Social Security’s “trust fund” is an empty pit of debt obligations. Benefits to current recipients are paid with incoming payroll taxes. Any difference is made up with additional taxes or monetary inflation, by way of Treasury bonds. They “reinvest it in the economy” if there’s ever a surplus, e.g., through military contractors. It finances the national debt.

Putting aside the quirks of that setup, the basic function is that the taxes you pay in now are not an investment in your own future, you’re basically just paying for the retirement of older people now. The expectation is that someone down the road will then pay taxes to finance your retirement. Hence, how SS was able to start paying benefits almost immediately (3 years) after payroll taxes started being collected.

What is your prediction for what will become of it, though. GDP growth stops and people start bursting into flames? You know we’ve actually observed this before, right?

Now, if you do mean “capitalism” not in the plain definition of “an economy based around private ownership”, but the more specific version where control of capital is highly centralized - there’s some truth to the idea that economic decline can cause people to start looking to reform that system. True of any system, really, because people generally don’t want to see their quality of life decrease. But that’s very different than an economic system “requiring” it to function.

Capitalism does not “collapse” with 0 or negative GDP growth. I don’t know where people got this idea. You only really see any sort of “collapse” if the social structure breaks down - the basic behaviors of trading continue even in extreme crises, insofar as a society operates with property assigned to individuals like that. Not counting “bubbles” and such as a “collapse”.

Unfortunately our own pensions and such are also getting wiped out by the same forces. And with less access to insider information.

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.