Sadly, NNT gets a key detail wrong: Bitcoin isn't controlled by its users, it's controlled by the miners.
Non-mining nodes still enforce the consensus rules. Miners can't just decide to increase the block size or change the total # of bitcoin to 42 million.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Author of Black Swan, on Bitcoin
111–120 of 131 posts
Re: Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Author of Black Swan, on Bitcoin
#112This utopian streak running through the crypto community is what convinces me most that it’s going to be a heartbreaker. > But Hayek used the notion of distributed knowledge. Well, it looks like we do not even need that thing called knowledge for things to work well. Nor do we need individual rationality. All we need is structure. Irrational exuberance is a good thing! And while these ideologues are busy demonizing t…
Re: Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Author of Black Swan, on Bitcoin
#113This utopian streak running through the crypto community is what convinces me most that it’s going to be a heartbreaker. > But Hayek used the notion of distributed knowledge. Well, it looks like we do not even need that thing called knowledge for things to work well. Nor do we need individual rationality. All we need is structure. Irrational exuberance is a good thing! And while these ideologues are busy demonizing t…
I honestly hope the utopian dream is smashed in the cryptocurrency community. It's not the kind of "utopia" I want to be a part of. I like the technical ideas behind cryptocurrency, but the terrible political views are off-putting.
Re: Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Author of Black Swan, on Bitcoin
#114Sadly, NNT gets a key detail wrong: Bitcoin isn't controlled by its users, it's controlled by the miners.
And yet ultimately the users can move to a fork if they are unhappy. To wit: Bitcoin Cash, which is the true bitcoin. (With Bitcoin Cash, Nassim's coffeeshop transaction would indeed be possible, and without needing to wait for 10+ minutes, contrary to popular belief.)
The lightning network is still in beta, but it's certainly a much more scalable solution than bcash or any other fork.
Re: Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Author of Black Swan, on Bitcoin
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
Read this as a comment from a cryptocurrency lurker. > Bitcoin Cash, which is the true bitcoin. I see this statement repeated often, to the point of sounding like a strategy of "if you repeat a lie enough, people will believe it". Isn't Bitcoin Cash the minority result of a Bitcoin fork? Isn't the majority result by definition the true Bitcoin?
Bitcoin cash is much closer to the original implementation by Satoshi Nakamoto. It's simply a much smaller, and IMO, cleaner codebase that just increased one parameter to achieve scaling. Bitcoin core (what we call BTC) has many more lines of non-Satoshi code that was added to facilitate off-chain scaling.
SegWit and Lightning are such elegant solutions that I can't really see a person as brilliant as Satoshi rejecting it.
Re: Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Author of Black Swan, on Bitcoin
#116A pretty correct analysis imo > [Bitcoin] not good enough to buy your decaffeinated expresso macchiato at your local virtue-signaling coffee chain. Plus he has some humor.
Re: Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Author of Black Swan, on Bitcoin
#117Governments could ban crypto sites, crypto trading, and conversion to currency. While this won’t completely kill it, it marginalizes it to such an extent that it won’t be an attractive medium for most folks because most people are lazy and don’t want the hassle.
Hell, China could reprice electricity rates for mining. That alone would almost do it.
Re: Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Author of Black Swan, on Bitcoin
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
I honestly hope the utopian dream is smashed in the cryptocurrency community. It's not the kind of "utopia" I want to be a part of. I like the technical ideas behind cryptocurrency, but the terrible political views are off-putting.
I'm legitimately interested in cryptocurrency; I think it's a really cool idea. So what I'm hoping for is that everything goes as horribly wrong as possible, the price tanks, everyone's dreams are smashed, and all the bullshit takes disappear. At that point, the people who are interested in building something worthwhile will be the only ones who remain, and we can work in peace.
Re: Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Author of Black Swan, on Bitcoin
#119> one can macroBS longer than microBS, which is why we need to be careful on who to endow with centralized macro decisions. Taleb goes overboard sometimes, but he has been so great for calling BS on finance pseudo-science.
I guess when you call everything 'BS', you're bound to be right some of the time.
Re: Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Author of Black Swan, on Bitcoin
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
I honestly hope the utopian dream is smashed in the cryptocurrency community. It's not the kind of "utopia" I want to be a part of. I like the technical ideas behind cryptocurrency, but the terrible political views are off-putting.
While claiming the principles of Liberty for yourself (deciding what kind of "utopia" you want to be part of), would you deny that choice to others? This is perhaps what separates libertarians from liberals, conservatives, socialists, etc.: we simply do not deny others the liberty we claim for ourselves. If a monetary system that cannot be debased/controlled by government is available, does that not allow you to elec…