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Davide
@0xdavide
❌📈When you read around "$XRP at 200$" or "X platform guarantees 10% per week" stay away because there is no infinite money! We often talk about "compound interest", "exponential growth" and "crazy prices" but always remember the well-known example of the "rice chessboard"! A merchant went to the King to show him a game he had invented: it was the game of chess. The King, intrigued, started playing and had a lot of fun. As a form of gratitude, the King asked his guest what he wanted as a gift. The merchant replied that he would be satisfied with receiving 1 grain of rice on the first square of the chessboard, 2 grains on the second, 4 grains on the third, etc. and so on up to the 64th square that completed the chessboard. The King, amazed by such modesty, ordered his officials to immediately satisfy the merchant's request.
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Davide
@0xdavide
The officials, performing the calculations, realized that the number of grains to be delivered increased enormously. After a few days, they went to the king saying that to satisfy the guest's request, the whole world's rice would not be enough. The number of grains of rice that would have to land on the last square of the chessboard would be equal to 2 to the power of 63, equal to about ten million trillion grains of rice. In the real world, exponential growth cannot be sustained, due to mathematical, physical, technological or computer limits (depending on the context): ✦Infinite growth of an asset: there is no infinite money (printing dollars decreases its value: supply dilutes growth). ✦Ponzi scheme: it makes high profits as long as new investors enter, but collapses when growth slows. ✦Moore's Law: the density of transistors in chips has doubled every two years, but we are close to the physical limits of miniaturization (quantum effects and thermal dissipation).
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Davide
@0xdavide
✦Internet Speed: the increase in speed meets the physical limits of fiber optic infrastructure and transmission protocols. ✦Subprime mortgage crisis (2008): easy credit fueled an exponential growth in loans, until the system collapsed. ✦Aircraft speed: at some point it collided with the physical limits of the aircraft: limited number of seats and fuel consumption (making the expense unsustainable). ✦Oil extraction: production grows exponentially until extraction costs exceed profits.
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