Curious to see how the author would suggest we donate to organizations like WikiLeaks without Bitcoin
Curious that anyone thinks using Bitcoin to donate to Wikileaks is any more anonymous than doing an ACH transfer.
It's time for us in the tech world to speak out about cryptocurrency
561–570 of 1001 posts
Re: It's time for us in the tech world to speak out about cryptocurrency
#562Earlier quoted context omitted.
What are the fundamental flaws you're talking about? (I assume throughput but I'll wait for your reply). What do you mean by saying people fell for "this"? I assume you mean it's a scam but I will wait for your reply.
I'm confused about why Bitcoin is being discussed in the past tense when both usage and price have both grown significantly over the last year. Is it already dead? Could have fooled me.
Usage in what sense? Beanie Babies once commanded a high price but they too were never a good payments system.
Many people are certainly buying in to crypto with the intent of selling it later at a profit. But that’s unrelated from its utility.
Re: It's time for us in the tech world to speak out about cryptocurrency
#563I'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 i…
Why is cryptocurrency/blockchain necessary for that?
You could have all of this with open banking standards.
Re: It's time for us in the tech world to speak out about cryptocurrency
#564I 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…
This is the most reasonable comment in this whole thread. It’s good to acknowledge the current mania and the type of unethical behavior it attracts, but it would be intellectually lazy to dismiss the whole field.
Not even a fairly neutral "it depends" does well here.
Ah well, I'll accept it for what it is.
Re: It's time for us in the tech world to speak out about cryptocurrency
#565Earlier 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…
You’re going to need a bit more evidence on the “criminals love gold” point. Your thailand example just shows people will scam for small, valuable, fungible things.
Gold didn’t have a rep as the hub of black market transactions before bitcoin.
Re: It's time for us in the tech world to speak out about cryptocurrency
#566Earlier 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…
I don’t know what you mean by point 1. The qualifier I used was “everyone who got access”, and I stand by that.
Initially only nerds had access and they couldn’t get enough. When access expanded to the general public, they couldn’t get enough either.
“You’ve Got Mail” is a 1998 movie starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. The internet was completely mainstream just 16 years after the military decided to standardize on IPv4.
If there will be a 2024 Hollywood blockbuster called “You’ve Got Bitcoin”, it’s going to be a dark parody of speculation and greed, not a heartwarming tale of how much cryptocurrency helped average people connect with each other.
Re: It's time for us in the tech world to speak out about cryptocurrency
#567I'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 i…
No one is going back to a Fed fund rate pegged savings account after parking stablecoins in a DAO governed yield farm aggregator.
Critics think we're in the Dotcom bubble of crypto right now, but we're still in the Usenet stages. You need technical expertise in finance and computer science to grok crypto. I would ask any naysayers to this point in particular to share their understanding of some protocol like Aave, Sushi or Yearn and how these fail to surpass similar products in the space of traditional finance.
Re: It's time for us in the tech world to speak out about cryptocurrency
#568Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I'm pretty sure it's nothing but a pyramid scheme, but I always gave the enthusiasts the benefit of the doubt. So go find out? I’m quoting you here for the “pretty sure” part. Do a deep dive. I’be done deep dives on Bitcoin, Ethereum, Cardano, Monero, Nano, Iota, Hyperledger, BSC, Uniswap, Tether, Chainlink and cursory glances at dozens of other coins/tokens. I’m a tech guy. I work on an operating system/embedded s…
Why can't the tech be neat/super cool and primarily be used to run a scam? I mean bittorrent is neat tech as well but it's still primarily used for piracy. Doing a deep dive into how bittorrent works doesn't suddenly change the fact that 99.9% of torrents out there are violating somebody's intellectual property. All I'm saying is, there's lots of super neat tech out there that's primarily used for not-so-super-neat s…
Don't gnu/linux ISO images make up a considerable proportion of bittorrent traffic nowadays?
Re: It's time for us in the tech world to speak out about cryptocurrency
#569Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Are you saying economies grow by inflating their currency?
Re: It's time for us in the tech world to speak out about cryptocurrency
#570Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm confused about why Bitcoin is being discussed in the past tense when both usage and price have both grown significantly over the last year. Is it already dead? Could have fooled me.
Usage in what sense? Beanie Babies once commanded a high price but they too were never a good payments system. Many people are certainly buying in to crypto with the intent of selling it later at a profit. But that’s unrelated from its utility.
Sure. They'll sell at the peak and buy at the bottom because it's a well known 4 year cycle programmed into the protocol. If the price is expected to appreciate 5-10x from any other asset in the market every 4 years that's a bet you should make, even if the timing of the peak and trough is hard to see. But the price floor increases over time as the trade becomes better known globally and the lottery odds expand. Eventually there is so much noise it all evens out and becomes a generally smooth slide into a stable store of value. It's network science and game theory that I personally consider much smarter than anything I could create (having deployed technology built on network science in exchange for money in the financial sector). And much more democratic than is possible in the traditional financial world. Frankly, the longer I study this the more impressed I am.
Usage as in number of network participants. People investing time, energy, risk into the system. Miners, traders, validators, second layer operators. Similar to members of facebook, servers in the internet. Price as in market price. And I'm only talking Bitcoin here.