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Why I’m Cryptophobic
201–210 of 455 posts
Re: Why I’m Cryptophobic
#202There 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…
Just using BTC to replace all of McDonald's daily debit/credit card transactions would completely destroy the system. I don't know why people think they are refuting your argument by pointing out low-volume examples like porn sites.
Just using BTC to replace all of McDonald's daily transactions in the Berlin metropolitan area alone would be enough to destroy the system. (Of course this is where people come along and talk about layers on top of BTC, but all those seem to me to just be extra ways to replace trivial transaction-level auditing with Turing-hard code auditing).
Re: Why I’m Cryptophobic
#203There 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 He doesn't even get into the thing that originally made me incredibly excited about the potential of blockchain tech—the way it lets one create a new sort of custom and irrevocable 'physics' for information and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.
It's a good question. There are several kinds of answers, two of which I allude to but don't go into a lot of detail. The answers based off of peer reviewed research can be found in the article in Science that I quote. There is also the answer based off a sort of existence proof—so far, even when this is been done at a high level around extremely controversial and impactful issues, this has not appeared to be a significant problem.
To be clear, the process that I am describing there is not some newfangled idea that I just dreamed up. It's something that has been used by France, Ireland, South Korea, even the EU as whole, is likely to be institutionalized as part of the governance of these organizations. It's just fairly new so not that many people have heard about it.
Re: Why I’m Cryptophobic
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’ll sell you that contract up to what I can finance it at.
You completely ignored what GP said. The floor is different from what people will sell it to you for right now. AMZN may have a floor of $ASSETS / #SHARES (or something, I just made that up), but that doesn't mean anyone will sell it to you for that right now.
That’s just the sort of definition of Floor that leads to internet breaking production outages.
Re: Why I’m Cryptophobic
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’ll sell you that contract up to what I can finance it at.
You completely ignored what GP said. The floor is different from what people will sell it to you for right now. AMZN may have a floor of $ASSETS / #SHARES (or something, I just made that up), but that doesn't mean anyone will sell it to you for that right now.
Anyone can invent quasi-financial terms to make grandiose claims. The beauty of the market is that loudmouths don’t participate in the market for long.
I’ll sell an American-style options contract to someone who thinks BTC is going anywhere near there at Black-Scholes -75. And I’ll have no trouble financing it.
You want the other side?
Re: Why I’m Cryptophobic
#206This caught my eye: "anarcho-libertarian roots" is tagged as destructive.
I simpathyze with positions close to that.
I do not understand what is harmful about trying to be free and not surveilled. Harmful for whom? For the people who wish to keep social control, smash you with taxes and do intervention and cheat, like the inflation we are suffering now in Europe bc someone decided to print money willy-nilly? Who benefited from this printing of money? The SAME people who printed it. Who pays? Yes you guessed right... normal citizens. I firmly believe we have the right to protect ourselves from abuses like these.
On top of that the ONLY purpose of the European Central Bank is to keep inflation under 2%... Come on... who can believe these people anymore... I do not. Even the same people responsible for it (Draghi and Lagarde among others) are still there as if nothing had happened.
Re: Why I’m Cryptophobic
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
You completely ignored what GP said. The floor is different from what people will sell it to you for right now. AMZN may have a floor of $ASSETS / #SHARES (or something, I just made that up), but that doesn't mean anyone will sell it to you for that right now.
That’s just the sort of definition of Floor that leads to internet breaking production outages.
Thank you.
Re: Why I’m Cryptophobic
#208There 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…
Who says BTC isn't used for payments? Many porn sites ONLY allow you to pay with crypto, including PornHub[1], and they're keeping the lights on somehow. It's being used by the Ukrainian military to pay their suppliers while the banking system is offline[2]. It's being used for remittances. I had to pay my rent with it once. Also VPNs, etc. There's far more global economic activity conducted in BTC than in gold. It a…
Pornhub runs ads.
Re: Why I’m Cryptophobic
#209I have a dumb question that's probably user error on my part, but I can't seem to find a simple answer for: shouldn't BitCoin transaction fees (and thereby price) eventually stabilize to the cost of electricity plus hardware? And if so, then why would price fluctuate? It seems like there are 2 options:
1) Cryptocurrency transactions cost less than the cost of electricity: a market will form farming the price discrepancy between electricity and coins (solarpunk?)
2) Cryptocurrency transactions cost more than the cost of electricity: a market will form to compensate miners for the extra electricity (money laundering? what goes here?)
If mining costs keep getting more expensive, eventually the network will be so throttled that it will petrify. Also I feel like the cost of mining tied (or passed) the cost of coins a few years ago. So I don't understand why anyone would want to be a miner now. Which suggests a hidden incentive to be a miner.
I stumbled onto this article from 2017 when BitCoin was close to the $20,000 it is today, and it cost about $3,000 to mine a BitCoin in Louisiana, maybe not counting hardware cost?
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/in-one-chart-heres-how-muc...
Re: Why I’m Cryptophobic
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just using BTC to replace all of McDonald's daily debit/credit card transactions would completely destroy the system. I don't know why people think they are refuting your argument by pointing out low-volume examples like porn sites.
Just using BTC to replace all of McDonald's daily transactions in the Berlin metropolitan area alone would be enough to destroy the system. (Of course this is where people come along and talk about layers on top of BTC, but all those seem to me to just be extra ways to replace trivial transaction-level auditing with Turing-hard code auditing).
It also seems like those "layers on top of BTC" erode one of the only aspects of blockchain that has appeal for me -- the full transparency of the system, such that you can see every exchange of BTC on the network.
The minute you offload any of that to other systems, you're essentially creating dark pools and money laundering opportunities because of differential oversight.