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Why I’m Cryptophobic

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Re: Why I’m Cryptophobic

#161

Post by thesausageking »

IncRnd wrote: post #131
thesausageking wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Tulip Mania" wasn't real. The "bubble" was a very small group of speculators and it did not have any larger affect on the industry. The stories about it were made up and come from propaganda pamphlets published by Dutch Calvinists who were worried that consumerism was causing societal decay: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/there-never-was-real-...

According to your link it was real. "That’s not to say that everything about the story is wrong; merchants really did engage in a frantic tulip trade, and they paid incredibly high prices for some bulbs. And when a number of buyers announced they couldn’t pay the high price previously agreed upon, the market did fall apart and cause a small crisis—but only because it undermined social expectations." In the link I pos…

You were responding to a claim that there have never been other cases of sustained momentum of speculation. The price spike for Tulipmania took place over about 18 months. Bitcoin launched 13 years ago and was first above $1k in 2017. They're not at all similar. I agree with the parent comment.

Re: Why I’m Cryptophobic

#162

Post by throwaway413 »

chaosbolt wrote: post #111
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…

Well an apple has value because it's food, but if today people are willing to pay 1 banana for it and tomorrow they're willing to pay 2 bananas for it, the apple still has the same value it did yesterday because the calories in it haven't changed, but you can actually obtain twice the calories you could've obtained yesterday by taking the banana (2 bananas today), so its value today has doubled. Bitcoin is a 0 calori…

This is well said, I’m gonna borrow that - “crypto is like a 0 calorie apple.”

This matters. Even gold, at least I can wear it and display my wealth. You can’t even display your crypto wealth like that. It is entirely lacking in any “real” value.

Idea: luxury tshirt made out of a $5 white tee with a wallet QR code slapped on the front showing off the balance of the shirt. Or a ring. Crypto fine jewelry.

Re: Why I’m Cryptophobic

#163

Post by bandrami »

yellowapple wrote: post #130
maury91 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People being paid by the hour is just a result of simplifying work, in the very past everyone was a merchant and they sold their goods/services. The same old behaviour should be applied to machines, it doesn't matter how much resource a machine takes to do the job, what is important is the output. The pay should not be X*Watts, but X agreed in advance for training that specific neural network, this type of market inc…

> in the very past everyone was a merchant and they sold their goods/services In the past nearly everyone was a serf and they provided their goods/services to their lieges in exchange for basic needs like having someplace to live. In the present it's pretty much the same thing, except with us serfs being paid wages (which we then end up spending most of as rent and taxes) and serving multiple lieges.

I normally push back at calling consumer capitalism "freedom", but the freedom to leave your employment is a huge one and the serfs didn't have that. The whole idea of just being able to pick up and move somewhere would be alien to most historical peasants.

Re: Why I’m Cryptophobic

#164

Post by yellowapple »

mikeyouse wrote: post #157
yellowapple wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Doesn't really make much of a difference; "only give your banking info to those you highly trust and only if it's absolutely necessary" has been common sense for longer than the Internet has existed.

Re: Why I’m Cryptophobic

#165

Post by capableweb »

hans1729 wrote: post #56
capableweb wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is not the case for crypto No? You don't think the following statement is as true as the one you made? "If you have Bitcoin, you will find someone who is willing to exchange it for something else with material value in any city on the planet" My experience would tell me otherwise, but maybe I'm a outlier.

Scenario: a country-wide blackout occurs. You're haggling with local farmers for food. Which has value to them, bits on a hard drive or solid gold?

If the farmer is unwilling, you'll find someone else. That was one of the conditions right? That you'll be able to find someone "who is willing to exchange it for something else with material value in any city on the planet". Not the likelihood of a farmer during a country-wide blackout. This is just moving the goalposts.

Re: Why I’m Cryptophobic

#166

Post by datadata »

enaaem wrote: post #101
rvense wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I can tell, money is so entirely based on trust that it might as well consist of it, trust in in some fuzzy combination of other people's continued rationality and things staying roughly the same. I accept 100 euro bills for my labour because I believe I'll continue to be able to trade them for food and shelter.

Fiat is indeed based on trust. The trust that the government remain functioning. Fiat is a government backed claim on economic production. That’s not trivial, because the government is the sole arbiter and enforcer of property rights. Fiat determines what resources you can legally assign to you, according to the rules of the sole arbiter of property rights. The notion of property rights is only relevant with a centra…

> The notion of property rights is only relevant with a central authority who is able to enforce it.

The innovation of bitcoin is precisely making this statement no longer true. The "property" might only be digital data, rather than physical things, so you can argue that it is no longer true in only a limited context, but it is not longer absolutely true.

Re: Why I’m Cryptophobic

#167

Post by yellowapple »

automatic6131 wrote: post #154
yellowapple wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 dies…

> Practically, you are talking nonsense and it's patently impossible.

The existence of IP over Avian Carrier demonstrates otherwise. It's slow and it's lossy, but it's good enough for a blockchain.

Re: Why I’m Cryptophobic

#168

Post by thebeastie »

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…

I had a look at the platform democracy page and I couldn’t see any explanation of how the process avoids capture by particular interest groups.

Re: Why I’m Cryptophobic

#169

Post by clintonwoo »

I generally agree with the article. I would say that people using "crypto" as a hedge against inflation are sorely mistaken as the correlation with inflation is probably incredibly low. It's too volatile to be a store of wealth. It has no intrinsic value. It's incredibly resource inefficient. It's not an "investment" since it doesn't produce anything, and financially it has performed worse than real investments.

The only thing it does have going for it is a perfect pump and dump economics. Crypto "believers" are really only truly believing in this ponzi scheme economics, which is a shame since they'd make more money by using real financial instruments. If crypto was really so good, we shouldn't have to worry about "investing" in it, we'd all just buy some to use it for day to day transactions. Which categorically is not viable at all any time soon.

Re: Why I’m Cryptophobic

#170

Post by cowtools »

daniel-cussen wrote: post #143
cowtools wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but a not-insignificant amount of gold is still used for industrial applications. Even if gold wasn't used as money or in jewlery, I imagine it would still be quite expensive: at least half of it's current price. The same could be said of other precious metals. But I don't think you can say the same about bitcoin. Bitcoin's fundamental utility is low, even compared to other cryptocurrencies. Gold has useful uni…

It would definitely be worth half its price as a reserve currency for purely industrial reasons, if not a bit more. Like if it became impossible to balance payments with it, well like if it became irradiated long-term like in Goldfinger , but there was still some clean gold left and it was just for industry. People would totally invent new uses for it at half the price. They just don't even consider it because it's e…

This reminds me, I was looking at the periodic table the other day and I noticed that gold actually has a pretty high electronegativity: almost as high as carbon!

https://mappingignorance.org/2017/02/09/electronegative-gold...

Makes me wonder if there are a ton of unexplored properties and usecases for rare metals that we just haven't discovered yet.

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