241–250 of 561 posts
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> tbh that reads a bit like the war on drugs propaganda we got in school back then. Well, propaganda or not, hard drugs are bad for you.
So is bleach, that doesn’t inherently justify anything past a warning label.
About 100,000 die annually from drugs in the US alone.
And people "high" on bleach never killed or injured anybody.
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This is simply not true. In South Africa, one of the largest African economies, you cannot hold foreign currency unless you are traveling and then you have to sell it back within 30 days of returning to the country. You can open a foreign currency account with a minimum of eg R1500 which is half the monthly minimum wage. Then there are the exchange fees to talk about. You are oversimplifying.
So having foreign currency in stable coins is allowed in South Africa?
Agree re. prediction markets and predatory marketing but disagree so hard with this > The private interest is genuine, a global market's appetite for a frictionless way to hold dollars, captured by the saver who holds the token and the issuer who books the reserves. The cost is paid by everyone outside that transaction. What looks rational for the individual Nigerian saver is corrosive for Nigeria. The way this is fr…
I hate these type of articles because they often come from people that live in a normal country and don't know the struggle to live in a corrupt shithole where you don't have financial freedom nor security
It is really striking how technologists keep disregarding any aspect of ethics, philosophy, proper usage, etc. and just focus entirely on the technology itself. Cryptocurrency, AI, social media, on and on. I used to think it was merely an innocent ignorance, just a soft subject that technologists weren’t familiar with. But anymore it seems like actively hostile to me, a kind of blind belief in the idea that technolog…
I've been deep into crypto for years and I was a big stablecoin supporter. I was fascinated by the tech and I still am. But everything outside the tech itself is just trash, scams, and gambling. I've come to believe that "pure" decentralization is neither practical nor particularly convenient. The only real use case that makes sense to me is giving people in developing countries access to a stable currency they can a…
> neither practical nor particularly convenient My only take away with crypto is, think of that one movie "In Time" but instead of the whole time = currency concept and the arm clock, what if crypto could be applied to a physical piece of e-paper like thing, where it says what its worth, and its worth what it says, you can transfer it on a whim from the paper to your phone (to a wallet) and back and forth. If anyone…
I've been deep into crypto for years and I was a big stablecoin supporter. I was fascinated by the tech and I still am. But everything outside the tech itself is just trash, scams, and gambling. I've come to believe that "pure" decentralization is neither practical nor particularly convenient. The only real use case that makes sense to me is giving people in developing countries access to a stable currency they can a…
>The only real use case that makes sense to me... Cryptocurrencies have a great and really boring application. You have to think "who needs a reliable ledger distributed among many entities?" The answer is institutional banks the likes of JPMorgan. They have a few cryptocurrencies, you need to be another large bank to use them. Big banks send each other large sums of money constantly back and forth. In no sense do th…
"Real money" these days is exactly that, i.e. accounting entries on a ledger, and has been for the better part of the past century or so.
> Plenty of organizations need to be able to keep track of money is between a collection of mostly-trusted peers. With cryptocurrencies they can ditch a lot of the transaction and accounting software.
What is blockchain technology if not even more complex accounting software? It has its uses, but a network of mostly trusted peers is probably not one of them.
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> but crypto is still hanging on among its supporters From what I last heard about crypto miners, the price of mining is not enough to justify price of rig + electricity, so they are quietly switching to AI. Wonder how long the second scam will last.
AI can’t exactly be turned into money the way crypto shenanigans can. You can sell inference, but it has to actually be real.
It is really striking how technologists keep disregarding any aspect of ethics, philosophy, proper usage, etc. and just focus entirely on the technology itself. Cryptocurrency, AI, social media, on and on. I used to think it was merely an innocent ignorance, just a soft subject that technologists weren’t familiar with. But anymore it seems like actively hostile to me, a kind of blind belief in the idea that technolog…
nerds gonna nerd i guess..
Two things can be true at the same time: - Bitcoin was and is a massive, historic accomplishment in creating digital scarcity for the first time and the long term effects are still playing out. - Virtually all of the "crypto" or Bitcoin 2.0 schemes in the 15 years since have been scams. Essentially a way for a tech founder to mint tokens out of thin air, and then try to convince others to treat them as money so he ca…
You are forgetting Ethereum which is the defacto main standard and driver in the "crypto industry". Most of those chains are in fact EVM based (so outside of Bitcoin, XRP or Solana). The people in and around the Ethereum Foundation are solving very interesting problems but nobody talk about it on HN. For example I believe they are at the forefront of the use zero-knowledge proofs. Just dig into [0]. Is the Ethereum F…
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I got into crypto in 2017 when I came across the phrase "money is a technology". That idea fascinated me. But fast forward several years later, and it's obvious that money might be a technology in the sense that it's a tool, but more importantly, money is a culture .
Or if you read Sapiens you'll know money is a story we tell each other. You can't literally do much with a coin or bank note or numbers on a screen but as long as we all believe it has value, it does. It becomes part of the culture, as you say. Crypto also has to tell a story about why it's valuable. There was a lot of anti government rhetoric and fear mongering (from libertarians) but the public never really believe…