141–150 of 178 posts
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They are pseudo-anonymous at best.
On an individual basis maybe, but on a macro statistical scale there is no way you can classify transactions as illicit or not with any remote degree of accuracy.
There are different kinds of anonymity, I think. There's anonymity of the identity of people, and anonymity of the nature of the transaction. Most cryptocurrency is bad at the former and good at the latter.
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The part I never understood about the concept of transferrable in-game goods is -- why bring crypto into it? I don't see how the blockchain solves any of the difficulties with the idea, either for the players or for any companies who are on-board with it. I also don't see why any of the companies would be on-board with it, given that accomplishing it would take a lot of development effort for little reward, and the g…
This was all cooked up by people who obviously don't play videogames nor understand the videogame market. The creators of Fortnite don't want you to take your DLC with you to play another game. They want you to keep playing Fortnite and spend money in their store.
This isn't about cryptocurrency at all. It's about the obviously bad idea of transferable digital in-game goods [sold for cryptocurrency]. You don't need the crypto part to see why it's not a good idea, although the model described here (selling loot to other players?) is not the extremely silly one I've heard more often (buy a CSGO skin and wear it in other games!).
Once you've crossed the line of purchasable in-game goods, transferable isn't silly.
Anyone who has read Cryptonomicon should remember that the hero protagonists went to a lot of effort to secure a large mass of gold to 'back' the currency they wanted to create. The Baroque Trilogy is less clear as Isaac Newton mints new currency. Does that mean that perhaps Stephenson's opinions were always that currency needs to be backed by something whether it is gold or national borders.
And yet his best approximation of cryptocurrency actually comes from REAMDE, in which it's an in-game currency for an MMO backed by virtualized geology (which doesn't sound too different from Bitcoin hash rate).
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Thank you for succinctly saying what takes me multiple paragraphs. One nitpick - it’s easily $10s of billions of in investment, more than likely approaching or surpassing $100s of billions. A16Z alone has raised roughly $10b. Throw in other big VCs, a bunch of coin/crypto specific funds, likely thousands or tens of thousands of angel/seed rounds we’ve never heard of capitalizing on the hype (or just outright frauds),…
You are both going around my very simple argument that these mind-blowingly huge piles of money poured into crypto scams, don't undermine the undeniable reality of crypto that is not a scam. Yes, people pouring their savings in tulips, fake railroad companies, and beanie babies is absurd. Does it follow that tulips, railroad companies, and baby plushies are scams and criminal in nature? The grifters and their victims…
At the time that those things were happening? Definitely scams. Not necessarily criminal, though.
> It doesn't care if grifters hype, pump, and dump its tokens.
True. But, as I think you've noticed, a whole lot of people do care, and don't want to have anything to do with the whole idea. Maybe even most people.
It doesn't help that pro-cryptocurrency people cannot articulate a real, practical use case (outside of one or two niche things, like moving money across contested national borders) that isn't already done at least as well by the existing monetary system and also isn't scammy.
This isn't about cryptocurrency at all. It's about the obviously bad idea of transferable digital in-game goods [sold for cryptocurrency]. You don't need the crypto part to see why it's not a good idea, although the model described here (selling loot to other players?) is not the extremely silly one I've heard more often (buy a CSGO skin and wear it in other games!).
You are right. From reading the article, Neal Stephenson doesn't criticize cryptocurrency in itself. His whole criticism is about integrating it inside the universe of games. I don't agree with your opinion that item transferability is necessarily silly, though. I was happy to be able to sell the rare Dota 2 items I accumulated after playing it for a couple years. It was never a central motivation for playing, but th…
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> I could easily imagine a world where I get "crypto currency" that I can use across games. Why would any company use a decentralized token to let you purchase things when they could simply make their own store currency/points and sell that instead? Look at all the F2P games that have in-game purchases, they all use points that are sold by the publisher that are bought with dollars because they make more money that w…
Oh, agree that I don't imagine this world being likely. Just imagining that there is no reason these points have to be backed by US dollars. And if you gave people a way to transfer value from one game to another, they may take you up on it. Incentive would be to give a reason to jump worlds, as it were.
There are so many hypotheticals and logical leaps here... This is not a useful argument anymore ... it's just you fantasizing.
I am out.
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It's been 14 years, billions in investment and roughly speaking zero non-criminal usage and no real-world killer use cases. That's just fact. Time to move on.
If anything, crypto at least seems to indirectly put food on your table, articbull. I would find it hard to believe you don't get any compensation from religiously covering every HN comment sections about crypto with misinformation. Surely your motives can't simply be the fear of being out of a job if bigtech fades into irrelevance. AI would logically be a way bigger threat to your occupation. Here are some stats for…
It's a hobby, I promise :)
> Surely your motives can't simply be the fear of being out of a job if bigtech fades into irrelevance. AI would logically be a way bigger threat to your occupation.
In my role as a critic (or I suspect you'd say cynic) whether crypto succeeds or fails doesn't matter. If it finds a killer use case and makes my life better I win because my life is better. I'll be the first to use any technology that makes my life better, or the things I do faster or cheaper. As I am not invested, it doesn't hurt me if it fails. The stock I own is broadly agnostic to the success or failure of crypto and the idea that any FAANG company is under threat from crypto is silly. If it takes off, the FAANGs would quickly find a way to profit.
> Surely calling 5-25% of many countries' populations criminals (including the US), should be relegated to a fringe extremist view.
They're not using it, they're speculating on its price. That's not the same thing. To use it they'd have to be exchanging it for goods and services and they're simply not because it's a bad store of value and a worse medium of exchange.
The title of that page is "Cryptocurrency Ownership Data" not "Cryptocurrency Use Data."
In re your reply down the line:
> It's as much real world usage, as people owning stocks and precious metals is.
Stocks are productive investments because their appreciation is derived from non-investor participants. Crypto doesn't derive it's value from non-investor participants. Crypto is only re-arranging the wealth in fiat terms, distributing money from later entrants to earlier ones. A better analogy would be to other zero-sum products like options or futures contracts but of course those have use as a hedge against risk which oviously crypto does not as it's simply correlated to the bubble stocks in the NASDAQ.
It is a lot like owning gold (well, except that gold actually is used industrially) but generally owning shiny pebbles has been a fringe sport dominated by William Devane and his 2am coin commercials on Fox. I think gold is a silly investment too and I don't hear anyone selling it as the future of anything.
We all started off enthused about cryptocurrency and then the Wolf of Wall Street types co-opted it and ruined it for everyone pulling off the most sophisticated Ponzi schemes in history. The only use-case for it now is for the criminal underworld (who have to somehow convert to fiat privately using novel techniques, and that gets harder with regulation and sanctions and outright banning of tumbler systems).
The capitalism was going great until actual capitalists got involved!
We all started off enthused about cryptocurrency and then the Wolf of Wall Street types co-opted it and ruined it for everyone pulling off the most sophisticated Ponzi schemes in history. The only use-case for it now is for the criminal underworld (who have to somehow convert to fiat privately using novel techniques, and that gets harder with regulation and sanctions and outright banning of tumbler systems).
2. There was nothing sophisticated about crypto Ponzi schemes. It was always trivially obvious that if X money is used to purchase or prop-up crypto then X is all that is ever coming back out.