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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

#721

Post by baby »

xpe wrote: post #535
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.

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.

Pinboard ignores the tech because he doesn’t understand it, yet he talks about societal impact without understanding it as well.

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

#722

Post by K0balt »

While it’s perhaps true that many promises of cryptocurrency have yet to come to fruition, it is also true that programmable money has the potential to reduce the need for the use of coercive force and violence by the state, as well as reducing socioeconomic violence in general. Now is the tool being used to these ends? Yes, by small projects compared to Bitcoin, but yes. Crypto can create stable stores of value and currencies ( these are already in common use) and can add features like automatic taxation, demurrage, and ubi for users.

Just because few people are using a tool correctly yet does not mean the tool is without value.

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

#723

Post by jarbus »

__d wrote: post #561
jarbus wrote: post #386

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 not for the anonymity, it's for the censorship resistance. US govt blocked payments to wikileaks

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

#724

Post by josho »

skrebbel wrote: post #98
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…

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…

I like your analogy. I'll add another. VHS. The early adopter to VHS tapes was the porn industry. No longer did people have to watch porn in a seedy movie theater, they could do it privately at home.

So, yeh, early adopters may often be driven by the seedy side of culture.

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

#725

Post by lhl »

earnesti wrote: post #594
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…

> You could no longer buy a pizza with it I have bought a lot of pizzas with BTC (and other cryptocurrencies), as the local food ordering platform accepts it. Worked grear, but at some point the crypto payment processor started requiring KYC. I'm not gonna upload my passport to pay for pizza. I dont know if this problem is because of crypto or excessive regulation.

Use of cryptocurrencies for transactions is also limited due to tax treatment - in the US and many other countries you are expected to calculate and report capital gains for every transaction. Of course this sort of treatment won’t be done for CBDCs (algorithmic stablecoins with governance tokens is the answer here. I’m still waiting for someone to combine this with a reasonable mobile UX, feeless transfer, and transactional privacy. All these properties exist independently (Frax, Nano, Nano, Monero, for example) but not in a single product. Yet.)

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

#727

Post by baby »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #24

I am not sure why this is flagged - it seems a reasonable and timely opinion piece. Cryptocurrency is a subject that has to have a deep and public debate. What the OP is saying (which I take to be "the tech world has a duty to point out the flaws in cryptocurrency to avoid giving an impression of a clean bill of health to every ICO out there") - that is a valid socially useful debate. There are valid real world uses…

Imo the problem is that the debate seems to involve a lot of people with strong opinions but a poor understanding of the field.

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

#728

Post by eloff »

K0balt wrote: post #722

While it’s perhaps true that many promises of cryptocurrency have yet to come to fruition, it is also true that programmable money has the potential to reduce the need for the use of coercive force and violence by the state, as well as reducing socioeconomic violence in general. Now is the tool being used to these ends? Yes, by small projects compared to Bitcoin, but yes. Crypto can create stable stores of value and…

Digital money with a central database can also do all those things, and do them better.

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

#729

Post by baby »

DennisP wrote: post #292

I don't see any technical criticisms in the thread, which means "us in the tech world" is just an appeal to meaningless authority. It's also a bogus attempt to imply a broad consensus where there is none. As someone in tech myself, my personal opinion is that most of the twitter thread is nonsense.

+1 to this. The twitter thread is bad and it’s hard to argue against it as it makes little technical arguments.

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

#730

Post by Y_Y »

viraptor wrote: post #499
kragen wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

OT, but how come you use 01982 rather than 1982? Is that a personal / subculture / locale thing?

Makes it look like a malformed octal literal to me.
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