transaction fees are not increasing though, so they can't offset miner rewards. they have been in the $100k-$200k per day range for a long time, with only occasional breakouts: https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/charts/transaction-fees-... and the trend is not to the upside. in fact with the arrival of ETFs in 2024 the trend is clearly downwards.
This can have another explanation as well: the moment a block is found, the miner starts building on top of the previous block but hasn't constructed a new full block of transactions yet as that costs a bit of time to calculate and distribute. In this period, a new block could be found.
Blocks are Merkle trees, only the head transaction contains global seed. So, for one to mine block, one needs to walk Merkle tree up from head and then finish work with small amount of data in the block header.
Thus, the time spent mining block is directly dependent on the logarithm of number of transactions in the block.
If one can mine a block with 3000 transactions (11-12 hashes to the header) in 10 minutes, one can mine a block with one transaction (1 hash to header) about ten times as fast.
The construction of the block is negligible if we talk about complete block mining time.
Not downvoting you but such a broad statement is pretty meaningless if you don't segment by age group. Also Tiktok captures almost the same percentage of US ad video spending - that wouldn't be the case if youtube had so many more viewers that matter to advertisers.
The feedstock has to come from somewhere, right? I’m assuming many farmers would prefer feeding it into stable vats of algae or fungus than dealing with the risks of another epidemic-induced chicken cull.
> I’m assuming many farmers would prefer feeding it into stable vats of algae or fungus than dealing with the risks of another epidemic-induced chicken cull.
Many farmers don't have the financial means to redesign their entire pipeline to move from birds to fungus. "farming" is in the name but I also suspect there is nothing in common between raising chicken in cages and mushrooms in sterile containers in term of know-how, maintenance, &c.
Factory farms consume far more feed than they can grow on site though, so the real power isn’t in the chicken farmers, it’s the ones growing chicken feed, and they’re probably used to switching crops to suit market demands.
And the farmers who do grow their own feed are probably smaller operations targeting higher quality meat than factory-farmed chicken, so they’re not the ones that vat-grown meat-substitutes would be competing with.
Alternatively, one of the poultry meat giants will just buy it and produce it themselves so they can capture the vegan/vegetarian market too. Why compete when you can consolidate?
Microsoft is using them in order to be better positioned than other big players, and they succeeded, even if Google is now starting to catch up. They can withdraw their support when and how they see fit, own exclusive IP rights to OpenAI's models and the hardware is their own anyway. They only lack the researchers, but they'll then be on the market.
There's also a possible scenario where the online ads market around search engines gets completely disrupted and the only remaining avenues for ad spending are around content delivery systems (social media, youtube, streaming, webpages, etc.). All other discovery happens within chatbots and they just get a revenue share whenever a chatbot refers a user to a particular product. I think ChatGPT is soon going to roll out this feature where you can do walmart shopping without leaving the chat.
This is unrelated to the cloudflare incident but thanks a lot for making that page. I keep checking it from time to time and it's basically the main data source for my long term investing.
Browse TikTok and you already see AI generated videos popping up. Could well be that the platforms with the most captivating content will not be a "social" network but one consisting of some tailor made feed for you. That could undermine the business model of the existing social networks - unless they just fill it with AI generated content themselves. In other words: Facebook should really invest in good video generating models to keep their platforms ahead.
Not gonna happen. They'll just threaten to move to another country. It's a prisoners dilemma for all countries. You can either give in to demands for lower taxation and hope that re-domiciling will over compensate for the tax reduction or increase taxation and lose tax payers to other countries.
The US taxes on global income all citizens, even those living abroad. The only way to avoid that is to give up your citizenship, but then you have to pay an exit tax as if you had liquidated your assets. Even if you go to a country with a taxation treaty, you'll still be paying the minimum of the two countries to some country. If the other country taxes you less, you pay the difference to the US.
That's the same as saying, you eventually pay the maximum tax rate of the involved countries. I think that's the standard practice of double-taxation avoidance agreements (DTAA).
The one thing about rich people is that they’re very greedy. But that greed often fuels economic activity. They don’t take the money their companies earn and hide it under a mattress, because inflation would make it lose value. Instead, they reinvest it, which either creates new jobs or expands the company’s assets.
Expanding assets can mean building new factories, ordering more raw materials, or entering new markets. Each of these steps involves third-party vendors: construction firms to build facilities, delivery companies to transport materials, mining companies to extract resources, suppliers, logistics providers, marketers, and contractors.
All of this spending creates jobs. Maybe not directly within their own company, but across the many other businesses that support their growth.
Where is all the cash going then? Dividend payouts have stayed roughly the same since 2000 and S&P 500 trade volumes have sky-rocketed since then. Firms and individuals are reinvesting cash at the same historical rate.
It's really not a dilemma. Those are US dollars - property of the united states government - and we can give them to whoever will use them best. Forcibly taking billionaires money seems scary, but when you realize most of them hate the median American (what else could you call the current wealth gap), it's the only sensible option. We need a new class of elites that love and have connections (race, history, religion) to their people. That being said, there's a reason "blood and soil" gets such a bad rep - our current elites would quickly be replaced, so the dominant narrative is "you're hitler if you want to take care of your countrymen".
Meanwhile, our tax dollars fund a genocide and we poor trillions into AI while the rest of the country suffers.
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