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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

#531

Post by eli »

lottin wrote: post #293
joepie91_ wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're actually almost right. While Bitcoin was launched with lofty goals, it was pretty quickly overtaken by capitalist vultures who saw a low-regulation industry to extract money from people. Importantly though, it's not an either/or. Capitalism is problematic and cryptocurrency is problematic. Both can be true at the same time.

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

But Bitcoin investors are mostly indifferent to the goals or mechanisms behind Bitcoin and merely hope to sell a coin to someone else for more than they paid for it.

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

#532

Post by eli »

mandelken wrote: post #516
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…

Clever analogy. Let me quickly give some background on actual the use of gold as a store of value, besides the obvious point that gold does not rust (decay) and that it is somewhat rare. As you know, gold is also shiny and has been used for jewelry for thousands of years in many cultures. Some anthropologists have reversed the causality of value and jewelry, arguing that gold is precious _because_ it is used as jewel…

It’s also a useful industrial material that is almost certainly in the device you’re using to read this website.

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

#533

Post by knorker »

cbzbc wrote: post #456
fleddr wrote: post #264

I could waste a huge amount of time refuting the author's points, but will make it more of a meta comment. Crypto is vast, complex, and inherently not suitable for binary thinking. I've studied the space for months and have come to the conclusion that crypto is two-sided in almost every aspect. Many/most coins are speculative, which you can associate with words like "greed" and "casino". Yet also provide wealth savin…

> Crypto is vast, complex, and inherently not suitable for binary thinking. I've studied the space for months and have come to the conclusion that crypto is two-sided in almost every aspect Is this a bit?

It's straight out of the coiner mantra playbook.

I've talked religion with more free thinking open minded Jehovah's witnesses.

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

#534

Post by bryanwb »

knorker wrote: post #488
bryanwb wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Have you even taken more than a cursory look at Ethereum?

I will get off your lawn now.

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

#535

Post by xpe »

tzumby wrote: post #247
xpe wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

If you don’t believe that there is value in a distributed self replicating Byzantine tolerant state machine, that’s fair, everybody is entitled to their opinion.

I don't think anyone is denying that there is value in any subset of the following:

* distributed systems * self-replicating systems * Byzantine fault tolerant systems * state machines

The tweets by Pinboard are largely talking about social and societal issues. Both technical and societal issues are important. They are intertwined.

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

#536

Post by mandelken »

skybrian wrote: post #391
rfd4sgmk8u wrote: post #337

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.)

Depends on your background and experience, I guess. In many European countries ATMs are free, even outside your own country. It is considered an elementary part of the banking service that you don't have to pay to withdraw your own money.

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

#537

Post by fleddr »

idlewords wrote: post #297
fleddr wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This huge silent majority that know it is a scam doesn't exist. Crypto is so large, complex and fast-moving that it takes thousands of hours to grasp. If I'd make a list of 100 questions regarding crypto, an exam so to speak, I am reasonably sure that this silent majority can't even answer 5% of the questions. Because they don't know crypto. At all.

It's a hash tree with a vape cloud around it, not quantum chromodynamics. I think most people on this technical forum understand it just fine.

Reductionism can be applied to anything. I am confident that very few understand it just fine. Because it cannot be understood without taking a very serious deep dive.

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

#538

Post by acjohnson55 »

DennisP wrote: post #504
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…

"Bitcoin" is a subset of "blockchain." Some blockchains have a lot of stuff to do, even if Bitcoin doesn't.

Which ones?

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

#539

Post by eli »

segmondy wrote: post #125

Just gonna sound like a hater, folks worship success. They will listen to anyone who made millions betting on cryptocurrency over any smart person who didn't and is "jealous" for missing out. One mistake us "smart" folks make is thinking that investing is about understanding a system that's complete and smart. Most investments are not like black jack but more like poker where it all comes down to behavioral economics…

A good start would be pointing out this obvious fact that all crypto is a speculative investment — it derives value from (hopefully) being worth more to someone else later than you paid to acquire it. The coins have little or no intrinsic value.

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

#540

Post by revel »

I've worked in both finance and technology. I think the technical people aren't seeing how amazing this is from a finance point of view. Payments are going to be completely transformed by this. All of fixed income will change to be oriented around crypto. It's just a matter of time.

All the main preconditions for crypto to take off are finally in place. If you are a professional money manager or CFO there is no way in hell you are going to risk managing your own keys, let alone keys on behalf of a customer or supplier. The largest impediment to all the good blockchain projects has been the lack of a cheap, affordable, insured custodian for key management.

It's taken years to get to this point because these issues aren't technical in nature; they're governmental. The SEC weighed in on what it takes to be a qualified custodian near the end of last year, so now finally some of the larger names in this space have said they'll offer services.

All the best, obvious use cases for crypto have been blocked by this issue: automatic payments, self-settling contracts and futures, escrow with almost 0 overhead, trade finance, etc.

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