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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

#691

Post by chrisco255 »

floatboth wrote: post #580
SubiculumCode wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you think these defi projects are hurting the environment then you have not been paying attention to the industry. Proof of Stake, what most smart contract tokens are moving to, is very energy efficient.

Is anyone actually really sure that Proof of Steak is secure though? Anyway, none of this matters because Bitcoin exists and is the dominant shitcoin (due to first mover advantage). All these other shitcoins can claim whatever efficiency, but it doesn't matter because that's a very isolated view of the problem. The shitcoin economy as a whole will still be fueled by mining unless somehow Bitcoin gets dethroned and th…

Yes, they've been live for years. Bitcoin can't do smart contracts, it's not a Turing complete scripting language and it's very difficult to work with, so of course it matters.

And already more transactions and more daily volume is settled on Ethereum than Bitcoin, see https://money-movers.info/ and https://cryptofees.info/ (pink lines are Ethereum DeFi applications)

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

#692

Post by darkerside »

lottin wrote: post #325
Graffur wrote: post #225

Earlier 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.

> What are the fundamental flaws you're talking about? For a payments system, the fact that all transactions are final is pretty bad. I'd say this, by itself, makes the system unusable in the real world.

You can use Ethereum to build contracts that look a lot like settlement execution, to my limited understanding

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

#693

Post by mthoms »

idlewords wrote: post #639
mthoms wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you were cashing out as the money was coming in, then you wouldn't have lost all of it in a "hack", would you?

So, which is it? Would you have lost all of it in a hack or would you be withdrawing straight to a bank balance because you abhor "hoarding"? It can't be both.

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

#694

Post by lhl »

idlewords wrote: post #30
pavlov wrote: post #21

“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…

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…

The problem is you’re looking at a technological dead end (Bitcoin). There’s no innovation there, financial or otherwise, just momentum. However all you have to do is to turn your eye adjacent to the dapp space and see where developer and user adoption is definitely happening. There’s no shortage of “stuff to do” in DeFi and over the past few months the pattern is that it maxes out the transactional capacity every single network it touches. There are currently multiple networks in production (BSC, Polygon, Solana) that have billions in TVL and handling hundreds of transactions/second right now and no shortage of contenders/alternatives and a huge amount of innovation at every layer.

Complaining about nothing to do on Bitcoin feels like complaining how empty the gopher server are after everyone’s moved onto the web.

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

#695

Post by baby »

Beaver117 wrote: post #673
pavlov wrote: post #21

“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…

I maintain that the most useful feature of crypto is still crime. The Silk Road was the killer app.

Wasn’t the first use of internet to buy weed between two universities?

Edit: first thing bought on the internet apparently was weed https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/what-was-first-thi...

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

#696

Post by pedalpete »

kragen wrote: post #285
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…

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 no idea why you are being downvoted. This is absolutely valid reasons for bitcoin to exist, but you don't have to be a failed state.

I'm from Canada, and moved to Australia. I was moving money from Canada to Australia, it was easier, faster, and cheaper for me to move that money via crypto (I used Eth rather than Bitcoin at the time) than going through the banking system.

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

#697

Post by baby »

jakelazaroff wrote: post #79
meowkit wrote: post #64

Earlier 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…

> 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.

Well, I work in the field and I think there’s both. Scams and real technology advances that would blow anybody’s mind if they would spend a bit of time to look into it. I promise there is more than Bitcoin and dogecoin.

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

#698

Post by baby »

adambatkin wrote: post #507
meowkit wrote: post #64

Earlier 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…

Blockchain as a technology is definitely innovative. The problem is that, in practice, the way that it solves certain problems come with tradeoffs. This isn't a technical problem per-se, just that it doesn't (IMHO) solve any real problems better (given the tradeoffs) than other, more "traditional" solutions. That's not to say that you can't make money with blockchain tech (just like you can make money playing blackja…

How doesn’t it? Do you know how slow traditional solutions are? Or prone to error?

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

#699

Post by jasonwatkinspdx »

toyg wrote: post #608
jfrunyon wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fiat money has value because it is widely, almost universally, accepted in exchange for things of intrinsic value (food, shelter, toys, tools). I'm not aware of any non-government-backed fiat currency which has gained widespread use in the history of humanity. And in fact all of the fiat currencies I know of originated as representative money. Bitcoin is not widely accepted in exchange for things of values, and I see…

> Fiat money has value because it is widely, almost universally, accepted in exchange for things of intrinsic value No, technically fiat money has value because it is accepted by a government to settle taxes. Which is why it loses value dramatically when a state collapses or otherwise becomes irrelevant to the local economy. Because traditionally the state itself was the issuer of such currency, already we have a mas…

> No, technically fiat money has value because it is accepted by a government to settle taxes.

Not true. There are quite a few places in the world where the de facto dominant currency is not the currency the local government requires for taxes, fees, etc.

In fact, the origin of using taxes + coinage goes back to a pragmatic way for ancient kings to not have to organize the logistics of feeding and housing a large army. Pay the soldiers in coin. Require citizens to pay a tax in the same coin. Boom, they self organize.

Money itself came about far earlier, and was independently invented in multiple places. The example most people look at is temple complexes in the Levant, where debt records came first, and currency second. It was an adaptation of earlier gift economy behavior to enable scaling to groups too large to have intrinsic social trust, and allowing for specialization of labor in building and maintaining the temples.

David Graeber's book will educate you about all this.

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

#700

Post by baby »

eli wrote: post #370
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.

And 8 years later the fees no longer make it viable for even that niche use case.

What fee? Are you talking about a specific currency or all currencies? In Celo currently fees are 0.1 cent per transaction, for example.
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