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On anti-crypto toxicity

blog.mollywhite.net

421–430 of 734 posts

Re: On anti-crypto toxicity

#421

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> None of their claims have materially panned out. * Starknet is running a Turing complete VM using nothing but zero knowledge proofs. It's now possible and practical to trustlessly prove general purpose computation with O(logN) proof sizes. * Uniswap processes nearly $2 billion of trading volume a day. For reference that's about as much as the Australian stock exchange. In an entirely decentralized, non-custodial, t…

> * Uniswap processes nearly $2 billion of trading volume a day. For reference that's about as much as the Australian stock exchange. In an entirely decentralized, non-custodial, trustless manner. An overwhelming majority of these are bot trades. > * The Solana network processes 65,000 transaction, about equivalent to the entire Visa network. Visa does 597 million consumer transactions per day. Not only is that magni…

They meant 65,000 transactions per second (they left that crucial word out). And that's the max that the Solana network can handle, not what it's currently doing all the time. So at it's maximum, the Solana network could handle 5.6 billion transactions per day. Visa only claims to handle 24,000 transactions per second, btw. [1]

Actual approximate volume of transactions per month was around 500 million as of Nov 2021[2], so around 16.5 million transactions per day, or only about 5,800 transactions per second on average, so it can handle a lot more.

It's handled just under 70 billion transactions to date[3] since it debuted in early 2020, so roughly 35 billion transactions each year for the two years it's been out.

[1]: https://usa.visa.com/run-your-business/small-business-tools/...

[2]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1280088/average-number-o...

[3]: https://explorer.solana.com/

EDIT: had to recheck and revise my math a bit, when working with that many zeros it gets easy to mistype something.

Re: On anti-crypto toxicity

#422

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Crypto has addressed real problems for Ukraine's military. > “In a situation like this, where the national bank is not fully operating, crypto is helping to perform fast transfers, to make it very quick and get results almost immediately,” https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/11/technology/bitcoin-ukrain... Is this BS and marketing?

I would characterize this situation (of crypto helping perform fast transfers) as a very temporary "advantage" that would almost certainly disappear over time. For one thing, this advantage over the national bank, is during a WAR. Assuming the war disrupts the national bank, yet over the long term will not also disrupt all the infrastructure that bitcoin needs (cheap high speed computing, available networking, reliab…

In the case of Ukraine, yes, this is probably a temporary state of emergency. But on a global scale, there is always a disruption somewhere. Or as one google SRE put it (I couldn't find the exact quote) "on our scale, once-in-a-million events happen every day". And, for many people out there, crypto is still the fastest way to transfer money, and the situation is very much not temporary. It's just that they are not the people that typically feature in the NYT.

Re: On anti-crypto toxicity

#423

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On the topic of the parent commenter's valiant content marketing effort: https://www.classaction.org/news/scam-tokens-class-action-al...

Thank you for heads up. I hope I was transparent enough with my content marketing efforts not to be rude and spammy. Maybe you can clarify if it is against HackerNews rules to link my own posts? I agree, Uniswap has its issues with scams. Even with added compliance and listing policy, it is highly likely to be most cost efficient. For example what we can do is that we focus only known good trading pairs like Bitcoin…

> I hope I was transparent enough with my content marketing efforts not to be rude and spammy.

In my humble opinion you were not, so I hope you don't mind me sharing some background context.

Re: On anti-crypto toxicity

#424

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> you haven't seen it, you were not interested in looking and I doubt that any "evangelist" is going to change your mind This is disingenuous. (Also, ENS appears to be functionally similar to App.net [1]. I'm open to being challenged on this.) One thing pervasively lacking from Web3 is compelling fiction. Not "this and that trustlessly," but a functional narrative of someone doing something useful or compelling they…

[flagged]

Re: On anti-crypto toxicity

#425

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FWIW, I haven’t seen one “Web3” application. All I ever see is folks singing its potential from the rafters. Loudly. Perhaps the “web 3” evangelists can switch to show more of these apps, and the real world value they provide.

Quoted post unavailable.

ENS:

> ENS’s job is to map human-readable names like ‘alice.eth’ to machine-readable identifiers such as Ethereum addresses, other cryptocurrency addresses, content hashes, and metadata.

So, for $5 (as of right now) a year, I can create a DNS-ish entry that points at a static piece of data (though not an IP?)? There are plenty of companies who sell DNS addresses (which can do the same things, plus IP), and while they do report to a single authority, that's to keep them in line, not to keep me in line.

Unlock Protocol:

> Create memberships and sell access NFTs in minutes

How is this not possible without a "central authority"? Exclusive community membership and cryptographically signed tokens have been around longer than you or I, likely even on the internet.

Being honest, neither of these are compelling technologies. At best, they're re-implementations of existing distributed technologies, just with a new backend. This isn't a bad thing, but neither is it very exciting.

Re: On anti-crypto toxicity

#426

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Is buying solar panels and using them creating energy? If so you could do the same thing with your mining proceeds.

But that's not what anyone's doing, or what anyone's going to do, with cryptocurrency. Even if we assume (which is definitely not a safe assumption) that burning all that oil in the first place to mine the coins produces less carbon than the overall reduction caused by the increase in demand for solar panels and subsequent increase in their production and deployment (because just buying solar panels that were already…

I never stated that miners are doing this, only that crypto mining could enable this new opportunity that never existed before it.

I did not check this but Michael Saylor claims that over 40% of mining is done using renewable energy. Considering solar power by itself is a good investment last time I checked ( around 13% ROI depending on your local energy price) then that number will probably increase as it just makes business sense to do it.

Re: On anti-crypto toxicity

#427

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> But it's clear that cryptocurrencies try to live outside of governmental control, which is of course where most of the benefit comes from. I believe it’s naïve to expect that it will remain outside of government control. That it won’t get slammed with the same laws and regulations applied to fiat currencies. Governments live on money. As alternatives gain traction, the governments take notice and start regulating.…

> it’s naïve to expect that it will remain outside of government control Not sure what about crypto is outside government influence. Crypto is regularly taxed, seized and landing people in jail. Countries that can't manage that wouldn't find an offshore bank account, as evidenced by their entire population of elites having one. "Government can't touch my crypto" is a founding myth.

I'm thinking more of the cross-border uses which are more "in the news" recently.

But fundamentally, I believe we agree.

Re: On anti-crypto toxicity

#428
post #230

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It turns out there are actually things that lawmakers don't really have the power to effectively ban, drugs and prostitution and gambling and cash transactions principally among them. A lot of people don't seem to integrate this fact. The practical power of a lawmaking body is not unlimited. There are certain things they simply cannot stop, no matter how many laws are passed. It won't "end" for either group, really.…

Theres one big weakness in the use of cryptocurrencies: swapping back and forth with the local fiat currency at scale. All a government has to do is shut those commercial ventures down, and the value of the $coin will disappear for those residents. Plus, unlike drugs and prostitution, the ledger is public and permanent… simplifying enforcement against the remaining fringes dramatically.

> All a government has to do is shut those commercial ventures down, and the value of the $coin will disappear for those residents.

So long as any of those residents can travel to another place where they can exchange it for hard money, that's not true. Countries do not exist in isolation.

Re: On anti-crypto toxicity

#429

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Politically working in sound money (no printer go brrrr) is governmentally forbidden. Bitcoin subverted the corrupt political process and has brought that choice back.

Bitcoin will only be "sound money" when I can pay my taxes in it. Or at least pay for my oil change. Sure it's artificially limited in quantity. Great! Doesn't make it money. It's a commodity like any other.

If the government told you you're not a person, would that hold?

To me you're saying nothing's money unless the government says it is.

In my community there's a whole ecosystem of people trading goods and services in Bitcoin, silver, and Monero.

Re: On anti-crypto toxicity

#430

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> they've gotten rich from selling their early-adopter cryptos to the next fool. And that's where it all falls apart. Crypto-fanatics assume that "good for me" translates to "good for us." As we know, the crypto-rich only exist because others (usually many others) became crypto-broke and/or fiat-broke. At least, in general, people have no realistic expectation of winning the lottery. You also don't usually have peopl…

Bitcoin fanatic here. No, it's literally about taking money printing away from corrupt governments worldwide.

It ^^ me tho.

Separate Money from the State

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