of human knowledge, the only way to stay sane is to ignore and discard most of it.

[KittyTac]

Have a lighthearted terror.

Several emulation sites have been served with serious copyright strikes and have been forced to remove all of their games. This is understandable, but with them have disappeared tens of romhacks that you cannot find anywhere else, and so many rare niche games from defunct companies that aren't popular enough for torrents and will never be sold again.

I know all is not lost as of yet, but this makes me seriously worried for archival purposes of old games. The copyright holders are playing a game they cannot win, but every time people have to reorganize is a time that these little things are likely going to be missing. The thought of media being lost permanently is not a pleasant one.

Whenever stuff like this happens, I want to buy a bunch of hard drives and impulsively hoard everything remotely interesting I find on the internet.

Internet Archive? Just drop random stuff in there.

[scourge728]

robots.txt is the bane of my existence tho, rip the Big Al game (grumbling about robots.txt and BBC and dinosaurs)

[Gentlefish]

Have a lighthearted terror.

Several emulation sites have been served with serious copyright strikes and have been forced to remove all of their games. This is understandable, but with them have disappeared tens of romhacks that you cannot find anywhere else, and so many rare niche games from defunct companies that aren't popular enough for torrents and will never be sold again.

I know all is not lost as of yet, but this makes me seriously worried for archival purposes of old games. The copyright holders are playing a game they cannot win, but every time people have to reorganize is a time that these little things are likely going to be missing. The thought of media being lost permanently is not a pleasant one.

if it matters, vimm is still up and serving hot ROMs which you should only download if you own the physical cartridge.

I personally try not to emulate games I can otherwise reliably own in my area but man do the companies make it hard sometimes.

[Yoink]

Vaguely unsettling dreams are the worst kind of dreams. o.o
Waking up at 5 am filled with unease and mounting dread and unable to even remember why is decidedly uncool. Maybe I just feel a bit unwell and decided to settle on a freaky dream as the reason, who knows.

...Ugh, I opened my phone to distract myself from this feeling so I could get back to sleep, yet here we are. Heh. Hopefully putting it in words will rob it of its power, at least.

[dragdeler]

-snip-