281–290 of 704 posts
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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.
Which could be compelling if you lived in a society where the banks were extremely unstable, but looks terrible if you live in one with regulation, deposit insurance and and other account protections.
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I think that's certainly a part of it, but it's not the whole story, and I suspect it's perhaps responsible for 1/3 of the story. A bigger motivation, and perhaps the most quixotic one, is financial security . No, I don't mean that cryptocurrencies haven't been highly unstable in value. But the more that the cabal chooses to truly enter the 21st century, the greater the danger of that technology being used as a means…
> Whether you agree with that perspective is another thing. Many crypto enthusiasts, whether they are explicit about it or not, like the idea of creating an economic system that everyone can participate in that doesn't involve countless middle-men. Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't the whole blockchain thing depend on an uncountable number of middlemen to verify transactions? They just don't have to trust them. No…
It's not that crypto enthusiasts don't like middle men, it's that they want to be the middle men.
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>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.
I was referring to this part: > 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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But that ledger isn't accurate. It's just distributed and difficult to change. I technically am the owner of (quite a few) bitcoin that were being processed by MtGox when they imploded. The wallet they were in at the time was emptied and no longer exists. I still receive the relevant court documents as the case continues still. As far as the ledger is concerned - they are no longer mine. --- So question to you: How d…
I see your perspective. There's another perspective from which you could look at the details of your situation. You deferred to a trusted party to secure your wealth and because that third party was untrustworthy, you have to defer to an intermediary. Had you deferred to yourself to secure your wealth you wouldn't be in this situation. The ledger would be the canonical one of ownership and possession, and you wouldn'…
I owned no bitcoins at the time I desired to trade bitcoins for a physical product (in this case: ~7g of Cannabis)
What recourse do I have that does not require trusting a third party?
I do not own the required compute power to mine it myself (not technically true at the time, although certainly true today)
I'd like to have you walk me through the exact set of steps to acquire my bitcoin and use them to purchase that physical good, where I can magically avoid placing any trust in a 3rd party.
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?
Crypto is used as a commodity and for scams, very rarely as a currency. Given that transferring crypto is hard, slower, more expensive, riskier, public, and more wasteful than real banking, I don’t see why these would be related.
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…
Just look at how git has transformed software development by mapping code to a hash. Or how DNS + SSL has transformed how people trust and transact online. Is the scalable future one where people and organizations trust their data to the cloud or other 3rd parties with no way to verify integrity?
Do people think that the future of human agreements is signatures on little pieces of paper managed by courts and lawyers? Personally I think it will be digital. Given it is digital, do you think there will be some "centralized database" run by government or a commercial entity that can be trusted as single point of failure? Personally I sure hope that there is some way to distribute and verify data integrity even if it isn't full blown proof of work. I'd sure prefer something more like git where I can see if two branches are the same even from different sources.
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 centralized, state-controlled currency is a dealbreaker for me Pretty sure you mean the opposite
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Voting is intentionally designed for it to be impossible to verify what your final vote is so that it's impossible for someone to use that to hold you to a particular vote. A classic example being a household all being forced to vote one way by the head of that household. With no verification possible you can freely vote without influence from others who would use that verification for their own ends. This is also wh…
> This is also why taking a picture of your ballot will nullify it In what jurisdiction is this the case? I have never heard of it.
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But what is it actually used for? Okay, you can donate to WikiLeaks ... But probably 99.999% of people who have possessed cryptocurrency are just speculators: buy low, sell high. And ironically, the exchanges are centralized entities :p
Bitcoin in particular is used as a store of value, or a form of "digital gold". Everything is speculation (you hope it goes up in the future, but no one knows for sure), but large corporations are increasingly keeping a balance in Bitcoin, as are wealthy individuals and fund managers. To understand its place in the world, you need to be a bit more familiar with government bond yield and risks, money creation/monetary…
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Algorand is carbon negative.
WHO CARES? Any cryptocurrency's monetary value is derived from exchange with the others — wasteful PoW titans like BTC and fraudulent wildcat banks like Tether. By participating in ANY openly traded cryptocurrency, you're participating in that economy that AS A WHOLE is involved in wasting power, fucking the GPU market, and massive financial fraud. Viewing any coin in isolation is completely stupid. Coins don't exist…
Your argument is like screaming that the Internet is full of porn and fake news and that any use of the internet (e.g. buying doilies on Etsy) is participating in that economy.
Also, it's not the case that any currency (crypto or otherwise) is derived from exchange with other currencies. It's derived from it's exchange for goods and services. If I can incentivize someone to do something with a cryptocurrency, it has value.