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The Edited Latecomer’s Guide to Crypto

mollywhite.net

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Re: The Edited Latecomer’s Guide to Crypto

#151

Post by molly0x57 »

vageli wrote: post #15
trhaynes wrote: post #10

Does anyone know if there is a tool or platform that makes it easy to make/publish this type of "leave footnotes on an article"? The UX here is nice and simple, and I think there is utility in sharing feedback this way (vs. blockquotes in email, or Google Docs comments, etc).

I too would like to know. I mailed the author and if they respond I will let you know as well.

It's just plain ol' HTML and CSS, plus a little JS that will highlight the corresponding annotation if someone clicks the highlighted text.

https://github.com/molly/website-v2/blob/master/src/pug/page... https://github.com/molly/website-v2/blob/master/src/sass/rev... https://github.com/molly/website-v2/blob/master/src/js/revie...

It's all open-source, so by all means feel free to reuse it if you like!

Re: The Edited Latecomer’s Guide to Crypto

#153

Post by dragontamer »

twox2 wrote: post #38
librish wrote: post #36

Until someone has built a crypto product that creates values (for the purpose of this discussion it can be a good or a service would be willing to spend USD on even if it wasn't a crypto) crypto is a negative-sum game. Any USD taken out of the system someone else has to have put in, plus whatever the miners take out. Fortunes aren't created, they are redistributed.

How is it negative sum, and not just zero sum?

A lot of miners have access to free electricity, often through corrupt officials on some unsavory countries... or even US Army folk who are abusing their home's utility bills (Uncle Sam pays for that electricity).

Under these conditions, the utility company has to pay for say $100 in electricity to make $80 of cryptocoin. But since the miner has "free electricity" and doesn't see these costs, they only see the $80 of cryptocoin that they sold off.

Re: The Edited Latecomer’s Guide to Crypto

#154

Post by Ygg2 »

seibelj wrote: post #52
librish wrote: post #36

Until someone has built a crypto product that creates values (for the purpose of this discussion it can be a good or a service would be willing to spend USD on even if it wasn't a crypto) crypto is a negative-sum game. Any USD taken out of the system someone else has to have put in, plus whatever the miners take out. Fortunes aren't created, they are redistributed.

I find a lot of DeFi projects to be very useful, but you have a logical fallacy - If I buy 1% of Apple stock at $100, and later it's worth $1000 based on the last trading price, money didn't change hands to make me have more USD, it's my paper wealth. If Bitcoin goes from $1 to $50k, and I never sell, I didn't take any money - the wealth simply grew.

If you hold something with that much volatility it's not a currency.

Re: The Edited Latecomer’s Guide to Crypto

#155

Post by randomhodler84 »

acdha wrote: post #114
jacinabox wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most bitcoin have never been sold. Bitcoin is a commodity that is intended to serve as a store of value, and other commodities like gold and silver do their work as a store of value without an appreciable fraction of them ever being sold. So using the term market cap is not a misleading measure in relation to bitcoin; it is simply used by analogy to how it would be used for a company; it's not literally implying that…

Bitcoin is a failed currency - see the original paper. After around a decade of failing to find demand the big holders started to market it as a commodity but since there’s no inherent value to it unless it’s actively traded it doesn’t really fit the usual meaning of that term.

Oh please do explain why it is failed?

The only thing that has evolved over time, that is peoples time preference. There will always be demand for BTC. The software works as it was designed, and grows stronger every year. Gresham’s law might be the key to understanding this.

Re: The Edited Latecomer’s Guide to Crypto

#156

Post by Aunche »

flaque wrote: post #120

The issue with crypto is that reasonable use cases are early, and don’t attract attention except for niche communities. There’s a few big ones, for example, filecoin right now has created a commodity market for storage that is currently 10,000 cheaper than S3 in some instances. (See file.app for stats) But realistically, the interesting projects are very small and hard to find. However, scams and ponzi schemes, by th…

>There’s a few big ones, for example, filecoin right now has created a commodity market for storage that is currently 10,000 cheaper than S3 in some instances. (See file.app for stats)

First of all, 63 PB is nothing in terms of cloud storage, so I wouldn't exactly call it a commodity market. Also, I doubt that Amazon is making 99.9% profit margins, so it's more likely that miners are just subsidizing the cost of storage to speculate.

Re: The Edited Latecomer’s Guide to Crypto

#157

Post by lhorie »

librish wrote: post #36

Until someone has built a crypto product that creates values (for the purpose of this discussion it can be a good or a service would be willing to spend USD on even if it wasn't a crypto) crypto is a negative-sum game. Any USD taken out of the system someone else has to have put in, plus whatever the miners take out. Fortunes aren't created, they are redistributed.

I'm curious if this comment is a usual fare of shallow dismissal or if you are aware of current applications of crypto in the wild and consider them to be useless nonetheless.

One example that comes to mind is that Docusign offers a product that uses Ethereum for storing evidence of contracts in a decentralized medium. That seems like a fairly legitimate application for the technology. Another example (albeit possibly more dubious) is BitTorrent tokens as a "currency" for "buying" download speed by incentivizing people to keep nodes running within its P2P network.

Do you consider these types of applications to be negative sums? If so, why? Not trying to be antagonistic here, I'm actually curious.

Re: The Edited Latecomer’s Guide to Crypto

#158

Post by eoo »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #122
flaque wrote: post #120

The issue with crypto is that reasonable use cases are early, and don’t attract attention except for niche communities. There’s a few big ones, for example, filecoin right now has created a commodity market for storage that is currently 10,000 cheaper than S3 in some instances. (See file.app for stats) But realistically, the interesting projects are very small and hard to find. However, scams and ponzi schemes, by th…

Yeah, it sucks. Monero for example is an actual privacy coin that's usable as currency but nobody seems to care. Very demoralizing. Bitcoin is obsolete technology at this point. It's continued existence does more harm than good to the cryptocurrency space because everyone gravitates towards it instead of better projects.

Bitcoin is as obsolete as POSIX. It's ossified, and not changing is a feature.

Re: The Edited Latecomer’s Guide to Crypto

#159

Post by d13 »

doogerdog wrote: post #65

Molly provides a great service to skeptics like me. She concise, easy to read, articulate and funny. I feel like I live in a world where a huge train wreck is getting set up. I would like to follow along but it has gotten to the point where I can't get myself to read many of these 'News' stories about a new crypto adventure. I only have a little news reading time in a day and the typical article about NFTs or whateve…

It’s a brilliant site, but definitely cherry-picked for entertainment value. It’s only a small part of the whole picture and provides a very distorted view

Re: The Edited Latecomer’s Guide to Crypto

#160

Post by dorgo »

germanjoey wrote: post #44

The article (or, rather, the commentary in the link above on the article) talks about the fallacious notion of "market cap" in regards to cryptocurrencies. That is to say, e.g., multiplying the number of bitcoins in existence times the current market price is a silly metric because the entire market would never be able to cash-out at that maximum price. What I was wondering was: is there a better number? e.g., is the…

>is a silly metric because the entire market would never be able to cash-out at that maximum price.

On the other hand, you can't buy all coins even if you pay the market cap..

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