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It's time for us in the tech world to speak out about cryptocurrency

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Re: It's time for us in the tech world to speak out about cryptocurrency

#481

Post by gmadsen »

hmrtn wrote: post #462

I think it's time for us in the tech world to speak out and make it clear the emperor has no clothes here. _Gold_ is sustained by a mix of money laundering, human slavery, fraud, ransom, gambling, and delusion. It has no social benefit except helping end first dates fast. What we especially need to stress to regulators is that there's no relationship between the claims of _gold_ and our now thousands of years of expe…

didn't regulation successfully shut down commerce with gold?

Why wouldn't that happen with bitcoin

Re: It's time for us in the tech world to speak out about cryptocurrency

#482

Post by lottin »

mandelken wrote: post #469
lottin wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin inventors were anarcho-capitalists, an ideology that promotes an extreme version of capitalism where there are no governments and corporations have unlimited power.

Could you provide some background (or links) to your claim (I thought the inventor(s) of Bitcoin were anonymous)? Thank you.

https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/the-politics-...

Re: It's time for us in the tech world to speak out about cryptocurrency

#483

Post by Taniwha »

daniel-cussen wrote: post #397
idlewords wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't agree with your point hard enough. Really useful nascent technologies all have this pattern—they grow incrementally more interesting and constantly gain applications. Bitcoin followed this pattern for a while. But then at some point it started to regress on that axis. You could no longer buy a pizza with it, you could no longer mine it, and it got too flooded by scammers to use safely. There's nothing to real…

It's become gold. Preferred by criminals, untraceable (gold is a single stable isotope, basically untraceable). A store of wealth. And you can't buy a pizza with gold, either, and there are tons of scammers who love gold (I remember, about Thailand, the scammers would conspire to get people's gold, a few would talk loudly about how jewels were going up, then someone else in your trip would just happen to mention, des…

Gold also has a fatal flaw, there's only so much of it, building a currency based on gold (ie the US dollar on the gold standard) limits the size of the economy, it can't grow if you can't pay for stuff - it's why we left the gold standard.

Bitcoin by design only has a fixed number of coins available, eventually the miners will have mined them all. It has the same limitation that gold has and basing an economy on it will stunt its growth.

Re: It's time for us in the tech world to speak out about cryptocurrency

#484

Post by knorker »

mthoms wrote: post #471
pavlov wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nerds, early adopters — whatever you want to call them, the online behaviors they pioneered became mainstream. In contrast not even nerds are actually using Bitcoin or Ethereum for anything that interacts with the real world. All proposed applications are self-referential shell games like NFTs, staking schemes, etc. If this is a superior platform for finance, where’s the real economic activity? Handwaving about “prob…

I'm going to cease to engage for several reasons: 1) You just flatly contradicted yourself without even realizing it. The top level comment said "The reality is that the internet was immediately extremely interesting (either useful or fun) for practically everyone who got access.". When challenged, you moved the bar to "Well, it eventually became useful to everyone!". 2) You're condescending "I can see how people in…

That's clearly not what they said. Any of the points. Except condescending. But I can't blame them with the nonsense you're saying.

Re: It's time for us in the tech world to speak out about cryptocurrency

#485

Post by hanniabu »

shafyy wrote: post #267
sneak wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The nice thing about Bitcoin is that it doesn't have a jurisdiction or location[1]; you can solve some problems in some places via a functioning government, but Bitcoin solves some problems in all places simultaneously. [1]: this is not to claim, as some do, that it is unregulatable, although it may be.

What problem does Bitcoin solve?

Why bother answering if every response will be dismissed with "yeah but that's not a real use case"

Re: It's time for us in the tech world to speak out about cryptocurrency

#486

Post by knorker »

SubiculumCode wrote: post #425
pavlov wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nerds, early adopters — whatever you want to call them, the online behaviors they pioneered became mainstream. In contrast not even nerds are actually using Bitcoin or Ethereum for anything that interacts with the real world. All proposed applications are self-referential shell games like NFTs, staking schemes, etc. If this is a superior platform for finance, where’s the real economic activity? Handwaving about “prob…

There is accelerating adoption of blockchain to manage cargo shipments, bills of laden, and authentication of supply chains.

Also git.

Also completely irrelevant for any of the cryptocurrencies and smart contract systems.

Re: It's time for us in the tech world to speak out about cryptocurrency

#487

Post by wmf »

hmrtn wrote: post #462

I think it's time for us in the tech world to speak out and make it clear the emperor has no clothes here. _Gold_ is sustained by a mix of money laundering, human slavery, fraud, ransom, gambling, and delusion. It has no social benefit except helping end first dates fast. What we especially need to stress to regulators is that there's no relationship between the claims of _gold_ and our now thousands of years of expe…

Gold mining and the gold standard should also be banned.

Re: It's time for us in the tech world to speak out about cryptocurrency

#488

Post by knorker »

bryanwb wrote: post #480
pavlov wrote: post #21

“But it’s like the early Internet!” shouted the Emperor’s coinholders. “The Internet wasn’t yet useful a mere, um, thirteen years after its invention either.” I can see how people in their twenties would fall for this argument because they can’t remember. The reality is that the internet was immediately extremely interesting (either useful or fun) for practically everyone who got access. Email and ftp alone were kill…

It is like the early Internet and you are like one of the old telco guys I worked w/ in 2000 who said people would never make phone calls on the Internet.

I sure hope this MLM and tax fraud is not our brave new world.

It's not that we don't believe it. It's that it's a dystopia.

Re: It's time for us in the tech world to speak out about cryptocurrency

#489

Post by giaour »

mthoms wrote: post #306
idlewords wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's be clear that if I had accepted Bitcoin payments in 2013, I would have then lost them all a year or two later when my exchange got hacked. That would make me an even more bitter person now. I can't remember ever calling for a ban on cryptocurrency. If you're remembering something I'm not, then please correct me.

You seem like a very smart and highly technical person so I find it incredibly hard to believe you would have left vast sums of crypto on an unregulated exchange. You're either being dishonest here or you consider yourself extremely naive.

What regulated exchange existed in 2013?

Re: It's time for us in the tech world to speak out about cryptocurrency

#490

Post by adambatkin »

itisit wrote: post #451
shkkmo wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The twitter thread mostly uses the full term "cryptocurrency", which is not ambigous. Using the term "crypto" to refer to cryptocurrency is amigous and misleading.

> Using the term "crypto" to refer to cryptocurrency is amigous and misleading. To whom? “Crypto” is the colloquial shorthand for “cryptocurrency”. And I believe those thinking otherwise are reacting to the new usage encroaching on the old. Petty hill to die on…

The "crypto" world, as in Cryptography has far more practitioners and far more hardware and software than cryptocurrency. And most of of the world's communications (among other things) rely on "crypto" as in Cryptography. The "old" usage (as you put it) remains orders of magnitude more instrumental to all of our lives than blockchain technologies (which is a far more accurate name). And will remain so, for the rest of all of our lives.
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