101–110 of 150 posts
I have thought about this with Bitcoin: if the protocol and potential capabilities are so interesting, why is 99% of the conversation related to Bitcoin about the current price. It does make me believe that greed is the predominant driver of most Bitcoin holders, which to me makes the whole concept a lot less principled than people pretend it is.
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Admittedly I got in from a greed perspective, but as I read more about the philosophy of bitcoin I stayed for a distributed, censorship-proof currency. Why do I need permission from a central authority to send and receive money? Why do we allow credit cards to invade our privacy and observe our purchasing history? Why store my wealth in fiat that's guaranteed to lose at least 2% of its value every year? It's way out…
You dont need permission to send funds, provided they are legal and you can proove that. These checks are for reason. You dont want money loundering and criminal money flowing around unchecked. Pay income tax on your cash and send them wherever you want (legaly).
This is a weird, angry screed. Op should read The Ascent of Money and maybe worry less about the moral failings of other humans. Peace and trust cannot exist without currency. Money lubricates peaceful resolution of conflict. If you need food and I have it, trade or violence are your only options if currency doesn’t exist. Screaming at Bitcoin is like screaming at evolution. As long as humans evolve, money will keep…
This is completely false. Currency is orthogonal to trust.
>Money lubricates peaceful resolution of conflict.
Just as easily as it is the driver behind conflict.
>If you need food and I have it, trade or violence are your only options if currency doesn’t exist.
Trade, gift or violence are your only options regardless of the existence of currency.
What currency does is help to expand the number of people that can do business beyond the number of people one can have a personal relationship with.
That is immensely powerful, but it also enables a whole world of fraud and bad things that we need a functioning trusted regulator to deal with.
I think the author needs to integrate into these arguments the Nixon Shock of 1971 and what’s happening with inflation in the US since 2008. There’s a reason the Dow just hit a record high and it’s not because the fundamentals of those firms are strong. I’m not a Bitcoin holder but the correct finger pointing here is at monetary policy.
i disagree if you mean people are somehow buying it as a hedge to the dollar
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I'm not sure I understand the hate for NFTs. Don't get me wrong, the concept of NFT as currently used is completely absurd and definitely overhyped. But what is bad about it? People who spend their money on NFTs mostly do it because they got rich in the past few years gambling on BTC or ETH, and now use that money to basically tip the artists they like. Or they plan to resell the token at some point, which is pure sp…
It's just indicative of the fact that we're 20 years into the blockchain, and the only real use case seems to be "acquire garish amounts of wealth from nowhere." Something everyone wants for sure, but if that's all it is, the party's gonna stop someday.
The community around Bitcoin is one of the most toxic. It's the main reason I haven't bought, and won't buy, any BTC (regardless of the fact I think the tech is completely subpar). Having said that, there's plenty of really great communities around crypto that shouldn't be pooled together along with Bitcoin. Nano, for example, is probably the most hated altcoin by Bitcoin maximalists (probably because they feel threa…
>The community around Bitcoin is one of the most toxic. It's the main reason I haven't bought, and won't buy, any BTC (regardless of the fact I think the tech is completely subpar). In that case "Have fun staying poor"
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Sometimes I wonder if getting people to click on more ads was actually a more socially beneficial project for that talent.
If you look at it from the perspective that ad-clicking has funded the biggest information retrieval system and the biggest human connection platform, yes it was overall socially beneficial.
The community around Bitcoin is one of the most toxic. It's the main reason I haven't bought, and won't buy, any BTC (regardless of the fact I think the tech is completely subpar). Having said that, there's plenty of really great communities around crypto that shouldn't be pooled together along with Bitcoin. Nano, for example, is probably the most hated altcoin by Bitcoin maximalists (probably because they feel threa…
And what's to say nano won't go the same way as bitcoin. By which I mean it will also attract its share of vocal proponents who want to get rich and will act the way you describe the current bitcoin community. It is also an unfair assessment of the bitcoin community as it is pretty much based on the most vocal proponents and not for example based on the development community.
The development is not a victim here.
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The point of a currency is to enable a society . A frequent claim about cryptocurrencies is that they can enable a better society than fiat. The proof is in the pudding.
I don't see how not participating in cryptocurrency communities prevents you from transacting with anyone else.
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Those engineers are so smart they refuse to scale Bitcoin.
No, they built some of the most well thought scaling solutions in forms of layer 2 (payment channels, lightning network, zk-rollups) and many other solutions like sharding, etc. You 're the one who refuses to see those solutions.