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Andreessen on Crypto

marginalrevolution.com

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Re: Andreessen on Crypto

#31

Post by timdaub »

I think it's pretty ignorant from both Thiel and Andreessen to put cryptocurrency and AI on the political spectrum.

And generally I doubt the usefulness in classifying things into right and left.

At the polar ends of each are people that have conflicting norms on how the world should work. These usually arise once again through ignorance as a norm carries the expectation to be accepted by everyone.

To someone that has worked in the tech of cryptocurrency, all I'm saying is that I'm not particularily interested in the left/right drama. Let's hope it never catches on.

In my opinion these narratives are just created because somehow they'll serve Thiel and Andreessen to run a more specific story that they can use to increase their wealth.

Re: Andreessen on Crypto

#32

Post by chrisco255 »

techbrobane wrote: post #3

This is an ahistorical and backwards analogy. Historically the left/right political divide goes back to the French revolution where the rights side of their parliament supported the monarchy and the left opposed. From this perspective AI would seem more centralized, authoritarian, and right-wing, while open networks are more democratic, distributed, and left-wing.

In the US we never had that battle. We had Federalists (more aligned with a stronger federal government) vs Antifederalists (more aligned with weaker federal government and pushed for the bill of rights to limit government power). Neither one wanted or ever pushed for authoritarianism. It's about individual rights vs local vs national government, and how much authority is delegated to the national body. I think right vs left is an overused and over-simplistic tool for analyzing modern politics, especially across various cultures.

Re: Andreessen on Crypto

#34

Post by colesantiago »

bradleyjg wrote: post #21
colesantiago wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So far the only mass use-case for crypto has been speculation... so you can't send crypto to another person? i'm confused. to downvoters: When you say the mass use case, you mean everyone is using crypto to scam each other? So there is absolutely no other good usecase for crypto and we should ban it completely?

So there is absolutely no other good usecase for crypto and we should ban it completely? I don’t think we should ban everything that has no valid use case. Maybe someone will come up with one eventually. For now, it’s all get rich quick all the time.

Well, Binance has been banned in the UK (Biggest crypto exchange in volume) so I don't see why we should stop there if the only usecase is 'scams', 'fraud' and 'ransomware'.

Re: Andreessen on Crypto

#35

Post by faitswulff »

Tesl wrote: post #25
darkerside wrote: post #18

For everybody saying cryptocurrency has no use, you must not remember how much trouble society had envisioning the uses for the very internet upon which we are now posting. Here's an example of a use case recently gaining ground. https://mobile.twitter.com/BrantlyMillegan/status/1402388133... I don't have a crystal ball, but it seems foolish and short-sighted to imagine we are certain that there are no legitimate use…

I am so unbelievably sick of hearing this from bitcoiners. It just isn't true. At all. There is zero comparison to be made between crypto and the early Internet, its incredibly dishonest.

Email was immediately useful.

Re: Andreessen on Crypto

#37

Post by nixpulvis »

> — the ability for many untrusted participants in a network to establish consistency and trust. This is something the Internet has never had, but now it does, and I think it will take 30 years to work through all of the things we can do as a result.

Wow, when you put it like that, it's amazing that I can shop, bank, and safely talk with my friends and family online. Pretty much all my messages are encrypted and/or checksummed (as necessary) and I still have to trust all the hardware and software on top to do it's job, just like anything else.

How does "Crypto" change this?

Re: Andreessen on Crypto

#38

Post by ZephyrBlu »

nixpulvis wrote: post #27
ZephyrBlu wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're synonymous, and crypto is the colloquial term.

They are only synonyms to coinheads.

I don't own any crypto and barely keep up with the happenings in the ecosystem.

Cryptocurrency is just more commonly talked about than cryptography.

Re: Andreessen on Crypto

#40

Post by lowkey »

From the article, the use case discussed is distributed consensus.

With cryptocurrencies we as society have the option of a new way of organizing labor and capital to achieve a goal. Instead of kings, politicians, corporate owners or middlemen - we have the opportunity to build systems based on the idea of rules without rulers.

Bitcoin eliminates the need for central bankers to control the money supply.

Ethereum replaces armies of lawyers and beaurocrats with smart contract code.

In the future crypto might allow you to build Ubercoin so we can have a distributed ride-sharing platform without a central entity in the middle.

These new distributed consensus mechanisms eliminate the weaknesses of traditional approaches which rely on fallible human leaders who can be corrupted replacing them with code and incentives.

This allows for emergent properties such as censorship resistant money that can be transmitted quickly and irrevocably over the internet.

These are novel and innovative use cases powered by the most important invention of the 21at century.

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