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On anti-crypto toxicity

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Re: On anti-crypto toxicity

#151

Post by Capira »

Werewolf255 wrote: post #133
Capira wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...which is good because it helps us move away from the throw-away society mentality. Bitcoin is very effective environmental activism.

Unless this is sarcasm, do you wanna talk about the environmental ramifications of so much work being duplicated and dumped in the bitcoin network? Like, the sheer number of machines and waste heat that comes from nodes who weren't quite fast enough to get the payout, and just had to put all those calculations into /dev/null?

Bitcoin is very effective environmental activism. It makes renewables more profitable because it offers a base price for excess energy. Any place, 24/7.

https://www.coindesk.com/business/2020/05/19/the-last-word-o...

Furthermore, it can reduce the hidden costs of the petrodollar. https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/the-hidden-costs-of-the-...

Re: On anti-crypto toxicity

#152

Post by Capira »

kuschku wrote: post #115
Capira wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Buy Bitcoin. Everything else is a scam. And if you want to launder money use Dollars just like everyone else.

That’s the issue, even Bitcoin can’t really be used as currency anymore. I used bitcoin when it was still new. In our friend circle, we paid each other with thousands of bitcoins for a single pizza back then. And yet it was still more usable as currency back then than it is nowadays.

You can use the Lightning Network to send Bitcoins instantly.

Re: On anti-crypto toxicity

#153

Post by sharperguy »

DebtDeflation wrote: post #61
Traster wrote: post #46

I think toxicity from the anti-crypto crowd is basically inevitable at this point. It has been a decade of dumb claims and ridiculous assertions from the pro-crypto crowd. None of their claims have materially panned out. There's some promise in some places - mainly in the most nerdy corners of ETH, but it's still only promises. Meanwhile, this long protracted failure has been accompanied by a massive increase in stup…

>It has been a decade of dumb claims and ridiculous assertions from the pro-crypto crowd. Agreed. For me it was the NFT'ing of a fart that was the jumping the shark moment that drove me from being merely a crypto skeptic to being vociferously anti-crypto and advocating against it at every turn.

Funny because the bitcoin community hates NFTs just as much as the anti-crypto community.

Re: On anti-crypto toxicity

#154

Post by Capira »

1ris wrote: post #128
Capira wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...which is good because it helps us move away from the throw-away society mentality. Bitcoin is very effective environmental activism.

>Bitcoin is very effective environmental activism. While using the per-design resource destroying, planet burning Proof-Of-Waste? Are you Kidding? And no, deflation does not encourage more long term investments, it does simply encourage hoarding, not exactly a desirable thing, form any perspective. And of course it is the fatal (and likely never fixed) flaw in bitcoin-as-a-currency.

Bitcoin being deflationary helps us move away from the mentality of a throw-away society.

You can use the Lightning Network to use Bitcoin as a currency. It's almost instant and free.

Re: On anti-crypto toxicity

#155

Post by notahacker »

ekianjo wrote: post #96
rzwitserloot wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The amount of time the internet took to show it is a solution to real problems, as well as the time it took for the internet to 'grow up' beyond the grifter stage (which was about the same time, and probably that is not a coincidence) is far shorter. Already - and bitcoin/crypto shows no sign of growing beyond the grifter phase. What, something like 1/3 of everybody who bought Bieber's NFT thing got it grifted? That'…

Internet was around for a very long time before we got the www... And even when the www came around it could not do much. people have short memories.

No, people distinctly remember that when the first wave of hype about the web came along, the public was being encouraged to buy books on Amazon.com, other stuff on eBay.com browse masses of content on Yahoo and AOL and of course post lots of messages on the social media of the day. Most of this interaction was free to the user not an "investment", and it was recognisable as a slower and lower resolution version of most of what we had today by the middle of the first decade of the Web.

The Internet existed before then in various forms, but never as an industry of rich people trying to convince poorer people to invest all their savings in email.

Re: On anti-crypto toxicity

#156

Post by Capira »

guywhocodes wrote: post #27
bedobi wrote: post #2

Waaay back, I thought Bitcoin was a cool technology, and convinced some friends of mine with businesses to accept it. We had a lot of fun with it - it was really cool to pay for your beer by scanning a QR code and seeing the transaction come through this public, distributed, tamper proof ledger, like magic, with no need for money, banks or any of the other financial infrastructure we're used to. Sadly, the "crypto sp…

Largely crypto seems to fail at being distributed internet money. If a project is fast and cheap enough for it that correlates with being too niche to be viable. We have seen BTC and ETH lose their function as internet money as transactions and prices have gone up.

You can use the Lightning Network to send Bitcoins instantly and almost for free.

Re: On anti-crypto toxicity

#157

Post by jack_pp »

bertil wrote: post #69
jack_pp wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that easy. Renewable power plants could be setup in areas where it makes no sense due to the logistics of transporting that energy to normal society and that plant could be 100% used to mine crypto which in a way makes crypto a "wireless energy transport technology". Complaining that crypto uses a lot of power is like complaining India is trying to burn fossil fuels which will harm the planet. India wants to…

I strongly disagree with the points that you make. There are many ways to implement fair financial systems. Crypto activists chose to ignore them, refused to understand the sources of failures and just attact principles. Instead, crypto advocates brandish an apparent technological solution that is at amost a very leaky abstraction. I can’t even stop screaming at how offensive is “wireless energy transport technology”…

What's offensive about it? Today energy generation of any kind has to have a way to transport that energy to a consumer. Bitcoin is in a privileged position of being able to use energy to create value locally to the energy producer. You might argue a datacenter could do the same thing but a datacenter requires a lot of staff and infrastructure while a mining operation doesn't. There's also the problem of a high speed high bandwidth internet connection.

So what is your solution to this? There are ways to generate energy purely from ocean waves, this is being used near shore for the reasons stated above (you must transport the produced energy to shore) but we could install these way further and just rely on a sattelite connection for internet.

How else would you utilize these yet untapped potential energy producing areas? Handwaving and using strong negative words aren't an argument.

----------

> There are many ways to implement fair financial systems

Depends on what you mean by fair but please do list those other more efficient ways

Re: On anti-crypto toxicity

#158

Post by Capira »

rvz wrote: post #150
janandonly wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then you did not look (closely) enough at BTC. When transaction prices went up in 2017 [1] the second layer technology "Lightning" was invented and build-out. Right now, Joe Average, can transact for fractions of pennies. [2] [1] http://melaurent.github.io/spamattack/ [2] https://bitcoinist.com/lightning-cnbc-sent-btc-to-a-ukranian...

Haven't you realised that 'the second layer technology "Lightning"' aka Lightning Network is not Bitcoin and is an off-chain system and is centralised by design which contradicts and defeats the whole purpose of what Bitcoin was built for? [0] [0] https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1367-2630/aba062

The Lightning Network is decentralised because it is trustless and permissionless. Anyone can send Bitcoins instantly and almost for free. Check out the code to convince yourself.

https://github.com/ElementsProject/lightning

Re: On anti-crypto toxicity

#159

Post by trompetenaccoun »

Steko wrote: post #49
bedobi wrote: post #2

Waaay back, I thought Bitcoin was a cool technology, and convinced some friends of mine with businesses to accept it. We had a lot of fun with it - it was really cool to pay for your beer by scanning a QR code and seeing the transaction come through this public, distributed, tamper proof ledger, like magic, with no need for money, banks or any of the other financial infrastructure we're used to. Sadly, the "crypto sp…

> mostly just been abused as a vehicle for crazy, baseless manias The whole movement came out of monetary crank-ism, those people were always there. Let me know when there’s a mainstream non-scam MiltonCoin or KeynesCoin that isn’t deflationary and automatically models semi-optimal central bank policy.

The origin is the cypherpunk movement and coders looking into ways to exchange money peer-to-peer. If you think that's "crank-ism" I'm not sure I want to know what social and monetary policies you support. Certainly Bitcoin gained initial popularity fast because it enabled the people to take back some control.

Re: On anti-crypto toxicity

#160

Post by jiscariot »

rvz wrote: post #120
kuschku wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is that with so many more scams than real projects, and so much focus on buzzwords, it’s more likely to fall for a scam than to actually find a real useful project. And even the not-entirely-a-scam projects, be it NFTs, the entire ETH or BTC sphere, are so full of money laundering, trade front running, people using it as investment vehicle, etc. that you can’t trust these projects either.

Exactly. Hence my questions about regulations that haven't been answered since you seem to answer for that other person: > Is it going away 100% guaranteed due to the rampant scams everywhere? > So since 2017, there has been no regulations, crackdowns and legislation that has been proposed to regulate anything related to crypto and nothing has changed? From the other reply: > Buy Bitcoin. Everything else is a scam. B…

HN is heavily affluent and westerner-skewed, but how about when you have a corrupt government and highly inflationary currency?

We often praise projects that morph from their intended purpose in to something else (e.g. a good % of tech out there).

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