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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

#301

Post by imtringued »

doomroot wrote: post #97
wpietri wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Why does the bitcoin blockchain need to be used for normal transactions? Do you not think a neutral payment rail/unit of account between nation state level actor’s could be valuable?

In my opinion there is nothing wrong with third parties offering services on top but you know, the whole cryptocurrency idea is that you don't need them.

Re: Cryptocurrency is something people tell lies about in hopes of getting richer

#302

Post by imtringued »

streamofdigits wrote: post #131

Cryptocurrency was a broken concept from the very start. It assumed that you can build a financial system by engineering "trust" in purely technical terms. Trust is something between humans. If you cannot find an arrangement of checks and balances that gives people comfort that the "system" is not ripping them off there is no amount of cryptoaccounting that will solve it for you. The very anonymity of the bitcoin fou…

In my opinion it feels like Bitcoin was designed by an amateur from a monetary perspective. Imagine if governments actually used it. Inequality would get worse than it already is. People buy it because of the multi level marketing aspect. Someone bought Bitcoin and they tell others to buy it, rinse and repeat.

People will call "nocoiners" jealous because they missed some train after all they didn't buy Bitcoin when it was at $100. Yet they talk about how oppressive the government provided financial system is. Like how getting -0.5% negative interest on savings above $100k is the end for the small saver but having your money go up 10x because you bought it early and having the purchasing power of your labor go down by 10x because you bought too late is the paragon of equality. One year of work buys me less Bitcoin than 3 years ago. I'm getting priced out like with real estate. It's really puzzling to me how this is supposed to lead to a crypto utopia.

Re: Cryptocurrency is something people tell lies about in hopes of getting richer

#303

Post by leppr »

dpedu wrote: post #238
jcbrand wrote: post #190

This article conflates NFTs with cryptocurrency, in a way that looks to me to be intentional in order to bolster his argument that crypto is for rich people to conspicuously consume and to pump and dump on the plebs. NFTs aren't money, or currency and just because they can be created on some blockchains doesn't make them so. I also don't see a genuine effort from the author to really understand why proponents think t…

> Bitcoin is open source, the original founder is nowhere to be found, there were no VCs involved in its creation or in the distribution of the coins and the entire network is run out in the open. The Bitcoin network is a commons. Hmmm. You've conveniently danced around any suggestion or mention of the fact that the "creator" of bitcoin mined 1.1 million - 1/20th of all bitcoins that will ever exist(!) - coins in pri…

As far as we know Satoshi himself was rather selfless. The Patoshi[1] miner suggests he actually calibrated his own mining to foster the network's health and decentralization in its early days, in detriment of his own output.

I'm absolutely on board to criticize the amazing amount of grifters in crypto. But letting this corrupt the image of the few people like Satoshi (and Vitalik Buterin and many others basically absent from the media), who willingly strayed from the opportunity to be among the richest individuals in the world, in order to instead focus on building something they think can better humanity, is not right. You don't need to look far to find the real grifters, they're showing ads in US media and paying millions to celebrities for product endorsements right now.

[1]: https://bitslog.com/2020/06/22/a-new-mystery-in-patoshi-time...

Re: Cryptocurrency is something people tell lies about in hopes of getting richer

#305

Post by imtringued »

HelixEndeavor wrote: post #81

I won't pretend I'm a computer genius or anything, but I feel like I understand tech at least more than the average Joe - at least, I'm the designated IT guy for computer problems faced by anyone I know. The fact that, despite having it explained multiple times by multiple sources multiple ways, I still can't seem to wrap my head around how crypto functions... Makes me suspicious. It feels like the whole idea is to o…

Honestly, one of the funniest things about our money system is that it keeps changing. Our understanding of money isn't really "finished". We ended up with a promise (also known as debt) based system by "accident" (through slow evolution) and that people have to catch up to this.

https://youtu.be/ZFRVfXeIaek

Re: Cryptocurrency is something people tell lies about in hopes of getting richer

#306

Post by leppr »

boh wrote: post #265
jcbrand wrote: post #190

This article conflates NFTs with cryptocurrency, in a way that looks to me to be intentional in order to bolster his argument that crypto is for rich people to conspicuously consume and to pump and dump on the plebs. NFTs aren't money, or currency and just because they can be created on some blockchains doesn't make them so. I also don't see a genuine effort from the author to really understand why proponents think t…

Not really a revolution when most people just trade it (mostly via fiat money). The original idea was for Bitcoin to be a currency, unfortunately the "hodlers" won, now its only reason to exist is to be more expensive. Boosters are still milking the original premise as some revolution they're supporting, when of course, if you ask how much of their crypto assets they've actually used/spent, the typical answer is 0%.…

L2s and decentralized stablecoins keep the dream of a free decentralized economy alive. It's a smaller community for sure (as most pretend enthusiasts aren't actually interested when there's no Ponzi in it for them, and most detractors would rather focus on easier strawmen), but it exists and it's thriving.

Re: Cryptocurrency is something people tell lies about in hopes of getting richer

#308

Post by dkersten »

andechs wrote: post #232
dkersten wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you limit the types of transactions in your blockchain to "this thing has been issued to this person/id/hash/whatever" and do not have any transactions of the type "this thing has changed ownership to a new person/id/hash/whatever" . A bank account that allows deposits but no withdrawals/transfers, its still a ledger, it just limits the operations you are allowed to do (not the operations you could theoretically d…

When a central authority is in charge of adding transactions to the blockchain, ie: DMV issuing licences, what's the advantage of blockchain over a standard database?

Oh, I agree. See my other comment on this page, I said the exact thing you did! Most cases where blockchain is usable, alternatives are still simpler, unless you actually need it to be distributed and zero trust, blockchain probably doesn't make sense.

I was just pointing out how it can be done or how it might make sense, if you needed it for something where blockchain did actually make sense, but in the case of drivers licenses, I don't think it does.

Re: Cryptocurrency is something people tell lies about in hopes of getting richer

#309

Post by secondaryacct »

krageon wrote: post #35
acomms wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are you so convinced that cryptocurrency solves the "outside forces much larger and more powerful than me have influence over the system" problem? It exchanged a solution to some problems for a new set of problems to be solved.

You are questioning what I'm saying by telling me something incredibly vague. I'm afraid I just don't know what to do with your question.

I can rephrase it: why do you think it impossible for vastly resourceful entities to acquire so much power they can control the decentralized system - in a softer way, probably but still.

Imagine a world tmr where bitcoin is everywhere. You ll have mining conglomerates in the cheapest electricity providers working as cartels to help each other and protect their interests (so can envision centralizing a blacklist of addresses they dislike, coordination on software version etc), de facto cartels of whales (like todays "billionaires" people describe as a collaborative force), and large lenders who concentrate capital and therefore still can buy out whatever they want (today called banks).

How do you think the blockchain solve any of that?

Re: Cryptocurrency is something people tell lies about in hopes of getting richer

#310

Post by Joeboy »

meheleventyone wrote: post #289
Joeboy wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like you're talking about cases where, as I said, there's "earlier evidence of somebody else being the creator of the work". In the absence of that , I think the token would be a decent piece of evidence in favour of the token owner.

So would posting it anywhere online essentially. Twitter would work for the same usecase. Or the old sending it to yourself through the mail thing. NFTs also don’t put the image on chain usually instead just linking from the metadata so a fraudster could register a bunch of placeholder NFTs and then later put stolen art where the link points to. Hey Presto you can steal art and “prove” the actual creator is the fraud…

Well, posting the actual content publicly would obviously make it public, which registering a hash on the blockchain would not. "Sending it to yourself through the mail" would probably be the competition, and I would say a cryptographic hash is at least as good as a postmark, as well as cheaper.

Anyway. I wasn't talking about NFTs as they exist today. I'm just saying the original concept (as I understood it) seemed basically reasonable, before everybody went insane.

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