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Why I’m Cryptophobic

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Re: Why I’m Cryptophobic

#151

Post by datadata »

ludston wrote: post #97
cowtools wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with your point, but consider the following: 1: Cryptocurrencies can still operate over distributed mesh networks or sneaker-nets in a semi-doomsday scenario. 2: With gold, it is difficult to verify its authenticity vs some impostor alloy without the necessary tech/knowledge. Edit: the bottom line is that in a doomsday scenario, people have little use for bitcoins or shiny yellow rocks.

You can verify gold with a vessel of water, an already verified piece of gold and a set of scales. It's taught in story form to primary age children with the famous quote "Eureka I found it!"

For daily transactions at the current gold price, it would be extremely hard to do this sort of measurement that way with any precision without very specialized equipment. A gram of gold (around $60) is a reasonable daily transaction size and has a volume of 0.05ml. In order to distinguish metals of similar densities, you'd have to be able to measure just a fraction of that volume accurately. Maybe there is some clever system to scale this down, but wasn't obvious to me.

Re: Why I’m Cryptophobic

#152

Post by yellowapple »

hans1729 wrote: post #108
kwertyoowiyop wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NFTs = attempted cultural prestige for crypto?

Ha, nice. Problem: art receives value wrt the artwork, not the canvas, so the screenshot-meme wins. (Unless the cultural prestige lies in the underlaying technology itself, in which case the piece of art is the blockchain-implementation, not embedded content)

> Problem: art receives value wrt the artwork, not the canvas, so the screenshot-meme wins.

This assumes that an original painting and a perfect replica of it have equal value. That might be the case if you don't know which is the original, but in the case of the Mona Lisa - and in the case of the NFT - you almost certainly can figure that out.

Re: Why I’m Cryptophobic

#153

Post by mjburgess »

bufferoverflow wrote: post #76
mjburgess wrote: post #4

There needs to be some basic economics here.. Money has value because of the value of the economic transactions in which its conducted. Government-backed currencies are forced to have value in the sense they force people to use it for their taxes. The US, additionally, forces the world to use it for oil trades. Value is in those economic transactions. A currency is just a "liquifying" of that value, to make it easier…

Your comment sort of works against BTC, because it was intentionally crippled. But there are many other coins that will do just fine for day to day transactions. But also the premise of your argument (taxes and oil) is weak. The value of these transactions pales in comparison with the rest of the transactions. So government enforcement has little to do with the value of USD. It has value, because people believe it, t…

Why do they trust that?

D'you think it might have something to do with the state willing to violently require you accept its currency?

Re: Why I’m Cryptophobic

#154

Post by automatic6131 »

yellowapple wrote: post #141
Aunche wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gold is used for jewelry more than it used as a store of value. Even as a store of value, Gold has an advantage of cryptocurrency in that you can actually store it. Cryptocurrency presupposes the existence of the internet. If all the world reserve currencies collapse, there is a good chance that the internet would go down with it, and your cryptocurrency would be worthless.

> Cryptocurrency presupposes the existence of the internet. Not really. You just need some way for nodes to communicate. That could happen over the Internet, or it could happen over mail, or it could happen over a team of ravens carrying transaction data on little scrolls (hell, given corvid intelligence, they might even be able to execute smart contracts in transit).

Theoretically, maybe you could do it over letters. Just like you could run a computing algorith with horsemen and flags in place of a CPU (like in the scifi novel, Three Body Problem).

Practically, you are talking nonsense and it's patently impossible. You cannot run any crypto currency with a system of letters even if you're transporting them with the full infrastrcture of the modern world with it's airmail and diesel vans.

Try and do it with letters delivered on foot. It is actually impossible.

Re: Why I’m Cryptophobic

#155

Post by gumby »

hans1729 wrote: post #112
gumby wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> economies can crash. Gold can not… A glance at the gold prices and economies of the 19th century show that in fact the gold price certainly can crash due to gold strikes. In addition, the stock of the planet’s gold is negligible compared to the global economy (the hard to quantify set of transactions that people do with each other) so by definition can only operate at the margins. If the world crashes so far that g…

The exchange rate for gold (i.e. the interface of an economy with the material) can crash, not gold itself, thus the inherent value. That was my point, sorry if that wasn't coming across. >If the world crashes so far that gold is a meaningful proportion, will there be much to transact at all? This is where I start speculating, but couldn't we just create an arbitrary new currency and tie it to gold?

> This is where I start speculating, but couldn't we just create an arbitrary new currency and tie it to gold?

How is that different from using the gold? i.e. has the same limitations.

There are rational reasons for the gold standard having been dropped.

Re: Why I’m Cryptophobic

#156

Post by datadata »

IncRnd wrote: post #87

> The world has never seen an economic phenomenon like crypto. There is no historical analogous technology trend or investment craze that comes close to capturing the sustained and frenzied momentum of crypto that has engulfed so many and that will continue to do. Never say never. Greed and speculation have a long and robust history. This crypto speculation and greed reminds of of the price of tulips. [1] During that…

Whenever this comparison is drawn, it must also be pointed out that after the speculative bubble, the Netherlands has remained for centuries the center of a profitable and stable flower industry that was born in that time. The collapse was real and the speculation was real, but the emergence of a new industry was also real. This is also similar example to the dot com bubble.

Re: Why I’m Cryptophobic

#157

Post by mikeyouse »

yellowapple wrote: post #146
mikeyouse wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not true for PHub -- Just went to confirm and the first option is bank transfer, the second is crypto. What percentage of people who pay for PHub do you think even own crypto? My guess would be <1%.

There's no way in any number of Hells that I'd trust PornHub with my banking info.

Right - as a commenter on a technical forum - how much overlap do you think there is between yourself and the age/infosec knowledge/technical savvy of the type of person who pays for PHub in 2022?

Re: Why I’m Cryptophobic

#158

Post by hackernudes »

mjburgess wrote: post #32
hackernudes wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So scarcity pays no role in value? Is the Mona Lisa not valuable? If money is printed it doesn't lose value? Why would Bitcoin collapse if it was used at "any" scale? Low max transactions per second? It is used by some people (even if not many) to pay for real things as well as wages! Are you saying an "economic" transaction has to be a commodity or taxes? I think any specific currency is valuable because people beli…

Every crypto coin trading at 0USD is likewise scarce. You need to pay attention to the actual economic transactions taking place. Looking at a graph of pure speculative value and calling it an economy is, more or less, a scam. You'll see that when it all disappears.. moreso than the cashflow of, eg., an actual business.

It is true that not all scarce things are valuable. But isn't scarcity is a good quality for a currency? Fiat currencies fail because of money printing.

I think many cryptocurrencies are useless and driven purely by marketing and speculation and most tokens are unregulated securities. Bitcoin is someone's attempt at inventing an "ideal" currency and it is being bootstrapped into value and existence. How else could it work? Maybe it will fail, maybe not.

> Imagine BTC was actually used for any scale of economic transactions. It would collapse overnight.

You never explained why and I am honestly interested in your reasoning here. Are you implying BTC can't scale? It seems like two contradicting thoughts - if it is used, then it becomes less valuable.

Re: Why I’m Cryptophobic

#159

Post by syzygyhack »

jjoonathan wrote: post #123
syzygyhack wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But the same irrevocability is now what makes me deeply concerned. Strange hang-up to have. Irrevocability is not a trait that is fundamental to blockchain applications. If the application is smart-contract based, irrevocability is a choice at the source code level. Just because one transaction in a block is irrevocable doesn't mean that another transaction in a future block can't undo whatever arbitrary state chan…

But that's just it: bad choices in the social layer become nearly irrevocable once a self-interested, powerful elite emerges. The bad choices put them on top and they will do anything to stay there.

Not at all. If a self-interested minority emerges, the majority can fork away anew (see: Steem & Hive).

Re: Why I’m Cryptophobic

#160

Post by nemetroid »

syzygyhack wrote: post #98
avivo wrote: post #18

There is also a rebuttal article by the same fund: https://www.bvp.com/atlas/the-antidote-to-cryptophobia/ That said, I think Adam (the original article) is closer to being right. He doesn't even get into the thing that originally made me incredibly excited about the potential of blockchain tech—the way it lets one create a new sort of custom and irrevocable 'physics' for information and incentives. But the same irre…

> But the same irrevocability is now what makes me deeply concerned. Strange hang-up to have. Irrevocability is not a trait that is fundamental to blockchain applications. If the application is smart-contract based, irrevocability is a choice at the source code level. Just because one transaction in a block is irrevocable doesn't mean that another transaction in a future block can't undo whatever arbitrary state chan…

The outcomes of malfunctioning "smart contracts" are irrevocable.
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