521–530 of 561 posts
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Buying crypto actually 'doubles' money by increasing risk: You buy crypto and give out fiat. Now you have apparently 1 crypto worth 1 fiat and someone else now has 1 fiat.
I go to the store and buy a pencil. Now I have apparently 1 pencil worth 1 fiat and someone else now has 1 fiat? What a preposterous notion!
If you do not consume this work, you can exchange it back.
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Crypto was initially interesting to me because scarcity based economics is failing us and crypto give us a way to explore alternatives. But so far, nearly everything we've built with it has just been a clone of some scarcity-based thing that already exists outside of crypto. Since then I've come to the conclusion that it's never worthwhile to buy crypto with fiat. Any scheme which asks that of its users creates too m…
Isn't the whole point of an economy a method of resolving scarcity? Money is a proxy for participation; it keeps me from having to agree to paint the miller's fence in exchange for some flour.
The twisted perversion of Capitalism that is in effect today is dramatically dissociated from the idea of currency as a stable means of, yes, measuring participation.
Perverting the value of participation and economic contribution is, perhaps, what the cancerous elite can be mostly said to have done to destroy the true purpose of an economy.
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It's illegal to sell abortion pills. What now?
Cash seems to have functioned pretty well for the illegal drug trade for a long time. What’s your point? Crypto somehow facilitates illegal financial transactions? That is not going to make normal people eager to use it.
I've been deep into crypto for years and I was a big stablecoin supporter. I was fascinated by the tech and I still am. But everything outside the tech itself is just trash, scams, and gambling. I've come to believe that "pure" decentralization is neither practical nor particularly convenient. The only real use case that makes sense to me is giving people in developing countries access to a stable currency they can a…
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And they also make their place they live and the rest of the planet a tiny bit worse due to the energy consumption of bitcoin, if they support bitcoin in any form even with lightning. A question though: How do they exchange their crypto into local fiat?
> they also make their place they live and the rest of the planet a tiny bit worse due to the energy consumption Energy consumption isn't the problem. It's how the energy is generated that is relevant to planetary health, and even then, whose to say the tradeoff isn't worth it. Crypto mining is estimated to take up 3% at most which means 97% is spent on other things. What makes this other 97% more worthy of this ener…
Stranded energy is basically energy which should be used but its commercially a lot more efficient to do energy abitrage with a global finance market with a local energy market.
Thats the biggest shit of bitcoin ever.
And no 3% for provoding gambling and only a small amount of money value is a bad joke. 3% is not nothing.
We increased the climate change rate per decade from 0.2 to 0.4 due to the amount of co2. Everything hurts us here.
Bitcoin is responsible for a gas powerp lant in NYC being turned on again. It only mines bitcoins now. It creates just heat and co2.
Bitcoin is responsible for power stealing across the planet.
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I don't think I enable that in any meaningful amount by taking money from a person that used to have a tesla. And if they only gave me $60 or so, and I made $10, I find it extremely unlikely the amount of harm tied back to musk is also in the range of $10. Also sorry to be blunt but in the vaccine situation I almost entirely blame the person directly in charge of your niece's vaccinations.
You don't enable it by taking money from a person that used to have a Tesla. The point was that you have to do what musk says, and musk told you you have to sell stuff to people who used to have Teslas (that's what giving money is).
What?? Where did this come from??
> you have to sell stuff to people who
I'm selling pizzas or something. I'm already willing to sell to basically anyone. Why would he have to order me to sell the things I'm selling?
If I buy a twitter check I'm contributing meaningfully to musk. If I just participate in society then the amount my transactions enrich musk might not be 0 but it's pretty close to 0. Me doing an ordinary sale at my unrelated business where I make $10 is not enabling anywhere near $10 of harm to me from musk. Nor $10 of harm to people in general from musk.
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How is the view from your imaginary moral high horse? Try this: you are a paralegal working with translating/notarizing documents from Spanish to English in Argentina. You have clients in the UK - a wine importer. You send an invoice for your work, it's circa GBP 500, about 1 million Argentinian Pesos. Then, you tell them about the payment options: - pay via SWIFT. will have a 30% surcharge to account for difference…
Sorry; one final edit: What you're describing is "bank" where the financial organizations settle transactions using a private media ("the crypto"); but each individual is still dealing with "a bank". In "crypto" you trust "the math" and you don't need to worry about the counterparty absconding with the money. In your scenario, the Argentine service provider is in a position where they trust "the app" not "the math" B…
> Do you mean you're just pushing fiat through stable coins into an exchange?
Not necessarily. The idea is that crypto allows you a backup. If it's possible to work with an exchange, fine. If not, then quite likely people will be able to make do by making transactions in person. And yes, I've been to Argentina and I exchanged ETH for ARS in person. It's almost as easy to find someone who exchanges crypto as it is to find someone who exchanges USD or EUR. It's not a hypothetical or vague situation.
> you may as well say "pay via paypal" or "pay via putting dollars into a bank of america account I keep open since I was a student abroad." (...) I don't see where there's some magic "crypto ledger"
There isn't any magic. It's just that you take everything for granted and you had the privilege to live in a world where "just use paypal" or "just use a foreign bank account when I was studying abroad" is completely ordinary.
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> Only if you ignore the practical differences. You'd think that it would be easier to just name a few but here we are discussing burying a bitcoin seed under a grave in Timbuktu.
I used that because it was charitable to the fiat argument because you could put both the fiat and crypto into the hidden hole in a way that would make seizing fiat money as difficult as seizing the crypto. If you don't like that, you can simply memorize a seed phrase in your head, it will accomplish essentially the same thing in a far more practical and more commonly practiced manner. If you insist on the realistic…
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According to that article it has nothing to do with condition, but with the lack of anti-counterfeiting protection on older notes. I have lived in, and briefly worked in a bank in, in a country where people do use USD, GBP etc. notes as a store of value, sometimes in large amounts (you hear about that when they get burgled!).
In my experience what Paradigm2020 describes is very much the norm around the world. > and briefly worked in a bank in, I suspect this might be where the confusion stems from, if you're thinking of places where people go to banks you might be thinking a bit too fancy. I'm thinking of stuff more like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCDQpm6f_pU >According to that article it has nothing to do with condition, but wi…
Somaliland is pretty extreme example and not representative of "most of the world". It is extremely poor, isolated because almost nowhere recognises it as a country which cuts it off from payment systems and currency markets.
I have no idea whether they claim is true or not in extreme places, but those places are not "most of the world".