566 karma · joined June 1, 2013
There’s really no comparison. Running a business with high fixed and variable costs, and considerable competition is far more difficult to pull off successfully than a passive investment. Which one do you think favours a “gilded elite” more?
Also unfortunate is the fact many internet users take silence as evidence of consent, and so just doing the obvious thing here — not having this conversation at all — would actively promote ignorance (see: “Bitcoin is obviously not good for small and fast transactions”).
> Designing a new blockchain that is good at that is innovation. Not a “shitcoin”.
Blockchains don’t create efficiencies: if not for decentralization and censorship resistance, which inherently come at a higher cost than centralization, there would be little point in the technology at all. A plain immutable database with cryptographic proofs of inclusion — e.g. ImmuDB — hosted by a trusted org would perform orders of magnitude better than a blockchain at the very same tasks.
As most people can plainly see, what passes for “innovation” in the blockchain space is often a solution in search of a problem, launched first and foremost as a courtship display to HNWIs, socially signaling for them to invest in the cryptocurrency at hand under the guise of it being “innovative”. Ethereum 2.0’s newly introduced “RocketPool” (RPL) token [1] is an unwitting quintessential example of this:
So if insurance isn't the real reason, then why do node operators
need to buy an additional 10% in RPL ($5,600 at current prices)? The
only logical answer is to force buying pressure and pump the token.
Adding a token means the protocol is now more likely to contain bugs,
audits are more difficult, users are confused, and taxes become
a nightmare.
I hope greed isn't the real driving force behind the RPL token,
but that's the only conclusion I can draw. They increased smart
contract risk for a payday, and it's possible the entire Ethereum
ecosystem will pay for it.
“Couldn’t there be other ways of doing this which aren’t obviously designed to enrich the founders?”
Put simply, launching a superfluous blockchain and token is just poor etiquette, and the people who point out this dynamic don’t deserve to be dismissed with endearing terms.
Bitcoiners have nothing against defi, it’s just a question of whether a new token or blockchain is needed to do the things these people purportedly want to do for the world, or whether the new token/blockchain is really just a pretense for self-enrichment.
HTH
See also: Nomic [2], SmartBCH, or Stacks
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/ethstaker/comments/ncqqu2/rocketpoo...
[2]: https://nomic.io/
Despite the definition of “premine” being extremely clear cut and objective, apologists for premined coins often liberally redefine and butcher the definition for financially-motivated, self-serving reasons: “See, Bitcoin is premined too. XYZ did nothing wrong.”
Just to understand how ridiculous this is, if we’re going to redefine premine to mean “any coin perceived to be unfairly distributed”, then we might as well not even use the word at all, because biased investors will use the term to describe every cryptocurrency they’re not invested in.
When’s the last time a billion dollar staking operation had to build multiple mining datacenters and fill them with hundreds of millions of dollars worth of hardware? That’s just not required for staking. It just isn’t. They’re not equivalent operations. Not in any way. Not by any stretch of the imagination.
Staking coins just means clicking a button and receiving a financial yield proportionate to your initial investment. Simply showing up with money on day one is enough to earn money on your money.
People financially invested in staking frequently pretend like button-clicking auto-yield is the exact same thing as A) procuring powerful computers which rapidly become obsolete year after year, and B) paying for electricity and hosting facilities for those computers over a long period of time. But the difference between the two scenarios is night and day, and no amount of waxing poetic over “commerce favoring the well-funded” will change that fact.
To act as if staking has exactly the same economic properties as mining is false equivalence.
Satoshi absolutely didn’t premine Bitcoin.
The most important factor in a particular asset’s “adoption” as currency is its propensity to act as the unit of account for international settlement between nation-states.
For example, if you could either use your GPU to mine $COIN for $10/day or to mine $ANTICOIN for $1/day, you could attack $COIN in full knowledge that your GPUs would still earn $1/day of $ANTICOIN afterwards.
The “Dai” peg did break — both in early 2020 [1], and a few days after launching. DAI’s now 60% backed by Tether like instruments. It’s basically a strictly worse version of Facebook’s Libra, assuming Libra weren’t crippled by state regulators (Libra is now Diem).
Every major algorithmic stablecoin has imploded at least once in times of market volatility. Preston Byrne has written a wonderful article explaining why the concept is clearly unsound and theoretically flawed [2]:
When you make a “coin” which is in form and substance a repackaged
exposure to another underlying cryptocurrency, as Dai is simply
repackaged Ether, and Basecoin is simply an abstraction of demand
for “Base bonds,” and peg that exposure to some meatspace asset
like an ounce of gold or a U.S. dollar, a sudden move against the
underlying collateral – in this case, 12% – can trigger a sell-off
that breaks that peg, and breaks it hard.
Unfortunately, when stablecoins break, they get propped up by biased investors in closely linked pseudo equities who limp the imploded stablecoin along by injecting more capital and then powering on the hype machine.
[1]: https://blog.makerdao.com/the-market-collapse-of-march-12-20...
Answered here [1].
> I personally find Lua far more intuitive than Vimscript...
One of the biggest motivating factors for the rewrite of Oni was the limitations imposed by Vim/Neovim of a terminal grid of characters in the rendering layer: “Neovim treats the visible screen as a grid of cells” [2]. This precluded implementing CodeLens amongst other things [3].
I’m also a fan of Lua — I’ve written a substantial amount of Fennel — but given Oni’s goals, revamping Vim’s rendering layer is of higher importance than Lua support, particularly since the VSCode extension ecosystem is being relied upon anyway. Onivim is designed as more of a direct challenge to heavyweight IDEs than as a substitute for Vim. I already switch between Vim and VSCode depending on requirements, but it’d be great to have the best possible support for modal editing in VSCode.
[1]: https://github.com/onivim/libvim#why-is-libvim-based-on-vim-...
[2]: https://onivim.github.io/docs/other/motivation#a-new-view-la...
Milwaukee, 2018: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mkRgPGncn0
Usually so, but sometimes not. What are the characteristics of Gion Kyoto, for example?
But humans occupy physical space. Almost everyone would prefer more privacy and space to less. Hence if the human population keeps growing, the price of having physical privacy and space will also keep growing. It’s just the bitter reality of it.
In addition, often times the architecture or established land use patterns of certain neighborhoods act as an upper limit on population density. It really grinds my gears when people advocate for essentially paving over these crucial neighborhood characteristics. This effectively destroys local culture in the name of “inclusivity”. Granted, there are definitely more neighborhoods without any unique character than not, and it’s hard to feel any sympathy for paving them over. But there are certainly quite a few neighborhoods globally that are quite special, and in these places inclusivity tends to be a tragedy of the commons scenario.
What are you in favor of, then?
Buying into any zeitgeist at any level. Related: underappreciating the pervasiveness of financially-motivated thinking.
What you’ve neglected to mention is altcoins of every stripe can’t accomplish anything whatsoever — be it running “smart contracts”, acting as a medium of exchange, or securing the value of assets built on top of them — if no one is willing to speculatively hold them as a store of value first.
Touting themselves as the “oil” or the “internet” to Bitcoin’s gold is a rhetorical strategy employed by altcoin promoters to bootstrap speculative value storage on the networks they’re invested in. Without speculative value storage, they have nothing, the blockchain halts, and no one can use it for anything.
It’s all a total confidence game to its very core, without exception, and it irks me to no end when people egregiously misrepresent this reality, particularly for financially motivated reasons.
Case in point: “It’s not intended to be money. Most crypto currency’s aren’t.”
This is why altcoins haven’t displaced Bitcoin: touting technological advancements over and above the benchmark set by Bitcoin is more or less irrelevant, except to the extent the narrative underlying it produces a network effect to compete with Bitcoin’s. But there’s no logical reason why Bitcoin’s network effect should ever be exceeded — Bitcoin has the first-mover advantage, and is the most widely recognized cryptocurrency, with the safest and simplest technical implementation which is clearly capable of meeting the needs of cryptocurrency users. Speculative value storage is the only real world use case of cryptocurrency, and Bitcoin does it better.
As an aside, the S&P 500 is down since 1970 as measured in gold [1].