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BBC cryptocurrency documentary pulled from air at last minute

theguardian.com

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Re: BBC cryptocurrency documentary pulled from air at last minute

#101

Post by naasking »

captaincaveman wrote: post #27
luckyandroid wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every person I've spoken to who's told me they're interested in crypto literally only care about it to make money, and have no interest in learning how it works. They all treat every last crypto-based use as investment like stocks, and not as a normal economic choice (e.g. "I want $3000 worth of bitcoin to buy a car" is not something people are doing, instead it's all "I want $3000 worth of bitcoin because the intern…

Your not buying the rights, that's the most annoying thing about NFTs, that people don't get.

> Your not buying the rights, that's the most annoying thing about NFTs, that people don't get.

You are buying the rights, but they're rights that exist in a pseudo-legal system that has no enforcement and isn't recognized by any existing legal authority. Some kind of enforcement could exist one day though.

For instance, it's possible that your house in a "metaverse" might only display art for the NFTs that it verifies you own.

Re: BBC cryptocurrency documentary pulled from air at last minute

#102

Post by NoboruWataya »

luckyandroid wrote: post #11
WilTimSon wrote: post #2

It's astonishing to me that people will just buy into any success story that involves crypto and NFTs. People don't question why poorly drawn pictures are being bought for thousands of dollars, don't question why there are hundreds of altcoins on the market and some "cryptocurrency experts" are supposedly "offering free tips" on investment. The whole space is rife with scams and embellishments and yet there are so ma…

Every person I've spoken to who's told me they're interested in crypto literally only care about it to make money, and have no interest in learning how it works. They all treat every last crypto-based use as investment like stocks, and not as a normal economic choice (e.g. "I want $3000 worth of bitcoin to buy a car" is not something people are doing, instead it's all "I want $3000 worth of bitcoin because the intern…

It's the purest manifestation of the greater fool theory.

Re: BBC cryptocurrency documentary pulled from air at last minute

#103

Post by notahacker »

ajsnigrutin wrote: post #71
notahacker wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The scarcity of land is physical. And to supply more housing you need to pay for the ownership of physical assets, and then for people to physically demolish them and physically build bigger structures, which is a lot of expensive to take if the demand for property doesn't already exceed its supply Or you could create more "limited edition" monkey pictures at essentially zero marginal cost.

There are a lot of places where there is enough land to build more and more, but the governments don't allow it. And there are also places such as san-francisco, where replacing single-family houses with apartment buildings would solve a lot of the housing crisis, but the government (and NIMBYs) don't allow it.

Even in a world with zero building regulation you're still running into constraints though. Sure, people could build more apartments which would slow growth in accommodation prices and maybe directly hurt the value of the neighbours' properties they overshadow, but land is still limited amd expensive (more expensive if you're allowed to build tenement blocks on it) and construction still physically intensive and expensive, so there's still no incentive to drive prices down by supplying more apartments than the market demands.

cf NFTs where digital art itself can be copied and viewed infinitely, and the NFTs themselves are just tokens issued at near zero cost by providers which could happily issue infinitely more tokens referencing the same art (even though at the moment, for the sake of trust and collectibility and not dampening the hype yet, it's more lucrative to issue finite numbers of additional tokens referring to more low-effort variations on the original art instead.)

Re: BBC cryptocurrency documentary pulled from air at last minute

#104

Post by lariati »

tluyben2 wrote: post #25
mistrial9 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many people are teased and abused, for year after year after year, working hard with obvious threat of termination, while a different system of money that they have no access to, grows and grows (investments) every day in the newspaper headlines for everyone to see.

I think this is quite important; many ‘normal’ people simply struggled while others got money ‘for free’; while of course this (with stocks, houses, inheritance etc) happened all the time before crypto, that was for the rich mostly. Now it appears you can put the little money you ‘have’ into crypto and make a nice living like a rich person; make so much interest that you can live of it. Even the careful people I know…

Crypto has to periodically 10X though for this to happen.

The narrative has a type of theta/time decay as there is just no way for the majority to 10X their investment periodically.

I think it is also very hard to think about the global entertainment dollars that have been locked up for the past 2 years. It is an enormous amount of money and as the pandemic fades people are going to splurge on the non-digital services and goods that they have not been able to for the past two years.

The pandemic fading throws the whole process that has pushed crypto to these levels in reverse.

The fact crypto has continued to make new highs is basically meaningless as far as the future is concerned.

Re: BBC cryptocurrency documentary pulled from air at last minute

#105

Post by Matticus_Rex »

pessimizer wrote: post #63
Rarebox wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can buy drugs and other illegal things off the internet (tor), that's very useful for some people. Basically crypto allows for transactions that could otherwise be blocked or easily tracked by central parties (1). It can also be used to bypass gambling laws. For legal purchases and activities crypto is useless, regular money is much more practical. [1] depending on which crypto and how it's used tracking is possi…

> You can buy drugs and other illegal things off the internet (tor) Can you? After that huge bust a few years back, I figured that particular usage was marginal at this point. Seems like the only use for crypto is ransomware, dodging taxes or smuggling embezzled money out of your country.

Yeah, there are still plenty of drugs on the darkweb. Busting a few dealers doesn't eliminate demand, and in-person dealers don't have a "reviews" page for their products and behavior.

Re: BBC cryptocurrency documentary pulled from air at last minute

#106

Post by avianlyric »

monkeynotes wrote: post #64
mandmandam wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

I am not sure what this comment is meant to convey, but it sounds to me that you are alluding to BoJo gutting the BBC for his own political gain. I think the reality is the license fee is overwhelmingly unpopular, has been for decades. The BBC has not evolved its business model to keep up with democratized broadcast and if BoJo is the one to do what is inevitable then who can blame him to use the opportunity to be th…

The relationship between the licence fee and the BBC isn’t that simple. You must pay the TV licence fee if you receive any broadcast television generally available to the public, regardless of if it’s BBC content or not. If you only watch Channel Four, and never BBC, you must still pay the licence fee. Your viewing habits are completely irrelevant.

The TV licence comes from law, and the government happens to delegate responsibility for collection to the BBC. But the BBC doesn’t get the money directly, it’s handed over to the government who then allocates to a number of different public broadcast functions. As it happens the majority of that money ends up back with the BBC, but not all of it.

In short the TV licence fee is really a tax on receiving public broadcast. It just so happens that the majority of that tax is used to fund the BBC.

Also the BBC isn’t a normal company. It can’t unilaterally change its funding model, only the government can do that. As the U.K. primary public broadcaster it can’t raise funds by charging a traditional subscription, or by advertising, the law prohibits it. Additionally the BBC is also bound to create radio broadcast, which is also funded by the licence fee.

So the BBC hands are tied. It’s unfair to criticise an organisation for failing to change something it has no legal ability to change. I’m sure the BBC would love to explore other funding options, but politicians aren’t interested in playing ball. They would rather trade on peoples dislike of the licence fee for cheap political points, than engage in a proper conversation about how, or even if, we fund public broadcast in the UK.

The BBC is held up as one of the best, if not the best, public broadcaster in the world. It would be a shame to see it die, or heavily diminished in its capabilities. The BBC provides far more public good than just news and TV. It produces incredible amounts of educational material for schools, and has provided an incredible venue for some of the UKs best journalists and documentarians like David Attenborough to truly hone their craft, and educate billions about the world we live in.

Re: BBC cryptocurrency documentary pulled from air at last minute

#107

Post by ARandumGuy »

globular-toast wrote: post #20
WilTimSon wrote: post #2

It's astonishing to me that people will just buy into any success story that involves crypto and NFTs. People don't question why poorly drawn pictures are being bought for thousands of dollars, don't question why there are hundreds of altcoins on the market and some "cryptocurrency experts" are supposedly "offering free tips" on investment. The whole space is rife with scams and embellishments and yet there are so ma…

Why limit it to crypto? People don't question why the value of houses seems to magically rise globally despite no tangible value being added to the assets in most cases. People don't question why Wall Street traders get rich by trading second derivatives of mortgage backed securities with each other all day. What makes a mortgage any more "real" than an NFT?

This seems like a classic whataboutism. Mortgages being bad or good has absolutely no bearing on the quality of cryptocurrencies or NFTs. If crypto was actually good, you shouldn't need to deflect criticism with "but the existing financial sector also sucks!"

Re: BBC cryptocurrency documentary pulled from air at last minute

#108

Post by wink »

WilTimSon wrote: post #2

It's astonishing to me that people will just buy into any success story that involves crypto and NFTs. People don't question why poorly drawn pictures are being bought for thousands of dollars, don't question why there are hundreds of altcoins on the market and some "cryptocurrency experts" are supposedly "offering free tips" on investment. The whole space is rife with scams and embellishments and yet there are so ma…

I dunno, I am not really questioning why some limited-run sneakers are being bought for thousands of dollars. Or why people spend 50k on their bathroom. Or why old Nintendo cartridges go for enormous prices. Or diamonds.

I don't see the difference here.

Now, I also don't get why NFTs have taken off AT ALL. But I don't see how they're really different than anything I listed above, except maybe more unstable or even more useless than a 2000$ pair of sneakers, which you could still wear if you ever ran out of shoes.

Re: BBC cryptocurrency documentary pulled from air at last minute

#109

Post by avianlyric »

iso1210 wrote: post #87
gpvos wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the article: > Continuing cuts to BBC budgets and deep job cuts, caused by successive licence fee freezes, have been blamed for recent errors in the corporation’s news output, especially in regional English newsrooms. That is the main piece of news as far as I can see. (Maybe it's not news for those who have followed the British media more closely than me.) The BBC does have some internal standards, but is incre…

In 2010 the TV license was £198.79[0]. Today it's £159, that's a 20% cut, with no real change in output. Over the next 2 years it's coming down another 10% (or more) [1] [0] https://www.in2013dollars.com/uk/inflation/2010?amount=145.5... [1] https://www.gov.uk/government/news/tv-licence-fee-frozen-for...

Accounting for inflation the licence fee in 2010 was £270 in todays money. So in real terms the BBC has seen a cut of 42%, which is kind of insane.

Re: BBC cryptocurrency documentary pulled from air at last minute

#110

Post by Hamuko »

captaincaveman wrote: post #27
luckyandroid wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every person I've spoken to who's told me they're interested in crypto literally only care about it to make money, and have no interest in learning how it works. They all treat every last crypto-based use as investment like stocks, and not as a normal economic choice (e.g. "I want $3000 worth of bitcoin to buy a car" is not something people are doing, instead it's all "I want $3000 worth of bitcoin because the intern…

Your not buying the rights, that's the most annoying thing about NFTs, that people don't get.

I thought the most annoying thing about NFTs is that you're basically buying a hyperlink to a website that you do not control.

I checked out the Doctor Who NFT thing after Team 17 was teaming up with the people behind that thing, and the domain where the NFT metadata and images are being hosted was due to expire next summer. They didn't even splurge on a five-year registration for the domain. Hopefully auto-renewals don't stop working.

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