261–270 of 295 posts
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Pleased to meet you jpambrun! I am one of those 0.1% idealists.
Can you name me a single good or service priced in BTC? If it's not a unit of account it can't be a store of value.
I’m actually tracking it for art
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His full diplomatic title is His Excellency Justin Yuchen Sun, Ambassador and Permanent Representative to the World Trade Organization in Grenada. It is correct to address him as His Excellency or HE. He also has diplomatic immunity.
> He also has diplomatic immunity. ... in Switzerland only, in his role as the Permanent Representative of Grenada to the WTO. He actually doesn't have diplomatic immunity in Grenada, and Grenada maintains an extradition treaty with the United States. [1] [1] https://protos.com/sun-grenada-his-excellency-justin-crypto-...
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Oh boy, have I got a story for you. Around 1999, my hometown (pop. ~600) fell for a conman. Like, the actual Town government, and almost everyone in it. Pudgy, balding, middle-aged white dude breezed into town and seduced the owner of one of the motels. She kicks her husband out and starts taking Conman to town board meetings, etc. Eventually divorced husband. Guy claims to be Hollywood connected, a wealthy promoter…
This should be a movie.
Written by Conan OBrien. Had a Catchy song and had Leonard Nimoy cameo.
I always have mixed feelings when someone is warned about the riskiness / foolishness / stupidity of a course of action, and then suffers for it. On the one hand, there's a certain satisfaction or Schadenfreude in the sense of vindication. And it's pleasant to feel like my own wisdom or self-control has been validated. OTOH, I know that everyone has limited wisdom / self-control / intelligence, including me. So it se…
A fool and their money are soon parted. The real problem is that swindlers have made a huge amount of money and can use that money to corrupt politicians so it affects the rest of us. It’s not just the extra tax of having to care for the newly impoverished. My former local community went all in on a bitcoin scam, they made commissions on new entrants so I never heard the end of it. I only talked about it when asked b…
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> I'm excluding individuals getting rich as that can happen due to gambling, etc. The tools that allow that stuff to occur onchain are pretty phenomenal. Bridges, farms, yield aggregators, yield optimizers, AMMs, the rapid evolution of standardized classes in the codebases (really was a mess before OpenZeppelin). It is capital formation and that is valuable for many people, a lot of capital formation improvements in…
Most of what you mention seems to be loosely related to fintech. There's nothing wrong with that but it doesn't match your previous comparison to the internet. If phrased in reverse, what would you lose if you lost the Internet? Now, what would you lose if crypto as a tech disappeared? It seems more akin to a niche technology than a transformational one (at the moment anyway).
I would lose a permissionless development platform that allows me to pay once for deployment and have to cover no overhead costs from then on, because all the compute nodes are pay once host/execute indefinitely with free read privileges
I dont have an alternative for that, when deployment is done the payment is in crypto which regulates the complexity of the deployment, and other overhead costs are covered by the consumer who also pay in crypto which regulates the complexity of the operation to attract consumers
Competing compute nodes are much more complex and have much more complex pricing models and compete primarily on how arbitrary those pricing models are
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A fool and their money are soon parted. The real problem is that swindlers have made a huge amount of money and can use that money to corrupt politicians so it affects the rest of us. It’s not just the extra tax of having to care for the newly impoverished. My former local community went all in on a bitcoin scam, they made commissions on new entrants so I never heard the end of it. I only talked about it when asked b…
The problem is the fintech industry - both crypto and mainstream - exists to swindle . The biggest rewards come from crossing the line and avoiding regulation/enforcement, either by legitimate or illegitimate means (including bribing enforcement officials). Next biggest are rewards for crossing the line and delaying enforcement until you can launder your rewards to a safe haven. If you're arrested and jailed - only l…
Fintech - in any of its forms, as you note - takes the maxim to its conclusions and seeks rent over transactions themselves, which gradually inclines it towards zero-sum "find a mark to dump my toxic assets on" shenanigans. So the industry perpetually leverages itself into fragility on the backs of "rip to them but i'm different" leadership and whomever they can convince to come along. At the nation-state level this creates nasty entanglements of regulatory capture and debt that let market leaders who play the game well make rules for themselves and pay off enforcing bodies, which contributes to macro-scale misalignments in who is getting funded or regulated for what, and therefore many "ills of the market".
The tech of crypto assets themselves, on the other hand, is antifragile in construction: Winning at the trading game does not result in regulatory capture or bailouts, since the settlement ultimately takes place on-chain, and on-chain is an automated consensus, one relatively hostile to political machination. Rent-seeking doesn't scale up well with this kind of asset. You can pull a small-time scam, but it doesn't lead to an empire lasting for generations. And if your asset becomes too hard to trade in because you've come up with some crafty way of polluting it or gatekeeping it, it's substitutable in a way that state-backed instruments are not. Price survival over a crypto bear market is a pretty strong signal for a project, and as the market gets bigger it attracts bigger players trying to remake the rules with a slant so that they can win. It's escalated every cycle, and really is a phenomenon beyond retail now.
What this past cycle entailed was an attempt by larger fintech players to muscle in on the crypto game and apply various strategies to capture it by adding obfuscating instruments in the name of liquidity and yield. The ones who survived made an early exit or successfully derisked, but many of them committed to their strategy in a way that ensured they would lose. And from here on, the only remaining escalations of that game involve some of the largest amounts of capital on the planet - the biggest banks, or actual governments.
I'm sure this doesn't apply to many here here, but: Do not trust leverage-trading crypto banks. Do not trade on leverage. These systems just recreate our current system of debt-based money that will inevitably collapse when the easy money dries up. If you believe Bitcoin has a future like I do, then buy some Bitcoin and hold it in cold storage for a long time, or try to jumpstart a circular economy where you use Bitc…
For anyone else enjoying the crypto meltdown, might I suggest the subreddit /r/buttcoin? It's quite enjoyable. https://old.reddit.com/r/Buttcoin/
> It's quite enjoyable. Not really, it's full of people hating and insulting and pretty much comparable to the average crypto bro subreddit.
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There's no real problems with donating fiat to Ukraine, you can send money to them no problem. https://u24.gov.ua/ As far as I can tell the reason they bought a bunch of stuff with crypto is because crypto fans gave them a bunch of crypto, not because they need to route around actual problems with the banking system. Of course Ukraine would make noises about how much they like crypto, because anything that encourages…
Sure, there's no problem donating now 5 months into the war. But what about when the war just started? How would someone from the U.S. be able to donate money and be confident where it was going? It's not like the Ukrainian govt had a well-known paypal address.
You are tilting at a windmill.
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Why would u enjoy people losing their life savings? Just because they told you to have fun staying poor on the way up?
When this crypto thing turned into a ponzi scheme, it was already guaranteed that many people would lose everything. We can only hope it collapses earlier so there are fewer victims.