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In Defense of Bitcoin Maximalism

vitalik.ca

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Re: In Defense of Bitcoin Maximalism

#41

Post by SketchySeaBeast »

seibelj wrote: post #29
astoor wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my view, how you earn your money affects how you value it. Many with cryptocurrency haven't had to do any hard honest work to obtain it, e.g. the early joiners who have just had to wait as their "wealth" accrues from later joiners, or even newer joiners who have made their "wealth" from scams or rugpulls or wash trading to artificially inflate the value of their NFTs or whatever. These people tend not to value the…

Putting a significant amount of money into something that the vast majority of "intelligent" people say is a scam (as you do), is reward for taking risk. No different than an investor looking at small cap stocks to pick winners and throwing a lot of money in. It seems you are criticizing the concept of investing.

So it's cool if you take part in a pyramid scheme because you're taking on risk?

Re: In Defense of Bitcoin Maximalism

#42

Post by ip26 »

seibelj wrote: post #29
astoor wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my view, how you earn your money affects how you value it. Many with cryptocurrency haven't had to do any hard honest work to obtain it, e.g. the early joiners who have just had to wait as their "wealth" accrues from later joiners, or even newer joiners who have made their "wealth" from scams or rugpulls or wash trading to artificially inflate the value of their NFTs or whatever. These people tend not to value the…

Putting a significant amount of money into something that the vast majority of "intelligent" people say is a scam (as you do), is reward for taking risk. No different than an investor looking at small cap stocks to pick winners and throwing a lot of money in. It seems you are criticizing the concept of investing.

No, they are just describing the well known mentality of "easy come, easy go".

Re: In Defense of Bitcoin Maximalism

#44

Post by justinpowers »

bin_bash wrote: post #27
bko wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could make the same argument against cash. You could easily lose your cash or have it stolen. That doesn't mean we should force everyone on a centralized digital ledger. You would be given some assurances in case of stolen funds through reversals. But there's a difference between accidentally losing your wallet and having your funds stolen because someone in power doesn't like you. The answer is to allow for both…

Who keeps a large percentage of their wealth in cash?

~22% of the US population if you equate being unbanked or underbanked with holding your wealth in cash.

Worldwide, the percentage is similar.

Of course being unbanked isn’t equivalent but it’s likely very nearly so.

Not to mention, the chances of being unbanked are higher for vulnerable populations, especially those who might benefit from uncensorable money.

Re: In Defense of Bitcoin Maximalism

#45

Post by popcorncowboy »

buildbuildbuild wrote: post #3

It's no coincidence that some of the strongest criticism against cryptocurrency happens here, in a community mostly of banked, relatively prosperous people in stable countries. May you never personally experience being unbanked or otherwise financially oppressed.

Not that you're wrong about anything that you've said, but your implication (and that of the blockchain punditry) is that somehow crypto is the solution here, without ever exaplaining "how".

The idea that crypto is "out of reach" of governments, regulators, law and oppressive regimes is one of the fairy tales that crypto pundits believe that is simply not true.

In a country that is unbanked and financially oppressed, even if you were loaded with BTC, and even if all your suppliers of food, housing, energy, clothing, schooling etc were somehow setup to transact in BTC, no-one explains how they'll just "bypass" the financial system, tax system, government regulators or the people with guns. There is a naive certainty that people can "sidestep" the formal system and no-one will ever come knocking. In unbanked, oppressed countries? This fairy tale that the "system" will just keep working but the "nasty government" will throw its hands up and go "YOLO BTC what are you gonna do lol carry on everyone". Please. It's the easiest thing in the world to pass laws outlawing this stuff, and then lean on infrastructure, network providers, suppliers, etc etc..

Nevermind the transaction fees that make this untenable anyway. Perhaps the poor oppressed can just write everything down on paper to settle accounts at the end of the month/quarter/year/never and dodge tx fees. Of course, L2 networks, problem solved.

Anyway. I suppose BTC growth has to come from somewhere. So why not exploit the global south further under the aegis of yet another colonial missionary expedition to save them from themselves. This may make life worse in the end for the savages but hey, a bunch of us will get richer.

Re: In Defense of Bitcoin Maximalism

#46

Post by seibelj »

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #41
seibelj wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Putting a significant amount of money into something that the vast majority of "intelligent" people say is a scam (as you do), is reward for taking risk. No different than an investor looking at small cap stocks to pick winners and throwing a lot of money in. It seems you are criticizing the concept of investing.

So it's cool if you take part in a pyramid scheme because you're taking on risk?

I don't think crypto is a pyramid scheme and your statement is an opinion not a fact.

Re: In Defense of Bitcoin Maximalism

#47

Post by smeej »

enkid wrote: post #22
game_the0ry wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trade offs - bitcoin is not a free lunch. If you want to be fully sovereign with your wealth, you have to accept full responsibility of that wealth. If that is not a responsibility you want bc you believe it is too risky, then do not buy bitcoin. Or, you can trust centralized authority (a bank) with that responsibility; obviously, the trade off is you lose full control of your wealth. Additionally, how you approach o…

What does being fully sovereign mean for something that's only used as a medium of exchange? It's value is always only meaningful when at least two people agree on it's value. At best you only control half of the equation.

The comparison isn't reasonably between "sovereign control of your wealth" and "in total control of what everyone else values." That doesn't even make sense.

The question worth asking is about how controlling your own wealth, but having to trust the value of it to a giant swath of people over which no one entity has any significant control, compares to not having any control of your own wealth, AND having the value of any wealth you do have dependent entirely on the will of some unelected bureaucrat.

Re: In Defense of Bitcoin Maximalism

#48

Post by headmelted »

seibelj wrote: post #29
astoor wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my view, how you earn your money affects how you value it. Many with cryptocurrency haven't had to do any hard honest work to obtain it, e.g. the early joiners who have just had to wait as their "wealth" accrues from later joiners, or even newer joiners who have made their "wealth" from scams or rugpulls or wash trading to artificially inflate the value of their NFTs or whatever. These people tend not to value the…

Putting a significant amount of money into something that the vast majority of "intelligent" people say is a scam (as you do), is reward for taking risk. No different than an investor looking at small cap stocks to pick winners and throwing a lot of money in. It seems you are criticizing the concept of investing.

I don’t know that this is a good analogy.

They’re both inherently high risk, but the value derives from different things. With small caps, it’s the idea that one or more may grow to produce outsize returns in the future, whereas the other is hoping someone will come along later with more money to take you out of your position.

(The small caps for the most part aren’t attracting money based on popularity or memes, so are closer to high-risk investing than gambling on speculative assets).

Re: In Defense of Bitcoin Maximalism

#49

Post by jjoonathan »

rtkwe wrote: post #17
game_the0ry wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My friend, I worked in the tech side of a big bank that you might have an account with, so I have seen how the sausage is made. I would trust Google, Apple, and many other tech companies with my money. A better analogy - tech improves the hammer, it does not have to re-invent it. Example: open your phone and marvel at how easily you can send and receive funds from you banking app; 10+ years ago, you would have to go…

My rule of thumb for tech companies is they're all a mess under the covers so every company looks bad from the inside compared to the outside. > I would trust Google, Apple, and many other tech companies with my money. When I have a problem and need to call my bank I can usually get an actual person or even go to a branch where I can annoy someone in person, where as Google acts like categorically opposed to support…

Yeah, you can get a person on the phone, who will calmly and patiently explain that they are going to proceed with fucking you because it's their policy to fuck you. Google doesn't pay a human to answer the phone, they just go ahead and fuck you. Either way, you're getting fucked, and the only difference is that if you do it the boomer way you get free phone therapy.

Personally I don't much care for free phone therapy. I think you get what you pay for.

Re: In Defense of Bitcoin Maximalism

#50

Post by smeej »

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #40
tenuousemphasis wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Luckily, there are already mitigations for risk of loss, notably backups and multi-signature wallets. Both have tradeoffs and additional mitigations. Backups are additional single points of failure but can be protected by passphrases. Multi-signature is more complicated but has no single point of failure and redundancy. Future developments like covenants (restricting future spending of a coin) will create even more s…

> systems that allow you to claw back stolen funds using backup keys for example Doesn't that remove the trust in the transaction? Isn't the one of the promised joys of these things that, short of a fork, the transaction is immutable and that people don't have to worry about fraud in the form of charge backs or their money disappearing once they have it?

Not necessarily.

If you know the mechanism for potential reversal of the transaction and trust the process responsible for making the decision about when to reverse a transaction, you've known the rules and the context from the start.

It would have to be a well-designed process to earn your trust, but it's not an unsolvable problem.

To my knowledge, there aren't any smart contracts that have implemented such a system really well yet, but I might just not have heard about them, or they may just not have been tried yet.

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