321–330 of 330 posts
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Penny stock is a utility token representing governance in a company as well as the privilege of taking its profits — much like crypto governance tokens are.
Wrong. Utility token gives you no equity. It's a gift card voucher to use a network
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Ah, my bad. I didn't realize those were different from governance tokens, which are more directly analogous to stock. That being said, just because something is commonly used for fraud doesn't make it illegitimate. There are fraudulent companies in real life, though usually there's more legal recourse to go after them.
All are fraudulent from the 20 or so I've looked into or talked to the founders and realised they were criminals
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> but the industry being built around it is very real even if niche. There's a lot going on (including research) What are some concrete examples? I think most of us who are critical are still interested, because we do see things that are going on, and we ask ourselves, are we missing something? But we seem to run into the same road blocks again and again. “Solutions” seem to come from people subtly or transparently “…
I think smart contracts are actually extremely novel in the form they take in Ethereum EVM, Tezos, Cardano, DAML and Pact (I'm author of the latter). TBH I'm a little frustrated with the evolution of smart contract langs post-2017, as I think Ethereum's dominance has made most engs/projects uninterested in innovating. If you look around, it's actually very hard to find a genuinely small language you can embed in your…
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>But this is already too long :) Not at all, I appreciate the info. Cardano I believe uses PoS of some sort. What is the thinking about what keeps these distributed application servers running? Is it still mainly the mining reward model? What sort of applications most excite you? Are there places the distributed model works better than the traditional? Are there applications the distributed model enables that the tra…
> What sort of applications most excite you? Outside of crypto, there are many areas within industries which require the sharing and use of data across multiple organizations, markets, and even intra-industry. Think of Healthcare and the multitude of data sources, processes, and interaction between parties. In areas like this, where multiple parties have many different roles and responsibilities in a shared business…
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I am not teetering on the edge of poverty so I would rather increase my volatility a tiny bit and stay EV neutral (or, more realistically, positive, since we’re talking about BTC) than incur a guaranteed substantial EV loss. My suspicion is that your mental model for comparing volatility and loss is incomplete, given that you didn’t mention anything about the size of the transfer compared to your wealth, or anything…
So you do want the gambling aspect because you’re not poor and you believe Bitcoin mostly goes up. That’s fine, but I don’t think it aligns with what most people want from their money transfers.
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> No. That is simply not possible with anything resembling today's technology. We'll have flying cars on a Mars city before automated arbitration on real world matters. I don't disagree about its current feasibility, but I think that's mainly so because of a distortion of incentives and that so many are invested in this model (the few) despite how horrible it is (to the detriment of the many) as so many people are in…
For the first part, I'll just say that you vastly overestimate our technical abilities if you think we could even specify the problem of arbitration in such a way that a computer could solve it, nevermind actually implement the solver. You've chosen a relatively simple case (proof of property) but arbitration in general is much more complex. For hyperinflation, I have been born and continue to live in Romania, a coun…
I'm not saying it's realistic with the current model, but these are all just software problems at the end of the day, what makes it slow, arbitrary and inefficient is the Human component. I look forward to a World where we can count judges and lawyers on a single sheet. The US's problem is regulatory capture from vying interests and lobbyists, that won't be possible if a smart contract is what is needed to approve or decline as their is no Human to corrupt, and while that seems insane just look at how much is done Online from the brick and mortar World from the 90s.
> For hyperinflation, I have been born and continue to live in Romania, a country that went exactly through that in the 90s, to the extent that a loaf of bread that was initially maybe 10-20 ROL would cost 10k ROL. I remember as a child not being able to afford popcorn when going to the park with my grandparents, or my grandfather selling his old car and buying the family's first color TV with the money. I remember living as a family of four in a 2 bedroom apartment (my parents had their bedroom, while my brother and I shared the livingroom until we were in our twenties).
That's for the context, I worked with many Romanians when I did my Ag apprenticeship in Germany; Dictatorship and the collapse really took a toll on that Society that people still pay to this day.
> But that wasn't the problem of our economy, it was just what kept it (barely) working! If we couldn't go to hyperinflation, we would have simply not payed salaries or other debts.
That's a very Central Banks apologist view, that I think doesn't hold up to reality, but you're entitled to your opinion of how you've internalized the experience. Also consider that as Romania entered the EU it still isn'e exactly immune to the many maladies that came from entering and the PIIGS nations showed how detrimental not having control of your currency is when Germany will devalue it to support its export based economy.
> Scarcity is a problem of production, not of money. Money itself is almost immaterial. If we could produce enough food, water, energy, cars, fridges, computers, furniture etc. for every single person on Earth, and all of their children, to have all they need at the same time, we could renounce money entirely, Star Trek style.
I agree, but I think it's only a part of it, but the need to discuss such lofty goals as post-scarcity is an absurd notion when you're dealing with such challenges as mass hunger and poverty in your life. Productivity and efficiencies are not a big concern when you cannot afford basic things like food/water/soap, which falls on deaf ears. Having at least a stable currency, which I'd argue you don't have, nor do I in the US despite it being the World's Reserve currency and represents opposite sides of the spectrums. I agree, with you conclusion, though: money is means not an end. We're still in the transitional phase, Bitcoin represents another vital step toward the need to do away with the concept of money (even the immense abstraction of it, ans all it is private keys/data).
> You have a terrible understanding of economics (and of the plight of people who lived through hyperinflation, like myself) if you think that people in a country experiencing hyperinflation would fare any better if they could trade in BTC instead of the de-valued fiat. The only ones who would be better off are the rich, whose reserves of cash would not suddenly lose their value. But people who live off wages would see pay cuts and eventually just stop getting payed if the currency were forced to a global standard instead of suffering inflation.
Do I? I mean one of the things that is remarkable consistent in these hyperinfalted currencies is captial controls, in which the central banks refuse to allot more than X amount of YOUR currency per day, and even in the EU will make transaction above an arbitrary amount is illegal. Hell, in Cyprus they had bail ins, in Spain their was talk about 'corralito' which is essentially the same thing. Do I need to talk about how horrendous the situation in Greece was, which uses the EUR and still suffered the same situation.
I'm not trying to make light of your situation, far from it I actually really sympathize with you, but I've dedicated the last 19 years of my life to addressing this very core problem and lived and worked in these countries and assessed them with these type of analysis.
> Oh, and guess what - the country got richer and better without the currency having to go through deflation! In fact, bread still costs 10-20k ROL, and a PC still costs 40-50 million ROL, we just 're-branded' our currency to RON at a fixed 1:10k RON:ROL exchange rate to make the numbers more manageable. We started having productive industries with products that others wanted to buy, and governance got better (we still have huge problems and some of the poorest regions in the EU, but that is besides the point).
> Oh, and guess what - the country got richer and better without the currency having to go through deflation! In fact, bread still costs 10-20k ROL, and a PC still costs 40-50 million ROL, we just 're-branded' our currency to RON at a fixed 1:10k RON:ROL exchange rate to make the numbers more manageable. We started having productive industries with products that others wanted to buy, and governance got better (we still have huge problems and some of the poorest regions in the EU, but that is besides the point).
No, you didn't: but this also helps me see what the core of your logic fallacies are particularly with the omissions of the trade requirements from being a core EU nation, and your dismissal of being the poorest region in the EU is much more poignant than you are making it out to be.
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> It didn't short 138% of GME stock. GME short interest increased to 138% while Melvin and many other hedge funds were shorting it. You corrected yourself to include that they weren't alone, but whatever... but that still doesn't change the fact that this would be impossible to do if it were a blockchain based system with these parameters built in, you cannot fictitiously create more of something that exists in order…
> but that still doesn't change the fact that this would be impossible to do if it were a blockchain based system with these parameters built in Why? Shorting above 100% doesn't "create more of something". Why would a blockchain based trading system prevent me from short selling a stock based on what other people are doing? I've got the stock in my wallet. It was loaned to me by Bob. I can sell it to you right now. W…
Because it adds no value when shorting is nothing more than a predatory model to extract wealth from the useful (entrepreneurs) to the useless (speculators). Consider the World's riches man only became so when the speculators made Tesla the most shorted company.
I think this shows, once more, that the Capital Markets as we're forced to believe are anything that and more a massive casino with reckless gamblers with connections to central banks endless money printing. And that's my problem with this more than anyting else, it's not fair, its not efficient it's a forced construct by the entrenched powers to create even more entrenched and systemic gaps in wealth and Society.
Do I really need to talk about 2008?
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> It didn't short 138% of GME stock. GME short interest increased to 138% while Melvin and many other hedge funds were shorting it. You corrected yourself to include that they weren't alone, but whatever... but that still doesn't change the fact that this would be impossible to do if it were a blockchain based system with these parameters built in, you cannot fictitiously create more of something that exists in order…
I'm not making normative statements about what's fair or not fair. There are legitimate and reasonable grounds for criticism of capital markets. I'm correcting your specific positive statements, which I quoted, because they're incorrect. I don't have anything to say about blockchain or the rest of your comment.
Ok, I stand corrected, and I don't mind accepting that, but that doesn't diminish the value of my response; none the less I appreciate the correction.
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> I think that's their point. There's a lot of discussion that 'banks will become obsolete with crypto' that forgets that banks are not the currency, they just manage it. If crypto becomes widespread banks will keep on existing, they'll just move to manage cryptocurrencies. > You just recreated consumer banking. While I personally detest the notion of such a model, and things like GME show why that is: I realized tha…
Not everyone ignore Bitcoin because they love fiat or can't handle the disruption. Some do it because enabling a stronger uncontrolled brand of capitalism sounds like replacing a weaker poison with a stronger one.
The fiat World is not Capitalism, it's so far detached from it that even comparing it to that shows just financially illiterate most are; but it's true Bitcoin doesn't solve many things, least of which is financial equality, but that is why founders and early adopters should be awarded: we took all the risk and built the infrastructure.
What differs is we have a vested interest in the new adopters succeeding and applying their Human capital and resources to this to create a more sustainable that does ensure it is FAIR. The Fiat World is incredibly unfair, and that is what i think keeps so many from even seeing the many benefits of Capitalism, which I subscribe to (Anarcho-Capitalism) but I understand is inherently flawed.
Still, its far more sustainable and beneficial and has already proven to be able to accelerating the advent of renewable energy and more distributed approaches to problem solving without the need for a centralized entity. And for most of my Lifetime that was never thought to be possible, outside of open source tech online, let alone something that could shift the very paradigm for a non-destructive system that treats Capital like an endless dole from the State and Central Banks based relationships.
I've been focused on being a multi-planetary Species but the truth is if we haven't solved this glaring issue caused by fiat we have no way of colonizing a planet if we have a business cycle bust/collapse and hyperinflation every 8-15 years, and the aver age of fiat currency is 40 years, which is nothing since Mars will take centuries to millennia but most of the proponents of this fiat system cannot even fathom this, let alone the need for the developing World to enter industrialization and higher standards of manufacturing for us to even have SLIGHT chance and making this happen.
Again, I don't think most people are financial literate, let alone deep thinkers on more than just the basic question like: why does my iphone cost so much.
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> I think that's their point. There's a lot of discussion that 'banks will become obsolete with crypto' that forgets that banks are not the currency, they just manage it. If crypto becomes widespread banks will keep on existing, they'll just move to manage cryptocurrencies. > You just recreated consumer banking. While I personally detest the notion of such a model, and things like GME show why that is: I realized tha…
> servile wave of infantile 'technologists' that are beholden to FAANG so this is clearly what happens when even 'smart people' get things wrong: they try to justify their errors with these campaign smears. Which is why I'm glad so many are leaving CA, hopefully it can go back to it's cypherpunk roots it had in the 80s and 90s. So true. I wish I had had the opportunity to live in the golden age cypherpunk CA of the 1…
But I always thought giving them the benefit of the doubt was the best strategy only to see how absurd it was for being so trusting... still I think it doesn't matter, we have so many of the Silicon Valley king makers on our side, YC included, so they will just follow when the time comes.
I wish I could find the academic research paper, but their was study on massive paradigm shifts throughout History and it concluded that in some of the most momentous, from things like the US and French revolutions to the migration of users from Myspace to Facebook, it was only between 5-15% of a studied populace to make them successful, and the rest just follow what those aforementioned do.
This is incredibly sad to me, because while I detest the spying business models this generation of SV guys work under, I always respected their intelligence which is why I keep coming back here, now I'm seeing they are susceptible to the same rationalizations that we see in the so called 'normies' that made ultimately made us bond despite disagreeing on talents/skills/interests as technologists.
Still... I think we're only now entering the enterprise and institutional adoption curve, they have a chance to pivot and use their immensely bloated salalries and still do ok, but I don think that is what is the core issue: they have delusions of being Chamath, or Elon being some low tier coder not realizing that the paradigm they function in is antithetical in ever creating another wave of Chamths let alone another Elon.
They will sabotage you and your startup, and even short the living fuck out you if you're already public while praising your efforts in public, if they have the slightest chance and fund both sides so that at best they will use you to get a fat IPO exit for something as stupid as doordash that relies on consolidation of any Industry for Megacorps.