Soooo many handles to remember to free in the right order, even before you got into OLE/COM. It was a lot of fun to come up with your own C++ wrappers to put them under RAII -- and this was before "smart pointers." You sort of had to iterate on a few versions of that, trying out mechanisms to scope sharing, to understand why MFC was the way it was.
Fond memories of the #winprog IRC channel. Discussions there, theForger's tutorial, and Charles Petzold's books got me going on Startup Control Panel and the like.
Modern money has operated as you describe for less than one human lifetime. It might not work long-term, and indeed there are significant reasons for worry that it won't. Not that it _can't_ in principle, but that it _won't_ due to mismanagement and misaligned political incentives. A future alternate system might well have deflationary characteristics.
If you mean Bretton Woods, that is in many ways an implementation detail. Ignoring the Great Depression (which probably _should_ be treated as a special case), and brief (~1 year) shocks after WW1 and 2, the last time the US, to take an example, saw _persistent_ deflation was the late 19th century.
If you mean to hold USD-denominated deposits in a local bank, the local government can easily confiscate or convert them. Numerous such examples.
If you mean to hold USD paper notes, that does happen a lot all over the world as you say; and not necessarily legally. Many advantages to digitization (and some disadvantages).
This seems like a comment from 10 years ago. In 2025, Larry Fink just announced he's a "big believer" at Davos, and the President of the United States ordered his team to evaluate creating a huge reserve.
Like, it's valid to point to its historical volatility, but it struck me as intellectually dishonest to say it's been (historically) risky without also acknowledging that holders have (historically) been well-rewarded for their risk appetite. High Sharpe ratio, etc.
To me it's never been that "intrinsic value" of Bitcoin makes much sense, but that it holds up a mirror to the incumbent system and how little that makes sense either!
Credit default swaps are not magic; if you can correctly predict future default risk you can use CDSes to take money from people who predict wrong (and this also provides information to the market, encouraging the underlying to be more accurately... never mind).
Not really, to the extent that Bell Labs undertook true basic research for its own sake, without much concern for any short/medium-term commercial potential. (No need to rock the boat commercially, while the parent corporation had a regulated monopoly to milk!)
Maybe some case could be made for Alphabet's "Other Bets" collectively, but...the Bell Labs column has nine Nobel Prizes in it...
