throwaway92937

Thanks. Is a tax accountant different than a CPA? That's definitely my priority now.

I'm still waiting for them to pencil me into a meeting, but so far it looks like three's not much I can do to reduce my capital gains tax burden.

If all global monetary transactions moved to Bitcoin, the amount of energy used by bitcoin would not increase, and global emissions caused by financial transactions would decrease by nearly 100%.

This analogy is only valid if you don't have a bank account.

It is valid criticism for me to say that I'm moving the bitcoin into the bank account, because that is the equivalent of dumping a truck load of motor oil in the lake, whereas bitcoin is the equivalent of dropping one drop of motor oil in the lake.

I also fly once per year. Honestly that's worse. I'm aware of the harm that I'm causing. I try to minimize it. But bitcoin is far better for the environment than tradfi companies.

Do you have an ethical option? One that doesn't invest in evil corporations?

Low cost of living countries and work-trades at communities.

Low cost of living countries and work-trades at communities.

The key to your misunderstanding is the "per transaction" part. It's a common misconception.

Now look at how much energy the whole financial industry uses. Put it on a line graph next to bitcoin's energy usage. You can almost not even see the blip of bitcoin's energy usage compared to the harm that the financial industry is causing.

Then learn how the energy does not increase as the transactions increases. This is a fact. The difficulty increases. It's mathematical. Read the white paper.

Then maybe you can finally see the lie perpetuated by the financial industry, which is a disaster to our environment compared to the greener alternative of bitcoin.

Do you also think smoking tobacco doesn't cause lung cancer? Or that burning fossil fuels doesn't cause climate change?

I am the one thinking rationally. You seem to be incapable of detecting junk science published by big corporations.

My guess is AI.

I can't say for sure because when I ask them, they won't tell me. But it seems like they use some third party to process their applications, and that third parry is probably using some sort of machine-learning or private AI algorithm that's throwing a false-positive. Two things would fix this:

1. Legally prevent banks from deferring account opening decisions to AI-powered systems, or
2. Legally require all banks to have a human-override in-place for when such systems inevitably throw false-positives

Right now it appears that the third party that tells the bank "yeah, don't open this account" doesn't really say why. Kinda like how AI doesn't tell you what it was trained-on to decide what word it should say next. It's incredibly frustrating.

Update: one time a bank did enumerate exactly which pieces of information that I supplied caused the rejection, due to not being able to verify its authenticity. One of them was my email address. One was my employer. I was never asked to prove the authenticity of this data. I emailed them asking what they need to authenticate my information, and they send me back another generic message that I had been rejected.

Be careful. You run many of the same risks as a lotto winner.

I've been spending $5k per year for the past 7 years. I think I might go all crazy and spend $10k this year lol. I've already bought like 8 bottles of $3 wine!

cash management account

what do you mean by "cash management accounts". Is that just a checking account split with other banks?

I've wondered about this a lot. We saw recently the mismanagement of Synapse. It's true that their customers would have been insured by the FDIC if they actually had put their customer's money in these FDIC-insured bank accounts. But they didn't.

These US banks have a history of fraud. If they didn't actually keep your money spread-out in different accounts, staying under the $250k limit, then you would only be insured up to $250k, right? I'd love to see that theory tested -- but I don't really want to risk it with my own $

I'm planning on using most of it to buy land as soon as I can. I do have retirement funds, but I don't plan to contribute to them from this windfall -- other than my usual yearly max Roth IRA contribution.