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Crypto is an unproductive bubble

alexkolchinski.com

11–20 of 539 posts

Re: Crypto is an unproductive bubble

#11
post #5

Counter point - art itself has absolutely zero non-monetary applications. If you disagree, then you must admit NFTs can be appreciated as art. If so, the argument of the OP is refuted. If you think art can be appreciated without being an NFT, then why pay any amount of money for any physical art when a super high resolution PNG does the same thing?

The NFT art is art.

The NFT itself isn't - it's in fact just a .. wait for it now .....financial tool to monetize said art.

got 'em

Re: Crypto is an unproductive bubble

#13
post #5

Counter point - art itself has absolutely zero non-monetary applications. If you disagree, then you must admit NFTs can be appreciated as art. If so, the argument of the OP is refuted. If you think art can be appreciated without being an NFT, then why pay any amount of money for any physical art when a super high resolution PNG does the same thing?

I see NFT as an alias to a file.

Re: Crypto is an unproductive bubble

#14
post #5

Counter point - art itself has absolutely zero non-monetary applications. If you disagree, then you must admit NFTs can be appreciated as art. If so, the argument of the OP is refuted. If you think art can be appreciated without being an NFT, then why pay any amount of money for any physical art when a super high resolution PNG does the same thing?

Anyone whose been to a museum knows that super high resolution images are not the same as art. They have a limit amount of color information, can’t be displayed in the same way unless you print them (which is difficult to do well), and don’t have any 3d features (like brush strokes).

That said, people are willing to pay irrationally large amounts of money for art for pretty similar reasons to why they pay money for NFTs.

Re: Crypto is an unproductive bubble

#16
Claim 1: bubbles are natural, that doesn't mean that underlying solutions are wrong, just that not all speculators are right or understand the problems being solved.

Claim 2: Google 'Bitcoin Spacechains'

Claim 3: On a long enough time scale all discoveries are minor, this is what it means to always be optimistically solving problems at the beginning of infinity.

Re: Crypto is an unproductive bubble

#18
post #6

I have a hard time imagining how your normal everyday people would put any faith whatsoever in crypto. It's another step removed from "just a bunch of numbers in an account" (current banking) that is even harder to explain and justify. Why should they trust it? So how can it succeed if everyday people don't want to use it?

At least with current numbers on account there is multiple governments involved trying to keep the value pretty stable overall. As that is best alternative in general for their politicians to continue staying in power. And other options are probably worse...

Modern monetary policies whatever they are exist for reason, things would likely be worse without them. And the big cryptos have no monetary tools...

Re: Crypto is an unproductive bubble

#19
One of the biggest drawbacks for blockchain is that transactions can't be revoked after the fact (with the only exception being costly forks of the entire ledger), and there's no additional human oversight (like I'd get when sending a large amount of money through a bank) to protect me.

If someone steals my credit card, I have my credit card company to give me some level of protection. They can block transactions if they think it's stolen, and if I report it as stolen I can claw back money from fraudulent purchases.

If I purchase something and don't get what I paid for, I can contest it with customer service or my credit card company.

With crypto, a software flaw used to steal crypto can kill an entire company. They're largely powerless to stop it once the transaction has gone through.

With crypto, a xss attack or a misplaced password can cost me all of my coins.

With crypto, I have to triple check the address I'm sending coins to because I can't undo it.

With crypto, I have to spend what's sometimes a significant amount of money just to complete a transaction, and transactions can take minutes or hours to complete.

I think there's a future in crypto but we're in the dotcom boom days of it where most of the value is in speculation (and I suppose illegal purchases on the darknet). I'll wait for crypto 2.0.

Re: Crypto is an unproductive bubble

#20
> Fiat currencies administered by competent central bankers have the attractive feature that their governance can be used as a tool to cool excesses and calm panics when the credit cycle goes through its inevitable revolutions.

No. Gold standard has none of the properties you told. Fiat currency is a disaster and evil. Besides, it's also likely the only reason why cryptocurrency is drawing attention to anyone.

https://henvic.dev/posts/bitcoin/

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