491–500 of 1001 posts
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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.
Let me know if you want a hand in setting up a private key on a normal computer
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> The author saying the “silent majority tech people” know its a scam is such nonsense to my experience. Every tech person I know thinks either A) its neat/super cool, or B) they don’t know anything about it besides memes. Counterpoint: most "tech people" I know — including people who have worked in crypto — both know about it and also think it's a scam.
That’s the real point. For the author, me, or you to claim what most tech people think is ridiculous.
If someone only knows crypto from stories in mainstream press or cable news, they’d probably incorrectly assume “tech people” are almost universally for it.
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It’s not artificial scarcity, it’s outright fake scarcity. The total supply of Bitcoin is 21,000,000 coins. However, every single coin is 100,000,000 individual assets. 21,000,000 sounds pretty finite. But 21,000,000,000,000,000 sounds a tad less finite. The price of Bitcoin relies on the fundamental false premise that it’s scarce.
That's like saying pizza isnt scarce because you can cut one into 1000 tiny slices. Or gold isnt scarce because you can cut 1 bar into 1 tiny million pieces. Pretty hilarious misconception
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The "early internet" comparison is usually presented when talking about how clumsy and slow the technology is in its current state. The argument is certainly not presented in the context of how "fun" it is. There's nothing "fun" about finance (and there never will be). In the context of technological state (how brittle and obtuse the tools are), the comparison between the two is right on the money IMHO. I once config…
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…
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Bitcoin didn’t regress, what actually happened is that its fundamental flaws ended up eventually dominating whatever early enthusiasm allowed them to be ignored. It was never going to work, for a variety of reasons that were incredibly apparent at the time. “Why did it regress” is much less interesting than “why did anyone ever fall for this?”
The extremely messed up incentives make it impossible to even have an honest conversation about it’s merits or issues. If there are any legitimate uses for blockchain (and that’s an if) they’re lost in the noise of 10,000 get rich quick schemes, outright frauds, and bad actors.
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…
Some gold obsessed people probably have hyperbolic claims about what gold can do, but my impression of it is that it is generally understood as a hedge against inflation or a store of value. Relatively few people think they are going to hodl gold until they 1,000x their way into being gold-millionaires and most of those that do probably aren't expecting real gains from gold.
Gold doesn't promise to be decentralized currency. Cryptocurrency does try to make that promise. Gold does solve problems it didn't create - e.g. use in electronics or in jewelry.
I think most of this parody just substitutes the word "Gold" for "Bitcoin" but misses that gold actually isn't making the same claims.
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Your comment is unclear. > What is surprising is how large the number of techies who don’t get this. What do you mean by "this"? Do you mean all of the points made by the author in the tweets? Or do you mean "the following" instead of "this", referring to what you think is most innovative about Bitcoin?
this = blockchain + proof of work / proof of stake , in my comment. The crypto currencies are a requirement to fulfill the Byzantine tolerance. They need to have value in order for the incentives to make sense
I find this writing to be unclear and/or circular.
Are you saying the following? _If_ the primary goal of a system is Byzantine fault tolerance, using a cryptocurrency is a requirement?
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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…
I've been using Bitcoin to get paid for a couple of years at this point (programming work for overseas clients), and I haven't gotten scammed yet. I'm not engaged in money laundering, vaporware, fraud, ransomware, or gambling, and only the usual amount of delusion. And I don't even buy illegal drugs! And, yeah, 13 years after the internet's invention was 01982; not only couldn't you get so much as a weather report on…
I have had banks stealing my funds for years -- be it financial providers eating up my first 401k contributions in excessive fees, be it the banks that charged me $2 every time I used an ATM, be it the random charges unauthorized charges that the bank pulled from my account... Then there is the watching all my adult life as assets grow more expensive and further out of reach, a debt treadmill emerges to ensure the co…
How are $2 ATM fees "stealing?" They provide a service, which you can pay for or easily avoid by planning ahead a bit. (And cryptocurrency charges even more.)
Better go transfer my life savings into Bitcoin, I suppose.