I feel like the deals in the U.S. have really gone downhill or maybe they were never deals to begin with. The internet has made everything pretty transparent at least.
Deals in the US vary in direct proportion to the state of the economy (or a given retailer's plight). In 2009-2011 for example, the deals were frequently tremendous due to bad economic condition of consumers.
Now the US has a U6 unemployment rate near 20 year lows and has added $45 trillion to its household wealth number in the last seven years, while incomes have also been rising modestly well the last several years. The need for substantial deals to move most merchandise is vastly reduced accordingly.
I didn't check the others but Casper and Leeza are twice the cost as a Tuft and Needle now. It's interesting to see how much they're raising prices with so many competitors and little to no differentiation. It must mean if you walk into a mattress store, you're paying well over the $1k.
"Yet you could have gone to AliExpress and bought the same none branded mattress for $100."
You proved the statement to be false. Not to mention, what you have posted are coil mattresses. Companies like Casper and Tuft mark-up quite a bit if AliExpress is "warehouse" pricing, but it's really not outrageous.
It is! unless you are China and you still want to make money while making sure the company line is toted by all.
China is able to track their populous really well, or at least have their population believing so, and thus anything that adds pseudo-anonymity kinda ruins their mission.
In the future it is probable that all countries will have their own cryptocurrency, backed by some sort of tangible asset like Au (gold) or Ag (silver). What strikes me as very important for the US is establishment of a national cryptocurrency. It can be anonymous (everyday cash is essentially anonymous), but the consensus on how to regulate one is very much a process of education (elder generation finance people don't really get bitcoin yet). So once regulatory measures can be taken to ensure there's no theft etc, then it'll be easy. China's thinking on the matter is that if it cannot be regulated, shut it down and make a version that can be.
There are various forms of decentralization. Bitcoin tries to be as extremely decentralized as possible but you can greatly increase energy efficiency by centralizing a few aspects. Here is a thought experiment:
Imagine a system where the money is issued by a central authority. The users would register their identities with the authority, and receive a certificate. When the bank issues money, it assigns a random serial number R, and it signs it with the bank's key and specifies whose money it is by the user's public key U: S[U, R]. Now suppose Alice has S_Bank[Alice, R] and wants to pay Bob. She can sign the money over to Bob: S_Alice[Bob, S_Bank[Alice, R]]. Bob could do the same to give Charles some money.
Eventually, someone will deposit the money they received with the bank. The bank will check if money with the same serial was ever deposited previously. It can then catch the cheater who double-spent the money by looking for the "fork" in the signature chain. So if the bank tied identities to some offline ID, the police can go arrest the fraudster (or you can imagine other punishments, like blacklisting them from the entire system, etc.).
Notice that even though money creation, identification, and double-spending defense are all centralized, payments remain decentralized: unlike credit cards etc., in this system, one need not contact the bank in order to spend money. True, there may be more of a delay in catching double spending; on the other hand, we have gotten rid of the very expensive mining process. We have also avoided one of the more subtle and annoying issues with Bitcoin: bootstrapping the P2P connection (you only need to connect to whomever you are trying to pay when you are trying to pay them).
[This is just a simplified version of "ecash," which cryptographers have been studying since the 1980s. What I left out is the mechanism for ensuring payment privacy, which is pretty interesting in the offline payments case.]
It doesn't have to be, it can also become a heavily centralized, carefully monitored system thanks to the intrinsic immutability of the underlying technology.
I am not making that comparison. Today's gainers and losers are priced more than $10. So not exactly penny stocks. Though both stocks mentioned are actually biotech stocks. Revolutionary but unproven tech. Wouldn't you say that is a fair comparison?
Is there any way to exchange your money for bitcoin and just put it in a 'personal wallet' if you don't want to store it on somewhere like coinbase, etc?
