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Cryptonomicon: Among the Bitcoin maximalists

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Re: Cryptonomicon: Among the Bitcoin maximalists

#101

Post by majormajor »

cdiddy2 wrote: post #72
majormajor wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Times were better when we didn't have enough to eat, curse this surplus and our lack of self control!" Strange to see such paternalism about people making unhealthy dietary choices from a crowd I mostly associate with libertarian thinking.

I don't think libertarians believe that government subsidy leading to monocropping is inline with their way of thinking.

What's really being said here is "people need to make better nutrition choices." Or can you support a claim that highly processed super-tasty engineered and mass-produced food is purely a function of ag subsidies? And that there would be no market pressure to create such a thing in your world.

Re: Cryptonomicon: Among the Bitcoin maximalists

#102

Post by DonHopkins »

horsawlarway wrote: post #93
kragen wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bet you wish you hadn't spent those hundreds of bitcoin, don't you? As I said in the last post I linked, Bitcoin handles a few billion dollars a year in cross-border remittances, largely to family members in Venezuela; this suggests that it's keeping several million people alive. I hear there are still darknet markets around, too. So there are current uses as a genuine medium of exchange that are very significant.…

> I bet you wish you hadn't spent those hundreds of bitcoin, don't you? No - not really. The point of them wasn't to hold them with an expectation that they would become unreasonably valuable (speculation). The point of them was to make an exchange for a good that was otherwise hard to acquire (in this case - weed, before legalization). You'll notice that's not something most of you "crypto advocates" ever actually d…

Please support your local union artisanal farm-to-bong marijuana farmers!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2CU1cdTlQE

Re: Cryptonomicon: Among the Bitcoin maximalists

#103

Post by floodyberry- »

invalidOrTaken wrote: post #18
shralpmeister wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it just me or does that read like a far-right, Christian, white supremacist screed?

To those of us who are far-right, Christian, and have noticed the lack of distinction that seems to be applied between say, David Duke, and Chris Rufo, this is not the takedown-by-association you seem to think it is.

You are inside a cult, complaining that people outside have not differentiated levels of extremes inside the cult, and therefore you do not view being similar to the cult as a bad thing. This is not a defense of the cult you seem to think it is.

Re: Cryptonomicon: Among the Bitcoin maximalists

#104

Post by DonHopkins »

oriolid wrote: post #53
MR4D wrote: post #4

This is interesting... The linked article is titled "Cryptonomicon", and written by Will Stephenson, and a book with the same title was written by Neal Stephenson. Yet, no mention of Neal or his book in the article. So I wonder where he got the word for his title?

With all recent Metaverse stuff, it seems that Neal Stephenson is public domain now. So many things on the Internet are based on Snow Crash and Diamond Age that maybe it's time to move to different book now.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29045605

If Mark Zuckerberg trademarks "Metaverse", William Gibson should trademark "Mark Zuckerberg".

https://www.wired.com/2015/04/virtual-reality-and-the-pionee...

>Virtual Reality and the Pioneers of Cyberspace: 25 years before Oculus, John Perry Barlow described what it was like “being in nothingness.”

>[...] And they were ready to make a product. They’d made a promo video starring Timothy Leary. Gullichsen had even registered William Gibson’s term “cyberspace” as an Autodesk trademark, prompting an irritated Gibson to apply for trademark registration of the term “Eric Gullichsen.” By June, they had an implementation which, though clearly the Kitty Hawk version of the technology, endowed people with an instantaneous vision of the Concorde level. [...]

moviesCyberspace: The New Explorers: Autodesk Demo Tape on Cyberspace with Timothy Leary.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FC4UQDm_mQ

Re: Cryptonomicon: Among the Bitcoin maximalists

#105

Post by Hendrikto »

majormajor wrote: post #46
Hendrikto wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gold and silver coins are not fiat though.

How much actual gold has to be in your gold coin before it crosses from "gold" to "fiat"? You had "debased" coinage in Roman times, if not earlier.

Does not matter as long as it‘s a fixed minimum.

Re: Cryptonomicon: Among the Bitcoin maximalists

#106

Post by Mondialisation »

once_inc wrote: post #25
Animats wrote: post #21

That's a great read. What's striking, in his description of the conference, is the total lack of any connection to real world activity. None of these people seem to be trying to get enough Bitcoin together to build a steel mill or a wafer fab or a smartphone factory or, indeed, any kind of startup that does something. Bitcoin is expected to somehow generate wealth without actually doing anything that generates revenu…

There are actually quite a few companies doing things with bitcoin that generate revenue. Bitcoin isn't supposed to make you money; it's supposed to be money. Dollars on their own don't generate revenue, nor is gold locked in a safe. Bitcoin has qualities that make it better than fiat and better than gold, at the cost of an established history. Perhaps the author just spoke to the wrong people, didn't get the fundame…

As opposed to other technologies out there, bitcoin does a very poor job as being money.

Re: Cryptonomicon: Among the Bitcoin maximalists

#107

Post by Karrot_Kream »

horsawlarway wrote: post #100
kragen wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Of fucking course [gold, silver, copper, and greenbacks work pretty well as currencies] - the government taxes exchanges on them at unreasonably high rates (gold has a 28% long term capital gains tax, vs the normal 15-20%.) Gold, silver, and copper have worked pretty well as currencies for 2700 years under a variety of taxation schemes, of which by far the most common was "no taxation", which I believe is the case…

Unless you can find a contractor who will remodel your bathroom for gold (or god help them, bitcoin), or a food vendor who will take gold instead of your local currency (at an equivalent rate) then when you actually need goods and services, you convert to a local currency, which is taxed. In exchange for that taxation, you can write a contract that says "I will give you X gold for Y dollars" and expect the government…

> Unless you can find a contractor who will remodel your bathroom for gold (or god help them, bitcoin), or a food vendor who will take gold instead of your local currency (at an equivalent rate) then when you actually need goods and services, you convert to a local currency, which is taxed.

I'm not sure if you've spent any time hanging around in the world of illegal immigrants, but in my family's circles, there _are_ contractors that are loose family friends of ours who _do_ take gold in order to perform services. Often the gold is repurposed into jewellery or otherwise sold to other immigrant-owned businesses. Eventually someone in the immigrant network can wash the gold clean. Members of our extended family fled civil war by holding jewellery on their person , and there are stories of others who melted their jewellery down and travelled with it, and used these to fund their lives in Western nations they emigrated to. Now that my family's country has politically stabilized this is a lot rarer and as such I don't know, at least in our extended network, anyone who still washes gold clean.

Re: Cryptonomicon: Among the Bitcoin maximalists

#108

Post by ipaddr »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #50
kragen wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As it turns out, moving money from one group to another† is pretty useful in modern society. It's really all that money is good for, after all. Some of my comments from the last week and a half about what Bitcoin is good for: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30469595 when your country's central bank suspends electronic cash transfers, suspends the foreign exchange market, limits cash withdrawals, and prohibits th…

But can you do it without going to jail when sanctions or similar are in place against you? Technically, you can, but you face the same consequences if you were able to get a wire or SEPA transaction through. That's the point. The tech doesn't change the policy or the law. You still go to jail or your country gets shelled. Miners get chased out of countries. Russia is reportedly exploring crypto for transfers if they…

If Russia pour a trillion into crypto it would boost cryto like crazy.

Governments are buying oil and other products from Russia and need a way pay them. Russian banks will move money outside of swift. Swift just makes it easier.

Re: Cryptonomicon: Among the Bitcoin maximalists

#109

Post by DonHopkins »

UncleMeat wrote: post #79
cdiddy2 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well we are approaching half of americans having a chronic disease and a large part of that is from what we eat along with lack of exercise. it does seem like we have a degradation of the nutrients in our food supply as well. https://www.fightchronicdisease.org/sites/default/files/docs... https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/vanishing-...

There has never been a time in human history where a smaller percentage of the population faced starvation. Actual wars were fought over access to spices I can buy for three dollars at the supermarket. Small changes in per-unit micronutrient quantities are not the cause of modern obesity. If you do want to make some claim that worldwide nutrition was better at some point in the past, that point was definitely not whe…

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Re: Cryptonomicon: Among the Bitcoin maximalists

#110

Post by Karrot_Kream »

Animats wrote: post #21

That's a great read. What's striking, in his description of the conference, is the total lack of any connection to real world activity. None of these people seem to be trying to get enough Bitcoin together to build a steel mill or a wafer fab or a smartphone factory or, indeed, any kind of startup that does something. Bitcoin is expected to somehow generate wealth without actually doing anything that generates revenu…

> That's what real authoritarianism looks like. Not mask mandates. Over the next few months, the tolerance for bullshit, especially in politics, will go way down.

I disagree. If you look at the Cold War period, there was all sorts of bitter politics over culture wars throughout the world. The US experienced the Free Speech Movement [1], violent leftist extremist group bombings [2] (concomitant with the rise of leftist extreme violence in the rest of the Americas with groups such as the FARC [3] in the backdrop of some pretty frightening authoritarian leaders), the Civil Rights Movement [4] and several other culturally and politically destabilizing events. All of these things happened in the background of a global conflict between capitalism and communism, when one could argue that left-wing authoritarianism was in full display in the Eastern Bloc. The US only got its act back together politically after the end of the Cold War with the rise of some awkward form of Pax Americana that lasted from roughly from the fall of the Berlin Wall to September 11, 2001.

I doubt the events in Ukraine are going to _decrease_ the amount of political sectarianism in the US. If anything, it'll add an additional pressure as groups will be called out to be sympathizers of authoritarianism much as McCarthyism attacked folks for being suspected Communists.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Speech_Movement

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weather_Underground

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutionary_Armed_Forces_of_...

[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_rights_movement

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