How is crypto still a thing?
How many startups have you interviewed with that were planning for "doubling head count this year!"? Nearly everyone I've talked to since 2018 has been planning for exponential growth with no idea what to even do with all these new hires.
People are building and shipping products that fundamentally don't make economic sense.
There have been plenty of IPOs for companies it's not entirely clear can ever turn a profit.
There was a post on Hacker News a few weeks back claiming that "natural resources" don't exist and there are absolutely no limits to economic growth.
I'm not fan of crypto but it's the natural consequence of the reality fading from memory.
As the price of money goes up, reality will return with a vengeance.
I don't disagree per se, but a resource is really a material that human ingenuity has been applied to so that it can serve a useful purpose. There are lots of lots of materials that used to be turned into resources that we no longer bother with like whale oil, or current resources that used to just be gunk like crude oil. There are also resources which don't come from nature directly like computation, money, and so on. There is a lot of potential to find new uses for materials and resources in the future that could lead to further economic growth.
Growth can be defined as as the increase or improvement in the inflation-adjusted market value of goods and services produced over a period of time. Services don't necessarily require pulling things out of the ground. Improvements in computing that increase productivity lead to growth. Making a person to person service more efficient or inventing a new service could allow for a lot of future growth. Is this likely to be infinitely sustainable? I have no idea.
There is still money coming in, and people want to believe.
When one of those stops… look out.
A16Z just set aside billions for the Web3.
It's going to take a while to disappear.
I think it's something employers can optionally choose to offer in their plans
https://amp.theguardian.com/technology/2021/nov/18/crypto-cr...
On the other hand, Bitcoin and Web3 sucks mainly because it is based on Blockchain. That solves the double-spend problem but in the most brute force way:
gather all transactions in one place (miner) and look for a double-spend, then have everyone store the state of every coin/smart contract.
That is as dumb as having BitTorrent require every seeder to host every file. As more people join, the throughput always remains the same.
Can you name any other Internet protocols where “max transactions per second” is a thing? How many websites per second can HTTP support? How many emails per second can SMTP support?
Blockchain is one of the only technologies in history that promises to become slower and more expensive over time. And hence people jump in early, to buy the “utility token” issued in block rewards, because it’ll become more scarce later as transaction costs skyrocket. All it does is attract speculation, not utility.
And hence, rather than using crypto with smart contracts to power community applications such as https://intercoin.org/applications — instead it is relegated to peer-to-peer applications that do transactions once in a while.
This is what must happen to make crypto mainstream: https://intercoin.org/proposal.pdf … but most projects are stuck in just doing more of the same … blockchain, blockchain, speculation, speculation, yields, rewards out of thin air, etc.
If no one successfully does this then we’ll live in a world where Big Tech controls our interactions and the Federal Governments (CBDC) controls our transactions. Very centrally planned world with no viable crypto alternatives. China already has WeChat central database and the social credit system. Canada already froze accounts of truckers. It’s early days.
How about: "Some people organizing a riot had their accounts frozen, some few of which might have been truckers, but probably not"
Since, y'know, truckers actually have to earn a living trucking, not parking in downtown Ottawa for weeks leaning on their horns and blathering about overthrowing the government.
> How about: "Some people organizing a riot had their accounts frozen, some few of which might have been truckers, but probably not"
That's something like what "truckers" means in this context. The context means you don't need to spell it out in excruciating detail like you're demanding. Language works like that. I got what was meant immediately.
Also, as far as I know, those protests were nothing like a "riot." Wasn't it mainly people parking illegally and honking horns obnoxiously? I get most of my news from the New York Times, and I mainly recall stories about how peaceful and well organized they were (compared to what you'd expect in America). If they were actually rioting, I don't think they would have given so much attention to stuff like that.
As controversial as they were, vaccine mandates were popular with the majority of Canadians and were part of the previous year's election campaign. The same government got in trouble earlier with the public (and official opposition) for not being strict enough at the border about COVID.
At that point many I know were personally ready to see said vaccine mandates dropped. But most were also completely unwilling to let it be because a bunch of authoritarian right wing dickheads demanded it
And the border things and vaccine mandates the truckers were complaining about were not even under the direct control of the Canadian govenrment but required by agreement with the US gov't.
Note that the same "truckers" did not attempt such an occupation in the US, where the same mandate was put in place and required? Why? Because your Homeland Security would have swept them out and arrested them and tossed them in jail far quicker than ours did. They occupied the Canadian side of the Ambassador Bridge in Windsor, not the US. Because same reason.
Honestly, it sounds like you just really dislike the "truckers" and are mainly getting irate when you see mention of them that doesn't express a similar opinion by being obviously negative and condemnatory. It's indisputable the Canada froze the accounts of many of the truckers, which is frankly the only bit that's relevant to a cryptocurrency discussion. The OP of this sub-thread expressed that clearly and concisely, and going into too much detail about the protests themselves is a derail.
Who gets to decide that?
OK, then. So when do I get to haul my noisy neighbor in front of The Hague for his crimes against humanity?
No, I'm just mocking the hyperbole.
Soft measures to defuse and de-escalate the protests were ineffective. The police refused to do their job. So the government acted.
Whether you call it a riot or not, I don't care the point is illegal behaviour including blocking an international border crossing -- with firearms -- has legal consequences. The people doing it were not "truckers". They were far right protesters.
The bulk of the organizers were the literally the same "yellow vest" protesters who freaked out about the carbon tax, and also Syrian refugees a few years earlier. We should not give them the benefit of letting them take the "trucker" label.
The vast majority of truckers in this country a) got the vaccine like the rest of Canadians b) worked for a living through this whole thing.
EDIT: Like, let's look at just two of the most prominent the leadership of this protest, people who had bank accounts frozen and who have had charges pressed.
Tamara Lich; not a trucker. Works in energy industry. "Yellow Vest" protest organizer. "United We Roll" anti-carbon tax anti-environmental protest organizer. "Western separatist" organizer. Then "trucker" protest. Again, not a trucker.
Pat King; not a trucker. Again, western secessionist. United We Roll organizer. Far right physical attacks on Antifa. Various anti-Muslim, white nationalist statements. Then "trucker" protest. Not a trucker.
The point is that there's a new definition attached to "truckers," which is people associated with that protest. It was clear from context that was what they meant.
> We should not give them the benefit of letting them take the "trucker" label.
Sorry, you're too late. That ship has already sailed (e.g. https://web.archive.org/web/20220614181936/https://www.googl..., https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/11/world/canada/trucker-conv...). If it's any consolation, it's probably ephemeral, and in a few decades all this will most likely be forgotten. But in 2022 "truckers" is the most widely-understood name for this group (and the only name I'd recognize).
None of the direct commenters have really bothered to address the substance of what I was talking about… decentralized alternatives to massive centrally planned platforms for all of us to transact and communicate.
I have a problem with the State. But I don't have a problem with community governance.I feel like much of 'crypto' is an attack on the latter. A tool for moving money outside of the purvey of the state, but also used to get around taxation, sanctions, and capital controls.
What 'crypto' and those 'truckers' have in common is a defiance of governance and assertion of selfish behaviour over and against community. The former to avoid taxes, finance laws, and money laundering laws.
It's pretty revealing that there's a contingent of libertarians that are arguing vigorously for the decentralization/degovernance/deregulation of financial instruments and currency and capital; but the same people are extremely quiet about the mobility of labour.
If capital can flow freely across borders -- why can't labour?
"Gay" used to mean happy.
"Piracy" used to involve cannons.
Hell, we're on "hacker" news, a term largely lost to what we used to call crackers, in the general populace.
Language evolves.
Yeah, but that doesn't mean people can't resist stupid changes.
Crypto meaning "cryptography" is far better IMHO than crypto meaning "that weird speculative fad from the early 21st century that made old scams great again." Cryptography is a pretty important, proven useful technology.
> "Piracy" used to involve cannons.
To nitpick, that's because muzzle-loading cannons are obsolete weapons. Classic piracy still happens, and the pirates still use guns.
I typically use both in full now, except where I can unambiguously use "crypto" to refer to cryptography (especially in cryptocurrency contexts where that's incongruous).