Cryptocurrency is something people tell lies about in hopes of getting richer
defector.com
defector.com
NFTs aren't money, or currency and just because they can be created on some blockchains doesn't make them so.
I also don't see a genuine effort from the author to really understand why proponents think that this technology will positively change the world. You might not agree with them, but at least then rebut their arguments instead of creating straw men.
Bitcoin is open source, the original founder is nowhere to be found, there were no VCs involved in its creation or in the distribution of the coins and the entire network is run out in the open. The Bitcoin network is a commons.
The permissionless, decentralized, p2p and stateless aspect of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin is as revolutionary as it was 12 years ago, and in these 12 years "normal" (i.e. non-rich) people had access to them as much as anyone else. Heck, 10 years ago there were faucets that would hand out 5 bitcoins if you solved a captcha.
The people who are today involved in the creation and distribution of fiat money have incredible power, a power which is largely hidden from view, but which actually drives and shapes a lot of what we see. Of course these people won't take an open source competitor lying down.
Satoshi is dead, the dream is dead, people are just trading the corpse
I'm talking about things like Reflexer's RAI[1], which is designed to have stable value independently of any singular currency, and whose most centralized component is price oracles (so not very centralized).
It is hard to understate how radical that is. Such an act of quiet resistance against the powers that be was somewhere between extremely difficult and impossible in 2005.
Sounds great btw, amazing product, can't wait to sell it to my friends and neighbors.
1. At least so far, Bitcoin and the rest do indeed let you and anyone send or receive money regardless of what political institution, corrupt government or censorious, politically pressured private company prohibits or selectively permits (think Visa/mastercard/paypal and their bullshit arbitrary restrictions on all kinds of things they or some politician decided to call "immoral")
2. Anybody can access the BTC blockchain and most other blockchains with minimal cost, extremely minor technical knowledge that they could easily pick up, and use them for money transfers. Playing along with the pump and dump bullshit or falling victim the bubbles is strictly optional.
In these things, it is indeed revolutionary in a quiet but important way, and I have a hard time understanding the sheer amount of snarky, hateful commentary from so many people on this site. Where the goddam fuck did the scrappy, freedom-loving respect for technologies that help individuals avoid arbitrary rules go?
The Bitcoin network has stayed remarkably stable and it's still possible to run a node on a raspberry pi, which is done exactly because the Bitcoin community value the ability of normal people to participate and be able to verify their transactions and that of the whole chain.
Concerning scams. Let's look at another relatively open technology. Email.
The vast majority of emails are actually spam, and a lot of those are scams (phishing, Nigerian princes etc.). In the beginning a lot of people fell for email scams, many still do, but by and large people are aware they exist and are able to use email productively without constantly falling victim to scams.
And well, it benefits (smart) ordinary people. That is, those who have invested or are investing. Smart money is here - and small investors are here too. And I'm saying purposefully "investing" as opposed to "trading". The former doesn't require any technical skills.
As for "ordinary people" not versed into technologies doing what their government is telling them to do (bans, warnings, hackers, criminals, murderers, ...), well... I'm feeling sorry for them, but crypto cannot just replace local country currencies without government consent. Now think again: who is to blame?
personally speaking I'm paying every day with a crypto card (which gives me a few % cashback ..). But that's ok, you seem to purposefully want to miss the train, can't help people against themselves I guess :shrug:
Hmmm. You've conveniently danced around any suggestion or mention of the fact that the "creator" of bitcoin mined 1.1 million - 1/20th of all bitcoins that will ever exist(!) - coins in private before launching bitcoin publicly and holds them to this day.
I'm absolutely on board to criticize the amazing amount of grifters in crypto. But letting this corrupt the image of the few people like Satoshi (and Vitalik Buterin and many others basically absent from the media), who willingly strayed from the opportunity to be among the richest individuals in the world, in order to instead focus on building something they think can better humanity, is not right. You don't need to look far to find the real grifters, they're showing ads in US media and paying millions to celebrities for product endorsements right now.
[1]: https://bitslog.com/2020/06/22/a-new-mystery-in-patoshi-time...
Also, AFAIK those were mined because Satoshi was the first miner, not because he purposefully kept it private in order to get the most for himself before anyone else could participate.
1. https://coinmarketcap.com/alexandria/article/satoshi-is-that...
Otherwise, you could just steal the coins straight after handing over the private keys. And even if that wasn't the case, the loaner will want exclusive control and move them to another key they control anyway.
If it was a loan, you would have blockchain records of movement of Satoshi coins. This can be proven not to be the case, and so we can be quite confident there was no loans to Satoshi.
NFTs on other hand appears to be equivalent of selling Golden gate bridge to tourists.
What's the value of pretending an easily duplicated digital thing is rare?
I realize that an NFT minted on a given chain is unique, but so what, that doesn't make it unique and interesting they way a baseball card might be.
> Whatever cryptocurrency might someday be For All Mankind, it is most urgently and avidly in this moment something that people tell weird lies about in hopes of getting richer.
You seem intent on spreading such get rich quick and utopian dreams on cryptocurrency. How much do you have invested in the ecosystem?
Edit: In my opinion, people who genuinely care about the revolutionary potential of Bitcoin need to avoid feeding the hype train that helps normalize the sketchy lieing behavior in the ecosystem and simply work on building that future instead.
Please point me to where I spread get rich quick dreams in my comments.
The NFT scene is even more BS. It could destroyed uninformed people's life, just like gambling. However, this kind of gambling is public on the internet with little regulations.
I hope more tech people speak about this instead of just ignoring them.
I agree that there are lots of scammy "blockchain" startups, but I don't think it's fair to paint them all with that brush. There are also plenty that are actually building cool projects, without pumping their coin, and announcing light interactions with a company as partnerships.
If you have 20% of companies being scummy, but churning out 80% of the news, your assumption will be that all of the companies are scummy.
- But cuz you work in a sleezy one so you can only meet the bad company
We were very technical oriented in the beginning. I was hired to do formal verification and system design. Until, money happened, and founders realize they over promised.
For example, authentication/identity using blockchain technology seems interesting to me.
[1] https://blog.ipfs.io/decentralizing-the-internet-s-root/
Identity on blockchain beyond resolving zooko’s triangle (I.e. stably mapping pseudonyms to pubkeys) typically does not offer an advantage over (partially) centralized identity providers. E.g. putting anything related to government ID on a blockchain is pointless because you might as well have the ID issuer run a central or federated service.
If you want to trust a conglomerate of folks who have a vested interest in keeping you small and poor to solve your problems, then there is no advantage. If you do not, then the advantage is exactly that it is not centralised.
It's not rocket science. When you keep your wealth in monetary terms, you don't get to have it in physical terms. Money represents how much real wealth you could have if you spent it. It's deferred consumption. There is no real wealth in something that didn't happen.
If someone hacks into my account, my bank will likely reimburse me for any losses. There are controls in place to stop them from stealing it al. If someone just transferred it to their own account, I could use the courts to get it back. If I use a credit card to pay a scam, I can do a charge-back.
With cryptocurrencies, it's just "bye money". They're not going to fork for you. There's no logic to stop people in Russia transferring my entire account. It's too hard to find criminals to get any relief. It's just your fault for using cryptocurrencies and not having 100% perfect security.
Not to mention, the chance of my bank stealing all my money is nil. They'd be sued and arrested, and the FDIC would reimburse me anyway.
What if it's taken thorough wrongful civil forfeiture? Will you be able to afford to navigate the courts to get your assets back after they've been seized?
You had to cover the "too big to fail" system.
On btc no.
Funny - I have never seen someone in the traditional financing system do that and not get caught. Closest things were ponzi schemes like Madoff (and he did get caught)
I have, however, heard of dozens of exactly this incident happening with cryptocoin exchanges (wallets, services, the most general term for all combined slipped my mind)
1. How much security do we need for this transaction?
2. For this block of transactions?
3. Can we have varying levels of security?
What we are ultimately trying to know is, is it profitable to double spend? If the answer is yes, then no one should be transacting, and anything they do transact is a gamble. If the answer is no, there's much less risk, and the farther the answer is no, the safer the transaction.
But we likely don't need as much security as we do now. In fact, it's very easy to handle at a user level.
A. Put the transaction on the blockchain.
B. Wait for additional blocks.
C. If your transaction is huge, wait for more additional blocks. Wait a week, a month. This is an important transaction. When the blockchain has not reverted for such a long time, finally do the transaction in the real world.
If you are transacting with yourself, you don't need any security at all. If you are transacting with a bar and the bar knows you, much like a tab, you don't need much security. If you are transacting with an anonymous person, you want high security.
So security is currently handled on a blockchain by blockchain basis, where it should be a transaction by transaction basis. What if you can't wait a month? Then you should put heavy fees on that transaction and it should be put in with other higher fee transactions.
4. How does security change with transaction size? Does it make sense to have limits?
5. How does security change with total transaction block size? Does it make sense to have limits?
6. When the coin price goes up, how does that change these factors?
7. When the mining reward in coins drops, how does that affect security?
8. When Bitcoin, in 100 years, moves to 100% transaction fee system, what happens to security? What would the transactions fees look like?
9. In 50 years when the block reward has been halved 5 times, either the price of Bitcoin moves to $1 million, or the security drops. Is that okay?
Bitcoin (and it's successors) are a decentralized solution to the double spend problem. If "decentralized" is a requirement, then a cryptocurrency can be an excellent solution. Other known solutions (like "just trust everyone") don't scale well (an understatement!).
If "decentralized" is not a requirement then there are other solutions to the double-spend problem.
This is only marginally better than SSO with Google/Apple/Facebook/whatever. It dodges the "Google closed my account" problem, which is a meaningful improvement. But I'm not fully certain why you need the public key to be part of a blockchain for this to work. Couldn't you just publish your public key identity on any number of considerably less wasteful systems? As far as I can tell, the only advantage here is the mapping between the name "UncleMeat" and my public key would be able to be reused across services... but in so many cases I don't want my identity to be consistent across services.
- It allows you to use the same passphrase for all services without compromising security since your passphrase never needs to leave your own machine; it is never sent over the wire. You just send signatures to different services.
- The cost associated with purchasing tokens needed to initialize an account on the blockchain would serve as a spam prevention mechanism; an alternative to SIM cards which most centralized services rely on today as a cost barrier to limit the creation of spam accounts.
- Superior integration potential between different services/systems provided by different companies/groups since they can all refer to the exact same account on the same blockchain and provide new ways to unify data between the different services.
I'd wager that most people don't care about this much, though it is real. Still, this can be achieved with signature-based authentication that doesn't require the tremendous waste of BTC. Just... tell the service your public key and sign a message when you sign up. Your key pair doesn't need to be associated with some distributed system for that to work. This has been around for decades and not exactly caught on.
> It allows you to use the same passphrase for all services without compromising security since your passphrase never needs to leave your own machine; it is never sent over the wire. You just send signatures to different services.
This is true for all signature-based authentication, which does not necessitate a blockchain.
> The cost associated with purchasing tokens needed to initialize an account on the blockchain would serve as a spam prevention mechanism; an alternative to SIM cards which most centralized services rely on today to limit the creation of spam accounts.
This sounds like an anti-feature to me. Especially since it'd be foolish for a service to only support authentication via a blockchain. Imagine telling my grandmother that she needed to buy some btc in order to sign up for the service that hosted my wedding photos.
This is different because your grandma would have to buy the tokens once and signup once and she will have access not only to the 'wedding photo service' but a large number of other services. It's more like paying a small amount of money to get access to an ecosystem of services. Like how people pay money to buy an iPhone and this gives them access to the Apple App Store and all the apps therein.
There will also be network effects associated with the blockchain price going up with adoption. People who signed up early to the right blockchains will have priority access to certain software ecosystems and exclusive services which are only accessible to the richest among them (for example).
Doesn't seem like that to me. If I get banned I can just move my cash to another account and start again, and assuming multiple services does this I can amortize the cost over all of them.
The rest seems to me like something mTLS could solve better.
You don’t need blockchains for this. Ordinary websites can implement this. They usually don’t, but, they could?
Essentially yes :)
There are some stateful blockchains which allow changing the passphrase but of course there is no 'forgot my password' feature; a malicious actor who manages to steal your passphrase could potentially use it to change your passphrase and lock you out of your account but at least you don't have to live in doubt if you suspect that your passphrase was compromised.
The idea behind the blockchain auth approach is that you would only need one passphrase for all services but you would have to secure it carefully since losing it would cause you to be locked out of all services associated with that account.
So you're gambling bigger: less likely to have your identity stolen, but complete loss of everything to do with that identity, with no recourse, if it is stolen.
I'm not sure I like those odds.
An amazingly succinct title. Absolutely true. Whenever someone hypes up cryptocurrency, it is almost always for their personal gain, directly or indirectly.
What was Satoshi lying about? What has he done with his riches?
> The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks
This is not the motivation of someone trying to get richer. It's someone who cares deeply about humanity.
Is it so hard to believe that there are others in the space with similar motivations?
I wish cryptocurrency fans would stop smelling their own farts for once and realize they aren't the absolute geniuses in finance that they claim to be. It's arrogant.
While many in the coin space are arrogant from ignorance, I would argue that the detractors are universally arrogant with their ignorance.
Bitcoin people are trying to decentralize the world. Make the powerful less powerful. Free humanity from debt economies, inflation, weak fiscal policy and the slow theft of fruits of your labor.
AntiBitcoin people are trying to centralize the world. Empower the already powerful. Stamp that boot onto the face of humanity forever. Ensure that the state can always rob its people of their savings and lifes work, and force compliance with weak fiscal policy, negative interest rates.
I think I know which is on the correct side of history.
I have looked at lots of potential money systems and I'd say most cryptocurrencies fall into the usual deflation speculation death that lots of government currencies (especially during the gold standard) have fallen victim to.
In fact, most currencies are heading down that route. The euro and yen are prime examples. It's kind of funny how people shout about inflation the most when it's been super low for a long time. They complain about inflation when their real problem is that they have no bargaining power because inflation target policies are also supposed to inflate wages. Bitcoin also doesn't solve the rentier problem with land. If your purchasing power magically increases with Bitcoin then the land owner just gets more of your money.
I am really tired of the anti debt crap. The only reason people would be against debt is that there are crazy people who are out of touch with reality who insist on permanent positive interest rates. Just think about the absurdity of hating debt when interest rates are negative. It's simply illogical.
>AntiBitcoin people are trying to centralize the world. Empower the already powerful.
Deflation is empowering the rich. That's what positive real interest rates do. If you have a lot of Bitcoin and Bitcoin goes up in value then you get more gains than a poor person with very few Bitcoin. Inflation and negative interest rates hurt those who are rich the most and hurt those who have very little the least.
>Stamp that boot onto the face of humanity forever.
Is this supposed to be some kind of joke?
>Ensure that the state can always rob its people of their savings and lifes work, and force compliance with weak fiscal policy, negative interest rates.
Savings are literally just a reduction in demand for labor. Reducing your demand for labor doesn't make anyone wealthier by itself. It's only because there are other people who want that labor that saving even earns a return. You are basically paid to reduce your demand so that other, more productive people get to have the scarce labor. If you reduce your demand for labor and nobody ends up demanding the freed up labor then you basically worked for nothing. The entire point of inflation and negative interest rates are to get this fact into your damn head. You are piling up a bunch of potatoes that spoil before you eat them. Stop that.
So, No, I will not stop that. Thank Satoshi that I don't need to.
I choose to opt of your authoritarian and paternalistic philosophies. I will always convert fruits of my labor into hard money, where you cannot hurt me.
You can't stop us (all).
FOMO hits the poor way harder than it does the rich. Rich people have lots of places to invest their money that give good returns and they don't need to "get rich quick".
I want cryptocurrencies shut down so they stop using insane amounts of power so that people can gamble.
We all indirectly gain if cryptocurrencies cease to exist, because less carbon will be released into the atmosphere.
Then your ire should be directed at scammers, not a specific implementation detail of their scams. Should we abolish wire transfers and gift cards because scammers use those in scams, too? How about stocks, while we're at it? Those get pumped and dumped all the time, too.
> I want cryptocurrencies shut down so they stop using insane amounts of power so that people can gamble.
> We all indirectly gain if cryptocurrencies cease to exist, because less carbon will be released into the atmosphere.
Not all cryptocurrencies are proof of work; proof of stake, for example, is increasingly common (Cardano is the biggest current example, and Ethereum is moving toward it) and uses negligible energy (and therefore releases negligible carbon into the atmosphere).
To get to (B) from here, we must endure some path dependence that takes us through an era of unaccountable wealth transfer.
Bad taste of the bored rich is not a new thing, but I hope NFTs won't become a noble tradition.
All an NFT is is a token that represents ownership, like if the title to your car or house deed was on a blockchain.
NFTs have some sane use causes like designating the owner of a valuable asset or creating electronic tickets that can be resold or transferred without some centralized entity like ticketmaster.
Prior to NFTs existing, would you purchase the ownership rights to a gif or tweet? Probably not. And that is what is dumb about the excitement around NFTs, some people with more money than sense seem to think that now that you can represent ownership on a blockchain some things, like crappy jpegs, have suddenly become valuable assets.
I can sell NFTs of bridges all day long; doesn't mean anyone is buying a bridge.
No. An NFT is just a few bytes of text pinned to a blockchain. They are essentially useless, and every useful property of an NFT can be achieved using asymmetric encryption or digital signatures, the blockchain component is just wasteful hype.
Not to mention you are not the only one to hold it either as someone else can Taylor Swift NFT and sell it to.
It is exactly same as buying and owning cards of your favourite celebrity. They are worthless even compared to cowdung and have absolutely not practical value.
One has to be high on drugs to buy ugly gifs for thousands of dollars.
The fact there is a new way of proving ownership doesn't make the thing owned valuable.
It sold for 74 ETH.
https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2015/03/02/beanie-baby-bubbl...
At the very least, you can buy a piece of IP directly from the IP holder, and receive a package that's nicely presented.
It's still totally overpriced, but I can see at least some value. It still needs to go a step further technologically. Like a special app that allows you to view the NFT with AR features artificially implemented. Or displaying it in a holographic form, especially for moments captured with 360-degree cameras.
You're not really buying the IP in any meaningful way, though, you just get a non-exclusive, non-transferable (!) right to display it. They can still air it or license it to others without paying you royalties.
There was talk about expanding off the one site, but I haven't seen any progress there.
The metaverse pitch is that you can create economies around these that aren't constrained to a single application. I can make and sell cool art, and you can buy that art and put it anywhere - and it's yours, in a way that a downloaded PNG just isn't.
The writing was on the wall when the big newspapers gave stock tips for consumers on the hottest newest telemetry startups.
We all know how it went.
I don't get the art focus.
They can be a degree, a concert ticket, a driving license, a permission to a API service, equity to a company.
Quote from statista: "In 2020, global gaming audiences spent an approximate 54 billion U.S. dollars on additional in-game content". But the players don't own their purchases. You don't play the game anymore, servers go down or you get banned and all your stuff is gone. Think about that.
Edit: Of course my comment got nothing but down votes again on HN. Was worth a try anyway.
With your example, if the game goes down, an NFT of the in-game purchase isn’t going to be very useful. What’s the difference between having a token or not of the content if there are still no servers for the game either way? Maybe the NFT still points to a screenshot? Great…
Why? The blockchain already does this. All you need to do is hold the private key to the wallet.
I don't quite understand your first point. Edit: the NFT is verifiable in your wallet and comes from a verified source
* Real charities, not those billionaire tax avoidance schemes.
There are a surprising number of bored rich people, especially when you consider all the new-found crypto wealth. Most of them probably haven't contributed any of their excess wealth to help the hundreds of millions of people who are still starving, so if NFT is one way to extract some of that, so be it.
Hate to burst your bubble, but that is 99.99% of the NFT market. There is maybe 5 people total who bought a NFT for art appreciation reasons, but aside from that rounding error the only reason anyone owns one is as a speculative investment.
No such thing.
In the US, a billionaire has more money at the end of the day if they just pay taxes on it than if they give it to charity and take the deduction.
The only other way a charity helps a billionaire save on taxes is if they use the charity's assets (e.g. boats, helicopers, real estate) as personal assets. But that's felony tax fraud. A billionaire wouldn't be likely to risk prison for that kind of chump change.
The crooked thing about charities is the people who run them, focus on fundraising, and pay themselves a huge salary. But those people aren't billionaires.
Now, you could rent your real estate to a charity you control at an inflated price, or sell them other services, but I think that's probably an edge case.
If not, who would buy an NFT of your jam sessions? The pioneering garage rock band The Stooges released a remastered edition of 1970's Fun House some years back, and included 2 CDs of rehearsal/studio sessions and outtakes.
They were widely panned for it, with some reviews saying that even the most ardent Iggy Pop fan wouldn't need 5 versions of "TV Eye".
Except all these NFT stores require an invite from another artist. As someone who loves taking photos but isn’t socially connected because it’s a passion and not a job, it seems very elitist. Maybe it’s that way because I don’t have access to it and my brain is just playing tricks. But it seems like one of those “you aren’t good enough for this” kind of thing. Some of the online stores like Foundation app have become gatekeepers rather than outlets.
Most of the influencers are shilling something, obviously
But when some random guy without a story renders a thousand animated dogs from a script and the actual art is how to push it via Reddit bots, my support for artistic value creation has reached its limit.
The recent Met gala.. socialites and wealth parading the halls hanging Caravaggio and Van Gogh, who died destetute.
Or things are only cool until they are not mainstream?
But once it was picked up by the grift/hype/fincrime machine that has eaten cryptocurrencies, it lost all semblance of plausibility to me. It has gone from something like "I bought a small piece of a creator whose work I treasure" to "ZOMG MAKE MONEY FAST".
As an example, take the guy who was big on what he calls investing and I call gambling, who proposed to his girlfriend with an NFT:
https://twitter.com/redditships/status/1432396694608662536?l...
For me it's the same deal with cryptocurrencies in general. Interesting idea, and I want to visit the alternate reality where it was developed gradually and sanely by the sort of curious, well-meaning person that got into it early on. But the sort of value-based innovation I care about got stomped long ago.
I know there's a hypothetical resale mechanism, but it's fundamentally operating on a lottery system - artists are buying a ticket hoping to hit it big, and that favors a self-destructive mentality.
A Patreon-like system still has an element of luck, but the steady monthly income makes it much easier for an artist to say "this is working, I should keep going" or "I guess I should start looking for a/keep my day job".
However once NFTs became a thing and the crypto whales started pimping it I saw the truth. These people have no vision beyond finding some story to get someone else to pay more for their crypto tokens down the line, full stop.
But in the interim, lets not compare crypto to some utopian world that doesn't actually exist. In the current world which we inhabit, the many major currencies are either controlled or heavily influenced by people who:
1) Believe prices constantly rising is good for poor people.
2) Advocate that governments can spend potentially an infinite amount without consequences because they control a printing press. And looking at the actions of, e.g. the US government, it is easy to suspect that the people who understand the nuance there aren't the ones in control of the money supply.
In such an environment, the crypto folk are reasonable. Even if in a perfect world they would clearly all be scammers.
I mean, inflation actually does benefit poor people, when wages and prices rise at the same rate. Devaluing savings accounts isn't a big deal if you don't have any savings in the first place. Inflation also makes debt less valuable over time, making it gradually easier to pay off.
The real problem is that (in the US) wages have been stagnant for decades. That's not an issue that cryptocurrency is going to solve.
Further though, I would imagine that people who have a little savings but not that much, would end up keeping that in a savings account rather than investing it. As such, the little savings poor people do have would be eaten away by inflation.
Also, like you suggest, wages are not rising with inflation so that just makes things even worse.
Inflation isn't meant to cause rising prices. It's a shitty approximation for negative interest rates. What inflation is doing is letting money rust so that it is flexible enough to represent the real world. Logically speaking income earned in 2010 should be losing value because of the opportunity cost of not employing people. Imagine an economy with two people and you decide to spend your money ten years later. The other party has to spend 10 years unemployed. Even though you lost 10 years of potential employment you still insist that your money from 10 years ago is still worth the same amount. Inflation adds enough flexibility to represent this loss and makes the holder of money realize the loss in the real economy, which encourages him to minimize the loss in the real world. With deflation you deny its existence by making the money system rigid and incapable of representing this potential state of the economy.
Say's law postulates that aggregate demand and supply are always in balance in a barter economy. Money as an intermediary allows short term mismatch between the two and deflation allows an almost permanent mismatch. Since inflation erodes past income any surplus is eroded which encourages people to utilize their surplus and let aggregate supply and demand match again.
>2) Advocate that governments can spend potentially an infinite amount without consequences because they control a printing press. And looking at the actions of, e.g. the US government, it is easy to suspect that the people who understand the nuance there aren't the ones in control of the money supply.
Maybe you like to think that other people think like that but reality is quite boring. What people have recognized is that the real world matters, not the financial world. If you see an unemployed person you can hire that person and at the end of the day customers are happy because that person provided goods and services and the worker is happy because he got paid. If granting credit and promising debt lets that person work, then it's better than trusting on some financial bean counter that tells you that employing people and providing goods and services is bad for the economy.
Crypto is rebuilding the same things that already exist but that process has the chance to remove people from a system who used to provide services and replace them with an algorithm. Most people would dimiss a NFT but some of the use cases could be great. If most laws/rules were enforced in code for business transactions would you need to spend as much money on a lawyer in your lifetime? That's the future of money and it's exciting. Will that happen? Maybe not, which is why it is speculative.
The problem is that a large majority of people who are speculative and most crypto assets are highly centralized, which defeat the point of decentralization to remove a few large actors from having control. Plus the scams and idiots in the space that income without labor always attracts.
The Internet changed how we communicated and shopped in well under 10 years, and in an era when 56kbps modems were a luxury, and nobody had a computer in their pocket. There is no comparison between the two, much as crypto-maximalists would like for there to be.
A debit card is similar to crypto. Is a debit card any different than cash for an end user? Did it cause big changes in banking? I can show you my account balance with a debit card. It may convince you I have the assets to buy whatever you are selling. I can bring a debit card to another country and exchange it to local currency. The merchant is passing on the 2-5% fee to you so that you can use a debit card. There is a huge organization of people behind that debit card.
I don't understand what you mean re: debit cards. Is it that the transaction processing fee is passed on to the customer? That is already well understood. The issue is that crypto is nowhere near to matching VISA/MC's per-transaction cost.
The cost will go down over time.
And the people who might have initially dismissed the early internet would likely have not understood it. A lot of NFT detractors are plenty tech-savvy.
I wouldn't need a lawyer if a digital contract enforced a 2% commission paid to a wallet address.
I would need a lawyer if all transactions weren't paid into that wallet address.
If I use software to play a song and it uses an NFT to make a payment to the owner. I theoretically cut out a lot of middlemen whos value is making sure the correct people are paid. There are tons of edge cases where anyone can argue that this wouldn't work but I think that the system only has to meet a bar where it is potentially better than what we have now.
In crypto, when things go wrong they just fork the blockchain. YOLO
Everyone imagines "just imagine if I invested when BTC was < $100 just a few years ago. I could be sailing near my own island now.
And with everyone from celebrities to investors constantly promoting it, it is hard not to jump on the craze.
All "doom and gloom" has bounced off the market. I am still expecting a massive crash, but to be honest, if I invested a few years ago I would be sitting at 3-20x my investment.
It is insanely profitable.
Thats the fun part of all this :)
I wonder what you would consider a massive crash in crypto. Because -90% in two or three months is nothing special, just day-to-day business. I would start to worry if it drops below 0.1% though.
Even so, arguably crypto ponzi games are harmless compared to more socially accepted ways of wealth extraction. Facebook, twitter and other mass social media destroyed society and utilize best ai/ml in existence to steal people's attention, at this point they should be viewed as human hostile ais. The lost potential of years wasted on pointless flamewars and mindless clicking is immeasurable. So many smart people wasting their best years on making ads even more effective instead of creating actual wealth.
In the good timeline there was no bailout in 2007 and the global financial system completely disintegrated, deleting most of fake wealth and unsustainable liabilities in the process, but without long term damage to real productivity.
This is the bad timeline in which wealth extraction dominates until there's nothing left, after which everything stops with no system energy reserves. That's how Soviet Union ended.
More than a decade on, approximately nobody uses Bitcoin for normal transactions. Compare with Venmo or MPesa, both of which launched around the same time, to se what actual digital money looks like. Both of those do way more transactions than Bitcoin and are much more widely adopted.
Which is really why bitcoin exists as thing today, in my opinion. It was a way to pay for drugs over the internet.
The rest of the pricing is purely speculation, and it hurts any real utility it might provide.
The goal was "a purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash". That is, money.
If you are proposing a new goal, a settlement system for couple hundred named organizations with strong relationships, then a) that's not money, and b) the Bitcoin system is socially and technically wrong for that. But if we keep the goalposts in their original location, Bitcoin is clearly a failure when you look at how the competition has done.
The main alternative would be to issue a Bitcoin backed currency. But then you're just re-creating the gold standard, and all of the problems that go along with that.
Sadly this really is the most nuanced definition of "blockchain" that many people can understand
This one annoys me in tech discussions all across the board. Someone justifies some piece of tech as good, others give counter evidence, and then the proponents say that it doesn't actually matter because it will be true some day. Social media is healthier than other media (well, it could be). Self driving cars are safer (well, they will be). Crypto is better for the people (well, it could be). Or my favorite, seen this morning in another thread: bitcoin isn't bad for the environment (well, it could be better, therefore it's fine).
First there was Railroad Mania https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_Mania
After the initial bubble, rail roads changed the world
First there was the dot-com bubble, and then internet changed the world.
Both sides can be right in this debate. Crypto can be a bubble and a scam and it can also change the world.
I don't think that Bitcoin will be a thing in 100 years, but blockchain will still exist in some useful format. Not in the way that it is pushed by some of its proponents though.
The fact that, despite having it explained multiple times by multiple sources multiple ways, I still can't seem to wrap my head around how crypto functions... Makes me suspicious. It feels like the whole idea is to obfuscate it's functionality to the point it becomes this incomprehensible enigma - by design.
If it's not easy to comprehend, and instead a strange mystery number that moves between even stranger mystery-er numbers, someone is bound to think those numbers must be worth something - otherwise it wouldn't exist, right?
Basically what I'm saying is cryptocurrency sends me into an existential spiral of thoughts about how all value is just perceived and agreed upon and 90% of what we call "the economy" is just fake. Look up fractional reserve banking and join the existential crisis with me!
We burned innocent people because of this not long ago.
Anyways, I find the Bitcoin paper very approachable. You may need to read it a bunch of times until everything clicks into place. But it's all there, in just 8 pages.
Right...
Anyways, the golden rules of investing is to not invest your money into something you don't understand.
It's certainly not just obfuscation and smoke+mirrors. It's only as complicated as it has to be and the mathematics behind it are solid. Unfortunately, it is complicated enough that most people won't be able to easily understand it.
Yes, you are awakening. Cultures seem to like jewelry and art.
Only a deep-seated ideological precept, that idealizes the supremacy of the state over all aspects of the lives of private citizens, could motivate such a dismissively mean-spirited article. There isn't an even an attempt by the author to give the subject an objective treatment. Usually this would sit fine with me, as a useful counter-force to the mirror negative that exists in the deluge of crypto hype from profit-motivated speculators, but the advocacy for illiberal laws that would prohibit financial privacy and imprison peaceful individuals makes the article unconscionable.
There are way too many words in that article, yet the author manages to say almost nothing that hasn't been said before. I suggest removing all adverbs and adjectives, then re-writing.
I think most cryptocurrencies and tokens are really dumb or a pyramid scheme. Then again, I think the same about multilevel marketing and much of the modern real estate and stock markets.
But I also see the really exciting potential and promise of blockchain tech. People are working on expanding access to capital and systems to countries with unstable currencies. They're working on the future of the corporation beyond capitalism with DAOs. Enabling micropayments for creators. Much more. It's tiring seeing all these articles harping on the downsides without acknowledging or looking into the upsides.
Probably because the system works fine for these authors -- they're somewhere with a stable currency, their 401k is going up, etc. Blockchain is a space where people are actually dreaming of something different and better instead of accepting the status quo. Meanwhile in the U.S. we have a Fed printing trillions of dollars to prop up asset prices, we have wars to support USD hegemony. In other countries their wages inflate away before they can spend them, etc.
I don't know a lot about all this stuff but I really respect the part of the blockchain space which is about broadening access, decentralizing power, and envisioning new systems.
I am seriously sick of people writing execrable impromptu science fiction and presenting it as reality.
Think of wallet concept. The wallet literally hold nothing. The fund isn't a file or something that the wallet keep. The wallet is simply server as an interface. The transaction can generate off chain. You can signed the transactionor any message to prove who you are. Read is essentially free but write contract cost gas. How can we explain these to a normal user? Why Solana is so fast and Ethereum is slow?
Now, the highly technical user understand those concept and feel something shady about a certain thing. Then they don't buy it. Meanwhile, othergroup get rich so quick and it makes the world feel like crypto is a ripoff.
Add in the controversal stuff such as Sushi fork Uni, then founder run off with $14m(and later return)...
all of that made crypto looks really bad.
But now let's see what blockchaing give us from a technical perspective. It's a distributed database where you can store data into it, like git, and can prove and trust it's what you write into it.
Example, DNS. DNS is very decentralize but what if your DNS server decided to return something different from the name server. What if we store DNS into blockchain? Write to it cost money but read is essentially free as long as you have a node.
But due to the highly cost of mining, and the craziness of its price, develop on blockchain is costly and it push people away because the people who want to build something on it doesn't have the fun. I, for one, want to do the above DNS idea with Ethereum but choose to go with Solana because Ethereum cost is just so damn high...
Would anyone even use a not-for-profit backed "crypto"? I don't mean in the blockchain-backed sense, more in the ICANN/gift-cards/points globally distributed sense.
Trust is something between humans. If you cannot find an arrangement of checks and balances that gives people comfort that the "system" is not ripping them off there is no amount of cryptoaccounting that will solve it for you.
The very anonymity of the bitcoin founder(s?) shows this was never an honest-to-goodness project. Its not surprising then that crypto never solved any real economic problem. As in: making any economy a tiny bit healthier, more resilient, less unequal. Not a single one.
But had it stayed a failed financial reform project would have been one thing. It is heartbreaking to witness the amount of fraud, waste of resources and manipulation it unleashed. Its ongoing amoral adoption by the formal financial system as "yet another asset class offering diversification to our customers" is a fitting closure.
The chicken came home to roost.
People will call "nocoiners" jealous because they missed some train after all they didn't buy Bitcoin when it was at $100. Yet they talk about how oppressive the government provided financial system is. Like how getting -0.5% negative interest on savings above $100k is the end for the small saver but having your money go up 10x because you bought it early and having the purchasing power of your labor go down by 10x because you bought too late is the paragon of equality. One year of work buys me less Bitcoin than 3 years ago. I'm getting priced out like with real estate. It's really puzzling to me how this is supposed to lead to a crypto utopia.
Money is not a "asset class", it is a claim on other people's time and the economic value they can generate with their work and talent. It is only "worth" the value of the community that accepts it as a legitimate tender. If a token dollar is worth something it is because a vast range of people will happily exchange it for something trully valuable.
The economy of a community made up of speculators and extortionists is worth exactly zero (if not negative) and it is a matter of time before this transpires.
The only positive thing to say about bitcoin and friends is that is showed to many more people that monetary system alternatives are in principle possible. Ofcourse some people have been for ages working on complementary currencies and such. Digital and programmable currencies are the future, but they will have to become real economic tools that will fix true problems before they stand a chance against the current system.
As for fortran and cobol, why change the technology if you are sitting pretty?
We need to be accurate when discussing the various scams proposed.
The sooner governments abolish fiat to cryptocurrency exchanges and make such transactions illegal, the sooner this clown car of sadness will come to an end.
As much as I'm not a fan of China and the CCP, they are making some good moves in this department recently to eliminate unneeded capital flight. The US should follow in their steps here.
[0] https://blog.chainalysis.com/reports/2021-crypto-crime-repor...
This author obviously has an axe to grind, so I didn’t get much out of his words.
Did they actually get around to talking about cryptocurrency at any point?
NFTs are epitome of tulip mania. Bitcoin, while it does increase in value due to low supply, is the only secure and actually fair escape hatch to the global monetary system and holds value globally. Proof of Stake, and every single coin below Bitcoin, copied from Bitcoin, are similar to fiat and centralized. Ethereum is the worst of the bunch and is scamming millions.
Anybody can buy BTC with stablecoins, which are unaudited, and whose creators have openly lied about maintaining a 1:1 ratio between USD and stablecoins in circulation.
Say what you will about fiat, but no bank in the world will let me exchange monopoly money for something I can use to buy a sandwich.
Why do you thinik the contagion from other crypto scams imploding won't bring down BTC? Will people still trust BTC if they lose trust in other crypto?
I wonder how many media outlets use GPT-3 to help generate content.
I'm not going to claim that cryptocurrency is going to change the world for the better, but this is an article almost entirely composed of straw men. Whether you like cryptocurrency or not, if you understand it at all and have actually heard the evangelists' arguments and understood them almost every single point made in this article doesn't really apply.
There are advantages to cryptocurrencies and one can very much want a future where currencies they would use isn't hampered by government.
And that’s fine. That’s a completely defensible world view, that many smarter than me have held throughout history. But for heavens sake why are you spending your time on a forum about celebrating startups hosted by a venture capitalist?
Ah right... because normal people never donate to journalists. Never pay for online subscriptions, never buy hardware off newegg. Just because the author has no exerience using cryptocurrency he assumes everyone is like him and repeats the FUD.
Not really, unless you count patreon.
> Never pay for online subscriptions, never buy hardware off newegg
Credit cards or paypal. Both of which have a better refund system.
I wrote about how misleading the crypto ecosystem is a while ago here: https://henvic.dev/posts/bitcoin/
If your average sports writer actually wanted to understand the space, they could read something with real data: https://nydig.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/NYDIG-Bitcoin-N...
The paper you linked doesn't exactly get off to a good start, considering there are ~1600-2200 dead/worthless cryptocurrencies (see below) and Bitcoin itself is incredibly volatile. It's somewhat absurd to claim Bitcoin is the stable alternative to fiat currencies, or the solution to cases of currency collapse. The rest of the summary is just speculation on how the carbon footprint of Bitcoin might be reasonable in the future. Would you mind pointing out the parts that you feel refute the article's criticisms?
Many other cryptocurrencies still experience extreme volatility on par with BTC's early history.
Largely in the right direction.
They initially argued that they could provide an unrivaled form of transparency because they kept all the data on the blockchain. But now I'm working for a customer of their's, and I realize there is no blockchain. I believe they now run a standard service backed up by a standard SQL database.
But look at their marketing:
"Omnichain has earned the prestigious recognition for its innovative solution that is helping brands and retailers create more transparent, connected supply chains and drive intelligent process automation."
Or check out this blog post:
"Lack of visibility is not a new problem. Supply chains have long dealt with fragmented management systems and data siloes—barriers that limit transparency, efficiency, and collaboration between stakeholders. The pandemic only magnified these challenges.
...Moving forward, end-to-end visibility solutions—made possible by technologies like blockchain—will be instrumental in helping businesses proactively identify risks and pivot accordingly. So going back to suppliers, manufacturers can use blockchain to connect and share data with their suppliers. With accurate, real-time visibility into available resources upstream, they can quickly identify alternate sources if needed, and ultimately prevent costly production delays."
I have the impression this company started off hoping to use the blockchain to create a more transparent supply chain. I also have the impression they have pivoted away from that vision.
And that's fine, of course. I'm not criticizing them. A startup starts with one hypothesis, tests it, and then pivots when that first hypothesis fails. This is good management.
But I think, in a small way, it indicates what is happening with those startups that got started when blockchain hype was at its peak. Two or three years ago you could get money from investors by promising to revolutionize an industry by using the blockchain. And now it's turning out that the blockchain is less useful than was supposed for creating new kinds of transparency.
As it turns out, supply chain transparency is limited by each companies unwillingness to share it weaknesses, it's lack of cash flow, it's lack of inventory, and it's slow shipping times. Blockchain can not fix any of those things.
And as I've said elsewhere, with these industrial applications of blockchain, I've yet to see a service that could not have been done more easily with a standard framework (Ruby On Rails or Django or Symfony or NodeJS) sitting in front of a standard SQL database.
A final point: this is my first time working on a big retail/warehouse project, and I am absolutely shocked at the primitive technology that is currently in use. Most of these companies lack APIs, which, in the year 2021, I find shocking. For our warehouse, for instance, there is no way to do an API call to find how much of a particular item is still in inventory. And this clearly limits how much the blockchain is able to change anything.
And this is especially wild: I've spoken to the good folks at Omnichains, and they tell me that they do not have an API. Rather, they can send us a CSV file at regular times, but that is it. In the year 2021!
Just amazing.