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My Opinion on Blockchain

vladcalin.ro

91–100 of 107 posts

Re: My Opinion on Blockchain

#91
post #89
post #17

> while day-dreaming about selling it for a huge profit (in FIAT currency) This isn't really true. The dream is that crypto becomes the reserve currency itself, and spendable after hard work on scaling solutions. There is no hypocrisy. The Morpheus meme is one of the oldest and strongest that Bitcoin has. [0] > Every advocate promotes holding, which is not what a currency is for Holding is just a new meme for an old…

Hypocrisy is being kind to people's intellects "Damn fool delusion" is that any better?

I think it's certainly a more fair criticism to say that bitcoin adopters are consistent fools rather than hypocritical smarties. I would say that that isn't the case either, but it more honestly focuses the argument on the merits of crypto rather than mis-portraying its promoters.

Re: My Opinion on Blockchain

#92
post #54

Same tired old talking points, nothing new here. It would be nice to get an explanation of why people care so much, if it's so stupid. You don't see that many articles titled "my opinion on Tupperware", or "why I'm not a scientologist", or "why I won't buy Kanye West's new sneakers". At this point I find it hard to believe it's just hype-backlash that's triggering so many people.

Your response is as rhetoric as the rhetoric opinions you are mocking. It is not trivial to think that a $600B asset that cannot be touched or used to buy daily groceries for majority of population is "useful" or taken seriously. This has never happened in our history, people will take time to adjust. Also, some of the questions being raised are absolutely worth listening to and responding by either an explanation or…

Blockchain topics have become a proxy war for Keynes/Hayek poorly framed as a technical discussion. I think most people who are passionately against crypto hold that view for non-technical reasons and more related to monetary policy. Which is valid, but suckers like me used to think questions like yours were posted in good-faith. I'd answer questions such as upgrades to PoW/PoS, TX rate limitations, side-chains, multi-sig, etc. After enough down-votes for factual answers you realize it was never about the technology.

Re: My Opinion on Blockchain

#93
post #87
post #50

Here are some things that people miss when having arguments like these. * Blockchain is not Bitcoin. Bitcoin is the first (and quiet primitive) PoC implementation of the technology. * Blockchain is not "cryptocurrency". Blockchain is just numbers and an ability to trustlessly and safely flip those numbers. What those numbers mean to people is secondary. * To build on the previous point. Blockchain is being used to re…

Did you read the article? All of the use cases of blockchain have other solutions. Blockchain is just not that interesting, except as a social phenomenon. So many smart people so confused. This is not so much a emerging technology as a giant Ponzi or Pyramid scheme. The only way to get your investment back is if a "bigger fool" buys you out.

> So many smart people so confused.

That's because the argument that "All of the use cases of blockchain have other solutions." is wrong. There in no technology that can achieve the basic primitive interaction that Bitcoin whitepaper describes, which is make a cryptographically provable transaction from one person to another with no middlemen while mitigating a double-spend attack. In other words a trustless one-time digital transaction whether of value or some other information.

Re: My Opinion on Blockchain

#94

Same tired old talking points, nothing new here. It would be nice to get an explanation of why people care so much, if it's so stupid. You don't see that many articles titled "my opinion on Tupperware", or "why I'm not a scientologist", or "why I won't buy Kanye West's new sneakers". At this point I find it hard to believe it's just hype-backlash that's triggering so many people.

It's always nocoiners who write these articles. I really respect Elon Musk, as he can admit that he was wrong and just buy some BTC instead of trying to look down on early adopters.

Re: My Opinion on Blockchain

#95
post #92
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your response is as rhetoric as the rhetoric opinions you are mocking. It is not trivial to think that a $600B asset that cannot be touched or used to buy daily groceries for majority of population is "useful" or taken seriously. This has never happened in our history, people will take time to adjust. Also, some of the questions being raised are absolutely worth listening to and responding by either an explanation or…

Blockchain topics have become a proxy war for Keynes/Hayek poorly framed as a technical discussion. I think most people who are passionately against crypto hold that view for non-technical reasons and more related to monetary policy. Which is valid, but suckers like me used to think questions like yours were posted in good-faith. I'd answer questions such as upgrades to PoW/PoS, TX rate limitations, side-chains, mult…

Indeed.

It's about the money.

Re: My Opinion on Blockchain

#96
post #33
post #11

I feel like the author here really misses what makes this movement in technology interesting, and that is evident in the title. Blockchain is not the innovation, distributed ledgers are. Blockchain is just one component in one formula that made it work. When you take DLT as the focus, you can examine how disruptive the technology CAN be on traditional ledger systems that require enormous amounts of human energy to ma…

If you ever maintain an Ethereum node, you know how hard it is.

how hard is it exactly? Genuine question.

Re: My Opinion on Blockchain

#97
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that's a fair comparison. Before Facebook was Myspace, and before that forums and BBSes. The concepts Facebook was built on are much older than it. When does it stop being the early days? I don't know - it'll take decades I would guess for it to be widely used and the general population to be comfortable with it.

And Bitcoin was based on Hashcash and countless other distributed ledger systems before it. > I don't know - it'll take decades I would guess for it to be widely used Well we're already down one and a half decades. What if it never sees widespread use. Defining "very early days" as "there's no users yet" means you can always claim it's "very early days". There's another issue here, which is that people point out hard…

Like I said, I'm skeptical too. There is a lot of growth though - cash app and coinbase make it easy to buy, bitpay makes it easy to spend. So when I say it's early days, I mean that if crypto takes off I think it has room to be significantly bigger than today.

Re: My Opinion on Blockchain

#98
> they say that the fact that it is deflationary and can not see inflation is a good thing, when it is actually a bad thing. There is a reason the target inflation is at ~2% almost everywhere. We need inflation to keep the economy going.

Looks like it is instead the author who has a misunderstanding of basic economics, in the seminal paper in monetary theory, Optimum Quantity of Money, we find “optimal monetary policy would involve a steady contraction of the money supply at a rate sufficient to bring the nominal interest rate down to zero—is one of the most celebrated propositions in modern monetary theory.”[1]

The reason we target a small inflation rate is chiefly to try to keep the nominal interest rate 0 and secondly because it doesn’t risk a deflationary recession. Israel for instance often targets a negative inflation rate [2]. But due to apprehension and perhaps some politics, many nations follow something similar to the Friedman K-Percent rule [3].

> they say that it's a currency, when it's not. It is not accessible to everybody (not everybody has access to internet).

This being true would imply to Zimbabweans the Sterling isn’t a currency since most don’t have immediate access to it, yet the British are happily using it as so. This is not a good nor mainstream criteria for a currency. But either way, in today’s day and age, money is already indisputably digital. Yet just like one redeems physical dollar at an ATM he may do so with cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin Cash.

The only good point is volatility but that can be fixed and is not inherent to the blockchain cryptocurrency technology.

[1]https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S157344980...

[2]https://www.statista.com/statistics/375241/inflation-rate-in...

[3]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman%27s_k-percent_rule

Re: My Opinion on Blockchain

#99
post #14

> if you lose your key, you lose the access to your wallet for good and nobody can help you. Which is why Vitalik advocates social recovery wallets: https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/11/recovery.html

Bitcoin's whole concept is to "Be Your Own Bank". If you can't keep your words safe, Bitcoin is not for you (yet). With great powers comes great responsibility.

Re: My Opinion on Blockchain

#100
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you read the article? All of the use cases of blockchain have other solutions. Blockchain is just not that interesting, except as a social phenomenon. So many smart people so confused. This is not so much a emerging technology as a giant Ponzi or Pyramid scheme. The only way to get your investment back is if a "bigger fool" buys you out.

Extract from the guidelines[1]: > Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that." [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Fair enough

Touché

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