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Dogecoin's inventor looks to the past for insight into the future

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Re: Dogecoin's inventor looks to the past for insight into the future

#221

Post by doctorfoo »

cornyNetHandle wrote: post #183
temp-dude-87844 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As others are saying, Satoshi made some political-sounding statements about financial systems around the time of release, but the paper only refers to facets of traditional financial institutions in measured, objective terms. Then again, given that Satoshi's true identity is unknown, a lot of this is necessarily speculation by interpreting a small set of clues.

Satoshi worked online with a group of developers for more than a year while keeping perfect operational security. Developed a solution to the byzantine generals problem, but has no published maths papers, otherwise something would have come up through text analysis. Designed bitcoin as a financial instrument, indicating inside knowledge of the banking industry. Has mined enough bitcoin to be on the list of the world'…

>Satoshi is a team employed by something very rich, probably a government

Or perhaps a bunch of guys from the offshore gambling industry...

Re: Dogecoin's inventor looks to the past for insight into the future

#222

Post by jhwang5 »

buckthundaz wrote: post #204
meri_dian wrote: post #2

>"To deliver a peer-to-peer alternative to cash that, through decentralization, did away with the need for trust in financial institutions, which the 2008 crisis showed to be unscrupulous, and often corrupt." The sort of activity which led to the financial crisis would not be mitigated by the establishment of a decentralized currency. Decentralization would not do away with the need for financial institutions (or the…

You are correct that the activity that led to all financial crises will not be mitigated in the domain of national currencies. It will be avoided in decentralized money that is uncorrelated, like gold. Your concept of decentralization is off. The purpose of it is this: How many points of failure are there? How many of these points can break before the cards all fall? If this happens, who pays for it? This illustrates…

Switching to cryptocurrency actually makes the problems worse, because instead of regulated entities calling the shots, we have an oligarchy of ASIC-armed miners calling the shots.

Between the two evils, any sane person would rather trust a regulated business than some folks who prefer to hide in the shadows.

Re: Dogecoin's inventor looks to the past for insight into the future

#223

Post by jhwang5 »

andrewla wrote: post #182
paulmd wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But they can't just literally increase the number of Bitcoin by a factor of 5 [1] in order to give trillions of dollars to people who have demonstrated their incompetence at handling that money. Sure you can. It's code, why wouldn't you be able to change it? There is no reason that cryptocurrency has to be inherently deflationary, rewards can easily be issued at a constant rate or any other rate. You are mixing up…

> Sure you can. It's code, why wouldn't you be able to change it? Fair enough. I'd expand that to say "code + consensus", which is what the rest of your post expands on. If the Bitcoin (for example) community really buys into the idea that we need to bail out some set of organizations, it's possible to execute a fork to do that. And the number of validating bitcoin clients out there is pretty large, so it would requi…

> If the Bitcoin (for example) community really buys into the idea that we need to bail out some set of organizations, it's possible to execute a fork to do that. And the number of validating bitcoin clients out there is pretty large, so it would require a lot of buy-in.

With crypto, you are essentially switching the authority figure from an elected government to a bunch of faceless miners forming an oligarchy.

Re: Dogecoin's inventor looks to the past for insight into the future

#224

Post by jhwang5 »

komali2 wrote: post #66
abakker wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please define what you mean by Centralized and Decentralized. I believe you and the OP are talking at cross purposes. the USD is decentralized in that P2P transactions are accepted with almost anyone in the world without needing a centralized intermediary.

Is it centralized in the sense that a single organism can exert more control than anyone else on the real value of the USD by printing more?

Same with Bitcoin. If say 30 individuals controlled 51% > of hashrate, then Bitcoin will arguably be more centralized than US Dollar.

Re: Dogecoin's inventor looks to the past for insight into the future

#225

Post by jhwang5 »

IronKettle wrote: post #130
Blackthorn wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it isn't. Dividends are only one way for stocks to return value. There are also buybacks and mergers.

Er, buybacks and mergers both involve a "greater fool" (either the company itself or the acquiring company).

Isn't it obvious that buying shares in a public company gives you proxy, fractional ownership of a business that's generating cashflow? You don't get that with crypto. Crypto, on the other hand, literally requires someone else to take you out in order for you to profit.

Re: Dogecoin's inventor looks to the past for insight into the future

#226

Post by jhwang5 »

rthomas6 wrote: post #52
vec wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the kind of dangerous thinking that fuels speculation bubbles. Bubbles go up and up and up until they plummet all at once. Everyone looks like they're winning all the way up until everyone suddenly loses together. Maybe Bitcoin isn't a speculation bubble; maybe it's something new. But if you ignore the underlying tech and just look at the price chart it sure looks like an old fashioned speculation bubble, and…

The internet was something new, and it fueled a speculation bubble. I think we are seeing something similar with cryptocurrencies. Are they something innovative and potentially useful? Yes. Do their valuations make sense? No.

Internet boom at least had startups that generated some dollar revenue. Most tokens and coins aren't backed by neither users nor revenue.

Re: Dogecoin's inventor looks to the past for insight into the future

#228

Post by tylerruby »

xorcist wrote: post #105
dahdum wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They rise and fall mostly with Bitcoin, Ethereum has shown recently to be more independent, but the biggest drops are usually spurred by panic about crypto regulation. Regarding 2018, I'm your fool...here are my predictions: Bitcoin will remain top market cap and crypto numeraire. Majority of the newest projects like IOTA, Tron, etc. will be down significantly. Burned by vaporware projects, investors will become more…

I want to play too! Here is my prediction for 2018: Just as 2015 was the year of the altcoins, and 2017 was the year of the tokens (why mess with a software project when anyone can create an ERC-type token effortlessly, plus there's no mining so you can sell every last bit of it day one), 2018 will be the year of the forkcoins. Things like Ethereum Classic and Bitcoin Cash are just too lucrative to pass by. Expect to…

Isn't Bitcoin Plus a scam? I mean, their Twitter is just a bot that chirps the high & low of the day and their website is a joke.

Re: Dogecoin's inventor looks to the past for insight into the future

#229

Post by openasocket »

peterjlee wrote: post #214
openasocket wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, they gave them credit for the money on their accounts, they didn't physically print any more money than they did normally.

Isn't it already a common knowledge when someone says "the Fed prints money", they're flipping digits in their computers and not actually printing paper bills? The Fed doesn't print the paper bills anyways. The Treasury does it.

But the point is that they could still do this with bitcoin. Even if they don't have the ability to create a bunch of bitcoins out of thin air, they do have the ability to credit their accounts. As you said, "So that's how the bitcoin came about to make a currency where there are no central governing body that can just print more whenever it wants," but the bailouts absolutely could still occur, because you don't have to directly control the money supply to be able to act as a lender of last resort.

Re: Dogecoin's inventor looks to the past for insight into the future

#230

Post by cornyNetHandle »

AgentME wrote: post #199
cornyNetHandle wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Satoshi worked online with a group of developers for more than a year while keeping perfect operational security. Developed a solution to the byzantine generals problem, but has no published maths papers, otherwise something would have come up through text analysis. Designed bitcoin as a financial instrument, indicating inside knowledge of the banking industry. Has mined enough bitcoin to be on the list of the world'…

>Designed bitcoin as a financial instrument, indicating inside knowledge of the banking industry. what Bitcoin is just the clever but natural progression from previous cryptographic cash systems like b-money. The cypherpunks mailing list had long been interested in making more decentralized cryptographic cash systems along those lines. The fact that one of them finally combined the right cryptographic primitives in t…

Governments are not superhuman either. I am not talking specifically about the difficulty of writing bitcoin, but the collection of circumstances along side that.
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