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100 years of whatever this will be

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Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#821

Post by grey-area »

pezzana wrote: post #680
grey-area wrote: post #649

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Money has always been owned by and manipulated by the powerful. That is not a project decades in the making, it's a natural consequences of our power relations. There are lots of reasons to want a decentralised currency system or at least one not run by nation states but Bitcoin is a terrible example of one with so many flaws, and 'defi' and 'crypto' is plagued by hucksters and scams. I'd rather the devil I know at t…

> Money has always been owned by and manipulated by the powerful. You're fighting a strawman. What I said was that money was being weaponized. Examples: - currency-driven economic sanctions (other countries) - civil asset forfeiture (citizens) These are new developments enabled by the dollar standard (1971), payment technologies (2000-), and the ever expanding power of government (particularly US, post-9/11). The adv…

These are not new developments, and diplomacy has always been war by other means, including using currency as a weapon of war against external and internal enemies. Currency has always been a system of control and has frequently been weaponised in the past, it has certainly always been a tool of the ruling class.

To provide some examples - Executive Order 6102 confiscated gold, the government then revalued it. During the American civil war could counterfeited currency was used to undermine currency, in WW2 the Nazis did the same to Britain.

https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/27/a-counterfe...

You have never owned your money, it is simply a promissory note from a national bank, and it has always been valued according to what the government thinks is appropriate. Even money made from precious metals was the same, and was changed or devalued at the rulers whim. The same holds for unregulated crypto currencies, but instead of a government you have a cartel of miners and a small governing body of developers and stakeholders.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#822

Post by toiletfuneral »

nouveaux wrote: post #133
ahtihn wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never seen anyone else define conservative vs liberals like that. Conservatives aren't against rules, they are against changing rules. Why are conservatives against abortion, gay marriage and drug legalisation if they don't want to be told what they can do on their "own 200 acre farm". All those issues are about enforcing a worldview on others .

This is the general perspective on conservatives and I agree with the sentiment. If you extrapolate this out, people who live happily in rural areas do not want someone (government) to tell them about new changes. Small government and less regulation is a big part of their ethos. "All those issues are about enforcing a worldview on others." This seems to apply to everyone involved. Liberals want to impose their world…

How small does a government get before it stops farm subsidies?

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#823

Post by webinvest »

thegrimmest wrote: post #224
pessimizer wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think the only weak people that deserve protection are the wealthy? The idea that the only legitimate function of government is to protect the status quo is strange, and in a world where everything is assigned an owner is a maxarchism not a minarchism. In a real Darwinian world, rich people wouldn't be able to walk the streets without a huge amount of security, and eventually that security force would kill…

I'm saying that "society" is basically an agreement to peacefully coexist, using due process to resolve disputes. It's not an agreement to cooperate. Just because the processes by which some some succeed and some fail are non-violent doesn't mean that those successes and failures shouldn't be total. > people who own everything are the intellectual and physical champions They're not, and I never said they were. All I…

Since two other commenters answered your question, I’d like to add to your 10 person society example.

What if a government taxed every one of their transactions by 25%, spent or redistributed 80% of those dollars within the society, and uncharitably donated 20% of all dollars away to another society. How long would it take for that society to have a rounded $0 and the other society to have a rounded $10?

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#824

Post by iostream23 »

stevetodd wrote: post #610
htek wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>That's a cool observation that I'll keep in mind. However, in my experience, it's not been the primary reason. Rather, it has seemed to me that rural folks live closer to nature than urban folks, and have often had firsthand experience that mother nature tends to be nasty and brutish (or just check out r/natureismetal). That's an experience which tends to create what they would consider (IMHO) a much more pragmatic…

I see it more as idealism vs pragmatism. We need both. I think older people tend to be conservative because they've become jaded by idealists and/or politics in general. To many, conservatism is that government and politics screw everything up, so we need less of it.

“ To many, conservatism is that government and politics screw everything up, so we need less of it.”

Which is a point of view funded by the large corporations actually funding the political screwups and bribing the politicians, particularly the ones who pretend to be conservative. (I.e. Manchin or McConnell)

Rural voters received their messaging primarily through TV and radio, and then go down to the local bar and regurgitate it to each other with lots of “good ole, good ole, ye olde goode ole” and self congratulation.

I’ve noticed this pattern in rural areas around the world. I see the rural urban divide as more fundamental than the national divisions.

Closer to nature? Yeah, but in a frontline of battle antagonistic sort of way, conquer the big scary nature, even the person referencing the above had a human vs nature framing. I’ve been burned out of my house in bushfires, wrestled with solar panels in hurricanes and I’ll still call the most dangerous thing on earth a group of self assured humans doing their job.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#825

Post by bradgessler »

tenpies wrote: post #802
kleer001 wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> people are ok with being wealthy. Yup. 100%. I doubt you'll find an organism on Earth that's not ok with having access to more resources than it needs. Can you describe an environment where this wouldn't occur? What would happen if an organism in that environment was able to hoard resources? Sounds like you might want to also consider as well the iterative prisoners dilemma and the tragedy of the commons with respe…

> Can you describe an environment where this wouldn't occur? What would happen if an organism in that environment was able to hoard resources? Only in a religious context where they see a benefit to vows of poverty or simplicity. Wealth as we have it right now is a huge pain in the ass. You have to worry about what some idiot in the Fed is doing, what some senile old man in an office is doing, and what some old Boome…

This has problem been rolling around in my head and where I’ve landed is that humans are terrible administrators, mainly because we get bored administering something after it’s built.

We see it in software development all the time. People are less interested in maintaining code they’ve inherited and are more interested in building their own.

I don’t think this is a bad thing per se. We’re creative optimistic creatures. We prefer green field because when we’re working on it, we feel great imagining the possibilities. When it’s older, “played out”, and to the point where we feel it’s something that’s to be administered, there’s less possibilities and we get bored. Time to try something else.

Everywhere you look, this pattern is present. We love building stuff. We don’t love administering stuff.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#826

Post by not_really »

pjkundert wrote: post #805
ntr-- wrote: post #748

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Incredible. > There is of course the most obvious horrifically misguided recently-popular "decentralized" system, whose name shall not be spoken in this essay. Instead let's back up to something older and better understood: markets. My reading was the author was referring here to cryptocurrencies and you read the article, claim it's profound, and then spruik an ERC-20 token.

The project was funded through an ICO a couple years ago; these will be exchangeable for the in-system HoloFuel cryptocurrency, when the project goes live. Of course, the project isn’t associated with Ethereum in any way.

Look, I'm a fan of this, and thanks for sharing - hadn't heard of this project until today.

However claiming it's not associated with ethereum in any way, really? There's mention of an erc-20 token on the home page. Come on, man.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#828

Post by kkjjkgjjgg »

haxiomic wrote: post #686
kkjjkgjjgg wrote: post #532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a common trope, supposedly free running capitalism would just waste as much energy as possible without regulation. It is of course nonsense, even without regulations industries have an incentive to save on energy, as it is a cost factor. Or think about cars - people would prefer to buy cars that use less energy, so that they have a wider range. Therefore there already is an incentive for car manufacturers to…

For sure, energy has a cost which you want to optimize for - no question about it. The crux is when that cost is artificially low: you can dump your radioactive waste in the river for as much as it costs to transport it, but the cost is then payed by the people downstream. Now as you say if this is tightly causally linked, the people downstream will fight back against you and then it's not so cheap. But the problem c…

You keep talking about externalities. Obviously those should have a price. That is not a free market issue.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#829

Post by dmitriid »

_9omd wrote: post #590
dmitriid wrote: post #545

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Could you have proved how revolutionary the internet would be in its early days? Yes. Yes, you could. 10 years after ARPANet was made public you already had things like France's Minitel. Blockchains? They still have zero use cases: https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/ten-years-in-nobody-has-c... > You have to be open minded and extrapolate Ah yes. "Revolutionary tech", and all you have to do is blindly believe in it…

This zero use cases rhetoric is really low effort. Here are some just off the top of my head. sovereign store of value (useful if your government sucks) permissionless payments (funding wikileaks) private/anonymous transactions (Monero) event tickets (good use of NFTs) synthetic assets (anyone/anywhere can speculate on TSLA) decentralized asset exchange - AMM decentralized prediction markets DAO - a new way for peopl…

> This zero use cases rhetoric is really low effort.

It isn't if you cared to at least read the link I provided

As to your use cases. First the obvious ones:

- event tickets. Have literally zero need for blockchain. NFTs are scam, and nothing but scam. All the fictional properties ascribed to ticketing via NFTs I've covered in my to responses to this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29282931

- synthetic assets, decentralized asset exchange, decentralized prediction markets. Require neither bitcoin, nor blockchains nor crypto. Used almost exclusively for trading fictional tokens, scams, and pretending it's innovation.

The less obvious ones:

- sovereign store of value (useful if your government sucks)

"Let's convert our value into a fictional token that has no value outside the fictional world, and can't be used for anything but buying other digital tokens".

Buy food? Oh, you have to convert it to real money (because no one in the world, especially not in the world where government sucks, accepts these fictional tokens). Or if someone does accept it, oops, random transaction fees just doubled your cost.

Buy actual physical assets? "When your government sucks", people prefer dollars and euro to fictional tokens.

- permissionless payments

This is a very tiny part that is arguably useful, but it comes with a plethora of issues that make them unusable for wide adoption. Among them, reversibility, enforcement.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#830

Post by dmitriid »

serverholic wrote: post #672
_9omd wrote: post #590

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This zero use cases rhetoric is really low effort. Here are some just off the top of my head. sovereign store of value (useful if your government sucks) permissionless payments (funding wikileaks) private/anonymous transactions (Monero) event tickets (good use of NFTs) synthetic assets (anyone/anywhere can speculate on TSLA) decentralized asset exchange - AMM decentralized prediction markets DAO - a new way for peopl…

How a tech enthusiast doesn't think these are all extremely interesting is beyond me.

All of these are as interesting as working at a bank or at a stock exchange (and those can be significanty more interesting due to amount of data they process).

Unless, of course, you're interested in outright scams like NFT. Yup, those are "interesting".

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