I was thinking like the headline until I witnessed that a government seized assets of thousands and left them pennyless in a very short time. After coup attempt in Turkey, 1.5 million people are investigated with accusation of being a member of armed terrorist organization (population of Turkey is ~80 million). Lots of people who could run away found their assets were frozen, and eventually legally or illegally seized. All of a sudden they were poor. Were they kept some of their assets in Bitcoin, they could easily move them out of the country. Yes, the state can still go after them but it becomes much more difficult. This alone is sufficient for me to "invest" a percentage of my assets in Bitcoin in case something bad happens. Yes, it is unlikely but anything that makes a state stronger bully should be done.
Cryptocurrency is something people tell lies about in hopes of getting richer
341–350 of 411 posts
Re: Cryptocurrency is something people tell lies about in hopes of getting richer
#342Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even if that analysis were accurate, that isn't mining "in private" before "publicly launching" as you claimed.
That's fair, my memory was incorrect. However, I don't think that makes a difference w.r.t. calling the coin premined.
I do not think the term should be used in this case because anyone could've mined at that point; others that actually did pre mine did so when only a few insiders could as well, like a pre IPO.
Re: Cryptocurrency is something people tell lies about in hopes of getting richer
#343Earlier 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?
Many/most people don't worry about having large amounts of cash stolen, whether by authorities or criminals precisely because they trust the banking system to keep track of their money.
Re: Cryptocurrency is something people tell lies about in hopes of getting richer
#344Earlier quoted context omitted.
> An NFT is decent evidence in favour of you being the creator of a work, if there's no earlier evidence of somebody else being the creator of the work It's really not at all reliable. I could create an NFT for the "Joeboy" HN account right now, and ostensibly become the owner of your HN account since such an NFT does not already exist. Obviously, this makes no sense, the NFT is meaningless.
No, you could create an NFT that supposedly represents that but unless people buy into the idea, no is becoming the owner of anything. If instead Ycombinator would release each user as an NFT, and allow people to buy/sell then, then yes you could become the owner of an HN account via NFTs. But until then, the one who knows the password is the owner. People seems to have some sort of problem with trying to understand…
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Re: Cryptocurrency is something people tell lies about in hopes of getting richer
#345Earlier 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?
Many/most people don't worry about having large amounts of cash stolen, whether by authorities or criminals precisely because they trust the banking system to keep track of their money.
The banking system would obviously cooperate with authorities.
Re: Cryptocurrency is something people tell lies about in hopes of getting richer
#346Earlier quoted context omitted.
> An NFT is decent evidence in favour of the keyholder being the creator of a work, if there's no earlier evidence of somebody else being the creator of the work. The second clause shows why the first is not true: the other evidence is what gives you the information you need. In every context where it really matters it comes down to what a court would accept and … uh … I would not want to be the one having to tell a…
I can't say for sure what a judge would make of a cryptographically secure hash of a piece of content that there's no record of prior to the hash's registration on a blockchain. I think if somebody tries to claim authorship of eg. a screenplay I've written, such a hash should be pretty good evidence in my favour.
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Re: Cryptocurrency is something people tell lies about in hopes of getting richer
#347I was thinking like the headline until I witnessed that a government seized assets of thousands and left them pennyless in a very short time. After coup attempt in Turkey, 1.5 million people are investigated with accusation of being a member of armed terrorist organization (population of Turkey is ~80 million). Lots of people who could run away found their assets were frozen, and eventually legally or illegally seize…
The fact that Bitcoin is a complete failure as a currency is why it's not practical to keep all of your assets in it even as a targeted person.
Re: Cryptocurrency is something people tell lies about in hopes of getting richer
#348Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The same account could be used by multiple independent services and this removes the need for a signup process altogether. This is only marginally better than SSO with Google/Apple/Facebook/whatever. It dodges the "Google closed my account" problem, which is a meaningful improvement. But I'm not fully certain why you need the public key to be part of a blockchain for this to work. Couldn't you just publish your pub…
- Resistant to centralized censorship (as you pointed out) - It allows you to use the same passphrase for all services without compromising security since your passphrase never needs to leave your own machine; it is never sent over the wire. You just send signatures to different services. - The cost associated with purchasing tokens needed to initialize an account on the blockchain would serve as a spam prevention me…
> it is never sent over the wire. You just send signatures to different services.
You don’t need blockchains for this. Ordinary websites can implement this. They usually don’t, but, they could?
Re: Cryptocurrency is something people tell lies about in hopes of getting richer
#349The 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…
Have you ever did a wire transfer through a bank?
Re: Cryptocurrency is something people tell lies about in hopes of getting richer
#350> Cryptocurrency is something people tell lies about in hopes of getting richer An amazingly succinct title. Absolutely true. Whenever someone hypes up cryptocurrency, it is almost always for their personal gain, directly or indirectly.
And likewise, whenever someone downplays/criticizes cryptocurrency, it is almost always for their personal gain, directly or indirectly.