731–740 of 1001 posts
Reminds me of something Elon Musk said. A lot of the content on the internet is a "projection of our limbic system". (Elon saying this https://youtu.be/ycPr5-27vSI?t=1074 ) I see the craze around crypto the same way. It is a representation of something in our limbic system. Perhaps greed?
To be fair, it took decades for e-commerce on the web to become mainstream. Remember what a joke Webvan used to be in 2001?
Uh, 2001 happens to be the year that Amazon became the biggest bookseller in the world, having been founded five years earlier. That's literally about as mainstream as you can get, and it was half a decade. Whether or not you agree with the arc of the linked article, the basic facts are correct: blockchains have been with us for a decade now and haven't done much or made anything that wasn't itself a speculation abou…
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'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…
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We've had "auth without centralized authority" for decades, and 99% of people don't care and won't deal with the hassle involved. see PGP, encrypted email, OpenID, etc etc.. The exclusive communities you mention only have value because of the hype and FOMO and high dollar amounts that people see being made on sales of "exclusive" NFTs or some such. Same as many of the many crypto pumps, same as the dotcom bubble, sam…
> see PGP, encrypted email, OpenID, etc etc.. Yeah, but this actually works. Like it or not, people are already using their wallets as their username. And they're trading cryptographic assets. And everyone can see it because it's public. This isn't theoretical. I've been to PGP key-signing parties. I can assure you that this is not that.
I can't use blockchain to pay pretty much any vendor I buy things from without an intermediary - the intermediary requires me to log in to a website and unless I'm willing to go through a lot of trouble (more trouble than dealing with PGP) an intermediary will also be storing my wallet and have "physical" control of all my "coins." Blockchain works to the extent that you aren't really using blockchain but simply a trusted intermediary.
If you're actually personally managing your wallet keys it's worse than PGP. With PGP if you lose your key you just say so and people figure it out, you have to go to some key signing parties. With Bitcoin if you lose your key you have no money, end of story, no recourse.
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Are there any other examples of recent + long cycle developments? Solar? Electric vehicles? Part of me has come to expect such fast development (Facebook, Uber, Yelp!), but other modern industries must have longer cycles I just am not paying attention.
https://twitter.com/TheCryptoLark/status/1471730881337323522
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There's selling NFTs of ape cartoons, or selling crypto coins or other imaginary assets. Rails and MySQL are too transitory for that - you'd buy a record in the database only to find the company hosting the database had gone broke or been bought by Yahoo who closed them. You buy a bitcoin and you can be fairly confident in a decade or two you'll still have it.
>Rails and MySQL are too transitory for that - you'd buy a record in the database only to find the company hosting the database had gone broke or been bought by Yahoo who closed them. Wouldn't working with more robust companies (like banks) solve this?
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For a pyramid scheme that certainly holds up. Whoever joins last seems most incentivized to bring others in. Has anyone modeled pyramid scheme dynamics to Bitcoin perhaps at an academic level? (Disclosure I own Bitcoin and Ethereum)
I don't understand how bitcoin is a ponzi scheme. There's no pyramid shape, which is kind of crucial. "Just look at the whales" uh huh, you mean like the dollar? It's just a value store. Debating the efficacy of the value store is fine, labeling it a ponzi scheme seems reductive to absurdity. The real problem (unsurprisingly) is with fiat currencies. These are heavily regulated, nearly made up values. That crash, oft…
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There's selling NFTs of ape cartoons, or selling crypto coins or other imaginary assets. Rails and MySQL are too transitory for that - you'd buy a record in the database only to find the company hosting the database had gone broke or been bought by Yahoo who closed them. You buy a bitcoin and you can be fairly confident in a decade or two you'll still have it.
> You buy a bitcoin and you can be fairly confident in a decade or two you'll still have it. And it will be worthless. Most assets that NFTs point to are already gone. Because that useless hash you have in your NFT? It points to a centralised storager somewhere.
Well maybe, maybe not. It's been remarkable resilient so far. See https://99bitcoins.com/bitcoin-obituaries/
NFTs I'm less sure of.
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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…
It’s a dangerous attitude because it has a paternal edge to it. Any “enlightenment” naturally leads to seeing others as unenlightened.