231–240 of 260 posts
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 a…
Starting up crypto miners, on the other hand, is a very low-risk endeavor. The worst that happens is you have to sign up for a VPN due to getting your IP banned. You probably won't make a ton of money (unless you do some major automation), but you will get something out of it that could dramatically increase in value, and it's probably small enough that it's literally not worth the time for affected companies to have their lawyers draft strongly worded letters, much less pursue you in court.
So, while law enforcement has a very limited number of terrorist groups to infiltrate, groups of crypto-scammers form and dissolve overnight, making it much more difficult to be proactive.
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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
> If it's better to hoard currency so you can buy 10% more things next year, everyone starts hoarding currency But they don't. Not if it's things they need now , like food, or want now : electronics have been deflationary for the last 70 years or so -- when you bought the device you typed your comment on, you knew full well that a year later you would get a better one for cheaper, and yet you didn't hoard your curren…
This is really a complaint against Proof of Work based consensus protocols. "Cryptocurrency" is also kind of a dumb term. Everyone seems to still think this is about creating new currencies. Really we are talking about tokens that represent some component of a system . Yes that is general because the base for experimentation with tokens is absurdly vast. God we need to move beyond thinking about Bitcoin! Really this…
> This is really a complaint against Proof of Work based consensus protocols. I wouldn't say so. The multi-level marketing ponzi scheme things would still be present. > "Cryptocurrency" is also kind of a dumb term. Yes, but "crypto" means something else. > Everyone seems to still think this is about creating new currencies. It's not. It's about greed and creating money for yourself. Currencies are just more direct. E…
After seeing a few of your replies on this thread I'd like to comment on this: what I see is someone who's using their own personal beliefs as justification on why something isn't useful, failing to understand others have their own beliefs and situations that make the technology useful to them.
For me, and others, there is a deep value in a decentralized, fault tolerant, fast, global, user controlled, immutable ledger of payments and store of value. You might argue that we have existing centralized solutions to these problems, which you believe are better, but that doesn't invalidate the inherit value I (and others) attribute to such a system. Being able to transact across the world in seconds for less than a bank wire and without a central authority is useful. Yes a centralized authority like PayPal can do it faster and with less resources, no that doesn't mean the decentralized method is useless.
Holdings: 5% of my net worth in various proof of stake coins, hoping to recoup money I lost to inflation not playing the equities game so I can afford a home.
some fair arguments here... but this is exactly the same kind of vibe most people emitted when i went to CS grad school in the early 90s. everyone was like, 'oh msft is so evil. they suck.' and i just didn't understand. in reality msft put compute in front of everyone and created an insane amount of opportunity. this sounds like a 'get off my lawn' broad attitude and maybe a better approach is to be open to some of t…
I believe your analogy is correct, but not in the way you intended.
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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.
I fully agree with the article, but perhaps naively am optimistic about Chia.
I see it as a comparatively ethical alternative to other currencies.
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They'll buy it if it doesn't go up either (and doesn't go down obviously). Hedging against inflation is a huge benefit.
If it were a hedge against inflation, it would behave like a hedge against inflation, and yet it shows no similar characteristics to preexisting inflation hedges? hmmmmm
Is that because, so far, if you were to measure since its inception, it's outperformed any other hedge against inflation?
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> some asshat Bram Cohen, the inventor of BitTorrent. I've rarely seen a first-idea to second-idea decline that bad.
What's the argument against Chia? I fully agree with the article, but perhaps naively am optimistic about Chia. I see it as a comparatively ethical alternative to other currencies.
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> some asshat Bram Cohen, the inventor of BitTorrent. I've rarely seen a first-idea to second-idea decline that bad.
What's the argument against Chia? I fully agree with the article, but perhaps naively am optimistic about Chia. I see it as a comparatively ethical alternative to other currencies.
Now let's take this to the extreme: What if you mined cryptocurrency by burning medicine? The more you burn, the richer you are. Clearly that's evil, as it rewards you for destroying the world.
In a perfect world you would mine cryptocurrency by making progress in peace on earth, good will towards man.
But if you can answer this: What useful resource, that's expensive to produce and has an environmental impact, do you want to incentivize destroying in order to further your greed?
Can you think of anything? Is it not by its very nature evil?
But consider even what happened under Imperial rule in India: Locals were rewarded for every dead snake they proved to the British. What happened? Obviously they started breeding snakes!
So now you have MORE snakes! You actually made the problem worse!
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> some asshat Bram Cohen, the inventor of BitTorrent. I've rarely seen a first-idea to second-idea decline that bad.
What's the argument against Chia? I fully agree with the article, but perhaps naively am optimistic about Chia. I see it as a comparatively ethical alternative to other currencies.
either way, it's literally wasting something to show commitment, and that's bad for every reason in the essay