That would mean that the attacker can already predict /dev/urandom, rendering it effectively useless. So the parent is right, "the result will be as strong as the best source of entropy", if both sources are bad then the result will be as well.
It is true under the assumption that the two sources are independent of each other. If one of the sources is entirely known or predictable, this will not affect the entropy of the other source.
You have two adversaries. Adversary A have control over your hardware source, and adversary B have control over /dev/urandom. If you XOR them A and B must cooperate to compromise your random generator. You can combine as many sources of randomness as you want, and each increase the difficulty for an adversary to defeat your generator.
Well Bitfinex is a special case relating to Tether, but I'm sure all exchanges hold some amount of money in some way to support operations. It's just misunderstanding how exchanges work to think a price drop in a thing being traded puts exchanges at risk.
It would only do so if the exchange has a strange unrelated agreement (like to trade 1 USDT for 1 USD), or were holding the money they're using to run their operation in that asset. Except for maybe Bitfinex (because of the special case), no exchanges are doing that with USDT.
Your dollars already do get more valuable over time wrt consumer electronics and cars, yet people still purchase them en masse.
Many still spend in a deflationary environment, they just do so with far more care about the product and it's longevity.
People will invest also, though only with a expected return greater than deflation gains.
Instead the status quo is being forced into overvalued equities or real estate investments. There's no real option to be a saver in the western world anymore.
No one measures the marketcap of gold or soybeans. When was the last time someone mentioned the marketcap of the USD?
It's an absurd metric made worse by the fact that more coins are issued every 5 mins. If price remains the same virtually all coins will go up in marketcap regardless.
Apart from the asteroids packed with precious metals or water/zero-g vacuum manufacturing /virtually limitless solar energy and near earth rendezvous from interstellar objects?
The end of the first link provides a response from Bernanke which says that the public would still have access to the data but the fed won’t aggregate it and report it. What the OECD does is the aggregation and reporting based on the raw fed data.
The second link provides why the M3 was useless to begin with.
