>"It's time for us in tech world to speak"
>"It solves nothing", "It's used by criminals".
If I got $1 every time I heard these...
It's time for us in the tech world to speak out about cryptocurrency
631–640 of 1001 posts
Re: It's time for us in the tech world to speak out about cryptocurrency
#632Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree, Bitcoin isn't zero risk. But compared to my experiences with banks and WU the risk is manageably low. I have to give someone my passport and home address in order to receive money via WU, so I'm exposed to the risk that buddies of the WU employees will rob my house later. I've had to pay a collection agency thousands for fees charged on a bank account that was empty and that I thought was closed. I've had my…
> I'm exposed to the risk that buddies of the WU employees will rob my house later In comparison to getting your wallet compromised by viruses searching for it (and they will probably become more aggressive and adept as BTC usage increases), the chance of this happening I feel is exceedingly low. And avenues of recourse exist: there are clear leads to follow on for an investigative team. > I've had my bank ATM card c…
When I first explained bitcoin to my mom and her friends, they didn't get it.
The second time, I explained it, they didn't get it. The third time, I sat them down, and made them learn how to run full nodes, run a few commands on the command line, and use bitcoin. Western Union is certainly not guaranteed, nor tyranny proof. If the governments of Argentina or Pakistan need the USD bad enough, they will every dollar Western Union is holding for recipients. To keep the story quiet and the money flowing in, they may imprison the recipients and their families. Desperate times call for desperate measures.
Re: It's time for us in the tech world to speak out about cryptocurrency
#633I'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.
No you can't. The protocols for buying and selling or making payments haven't changed in decades. The problem is communication authority and scaling, not the data format. Blockchain enables so-called triple entry accounting. Everyone sees everything everyone else is doing (if you want them to). There is never an argument about who did something or why. Just consider the audit and servicing cost savings.
Re: It's time for us in the tech world to speak out about cryptocurrency
#634Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the issue is that mostly these smart contracts and efficient coins are not the main attraction. The main attraction is Bitcoin and recently Dogecoin. BTC is slow and costly and mostly a speculative play. Dogecoin is a joke, but also worth billions. Also these coins are speculatively often first, and useful second. Not all but many. Thus instead of being useful for exchange, they become methods of speculation.…
"Smart contracts" (public finance bots) are basically Ponzi-as-a-Service. Someone launched an explicit "PonziCoin" on ETH even. "It's just overtaken" is not a great take. The problems are way more fundamental – the whole concept of trustless irreversible digital cash just does not work in the real world for normal transactions.
> Someone launched an explicit "PonziCoin" on ETH even
Lots of meme coins have launched -- does not delegitimize everything else.
> ...whole concept of trustless irreversible digital cash just does not work in the real world for normal transactions
Layers will be built on top to provide that. Your vision is limited.
Re: It's time for us in the tech world to speak out about cryptocurrency
#635“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…
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Re: It's time for us in the tech world to speak out about cryptocurrency
#636Earlier quoted context omitted.
Very simple game theory answer to this question: tragedy of the commons. There is a reason popular culture stereotypes financiers as greedy sociopaths. If the system can be cracked then it will be cracked. No shortage of examples, Bernie Madoffs, subprime lending crises, endless financial crashes and crises. Blockchains solve this problem, as in mathematically proves that certain classes of exploits requiring informa…
That sounds like a typical blockchain enthusiast answer: The banking industry is corrupt. Blockchain solves this. End of argument. I have yet to see a specific, easy to explain answer on how blockchain solves any kind of fraud. Who is forcing any of these fraudsters to put any information on the blockchain? As soon as you need external safe guards you are back to square one. I don’t have the solution to any of the pr…
Well my answer would be that there are many different types of exploits that we may consider fraud. As I said blockchains prevent _some_ of these exploits but not all. I don't think we can prevent laundering of illegal arms sales with cryptocurrency just as I don't think we can prevent the same laundering with actual paper bills.[a] However blockchains do prevent problems like double spending and information asymmetry from occurring.
My counter point to the lack of specific, easy answers on how blockchain solves any kind of fraud would be that there aren't any, in that there is a certain amount of financial and technical know how that is prerequisite to explaining _why_ these problems are provably non existent. We will need to wait for higher level abstractions to be invented before mainstream adoption is possible, and until that happens I will admit cryptocurrencies are almost hopelessly confusing in their mechanisms of action.
[a] China's new central bank currency may be able to solve this problem to some extent but I consider the forced adoption of such a currency in the Western world to be too draconian to be practical.
Re: It's time for us in the tech world to speak out about cryptocurrency
#637“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…
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Re: It's time for us in the tech world to speak out about cryptocurrency
#638Earlier quoted context omitted.
> How do you turn your Bitcoin into food, housing, utilities, and other necessities? I sell it for dollars to people in person; some of the dollars I have to change into Argentine pesos before I can spend them. Isn't that how everybody does it? > The Internet was not available to virtually anyone in 1982 much less 1969 It was available to almost anyone who knew someone who had access, which is the same situation as B…
> I sell it for dollars to people in person; some of the dollars I have to change into Argentine pesos before I can spend them. Isn't that how everybody does it? No, most people just spend their currency directly on the things they need to purchase, actually. > It was available to almost anyone who knew someone who had access That's not even remotely true, and is also a tiny number of people. > It was remotely simila…
This is willfully ignorant and motivated reasoning. Crypto has more uses than I care to even list, in fact it’s quite easy to come up with many of them, but it’s weird that people who’ve set in their ideology against it won’t ever budge. In another thread I listed out a handful, and it was so interesting to see people do what always happens in political fights: they take a small subset of the idea or just one of the things that they feel they can best counter, and counter that, conveniently ignoring that they aren’t really engaging with the point at all but rather very small branches of the argument.
If you care to see, it’s in my comment history not long ago. And the thread is fascinating because at best the replies just cherry pick and do semantic tricks like this.
Crypto has a wealth of interesting uses. Tech company co-ops, incentivizing content curation, new and organic stock distribution mechanisms for open source projects, and of course the giant one of providing a far better investment and transfer vehicle to the non-first world countries.
I mean, I can totally see the arguments that it is wasteful, or a bubble, overhyped, and not reaching its potential. But the ones who say it has no or next to no uses are in my opinion on the same plane as Krugmans “the internet will be less useful than the fax machine” or the classic Slashdot iPod “less space than a nomad” comment. It may take even 20 years to prove it, IMO that’s not unreasonable, but it will be claim chowder I’ll be happy to revisit.
If proof of stake works out, there’s no doubt the next Google will be a crypto company that gives revenue back to the user base to incentive good contribution. Content sites absolutely will be totally disrupted. Well look back at writing reviews for the Yelps and Googles as being anachronistic, “why did we used to give all this content to the largest company in the world for free”. Instead, a crypto-based Yelp or Reddit that used a coin and distributed it fairly in relation to contribution would absolutely blow up.
I think VC is also better done with coins in general. Take any traditional tech company that has nothing to do with crypto and just change one thing: instead of paying early adopters who help the platform grow $150 bucks, which is nothing, pay them in what is essentially a micro-dose of stock. That’s a 10x more incentivized early adopter because they actually could make something more than lunch money.
The reason crypto is blowing up isn’t because it’s a ponzo scheme. It’s because laws around accredited investing are truly the most egregiously disgusting instantiation of class warfare ever to exist, and finally small guys have a chance to do what the wealthy have been doing since forever: take their extra money and invest it. All the “pure” crypto companies are total bullshit, minus many BTC and ETH, because they have no product. That I agree with. But in time you’ll see a huge growth in companies that are simply normal tech companies with novel tech/uses, but who build in community ownership, rewards and incentives that actually share profit with their user base.
Again: why do people not get paid for contributions to Pinterest, Yelp, Reddit? These are companies paying millions of dollars to employees, and 100% of their content is given to them by users. In a better world they are actually run by the community, owned by the community, and developed in the open.
Re: It's time for us in the tech world to speak out about cryptocurrency
#639Earlier 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.
I seriously considered acceptiong bitcoin payments (it was a fad, why not) but did not want to connect something like Mt. Gox to my bank account. That was the stumbling block for me.
It did not occur to me at the time that I should hoard these payments until they were worth millions in 2021; back then we were still thinking of cryptocurrency in terms of something you'd get paid in and convert to a bank balance.
Re: It's time for us in the tech world to speak out about cryptocurrency
#640“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…
its not about interesting but about adoption. Crypto is interesting to anyone who spend time getting into it. Not for the same reasons and that is why the adoption looks different, but its there and that is really what matters.