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On anti-crypto toxicity

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Re: On anti-crypto toxicity

#521

Post by vmception »

> But when you come across someone on Twitter with a hexagon-shaped profile picture, your chances are at least as good that you’ve come across someone in the first bucket than in the second

Ah so this is about twitter culture. I agree, it is strange that people showing some outward interest in crypto are ignored.

These conversations basically go like this

: thats not accurate, the flash loan was used to borrow and acquire a bunch of the governance token and then launch and pass an emergency governance proposal and the primary issue is that the protocol allowed for this to occur in a single block, not the flash loan

: you have an NFT profile picture your opinion is invalid! I just screenshot it!

so the technical person that could improve understanding is surrounded by perpetual ignorance

Re: On anti-crypto toxicity

#522

Post by JumpCrisscross »

reedjosh wrote: post #518
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> inflation is 8.5%, and you're holding an ounce of gold, then that gold raises by 8.5% in kind Gold is volatile in real terms [1]. If inflation is 8.5%, your gold might be worth 10% more, 100% more or 90% less. [1] https://goldprice.org/inflation-adjusted-gold-price.html

That isn't the point. In fact you're basically illustrating my point. Without taking risk, you will lose the value of your money. If you had some perfect asset (not gold since the volatility distracts you) that increased in dollars exactly as much as inflation, then you would still lose value to taxation even though you only gained as much as inflation. In the real world, yes, no perfect asset like that exists, so it…

> no perfect asset like that exists, so it's worse than that

TIPs [1] come damn close. The interest is subject to federal tax, but you're still coming out ahead.

[1] https://www.treasurydirect.gov/instit/annceresult/annceresul...

Re: On anti-crypto toxicity

#523

Post by crypthrowaway1 »

HWR_14 wrote: post #408
reedjosh wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not about getting rich on Bitcoin, it's about taking back our choice of what money to use. Bitcoiners hate NFTs mostly because they give the whole space a bad rap.

I fail to see the difference between what I said and "Bitcoiners hate NFTs mostly because they give the whole space a bad rap." Anyway, you have your choice of what money to use. I prefer USD and Euro myself. And I really still don't understand any use case for someone in a first world country to use crypto. I grant that 3rd world countries without banking systems may, may need it, but I don't know why we just wouldn…

> And I really still don't understand any use case for someone in a first world country to use crypto.

Hi. Here is a use case you can carry on to future discussions. There is a flourishing scene of dark net markets where people can purchase drugs using cryptocurrency. Merchants have reviews, products have reviews, and the whole process is much safer, secure, and convenient than meeting a drug dealer in real life with cash.

Re: On anti-crypto toxicity

#524

Post by janandonly »

rvz wrote: post #150
janandonly wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then you did not look (closely) enough at BTC. When transaction prices went up in 2017 [1] the second layer technology "Lightning" was invented and build-out. Right now, Joe Average, can transact for fractions of pennies. [2] [1] http://melaurent.github.io/spamattack/ [2] https://bitcoinist.com/lightning-cnbc-sent-btc-to-a-ukranian...

Haven't you realised that 'the second layer technology "Lightning"' aka Lightning Network is not Bitcoin and is an off-chain system and is centralised by design which contradicts and defeats the whole purpose of what Bitcoin was built for? [0] [0] https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1367-2630/aba062

So 10% of the total number of lighting nodes holed 80% of the total BTC coins... and that is why it is 'centralized'?

I think I have a different definition ...

Re: On anti-crypto toxicity

#525

Post by djur »

mr_spothawk wrote: post #455
traceroute66 wrote: post #81

IMHO the problem with crypto is the very thing that its proponents cite as one of its key benefits, its decentralised nature. We are told that crypto is supposedly a way to "stick it to the man", to fight those "evil banks/governments". The trouble is that unlike fiat currency, there is no fundamental means of valuation. Crypto is worth what its worth on the day based largely or exclusively on entirely non-economic v…

> fundamental means of valuation. Can you expound on the fundamental means of valuation for Fiat currency? It's my understanding that there is no fiat currency with any fundamental backing. I was pretty sure Khadaffi was killed for promoting an African currency backed by gold, in lieu of the USD hegemony. > The value of fiat currency is ultimately tied to the economics of global, and therefore provides an objective m…

You can use it to pay taxes, which means you can live, work, and do business in a particular country.

Re: On anti-crypto toxicity

#526

Post by alienthrowaway »

Mindwipe wrote: post #371
gwbas1c wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100% agree, and I must add: Those are all political problems. Technology does not solve political problems. Politics solves political problems. All cryptocurrency does is obfuscate the politics behind its monetary system. As flawed as our monetary system is, the politics behind it are visible and under control of a government. In my country, my government is elected, and I'm an active and informed voter. Thus, I thin…

> Technology does not solve political problems. Politics solves political problems. I don't think this is true, bluntly. Technology does not automatically solve political problems. But technology does sometimes render bad political actions unviable. I would argue that a large part of the widespead acceptance of homosexuality in Western society was due to the deconstruction of singular media gatekeepers by the move of…

> I would argue that a large part of the widespead acceptance of homosexuality in Western society was due to the deconstruction of singular media gatekeepers

And yet folk from my (mostly homophobic) part of the third world argue the opposite: that homosexuality is widely accepted in the west because it was promoted by media and entertainment gatekeepers. I disagree with them (and with you) - I think sexual liberation was an idea whose time had come; and the progress can be plotted to the 60s and beyond (maybe even as far back as WWII, when women were economically empowered); preceding even ARPANET.

Re: On anti-crypto toxicity

#527

Post by rglullis »

falcolas wrote: post #425
rglullis wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

ENS: > ENS’s job is to map human-readable names like ‘alice.eth’ to machine-readable identifiers such as Ethereum addresses, other cryptocurrency addresses, content hashes, and metadata. So, for $5 (as of right now) a year, I can create a DNS-ish entry that points at a static piece of data (though not an IP?)? There are plenty of companies who sell DNS addresses (which can do the same things, plus IP), and while they…

> (though not an IP?)

You can point to anything.

> How is this not possible without a "central authority"?

Ask that to the people that got shut out of Patreon, OnlyFans, business in Russia that have nothing to do with the war and yet got blocked from transacting with the rest of the world, a freelancer in Venezuela who does not want to have their funds confiscated by Maduro's thugs...

> At best, they're re-implementations of existing distributed technologies, just with a new backend.

The big thing that you are missing out is that this backend is permissionless and that it can not be captured by any single entity. It's not so much about what it can do, but what it prevents from being done.

Basically, web3 can be the place where we can build the next search engine that is as revolutionary as early-day Google, without worrying that it will become a Goliath that controls every aspect of our lives. And that to me is very exciting.

Re: On anti-crypto toxicity

#528

Post by przeor »

loceng wrote: post #381
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bootstrapping a new cryptocurrency where 90% of the coins go to relatively few early adopters is the worst possible way to fix financial inequality. The crypto holders would love if the world switched to using the cryptocurrency they’re invested in because it would make them extraordinarily wealthy relative to the average person buying in late. I don’t understand how anyone can honestly suggest that a gradual changeo…

While trying to not regularly call the majority of cryptocurrencies (the term currency misappropriated) an MLM-Ponzi scheme, I've started to realize that an easier or perhaps better way to state the problem with them is to use one of the key values that is virtue signalled against them: it's claimed that Bitcoin et al are anti-inflation, when in fact the inflation is just built into it - and only benefit the early/ea…

Social Security at least in Poland, also is a Ponzi-like scheme. The difference is that to crypto you arent forced to participate in in opposit to govt backed schemes.

Re: On anti-crypto toxicity

#529

Post by dmitriid »

rglullis wrote: post #510
theamk wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a prime example of what others were saying! We asked for an example of "good/useful/entertaining websites", and you are giving us technology demos, something that is only interesting to Web3 people. How about some real-life useful stuff? Don't give me youtube, show me Kurzgesagt channel. Don't talk about Javascript, DOM and browser optimization, show me Google Maps. Right now, all the stuff Web3 people produc…

You are basically saying "these GNU people only produce things that are interesting for people into software stuff. Don't give me a C compiler, give me Visicalc." It's not because this is not "real-life" enough for you that it means that it is not worthy of being done.

> You are basically saying "these GNU people only produce things that are interesting for people into software stuff. Don't give me a C compiler, give me Visicalc."

Yes we are. Yes, we re saying that. Because Unix was announced outside Bell Labs in 1973, and VisiCalc's first release was in 1979. It wasn't released on Unix, but that's really beside the point. Two years later it was available for basically any consumer system in existence.

And on top of that there was a wealth of other software available on those systems. For example, vi and emacs are both from 1976.

What you are saying is that "well, bitcoin paper is from 2008 (14 years ago), smart contracts are from 2014 (7 years ago), and we still have nothing even resembling VisiCalc, scratch that, we don't even have an equivalent of emacs or vi, `it's still early boohoo`"

Re: On anti-crypto toxicity

#530

Post by pjc50 »

n_io wrote: post #484
LargeWu wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In addition to that I would add it needs to be a real store of value. Over any moderate timescale (a few years, say), it should reasonably maintain its value over that period. Swings of 40% purchasing power are unacceptable for a useful currency. Sure, bitcoin maximalists love to point out that if you bought it a year ago, it's up XXX%. But what if I bought near its high value? Not so good a proposition then.

Is the money in your bank account a real store of value? Do you not notice what’s been happening to it at an accelerated pace over the last 30 years? I’m not arguing for bitcoin either way. But I implore you to take a hard look at your definition of real value in a system with inherent inflation that forces you to speculate in order to preserve any “real value.”

I feel that the value of my bank account has been far less relevant than (a) my salary and (b) my mortgage. And I suppose my pension, but since that's a government tax exempt deferred income mechanism it's not "mine" in quite the same way.

It always feels strange talking to people for whom the hoard of cash is the important bit. For many people it would be far more useful to stabilize house prices - which are affected by a completely different set of factors.

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