311–320 of 393 posts
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Can you explain that more? I'm not familiar with Monero. What apps couldn't be made without it?
Monero is a privacy-focused cryptocurrency. It obfuscates transactions while keeping the technical perks of a decentralized ledger.
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> but I do think the technology already has applications that are useful to many For example?
How about international money transfer for a start? I can and have moved money internationally in minutes for less than it would cost through the SWIFT system which would take days. This is all fine and good for me, as I live in a developed country, so I "could" just use SWIFT ,but what about remittance payments? For people who have a mobile phone, but no bank (a large number of people in the developing world), a rel…
Sending remittance payments in cryptocurrency does not make sense for people who are sending their hard earned dollars back to their home country to support their impoverished families. The risk exposure to exchange rate fluctuations, and risk of loss of funds in transit (due to fraud, hacking, losing a crypto wallet, sending money to the wrong wallet, etc), the fees associated with cryptocurrency transfers, and the extremely slow transfer times, all makes cryptocurrency a totally inappropriate product for the demographic that you are suggesting be targeted. You are basically suggesting that crypto bros should get rich off of selling a product to poor people that will only make them poorer. It's disturbing. This is exactly the kind of thing that makes me agree with title of this post.
Fortunately, most people have other options available for international remittance payments. For example, you can now transfer money to people using Visa in over 80 countries, all you need is their Visa card number, and the transfer time is 30 minutes or less for Visa debit. All the major retail banks have similar services, and there are plenty of money transfer apps (including a Western Union app), none of which depend on "blockchain technology."
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> none blockchains can scale and all are bad for planet How is Solana bad for the planet exactly? I don't use Solana, or particularly like it, but it's proof of stake, so if you'd resist the urge to jump to conclusions, you'd find with a couple of minutes of research that its energy usage is comparable to a few average households.
> In total, the entire Solana network — with 1,196 validator nodes and an estimated 20,000,000,000 transactions — uses an estimated 11,051,066 kWh per year. This is the equivalent of the average electricity usage of 1038 American households. https://solana.com/news/solana-energy-usage-report-november-...
From your own link though, with the current usage of the Solana network, a transaction consumes about as much energy as a google search. Not exactly something worth drawing out the energy pitchforks over.
Absolutely not. I completely disagree with your claims. https://mobile.twitter.com/realsexycyborg/status/13807504757 ... https://twitter.com/RealSexyCyborg/status/140404849753222758 ... This kind of rhetoric can only be used by privileged (often white) western people with access to international financial markets, PayPal, stocks, and free (or cheap) cross-country transfers like and unified banking regions like USA or…
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Filecoin offers an S3-like service for a radically lower price: https://filecoin.io/blog/posts/filecoin-in-2021-looking-back... You have now seen a use for the technology which is not a scam.
I don't get it. Why does this need crypto to work? From what I've seen, its an auction to provide a service. Why would I ask my neighbour to host data, rather than two or three expert companies that understand backups, power- and temperature requirements?
I think people use S3 not because their prices are great, but because they're not comfortable trusting some no-name company that offers better pricing. Protocols like Filecoin aim to remove the need for trust, by having untrusted storage providers prove that they're storing some data.
These anonymous storage providers almost certain aren't following convention best practices in terms of RAID, UPSs etc, so a single copy of the data has a greater likelihood of being lost, but we can compensate for that with extra redundancy.
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Decentralized lending markets like Algofi which went through YC
To be very clear, fully collateralised loans are not really lending per se. They are repurchase agreements. I am not even sure what use such 'loans' have when you need to have $2 to take a loan of $1. They certainly solve some issues that Cryptocurrencies introduce for themselves but outside of that world they are useless
I agree with your assessment. It's an overcollateralized repo agreement. In the the "centralized finance" world, the purpose of the repo market is to provide investors with leverage at low cost. It's similar getting a mortgage from your bank to invest in a real estate property - you give the bank a down payment (let's say 20% down), and the bank lends you the remaining 80% to buy the property. In this way, your initial investment (20% down payment) is leveraged 4 times. Despite your leverage, the mortgage on the interest rate stays low because the bank has a lien on the real estate property so they can recover their loan value by selling the property if you don't pay back the loan.
> I am not even sure what use such 'loans' have when you need to have $2 to take a loan of $1. They certainly solve some issues that Cryptocurrencies introduce for themselves but outside of that world they are useless
But what issues in cryptocurrencies does it even solve? What is the business model of these DeFi businesses? They advertise to crypto investors that they can earn impossibly high rates of "interest and rewards," and there are plenty of crypto HODLs who would be happy to lock up their crypto in a DeFi to earn interest, but where is the demand side? Who needs to borrow $1 worth of crypto while posting $2 of crypto as collateral and paying impossibly high interest? Who needs to borrow cryptocurrency at all? The only purpose I can see of borrowing crypto would be to short sell it, but how many people are crazy enough to do that? I can't help but feel like DeFi is some kind of scam and a reincarnation of the ICO bubble.
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>There's a lot of research and development into blockchain technology by very smart people. 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…
> Proof of work combined with the deflationary nature of these currencies is literally the antithesis of efficiency. 1) First of all, are we discussing crypto as a currency or blockchains as a technology? Your criticisms seem all over the place here. 2) Maybe talking negatively about the dangers of deflationary currencies while we're in a period of economic inflation and peoples' purchasing power is being deliberatel…
Let's not argument in terms of 'what ifs'. Proof of waste is real here and now.
DLTs are not the problem. The problem is idiocracy. Most people don't think anymore. Some people even buy NFTs thinking ownership right come with those - not even asking legal questions... DLTs can indeed be incredibly useful, e.g. when multiple parties use the tech as a trusted pseudonymous data log, e.g. drug tracking from production to pharmacies. Or decentralized certificate wallets which allow you to actually ow…
Why can't they just use a database? Tracking information isn't a new problem.
Absolutely not. I completely disagree with your claims. https://mobile.twitter.com/realsexycyborg/status/13807504757 ... https://twitter.com/RealSexyCyborg/status/140404849753222758 ... This kind of rhetoric can only be used by privileged (often white) western people with access to international financial markets, PayPal, stocks, and free (or cheap) cross-country transfers like and unified banking regions like USA or…
Proof of waste is bad for environment.
Anyway I was born in to occupied country. You should rather fight for your democracy.
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The OP doesn't say complain to crypto users. It says that we need to inform the general public so that they are immunised against the draw of these schemes.
I don't think you realize how much the laughably obtuse skeptic and the crypto die-hards have in common. Both agree that 98% of the space is a scam (though not in market cap terms), its just some people actually look in to find the pockets of progress and value, while others ignore it all and stay poor and resentful. I hate using the term "stay poor," but when I continually see these forever skeptics less versed in b…