151–160 of 1001 posts
The central problem in this entire debate is two groups talking past each other. The skeptics say "what is it for?" expecting a detailed answer, and the response from crypto enthusiasts is vague and high level; most of what I hear is heavy on words like "revolutionize" and "decentralize" but very, very short on specifics. Or I get argument by analogy to other technologies. If I heard a single use case where blockchai…
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“Low slippage stable coin swap” is one of the most jargony things I’ve read on here in a while. Can you please ELI5 because I have no clue what this is or how it could be useful.
Have you heard of leverages, margin calls, derivatives, put options, etc.? DeFi is pretty much the same level of complexity but implemented on top of cryptocurrencies.
2010 iPhone, I was mind-blown by the Word Lens app which could do OCR on text in the camera feed, translate the words into another language, and overlay the results on the image in near-realtime. http://edition.cnn.com/2010/TECH/mobile/12/20/word.lens.ipho...
These are tasks I had never seen any computer do in any circumstances, things which would be unthinkable on a Java MIDP Blackberry from 2005, or a Pentium II desktop from 1997. Compare this to the wearable augmented reality devices Professor Steve Mann was building through the 80s and 90s[1] and this "describing the image" is so so far ahead in so many ways - processing power, imaging quality, battery life, storage space, size, weight, convenience, reliability, it's just mindblowingly better, neural networks and fast chips and solid state storage is a step change in a way that "faster" isn't enough to really convey.
Google tells me "Derivatives have a long history in the United States, dating back to the founding of the Chicago Board of Trade in 1848.", you're telling me people are doing that but with blockchain, why is that interesting at all, why mind blowing?
I'm still very opposed to the idea of taking a technology and then searching a problem for it. Why? Back in 2017 during the first hype cycle, blockchain companies raised hundreds of millions with ICOs. I became very interested in the technology too, and some friends still work in this space. 4 years later in the web3 era, there is not a single product aside from trading/finance that got traction. Use cases like stori…
People are doing research and deploying cool stuff that others are actively using. You can criticize that as much as you want but it won’t do much.
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I don’t understand your point. So if University research makes it out to the world - but the world decides to create scams from it, is it University’s fault? I get it. People are angry about blockchain. Let’s shoot the world, not the messengers. Otherwise, we’ll be blaming the Bell Labs engineers for 4chan.
I don't think people are angry about blockchain (the technology) but about promises people make that with this technology will solve almost any society or world problem and then attracting people to invest and then if it does not work make the promise larger and atrract more money. To use your example: it is like Boston Dynamics and people around will start saying invest in our IRO (Initial Robot Offering) as we will…
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I believe this characterization fails to engage with what money actually is and does. It sounds good in print but fails in practice. Except for bitcoin's current "monetary" uses, like money laundering and tax evasion.
I personally prefer a money that isn't explicitly designed to encourage hyper consumption and short term thinking. Better for the planet. But what do I know? I'm just a dumb ape.
Or is the "designed for hyper consumption" a reference to inflation in fiat currencies? Sorry, perhaps I've confused myself.
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'Zooming out and seeing the big picture' seems to mean buying into a libertarian vision of the world where the current money system is horribly broken and blockchain technologies are a viable and superior alternative. I profoundly disagree on all points of that analysis.
I’m not libertarian at all. I see cryptocurrency as a fair and transparent way out of the extreme wealth inequality we see in the world today. Decentralization gets me excited. New ways of using technology gets me excited.
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People are doing research and deploying cool stuff that others are actively using. You can criticize that as much as you want but it won’t do much.
Can you show some examples?
Incentivizing IPFS content pinning, Filecoin.
Allowing censorship-resistant / chargeback free donations, most coins.
Enabling private transactions, Monero.
Most "dapps" empower decentralization, distributed exchanges, trading, DNS, ownership contracts (DOAs), etc.
NFT's for art as silly as it is, more importantly for Handshake domain names and other cases where ownership proof comes into play.
Please feel free to go and attack all of those ideas and projects, but don't think for a second you can really gaslight people into believing they aren't worth of pursuit.
Depends on how you define early. When comparing the situation of crypto to the internet, I would say we are at around 1997 now. 1996 was the year when Yahoo went public and 2021 was the year when Coinbase went public. The usability of crypto solutions also reminds me of 1997. It is still so bad that it makes them almost unusable. Reminds me of acoustic couplers where you had to manually plug your cable bound phone in…
>TCP/IP and DNS were both developed in the early 70s (1972 I think). That is more than 40 years before the first internet company went public.
1996 - 1972 = 24.
A few months ago I agreed with her entirely. Tether is an unbacked fraud and NFTs are being front-run [1, 2]. The mid-level marketing Ponzi vibe is crazy. The latency of applications on the blockchain is atrocious. But more recently after learning from and interacting with people building in the space my assessment changed. There is an interesting intersection between tech, communities, and economics. There exists a…
I have wondered for awhile why the crypto mega-whales in my vicinity are trading USDT at par or better over the last year or two. My conspiracy theory is that when insiders trade a distressed asset at par or better it’s often a bailout expectation that’s really being traded. Who has unimaginable access to financing, a “stablecoin” going so/so, and a primary line of business critically dependent on Tether, like, I don…
I'm still very opposed to the idea of taking a technology and then searching a problem for it. Why? Back in 2017 during the first hype cycle, blockchain companies raised hundreds of millions with ICOs. I became very interested in the technology too, and some friends still work in this space. 4 years later in the web3 era, there is not a single product aside from trading/finance that got traction. Use cases like stori…