201–210 of 734 posts
I've been a victim of this. People in crypto hate you for trying to do things the right way (connecting crypto to real economic value instead of engaging in tribal maximalism and hypemongering popular projects) and people outside of crypto hate you for being involved in crypto which they think is all scams.
The irony is that only the scammers on both sides win.
I don't think I am ever going to get used to "crypto" meaning "cryptocurrency" and not "cryptography". Can't we just keep calling it "cryptocurrency"? I thought this article would be about the various misguided governments' attempts to outlaw cryptography.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Any fix for a failure in human organization(s) is going to come from ... humans. There are no hall monitors here, and there's also no magic wand. When things are of a large enough scope, the way that humans tend to organize to get things done, or get things fixed, is called "a state". Just like all human efforts, the outcome will likely not be perfect. But there actually isn't another way. Sure, you can suggest the i…
Right, and saying "just pass a law" is asking the hall monitors to wave a wand.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But that’s just an argument against any technology that will increase electricity demand, such as EVs. When the web was growing the electrical demands were similarly criticised: “The current fuel-economy rating: about 1 pound of coal to create, package, store and move 2 megabytes of data. The digital age, it turns out, is very energy-intensive. The Internet may someday save us bricks, mortar and catalog paper, but it…
No: EVs has less carbon footprint than ICE, usually several times less. Digital economy has a carbon footprint, but orders of magnitude less than the alternatives: paper for administration, casettes for music or plastic film for movies. You need to compare solutions at scale, not just say that a process that serves billions of people is wasteful because it uses as much energy that a process that is serving dozens of…
This is exactly the same case as with bitcoin miners.
Estimates I’ve seen put renewables as 40-66% of bitcoins energy mix, with this figure rising over time.
The incentive is towards cheaper renewable sources that would otherwise not be viable.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Use the state to fix failures of the state? Yup, that's how it works in democracies...
You have to accept though that just saying "ah, the government will fix it" when historically governments have been a major contributor to wealth inequality, is somewhat glib. There's a reason NGOs and private charity exist. I think this approach is just as wrong as saying "crypto is the answer".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You have to accept though that just saying "ah, the government will fix it" when historically governments have been a major contributor to wealth inequality, is somewhat glib. There's a reason NGOs and private charity exist. I think this approach is just as wrong as saying "crypto is the answer".
And that is another instance where many people part ways, because another big aspect of crypto is that it is partially motivated by a political ideology that most people politely reject and many people think is full of crackpots and scam artists (because it is).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right, anyone can generate NFTs though. How does this differ from saying something like "the artist who called an empty room art is the jumping the shark moment, now I'm advocating against art at every turn"?
Because artists haven't generally backed themselves by weaponized ASICs and a very unhealthy social scene of greed and deception (not to mention pollution)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Use the state to fix failures of the state? Yup, that's how it works in democracies...
More like that's how democracies fail. Our current method of "fixing" failures of the state involves layering more and more legislation and regulation on top of the broken legislation and regulation. We do nothing to address the root causes of those failures because that would mean closing a lot of the loop holes that allow politicians to get rich by leveraging their positions aka corruption. Why else would we need b…
The UK is the perfect example. Hundreds of years of out-dated laws layered on top of each other to the point where nobody can tell what is law and what is a joke.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The old use case of “keep money in your BTC wallet on your own PC, send it as needed” doesn’t really work anymore (not even counting the issue of being unable to run a full node anymore)
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.
Freicoin is the closest I can think of