Yea, sorry but not going to trust proponents of MMT on economic issues. Yes crypto is mostly a scam. I do think that btc is different though.
Why All Cryptocurrency Should Die in a Fire
101–110 of 341 posts
Re: Why All Cryptocurrency Should Die in a Fire
#102>help me make it die in a fire I'm rather mistrustful of people that are this forthy about being against a new technology. If it really is that devoid of merit it'll die on its own. I also think it is a rather fundamental failure to see the big picture. Not efficient? Well neither was the Ford model T. Newer generations are getting better. Similarly somehow existing systems seem to get a free pass for things that are…
> I'm rather mistrustful of people that are this forthy about being against a new technology.
I believe this top comment reveals the real reason why many technologists actually hate cryptocurrency: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31356579#31356857
Re: Why All Cryptocurrency Should Die in a Fire
#103Somewhat relatedly, I’ve been wondering for a while now why so many people here are so intensely, emotionally against this tech (and consequently why so many mediocre articles on the topic with emotionally charged titles are upvoted to the front page). Plenty of different arguments are offered by the commentariat, some of which have merit. But whether the stated reasons are environmental issues, political implication…
Some of it is because so much of the space is just naked scams.
And then the stuff that isn't overtly a scam tends not to make a lot of sense. Bitcoin is a wasteful way to do what it does, and things like that.
Re: Why All Cryptocurrency Should Die in a Fire
#104>help me make it die in a fire I'm rather mistrustful of people that are this forthy about being against a new technology. If it really is that devoid of merit it'll die on its own. I also think it is a rather fundamental failure to see the big picture. Not efficient? Well neither was the Ford model T. Newer generations are getting better. Similarly somehow existing systems seem to get a free pass for things that are…
> I'm rather mistrustful of people that are this forthy about being against a new technology.
I don't really give a crap about what people do or don't do with new technology, ultimately what people want to spend their time and money on is up to them.
However, "Crypto" is different. If all it was was just the unbelievably irritating crypto bros rug pulling, ponzi scheming, wash trading, ugly NFT shilling and hacking all the while claiming to be at the spearhead of a solution to pretty much every human problem in existence then so be it. I would be capable of ignoring it. I would read a different article, do some work or go for a walk, ignored, done.
But "Crypto" (specifically the energy intensive kind) has a different problem, and that's that it has /massive/ externalities that it simply ignores, forcing us, the people who want nothing to do with it, to now deal with it, and with the people in the ecosystem that we find so objectionable. We are dealing with the significant fallout from their hobbies. We are in the middle of 1) a very serious climate crisis 2) a cost of living crisis where people can't afford energy to cook and heat (in the UK at least) and 3) a war that would likely be brought to a stop sooner if we could phase out Russian gas sooner.
All things that could be alleviated if "Crypto" and it's so-far intangible benefits were to dissapear.
That is why I hate "Crypto", that's why I call people out about it, why I'm "frothy".
> Not efficient? Well neither was the Ford model T. Newer generations are getting better.
The Model T allowed people to do something that previously hadn't been done before. So far no-one has been able to point me at a single thing that public public blockchains do that either is worth doing and is only possible using blockchain tech, or is better (more power efficient, faster) than using pre-existing technology.
If people can point me at some of these things then we can at least start having a discussion about wether it's worth spending an entire country's worth of electricity on it.
Re: Why All Cryptocurrency Should Die in a Fire
#105>help me make it die in a fire I'm rather mistrustful of people that are this forthy about being against a new technology. If it really is that devoid of merit it'll die on its own. I also think it is a rather fundamental failure to see the big picture. Not efficient? Well neither was the Ford model T. Newer generations are getting better. Similarly somehow existing systems seem to get a free pass for things that are…
> If it really is that devoid of merit it'll die on its own.
Many bad things don't die on their own; we have to fight them to the end.
(We're slowly coming out of a global pandemic which was quite "devoid of merit", for instance, but it didn't recede on its own.)
Re: Why All Cryptocurrency Should Die in a Fire
#106Re: Why All Cryptocurrency Should Die in a Fire
#107Somewhat relatedly, I’ve been wondering for a while now why so many people here are so intensely, emotionally against this tech (and consequently why so many mediocre articles on the topic with emotionally charged titles are upvoted to the front page). Plenty of different arguments are offered by the commentariat, some of which have merit. But whether the stated reasons are environmental issues, political implication…
> I’m speculating about the reasons for the disproportionate level of ire directed against crypto on this forum
I don't personally know any people who became rich on cryptocurrencies and also don't feel any particular envy towards the people who I know of, via the internet, but am pretty vehemently against cryptocurrencies, so I'm a sample-size one counter-example to your thesis.
I obviously don't think that my ire against cryptocurrencies is disproportionate, since if I did, I'd scale it down until I thought it was proportionate, so I think that it's justified by the object-level issues.
If I were to speculate on why classes of people like me are more strongly opposed to cryptocurrencies than other people:
1. We are (or feel we are) more qualified to see many of its technical deficiencies, some of which have been patched over the years, others of which seem fundamental.
2. We agree with the "crypto people" on many topics, such as decentralisation or privacy, but think that their solutions are broken, and worse we feel that their philosophy and approach is a bit of a dark mirror universe of ours (to exaggerate _immensely_ imagine that both groups were religious people who agreed completely on matters of scripture, but they inexplicably decided to worship Ahriman instead of Ahura Mazda). See also "I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup"[0].
[0] https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anythin...
Re: Why All Cryptocurrency Should Die in a Fire
#108>help me make it die in a fire I'm rather mistrustful of people that are this forthy about being against a new technology. If it really is that devoid of merit it'll die on its own. I also think it is a rather fundamental failure to see the big picture. Not efficient? Well neither was the Ford model T. Newer generations are getting better. Similarly somehow existing systems seem to get a free pass for things that are…
> I'm rather mistrustful of people that are this forthy about being against a new technology. I don't really give a crap about what people do or don't do with new technology, ultimately what people want to spend their time and money on is up to them. However, "Crypto" is different. If all it was was just the unbelievably irritating crypto bros rug pulling, ponzi scheming, wash trading, ugly NFT shilling and hacking a…
This. A 100% this.
Re: Why All Cryptocurrency Should Die in a Fire
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
I understand this privacy argument - but I'm wondering what the practical downside is of this "spying"? I've been using credit cards online for decades and I am yet to encounter anything negative from doing so. I get that my credit card provider knows that I'm buying £X of goods from merchant Y. But unless that merchant is very specific, the card company doesn't know what I've bought. And, if it did... so what? Perha…
A future government that is analogous to Nazi Germany wants to put certain groups into a concentration camp ("sexual deviants", religious minorities, you take your pick). Better hope there isn't a CC history that shows you buying sex toys or religious items in the last 30 years. Sure, in the western part of the world, you could think that this is paranoid, but depending on where you are in the world, and what minorit…
I'd say it's already relevant. From an article last week [0], location data identifying visits to Planned Parenthood was easily purchasable. While this particular company removed that category in response to the article [1], there's nothing that would prevent other data brokers from selling the same information. The US is far, far overdue for a GDPR-style privacy law.
(Also, we need a better term than "data brokers", as that term is biased toward their legitimacy. "Digital stalkers" or "stalkers for hire" imply that the stalking occurs after the point of hire, rather than being proactively performed on everybody. "Privacy abusers" is accurate, but non-specific. I don't have a term that would encompass the omnipresent spying, the danger of a dataset's existence against future threats, and the low price they put on our privacy. Bonus points if the term could call out the false dichotomy of public vs private.)
[0] https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7vzjb/location-data-abortio...
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/05/04/data-broker-safegraph-stops-...
Edit: That said, advocating for privacy is not advocating for cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrencies are by design massively inefficient, in the same way that a low-trust society is inefficient, and somehow touts that as a virtue.
Re: Why All Cryptocurrency Should Die in a Fire
#110>help me make it die in a fire I'm rather mistrustful of people that are this forthy about being against a new technology. If it really is that devoid of merit it'll die on its own. I also think it is a rather fundamental failure to see the big picture. Not efficient? Well neither was the Ford model T. Newer generations are getting better. Similarly somehow existing systems seem to get a free pass for things that are…
> The people certain it'll be a disaster seem just as silly...
I'm not certain, unfortunately. But I'm hoping.