31–40 of 393 posts
Alright, go for it. Speak out all you want. Cryptocurrency users will continue ignoring and/or deriding you. Telling people that you don't like what they're doing is not an effective way to modify their behavior. You need to provide competing incentives, and somehow I doubt y'all are up to that.
But these days, I can't help but think that we've inadvertently created a paperclip maximizer without even bothering to create an AGI first. Humans are the AGI, and we're going to happily use more and more energy to play this stupid game for as long as it looks like there's a profit to be made, even if the global outcome is to our own detriment.
If we want this mess to go away, we need to find a way to change the incentives globally.
Alright, go for it. Speak out all you want. Cryptocurrency users will continue ignoring and/or deriding you. Telling people that you don't like what they're doing is not an effective way to modify their behavior. You need to provide competing incentives, and somehow I doubt y'all are up to that.
In 1997, Albania was transitioning from a communist state to a market economy. This created a power vacuum and a distrust in the institutions of government and finance. This allowed MLMs/pyramid schemes to blink into existence and multiply out of all proportion. At its peak, almost half of the entire GDP of Albania was locked up in them. "When the schemes collapsed, there was uncontained rioting, the government fell, and the country descended into anarchy and a near civil war in which some 2,000 people were killed." [1]
This isn't all fun and games and innocent gambling. This is a cancerous symptom of the failing of the state.
[1] https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2000/03/jarvis.ht...
My brother is currently working in the field. It brings him good money. Now, really good money. His work is 100% clean per se (infrastructure for mining). I don't feel any moral grounds to say anything to him, he does it for engineering and fun and really actualizes himself. He is my older brother finally creating something meaningful for people and having rightful rewards. He is hidden in the moral waves, harvesting…
I have friends who have made millions from crypto. But every dollar they made is a dollar that someone else paid into the system, that that person is going to lose when the bubble bursts. Enabling that loss is not morally clean.
Similarly I don't see anything wrong working for a betting company or even a company that produce dangerous or addictive drugs.
I consider it morally wrong to work for the government or for criminal organisations which steal money under the threat of violence or kill people for reasons other than self defence.
I mean I graduated top 5% of my class and make early 6 figures. My friend who graduated bottom 5% is now a crypto millionaire living in Dubai. Meanwhile I can write complex Scala code but I have no idea what blockchain , NFT , crypto is all about apart from the fact that it made my friend rich and made early adopters rich . How , why , when I don’t know . What’s the gain, purpose of it - I don’t know . Then again I d…
survivorship bias?
Also, if mainstream crypto is a Ponzi scheme, how is fiat currency not?
I really don't follow. Can anyone enlighten me? I used to go with the casual notion 'tech isn't evil' / 'even a chair can be used as a weapon'. What have I missed here for blockchain?
The infrastructure of crypto is blatantly inappropriate for the domains people are trying to apply it to. Which leaves open the question, why are they pushing for it?
The answer should be clear to anyone with a passing knowledge of the crypto scene.
I find it strange that people keep promoting that YouTube documentary. Ignoring tone issues, there is a lot of cherry picking and other logical fallacies. For example, he talks about how terrible Tether is and then completely ignores USDC. He also claims that none of the popular blockchains can scale, but Solana is frequently in the top 5 most popular cryptocurrencies. It seems to me that people that do an hour of re…
This is very frequent tone on many subreddits, whether you used it intentionally or not, you became part of the problem: none blockchains can scale and all are bad for planet, but have you seen how good solana actually is?
This week Solana had some problems with network congestion, subreddit was instantly flooded by what initially looked to be anti-CC movement, but quickly turned out to be Stellar supporters looking for new buyers, day before trading value dropped 15%...
Edit:
This is it, look at what I did. I didn't say anything bad about solana or PoS but people jumped to comments to protect this project asking me to explain myself from something I did not say. I didn't even state my opinion on blockchain, PoS, Solana nor Stellar.
Alright, go for it. Speak out all you want. Cryptocurrency users will continue ignoring and/or deriding you. Telling people that you don't like what they're doing is not an effective way to modify their behavior. You need to provide competing incentives, and somehow I doubt y'all are up to that.