91–100 of 196 posts
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I hate on crypto any chance I get, but crypto has damn near a monopoly in facilitating black and/or grey market electronic transactions. It is very in demand, for instance, in helping dictators evade sanctions, or helping criminals extort or trade illegally.
I suppose you could count Venezuelans going hungry as "criminals". But I wouldn't.
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Oh god this gets trotted out every time someone points out the evil that crypto facilitates. Give it a rest. It pales in comparison and there are many other solutions that your argument conveniently ignores.
The vast majority of bitcoin use is legal. https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w29396/w293... > For example, illegal transactions, scams and gambling together make up less than 3% of volume. Sure there's the odd dumb criminal who doesn't understand the prosecutorial implications of an immutable public ledger. But it pales in comparison, according to the actual data.
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Yes but stocks are usually tied to a business producing some sort of service that people want, and therefore have value. Crypto is tied to, checks notes nothing.
Dollars are also tied to nothing. A towel with the logo of a sports team also has zero intrinsic value. Same with a shiny lump of useless metal. That's because being tied to something, or having intrinsic value is not how things gain value. Things, crypto, dollars, gold, and towels, have value because people WANT them. That's it. You even touched on it: "some sort of service that people want, and therefore have value…
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The best and worst examples were in the same movie, IMO: Nedry's finger-wagging admonishment and all hell breaking loose, then later, "it's a Unix system, I know this!" and some exotic file manager visualization.
That exotic file manager vis was a real SGI prog called fsn. Exists for sunos as well.
So the version of password manager he was using was vulnerable because it was generating low entropy passwords. They also found the seed was from time and knew when he had created it. He got lucky there a little.
> He got lucky there a little. Who is he in that sentence? Do you mean the owner of the wallet who is absouletly very lucky, or the hackers that did a lot of investigating and reverse engineering to learn that the datetime was the seed. Was that luck or l337skillz?
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Oh absolutely. Money is the root of all evil. But crypto bros are often delusional about what intrinsical value exists in the normal market, compared to crypto coins where they invent the value. Therefore manipulation of value compared to real world markets becomes a lot more abstract.
The original saying is: "For the love of money is the root of all evil: ..." -- 1 Timothy, 6:10 It's not the money that is evil, it is the things we do because of the desire we have for it.
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Oh absolutely. Money is the root of all evil. But crypto bros are often delusional about what intrinsical value exists in the normal market, compared to crypto coins where they invent the value. Therefore manipulation of value compared to real world markets becomes a lot more abstract.
One of the greatest uses of crypto is the ability to transfer any amount of money to any point on earth for next to nothing and no questions asked. That is worth more than most any other use for crypto.
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One of the greatest uses of crypto is the ability to transfer any amount of money to any point on earth for next to nothing and no questions asked. That is worth more than most any other use for crypto.
but you can't. you can't send Bitcoin or Eth around the world for "next to nothing" today. not in a reasonable time frame. and that isn't accounting at all for the massive power wastage in the Bitcoin case.
Hedera is the way.
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Oh god this gets trotted out every time someone points out the evil that crypto facilitates. Give it a rest. It pales in comparison and there are many other solutions that your argument conveniently ignores.
The vast majority of bitcoin use is legal. https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w29396/w293... > For example, illegal transactions, scams and gambling together make up less than 3% of volume. Sure there's the odd dumb criminal who doesn't understand the prosecutorial implications of an immutable public ledger. But it pales in comparison, according to the actual data.
"We first document that 90% of transaction volume on the Bitcoin blockchain is not tied to economically meaningful activities".
How much of the actually meaningful use is legal? E.g. buying good and services, not evading laws, regulations, sales taxes etc.
"Michael... now has 30 BTC, now worth $3 million, and is waiting for the value to rise to $100,000 per coin." What the ? You presumably go from not a millionaire to having $3,000,000, and you decide to risk it to triple it? That's some next level greed right there.
FYI he's not gambling the bitcoin, he's holding onto it, and given it's history, which is the sub-story, it seems to be the smart thing to do not the risky/ dumb thing to do, especially in the current stage of the cycle.