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It’s not still the early days of blockchain

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Re: It’s not still the early days of blockchain

#721

Post by Andrew_nenakhov »

dmitriid wrote: post #672
Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #576

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conversion of bitcoin to whatever currency is hard to block. USSR had death penalty (!) for buying or selling things using foreigh currency. Yet, the black was persistent. Also, we are talking about the unbanked: people who otherwise have no other state-sanctioned way to use financial services. Bitcoin first and foremost helps such people.

> Also, we are talking about the unbanked: people who otherwise have no other state-sanctioned way to use financial services. Bitcoin first and foremost helps such people. No. No it doesn't. The main reason for a large portion of the unbanked population is that they are so poor that they can't even afford to open and maintain a bank account. But sure, "we require a person to have a smartphone with always-on internet…

I got into bitcoin when i could receive payment from a client that normally was declined to process by banks in our respective countries, and options like Paypal were too expensive.

In the result buying buying bitcoin for a client for his currency, sending it to me and selling for my currency was cheaper than simply converting USD to my local currency. That's where I understood that bitcoin is a great thing and is here to stay. It is enough to shut your argument. I wasn't poor, but absurd restrictions by banks stood in my way just the same. Bitcoin liberates money.

Re: It’s not still the early days of blockchain

#722

Post by DennisP »

deanCommie wrote: post #58
betwixthewires wrote: post #15

> All that to say, a lot has changed in the technology world in the past six to twelve years It sure has. But not really that fundamentally, since 2009. A lot has changed in the blockchain space too. Just because you don't know about it doesn't mean it isn't true. A lot of those changes are on par with some of the tech advancements mentioned before my quote in the article. In 2009, you had bitcoin, so basically a dis…

Do we have proof of stake or do we have a lot of bitcoin folks avoiding criticism about the wasteful nature of most chains by claiming that proof of stake will fix all this. How many coins are actually using proof of stake? Why haven't the biggest including Ethereum done so?

Right now Ethereum has 9 million ETH deposited on its proof-of-stake network, worth about $30 billion.

That's running in parallel to the main network, which is still mining. Code to merge the two and eliminate mining is currently running on a public test network. Previous upgrades have all taken less than a year to go live after the launch of their public test networks.

Re: It’s not still the early days of blockchain

#723

Post by laserlight »

tim333 wrote: post #639
MaxfordAndSons wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> blockchains that handle incentivized file storage, alternate name lookup systems It would be a shame if IPFS and Filecoin end up in the dustbin of history if the web3 music stops. They're the only reasonable non-financial applications of blockchain tech that I've been able to wrap my head around to date.

And IPFS isn't even really a blockchain tech. It's more a variation on bittorrent which predates bitcoin by several years.

8 years, to be exact.

Re: It’s not still the early days of blockchain

#724

Post by mw888 »

chrischen wrote: post #194

My purely anecdotal experience so far has been that crypto bulls have tended to be more business-y/finance type people and, even among technical people, the technical people who don’t actually know how a blockchain works. Not a good sign for the technology and its applications but I don’t think all crypto is useless… but a lot of the hype is definitely by people trying to get rich quick with a hand-wavy understanding…

Exposure bias. Who are you going to see more? The thoughtful coder and innovator who spends their time working on problems, or the excited businessman telling everyone about that work? Even the more outgoing founders are overshadowed by influencer types, and that’s not surprising at all.

One dichotomy I have noticed in crypto is that non-involved “tech” people seem to understand crypto and the big picture much more slowly than economically minded people (no, not just speculators). People don’t usually understand that crypto currencies are an economic innovation using cryptographic primitives, though more recently the space has started driving cryptographic innovation as well.

Re: It’s not still the early days of blockchain

#725

Post by mw888 »

democracy wrote: post #359

"Crypto" shat itself in the area of payments (noone really needs or wants it and it provides 0 value), so now they are trying other angles - NFT, DeFi. The problem is the crypto influencers are losing touch with reality. You could at least bullshit someone clueless about cryptocurrency and payments, but it's really hard to sell the idea of collecting JPEGs or investing into DeFi (which aggressively described in the t…

Ahh yes the “they” in crypto. The same “they” that people like you used to say would ‘turn it off whenever they wanted’ a few years ago.

Re: It’s not still the early days of blockchain

#726

Post by acdha »

giantrobot wrote: post #702
acdha wrote: post #631

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Typewriters had immediate value: buy one and you can produce easier to read documents faster — a very fast writer might do as much as 30 words per minute, which is like a third of a proficient typist’s throughput. Businesses bought them rapidly because it meant the same number of clerks could do more work and you reduced errors due to bad handwriting. Put another way, the first commercial typewriter was sold in 1874…

> Typewriters had immediate value The GP pulled one of the cryptobro rhetorical scams: X existing technology took Y years to catch on! Besides the statements rarely actually being true they're nonsensical. A typewriter (or whatever technology they point out) has obvious utility. No honest assessment of whatever they can bring up will say that X technology is useless. Maybe at the time typewriters we're released fount…

> The cryptobros can't seem to fathom that they got sold on a bunch of useless shit.

I think it’s more that they can’t afford to acknowledge it: the only way cryptocurrency has meaning is if they can line up a buyer, and as soon as you allow that to be questioned those big dreams about becoming as rich as the people selling them on “web3” start to look pretty unlikely. A lot of these people have built their vision of the future on very high returns and the only way that happens is if they donate their time pro bono to the major investors backing these companies.

Re: It’s not still the early days of blockchain

#727

Post by z3c0 »

mw888 wrote: post #712
saalweachter wrote: post #522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry, I'm not trying to call you out personally, but this is itching my brain something fierce so I have to blurt it out, and hey, it's the internet. A little derailing never hurt anyone. It's amazing to me how universal the "I used to be a non-believer" line is in evangelism. From the classic "I used to be an atheist but I've been born again" to all the members of political party A claiming to have been a membe…

That’s a nice little Kafka trap you’ve constructed to disregard the people who change their minds away from what you think. So every time someone changes their mind and uses their previous opinion as informative you are going to non-committally imply it’s “evangelism?”

Seems like a reworking of the "everybody has an agenda" retort you see so often these days. It's a slippery slope that only leads to dying a curmudgeon, as all chances for new perspectives were rebuked as agendas/evangelism/propagandist/etc.

Re: It’s not still the early days of blockchain

#728

Post by mw888 »

ryandamm wrote: post #63
mizzao wrote: post #54

How's this any different than the typical technology hype and adoption cycle? Perhaps we are just at the "peak of inflated expectations" right now, and are about to dive into the "trough of disillusionment". https://setandbma.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/technology-ado... This certainly happened with AI at least twice... remember the AI summers of 1970 and 2010 and the AI winters in between...before certain applicatio…

> My wife recently suggested one: NFTs minted by your university as proof of your diploma. Or perhaps your academic transcript. No way to forge a fake diploma again. This is once again better served by a database. Diplomas are inherently centralized and issued by a trusted authority. Guess we gotta keep brainstorming for use cases -- that's how technology development works, right?

What makes you think you can’t sign as a trusted authority a decentralized object? Maybe before you condescend you should learn the utter basics of what you are talking about.

Re: It’s not still the early days of blockchain

#729

Post by thelastgallon »

DennisP wrote: post #717
nly wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone doing P2P transfer and bypassing traditional banking institutions is a powerful idea... but ultimately everyone needs to agree on a single medium of exchange, otherwise efficient market pricing is too hard. And it's debatable whether fiat will ever whither and die. The Government will ultimately have to endorse a currency for tax purposes, and they'll always seek to control the inflationary environment so th…

> otherwise efficient market pricing is too hard Oh I don't know, everybody's carrying around an internet-connected computer in their pocket, it can't be that hard to show current prices in a variety of currencies. But if it is too hard, then stablecoins backed by on-chain assets are another option. Fwiw, Ohio accepts tax payments in Bitcoin: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kellyphillipserb/2018/11/26/ohi...

> Fwiw, Ohio accepts tax payments in Bitcoin:

Ohio businesses can no longer use Bitcoin to pay taxes. Don’t worry, though. Sprague went on to say that in the 10 months since OhioCrypto.com launched, less than 10 businesses have chosen to pay their taxes in Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies. No one is really going to miss it. [1]

https://thenextweb.com/news/ohio-suspends-bitcoin-tax-paymen...

Re: It’s not still the early days of blockchain

#730

Post by mw888 »

cuteboy19 wrote: post #51
magicjosh wrote: post #42

The article suggests that using the phrase "it's early days" is incorrect in blockchain technology because Bitcoin and Ethereum have been around for 13 and 6 years respectively. The author goes on to give examples like smartphones, Uber, and Tesla, all of which have had serious developments in terms of impact and usability in around the same time period. Then given that Bitcoin and Ethereum have not made similar prog…

It will always be "early days". Crypto requires a constant influx of marks who genuinely believe that they are early, as a ponzi scheme only ever benefits early entrants. No crypto enthusiast is ever going to tell that you are late.

Crypto does not require any such action. Likewise no dogmatic crypto skeptic like yourself will ever tell you you are early. Stay poor.
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