The main assumption here that's wrong is that government is competent at IT. It's not.

Even giant companies have a really hard time integrating new IT infrastructure. A failed IT upgrade is one of the most oft cited reasons for firing CEOs, for example. Incidentally, this is why Costco refuses to upgrade their systems. It's too costly and the chance of failure high.

If you want to know how bad it is, just remember what happened with healthcare.gov. Government is an order of magnitude worse than large companies. CBDCs and the dystopian nightmare you're talking about is almost an existential risk to government. Think about some software bug that doesn't let you buy groceries or pay for a used car from a neighbor. It's bound to cause way more strife than almost anything else. This is why despite the power to do so, China is rolling out their CBDC slowly and very carefully. Even then, there are going to be big glitches.

The VCs they raised from are all heavy altcoiners. There's now a decent chance they move to Solana or something if they don't get OP_CAT.

Let me just say that I'm a very happy member. Andy does not pay for any endorsement from me and despite being good friends with Andy, I joined because it was an economically rational decision.

I used to work in health care billing (athenaHealth before it went public) and my wife used to be in the medical field, so I know more than most about what a complete disaster the whole field of health insurance is. It's a robber's den of regulatory capture and rent-seeking and I couldn't be happier that CrowdHealth exists.

Also, if they don't ask for the money you put into your health account every month, they send it back! I've never had a health insurance company do that. And now that they have Fold integration, you can convert that straight to Bitcoin. It's a wonderful service and I truly believe it's better for your health.

The article just destroyed Paul Sztorc's Hivemind and in turn, Drivechains, not to mention all those altcoins that were focused on some platform for betting/gambling.

The article makes sense to me and I don't really see any substantial flaws in it. There is a way to subsidize using inflation that would motivate savers, but then that's essentially what the stock market and real estate are now. Anyway, nice find!

Patronage systems are a lot more realistic.

What backup version do you have? Armory used a proprietary backup format (the wallet was created before BIP39), and it uses the backup to generate the private keys in a deterministic fashion. IIRC, they are all letters, no numbers. Anyway, it's been a while, but I used to work on that code base so message me on Nostr if you want help.