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On anti-crypto toxicity

blog.mollywhite.net

171–180 of 734 posts

Re: On anti-crypto toxicity

#171
post #154
post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

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

No, it does not. How could it? It does nothing but encourage hoarding. Not only that, but also a economy where everything is more scare tomorrow than today, is a economy in perpetual decline.

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

That does not side step the proof-of-waste on the main chain. This is a completely unrelated debate.

Re: On anti-crypto toxicity

#172
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on the people you hang with. I'm currently at devconnect in Amsterdam and it's full of people who care about tech. Really nice a crowd and even a bit more diverse than the rest of IT.

Unfortunately at the the surface, it’s all cranks. The people you see trending on Twitter and such almost seem like an alien species. And then there’s all the advertising for exchanges and such being blatant “get in at the bottom of the pyramid scheme” nonsense. I was also “into” crypto roughly early, never found a community (nor should I have to), that’s all I see, and that’s all I therefore assume exists.

Yes, totally get it.

I found my crowd, but many people don't.

Re: On anti-crypto toxicity

#173
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Then monero is what you’ll want to use. Not ETH, BTC, or NFTs.

Re: On anti-crypto toxicity

#175
"How can we create a more equitable financial system, where everyone has access to banking services?"

The same as national health insurance. You make a law that everyone must be served by the banks. Easy.

Re: On anti-crypto toxicity

#176

You cannot solve contract/legal problems and wrong transactions through decentralization. You can't also make a democratic system act on every conflict. You assign a central authority to act on them and you select that authority through a democratic process, which is what we already have. - I want to have a beer! - ok, scan this QR, and accept the transaction - there you go! - thank you, here are your 5 beers - oh, d…

Updated that script for you:

- I want to have a beer!

- ok, scan this QR, and accept the transaction

- there you go!

- thank you, here are your 5 beers

- oh, did I just pay for 5? I wanted 1! can you refund me and take these back?

- sure! can I see your QR code?

- there you go!

- thank you, here is your 1 beer and refund

Note that I'm totally burnt on bitcoin for practical reasons, but your example is just silly.

Re: On anti-crypto toxicity

#177

"How can we create a more equitable financial system, where everyone has access to banking services?" The same as national health insurance. You make a law that everyone must be served by the banks. Easy.

Use the state to fix failures of the state? There's a weird cyclic optimism here that I don't think can really be supported by the facts. After all, those who write a law can just as easily add addendum to that law, or remove it all together. Even with equal banking laws, there's always going to be an individual who the state deems as less equal than others. That's just how it's always been.

Its bizarre that this is such an unpopular idea, when if posted in a thread about anything other than crypto, it'd likely not be scoffed at this hard.

Re: On anti-crypto toxicity

#178
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…

> The potential for cool applications of blockchains is still there It is important to note that crypto currencies are distributed blockchains, a subset of blockchain methods. Blockchains for tamper detection purposes have been around for longer than bitcoin and its ilk, IIRC they date back to the mid 80s or before.

I love Git. It is a distributed cryptographic chain technology. Git is open source and free and used by many millions of people every day. You would think that proponents of decentralized cryptographic chain technology would talk about Git a lot.

But the crypto people don't talk about Git. They are focused on being early adopters and investors in something that will generate 1000x returns, even if those returns come from a pyramid scheme mechanism.

Re: On anti-crypto toxicity

#179

I'm grumpy about Visa/MC taking 3% of every transaction. I want a technofix for that. There are new blockchains that cost less than a penny per transaction use about a millionth of the wattage of bitcoin and I hope they turn out to be non-BS. I just want an efficient low-cost barrierless payment network.

> I'm grumpy about Visa/MC taking 3% of every transaction They don't. Scheme fees in a 4-party payment network are the smallest part of the net fee, around 0.1-0.2%. > I want a technofix for that. And you'll never get one. Moving money between bank accounts in an immutable way is extremely cheap already. But that isn't what people want. If you want to lower card payment fees you need to introduce regulations that cap…

> Moving money between bank accounts in an immutable way is extremely cheap already.

Only true in certain countries, between certain banks/processors, and within certain thresholds.

My last last transaction fee on Tezos was a fixed cost of 0.000544 xtz ($0.00177 USD), had no threshold limitations, required zero privacy invasion, settled in ~30 seconds, and was not limited to a particular bank or regional currency. This is essentially the 'technofix' that crypto users want to see adopted by the rest of the financial sector.

Re: On anti-crypto toxicity

#180
post #74
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your whole four paragraphs can be simplified to: 90% of projects out there are scams and have a crypto-token attached to it with a pyramid scheme on it and there also exists a 10% of projects somewhere that it is not purely a 'get-rich-quick-scheme', or a 'web3' crypto project that doesn't require a crypto-token attached to the product that has utility? Thus, it also must mean that it is not going away 100% guarantee…

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.

> and so much focus on buzzwords

The “blockchain” thing killed it for me personally. Only so long I could just sit and see people naively wave around blockchain as a solution to every goddamn technical and social problem they can think of.

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