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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

#821
bitcoin reminds me a lot of herbalife.

everyone knows it’s an open ponzi scheme. but you’d also be rich if you invested in it early. and you can’t convince someone whose bought into the ponzi that it’s a scam. you just have to wait for them to get burnt

and it mostly takes advantage of poor people trying to get rich to the advantage of early adopters.

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

#822

Why does some (pseudonymous, or even anonymous?) Twitter account claim to speak for some "silent majority"? Even using the term "we". Who is "we"? And why they think they are a majority? Was there a poll or so? Did I miss out something? Such kind of framing makes me angry — no matter I agree or not on the actual point! Who the fuck thinks they can speak on my behalf without even trying to ask me about my opinions?

My full name and phone number are in my Twitter bio, you dillweed

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

#823
post #339

Oddly enough I’m the diametric opposite: skeptical of crypto’s long term value up until recently (but before the last big run up) - I now see it is a a fundamental hedge against totalitarianism among other things. Westerners can fail to grasp the potential benefits due to the privilege of the time and place they were born. At least for now.

and you think a totalitarian government is going to let you buy crypto?

if they just shut down coinbase and robinhood and square then 99% of people will lose access.

chinas great wall blocks a lot of the internet itself. it’s delusional to think governments can’t stop crypto easily. they can even just block internet completely

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

#824
post #579

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fees high, world too stable, heavy speculation. Cryptos forced to trade on centralized exchanges to avoid fees, making it a much crappier version of something like PayPal. Doesn't help that there's an unending supply of people more than willing to participate in ponzi schemes creating massive volatility and turning the "currency" into the commodity.

Trading on a DEX is free trading on an exchange costs you fees. People are just lazy and use exchanges because they provide easy to use apps and stuff and cash out to fiat etc. but this changes because exchanges are horrible at staying up when the market moves fast and everyone wants to trade. Sologenic DEX [1] is an modern UI for a DEX to trade. Cutting out the middlemen was once a key point of p2p and decentral sys…

Weren't DEX trade fees in the thousands of dollars during the big part of the crash a few weeks ago?

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

#826
post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More people need to appreciate this

They never transact with people in countries that have strict financial controls, so the problem does not exist for them. I pay people in Venezuela in cryptocurrency because nothing else is a viable option.

Which cryptocurrency do you use for it?

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

#827

Beyond cryptocurrency, how many other applications have either been built around or shifted to primarily function off of blockchain? This isn't meant as a gotcha question, but it is something that I can honestly say I can't think of any. In terms of cryptocurrency, from my perspective the problem for mass adoption comes down to stability of value and oversight. Why would anyone want their paycheque to come to them in…

Look into how BMW and Walmart are using Vechain:

https://nederob.medium.com/bmw-uses-vechain-to-combat-mileag...

https://medium.com/vechain-foundation/walmart-china-takes-on...

The "why": https://www.reddit.com/r/Vechain/comments/7ra0tt/honest_ques...

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

#828
post #694

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…

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…

Crypto only solves problems crypto itself created. DeFi is a perfect example of that.

The reason is that blockchain can only offer its trustless, decentralized and permissionless guarantees to things that are wholly representable on-chain. As soon as you try and sync it with the real world, the real world is the source of truth and the chain representation is meaningless.

Further, by boat anchoring solutions to the fundamental inefficiencies of blockchain, you leave your chain solutions at a material disadvantage to centralized, permissioned solutions anyways. This creates huge adverse selection bias, leaving only the criminals and scammers using it.

Concrete example: Sia has 800TB of storage - total! - in spite of an $800M market cap and millions spent on R&D. You could achieve the same result with a half of a 1U rack of hard drives and $40,000 - or a few bucks on AWS. Why? Because why on earth would anyone use it?

On the other hand, Chia has 1.5 exabytes of wasted hard drive capacity loaded up with bingo cards lol.

This is crypto.

DeFi is particularly fun, it's basically just decentralized 2008, a way to extend way too much leverage to people who simply should not have it, in exchange for fanciful 3-digit percentage APR to lenders.

It's all a damn mess.

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

#829

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…

"A lot of observers", "Many people say", "Everyone says". Let's stop using weasel words, if you consider yourself a techie, come up with some real evidence-based arguments.

What do you mean? Isn't the burden of proof on cryptonerds to back up their claims?

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

#830
post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The hard part is not the data structure behind it (Merkle tree) but the economics. An entirely new branch of economics has spun of it and it's far from trivial.

"People had to invent entirely new ways to explain it because our existing models didn't work" isn't a very good argument for it being real.

I mean, it's not even 'entirely new ways' to describe it. Bitcoin has been reinventing the finance industry one mistake at a time.

Tragedy of the commons is fully evident in the bitcoin block size debacle.

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