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Cryptocurrency Is an Abject Disaster

drewdevault.com

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Re: Cryptocurrency Is an Abject Disaster

#111

Post by mijamo »

pk_kinetic wrote: post #100
reducesuffering wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No I don't think it's poor form. If we had a forum full of people talking about how great Facebook is, and when forced to disclose their $FB holdings, realize everyone is holding $100,000+ of $FB, we might realize we have skin in the game to talk it up instead of objectively evaluating it. Big difference in incentives between $10 and $100,000. Stake 0.05 BTC, 1.2 ETH

Imagine a world where you can’t argue about anything without disclosing the exact amount of stake you have in it. Skin in the game works both ways. FOMO is a real thing.

Your comment is funny because in many countries all people that talk in a national assembly need to disclose their stakes. So yes I can imagine it, because a lot of parliaments work exactly like that.

And I am not sure what "both ways" means but of course you have to disclose if you have taken a short position in the matter.

Re: Cryptocurrency Is an Abject Disaster

#112

Post by shkkmo »

eric_cc wrote: post #97
shkkmo wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think most, if not all, of those things work fine (and arguably better) without using a cryptocurrency.

so you see no value to: - DeFi - decentralized data storage. - a decentralized & censorship resistant video streaming platform. - Artists getting compensated fairly via NFT's. - Banking the bankless - DAO's (btw, how can DAO's work better without being decentralized? hahaha) - A decentralized and censorship resistant social network - Sythentics. What is a better solution to tokenizing assets in your opinion? and on a…

I see plenty of value in many of those issues. Some appear to be just jargon or beg the question. I see zero evidence that cryptocurrency is necessary or even beneficial in solving any of those problems.

Re: Cryptocurrency Is an Abject Disaster

#113

Post by knorker »

pk_kinetic wrote: post #100
reducesuffering wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No I don't think it's poor form. If we had a forum full of people talking about how great Facebook is, and when forced to disclose their $FB holdings, realize everyone is holding $100,000+ of $FB, we might realize we have skin in the game to talk it up instead of objectively evaluating it. Big difference in incentives between $10 and $100,000. Stake 0.05 BTC, 1.2 ETH

Imagine a world where you can’t argue about anything without disclosing the exact amount of stake you have in it. Skin in the game works both ways. FOMO is a real thing.

You do know that ethical journalists talking about stocks disclose if they are long or short on that stock, in the article they're writing, right?

Re: Cryptocurrency Is an Abject Disaster

#114

Post by [deleted] »

reducesuffering wrote: post #43
HPsquared wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's inherently bad about deflation? It's happened routinely throughout most of history until recently. Speculation is a good thing, it's a form of entrepreneurship. Example of historic deflation: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Deflation

Deflation causes a positive feedback loop of reducing trade. If it's better to hoard currency so you can buy 10% more things next year, everyone starts hoarding currency and reducing trade, leading to suppliers dropping prices to encourage purchases, leading to further deflation, and so on. Trade grinds to a halt as everyone holds currency in anticipation of buying more later. Stake: 0.05 BTC, 1.2 ETH

[deleted]

Re: Cryptocurrency Is an Abject Disaster

#115

Post by joepie91_ »

acdha wrote: post #21
knorker wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But cars had value. They have value. They had value from day 1. Cryptocurrencies just don't. It's all smoke and mirrors, where everything would be better without the blockchain. Without irreversibility. Without everything about it. There are whole books about how terrible and useless it is. And please do what the article said: How much of your own money is dependent on you selling the lie of cryptocurrency or smart c…

> But cars had value. They have value. They had value from day 1. This is so true: cars have massive externalities but the 20th century was spend rebuilding the world around them because they were useful. You saw that immediately and the true costs only became more apparent years later. Cryptocurrency is as if Robert Moses had redesigned NYC around pet rock warehousing on the theory that someone would later find a us…

> This is so true: cars have massive externalities but the 20th century was spend rebuilding the world around them because they were useful.

Well, no, not really.

While cars do have non-zero usefulness, the reason we rebuilt the world around them was because of car manufacturer lobbying, not because of some shared revelation about their value to society.

Re: Cryptocurrency Is an Abject Disaster

#116

Post by acdha »

eric_cc wrote: post #79
acdha wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain in detail? Citing sources for claimed benefits over the established services it’s replicating?

Sure, if you compensate me for my time and effort in doing so. I'll compile a report for you for 0.0037 sats.

I'll take that as “no”, then. I mean, you're the salesguy popping into the thread to say we should all buy in to something, you might need a better pitch if you want to get rich that way.

Re: Cryptocurrency Is an Abject Disaster

#117

Post by pk_kinetic »

yui43 wrote: post #101
pk_kinetic wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In that same vein, I assume that anyone who comes out against crypto has little or no stake in it. And I’m usually correct.

That’s a revelation as mind blowing as noticing people against drugs tend not to consume them. Only crypto folks seem to think skin in the game is a prerequisite for criticism and objective discussion. Do you need to own other humans to form an opinion on slavery? Do you need to eat meat to form an opinion on being a vegetarian? Do you need to be in Congress to opine on its dealings? Why is cryptocurrency any differe…

There is no element of FOMO or being proven wrong when talking about slavery or drugs.

When someone comes out against crypto and I find out they have just sold their stake, that seems really suspect to me.

Re: Cryptocurrency Is an Abject Disaster

#118

Post by robjan »

eric_cc wrote: post #79
acdha wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain in detail? Citing sources for claimed benefits over the established services it’s replicating?

Sure, if you compensate me for my time and effort in doing so. I'll compile a report for you for 0.0037 sats.

0.0037sats is currently US$0.00000197. We have a deal but I'll transfer another currency since the transaction fee is several orders of magnitude greater than your quoted price.

Re: Cryptocurrency Is an Abject Disaster

#119

Post by 22c »

ddevault wrote: post #98
22c wrote: post #86

So it seems Drew is biased here, he is biased because his service is being used by thieves to make money. My tainted opinion: I think the criticisms of Proof-of-Work are totally justified here. There are perverse incentives for "miners" to execute work in the cheapest way they can, whether that is JS miners, bot farms, abuse of free services, hacked AWS accounts, abusing favorable tenancy conditions etc. and even if…

>So it seems Drew is biased here, he is biased because his service is being used by thieves to make money. Thieves using my service to make money is what pushed me over the edge into writing this piece, but I have a well-documented history of criticising cryptocurrencies. Here are some examples on HN: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

You're asking people to document their own bias, so I think it is only fair to point out yours.

Do you believe that cryptocurrency as a whole is an abject disaster? Do you support efforts to reform consensus with alternatives to Proof-of-Work (eg. Proof-of-Stake, Delegated Byzantine Fault Tolerance, etc.) or do you think cryptocurrency is a lost cause?

Re: Cryptocurrency Is an Abject Disaster

#120

Post by xxxxxxx12 »

aeroheim wrote: post #58

The most alarming thing to me is how effective cryptocurrencies are in drawing out the inner greed of most people. It's created an obsession of quick wealth among a lot of otherwise normal people, hijacking their rationality and further propagating the viral nature of it. If you take a look at many of the online communities for cryptocurrencies online you'll notice a lot of disturbing behavior that's very cult-like.…

> It's created an obsession of quick wealth among a lot of otherwise normal people

It's showing a demand for an asset that isn't linked to the central planning of government where they continually and arbitrarily inject as much extra currency as they want whenever they catastrophically mess up sovereign budgets.

That's not greed. It's an interest in safety from a drug-addict-like government that opens the floodgates on a whim.

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