Off topic. Did anyone else's AI generated text radar go off on this article? Seems like too many fancy words.
I wonder how many media outlets use GPT-3 to help generate content.
Cryptocurrency is something people tell lies about in hopes of getting richer
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Re: Cryptocurrency is something people tell lies about in hopes of getting richer
#72I was involved in a blockchain (DeFi) startup. All the blockchain companies are mostly a huge pyramid scheme. The company I worked for has a lot of big claims, raised millions, wanted to solve world hunger, prioritized partnership, marketing, while having no working implementation. Others in the eco system are the same.
The NFT scene is even more BS. It could destroyed uninformed people's life, just like gambling. However, this kind of gambling is public on the internet with little regulations.
I hope more tech people speak about this instead of just ignoring them.
Re: Cryptocurrency is something people tell lies about in hopes of getting richer
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Resistant to centralized censorship (as you pointed out) I'd wager that most people don't care about this much, though it is real. Still, this can be achieved with signature-based authentication that doesn't require the tremendous waste of BTC. Just... tell the service your public key and sign a message when you sign up. Your key pair doesn't need to be associated with some distributed system for that to work. This…
>> This sounds like an anti-feature to me. Especially since it'd be foolish for a service to only support authentication via a blockchain. Imagine telling my grandmother that she needed to buy some btc in order to sign up for the service that hosted my wedding photos. This is different because your grandma would have to buy the tokens once and signup once and she will have access not only to the 'wedding photo servic…
> People who signed up early to the right blockchains will have priority access to certain software ecosystems and exclusive services which are only accessible to the richest among them (for example).
This seems even more like an anti-feature TBH. Imagine not being allowed to use the future equivalent of basic services because you were not "early enough". Sorry grandma, no wedding photos for you because you didn't buy these specific three coins out of the thousands started every month.
Re: Cryptocurrency is something people tell lies about in hopes of getting richer
#74The rebranding of MySQL as blockchain was a brilliant move for sales. Bit torrent is decentralized and it doesn't use "blockchain". "Blockchain" only works for money and nothing else
I mean, if you look at transaction cost, settle time, user friendliness, and currency risk, it doesn't even work as a medium of exchange, which is the definition of money. More than a decade on, approximately nobody uses Bitcoin for normal transactions. Compare with Venmo or MPesa, both of which launched around the same time, to se what actual digital money looks like. Both of those do way more transactions than Bitc…
Hard agree - the only thing bitcoin can reasonably be spent on for most folks is black market goods (usually drugs).
Which is really why bitcoin exists as thing today, in my opinion. It was a way to pay for drugs over the internet.
The rest of the pricing is purely speculation, and it hurts any real utility it might provide.
Re: Cryptocurrency is something people tell lies about in hopes of getting richer
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't trust the collective anonymous users of Bitcoin more than I trust my bank and the court system though. If someone hacks into my account, my bank will likely reimburse me for any losses. There are controls in place to stop them from stealing it al. If someone just transferred it to their own account, I could use the courts to get it back. If I use a credit card to pay a scam, I can do a charge-back. With crypt…
> There are controls in place to stop them from stealing it al. If someone just transferred it to their own account, I could use the courts to get it back. What if it's taken thorough wrongful civil forfeiture? Will you be able to afford to navigate the courts to get your assets back after they've been seized?
Not always, but wrongful civil forfeiture is just one of many possible ways to steal. In other cases using the court system will be possible. With bitcoin, it is never possible.
Re: Cryptocurrency is something people tell lies about in hopes of getting richer
#76The whole NFT craze lost me when tech founders I once highly respected started pushing and showing off their ugly gifs and trading cards on Twitter. Bad taste of the bored rich is not a new thing, but I hope NFTs won't become a noble tradition.
I have a rule, which is that by the time I dream up an idea, plenty of other people have already had the same idea. So, when I proposed selling NFTs of the rehearsals of my band, and told my son about it, he said: "Dad, a million people are already doing that sort of thing."
If you're with Pink Floyd, you could still give it a try.
Re: Cryptocurrency is something people tell lies about in hopes of getting richer
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, I found it to be a decent solution to support actual artists (esp. Photographers or folks like eBoy fame) who were already selling their digital art in genuine and honest capacity. But when some random guy without a story renders a thousand animated dogs from a script and the actual art is how to push it via Reddit bots, my support for artistic value creation has reached its limit.
I am an artist. Have shown in galleries, museums and rubbed shoulders with all sorts of dealers etc in Manhattan art world. What you see in the nft space is pretty normal.. for every genuine, talented artist there are 1000 copy cats just gaming the market trends. For every genuine, professional art seller/buyer there are 1000 used car salesmen looking to flip hype and bad taste for quick profit, screw over naive and…
What's lacking is an agreed upon mechanism for distinguishing the real artists from the hacks, and the real buyers from the flippers.
Re: Cryptocurrency is something people tell lies about in hopes of getting richer
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There are controls in place to stop them from stealing it al. If someone just transferred it to their own account, I could use the courts to get it back. What if it's taken thorough wrongful civil forfeiture? Will you be able to afford to navigate the courts to get your assets back after they've been seized?
Not always, but wrongful civil forfeiture is just one of many possible ways to steal. In other cases using the court system will be possible. With bitcoin, it is never possible.
So if you think the risk of permanently losing your assets via legal channels is, let's say, 99-to-1 compared to the risk of losing your assets to cryptocurrency attacks, then wouldn't it make sense to hold 99% of your assets in the bank and 1% in cryptocurrencies?
Cryptocurrencies don't have to replace all existing financial instruments to be a useful hedge. They can just be one tool of many to diversify your risk profile.
Especially consider that for people living outside the developed world, the risk of having your assets stolen through legal channels is going to be much higher.
Re: Cryptocurrency is something people tell lies about in hopes of getting richer
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
Honestly I don't think NFTs - as it exists - was ever a good model. I know there's a hypothetical resale mechanism, but it's fundamentally operating on a lottery system - artists are buying a ticket hoping to hit it big, and that favors a self-destructive mentality. A Patreon-like system still has an element of luck, but the steady monthly income makes it much easier for an artist to say "this is working, I should ke…
It wasn't ever meant to be a lottery. It was and remains just a way to sell ownership rights to stuff without physically transferring any stuff. The fact that a speculation market bloomed around it was just a weird circumstance.
Weird circumstance? It seems like an entirely predictable outcome, and as such it seems like it may very well have been the actual point.
Especially since NFTs confer no actual assets or rights in anyway that matters EXCEPT for in an adjacent speculative market.
Re: Cryptocurrency is something people tell lies about in hopes of getting richer
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wouldn't that make it impossible to change your password if compromised?
As the saying goes: not your keys not your wallet. This is the fundamental issue with the anonymity. You can prove you have access, but you cannot prove it belongs to you. The centralized/decentralized conversation often doesn't touch this aspect. When it comes to ownership, at some level, there needs to be a central power to enforce it as ownership is in itself a vague concept.
The path forward are contact wallets and dead man switches