Tell HN: We have a responsibility to speak out against blockchain technologies

That is precisely why this is such a societally detrimental technology. The communities that are forming around it are self-reinforcing and suck up both monetary and intellectual capital.

All of this hype about crypto's "potential" is demolished in Dan's excellent work.

>It's a lack of imagination to think that because crypto is "slow" now (and not all of it is by the way), that it will always be the case.

Proof of work combined with the deflationary nature of these currencies is literally the antithesis of efficiency. The system necessarily needs to become less efficient over time because new coins need to become asymptotically harder to mint.

>Maybe a purely decentralized system cannot.

It's clear that the systems that interpret the blockchain (and even the blockchain itself, if wealthy and well-connected folks decide to fork) can be pressured into "censorship."

>if they can prove perfectly transparent and reduce or eliminate corruption?

No system that relies on human inputs can prove to be perfectly transparent or eliminate corruption. The blockchain itself can have provably unbreakable crypto that prevents man-in-the-middle manipulation of data but that in and of itself does not govern the interface between the chain and the people feeding it data.

Forex is a highly-leveraged speculative zero-sum game where you're betting against a different trader. It's provably zero-sum like futures trading. Negative sum if you include the rake. The total supply of both sides of that trade remains the same, it's simply a redistribution of wealth from the losing trader to the winning trader.

It's also strictly a pair trade meaning that you're buying one currency and selling a different one at the same time, on the anticipation that you can unwind that for more than you spent to enter it. Forex trades are never just "USD" it's always "USD/YYY."

This is completely different than expecting to earn money by holding USD.

If I had funding, my preferred approach would be a consumer reports modality both in written form and on TV as consumer protection.

There is a palpable difference between seeing criticism as mere jealously or whining --- what 'Pubs and Dems talking heads do to each other on TV or headless voices on AM/FM do which by now is largely tuned out or wholly bought into the determinant of the country either way --- and education.

I do not think people who care about this are whiners; certainly not. But in the context of Trump, Covid, Jan-6, etc. there is a general climate of people posing as victims so they can take offense "righteously" which is an immediate turn off.

Education undercuts all that BS. It's empowering in the good way. If the goal is invest what'd be better? Who better to work with? How better to contextualize investment and money management? And how does that redound to the betterment of you and your loved ones? That's the game we wanna be in.

The chutzpah has gone so far that anything proto-crypto is the solution to anything else.

This person is dealing with cancer and bankruptcy and some putz comes along and tells him to create some NFTs.

I wanted to scream.