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Cryptocurrency Is an Abject Disaster

drewdevault.com

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Re: Cryptocurrency Is an Abject Disaster

#211

Post by doggosphere »

shkkmo wrote: post #207
doggosphere wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the current use case of cryptocurrency is breaking or avoiding the law, it has yet to find a use case outside that. If the law is your baseline standard for what is moral, then you should probably try a little harder and put some thought into whether or not cryptocurrencies deserve to actually be illegal. For the most part, it is not illegal to own or trade in cryptocurrencies in the developed world. The US doll…

Bitcoin is useful for illegal things because they are illegal, morality does not enter in to it. If those things became legal, bitcoin wouldn't be needed for them anymore. If the US dollar fails in the near future, your bit coin will be mostly useless because the global system that generates wealth and handles logistics will have broken. People will be starving, bartering and looting. nobody will want to give you any…

This is where your lack of knowledge in economics and trade really shows.

If the US dollar ends up hyperinflating, assets like gold, bitcoin, stocks, housing, etc. become very, very expensive. They become expensive because everyone seeks to escape USD into safety of assets that are inflation resistant.

So you have it backwards: people will give EVERYTHING of value to get those assets, because those are the only things they want to be paid in. They are the only things capable of storing value.

Its funny you think nobody will want to trade for "stupid worthless ones and zeroes", because today they trade for "stupid worthless paper with President's faces printed on them", and before that, they traded for "stupid worthless shiny yellow rocks".

Re: Cryptocurrency Is an Abject Disaster

#212

Post by 22c »

danaris wrote: post #192
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…

I've heard a lot about proof-of-stake as being a lesser drain on energy per unit of mining, but I'm still very unclear on—well, many things about PoS, actually, but one in particular stands out: How would eliminating all Proof-of-Work cryptocurrencies and shifting entirely to Proof-of-Stake eliminate the incentive for miners to monopolize every last bit of computing resources they can? My understanding of cryptocurre…

>How would eliminating all Proof-of-Work cryptocurrencies and shifting entirely to Proof-of-Stake eliminate the incentive for miners to monopolize every last bit of computing resources they can?

I guess the point here is that you could effectively stake on a Raspberry Pi with a 256GB SD card for the next 5 years or so, and you don't need more Raspberry Pis or SD cards to stake higher amounts. The main limiting factor is typically you need to be a full-node, which means syncing the entire blockchain.

If that's not really green enough for you, you can also do delegated staking. One person could run a staking service on their Raspberry Pi for 1,000 people, etc.

Re: Cryptocurrency Is an Abject Disaster

#213

Post by shkkmo »

doggosphere wrote: post #211
shkkmo wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin is useful for illegal things because they are illegal, morality does not enter in to it. If those things became legal, bitcoin wouldn't be needed for them anymore. If the US dollar fails in the near future, your bit coin will be mostly useless because the global system that generates wealth and handles logistics will have broken. People will be starving, bartering and looting. nobody will want to give you any…

This is where your lack of knowledge in economics and trade really shows. If the US dollar ends up hyperinflating, assets like gold, bitcoin, stocks, housing, etc. become very, very expensive. They become expensive because everyone seeks to escape USD into safety of assets that are inflation resistant. So you have it backwards: people will give EVERYTHING of value to get those assets, because those are the only thing…

If you have hyper inflation, all the prices are going up. However assets with little to no practical value and no long term proven track record of value will not be where people will go to seek safety.

Hard assets with long track records of value will beat bitcoin hands down.

Re: Cryptocurrency Is an Abject Disaster

#214

Post by davidgerard »

knorker wrote: post #130
tjk_ wrote: post #82

I work for a large provider in the VCS/CI space. While I appreciate the varied opinions in the comments here on the perceived usefulness of Crypto, I think folks outside of the space simply do not understand how much time is being spent combating the issue. If we, for example, had a team of 20 working on our CI offering, we would have re-allocated at least 50% of them to work full-time on combating the miners. And th…

In short: Cryptocurrencies create a price floor for: * Electricity * Now hard drives? (some asshat made a "proof of space" system) * CI * Graphics cards * Any general computation

> some asshat

Bram Cohen, the inventor of BitTorrent. I've rarely seen a first-idea to second-idea decline that bad.

Re: Cryptocurrency Is an Abject Disaster

#215

Post by davidgerard »

kemonocode wrote: post #77
knorker wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From my reading it looks like the "developing world" use case is pure propaganda. E.g. someone investigated the "bitcoin in venezuela!" claim. Actually going there and tracking down use. Turns out it was a bitcoin investor who went to venezuela to do a transaction for the sole purpose of screaming "bitcoin in venezuela" to pump up the price.

You might want to check LocalBitcoin's usage in Venezuela [1] to get a clearer picture. It's not pure propaganda. [1] https://coin.dance/volume/localbitcoins/VES

yes, it's gone up from negligible to negligible.

The use case in Venezuela is wealthy Venezuelans getting their wealth out of the country.

When bitcoiners say "refugees" as a use case, they mean rich people looting and running.

Re: Cryptocurrency Is an Abject Disaster

#216

Post by davidgerard »

danaris wrote: post #192
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…

I've heard a lot about proof-of-stake as being a lesser drain on energy per unit of mining, but I'm still very unclear on—well, many things about PoS, actually, but one in particular stands out: How would eliminating all Proof-of-Work cryptocurrencies and shifting entirely to Proof-of-Stake eliminate the incentive for miners to monopolize every last bit of computing resources they can? My understanding of cryptocurre…

> How would eliminating all Proof-of-Work cryptocurrencies and shifting entirely to Proof-of-Stake eliminate the incentive for miners to monopolize every last bit of computing resources they can?

It absolutely wouldn't - as we see from Proof-of-Space trashing the hard disk market recently.

Re: Cryptocurrency Is an Abject Disaster

#217

Post by crecker »

> This rant has been a long time coming and is probably one of the most justified expressions of anger I've written for this blog yet. However, it will probably be the last one.

You're free to disagree whatever you wish to, but from this to "I'm ashamed to share an industry". Hey man, who are you? Then I'm ashamed to share the web with you. It's fine to disagree/agree/comment, but I'm little bit triggered of your words.

TL;DR: "cryptocurrencies is evil", but you are not understanding that it's not the technology that is evil. Cryptocurrency is a tool, and as a tool, many aspects of it depend on the people that use it. Let's then rant about AI (that is used for military scopes, so must be evil!) and IoT (ahh those chips that can not be found!!1111! Crisis!).

You're not ranting about cryptocurrencies, you're ranting about attackers. I would personally remove your last words about "ashamed".

[spoiler: I work with cryptocurrencies, sorry]

Re: Cryptocurrency Is an Abject Disaster

#218

Post by yamdeb »

tjk_ wrote: post #82

I work for a large provider in the VCS/CI space. While I appreciate the varied opinions in the comments here on the perceived usefulness of Crypto, I think folks outside of the space simply do not understand how much time is being spent combating the issue. If we, for example, had a team of 20 working on our CI offering, we would have re-allocated at least 50% of them to work full-time on combating the miners. And th…

You can't win this by being reactive. It's the same dynamic as with terrorism. No government can keep terrorism under control, if it just responds to terrorist attacks. You need special task force which infiltrates and basically terrorize terrorists, so that they don`t have time and resources to plan for new attacks. Same with mining, if all miners have to care about is just how to bypass your heuristics, they will always outnumber and outsmart you, but if they will also have to spend time to constantly patch their own code to keep blockchain and mining pools running, meanwhile maintaining consensus that mining shouldn't be dropped all together, to avoid constant proactive attacks on network, only then you stand a chance.

Re: Cryptocurrency Is an Abject Disaster

#220

Post by kemonocode »

davidgerard wrote: post #215
kemonocode wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might want to check LocalBitcoin's usage in Venezuela [1] to get a clearer picture. It's not pure propaganda. [1] https://coin.dance/volume/localbitcoins/VES

yes, it's gone up from negligible to negligible. The use case in Venezuela is wealthy Venezuelans getting their wealth out of the country. When bitcoiners say "refugees" as a use case, they mean rich people looting and running.

I'd hardly consider myself "wealthy" (certainly NOT by Western standards) but sure, whatever fits best your own views. ;)

I'd say if you have enough money to be a capital flight risk, there are far less cumbersome means to get your money out of the country than crypto.

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