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Google bans cryptocurrency ads

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Re: Google bans cryptocurrency ads

#331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Noone talks about people who created stuff that works and doesn't scam people. And there's a lot of such stuff. No, there isn't. It's always been nebulous talk of "potential" without any concrete uses beyond scams and criminal activity. There have just been iterations of tools for those areas. Then you have the near-religious libertarian True Believers who promote as a matter of faith, regardless of what the reality…

True democratic and transparent electronic voting system is a legitimate use case for the block chain. The fact it's hard to not only implement correctly, but to promote to society does not mean it's not relevant. Good things take time. Remember that people thought for some time that general relativity and the Law of large Numbers would never have practical applications.

> True democratic and transparent electronic voting system is a legitimate use case for the block chain.

Full public transparency isn't that great a property of a voting system.

And it's hard to call it a "legitimate use case" before it's successful.

Re: Google bans cryptocurrency ads

#332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes because at the end of the day an share of AMZ means you own a small percentage of that company. That includes a small percentage of all their physical assets, servers, real estate, cash on hand etc. So yeah there is some intrinsic value.

can you go to amazon headquarters and exchange an AMZ share for an office chair? as a physical asset? i have a feeling that security will escort you from the building before you finish the transaction. the only intrinsic value will be the bruises on your wrists. edit: the value of the share (in the old good days) is the discounted cash flow. you invest in a business, then business pays you the share of the profits (h…

> can you go to amazon headquarters and exchange an AMZ share for an office chair?

If the total value of share prices drops below the value of the assets, you can buy all the shares, take the company private and sell off all the assets to make money.

Assets (vs liabilities) thus can put a floor on the value of a stock price.

Re: Google bans cryptocurrency ads

#333
post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except paranoid dorks are not the ones scamming. It's a completely different group of people who created the space, and completely different one that twisted it into a farce, created thousands of scam ICOs and altcoins that make no sense. Well, some overlap actually might be there, but not that much.

Every time tech people invent a new way for people to interact, someone comes along and figures out a way to use it for a scammy interaction. And it's effective because it is new, which means it is both exciting and poorly understood.

The difference here is that there’s not much else. In contrast, things like the internet or web had tons of legitimate use from day 1.

Re: Google bans cryptocurrency ads

#334
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the best tweetstorm ever on topic by Sarah Jeong: https://twitter.com/sarahjeong/status/953464303960469504 > All of this has gone too far!!!!! It was fine when you paranoid dorks were out there scamming each other, please leave the normies alone!!!!!!!!!!!

Why is something that paints anyone who has legitimate concerns about financial censorship and mass surveillance a "paranoid dork", one of the best tweet storms ever? It's exactly this kind of crude tribalism that prevents constructive civil discourse and encourages ideological narrow-mindedness and conformity.

If you care about surveillance, bitcoin is the last thing you want to be involved with: you’re creating a permanent non-repudiable record and gift-wrapping it for them!

Re: Google bans cryptocurrency ads

#335
post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

can you go to amazon headquarters and exchange an AMZ share for an office chair? as a physical asset? i have a feeling that security will escort you from the building before you finish the transaction. the only intrinsic value will be the bruises on your wrists. edit: the value of the share (in the old good days) is the discounted cash flow. you invest in a business, then business pays you the share of the profits (h…

> can you go to amazon headquarters and exchange an AMZ share for an office chair? If the total value of share prices drops below the value of the assets, you can buy all the shares, take the company private and sell off all the assets to make money. Assets (vs liabilities) thus can put a floor on the value of a stock price.

i have AMZ shares. and i am still waiting when amazon business goes down the drain so i can take amazon private and sell off its assets and make profit. one helluva business plan and intrinsic value.

Re: Google bans cryptocurrency ads

#336
post #135
post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I think is most bizarre - I have friends with really decent businesses that try really, really hard to get a few hundred thousand in funding. And yet I see the most _terrible_ ideas with an ICO cap of 20 million dollars. Still people throw in the cash. Ideas with literally no need for a blockchain. But "everyone will be able to spend the token on [insert terrible idea]!" 'The most bespoke electric hypercar! With…

How much money is actually raised during ICOs? Market cap is based on marginal pricing, so it's completely meaningless in a cryptocurrency.

I always wonder who actually validates the money when somebody says they raised $20 mil in a private ICO. What keeps people from just claiming that to make other investors more willing and give an appearance of legitimacy?

Re: Google bans cryptocurrency ads

#337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Noone talks about people who created stuff that works and doesn't scam people. And there's a lot of such stuff. No, there isn't. It's always been nebulous talk of "potential" without any concrete uses beyond scams and criminal activity. There have just been iterations of tools for those areas. Then you have the near-religious libertarian True Believers who promote as a matter of faith, regardless of what the reality…

True democratic and transparent electronic voting system is a legitimate use case for the block chain. The fact it's hard to not only implement correctly, but to promote to society does not mean it's not relevant. Good things take time. Remember that people thought for some time that general relativity and the Law of large Numbers would never have practical applications.

>True democratic and transparent electronic voting system is a legitimate use case for the block chain.

As always with these claims (that, as noted below, have not actually been implemented and so can only be speculated on), the question isn't whether this could be done with the blockchain, but rather whether this requires the blockchain to be done.

All too often the claimed magical things the blockchain will allow can be implemented far more easily with other, existing technology. So far it's a solution in search of a problem.

Re: Google bans cryptocurrency ads

#338
post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True democratic and transparent electronic voting system is a legitimate use case for the block chain. The fact it's hard to not only implement correctly, but to promote to society does not mean it's not relevant. Good things take time. Remember that people thought for some time that general relativity and the Law of large Numbers would never have practical applications.

> True democratic and transparent electronic voting system is a legitimate use case for the block chain. Full public transparency isn't that great a property of a voting system. And it's hard to call it a "legitimate use case" before it's successful.

Transparency of votes doesn't have to map to identity of voters. The blockchain is transparent, what you put inside is left to the implementer to choose.

And come on, it's a highly experimental technology whise use cases impact the most controversial aspects of our society : money, vote, accountability, transparency, power to the masse.

Of course it's going to take time and fail in many spectacular ways.

Re: Google bans cryptocurrency ads

#339
post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every time tech people invent a new way for people to interact, someone comes along and figures out a way to use it for a scammy interaction. And it's effective because it is new, which means it is both exciting and poorly understood.

The difference here is that there’s not much else. In contrast, things like the internet or web had tons of legitimate use from day 1.

Yeah, this particular technology is particularly vulnerable to scamming for additional reasons. Not just lack of widespread usefulness, but because it's also _close_ solving a real problem people think they have. And it's just legitimate enough that it has some valid niche uses, which lends an air of credibility to the whole thing. It's merely a scam, it's something which can be turned into a scam.

Re: Google bans cryptocurrency ads

#340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True democratic and transparent electronic voting system is a legitimate use case for the block chain. The fact it's hard to not only implement correctly, but to promote to society does not mean it's not relevant. Good things take time. Remember that people thought for some time that general relativity and the Law of large Numbers would never have practical applications.

>True democratic and transparent electronic voting system is a legitimate use case for the block chain. As always with these claims (that, as noted below, have not actually been implemented and so can only be speculated on), the question isn't whether this could be done with the blockchain, but rather whether this requires the blockchain to be done. All too often the claimed magical things the blockchain will allow c…

Nobody is talking magic. We have a system with characteristics that maps to problems we wish to solve and we try to do it.

Nothing wrong with that.

The fact crypto is riddle with quick money making claims and project using the blockchain for sheer buzziness tends to make skeptics extra pessimistics in their views.

It's unfair to the technology.

We have a transaction oriented temper proof distributed transparent database.

Those are objective features, and they deserve we give them a try.

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