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Why I’m Cryptophobic

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Re: Why I’m Cryptophobic

#301

Post by ChainOfFools »

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…

there is so much soft-corruption pressure and old fashioned lobbying from Bitcoin kingpins to insinuate BTC into various nations' fiat pools. Why is this, when making bitcoin into fiat undermines the entire point of bitcoin.

Well obviously, on the superficial level there's plain old greed.

But on a more existential level, bitcoiners are acknowledging that proof of work will lose to proof of lead, in any kind of direct confrontation.

So backing its security with math isn't enough, coiners want it backed with armed force. like fiat.

Re: Why I’m Cryptophobic

#302

Post by smoldesu »

engmgrmgr wrote: post #236
smoldesu wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there's one thing that people should correctly point out as scams in the world of crypto, it should be L2 chains. Every single one of them is a ploy to enrich their creator, full-stop. I don't even know what kind of pipe dream they sell to their investors to get capital. It's particularly funny, because I remember Justin Sun trying to scam people like this years before cryptocurrency had really taken off. Back the…

That’s a rather myopic view. You could look at L2s as a sort of credit card system, and from a systems and technology POV there’s nothing inherently “scammy” about it. For web3 applications of any meaningful large scale, L2 solutions are necessary. For better or worse, the L2 developer platforms that I assume you’re referring to are essentially low-code solutions to abstract away the actual systems software engineeri…

> Well-staffed tech companies building web3 applications often build their own implicit L2 solutions because it’s just how you connect things in a distributed system with modern L1 blockchain constraints.

Sure. The banks do the exact same thing, which is what makes them so goddamn profitable to run. The problem is that the entire cryptocurrency space now has to choose between two destinies:

a. Default on the trustless model in order to continue scaling, passing the actual verification process to private validators who may or may not be scamming you.

b. Let every token lose it's value, allow the system to suffocate and continue pushing for airtight security until the bitter end.

Now, neither of those are attractive choices. I'll tell you what, though: I'd rather have a $20 bill than $20,000 of Monopoly money.

Re: Why I’m Cryptophobic

#303

Post by syzygyhack »

avivo wrote: post #214
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…

It is a choice at the software later. And who is making that choice? It's the initial people who actually write that software. But what if that system is now affecting many other people, or the entire planet in a significant way? Should they have some voice over that? Under a traditional governance regime the answer is that that is at least possible to change. It may be difficult, but it does not violate the laws of…

> But what if that system is now affecting many other people, or the entire planet in a significant way? Should they have some voice over that?

This is an important point you are making. What you must recognize is that they absolutely can have some voice over that.

Just as we can write software (or smart contracts) that allow no one to update and fix such issues. We can write software that allows one person to do it. Or we can lock the ability behind a multisig, requiring a majority of the software's developers to do so. Still not good enough for the use case due to far-reaching trust ramifications? Then we write code that delegates the ability to trigger such an update to the entire userbase of the application.

In the world of contract platforms, you have to keep in mind that contracts and the tools that you can build with them are primitives. They are composable. There is no problem in building a DAO to control the ability to update a contract (or trigger arbitrary functions to remedy critical situations caused by unexpected and undesired state changes). This is already done in practice in various applications--and sometimes with undesirable outcomes! Of course, these are still experimental times and lessons are still being learned.

Re: Why I’m Cryptophobic

#304

Post by tsimionescu »

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.

Why not? They're a far more reputable business than many online stores, for example.

Re: Why I’m Cryptophobic

#305

Post by Sargos »

Night_Thastus wrote: post #279
jrm4 wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But this feels like "Just using Model T's to transport all of the corn in the early 1900's would destroy the Model T system." Doesn't really say anything meaningful about "the impact of cars and trucks." I don't get why this is a useful argument; BTC and/or Crypto is definitely going to evolve. The question is how.

[deleted]

> The key difference is that BTC and all cryptocurrencies in general are not getting better about being scalable to many total transactions and transactions/second - they're getting worse.

> This is true for all blockchain-based currencies, and it's fundamental to the technology. There is no "fix". It's not just a case of poorly written code or limited infrastructure, it's the core premise of the idea that's rotten.

You are very confident for someone who seemingly hasn't researched much about optimistic and zero knowledge rollups. These systems inherit the security of Ethereum while providing exponentially greater transaction throughout which means scale improves and these networks cannot steal your money or do anything nefarious.

Re: Why I’m Cryptophobic

#306

Post by bendtheblock »

TrapLord_Rhodo wrote: post #281
bendtheblock wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My question to you is: what's the problem? On the few times I've lost money to online fraud, the bank returned it to me. Why does having a huge public web of transactions on the slowest ledger ever created help? What happens to your "sovereignty" when everyone can see your purchases patterns? What happens when grandma loses her wallet key? re: Greece, worth hearing Yanis Varoufakis on crypto: https://www.youtube.com/…

> re: Greece, worth hearing Yanis Varoufakis on crypto: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bS0W-Whl0T0 top comment: "How fantastic to let this man expose how incredibly dangerous governments are, without him even realizing [he's] doing it." Also, the entire time he seems to conflate crypto with CBDC which are nothing alike. >what's the problem? On the few times I've lost money to online fraud, the bank returned it to me…

I think you're right about online fraud being much reduced with public private key tech, but if it's such a good idea why has no one been able to do it?

Re: Why I’m Cryptophobic

#307

Post by antoniuschan99 »

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…

Isn’t the value in money both in security (eg. Dollar backed by Superpower) and economic transaction?

With Bitcoin’s hash rate at an all time high, it’s more secure than ever - can we say it’s the most secure system in the world?

Of course the tradeoff for BTC is like insane consumption of power (currently Argentina size).

With BTC, I don’t think the use case will ever be to handle small sums of money. Transaction speed and fees don’t make sense for it.

Re: Why I’m Cryptophobic

#308

Post by tsimionescu »

jrm4 wrote: post #270
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…

Weird argument, you're presuming that it has no value today because it doesn't work YET. But, that's like the whole point of e.g. IPO's. People sometimes put money in something in the belief that it, or something related to it, will work later.

Bitcoin can't scale to real numbers of transactions (say, enough to handle the daily needs of a small town) fundamentally by design. Investing in Bitcoin with the expectation that it will ever scale to Visa levels of tps is like investing in an early-stage cold fusion start-up.

Re: Why I’m Cryptophobic

#309

Post by pavel_lishin »

antoniuschan99 wrote: post #307
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…

Isn’t the value in money both in security (eg. Dollar backed by Superpower) and economic transaction? With Bitcoin’s hash rate at an all time high, it’s more secure than ever - can we say it’s the most secure system in the world? Of course the tradeoff for BTC is like insane consumption of power (currently Argentina size). With BTC, I don’t think the use case will ever be to handle small sums of money. Transaction sp…

What sort of security are you referring to?

Re: Why I’m Cryptophobic

#310

Post by tsimionescu »

ETH_start wrote: post #194
throwaway413 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a geopolitical climate is too volatile for fiat to provide value, what good is it that crypto can isolate its stability (it can’t) if the humans who would use it have bigger problems than how to pay with money they already have in some form? Supply chains, physical force/warfare, climate, etc. If fiat is breaking down, there are surely bigger problems at play. How does solving the ability to transfer money solve t…

>>Per your example, ok Apple Pay got cut off. Is the transit system going to support crypto? Will they be able to run their business and make that transition with regulators? That's the big question. But assuming for a moment that crypto can act as a substitute for traditional centralized payment systems, then it has significant advantages in some contexts over those systems.

> But assuming for a moment that crypto can act as a substitute for traditional centralized payment systems, then it has significant advantages in some contexts over those systems.

Except that, fundamentally, distributed permission-less systems can't come close to the computational efficiency of centralized systems. So this is like "assuming perpetual motion machines existed, we could build a post-scarcity society" levels of assumption.

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