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It's time for us in the tech world to speak out about cryptocurrency

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Re: It's time for us in the tech world to speak out about cryptocurrency

#661

Post by seibelj »

simonsarris wrote: post #524
seibelj wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can send unlimited amounts of money, anywhere on earth, for (at most) dollars in a few seconds. I don't need to rely on any government for any reason, and no government can stop me.

This is obviously not true. You cannot buy, say, 3 million USD of bitcoin to transfer to another person who then cashes it out for 220 million rubles. More than one government will be clued in, many will stop you until you identify yourself, and it certainly won't be at most a few dollars to exchange.

You are 100% incorrect. I worked at Circle which had the second-largest OTC desk while I was there, and $3 million in BTC even back then was trivial. The markets now are ~25x more liquid than they were a few years ago. I don't think you know even the smallest thing about this industry because your comment is so entirely mistaken it reveals you are clueless. Converting from BTC to rubles is a different matter but BTC / fiat trades of major currencies is very easy for USD and I can't imagine rubles are difficult.

Re: It's time for us in the tech world to speak out about cryptocurrency

#662

Post by diego_moita »

No, it is too late.

Economic bubbles are self-feeding. They have the social mechanisms of a cult where the members shut off communication with the external culture and only seek reinforcement for their belief system.

If the tech world speaks out it will be like doctors recommending masks and quarantine in the early days of Covid or climate experts explaining global warming: the "true believers" will just reinforce their belief.

Let them drink the Kool-Aid, there's nothing we can do anymore.

Re: It's time for us in the tech world to speak out about cryptocurrency

#663

Post by chrisco255 »

throwaway3699 wrote: post #326
chrisco255 wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They did, but they were an insular community as a result. NFTs allow for a common open standard to be interoperable between games. That helps create an economy where, for example, you can buy a digital artwork at a Christie's auction and display it in Decentraland and have it be verifiably authentic. Second Life was awesome! This Metaverse trend is pushing that concept much, much further and it's giving ownership and…

Look to the Steam Community Market & Trading if you want an example of a cross-game economy.

And how does it interoperate with the virtual artwork NFT ecosystem that is burgeoning right now? Can I use a song I purchased on Audius to play in my virtual pad on Decentraland while showing off some art work that I purchased on OpenSea?

Re: It's time for us in the tech world to speak out about cryptocurrency

#665

Post by derefr »

idlewords wrote: post #30
pavlov wrote: post #21

“But it’s like the early Internet!” shouted the Emperor’s coinholders. “The Internet wasn’t yet useful a mere, um, thirteen years after its invention either.” I can see how people in their twenties would fall for this argument because they can’t remember. The reality is that the internet was immediately extremely interesting (either useful or fun) for practically everyone who got access. Email and ftp alone were kill…

I can't agree with your point hard enough. Really useful nascent technologies all have this pattern—they grow incrementally more interesting and constantly gain applications. Bitcoin followed this pattern for a while. But then at some point it started to regress on that axis. You could no longer buy a pizza with it, you could no longer mine it, and it got too flooded by scammers to use safely. There's nothing to real…

Why are you measuring a specific cryptocurrency vs. the whole Internet? The correct comparison for the Internet would be "all cryptocurrencies."

Bitcoin "regressed" (really, specialized) because it got so big that it became speculators' favorite, which made it too expensive for anyone but speculators to interact with. Then, other cryptocurrencies that aren't so expensive to move around were created, and people who wanted to use cryptocurrency as a medium of exchange moved to using those instead. So now the ecosystem supports two applications (investment, exchange) using different tools specialized to those purposes, each better at that thing than a single cryptocurrency trying to "do it all" would be.

Which is, y'know, also the story of the Internet.

Re: It's time for us in the tech world to speak out about cryptocurrency

#666

Post by rockemsockem »

Since when has tech culture been about trusting big companies and governments to do the right thing? Sure you can achieve all the same objectives as the currency-side of the blockchain with traditional means, but, fuck the traditional means. Banks are trash, Wells Fargo literally opened fake accounts on behalf of their customers and those customers didn't know. The list of ways that banks have failed people goes on and on: racist loan denials, ATM fees, overdrafting, arbitrary transaction fees for payment processors, and I'm sure there's more that isn't coming to mind. Surprise, replacing the world financial systems is a long road. Personally I hope that we can keep walking on it.

Re: It's time for us in the tech world to speak out about cryptocurrency

#667

Post by mikedilger »

Taniwha wrote: post #483
daniel-cussen wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's become gold. Preferred by criminals, untraceable (gold is a single stable isotope, basically untraceable). A store of wealth. And you can't buy a pizza with gold, either, and there are tons of scammers who love gold (I remember, about Thailand, the scammers would conspire to get people's gold, a few would talk loudly about how jewels were going up, then someone else in your trip would just happen to mention, des…

Gold also has a fatal flaw, there's only so much of it, building a currency based on gold (ie the US dollar on the gold standard) limits the size of the economy, it can't grow if you can't pay for stuff - it's why we left the gold standard. Bitcoin by design only has a fixed number of coins available, eventually the miners will have mined them all. It has the same limitation that gold has and basing an economy on it…

It doesn't limit the size of the economy. It incentivises saving over investing, since the value of the currency tends to increase as the economy grows. Modern fiat currency is designed to disincentivise savings and incentivise investing, in order to supercharge economic growth.

A counter-position from the Austrian/Chicago school is that supercharging growth drives malinvestment, and they can't be entirely wrong about that - I've seen tons of dumb money flow into dodgy companies during tech booms.

Re: It's time for us in the tech world to speak out about cryptocurrency

#668

Post by chrisco255 »

lottin wrote: post #325
Graffur wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the fundamental flaws you're talking about? (I assume throughput but I'll wait for your reply). What do you mean by saying people fell for "this"? I assume you mean it's a scam but I will wait for your reply.

> What are the fundamental flaws you're talking about? For a payments system, the fact that all transactions are final is pretty bad. I'd say this, by itself, makes the system unusable in the real world.

This is how cash and gold worked for thousands of years.

Re: It's time for us in the tech world to speak out about cryptocurrency

#669

Post by tiborsaas »

jfrunyon wrote: post #408
pa7x1 wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The hard part is not the data structure behind it (Merkle tree) but the economics. An entirely new branch of economics has spun of it and it's far from trivial.

"People had to invent entirely new ways to explain it because our existing models didn't work" isn't a very good argument for it being real.

Why not? We made something and it takes time to understand its implications.

Re: It's time for us in the tech world to speak out about cryptocurrency

#670

Post by gtyras2mrs »

lamontcg wrote: post #398
fleddr wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This huge silent majority that know it is a scam doesn't exist. Crypto is so large, complex and fast-moving that it takes thousands of hours to grasp. If I'd make a list of 100 questions regarding crypto, an exam so to speak, I am reasonably sure that this silent majority can't even answer 5% of the questions. Because they don't know crypto. At all.

> it takes thousands of hours to grasp. It really doesn't. But that is a convenient way to dismiss criticism from everyone who isn't a crypto insider (which is a self-fulfilling prophecy -- the people who spend that much time on it will necessarily be bought into it, the people who are critical will have given up caring about it at some point so will never have the necessary "credentials" to talk about it).

It would have taken me hundreds of hours to understand the mechanisms of derivatives like the sub-prime mortgage backed CDS-es as well.

Not a very good way to convince me of cryptocurrencies' greatness by saying 'oh its too complicated to understand, but trust me its big'.

i'm not very into crypto - and everytime i look it feels like another speculative bubble but this time the speculators are even more hyped.

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