771–780 of 1001 posts
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'I'm shocked to find that gambling is going on in here.' https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0034583/quotes/?item=qt0429972
"I'm shocked! Shocked…" (The double "shocked" is what makes the quote next-level.)
It's good to know everyone here is weary of crypto scams, but I don't see anyone accurately describing the significance of these technologies. Bitcoin failed as a currency, and as that became realized, institutional investors pivoted to the "digital gold" scam, to keep people long, while they divest or hedge. The two reasons why it failed as a currency are transaction latency, and lack of fungibility. Transaction pri…
> I would encourage you to learn about them as if they were just incredibly robust databases that even governments would struggle to take down. Surely you can think of something cool to build with that, which doesn't involve money. Why is it so popular for someone in tech to assign everyone else the task of thinking up something useful to do with technology x they think is cool? > It's not an overstatement to say tha…
These technologies can be used by people to coordinate amongst themselves whether the outgroup likes it or not.
If you google "network state" you will find things that you might like, and things that you might not like. It's not up to you whether other people create these things. You can only control your own participation.
Cryptography is really the study of incredibly rigged games, games that one side almost always wins, even when both players play perfectly. If human society is a game where humans try to coordinate with other humans to be better off, sometimes at the expense of other humans, then distributed ledgers have totally changed the meta.
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My advice is always: Just hodl some bitcoin, but not in amounts that make you cry when you loose it. It's been better for me so far than normal savings accounts.
well i would hope so, a normal savings account has 0 risk. im not sure this is a great argument to hold some bitcoin lol
Also, the risk isn't zero, just way closer to zero than that of Bitcoin or other crypto, in my opinion.
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Bitcoin is also money printed out of thin air. Bitcoin is also a fiat currency. It may be impossible to change the rate of Bitcoin printing, but it's definitely possible to print more cryptocurrencies (see Ethereum, Monero, Solana, Tron, etc), it's definitely the case that bitcoin's non-deflationary nature is terrible for it as a medium of exchange as it encourages hoarding and destabilises the value, and it's defini…
Is monopoly money a threat to the dollar? Does Hasbro need to report to the Fed how much it has issued each year? People will only hoard hard money until they need to buy things after they've run out of the state's fiat tokens to try and sell. Look up Gresham's and Thier's Laws
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Almost every cryptocurrency starts out with low fees and then fees increase when it gets popular and runs into processing limits.
Okay full disclosure, I believe in stablecoins only but what are your thoughts on nano. It has zero fees and I worked using its zero fees to store data/timestamps in it by nanotimestamps Personally I prefer usdc on polygon
I repeat:
> Almost every cryptocurrency starts out with low fees and then fees increase when it gets popular and runs into processing limits.
The US crypto lobby has already raised over 240 million for the 2026 election. It’s a cancer attacking our society’s institutions.
240M is small time for US lobbying. Just saying, they are gnats compared to pharma, banking, MIC, Unions, or energy.
https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2024/01/31/end.html#section... Vitalik touched upon this briefly in an other-wise long and wide-reaching essay. I think its a good treatment of the topic that the author is talking about. He categorizes the ecosystem broadly into 4 cohorts- [token holders] (which includes investors, speculators, etc.), [pragmatic users] (actual end-users who spend crypto to buy stuff), [intellectuals]…
In a casino you have - The gamblers spending a lot on the casino - The people coming in for the fun and spending little money - The owners/C-levels - The operational team Someone from the operational team just learned that business relies only on the first group to be successful.
It's good to know everyone here is weary of crypto scams, but I don't see anyone accurately describing the significance of these technologies. Bitcoin failed as a currency, and as that became realized, institutional investors pivoted to the "digital gold" scam, to keep people long, while they divest or hedge. The two reasons why it failed as a currency are transaction latency, and lack of fungibility. Transaction pri…
> I would encourage you to learn about them as if they were just incredibly robust databases that even governments would struggle to take down. Surely you can think of something cool to build with that, which doesn't involve money. Why is it so popular for someone in tech to assign everyone else the task of thinking up something useful to do with technology x they think is cool? > It's not an overstatement to say tha…
There was a period of ~1000 years where you could also make this argument against some high-minded guy advocating for democracy.
It's good to know everyone here is weary of crypto scams, but I don't see anyone accurately describing the significance of these technologies. Bitcoin failed as a currency, and as that became realized, institutional investors pivoted to the "digital gold" scam, to keep people long, while they divest or hedge. The two reasons why it failed as a currency are transaction latency, and lack of fungibility. Transaction pri…
IME, these discussions always reduce down to one set of irreconcilable differences: Does a government have the legitimate right to impose taxes on its people, and to sanction criminals (and criminal activity) via control of the Financial system? Anti-crypto people say yes (and in fact the government has a responsibility to fight tax evasion). Pro-crypto people seem (I’m not one of them) to say no, that people have th…
It's entirely an issue of what people can and cannot do with this technology. It's a game with sides, and the concern should be that the technology has made playing for one side much easier than playing for the other.
The technology has unlocked total freedom of association, and I don't see a way to reign that in, other than restricting access to computation and the network for the entire population. As long as the average voter wants personal computing to continue, I don't see a way that a government could get the necessary control to shutdown one of these systems.
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A store of value is an asset with as close to 0% volatility in price as possible. Bitcoin is a speculative asset: it has very high price volatility. It is not a store of value in the proper term.
By that standard, over the past year, Bitcoin would be a better store of value than gold...
Bitcoin lost 10.8%
Gold gained 60.0%