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Crypto: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

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Re: Crypto: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

#151

Post by notahacker »

keiferski wrote: post #85
dagmx wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your first comment is a very common crypto talking point that isn't really borne in reality IMHO. It takes decades to see the impact. It almost never takes a decade to see the use, and that's what people are deriding. Crypto doesn't really solve a problem that needed solving and it is often the wrong solution for many things it's used for. All at a very high cost. Cryptocurrency hasn't really brought much in the way…

> It almost never takes a decade to see the use, If you study the history of technology, its ultimate impact is never manifest within a decade. It took decades for the Gutenberg Printing Press to spread around Europe and centuries for the consequences to see be seen (Protestant Reformation, newspapers, birth of the modern media, on and on.) This is the case for pretty much every other invention. > Crypto doesn't real…

I'm not sure why crypto is being compared with historic technologies in a world which lacked the communication and education to spread them, and not much-hyped Internet technologies like eCommerce video streaming or cloud computing which arguably had much greater technical barriers to spread than crypto but were ubiquitous within 10 years and exciting to people that didn't have a financial stake in them.

The second bit worth noting if you think crypto is more to follow the Gutenberg path, is that investing in him turned out to be a terrible decision: he made things which were tangibly useful from the start but lost money doing it...

Re: Crypto: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

#152

Post by neuronic »

1.5 decades into the tech, blockchain hasn't really provided any utility aside from easing drug transactions and money laundering.

I agree with the author that some interesting tech issues were solved but apparently this still doesn't lead to anything legitimate and more useful than the non-crypto version of whatever problem you're trying to solve.

Re: Crypto: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

#153

Post by grey-area »

sneak wrote: post #58
grey-area wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Popularity is not quality, usually the inverse.

If people are willing to pay for it, the people consuming it find it valuable, which is frequently a proxy for quality (in the eyes of those consumers - the ones who count in this equation). Quality of content is, of course, subjective. I have paid for Lady Gaga albums.

Monetary value is not quality either.

Quality is of course subjective, but there are certainly examples of things which are popular and trashy, or cost lots of money and are not high quality, and even some examples of things which are popular and trashy and cost lots of money but are not high quality (Melania Trump's interior design comes to mind).

Re: Crypto: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

#155

Post by petre »

dskloet wrote: post #123
jasongi wrote: post #115

I don't understand how any take on crypto can not mention that it is now the de-facto currency of online black markets, from pornhub to silk road 9.0 or whatever version we're up to. This is crypto's utility and the only thing I've seen crypto being used for seriously that isn't speculation. Cryptocurrency is disrupting the black markets the same way amazon/ebay/online shopping disrupted the retail markets. Crypto is…

> the only thing I've seen crypto being used for seriously that isn't speculation When paying for domain names or VPS (or anything online, but those are the cases where it's easy), I prefer paying with crypto because I don't want to give my credit card information to some stranger so they can misuse or lose it. This is not illegal and a legitimate use case.

There are Revolut single use virtual credit cards, prepaid credit cards, paypal etc.

Re: Crypto: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

#156

Post by GrumpyNl »

thomasikzelf wrote: post #131

Crypto needs to solve a problem. I think cryptocurrencies should focus on making a cheap currency that people can actually use. requirements: - low transaction costs - low volatility - many places where you can pay with it - secure - privacy - no tax problems - fast transactions - handle fraud - scalable If a crypto currency can solve above points by cutting out the middle man and making transactions virtually free i…

Its very strange that a country like Kazakh can influence the value of bitcoin, just by its power supplies. https://cointelegraph.com/news/kazakh-government-resigns-shu...

Re: Crypto: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

#157

Post by rland »

ethbr0 wrote: post #134
rland wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, there isn't. Money is useful because it is an abstraction of a physical process somewhere. Cryptocurrency can never be an abstraction of some physical process.† Therefore, I would argue, it can never be useful to us. † Well, technically, it actually is an abstraction of a physical process: a heat engine with 0% efficiency.

Well, commodity-based currency had non-zero value because it was an abstraction of a physical process somewhere. Proof of work. I have to spend time mining gold, so gold has value, so gold coins have value. But that wasn't sufficient alone to give it utility . And without utility, there is no buyer of last resort, and no floor under value. Hence taxes. Fiat currency removed the proof of work, and replaced it with pro…

The difference, though, is that the proof of work is qualitatively — physically! — a different type of work.

The value of money is derived from moving against thermodynamic equilibrium. Cryptocurrency’s value comes from moving towards thermodynamic equilibrium. The conversion of work into heat — not heat into work!

I’m not talking about taxation or apps. Those are things built with the axioms of crypto-evangelism. I’m talking about the physical fundamentals underlying those axioms.

Re: Crypto: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

#158

Post by hooande »

thomasikzelf wrote: post #131

Crypto needs to solve a problem. I think cryptocurrencies should focus on making a cheap currency that people can actually use. requirements: - low transaction costs - low volatility - many places where you can pay with it - secure - privacy - no tax problems - fast transactions - handle fraud - scalable If a crypto currency can solve above points by cutting out the middle man and making transactions virtually free i…

You're describing Visa. They've invented debit cards.

The only advantage to cryptocurrency is the concept of decentralized trust. A blockchain only has value in situations where no central authority can be trusted. If Nano solved every problem on your list the result would be what we already have, but with a distributed network of coin owners in control of it instead of credit card companies. That just doesn't seem like a very compelling benefit [0]

As the article says, I'm sure there are enthusiasts who are very interested in the technical problem of creating a global payment network. Unless they can do it for roughly half the cost of what we have now, it doesn't have a lot of practical value.

[0] I am aware that there are people who are locked out of financial systems because of corrupt governments, etc. But if 80%+ of the population can use the existing systems, they aren't going to go through the trouble of switching to a new currency for the sake of the 20% that can't. And even if they did, it wouldn't be long before the same corrupt governments found a way to lock certain people out of the new system

Re: Crypto: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

#159

Post by jasongi »

Slartie wrote: post #130
jasongi wrote: post #115

I don't understand how any take on crypto can not mention that it is now the de-facto currency of online black markets, from pornhub to silk road 9.0 or whatever version we're up to. This is crypto's utility and the only thing I've seen crypto being used for seriously that isn't speculation. Cryptocurrency is disrupting the black markets the same way amazon/ebay/online shopping disrupted the retail markets. Crypto is…

I'd add ransomware payments to the list, but otherwise your take "the problem was found back in 2011 - it's just that nobody wants to admit it" is spot-on! An interesting tangent of your BitTorrent analogy is that, for BitTorrent the protocol, an actually legal use case was found later: it is now used to create powerful ad-hoc CDNs for limited use cases with the novel property of gaining bandwidth automatically as mo…

I would consider ransomware under the umbrella of black markets. Perhaps "anything illegal" would have been a better description.

Nice point about BitTorrent. I'm sure crypto will have some niche adoptions in the future too. Apparently P2P game updates ended up being disabled though. Probably a good thing too - imagine the absolute carnage on ISPs if places like netflix decided to outsource their CDN to everyone's home internet.

https://web.archive.org/web/20160715104054/https://us.battle...

Re: Crypto: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

#160

Post by kmmlng »

jasongi wrote: post #142
dskloet wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the only thing I've seen crypto being used for seriously that isn't speculation When paying for domain names or VPS (or anything online, but those are the cases where it's easy), I prefer paying with crypto because I don't want to give my credit card information to some stranger so they can misuse or lose it. This is not illegal and a legitimate use case.

Crypto offers zero protection from fraud, as transactions are non reversible however if you pay by credit card goods are not delivered or if your card is used fraudulently, the credit card issuer can and will reverse the transactions. Also due to PCI standards almost all online transactions are done via a third party, PCI compliant payment processor. I don't see the value crypto is adding here. If you did have mispla…

With credit cards, you have to give out your details to whoever you are paying. That party will save them somewhere and then there is a possibility that someone else will gain access to your details and abuse them. You won't ultimaltely lose money here, because your credit card company will reverse the transactions, as you said. Being the victim of credit card fraud is still a hassle, however.

With crypto, the only thing you give out is your public key. No one can perform any fraudulent activity with just your public key. It is of course possible to be defrauded with crypto, but then it will be partially your fault because you did something you should not have. With credit cards, you can become the victim of fraud through no fault of your own.

I do think that is a difference worth pointing out.

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