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Cryptocurrency is something people tell lies about in hopes of getting richer

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Re: Cryptocurrency is something people tell lies about in hopes of getting richer

#321

Post by Nasrudith »

cratermoon wrote: post #194

How long before Amazon starts paying their workers in a BezosBucks cryptocurrency that can only be redeemed at the Amazon company store? https://jacobinmag.com/2021/07/amazon-warehouse-communities-...

Good god what is with their obsession with scrip? Scrip payments have already been banned and it wasn't even a winning strategy for its users! You might as well raise concerns about the Kaiser going militant or the Shogun holding a coup in Japan.

I am seriously sick of people writing execrable impromptu science fiction and presenting it as reality.

Re: Cryptocurrency is something people tell lies about in hopes of getting richer

#322

Post by trixie_ »

streamofdigits wrote: post #224
trixie_ wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All I know is that I actually feel in control of my money with crypto and can easily move it around the world. ACH and wire transfers are painful in comparison.

I am not defending existing monetary systems. The cost and difficulty of transfers is in no small measure the result of cartels that the official system is quite happy to let fester because they haven't seen an oligopoly they didn't like.

I'm sorry, it has nothing to do with cartels and everything to do with an incredibly complex banking infrastructure running mostly on fortran and cobol.

Re: Cryptocurrency is something people tell lies about in hopes of getting richer

#323

Post by streamofdigits »

imtringued wrote: post #302
streamofdigits wrote: post #131

Cryptocurrency was a broken concept from the very start. It assumed that you can build a financial system by engineering "trust" in purely technical terms. Trust is something between humans. If you cannot find an arrangement of checks and balances that gives people comfort that the "system" is not ripping them off there is no amount of cryptoaccounting that will solve it for you. The very anonymity of the bitcoin fou…

In my opinion it feels like Bitcoin was designed by an amateur from a monetary perspective. Imagine if governments actually used it. Inequality would get worse than it already is. People buy it because of the multi level marketing aspect. Someone bought Bitcoin and they tell others to buy it, rinse and repeat. People will call "nocoiners" jealous because they missed some train after all they didn't buy Bitcoin when i…

The jealousy argument just reveals the character and knowledge level (and maybe age) of the people who make up the cryptomania movement.

Money is not a "asset class", it is a claim on other people's time and the economic value they can generate with their work and talent. It is only "worth" the value of the community that accepts it as a legitimate tender. If a token dollar is worth something it is because a vast range of people will happily exchange it for something trully valuable.

The economy of a community made up of speculators and extortionists is worth exactly zero (if not negative) and it is a matter of time before this transpires.

The only positive thing to say about bitcoin and friends is that is showed to many more people that monetary system alternatives are in principle possible. Ofcourse some people have been for ages working on complementary currencies and such. Digital and programmable currencies are the future, but they will have to become real economic tools that will fix true problems before they stand a chance against the current system.

Re: Cryptocurrency is something people tell lies about in hopes of getting richer

#324

Post by streamofdigits »

trixie_ wrote: post #322
streamofdigits wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not defending existing monetary systems. The cost and difficulty of transfers is in no small measure the result of cartels that the official system is quite happy to let fester because they haven't seen an oligopoly they didn't like.

I'm sorry, it has nothing to do with cartels and everything to do with an incredibly complex banking infrastructure running mostly on fortran and cobol.

I'm sorry, do some research. A few large operators keep the remittances costs high. https://voxeu.org/article/stubbornly-high-cost-remittances

As for fortran and cobol, why change the technology if you are sitting pretty?

Re: Cryptocurrency is something people tell lies about in hopes of getting richer

#325

Post by kibbleble »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #126
cryptica wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but it also makes it a LOT less likely that your passphrase would be compromised because it is never sent to any service over the wire; with blockchain signatures, your passphrase never needs to leave your own machine. So the service providers you log into never have any opportunity to even see your passphrase; they only see your signatures which proves that you know the passphrase. You could use a different prog…

If someone does steal your identity in this way, there's no way of getting it back. You can't appeal to any authority, because there's no authority to appeal to in a decentralised system. You literally have to start again and create a new identity. So you're gambling bigger: less likely to have your identity stolen, but complete loss of everything to do with that identity, with no recourse, if it is stolen. I'm not s…

It can't be much worse than relatives claiming you as dead so they can have your house, and then every government system denies you any service because you're "dead"

Re: Cryptocurrency is something people tell lies about in hopes of getting richer

#326

Post by kibbleble »

wpietri wrote: post #63
space_rock wrote: post #31

The rebranding of MySQL as blockchain was a brilliant move for sales. Bit torrent is decentralized and it doesn't use "blockchain". "Blockchain" only works for money and nothing else

I mean, if you look at transaction cost, settle time, user friendliness, and currency risk, it doesn't even work as a medium of exchange, which is the definition of money. More than a decade on, approximately nobody uses Bitcoin for normal transactions. Compare with Venmo or MPesa, both of which launched around the same time, to se what actual digital money looks like. Both of those do way more transactions than Bitc…

Bitcoin is a 1.0, a beta version that caught on. Anybody who knows better wouldn't use Bitcoin as money, that's true. They've moved on to Monero.

Re: Cryptocurrency is something people tell lies about in hopes of getting richer

#327

Post by Geee »

SwimSwimHungry wrote: post #277
Geee wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not even remotely true.

What do you mean? Of course it is. How else has ransomware been able to thrive as of late? The sooner governments abolish fiat to cryptocurrency exchanges and make such transactions illegal, the sooner this clown car of sadness will come to an end. As much as I'm not a fan of China and the CCP, they are making some good moves in this department recently to eliminate unneeded capital flight. The US should follow in th…

It happens, but it isn't "the domain" like he meant. There are hundreds of millions Bitcoin users already, and the vast majority of them are not criminals. According to Chainalysis, only 0.34% of total transaction value was criminal in 2020.[0]

[0] https://blog.chainalysis.com/reports/2021-crypto-crime-repor...

Re: Cryptocurrency is something people tell lies about in hopes of getting richer

#328

Post by whywhywhywhy »

javert wrote: post #111
whywhywhywhy wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Real charities, not those billionaire tax avoidance schemes. No such thing.

Do you even know what you're talking about? In the US, a billionaire has more money at the end of the day if they just pay taxes on it than if they give it to charity and take the deduction. The only other way a charity helps a billionaire save on taxes is if they use the charity's assets (e.g. boats, helicopers, real estate) as personal assets. But that's felony tax fraud. A billionaire wouldn't be likely to risk pr…

Talking about almost all charities, the billionaire element is irrelevant. Google "St Judes Executive Salaries"

Re: Cryptocurrency is something people tell lies about in hopes of getting richer

#329

Post by [deleted] »

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #328
javert wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you even know what you're talking about? In the US, a billionaire has more money at the end of the day if they just pay taxes on it than if they give it to charity and take the deduction. The only other way a charity helps a billionaire save on taxes is if they use the charity's assets (e.g. boats, helicopers, real estate) as personal assets. But that's felony tax fraud. A billionaire wouldn't be likely to risk pr…

Talking about almost all charities, the billionaire element is irrelevant. Google "St Judes Executive Salaries"

[deleted]

Re: Cryptocurrency is something people tell lies about in hopes of getting richer

#330

Post by CryptoPunk »

acdha wrote: post #231
CryptoPunk wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If an external source - say the Twitter account of an artist - can authenticate that the holder of the NFT is who the creator of the art work wants to be recognized as the owner, then social consensus will lead to widespread value assignment to that NFT. The ability to hold and trade the NFT on the public blockchain makes that asset accessible to a large number of autonomous on-chain markets, like dApps which allow a…

> If an external source - say the Twitter account of an artist - can authenticate that the holder of the NFT is who the creator of the art work wants to be recognized as the owner, then social consensus will lead to widespread value assignment to that NFT. In other words, you don't need the blockchain because the actual value comes from a different system. The only thing it's adding is overhead and unreliability.

The second paragraph explains the utility of issuing it on the blockchain.
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