161–170 of 1001 posts
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Am I misinterpreting you or are you saying Bitcoin would make a better, faster, cheaper Git? If you are, I am already laughing.
They're saying git would not have been better or faster or cheaper if implemented in a classical centralized way.
I've never understood the initial arguments about Bitcoin, no matter how many times they've been explained to me. The block chain is, and always was, an extremely inconvenient database. How anyone, especially many intelligent people, thought it was realistic to graft a currency on top of such a unwieldy piece of technology is beyond me. Maybe it goes to show how few people understand economics and anthropology and ho…
The anonymity aspect of it always confused me. If anything, bitcoin and almost all other cryptos are the ultimate surveillance state currency. Every single bitcoin, no matter how many fractions it is broken into, is traceable through every single transaction it has ever participated in, all the way back to when the coin was first mined.
Is it really a waste if you made enough money to retire?
At the end of the day you are always just working to make someone else rich or to give them the promotion they want. If you get rich yourself along the way, take that as a win.
I've never understood the initial arguments about Bitcoin, no matter how many times they've been explained to me. The block chain is, and always was, an extremely inconvenient database. How anyone, especially many intelligent people, thought it was realistic to graft a currency on top of such a unwieldy piece of technology is beyond me. Maybe it goes to show how few people understand economics and anthropology and ho…
Bitcoin has a great mythology associated with it. People over emphasize the technical aspects, i think its the "story" that made it succeed. Its about taking back "control" from the man. People love an underdog story, people love a rebellion story. Lots of people in the tech space are anti-establishment or libertarian. Bitcoin is the perfect fulfillment of the dream of that ideology.
When people try to sell bitcoin, they aren't selling merkle-trees, they are selling "freedom".
I think if it was actually just about digital currency, then chaumian ecash would have taken off. It technically has a central party but not in a way that matters. It makes so much more sense than bit coin. But it doesnt have the total freedom story.
> How anyone, especially many intelligent people, thought it was realistic to graft a currency on top of such a unwieldy piece of technology is beyond me.
I mean, it did work. It is a shitty currency no doubt, but you can buy and sell stuff with it. There are bitcoin atms in my neighbourhood. I think the bigger mystery is not how anyone thought it could be a currency, but how the hell something so silly actually sort of became one (albeit bad one)
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Indeed, most societies ended up inventing a mandatory trusted third party escrow called a "legal system" as part of a "state". They usually issue hard-to-copy tokens, solving the double spending problem.
Most states still haven't created digital versions of these hard-to-copy tokens meaning that there needs to be an alternate provided by a 3rd party which is where cryptocurrency comes in.
Crypto is not necessarily just a casino; the tech has value but there is no mass adoption of the currency as of yet. We'll probably see mass adoption of crypto if a crypto can become a store of wealth
And yet, as you say, there's no mass adaption (yet). All it's doing is making tech bros and speculators even richer. It's possible that wider adoption will eventually happen, but as years pass this claim gets harder and harder to make. It's not any easier for "normal" people to use than it was ten years ago, and the main use cases are still "speculation" and "paying for drugs", also just like ten years ago.
From someone who also genuinely thinks the underlying crypto tech is fascinating, it's hard not to see the "currency" part of it as a kind of cancerous growth on the world economy.
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It's an ingenious solution to achieve a "trustless" currency that prevents double-spending without a central authority. Unfortunately, this solves the wrong problem. Spending money usually involves getting a good or service in return, which inherently requires "trust" (as does any human interaction). Your fancy blockchain is not going to help you if you order something with Bitcoin and no package arrives.
Neither will cash. Thats what a third party escrow is for. You get that as part of what you pay for a credit card. Not trying to come down on either side of this i personally hold near zero crypto, your statement was just wrong.
Umm, you are agreeing with the person you are responding to.
Is it really a waste if you made enough money to retire?
Right, OP writes up crypto as being this terrible disease with no meaning. But outside of crypto there aren't many jobs that have real meaning either. I worked for the UN at one point, and that was actually one of the worse. At the end of the day you are always just working to make someone else rich or to give them the promotion they want. If you get rich yourself along the way, take that as a win.
Bitcoin was just a waste of talent and resources.
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OK, suppose the whole world used a trustless digital cash. Now you cannot do monetary policy. Now booms are booms and busts are busts and we are back to the early 1900s. Great. Actually what would likely happen is that people would be incentivized to opt-in a digital currency with a monetary policy knob, and this would again become the de facto currency that everyone uses. The problem with 2008 was corruption not mon…
No solution is perfect. Come up with a better one. More regulation, however, is not what we need. We need to decide what we want the financial sector to actually do, and that probably doesn't involve a bunch of children playing games.