261–270 of 704 posts
What about gaming? A huge problem in gaming now is that once games are no longer profitable, the servers go offline and they become unplayable. In-game assets simply disappear, and DRM servers go offline on the whim of the publisher. With the right architecture, crypto could solve both of these problems. Disclaimer: I don't like DRM or microtransactions, I think both of them make the gaming experience in 2021 pretty…
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Leaving aside the dubious idea that the Federal Reserve can give their friends the ability to print money, stablecoins don't subvert any party's ability to print money if they are pegged to that money. If you can print USD, and I have a stablecoin pegged to $1 USD, you can just print $1 USD and buy my stablecoin on the open market.
>Leaving aside the dubious idea that the Federal Reserve can give their friends the ability to print money You didn't read my comment correctly.
> stablecoins subvert the ability of the Federal Reserve to print money and give it to their friends at Goldman Sachs et al
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So the US has an antiquated payments system vis-a-vis Europe, but crypto solves none of those problems. I don't see it. I see FOMO, groupthink and greed.
You fail to see people who lost trust in their governments and organizations? You don't see how people are unhappy with getting their savings diluted by unlimited money printing?
If anything, I think stablecoins are way more dangerous than the author indicates. People talk about things like Bitcoin as a threat to sovereign currencies, and they are, as competitors, of sorts. But stablecoins are another matter entirely. One huge aspect of the value of sovereign currencies is that they are instruments of law -- courts will settle in them as a lowest common denominator, and it is safe to use them…
Stablecoins are dangerous because they have the potential to change the current selection effects on the elite. For one thing, stablecoins subvert the ability of the Federal Reserve to print money and give it to their friends at Goldman Sachs et al --- normally this is supposed to result in their friends have a larger fraction of money than they previously had. You start with 1 dollar, David at Goldman Sachs starts w…
May I recommend https://www.lynalden.com/quantitative-easing-mmt-inflation/
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Of all the things you could do with a blockchain, it's probably the worst. The legitimacy of voting outcomes depends critically on everyone understanding and in principle being able to verify how it works, and it being resistant to tampering at scale . Very few people would understand a blockchain based voting mechanism well enough to really verify, and any implementation error could give an attacker complete and unt…
You telling me everyone understands computerized voting machines? Because I don't think there's that much of a gap between people who know about those vs people who know about block chains
Not being pegged to a centralized, state-controlled currency is a dealbreaker for me. It's still in infancy and it's true that 99% of the projects are get-rich-quick schemes with no intrinsic value. Though, I think the author lives in a country with a trustworthy government because that's not the case for many people including me. In the last two days my country's currency has shaken much more than crypto and I don't…
Not being pegged to a state-controlled currency means your devalued currency competes with stronger ones, at least on the fictitious transitional period, you're sure you want that ? Assuming a stateless money, when/if someone then steals your crypto coin, which gov't backed law/judicial system are you gonna turn to ?
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It provides "distributed trust", in the sense that you know no single person or group is in control and you trust the distributed consensus, in terms of ledger state and algorithm accuracy.
I'm not fully up to speed but are modern blockchains still susceptible to a 51% attack?
There are some with lower threshold tolerance of these attacks based on the idea that they're unlikely and the added threshold doesn't actually add security. I don't know about that but some people seem to think so.
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I guess the distinction would probably be commoditized middle-men. Read, as distinct from our current champion middle-men, chosen by favor, regulation, and access to capital.
Explained simply, while there are indeed users acting as the middle man verifying transactions, you don't have to worry about trusting them because the system is built in a way where you know exactly what they're going to do. To add to this idea of mining, theres a more grandiose theory that smart contracts are the additive tool that we can use to build all sorts of incentives in our society for people to collaborate…
Wouldn't it be just as possible then to incentivise them to build things to the detriment of society (but that are to my benefit, of course)? We do that today with regular old money and regular old contracts.
Crypto is libertarianism-as-code: it promises freedom for all, even from the state (or "cathedral" in Moldbugese), but it's really an unworkable scam whose actual effect is to enrich the founders and the investor elite at the expense of everyone else. Oh, and as a side effect, it contributes to destroying the environment while its proponents tell us this is a good thing.
It was supposed to be, but that whole code-is-law thing lasted all of five minutes before the first major hack (Ethereum DAO exploit).
I wonder how much of the Crypto hype is because the US banking system still lives in the 1980s or thereabouts. If everybody in the US had access to bank accounts with easy electronic transfers within 5 seconds for no charge, no chargebacks and so on, as people are used to in the EU, would people still be excited about Bitcoin?
The problem with bank accounts is the banks. The promise of crypto is that you don't need to trust any institution, such as a bank, to keep track of your money.