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Crypto has become the ultimate swamp asset

economist.com

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Re: Crypto has become the ultimate swamp asset

#91

Post by martin-t »

keiferski wrote: post #38

The history of crypto is pretty much a story of technical people creating something interesting with a cyberpunk/ open ethos - then the financial industry realizing it can be exploited to make money in ethically dubious ways, while simultaneously destroying the philosophy behind it. The bitcoin paper is still one of the most elegant technical documents I’ve ever read, a decade+ since it was published. I’m not sure wh…

Because the people who control the narrative are _redistributors_, not _builders_.

Broadly speaking, I divide people into builders and redistributors according to their primary approach to life - not just their job but their belief system - both how they seek to keep themselves fed and what they enjoy doing.

The thing is, builders are driven by the need to create and that's what occupied most of their time and energy. Sure, they publish their stuff but that's not their primary driver.

Then redistributors notice what they've built and see ways to make money off of it. And because good advertising is way more effective at convincing people to give you their money than simply having a good product, in the end it's them who end up building the narrative because it's them who invest way more time into publicizing the thing.

---

(Note I am not saying all redistributors are bad, there are plenty of honest and socially positive jobs which don't build stuff but have a positive outcome for everyone involved. But I feel like increasingly more and more of the population is preoccupied by how to make the most money with the least effort.

Maybe I need better terminology and split redistributors into two categories.)

Re: Crypto has become the ultimate swamp asset

#92

Post by ionwake »

rimbo789 wrote: post #70
ionwake wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Imagine in the year of 2025 believing crypto has value beyond making fraud easy. After over a decade of this thing rattling around it remains a problem in search of a solution and by and large huge waste of everyone’s time.

Imagine working in tech for years and not having bought the only 2 trillion dollar asset that could have freed you from your shackles. Then complaining about it.

Re: Crypto has become the ultimate swamp asset

#93

Post by surgical_fire »

swalsh wrote: post #61
croes wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah lets combine two technologies that need lots of energy. Climate change is still a problem

A tired old debate devoid of facts. The chains I advocated for are proof of stake, and AI is a useful system worth the energy it uses. Should we not consume energy at all?

> A tired old debate devoid of facts.

You are advocating for more fucking cryptocurrency.

You don't get to ignore any response as "a tired old debate devoid of facts".

Re: Crypto has become the ultimate swamp asset

#94

Post by keiferski »

trustsafe wrote: post #86
keiferski wrote: post #38

The history of crypto is pretty much a story of technical people creating something interesting with a cyberpunk/ open ethos - then the financial industry realizing it can be exploited to make money in ethically dubious ways, while simultaneously destroying the philosophy behind it. The bitcoin paper is still one of the most elegant technical documents I’ve ever read, a decade+ since it was published. I’m not sure wh…

I'm not so sure that cyberpunk is dead, it's just that Billy Idol has better things to do with his time than try to co-opt something his manager read about in WIRED. The broken-circuit-boards-and-leather NiN aesthetic lasted for so long that it can't really be revived, which is 100% fine. I think now that a ten year old laptop that can run Linux, tor, and i2p is worth $20 means that now is more cyberpunk than ever.

Maybe a better way to rephrase my point: money won and took over other sources of value. Technology became the biggest section of the economy.

Case in point: this site is called Hacker News and it’s run by a venture capital investment firm. Those two things (hacker/cyberpunk culture and VCs) would probably have seemed almost antithetical in the 90s.

Re: Crypto has become the ultimate swamp asset

#95

Post by ionwake »

rimeice wrote: post #80
ionwake wrote: post #47

I just think its wild you all have subscriptions to the economist

Why? Probably the easiest and quickest way to get a read on everything that’s going on outside of tech and therefore understand the global context our industry sits in…

I prefer my own curated news sources that never required me to pay. I dont think Ive ever paid for an online newspaper.

Re: Crypto has become the ultimate swamp asset

#96

Post by charcircuit »

Zanfa wrote: post #78
charcircuit wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It prevents centralized entities being the gatekeepers to the modern financial world. The US maintaining their own digital version of cash would also work, but the government is slow, and does not want to compete against these centralized entities due to being advantaged as the government controls the currency itself. Payment processors essentially get to dictate what is and is not allowed to be financially viable wh…

> It prevents centralized entities being the gatekeepers to the modern financial world. In theory, but it doesn’t in practice. Most crypto transfers never make it to the blockchain, they happen entirely in SQL databases of exchanges. Also, Tether has complete control over USDT and can block or reverse any payment or freeze any account it wants. No bank or payment processor in the world has such centralized control ov…

>In theory, but it doesn’t in practice.

In practice neither exchanges or Tether have made any attempts at refusing to allow payments to legal businesses as far as I'm aware. So in practice it does.

Re: Crypto has become the ultimate swamp asset

#97

Post by surgical_fire »

pawelduda wrote: post #65
jsheard wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So did pump and dump scams, but crypto brought in a new golden age of pumping and dumping. It's a matter of scale and ease of execution.

Getting kidnapped happens against victim's will, whereas getting into a global PvP casino, taking a risk and getting burned is self-inflicted. Sure, it's easy to fall into it when everyone, especially celebrities shill these scams but still, nobody's holding gun to anyone's head here. I've bet on wrong thing many times but ultimately it was my choice

Are you really arguing that victims of scams deserve it if no violence or coercion was involved?

Re: Crypto has become the ultimate swamp asset

#98

Post by cherryteastain »

helsinkiandrew wrote: post #51
cherryteastain wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sending money without government interference to relatives living in countries with strict foreign exchange controls (Argentina, Lebanon, Turkey...) is one quite legit use case.

Unfortunately to governments and law enforcements that looks identical to organised crime and terrorists sending money. All three of those countries have restrictions/regulations on converting crypto currencies into local currencies - doesn't crypto just move the the problem to converting it to local currency?

When it comes to receiving USD, EUR etc these countries do not tend to have restrictions, as the point of forex restrictions is to keep capital in the country. Hence, these countries are usually quite lax about KYC/AML stuff because they want hard currency inflows, wherever it's sourced from. The utility of crypto comes in when

1. You want to convert the "hard" currency into the local currency

2. You want to convert the local currency back to the hard currency

3. You want to send hard currency back

Often there are official rates set by the central bank in these countries, and then there are black market rates. Banks etc will convert hard currency to local currency only using the official rates, which tends to be a lot lower than the black market rate, so you get shafted by that in the first instance. Then, when you want to convert the local currency back, banks won't sell it to you because the government does not let them sell hard currency to the general population. Finally, sending hard currency abroad is usually de facto (and sometimes also de jure) banned so your money can't leave the country once it's in. And as a last resort if you say screw you I will withdraw e.g. USD notes and take a flight, banks will refuse to give cash hard currency.

Obviously crypto lets you sidestep all that as nothing can prevent you from sending USDT from your wallet.

Re: Crypto has become the ultimate swamp asset

#99

Post by bediger4000 »

simonw wrote: post #5

That's the thing where if you have significant assets your family members get kidnapped until you irreversibly transfer those assets to criminals, right? I'm not sure how crypto continues to gain mainstream adoption in the face of that , no matter how much excitement there is for it in the current US administration. My previous argument was that a technology where losing your password means you lose your net worth wa…

The irreversible transfer is a large part of the attraction isn't it? Your business policy may be "no refunds", but customers paying with credit cards have a decent chance of a refund from Visa or MasterCard. Now your "no refunds" business, which might be on the scammy side, has to deal with Visa's lawyers per charge backs.

Irreversible transactions make scammy businesses more profitable.

Re: Crypto has become the ultimate swamp asset

#100

Post by pawelduda »

surgical_fire wrote: post #97
pawelduda wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Getting kidnapped happens against victim's will, whereas getting into a global PvP casino, taking a risk and getting burned is self-inflicted. Sure, it's easy to fall into it when everyone, especially celebrities shill these scams but still, nobody's holding gun to anyone's head here. I've bet on wrong thing many times but ultimately it was my choice

Are you really arguing that victims of scams deserve it if no violence or coercion was involved?

Absolutely not, it's not up to me or you to decide whether someone deserves to be scammed. Just saying it's a gamble many choose to take.
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