Earlier quoted context omitted.
are you asking for examples of things that were outlawed?
no, i'm asking for an example of "society [correcting] itself via legislation"
On anti-crypto toxicity
551–560 of 734 posts
Re: On anti-crypto toxicity
#552Earlier quoted context omitted.
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Not sure why you are downvoted since here on HN, a bad egg soils the bunch. The logic with them is as follows with an example of a fallacy with cars and the environment: 'The majority of cars worldwide are not electric. They are all petrol and diesel cars. That means that ALL cars are bad for the environment and that will not change and thus should be all banned.' Not all cryptocurrency projects are scams, just like…
> The absolutism towards […]
> I'll tell you that both extremes are incorrect.
Being extreme or not have little bearing on an opinion being correct. Some opinions, such as "murder is bad", are both extreme (they suffer very few exceptions), and correct.
And it happens quite often that the most informed opinions also happen to be the most extreme. And as far as I can tell, this seems to be the case for crypto currencies: the more I look at them, the more I think they cannot be redeemed: to date, I have seen no problem that is best solved by a blockchain, and I increasingly doubt there ever will be.
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> Not all cryptocurrency projects are scams
I can believe that. However, I do believe that all crypto currencies, without even a single exception, are a net bad for the world. If we restrict that to proof-of-waste crypto currencies, that belief is a near certainty.
Long story short, it seems that in practice, all crypto currencies eventually devolve into a pyramid scheme. They're also used as an actual currency, but their volatility is such that it's not very practical to begin with, and that use is so marginal compared to "investment" that the financial freedom gained by people who actually need it is outweighed by the harmful side effects of the pyramid. (We ruin more people than we save.)
Add proof of work (or space-time, or whatever scarce resource you can think of), and you end up with a massive waste of resources on top of that. A waste so massive in fact that it manages to influence electronics prices around the world, not to mention the energy consumption of the Bitcoin network alone, in a world that really really needs to reduce its CO2 emissions. Like right now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPCC_Sixth_Assessment_Report
They may not be all scams, but as far as I can tell all honest attempts are doomed to fail.
Re: On anti-crypto toxicity
#553Earlier quoted context omitted.
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> It's much easier to "sell" web3 to someone that has lived with dysfunctional institutions and has faced one of its many problems, whether it is hyperinflation that leaves poor people with no perspective to save, or systemic corruption that shuts the citizens of any quality service I have lived in such countries (Moldova, in the 90s; Turkey, early 2000s). I wouldn't touch this web3 shit with a 1000-ft pole. All this…
> usually comes from relatively wealthy people in stable countries whose idea about "poor people" comes from watching a Netflix overproduced dramatic documentary.
Ok, I was born in Brazil and I experienced 40% per month inflation in the 80s and I saw a government confiscating everyone's saving accounts as part of a "economic plan". I also saw another government putting a tax of 0.38% on every financial transfer (does not seem like much until you think of all the cascading effects) and I can tell you how little of all those taxes came back to the people in the form of public services.
Are you satisfied with my credentials or are you going to continue with the gatekeeping?
> web3 is more unstable and volatile
If you are talking about Bitcoin (or crypto currencies in general given how BTC unfortunately still makes its own gravity in the crypto market), I will 100% agree with you. But web3 does not need Bitcoin to exist.
Re: On anti-crypto toxicity
#554Earlier quoted context omitted.
You have many cryptos with completely negligible environmental impact, thanks to smarter consensus mechanisms. It's a really new tech field, and as almost everything in tech, it improves over time.
> as almost everything in tech, it improves over time This doesn't describe crypto over the past decade. It's become more pervasive, more corrupt, more destructive (from environmental impact to its role in facilitating hacking) and, with NFTs, more slot machinesque.
You seem pretty biased. You now have cryptos that allow you to transact with anyone in the world, instantly and without fees, while consuming barely any energy. And all of that, while remaining 100% in control of your money. You have others that let you lend or borrow assets in a permission-less fashion, without many intermediaries. More and more companies are using it as a backbone for their operations, for example in IoT settings or in financial situations. If you look a bit more, you will see many interesting development. But like everything in tech, there are good and bad things.
Re: On anti-crypto toxicity
#555Unfortunately, given: "How can we create a more equitable financial system, where everyone has access to banking services? How can we reduce the power that a small few currently hold over the web? How can we improve data privacy and ensure that people have control over their personal information? How can we create reasonable privacy in the financial system? How can we make information more available to everyone? How…
Underlying all of our financial transactions is debt. Even an ACH transfer is a very temporary debt in a network of trust. That's why people with "bad credit" can't get accounts at traditional banks. This hurdle does not exist in crypto. I'm not suggesting crypto is some panacea, but it does eliminate this very important problem for people on the bottom of the economic ladder.
You can't pay for groceries with crypto. The easiest way to transfer money people can actually use without a bank account is probably texting someone a prepaid card number, though for low amounts the purchase fee is kind of a lot. Crypto is good for circumventing the legal system (ex. getting DIY HRT where it's not legal) but for most basic needs it's not very useful.
Re: On anti-crypto toxicity
#556Nowadays, I don't really discuss Bitcoin anymore with anyone. The people who need it the most will ask questions like: "How can I send money from the EU to the Dominican Republic without paying 25% 'banking commissions'?" or "How can I help my mother in Jakarta to get money quickly?" and totally organically, we come to the conclusion that Bitcoin is the answer... We in the West tend to be blind from the problems and…
Funny, because when I lived in the Dominican Republic, not a single one of the people I knew used Bitcoin to transfer money from the EU to the DR (and that wasn't for lacking of knowing people doing that.) Meanwhile, overall computer literacy and even access to a computer was a massive challenge for many people in that country.
Yeah, because with transfering money via Western Union you have one problem: they take a cut, but the person on the other end gets fiat in their local currency and you pay in your local currency.
With sending bitcoin you have many more problems: converting your local currency to bitcoin, and if you're like 99% of regular people using a hot-wallet like Coinbase and they take a cut to buy bitcoin, waiting for that to clear, sending it to another bitcoin address, waiting for that to clear, then the person on the other end has to cash out. Is there a coinbase-like in DR? If we're talking about underbanked, then how do they get their money? Is there a window for this coinbase-like thing that will pay out in fiat of the local currency? I've seen plenty of bitcoin ATMs around my area, but none are for withdrawal.
Re: On anti-crypto toxicity
#557Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except that's not what I'm saying at all. What I'm saying is: 1. Bad laws got us into this place 2. There's a lot of inertia in government 3. There's a lot of stake holders in government who don't have citizen's interests at heart 4. It's illogical to think you can, in light of this, just pass a law and fix it. Yeah, we designed the law, and we know how it works. Sadly, we know also that the way it works is generally…
I agree with your points 1-3 but I don't think your conclusion in 4 follows logically. It misses important historical context of where passing laws did in fact create more equitable access to important civic resources. Take for instance the Civil Rights Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act. You could have made the same argument you are making now to dissuade people from passing those laws.
I definitely think laws can do what you say. But I think that's not always what happens. What I object to is really more specifically how the gist is "change the laws, its an easy fix". Anyone who spectates government (odd phrase, I know) will understand that this is very much not an easy fix.
Re: On anti-crypto toxicity
#558Earlier quoted context omitted.
> On the other hand, what would the world look like without democratic governments Nobody here is advocating against democracy. People are just pointing out that blind trust in state institutions is equally as illogical as blind trust in the EVM. States have a track record of serving the powerful first, and sometimes exclusively. Trusting apparatus with a track record like this masks a sort of flawed optimism, just l…
Why are you so insistent that the trust necessarily be blind? Having legislation is the first step to getting banks to comply with how we think they should work. What's the alternative method of coercing their behavior?
The initial discussion started with someone saying something to the effect of "just change the law, easy". To me, that reads as "just use the government, it'll be fine". Perhaps it's just me, but that sounds a lot like blind trust in an institute.
Re: On anti-crypto toxicity
#559> But when you come across someone on Twitter with a hexagon-shaped profile picture, your chances are at least as good that you’ve come across someone in the first bucket than in the second Ah so this is about twitter culture. I agree, it is strange that people showing some outward interest in crypto are ignored. These conversations basically go like this : thats not accurate, the flash loan was used to borrow and ac…
I'll have to side with for the same reason I wouldn't give a Scientologist a chance to speak either.
Re: On anti-crypto toxicity
#560Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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. 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.
>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. Literal nonsense.
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