I went from early bitcoin adopter to early bitcoin skeptic and despite missing most of the gains I have no regrets. During the early days the crypto space was concentrated to small online communities. People were mostly interested about the technology and the talk of price was limited, in the context "mass adoption". Nowadays it's about the price and the memes. Add to that the money laundering, energy waste and these…
> Too many smart people work on these pointless projects instead of useful tech that benefits society. To be fair, almost nothing that most techies work on benefits society.
We have reached the "severed fingers and abductions" stage of crypto revolution
91–100 of 121 posts
Re: We have reached the "severed fingers and abductions" stage of crypto revolution
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
Decentralization benefit society. Trust-less systems - don't. Trust-less systems lead to libertarianism and anarcho capitalism, both are just fancy words for feudalism. We all know how that works, there are even modern day re-enactment which all end up massive fraud and crime. I prefer semi-trusted democracy to the feudalism any time.
I don't see how a trustless & decentralized system would cause feudalism. On the other hand, I see how our current "democratic" system evokes in neo-feudalism. We are all slaves to the government and the few conglomerates they favor, paying taxes to be more restricted. No thanks, I'd rather have a libertarian system and close to 0% tax, if not zero and practically no government. No, you don't need to worship Amazon i…
I personally don't to live in either possibility, neither in "nothing exist" libertarian dystopia, nor in the current normal society where i would need to pay for a bunch of selfish freeloaders who avoid taxes.
Re: We have reached the "severed fingers and abductions" stage of crypto revolution
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
... Which means an even easier time for ransom criminals?
Just like encryption and cash. You wanna ban or discourage its use too? Bad people can do bad things with good technology but that doesn't mean good people shouldn't use and benefit from that technology. I would think someone on HACKERnews would agree.
And this has nothing to do whenever the tech is good or bad, this is literally about how "untraceable" tech will make it easier for criminals to turn the supporters into helpless victims.
Since the irony is with your absolutist argument that it goes the other way too, if we have a proper surveillance state for instance there would be clear and obvious benefits to this; however this doesn't mean that these benefits outweighs the negatives far from it, hence why a lot of the tech that are raising concerns is being discussed and tested out to see how far we can create a better world while not forsaking said tech.
The question about crypto isn't can it keep the feds from auditing it, it's whenever or not it's worth having an anonymous currency given all the implications, risks and general problematic aspect of it outweighs the benefits of it.
So far it seems that people have moved away from crypto due to that reason, and instead it's mostly seen as a speculative market.
Re: We have reached the "severed fingers and abductions" stage of crypto revolution
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
Stablecoins are actually the future of remittances, the problem is which stablecoin is safe and has enough adoption. (When a big or central bank decides to have a stablecoin, things will change a lot) I work in “traditional” (as in, non crypto) payment systems, and i can tell you that plenty of companies are looking into using cryto rails for complex remmitance routes. The problem is swift network/correspondent/inter…
> The problem is swift network/correspondent/intermediary banking. When you want to send money abroad to badly connected banks of badly connected countries, you might have a big route chain (multiple times intermediaries), fees can be huge , and settlement can take a long time. But why is this complicated? Isn't it mostly about regulations / KYC / AML, rather than anything technical? Stablecoins are much simpler beca…
Payments basics: Simplest scenario (details overly simplified) When you send money from account A on bank X to account B on bank Y, what happens is that Bank X debits account A on its system and credits bank Y’s account on bank X (let’s say it’s Xy account) Then bank X sends message to Bank Y to credit account B, so Bank Y debits X’s bank account (Yx) and credits B.
As you can see this is an issue, it means that every bank has to have an account on every other bank in order to have funds moving around, and even keep liquidity there.
That’s where Clearing And Settlement system comes in, they act as a centralised force.
So instead of bank X having an account (with enough liquidity ) on bank Y so that its customers can transfer money to Bank Y customers, both of these banks have an account on some Clearing/Settlement third party (usually it’s a system by a Central Bank) and interact with that system instead, so instead of N*N bank accounts on outer banks, you have N accounts on central system.
EU has TARGET from ECB for settlement of euros across EU.
But there is no central bank of the whole world of every currency.
So what happens when too far away banks interact?
They have to search through the graph of all the world banks how they can get money to a particular bank. Add currency conversion as an extra complexity, because every connection is on a currency.
So it’s quite the graph search with many constraints, clearing and settling such stuff is hard because of that.
Regulation and AML is just one of the difficulties in linking nodes, but other exists, for example liquidity, a small bank can’t just spread multi currency accounts on many places.
The benefit of stablecoin on a blockchain, is that it kinda gives you “whole world central bank”, more correctly, it makes everybody share the same ledger, instead of each bank having its own that needs reconciliation with everybody else.
The only thing extra needed for stable coins, is space for encrypted messages is a transfer(so that a bank can tell other bank to credit customer B) and a public mapping from Bank Bic to crypto wallet id.
Re: We have reached the "severed fingers and abductions" stage of crypto revolution
#95Banks are fortified and guarded for a reason. If you have money in bitcoin, it's only as secure as your person and whatever you use to access your crypto assets. If you had a million in gold, would you leave it on your desk? Walk around with it on the street? Your odds of getting to where you're going with the gold are pretty good in most places, but it's still a big risk. Brag about or show that gold off to somebody…
You can store your private keys encrypted in a safety deposit box. You can store 3 copies in 3 different banks. It only costs $15-30 per year per box.
Re: We have reached the "severed fingers and abductions" stage of crypto revolution
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
Watching how it is working. That the laundering can be tracked is just an expense to the process of recruiting suckers to be the visible parties who eventually do time and don't know about anything but the other visible parties.
But that also happens in the fiat system, so where's the flaw in crypto?
Any attempt to say they are on the same level is intellectual bankruptcy.
Like asking "What's the problem with restricting access to VX? Everyone's got a can of bug spray in their cabinet and they're both organophosphates, brah!"
Re: We have reached the "severed fingers and abductions" stage of crypto revolution
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
Decentralization benefit society. Trust-less systems - don't. Trust-less systems lead to libertarianism and anarcho capitalism, both are just fancy words for feudalism. We all know how that works, there are even modern day re-enactment which all end up massive fraud and crime. I prefer semi-trusted democracy to the feudalism any time.
I don't see how a trustless & decentralized system would cause feudalism. On the other hand, I see how our current "democratic" system evokes in neo-feudalism. We are all slaves to the government and the few conglomerates they favor, paying taxes to be more restricted. No thanks, I'd rather have a libertarian system and close to 0% tax, if not zero and practically no government. No, you don't need to worship Amazon i…
The only thing keeping the billionaire class from extruding you through a nozzle, drying out the paste, and then distributing what used to be you in powdered form as a daily ration to their indentured servants is the government.
A bad government can also enable this, but examples of bad governments are far outweighed by good or at least mediocre examples to the point of absurdity.
Whenever I talk to libertarians about this they respond "we'd just band together to make rules against this to protect ourselves" -- that's a fucking government.
(or they have some fetishistic fantasy about guns and shit)
Re: We have reached the "severed fingers and abductions" stage of crypto revolution
#98The whole system is rigged. Yes, crypto too.