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On anti-crypto toxicity

blog.mollywhite.net

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Re: On anti-crypto toxicity

#211

Post by ModernMech »

trutannus wrote: post #203
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any fix for a failure in human organization(s) is going to come from ... humans. There are no hall monitors here, and there's also no magic wand. When things are of a large enough scope, the way that humans tend to organize to get things done, or get things fixed, is called "a state". Just like all human efforts, the outcome will likely not be perfect. But there actually isn't another way. Sure, you can suggest the i…

> There are no hall monitors here, and there's also no magic wand. Right, and saying "just pass a law" is asking the hall monitors to wave a wand.

The law isn’t magic though. It’s a system we designed for this purpose and we know how it works.

Re: On anti-crypto toxicity

#213

Post by hypertele-Xii »

throwaway4aday wrote: post #195
pjerem wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Use the state to fix failures of the state? Yup, that's how it works in democracies...

More like that's how democracies fail. Our current method of "fixing" failures of the state involves layering more and more legislation and regulation on top of the broken legislation and regulation. We do nothing to address the root causes of those failures because that would mean closing a lot of the loop holes that allow politicians to get rich by leveraging their positions aka corruption. Why else would we need b…

Allowing politicians to get rich by leveraging their positions is still better than the alternative. What's the alternative, by the way? What do you suggest we replace democracy with?

Re: On anti-crypto toxicity

#214

Post by aww_dang »

the_only_law wrote: post #180
kuschku wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is that with so many more scams than real projects, and so much focus on buzzwords, it’s more likely to fall for a scam than to actually find a real useful project. And even the not-entirely-a-scam projects, be it NFTs, the entire ETH or BTC sphere, are so full of money laundering, trade front running, people using it as investment vehicle, etc. that you can’t trust these projects either.

> and so much focus on buzzwords The “blockchain” thing killed it for me personally. Only so long I could just sit and see people naively wave around blockchain as a solution to every goddamn technical and social problem they can think of.

Tech does this generally. "Cloud" is another all encompassing buzzword. There are plenty of cloud solutions which are arguably ridiculous. Some here buy that kool-aid. Where's the self-righteous outrage?

People buy all kinds of financial products which may not work out for them. There's an entire industry of OTC pink sheet stocks. Again, where's the outrage?

There's plenty of bad actors anywhere, but it becomes toxic when you have an app with an optional crypto integration and people come out of left field preaching their climate doom, crypto will boil the oceans, capitalist greed will be the end of us all, and all crypto is a scam. Meanwhile I'm offering a free to play game?

There's a toxic confluence of engineer's anti-biz perspective combined with a larger ID politics theme. Some benefiting from crypto are outside of the traditional channels. Wherever there's a disruption people take offense. In a word it is a hysteria over changing norms.

Re: On anti-crypto toxicity

#215

Post by djbusby »

trutannus wrote: post #203
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any fix for a failure in human organization(s) is going to come from ... humans. There are no hall monitors here, and there's also no magic wand. When things are of a large enough scope, the way that humans tend to organize to get things done, or get things fixed, is called "a state". Just like all human efforts, the outcome will likely not be perfect. But there actually isn't another way. Sure, you can suggest the i…

> There are no hall monitors here, and there's also no magic wand. Right, and saying "just pass a law" is asking the hall monitors to wave a wand.

No. It's asking society to correct itself via legislation (we've done that before).

It's slower and less sexy than new-tech and has a better track record.

Re: On anti-crypto toxicity

#216

Post by OGWhales »

eldenwrong wrote: post #191
traceroute66 wrote: post #81

IMHO the problem with crypto is the very thing that its proponents cite as one of its key benefits, its decentralised nature. We are told that crypto is supposedly a way to "stick it to the man", to fight those "evil banks/governments". The trouble is that unlike fiat currency, there is no fundamental means of valuation. Crypto is worth what its worth on the day based largely or exclusively on entirely non-economic v…

Quoted post unavailable.

You should elaborate after making such a claim, otherwise your comment will be dismissed as meaningless.

Re: On anti-crypto toxicity

#217

Post by logifail »

sneak wrote: post #198
Traster wrote: post #46

I think toxicity from the anti-crypto crowd is basically inevitable at this point. It has been a decade of dumb claims and ridiculous assertions from the pro-crypto crowd. None of their claims have materially panned out. There's some promise in some places - mainly in the most nerdy corners of ETH, but it's still only promises. Meanwhile, this long protracted failure has been accompanied by a massive increase in stup…

> None of their claims have materially panned out. Well, I can send arbitrarily large amounts of money across the planet, to any country with internet access, for tiny sums, safely, irreversibly, to anyone. Many people have sent many millions to Ukraine, for example. Transnational, permissionless internet money is quite handy. That wasn't possible before, and that's pretty useful, so I think the basic claim (that cry…

In one corner we have types who want to send

> arbitrarily large amounts of money

and in the other corner we have the types who know about and enforce AML and KYC legislation.

How is this possibly going to end well for the first group?

Re: On anti-crypto toxicity

#218

Post by aww_dang »

ggm wrote: post #57

What level of economic activity in crypto is unrelated to speculative gain. If you want to stop angry responses to claims for the value to economic process you need to be honest about the extent to which crypto is a game for massive speculative gain, pump and dump, washing and money laundering. Use of public signed ledger to audit value flow and provide certainty to low doc activity like cash in Africa, payments to f…

Is speculation unacceptable?

Re: On anti-crypto toxicity

#219

Post by greybox »

mattdesl wrote: post #165
greybox wrote: post #94

Regarding the list of questions that are presented here EG - "How can we create a more equitable financial system, where everyone has access to banking services?" Can anyone explain to me how crypto is uniquely suited to solve this problem? I'm not in principal against crypto currencies existing, but more and more I just see people trying to apply it to problems that they think exist because "the financial system is…

There are several properties of blockchains that could improve upon our current financial structures. 1) Custody: with fiat, the concept of self-custody is "store your cash under your bed," and as we continue to move away from cash into digital money, this option is being eroded. In crypto, the concept of self-custody may be an EOA (account based on a private key) smart contract (such as a multi-signatory account), o…

While I agree with some of your points here, (Mitigating the need for intermediaries in certain situations)

- Crypto inherently holds no security benifits over traditional banking. Fortran has been used for decades because it has worked, and there has been little need for change.Fortran isn't a security hole in itself. In fact it has all of the same problems with private PIN access and MFA, PLUS all the downsides that come with malicious smart contracts. As far as personal security goes, crypto is much much worse.

- The immutable and public nature of smart contracts. Why should anything be immutable? What if something is done by mistake, or by fraud? The benefits of traditional banking is that at the end of the day, there is a human on the other side that can reverse things if stuff goes wrong.

- I see no benefit of the entire chain being public, just because I give someone my public key, because I spend money with them, or my employer needs to pay me, why should they be able to see EVERY transaction I have ever made?

Re: On anti-crypto toxicity

#220

Post by trutannus »

ModernMech wrote: post #211
trutannus wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are no hall monitors here, and there's also no magic wand. Right, and saying "just pass a law" is asking the hall monitors to wave a wand.

The law isn’t magic though. It’s a system we designed for this purpose and we know how it works.

Except that's not what I'm saying at all. What I'm saying is:

1. Bad laws got us into this place

2. There's a lot of inertia in government

3. There's a lot of stake holders in government who don't have citizen's interests at heart

4. It's illogical to think you can, in light of this, just pass a law and fix it.

Yeah, we designed the law, and we know how it works. Sadly, we know also that the way it works is generally not how it should, and it has been co-opted often for the powerful.

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