591–600 of 700 posts
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The two are in absolutely no way whatsoever comparable, don't be ridiculous.
Says who? Who are you to say that what amuses one person has more value than what amuses a different person?
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This is the most crucial question about everything crypto-related. Because it turns out every crypto market is a negative-sum game. If you invest, you are guaranteed to lose on average. If you do happen to win, your gains are coming out of the pocket of someone else who lost even more. The price of the token in question doesn't enter into this at all. It can rise, fall, anything. It is still a negative-sum game, but…
> Because it turns out every crypto market is a negative-sum game. [Citation needed] You can't just hand wave and assume this to be true. If the world's major investors decide that crypto represents a store of value, then that's a positive-sum game for crypto. If stablecoins transacted on smart contract chains generate demand for Ethereum to pay for the network transaction fees, then that's a positive-sum game for cr…
It is a negative-sum game, no matter how hard you wished it were not.
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This is the most crucial question about everything crypto-related. Because it turns out every crypto market is a negative-sum game. If you invest, you are guaranteed to lose on average. If you do happen to win, your gains are coming out of the pocket of someone else who lost even more. The price of the token in question doesn't enter into this at all. It can rise, fall, anything. It is still a negative-sum game, but…
>It is still a negative-sum game, but some people have not yet realised that they lost. And some people have not lost at all. As a lifelong poker player, the calculus is very much the same. A poker game where rake is taken out is a negative-sum game. But that doesn't mean that every player loses, even if they play forever. There will be more net losses than net wins, but these are not evenly distributed.
In reality, you're going to lose money.
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Right. So exactly the same is true of stocks when it comes to trading existing stock. The key difference is the creation of stock - IPOs. The company uses that money they get from the IPO and invests it into the business, which results in profits, which they give out as dividends. There's no such mechanism in cryptocurrency. Unfortunately the other side has a good response to this - if the dollar value of buybacks+di…
Regarding stable velocity. If we had negative interest we would have it. Then all that monetary expansion nonsense could be over and we could get on with our lives without cursing some evil businessmen for being morally reprehensible so we have a scapegoat.
And do be so quick, there's always another issue to simplify! Can we get base 12? Can we get a carbon tax? A land value tax? Voting reform? I can go on all day here...
A thought exercise you should undertake if you're thinking about / talking about crypto/NFT/web3-related projects: If the financial instrument that underlies the project were to stop going up in value XX% per month, would you still be interested in the project? I do this a lot because I've made the conscious (and perhaps financially foolish) choice to stay away from everything crypto/blockchain related (for now, at l…
But Web3/Crypto/NFT is so much more than the financial incentives. It's much more about culture, belonging, tribalism (the good version) and the endless opportunity space of what I would call a resource. Digital assets that behave as if they are physical. I have been involved in crypto since the beginning and the least interesting things for me is about the value. It's just a savings account. All the fun stuff is wha…
> We believe in a future where work and play become one. I'd like to nominate this statement as one of the most cynical sentences of the year.
Actual meaning: play, but boring!
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> When a player is earning $10 every 4-6 hours by automating chopping logs, that's a sign that some of your playerbase isn't enjoying what's happening to them. They're sending the clearest possible economic signal they can that the grind isn't a positive or rewarding experience for them. Unfortunately, in the scope of Runescape, this misses the point in a big way. Runescape has a robust economy where every action can…
> Runescape has a robust economy where every action can be measured in gold and experience per hour (when played efficiently). Someone might be buying magic logs for gold because cutting them down is a poor choice for them from an opportunity cost perspective (i.e. they can make more gold per hour via other activities their character has access to). I don't think this holds up when real-world money enters the equatio…
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David Graeber is an anarchist, his criticism of bullshit jobs is about sustaining the centralisation of power, not techbro idealism. There is no reason outside of power dynamics why airline desk staff need to exist to comfort disgruntled passengers, because the existence of disgruntled passengers who need to be shooed off is a consequence of the airline industry.
Noise insulation in the airplane exists because it tries to shield passengers from the aircraft noise, which is a consequence of modern airplane design. Following the same logic, shall we call it bullshit insulation? This line of thought assumes three bold ideas: 1. that existing model is bad 2. that alternative model for airline (or any other industry) exists 3. that alternative model won’t suffer from similar issue…
How I'd look at it (as a postmodernist) is like this: after the owning class moved all the "real" (ie, related to manufacturing) work overseas to places where labour is cheap, first world jobs have been increasingly focused on problems within the abstraction itself - we're not dealing with harvesting or processing grain or rolling steel, we're managers of managers of people who generate sales contracts for rolled steel made somewhere in China. Our jobs feel like bullshit because they're entirely removed from material production, and are generally quite "meta". It's a form of labour alienation, which is a consequence of the capitalist division of labour (as compared to the artisan/craft system under feudalism, which people in the West are often seeking to imitate now).
Axie Infinity isn't interesting as a game, but as a model it is. The other day I was going through air port security. I had to wait 10 minutes for one of my bags to be screened a second time. I happened to be waiting while some type of manager was doing a huddle for a new shift of employees about to start. The dumb shit the manager was telling the group of 12-15 TSA workers was abhorrent. Just really vile statements…
The TSA was created and Afghanistan was invaded because America felt like it needed a proportionate response to 9/11. Locking cabin doors was sufficient to prevent it but didnt "feel" like nearly enough.
In hindsight the Taliban probably could have negotiated a "we'd love to get rid of the terrorists but we need your help" deal and then just let us pump them full of military aid on the condition that they add the groups we want to their list of persecuted people. It's not like we hated them out of principal. These were the same guys we armed to kick out the Russians. Taking a page straight out of the South America playbook would not have been that big a stretch.