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Tech experts urge Washington to resist crypto industry’s influence

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Re: Tech experts urge Washington to resist crypto industry’s influence

#141

Post by jcbrand »

Seriomino wrote: post #139
jcbrand wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And yes sanctions against north Korea or Russia are more important than the inflation of Lebanon, Zimbabwe or Turkey. Impoverishing entire nations by making sure they can't buy necessary goods and thereby putting them at risk of starvation is more important than other nations who are impoverished and at risk of starvation due to their currencies collapsing.

They are not collapsing just for fun without a reason. The normal people of that country are btw not able to just buy crypto. After all someone still needs to take their money to exchange it and they need hardware and knowledge. You sound like crypto would just solve those issues just because it's there.

> need hardware

You mean a cellphone? Which pretty much everyone in the world has?

Re: Tech experts urge Washington to resist crypto industry’s influence

#142

Post by jcbrand »

throwaway290 wrote: post #130
birracerveza wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You bet I think those people act with my interests in mind, since I elected the people who appointed them (unlike random scammers in croin space). I want to live in this wonderland too, where are you?

If you don't think the system works, fix it. It is actually possible in a democracy, thankfully. Techno solutions do not solve the underlying human factor problems.

> If you don't think the system works, fix it

Hence Bitcoin.

Re: Tech experts urge Washington to resist crypto industry’s influence

#143

Post by Seriomino »

jcbrand wrote: post #141
Seriomino wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are not collapsing just for fun without a reason. The normal people of that country are btw not able to just buy crypto. After all someone still needs to take their money to exchange it and they need hardware and knowledge. You sound like crypto would just solve those issues just because it's there.

> need hardware You mean a cellphone? Which pretty much everyone in the world has?

Zimbabwe apparently has 50% smartphones.

Btw. You should read up more on how well Bitcoin works in El Salvador.

And of course all the other points I brought up are still valid as well.

Re: Tech experts urge Washington to resist crypto industry’s influence

#144

Post by jameshart »

jcbrand wrote: post #62
qsort wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's a pernicious myth that there is some meaningful democratic oversight over monetary policy Latinate words are not a useful cover when you're lying. All Western central banks are effectively a branch of government and are directly responsible to Congress/euparl/$local_variant, and are run by a bunch of politicians (the chair of the Fed is Powell and the president of the ECB is Lagarde, ffs). The notion that they…

The second paragraph on Wikipedia: Central banks in most developed nations are institutionally independent from political interference. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_bank

So, generally, are courts, police and civil servants.

That doesn’t mean that those are not government institutions.

Re: Tech experts urge Washington to resist crypto industry’s influence

#145

Post by Layke1123 »

No amount of currency is going to work unless we acknowledge that every human life deserves certain basic rights, like a house, food, health, education, etc. If a job cannot provide these, then they are being exploited and we should stop the exploitation. No one is worth more than any other, and modern society letting this notion not be held first and foremost is a detriment and directly responsible for measuring people in terms of dollars and not inalienable rights.

Re: Tech experts urge Washington to resist crypto industry’s influence

#146

Post by dqpb »

jameshart wrote: post #113
dqpb wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could replace “crypto” with “web” and it would make these statements equally broad and absurd.

This is the very definition of a shallow dismissal. You are trying to insinuate that people who believe crypto is bad technology and bad for society, are doing the equivalent of arguing that the web is bad technology and bad for society. But 1) the arguments against crypto are specific to crypto; 2) the very people who are arguing against crypto are the same people who have been the most vocal advocates of an open we…

> This is the very definition of a shallow dismissal

Short and succinct is not the same as shallow.

> You are trying to insinuate that people who believe crypto is bad technology and bad for society, are doing the equivalent of arguing that the web is bad technology and bad for society.

I’m not insinuating anything, I’m explicitly saying that is the case.

> 1) the arguments against crypto are specific to crypto

“Crypto” is so broad, there’s no such thing as an argument specific to crypto. Are you saying all crypto-related data structures, protocols, and algorithms are de-facto bad for society (and thereby anything that stems from them)?

If so, that argument sounds blatantly absurd to me. And if not, then your argument is so non-specific it’s meaningless.

Re: Tech experts urge Washington to resist crypto industry’s influence

#147

Post by mjburgess »

jcbrand wrote: post #100
mjburgess wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, but you realise that a system in which the handful of early-stakers have all of the power; and in which no change or revision is possible; and in which blackmail & abuse of key-holders is necessitated to obtain their funds; and in which there is no economy of the currency to provide a grounding in value; and in which therefore it is the late-stakers who provide liquidiy to the early feudal lords... and in whic…

The issuance of Bitcoin is about as fair as one could hope for, for a non-state currency. Satoshi advertised the currency and the start of mining beforehand, to give other people a chance to participate. There was no pre-mine. In the early days there were faucets that handed out bitcoins for free. Due to the boom and bust cycle of Bitcoin, many of the early holders cashed out instead of holding all the way to untold…

I believe it's estimated c. 10 individuals own c. 50% of Ethereum.

A deflationary asset, like land for example, is not a good currency. As a powerbase, it's called feudalism. And that's not a good politics.

Power in crypto is radically centralised to the owners, not the users (unlike democracies).

One has to imagine people like you know this, or feel it, in the lust for the value increases to your own stake: that is, a lust that you are the one in control. Either way, you're playing the role of a daemon here, whether you realise it or not.

And the devil you are putting on the thrown are a handful of billionaires with power and control executed by a machine.

Thankfully bitcoin has no army, and all of this will fade into the obvious malicious stupidity it already is.

Re: Tech experts urge Washington to resist crypto industry’s influence

#148

Post by gfodor »

This is fundamentally embarrassing to all involved, and will one day feel similar to if a professional software engineer signing a letter condemning Linux as "communist" and demanding the government stop it during the Microsoft heyday. If I had my name on such a letter today it would be something I'd cringe anytime I thought about it.

Re: Tech experts urge Washington to resist crypto industry’s influence

#149

Post by gfodor »

ghuntley wrote: post #4

From: https://twitter.com/smdiehl/status/1531920908696358912 Today the global community of technologists sent a letter to Congress urging them to resist the crypto industry’s lobbying influence. The letter was signed by some of the most respected scholars and technologists in our field. And now we need your help. Crypto fraud is spiraling out of control. So-called "web3" is not going great. Regulators are paralyzed a…

> It's on us as citizens and responsible engineers to help fix the problem we created by our inaction.

Engineers don't fix problems by begging the government to create laws that will throw people in jail for using a given technology in a way they don't like.

Re: Tech experts urge Washington to resist crypto industry’s influence

#150

Post by bko »

AlexandrB wrote: post #132
bko wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The only limits on the gold supply are technological ones Right, there's nothing special about it besides the technical limitations. But what's the alternative? With fiat you still have those technical limitations (someone could create indistinguishable counterfeit money and dump it on the market). But there's also the political risk. Someone can get power at the Fed and decide to double the money supply over night…

> With fiat you still have those technical limitations (someone could create indistinguishable counterfeit money and dump it on the market). I think there is more than technological limitations to making this happen. Not only is counterfeiting considered a major crime by the state (who has a monopoly on violence), but the amount of "money" in circulation that has a physical representation is dwarfed by "money" that d…

> I think that if the function of government breaks down to this extent, I will have bigger problems than currency devaluation.

I don't know how to tell you this but...

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M1SL

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