Earlier quoted context omitted.
No man, there's so much more exposure that way. And remember, this is a criminal enterprise. Those people who run your fronts could just as easily rob/kill you and take it for themselves, and given the chance they will . With bitcoins you can 1) do it yourself, no middlemen other than the bitcoin processor who doesn't give a flying right-hand fuck where the money comes from, and 2) do it far, far, far quicker than tr…
> if I paid the 30k to not have to deal with ANYONE face-to-face How do you propose cashing out? Your cronies aren’t going to want their wages in Bitcoin. > I'm not spending MY 30k, I'm spending YOUR 30k Practically speaking, if you steal my money it’s now your money. More money is better than less money. In any enterprise, criminal or legitimate, there are systemic incentives for maximising pay-out.
Bitcoin is a Cult
81–90 of 232 posts
Re: Bitcoin is a Cult
#82Re: Bitcoin is a Cult
#83can someone name one successful startup that actually utilizes the blockchain to do something they couldnt have done without?
Then there is some land registry in some African country. Had it not been for the magic of the bitcoin then the evil thugs in the government would have stolen all of the peasants land.
I have been told of other examples, by cult members that know nothing of finance and nothing of programming. But, if you locked me in a police cell and the only way I could get out was to provide further examples, then I would be stuck there for a very long time!
Nonetheless the two examples provided deserve further scrutiny. In the case of Wikileaks, if I was able to respond to the assertion of the believer (which would not be possible as they do not listen), then I would point out how little it costs to host a website and how 'cryptome.org' has been going for years doing a similar/much better thing for two decades without the site owner having to solicit big bucks to keep the thing going. I would also point out that Julian Assange was in it to monetize it and how that behaviour is questionable, tantamount to warmongering.
But, when you are dealing with belief, facts are no use. Critical thinking is of no use. Experience is of no use. (Side topic, John Young from Cryptome on Wikileaks: https://www.cnet.com/news/wikileaks-estranged-co-founder-bec...).
So if the believer gets into a discussion with someone that knows facts then they a) shout louder and b) move on to the next bogus example of where blockchain goodness has saved the world, e.g. with the land registry in Africa example. Specifics are lacking, if it is all on the public ledger then surely the believer should be able to prove one instance of one poor African farmer who has his property secured by the magic blockchain? Surely this would be a Google search away? Of course they are too busy for that, trading their alt-coins 24/7, unable to stop for pedants that have trite 'I have a bridge to sell you' arguments.
But then the true cult isn't about hard fact things from the past, it is about the wonderful future that is to come. So any hard questioning of concrete evidence of blockchain success stories pivots to the paradise promised. No matter what your profession the true blockchain believer will try to interest you in how blockchain will revolutionise whatever it is that you do.
If you are a lowly fruit picker then you get told that blockchain will revolutionise things so that those organic strawberries you pick will soon be notched up to some farm to consumer blockchain 'technology' so that the consumer won't be fobbed off with those fake organic strawberries. Because it will be decentralized and on a public ledger nobody will have the wool pulled over their eyes. All sounds good but if you are that lowly fruit picker then you know a little bit about the industry and know that is not going to happen.
Or, if you are further up the food chain, e.g. in dentistry and fix people's teeth for a living, then you get told about how a blockchain startup is going to revolutionise dental records.
The patronising attitude gets worse if, heaven forbid, you are a developer. In your career you may have worked in many sectors and in many industries but you can't think of a single blockchain application that would make your work better or deliver better deliverables for a single client. However, the believer will be able to tell you that soon there is a blockchain application for whatever it is that you do, so rather than slave away for months on that complicated integration that you are working on you might as well give up now as 'very soon' this 'app' is coming out that will enable you to do it all in a fraction of the time.
The believer in the blockchain probably does not have a day job so they do not understand how preposterous is their proposition, but your domain expertise can be dismissed as you don't understand how blockchain is going to revolutionise everything.
Of course none in the cult can do any useful programming. Yes there are people with day jobs that hold a few coins and enjoy speculating on them from time to time, but these folk are not hardcore cult members. The true cult members see themselves as above the programmers of the world, they see 'developers' as like sheep that can be herded by them to do things for a few table scraps from the blockchain geniuses such as themselves.
Recently I learned of a multi-billion dollar air-drop where the founders would hold onto a few tens of billions of these altcoins and the developers of the world would be given an opportunity to develop save the world green applications. So through the generosity of the blockchain believers and their unique abilities to incentivise developers the world would be saved. There is this view that developers are simple folk and that they just need the right blockchain platform to work with. These developers are almost mystical, thousands of them from all over the world will just turn up to work for free on their blockchain platform in some open-source type of way whilst they do their 'fintech' part, holding on to the billions of alt-coins they kept back for 'the founders'.
The cult members also have an amazing excuse for being skint. Much like how real cult members in real cults of the religious flavour don't have day jobs or money, blockchain cult members can't do real work. So they are skint. But they can always claim their funds are in this greater world of crypto and they don't have any 'fiat' right now as 'everything is locked up until the EOS mainnet goes live' or some other spurious story.
So maybe that is it, a genuine 'startup' success that actually uses blockchain, the ability of the believer to scavenge real cash, food and whatnot from their parents, friends and partner because they always have a good excuse for not having any 'fiat'.
Re: Bitcoin is a Cult
#84There is, without a doubt, a Bitcoin cult. Or more generally, crypto-currency cults. The headline reads like it's only a cult, which isn't the case. Even the most critical observer must concede that these distributed networks are novel and interesting. The farther you move from social media, the less cult-like things get. The best discussion remains on listservs, and there is a lot of interesting and substantive disc…
Bitcoin sold itself as a cult from the very beginning so it's no surprise that all manner of cults have congregated around the technology. Bitcoin is an interesting example of a paranoid technology: it purports to be "trustless" and perfectly "fair" and it requires only a "faith" in math. The reality is very different but it's no surprise such a marketing pitch would appeal to the paranoid style that dominates these groups.
Communities that don't value trust accumulate paranoiacs and then become prone to delusion. This is the self-defeating logic that dooms cults in the end: delusions can persist for a while, until they don't, and the real world wins. With Bitcoin I suspect the real world will win once the miners, having extracted 95% of the value from the trade, leave and turn their fleets towards more profitable ventures. This is the real bubble [1] at work, after all, and compared to this all the schemes and schemes and wacky delusions promoted by the holders is nothing.
Re: Bitcoin is a Cult
#85can someone name one successful startup that actually utilizes the blockchain to do something they couldnt have done without?
well, you may not call Sia successful (a cloud storage network with 200 TB of data being actively stored on it), but it uses blockchain to achieve something that it could not achieve without.
Re: Bitcoin is a Cult
#86r/bitcoin comes to mind whenever I think of the words "Bitcoin" and "cult" in the same sentence.
If you want to read an interesting story read this. https://old.reddit.com/r/BitcoinMarkets/comments/6rxw7k/info...
> Some of the employees of Blockstream also put forth some proposals, but all were so conservative, it would take bitcoin many decades before it could reach a scale of VISA.
I hate to bring it to you, but no big decentralized network where everything happens on a single chain will ever reach VISA scale. I'm not sure why people think Bitcoin can do this. I do not work for blockstream and I think just scaling this up is a terrible idea. I only know a handful of technical people who disagree.
> After this free and open source software was released, Theymos, the person who controls all the main communication channels for the bitcoin community implemented a new moderation policy that disallowed any discussion of this new software. Specifically, if people were to discuss this software, their comments would be deleted and ultimately they would be banned temporarily or permanently. This caused chaos within the community as there was very clear support for this software at the time and it seemed our best hope for finally solving the problem and moving on.
IMO the chaos did not come from content moderation but from different groups of people who all claimed their software (bitcoin XT, bitcoin core) was the real bitcoin. And not many people understood what was going on. There was definitely some support for bitcoin XT, but it was always minuscule compared to bitcoin's IMO. This has nothing to do with either Theymos nor Blockstream.
Re: Bitcoin is a Cult
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s media sensationalism. BTC is not remotely anonymous and is useless as a tax evasion mechanism. Your money still has to go through someone to turn into BTC, and that’s the same as any other money laundering operation. Once their books are audited, your “safe haven” is worth nothing.
Vice has a good video on drug dealers lining up to use a Bitcoin ATM every day somewhere in an American ghetto. Bitcoin is 100% about drug dealing, gambling, and tax avoidance. You would have to be a total moron to go through all the hoops to use it otherwise. Its kinda like running desktop linux in that way.
Re: Bitcoin is a Cult
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
9 years is not very long for an emerging technology. AI has been around since the 60's. Arpanet was established in 1969. Electricity was relatively well understood in 1750 (we had batteries that could store electrical charge) but the electric lightbulb wasn't invented until more than 100 years later. Bitcoin is very early, it's core infrastructure, it's going to take time to get established, and once it does get esta…
I work in the public sector, we’ve done quite a few proof of concepts on blockchain over the years, because we have actual use cases where a decentralized system makes sense. Like land registry, keeping bi-temporal records and case flows where citizens can follow their progress from home. We’ve yet to make it work though. Decentralized voting is too vulnerable and mining is too anti-climate, so it’s really all turnin…
Re: Bitcoin is a Cult
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
Government bonds aren't meant to be a currency, cryptocurrencies are.
I don't see the relationship between "meant to be" and "is" here. Doesn't it only matter what it actually is rather than what some people thought it might be?
Re: Bitcoin is a Cult
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe it’s because I’m European, but 8 years ago I could buy coffee with crypto in both Copenhagen and Berlin and today I can’t.
Did they ban it in Copenhagen and Berlin? In general? Or just not enough demand so they threw it out?
Today we’ve linked instant payment methods to our credit cards, if the card isn’t rfid enabled on its own. So you just swipe your payment method and you’re done.
We even have a banking app that lets you instantly transfer funds between you, between banks as well, for free. Called mobile pay. So smaller stores that can’t afford to have a credit card system, use that.
So that’s on the payment side. It’s also extremely tedious, and expensive, to turn the bitcoin into actual cash + taxation makes selling a coffee with crypto a bad business case.
Honestly though, I think it’s mostly down to a complete lack of demand.