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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

#651

Post by mmcgr »

coliveira wrote: post #278

This is not even touching the fact that bitcoin and similar currencies are a danger for the environment. They spend huge amounts of energy that are helping destroy the planet. The longer this scam goes on, the more damage will happen to the world.

>They spend huge amounts of energy that are helping destroy the planet

This sounds extremely ignorant, Bitcoin essentially has accomplished a _trustless_ transfer of value, globally and at very low costs (even considering the extraordinary fees right now). This is just the cost of that...

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

#652

Post by mmcgr »

brianolson wrote: post #188

Bitcoin is terrible technology and stupidly wasteful, but there are new blockchain networks coming along that are about a million times more efficient, so use those instead.

If you are referring to PoS (both stake and space), they make fundamentally different tradeoffs as opposed to PoW. It's intellectually dishonest to claim either is "more efficient".

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

#653

Post by xpe »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #514
tzumby wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Considering that it hasn't produced any value of note in 13 years, I'm gonna go out a limb here and say I don't think it's worth 2% of the entire world's wealth - and certainly not 3% of the world's energy.

In this comment, I'm assuming you are talking about Bitcoin.

> I don't think it's worth 2% of the entire world's wealth

Taken literally, if 2% of the world's wealth is in Bitcoin, so isn't that its value, by definition?

I'm not trying to nitpick. I'm trying to push back on what seems to be a glossing over of the fundamentals.

I wonder if what you mean is that you don't think it is _wise_ for people to put so much of their assets in the form of Bitcoin.

Now, if we want to have the discussion of "how has Bitcoin affected the economy?" it is not enough to only look at a snapshot of how wealth is allocated at one instant of time. We should be looking at a differential view; i.e. before and after.

In particular, an economist would ask questions such as...

1. How has Bitcoin changed transaction costs? Who bears these costs? Over what time frame?

2. To what degree does the structure of Bitcoin provide advantages relative to other assets?

3. How does the development of Bitcoin factor into a longer-term view of experimentation and innovation?

4. To what degree has wealth been reallocated due to Bitcoin? To what degree did it disrupt existing wealth patterns?

And so on...

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

#654

Post by seibelj »

wmf wrote: post #517
tuesdayrain wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not very good at experimenting then. I first bought BTC in 2013 because of a legitimate purpose: to pay for online goods (legal software) to a seller who wanted to completely eliminate any risk of chargebacks.

Completely eliminating any risk of chargebacks mostly shifts risk back onto the customer; I don't think it's a net benefit. Some businesses seem to intrinsically have sky-high chargeback rates but I'd prefer that those businesses simply not exist rather than put up with the existence of crypto. I once bought donuts from a food truck with BTC and the donuts were good but the payment process was really slow.

I own a small online business selling custom-configured RPIs and chargebacks are terrible. Businesses build reputations but expect their customers to be anonymous every time. It would be far better if chargebacks were eliminated and customers could review the merchants to reduce fraud. Putting all the risk on the merchants is backwards.

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

#655

Post by marcusae313 »

kragen wrote: post #392
mandelken wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for sharing your point of view. What is unclear to me, is how these remittances work in practice. I get that in the US you can exchange USD to Bitcoin with a credit card and then send that to a person in, say, Venezuela (or share the wallet password). But how is it converted back to Venezuelan Bolivar? I can't imagine you buying a pizza with bitcoin in Caracas. Side question, why do you write your years with a…

I haven't been in Venezuela since 02006 so I don't know how people there cash out of Bitcoin. I'm guessing nobody has a clear view of the whole system, since being transparent to Maduro's thugs is not in the interest of any of the participants. If I had to guess, I'd guess that Venezuelans who are fleeing the country sell their dollars for Bitcoin, and Venezuelans whose family is abroad buy them. One thing I do know…

Thousands of PoS terminals in the country.

https://news.bitcoin.com/venezuelans-can-now-use-bitcoin-to-...

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

#656

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#657

Post by boringg »

LegitShady wrote: post #426
meowkit wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree with the characterization that the primary use is a scam. That’s like saying the primary use of email is to receive ads and phishing mail.

Because email has no value except as a means of communication. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are massive speculation scams. It's popular because everyone wants to hold one in the hopes it goes up in value. There's no reason for it to go up in value except that other people think it will go up in value and want to buy one too. You're buying a number on a blockchain somewhere in the hope someone else will want it…

I’m curious if it is actually such a large scam with too many people that they can’t let it fail.

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

#659

Post by chrisco255 »

curtisf wrote: post #236
chrisco255 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you been looking at the Maetaverse at all? https://www.sandbox.game/en/ https://decentraland.org/ These are 3D virtual world environments and people are using crypto to build an online economy. They are trading property, buying virtual artwork and creating galleries, setting up clubs and meeting spaces, etc. You can also explore decentralized finance, act as a peer-to-peer lender, provide liquidity in a marketpl…

> These are 3D virtual world environments and people are using (VIRTUAL CURRENCY) to build an online economy. They are trading property, buying virtual artwork and creating galleries, setting up clubs and meeting spaces, etc. What you're describing here is Roblox (2006), which was launched 2 years before Bitcoin was conceived, and has attained a market cap of >$50 billion without any cryptocurrency nonsense. Or Secon…

No, I'm not describing Roblox. Roblox is a great game and has many great characteristics, but this is bigger and broader than that.

Sybil attacks would be detected in an open network first of all. If you can pull it off, I invite you to try: there's hundreds of billions of dollars on the table protected by nothing but cryptography and game theory. Knock yourself out. I'm sure all the people in this space are idiots and haven't seen the holes you claim are there.

I'm old enough to remember when using a credit card was a hassle or seen as predatory on consumers and many people either refused to use credit or accept credit in their businesses. For several decades using a credit card wasn't any more convenient than using cash or check even. Over time, the scanners got better and faster, Visa and MasterCard integrated with ATM debit cards, and then mobile phones and swiping plugins enabled it all to get better. Now it's ubiquitous. But that ubiquity will make it all the more easier for merchants to adopt crypto.

It turns out there is already crypto insurance protocols like Nexus Mutual and Cover that will cover you if a loss occurs. Insurance is really just a business problem that is easily fixable.

On the plus side crypto is far more secure than Visa or MasterCard, because it works on public/private key cryptography and you simply sign a transaction rather than enter your name and address and all the same information you'd need to commit a fraudulent credit card transaction.

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

#660

Post by eightysixfour »

zx2391 wrote: post #183

I read a Blockchain book from O'Reilly in 2015, when it came out and it left me with the distinct impression that this "technology" is vaporous. It could do anything, yet, almost no examples to try out, let alone real-world successes. Over time I witnessed many "new" things, and the ones which stick typically have a specific aura to them, like a 10x simplification, or speedup or reduction in "noise". These things are…

> PPPS: Wild speculation: With 5G, everyone with a phone could host their business directly on their device, instead on other peoples servers. When phones hit a TB in storage, you can run your socnet with your friends - and you probably will, because mainstream money will have moved to something much more immersive, addictive, profitable like glasses, vr, ar.

I've been thinking about this a lot lately. The decrease in the cost in high performance phones, more storage, and high speed connectivity will make for some interesting social network opportunities where your device is the server and there's no/minimal intermediaries. You could bring back the Google Circle concept and cache things from your inner circle while accept that things in outer circles are ephemeral if the friends' device is off.

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