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The Handwavy Technobabble Nothingburger of Crypto

stephendiehl.com

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Re: The Handwavy Technobabble Nothingburger of Crypto

#291

Post by tux1968 »

moolcool wrote: post #224
tux1968 wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the mechanism that ensures bitcoin inflates proportionally to the dollar?

(not an economist) If most bitcoins are bought with USD, all else remaining equal, wouldn't this automatically happen?

I'm not an economist either... but the buying power of your bitcoin goes down if people demand more of it for a given product. If USD prices rise, the bitcoin price will rise too, meaning your bitcoin wealth is affected by inflation, and you're not protected from the Fed printing money.

Re: The Handwavy Technobabble Nothingburger of Crypto

#292

Post by rm445 »

mitchdoogle wrote: post #158
Scarblac wrote: post #38

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.

The promise of crypto(currency) is that you buy some and then you get rich.

I'm not even trying to be super-negative here - after all, if it does become a lasting store of value, accepted as money in the long term, then early adopters will be holding something valuable. It could happen. But right now the hype is self-perpetuating.

Re: The Handwavy Technobabble Nothingburger of Crypto

#293

Post by CPLX »

Scarblac wrote: post #38

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?

Yes of course they'd be excited about it. It's gambling, and people really like gambling.

To be blunt, they fucking love it. Like they’ll build an entire city in the middle of an uninhabitable desert just to do it. They’ll give up their kids future for it. People making $7.25 an hour will spend hundreds of dollars a week on scratch off lottery tickets in order to participate in it.

An endless demand for new ways to gamble is the least fucking confusing cultural development to ever happen.

Put people in a prison and they’ll do it with cigarettes. Give a bunch of construction workers a lunch break and they’ll bet on which pigeon is gonna to take off first. Hand a group of people a round ball or a deck of cards and they’ll figure out how to do it.

Beanie babies, little ceramic figures, baseball cards, coins. The desire for people to speculate on synthetically created scarcity is boundless, spanning generations.

Speculation is common to every culture in every era of human history. It's an amazing use case for a new technology with billions and billions of dollars in pent-up demand.

Crypto (and NFT's) are a gambling fad. People will keep doing it until it’s banned, matures, or gets replaced by the next gambling craze.

Re: The Handwavy Technobabble Nothingburger of Crypto

#294

Post by whatever1 »

tigereyeTO wrote: post #260

The author of this article makes specious claims that can each be refuted. >Any application that could be done on a blockchain could be better done on a centralized database. Except crime. That's simply not true. First he doesn't define "better" which is incredibly important when making such a claim. I would agree that centralized databases can do things "more quickly" and "with less overhead" but you'd lose the most…

Crypto can be forked without my consent too.

Re: The Handwavy Technobabble Nothingburger of Crypto

#295

Post by matheusmoreira »

horsawlarway wrote: post #59
padobson wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, this is what I don't understand from the naysayers. Anyone who says blockchain-driven assets don't have intrinsic value seems to ignore the value of trust - the ability to trust that the ledger is accurate seems extremely valuable. The author of the article skips over the question entirely, maybe he's addressed it elsewhere, but if the crypto skeptics continue to ignore one of its primary value propositions, I…

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…

> How do you reconcile the theft of my property with the ledger at this point?

Authorities must find whoever received those bitcoins and make them transfer the funds back to you.

Re: The Handwavy Technobabble Nothingburger of Crypto

#296

Post by mountainb »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #198
mountainb wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The technology doesn't really matter that much. If the US banking system wants to compete, it could try paying yield on savings. That's one weird trick that has made banking attractive for well over 1,000 years. A banking system that does not pay yields to savers is just a glorified collection of ledgers.

A crypto system that pays yields on monopoly money is just a glorified collection of ledgers moving fake money around, no? What are yields a product of with crypto? If not productivity of underlying assets, it must be speculation, which isn't sustainable. You eventually run out of greater fools.

There are hundreds of fake monies used all over the world, including many countries with dual currency systems in which they use one fake money internally and one fake money externally. Bitcoin and frankly many other random altcoins are more credible than many of those hundreds of moneys.

The history of banking is replete with unsustainable arrangements involving the quest for yields deriving from speculative assets. Banking systems are continually expanding, exploding, and then expanding again. If we want to make the normal banking system competitive, it has to pay yields even though doing so means risk. The crypto explosion is best understood as a technologically enabled resumption of the usual cycle of banking despite the industrial west's attempt to suspend that cycle through extraordinary regulatory action.

Re: The Handwavy Technobabble Nothingburger of Crypto

#297

Post by zachmx »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #268
zachmx wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> You don't have to force people to collaborate towards the greater good if you can just incentivize them to build the thing you need. 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.

We do that today because we are incentivized to acquire monopolies. Or in other words housing and other generalized assets that use a typical ownership model. If individuals can't "own" property, but instead "possess" property via a self assessed real time tax, you eliminate that gluttonous incentives that all humans have for accumulation.

With collective possession you can increase users stake in making sure that negative incentives don't exist. It's all in the game theory of realigning incentives, but before you do that you have to break down how the current system we live in at its foundational root is flawed.

My theory is that we don't understand the economic systems of the crypto economy because they aren't rooted in the same type of economics that exists in our current system. They are completely different incentive systems and are not correlated at all. We just confuse Capitalist values with crypto-economic values, thus leading to entire new schools of thought in how we organize ourselves manage systems.

Re: The Handwavy Technobabble Nothingburger of Crypto

#298

Post by chishaku »

> It’s a scary but essential truth to realise that normal software engineers like us are an integral part of society’s immune system against the enormous moral hazard of technology-hyped asset bubbles metastasizing into systemic risk.

Myopic and uninformed.

Pretend crypto doesn't exist and you still have a market rife with moral hazard and technology-hyped asset bubbles that metastasize into systemic risk to the point of bringing down the real economy in increasingly shorter crash cycles.

Is crypto a cause or a symptom?

Re: The Handwavy Technobabble Nothingburger of Crypto

#299

Post by aunty_helen »

kmmlng wrote: post #82
rawtxapp wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then you would expect people in the EU to not be interested in crypto, yet it's the opposite. You can pull up search volume for "Bitcoin" across the world (using Google Trends), many European nations are at the top. As a matter of fact, their search volume is higher than US.

> easy electronic transfers within 5 seconds for no charge This is certainly not the case everywhere in the EU. In Germany for example it usually takes days. Not sure about other countries.

In Germany there's SOFORT, it takes litterally the time to click through the interface to transfer money.

I can get money from Germany to Colombia in under a minute via n26 and transferwise. Maybe we're not talking about the same country.

Re: The Handwavy Technobabble Nothingburger of Crypto

#300

Post by Quarrelsome »

briantakita wrote: post #116
bhouston wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you point out what is low quality about it? Right now it seems that you are just making that claim because you disagree with the thesis of the article. e.g. https://www.txstate.edu/philosophy/resources/fallacy-definit...

Using the phrase "woo woo" along with various strawmen & many omissions of why crypto is being adopted was the extent of his criticism, hence low quality. He does not understand crypto & is trying to sell his competing product. If he were to talk about decentralization/distribution vs centralization along with who controls the fiat money supply & who benefits & who does not benefit from the fiat central bank policies…

what's wrong with "woo woo"? If they said "smoke and mirrors" or "hocus pocus" would you take the author more seriously?
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