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The End of My Childhood

vitalik.eth.limo

31–40 of 83 posts

Re: The End of My Childhood

#31
post #6
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Inherently so, it is not. But nice try to lower your buy in price.. ;)

I’m not against crypto as a technology, but as a financial tool, how is it not a greater fools game? Broadly speaking, you can’t live on crypto alone. Most people aren’t able to buy food and shelter with it. So the goal, in those majority of cases, is to buy in low for the exact purpose of waiting for a “greater fool” to purchase it from you for more.

> Broadly speaking, you can’t live on commodities alone. Most people aren’t able to buy food and shelter with it.

> So the goal, in those majority of cases, is to buy in low for the exact purpose of waiting for a “greater fool” to purchase it from you for more.

Feel free to substitute with your preferred non-monetary asset.

Re: The End of My Childhood

#32
post #9
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

there's plenty of offramps and onramps from crypto to trad finance. You can earn your money on crypto, get a debit card, and pay for your food and rent with it. I've done it.

Sure, but that’s my point exactly. You need an offramp. The only offramp is someone else (or some exchange) buying your crypto. They would be the “greater fool” in this case. Even if you earn crypto, that crypto came from a “lesser fool.” You’re just the intermediary.

> Sure, but that’s my point exactly.

> You need an offramp.

> The only offramp is someone else (or some exchange) buying your stocks.

> They would be the “greater fool” in this case.

> Even if you earn stocks, that stock came from a “lesser fool.”

> You’re just the intermediary.

Re: The End of My Childhood

#33

The cool thing about Vitalik’s blog is that it is decentralized. The blog uses decentralized storage (IPFS) and uses a decentralized ENS domain (vitalik.eth). If you use a web3 browser like brave browser vitalik.eth resolves natively in the browser without the need to use the ENS+IPFS (eth.limo) gateway.

Not talking about Vitalik but about IPFS and about ENS:

- For IPFS see the other current thread on HN [1]

- For ENS I can say that it was and it is ridiculous. My company was relatively well known in the decentralized space when the ENS launched and obviously someone registered our name before us. This is not a support of the current DNS system but the "decentralized" nature didn't add any decentralized feature (e.g. DAOs) that enable you to protect your brand. It was decentralized as a bad anarchy is. This can be easily check on Reddit discussions about the issues I pointed. For example [2] and [3].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39208673

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/5zmg76/serious_co...

[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/5z4iiw/ama_we_are...

Re: The End of My Childhood

#34
post #23
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Put another way, money is a method for purchasing time. We pay money to use other people's time, and we sell our time to get paychecks. Remember the old saying: Time is money.

Close. We pay money to use other people's times _and_ resources (capital) and outputs (widgets). Take Netflix. You watching a whole lot of Netflix for $400 a month (or whatever they are charging these days) doesn't make people work any differently than paying for it and not watching it, or, truth be told, not paying for it (as an individual), or, in the rare case, watching it without paying for it. Thanks to the magi…

>Close. We pay money to use other people's times _and_ resources (capital) and outputs (widgets)

If these other things still require time as an input to create them, isn't it still just time at the end of the day?

Re: The End of My Childhood

#35
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ty for the tidbit never really found an excuse to install brave before

Given the CEO's "history" [1] I'd heavily recommend against installing Brave [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendan_Eich

i use and think about javascript everyday of my life so i'll give brendan a pass, idgaf about politics

Re: The End of My Childhood

#36
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but that’s my point exactly. You need an offramp. The only offramp is someone else (or some exchange) buying your crypto. They would be the “greater fool” in this case. Even if you earn crypto, that crypto came from a “lesser fool.” You’re just the intermediary.

> Sure, but that’s my point exactly. > You need an offramp. > The only offramp is someone else (or some exchange) buying your stocks. > They would be the “greater fool” in this case. > Even if you earn stocks, that stock came from a “lesser fool.” > You’re just the intermediary.

> Sure, but that’s my point exactly. > You need an offramp.

> The only offramp is someone else (or some exchange) buying your fiat.

> They would be the “greater fool” in this case.

> Even if you earn stocks, that stock came from a “lesser fool.”

> You’re just the intermediary.

Re: The End of My Childhood

#37
post #29
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But seriously, there are 1000's of cryptocurencies, you can't logic the possibility that even one was built with 'non-scammy' intentions? Cause 1 is all it takes to refute that 'ceyotocurrencies are inherently a scam'. I'm sure your being vacecious, but there are those that would comment that seriously.

Whether a crypto is built with non-scammy intentions has little bearing on whether it is used as the vehicle for scams. And a permanent, uncorrectable ledger as the sole truth of transfer of funds is perfect for scams.

"Whether a crypto is built with non-scammy intentions has little bearing on whether it is used as the vehicle for scams."

Many things can be used as a vehicle to scam to varying degrees, to say that cryptocurrency is inherently a scam in and of itself, is not accurate, as it certainly has non-scam use cases, just like non-cryptocurrencies.

I'm happy to debate, but I don't think either of us are wrong so far, as what you said and what I said are both not mutually exclusive. But if you are asserting that cryptocurrency is in and of itself a scam, I'm happy to have a healthy debate.

Re: The End of My Childhood

#38
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ty for the tidbit never really found an excuse to install brave before

Given the CEO's "history" [1] I'd heavily recommend against installing Brave [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendan_Eich

I'm a bisexual, in favour of marriage between arbitrary combinations of consenting adults(even if I have no interest in marriage myself), and I generally care about politics in tech when relevant.

I fail to see the relevance here.

Seems like he was forced out of Mozilla by a bunch of children who can't handle the fact that people have different opinions and perspectives. Even though I disagree with him on this particular issue, he was not the one acting wildly unprofessionally here. A brief look at his resume and the relative success of Brave as a company suggests he's perfectly qualified at his job.

To be clear, I'm not some Brave fanboy. I don't use Brave because it doesn't offer me anything I need that Firefox doesn't.

Brendan Eich's personal views have nothing to do with it.

Re: The End of My Childhood

#39
post #33

The cool thing about Vitalik’s blog is that it is decentralized. The blog uses decentralized storage (IPFS) and uses a decentralized ENS domain (vitalik.eth). If you use a web3 browser like brave browser vitalik.eth resolves natively in the browser without the need to use the ENS+IPFS (eth.limo) gateway.

Not talking about Vitalik but about IPFS and about ENS: - For IPFS see the other current thread on HN [1] - For ENS I can say that it was and it is ridiculous. My company was relatively well known in the decentralized space when the ENS launched and obviously someone registered our name before us. This is not a support of the current DNS system but the "decentralized" nature didn't add any decentralized feature (e.g.…

Regarding the other post I am lucky to know neiman personally.

Neiman is a PhD in mathematics and idealist. The solution he wants goes beyond just hosting a decentralized blog.

As far as ENS, I’m a fan. Though it’s too bad someone registered your well known business name you can always import your DNS into the ENS protocol (ENS is not the .eth extension, rather .eth is the native ENS blockchain extension but is reverse compatible with DNS).

Going back to neiman, for a time he was working on his own naming protocol named Woolball. Might be a fun read for you: https://neiman.eth.limo/2022-10-25/Woolball_a_name_system_wi...

Re: The End of My Childhood

#40
post #14

The author sums up everything that is wrong with crypto in two sentences: > I was getting excited about every new cryptography protocol, and economics too seemed to me to be part of that broader worldview: it's the mathematical tool for understanding and figuring out how to improve the social world. No, it isn't. This kind of hubris is what hides what Crypto is, which is a game of greater fools and nothing more.

Bitcoin has been around for 15 years at this point and there is absolutely no confusion about the technical underpinnings. It has handily survived attempts at government shutdowns in China and serious interest rate hikes. Numerous scams have come, gone and had no impact on hodlers. At this point it is no longer reasonable to just claim it is a greater fools game without an argument for why. The evidence right now see…

I feel the comparison to gold is a bit of a reach. Gold is valuable because:

1. People see it as a store of value

2. It has some useful physical properties

3. People use it as a decoration

Possibly there are other reasons as well, but those are the ones that come immediately to mind. As far as I can tell, Bitcoin only shares attribute #1. It doesn’t have intrinsic properties that make it useful into larger systems (though perhaps we just haven’t found the right systems yet?), and people don’t feel it’s intrinsically valuable. Not to completely bash Bitcoin though — if enough people find it valuable it can become a useful way to exchange value. Right now it’s just pretty bad at that.

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