261–270 of 378 posts
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Except let's not forget the DAO hack, where everything was forked because too many rich people lost their money.
If by "everything" you mean "the balance in one address was moved to one other address" then that would be a correct statement.
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Cash? Otherwise, for digital, who are we talking about, exactly? What country doesn't have banks? If you can't get a bank account it's unlikely your basic needs are going to be met by a stranger you've never met.
There are 1.7 billion adults in the world who are unbanked. 420 million of them have internet access. You can find them in countries all over the world. For example USA have 18 million and France have 3 million who don't have a bank account. It's not just poor people in countries without banks who have these problems. Even rich porn stars have had their bank accounts closed (for being porn stars) and people in the ma…
Any income is instantly frozen and collected. Even when they want to eventually pay debt, lack of liquidity prevents them from work.
They can only use cash, or bank accounts of friends, or things like Revolut or PayPal (bailiff doesn't know about them because they operate in different country).
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There are 1.7 billion adults in the world who are unbanked. 420 million of them have internet access. You can find them in countries all over the world. For example USA have 18 million and France have 3 million who don't have a bank account. It's not just poor people in countries without banks who have these problems. Even rich porn stars have had their bank accounts closed (for being porn stars) and people in the ma…
There are 0 adults in the world who are unbanked but have access to a mining rig or card payments to buy cryptoassets. By an interesting coincidence, 0 is also the number of unbanked people who should risk the money they need to eat on unregulated, complicated and easily stolen intangible financial assets which wealthy foreigners invented to print themselves money.
m-pesa isn't a cryptocurrency in the same mold that bitcoin is, but it's electronic money for the unbanked that you're arguing can't exist.
The biggest problem is actual uptake for real transactions, as opposed to speculation and black markets. The 2 biggest barriers to be solved are: -lack of trust/ease of use for the layman -volatility These problems may or may not sort themselves out with time.
I stopped using Bitcoin for daily transactions because of the stress of having to report every coffee purchase on my tax return.
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No, it’s a technological problem. The social solution is to make what you’re trying to do legal. And yeah you’re free to do whatever you want so long as you’re willing to pay the consequences such as fines and jail time.
Writing code collaboratively and convincing thousands of people to run nodes replicating your slow database is a social act -- I'd even call it a political act. Not sure why you think technology is outside the context of our society. This stuff isn't built by elves.
You're not solving the actual problem by going out and convincing society you're right (and you are, the Portuguese model shows that full decriminalization and even legalization lead to much better outcomes and no material increase in usage).
You're convincing people to deploy magic bean producing power wasters that just happen to let you buy drugs. It doesn't help mitigate or undo the harm foisted upon the millions in US prisons who got there because they wanted drugs. It doesn't help bring about the downfall of the cartels. If anything, it props those things up.
> Writing code collaboratively and convincing thousands of people to run nodes replicating your slow database is a social act -- I'd even call it a political act.
Yes, in and of itself it is.
The social act is deploying a slow database, which in turn provides technological workarounds to the actual social issues (like drug policy) that should be tackled head-on.
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Obviously all cryptocurrencies are a scam. Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2107770 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21145147
Except Bitcoin. And the market justly reflects it via price.
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Funny you can online pay your drug dealer in countries where drugs are legal, like pot in Canada. It’s almost like social solutions are the right way to solve social problems.
So then should we forget about easily accessible encryption, since it's a social problem if your government spies on your data and not a technological one? That's not a very "defense in depth" approach. Our democracy is purposely designed to allow such checks and balances through mechanisms like the fifth amendment. It is an important part of what makes our democracy strong and prevents lawmakers from throwing people…
While I don't believe this myself, I could see a logically consistent case for supporting the development of ciphers and banning something like TrueCrypt. It's not about the technology, it's about how you choose to use it.
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I'm struggling to understand if uncensorable transactions are a good thing (note: struggling not in a sense of "I actually think it is evil but let's hear your bullshit arguments so that I can easily debunk them", but in a sense of really being undecided). I am not a libertarian so I don't think that laws are just a useless form of violence. So how can uncensorable transactions be useful for a law-abiding citizen? On…
> I am not a libertarian so I don’t think that laws are just a useless form of violence. Libertarians aren’t anti-law, they are pro-constitution. Libertarians are against the drug war, pro-marijuana legalization, against civil asset forfeiture, and trying to end the endless wars waged in the Middle East. You will not find a better friend than a libertarian if you ever find yourself arrested or sued for any reason. Ju…
That said, why is the emphasis on constitution (BTW, do you mean any constitution or US constitution in particular)? Constitution is just a special kind of law after all and I can totally imagine libertarians claiming that it is inadequate, pushing to change it and make it more aligned with their principles.
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Those are real use cases. However the adoption is severely lacking. The problem is that it has gotten worse not better. There has not been a good use case for a Joe NormalCitizen for crypto in a while. Anecdata: I first mined BTC in 2011 and used BTC quite a bit in 2013 to buy bunch of online and offline services. It was relatively painless since I had my own BTC. (Also it was really pseudo-anonymous since I was only…
>If I want do something shady, I'd have the problem of onramp KYC etc. Is it still possible to circumwent KYC by mining? Or is it too expensive? Sounds like an advantage of PoW over PoS
Not really. You can't earn much at all mining any coins without significant and reoccurring capital investment.
There are de-centralized exchanges like Bisq that you can use without KYC.
Also Monero has true anonymity so while you might need a KYC onramp to get into crypto, once your value is on the Monero chain it's anonymous, transactions cannot be followed, balances can't be seen (without permission).
It's funny to write such a blog post without even mentioning Cardano...
It's even more funny to leave a comment like this without even elaborating on the argument and not contributing to the overall discussion. Why would this blog post mention Cardano?