741–750 of 1001 posts
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.
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No, it's not a good comparison. The internet was always state of the art and better at solving actual problems the worse solutions were tackling. Fidonet was always, on a technical level, a worse experience than the internet. BBSs have their charm, but were absolutely obviously worse at what they did that the internet. Cryptocurrencies are just awful at solving real problems, compared to existing solutions. Why are y…
It's a good comparison insofar as the tools were/are primitive and only usable by experts. A lot of domain knowledge was required. You can hate crypto and still agree with me on the above point. It's a pretty innocuous observation. I'm not going to engage the rest of your argument which has no bearing on the point being made.
You’re giving a completely wrong impression of how the early web was and the early internet. I wasn’t around for that so I won’t personally give my input but for the time, each iteration every few years was great.
If domain knowledge wasn’t needed by the 90s. When was serious domain knowledge needed? When did that stop?
Some people found the internet hard to use and found it required more domain knowledge than they had every single year since the internet snd web have been around. Including in the 2020s.
“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…
Hmm. It’s interesting to note that skeptics seem much more invested in being right about crypto being a scam than proponents are in it being here to stay. The more time passes, the shriller the cries of skeptics become, leading me to believe that skeptics are emotionally invested to the extreme in the failure of crypto. I rarely see any carefully considered, informed opinions just tulips and drugs and money launderin…
Bitcoin is a horrible store of value. It might not go to zero, but it’s fluctuates wildly.
I think for people who predicted from a decade ago that this was all nonsense, the case is there that it is.
Realistically, what are we looking at? What runs on smart contracts? What is being bought and sold with Bitcoin.
This answer is not nothing, but…I mean really? This is the revolution?
As far as legal uses, the only one that has any amount of traffic is speculation. That’s it. Are there other people using it occasionally for other things? Sure! But then we’re looking at, checks ledger NFTs?
All of this while burning through tremendous amounts of electricity. We’re talking over half a percent of the total energy consumption of human civilization.
What have we gotten in return? This isn’t like people pushing back against airplanes or paper or rice. There’s no denying that a lot of money is thrown around, but you can only talk about people being “left in the dust” if you can point to something worth, again, >0.5% of electricity consumption of the PLANET.
The issue of the "promise" of cryptos (and blockchain in general) is that it tries to solve problems that are not tech problems. They are mostly political/governmental problems that are solved by a working democracy. In countries where there is no working democracy, the dictator won't give two shits if this NFT proves that you own this piece of land before taking it from you. Blockchain in itself is not something tha…
>working democracy That's a sizable assumption to begin with. Democracies are less and less, well, working because the Internet itself has eroded trust significantly and is moving the parameters of epistemology around. That is a problem caused by tech, so how is it not a tech problem ? The work done in the blockchain space on trust is IMO very important.
I have had banks stealing my funds for years -- be it financial providers eating up my first 401k contributions in excessive fees, be it the banks that charged me $2 every time I used an ATM, be it the random charges unauthorized charges that the bank pulled from my account... Then there is the watching all my adult life as assets grow more expensive and further out of reach, a debt treadmill emerges to ensure the co…
But that doesn't necessarily mean that the present alternatives (bitcoin, altcoin of your choice) are THE answer either. It's not a binary thing. Something may emerge that is valuable and useful and decentralised but I haven't seen anything that fits the bill yet.
For the vast majority of people Bitcoin is an investment because the price is going up. The price is going up because lots of people think it's a good investment. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy until it's not. Then it's every person for themselves and someone will be left holding the bag.
Yes, some people can use Bitcoin to buy goods and services. But if all the speculators were to decide they wanted to exit the market at approximately the same time do you really think the price is going to hold anywhere near where it presently sits? And are those people using Bitcoin for purchases going to hold, or are they going to exit their positions too?
Phrased more simplistically - can we all agree that the vast majority of xCoin holdings are speculative?
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I think that cyberpunk dream died when billionaires and VC got involved and Bitcoin (and other) currencies skyrocketed in price from millions of people playing crypto-lottery. Strikes against it: - It's burning a massive amount of resources and that is just increasing - I don't have the stats but I imagine the exponential growth in Bitcoin/coin prices is mainly from people using it as a pyramid scheme/casino not simp…
> It's burning a massive amount of resources and that is just increasing Do you own a car? Have you ever used plastic? How much resources are burned by banks? > I don't have the stats but I imagine the exponential growth in Bitcoin/coin prices is mainly from people using it as a pyramid scheme/casino not simple an upticl in usage Yea lets also ban computers because they allow cryptocurrencies. > A transaction is stil…
But decentralization? How will the ease of entry not allow allow rich people to dump money into it and be the main players/money makers in that system. Perhaps they wont all be in one country but they'll certainly (by stake owned) be one predominantly one demographic.
These two resonated with me: > A lot of intelligent observers look at cryptocurrency, see that it makes no sense, and reasonably infer that they must be missing something profound on the technical level. Tech culture has a nice tradition of not deriding new ideas, but we need to break it here and speak out > [non-tech people] don't see the huge silent majority of tech people who know it's a scam. That's on us It is o…
> 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…
Tether smells extremely fishy and seems to be used for a huge amount of trade volume on BTC and other cryptocurrencies.
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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 si…
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The extremely messed up incentives make it impossible to even have an honest conversation about it’s merits or issues. If there are any legitimate uses for blockchain (and that’s an if) they’re lost in the noise of 10,000 get rich quick schemes, outright frauds, and bad actors.
100% this. It's the world's greatest machine for generating motivated reasoning. People buy in during the pump and get incredibly motivated to join the immune system for their chosen coin.
“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…
BC has value because it a limited supply of a unique item that can be mathematically verified, even if it never solves all problems its advocates claim to want to solve in the world.
It might not have value to you personally, but it currently does to some people. Just like you might not value Micheal Jordan's rookie card, it is after all a supposedly limited supply piece of printed thin cardboard, there are plenty of people that do.
Let's pretend crypto currency tech didn't exist. Your local gov't wants to develop a digital currency that is verifiable, devoid of simple fraud and counterfeit, and is completely traceable by the general public.
All the smart people in the country would get to together and would come up with system that would end up looking a lot like block chain. The gov't would control all the nodes of course. They would contract out server maintenance (mining), charge fees on transactions (sales tax) and banks would hold your digital currency and give you interest (staking). Instead of stocks, companies would probably just issue, I dunno, something uniquely tied to them that equates to value, like a ... token?
It's not much different from what we do now, it just doesn't involve a bunch of baggage paper money has been carrying around for hundreds of years.