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On anti-crypto toxicity

blog.mollywhite.net

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Re: On anti-crypto toxicity

#711

Post by bertil »

arriu wrote: post #246
bertil wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a million times more efficient than Bitcoin That is still a million times less efficient than existing solution and still horrifyingly wasteful. Blockchain principle is that if you have as many people as possible waste an astounding amount of computation and energy, you make over-ruling most of them too wasteful to be possible. You are not solving anything that way, just showing off that you have never heard of Kwa…

You’re comparing database to a trust-less distributed fault tolerant system. Of course the db has a smaller energy footprint but it doesn’t provide the same features. It’s like saying a bicycle rolls down the road just as well as a car so we should not use the car. There are blockchains now that are designed to be optimal for what they provide. The bigger issue is that there are applications running on chains that cl…

I’m saying that for 95% of journeys currently done with cars, bicycles would be perfectly fine. I mean that both litterally and figuratively. More importantly, both for transport and for digital services, if we don’t switch to bicyles, there won’t be a planet to run those services for.

You are advocating for the end of the world as we know it within ten years.

Re: On anti-crypto toxicity

#712

Post by throwaway4aday »

hypertele-Xii wrote: post #690
throwaway4aday wrote: post #483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can have democracy with less corruption. There is no reason why politicians should be in politics for the money.

So... how? You speak as if you have solved corruption. Let's hear it.

You could start with a lot more transparency. Everything that isn't critical to the defense of the nation should be public and auditable. Hot button issues like stock trading while in office, term limits and corporate lobbying could be fixed with simple laws if you ignore the whining of current office-holders. If you want to be more drastic, then start shifting power away from the federal government and towards local governments. Politicians who are close to their constituents are the only ones that can be sufficiently supervised. Reduce the role of the faraway central government to that of referee and coordinator and make sure that 99% of representatives time is spent in their own districts where the people can get a hold of them. Finally, if you want to flip the table completely then institute some form of sortition where another branch of government with equal power is formed from randomly selected citizens who are given the opportunity to represent their communities at the levers of power.

Re: On anti-crypto toxicity

#713

Post by trutannus »

giaour wrote: post #705
trutannus wrote: post #702

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You make a law that everyone must be served by the banks. Easy. This is the one I'm specifically discussing, its from a different user. This is the line that started the thread. Plenty of users are discussing this specific line I believe.

FWIW, I thought the "Easy." you cite was meant sarcastically. The full context is: > The same as national health insurance. You make a law that everyone must be served by the banks. Easy. and national health insurance is famously a fiendishly hard public policy issue (albeit one for which several competing models exist and have been put into practice). Working from an existing public policy model (like using France's…

> seems way easier than just deciding to solve it with crypto

Yeah, I don't disagree that crypto won't fix this. I just disagreed that it was "easy". I took them as being literal.

Re: On anti-crypto toxicity

#714

Post by loup-vaillant »

nec4b wrote: post #696
loup-vaillant wrote: post #641

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, so redistributive pension systems are pyramid schemes… I’ll just note that this is a highly debatable interpretation of such systems. Now if we think about it for a moment: social security need money for 3 major things: unemployment, retirement, and health care. At any given point in time, you can divide the population in 2 categories: those who are currently working, and those who are not. And those who are curr…

Inverted pyramid means that each succeeding generation is smaller than the next. There will be no relief when boomers are gone, because generation Y is even smaller than generation X and there is even less millennials than there is of generation Y. When you go from 10 active people to 1 retiree to 2 active people to 1 retiree, you can't solve a problem by increasing contributions by a little. And no, investing money…

> And no, investing money for retirement is absolutely different from spending it on the retirement.

I've addressed this remark here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31107334

Re: On anti-crypto toxicity

#715

Post by cinntaile »

trutannus wrote: post #703
cinntaile wrote: post #666

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose you could call everything produced by man weapons of environmental destruction, but that doesn't make it very useful.

You dilute the meaning of the word at that point. Weapons are specific tools that are used with intent to cause harm. If something happens to cause harm without intent, and you define it as a weapon, the word becomes useless.

You formulated it clearer and better than I did.

Re: On anti-crypto toxicity

#716

Post by dang »

rglullis wrote: post #697
dmitriid wrote: post #694

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"You expect Visicalc, not Unix compilers" "Visicalc isn't free, also Linux" "Killer app is sending money" "You're an idiot" See these and other useful quotes in our New York Times bestseller, "A Crypto Shill's Guide to a Productive Conversation".

So not only you are misinterpreting every thing I said, you also are resorting to call me a shill? My work is on making it easier to have crypto for e-commerce, focused on stable currencies. If you go look at all my writings and discussions, you will find me telling people to avoid speculation on token price and to not look at crypto for a quick buck. You are completely lost in your hate, dude. Quite fitting for a "a…

You broke the site guidelines repeatedly and egregiously in this thread. That's seriously not cool, and we ban accounts that do it. I don't want to ban you, so please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the intended use of HN from now on.

Re: On anti-crypto toxicity

#717

Post by dang »

dmitriid wrote: post #699
rglullis wrote: post #697

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So not only you are misinterpreting every thing I said, you also are resorting to call me a shill? My work is on making it easier to have crypto for e-commerce, focused on stable currencies. If you go look at all my writings and discussions, you will find me telling people to avoid speculation on token price and to not look at crypto for a quick buck. You are completely lost in your hate, dude. Quite fitting for a "a…

Quoted post unavailable.

Perpetuating flamewars on HN and breaking the site guidelines yourself is not cool, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are, and regardless of how badly they've been behaving.

Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the intended use of the site from now on. This doesn't depend on what other people do.

Re: On anti-crypto toxicity

#718

Post by rvz »

oliwarner wrote: post #572
rvz wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I'll tell you that both extremes are incorrect. Okay, I'll bite. What's incorrect at the anti extreme? In other words, what crypto-currency isn't a) burning down our planet and b) disproportionately rewarding early adopters?

> What's incorrect at the anti extreme? In other words, what crypto-currency isn't a) burning down our planet and b) disproportionately rewarding early adopters?

It can just take a single example to invalidate that question and Nano [0] perfectly does so. Unlike the others, it is not 'burning down our planet', was not 'pre-mined' / 'pre-allocated' or ever did an ICO back when it was launched. sorry.

Now here's my question to you since I answered yours: Hence your support for the anti crypto-extreme: Are they all going to go away 100% guaranteed despite all the other scam projects existing and with looming regulations on the horizon?

[0] https://nano.org/

Re: On anti-crypto toxicity

#719

Post by saltcured »

przeor wrote: post #671
saltcured wrote: post #656

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. In essence, I think these details of the redistributive function are what make it Ponzi-like or sound. On one end of the spectrum, you have personal and "defined contribution" saving and investment schemes: the individual carries a personal pool into their later years where they draw it down. How are differences between the contribution+performance and lifetime needs reconciled? Estates pass inheritances or in…

Every aspect of life is related to population distribution graph which is doomed in Europe. Even if you save your retirement in a real estate, it's value is tightly correlated to amount of people in productive age when you try to sell it. The only thing that can save one, is to start saving money early and give it to componding effect. Albert Einstein once said “Compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world. He…

Under these population curve assumptions, doesn't crypto have the same inflationary risk, as a share of future economic value? It's not a technical characteristic of the financial instrument, but instead a basic imbalance between a net supplier and net consumer generation. A bunch of retirees holding crypto tokens is only rational if there is a reason to believe that a bunch of future kids would see value in those tokens. Just like dollars or euros or yuan.

If the future population does not drive a large enough economy, there are dwindling products and resources available to swap for all existing financial instruments. These real resources are things like clean water, food, medicine, shelter, energy, technology, and services which cannot be stored over a person's lifetime and then consumed decades later.

It seems to me that the instruments with meaningful value in this picture are those rooted in a right to capture future production. That is things like ownership shares in continuing business enterprises, industrial infrastructure, natural resources, buildings, and developed land for housing and commerce. Of course, infrastructure and buildings decay over time, but they do represent a kind of real stored value for a planned service lifetime.

An actual plan to take care of a shrinking population would need to think about how automation can increase the efficiency of production such that a smaller future generation can generate sufficient output to satisfy the needs of the whole population including the elder non-workers. To avoid the Ponzi threat or more generally the "musical chairs" game mode, this plan needs to accomodate continous, incremental decline. The important technological and cultural skills to operate this system need to be passed down to ensure continued production for all who remain alive.

Re: On anti-crypto toxicity

#720

Post by version_five »

idiotsecant wrote: post #605
throwaway82652 wrote: post #570

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

>they're all built on the idea of creating a fake, unregulated private money out of nothing and then getting people to pay increasing prices for it. As opposed to our current financial system which is built on the idea of creating real (except when we reeeeally want some extra money, in which case we just make some more), regulated (unless your regulated activity is conducted by an entity that is sufficiently rich or…

This is the lazy answer that gets trotted out every time cryptocurrency gets called out as a scam

"But the regular financial system is a scam too!"

It has lots of flaws, but it grew organically over thousands of years, and so did regulation that offers some reasonable protection that lets people use currency without massive risk of getting scammed (I'm sure there is a pedantic counterpoint to this, but overall, people get by on real money, much better than if they "invested" - because that's all you can do, you cant actually transact in any normal way - in the current crypto nonsense.)

Anyway, if your best argument is that real money is also a scam, it's hard to believe anyone would be lining up to switch to your scam

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