rodiger

Unfortunately it's almost definitely a smart nerd (using this as a compliment here) who passed away.

There are a lot of absolutes here, which is generally not a great basis for discussing emerging technology. I recommend you reconsider your view of crypto "in its entirety" which seems based on the rabid views of a few.

Many seem to make the same mistake and focus too much on the "my coin will keep going up" crowd. There're a lot of real technical challenges being solved in the crypto space, and I feel it'll still be interesting to follow from an academic standpoint even after the next inevitable bubble burst.

The shadows and latency are rough currently but totally agree that single, flat, rectangular input devices shouldn't be the future. Tactility is amazing and a large reason people prefer their old "dumb" interfaces.

Read into it- it's not as scary as it sounds and it allows for more efficient aribtrage meaning tighter markets across services. The whole transaction is atomic meaning no risk for the lenders (lump sum must be paid back in a single transaction + small interest fee).

Reposting my comment from another thread about DeFi. There's clear innovation and utility in that space and it would be a shame to kill it all over the worst crypto has to offer.

"There are financial primitives that cannot exist in traditional finance that I'd call pretty novel. For example flash loans allow uncollateralized loans for millions of dollars[0]. Or take KeeperDAO[1] or Dai[2] or any of the other meta protocols generating returns by providing utility. Also the sheer fact that this is all decentralized/identity-less is already a novel aspect.

[0] https://aave.com/flash-loans/

[1] https://medium.com/keeperdao/a-keepers-guide-to-arbitrage-mi...

[2] https://makerdao.com/en/"

These are growing pains of a new technology. People used/use the internet to commit fraud too, and it wasn't exactly good for the environment.

As others said, the answer here is Proof of Stake, not banning crypto outright.

Effective arbitrage is required for efficient markets. Again I'll repeat: the sheer fact that this is all decentralized/identity-less is already a novel aspect.

The specific DAO's I linked to build products that allow for shared arbitrage profits and an autonomous decentralized stablecoin respectively- the utility is found in the effective distributed markets they help optimize.

The very fact that you can trade coins or earn interest on a loan in a decentralized manner is the utility. Composable financial legos are pretty useful.

Yeah seems like a weird combination of both PoS and PoW which gets the best of neither. Would've been cool to see a novel PoW here that actually translates into actual "work" for the network.

No, you don't need 10TB. But you do need a crazy machine with 128GB+ of RAM.[0]

[0] https://docs.filecoin.io/mine/mining-architectures/#protocol...

Stealing this from Reddit as it summarizes my feelings about Filecoin's reward structure being a little ponziesque at current prices:

"The primary demand for Filecoin is from people trying to mine it. It requires that you deposit filecoin for every chunk of storage you want to “seal” for mining. It also takes a long time to seal and you have to get to 10tb or you can’t even mine. So people trying to build filecoin miners are likely the primary source of demand for filecoin. Then as the price goes up more people try to mine, but they also need to buy a ton of filecoin.

People are definitely not spending billions to try and store shit on IPFS. It’s people trying to buy filecoin to mine more filecoin. Sigh."[0]

That being said, the tech is pretty cool. And the funding scheme is no different from most PoS coins out there. Proof of Stake works best when there's already wide distribution of a coin. In the initial stages the game theory is tricky. This is all a long-winded way to say it's overpriced right now but could have a bright future.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/mhpaar/file...

There are financial primitives that cannot exist in traditional finance that I'd call pretty novel. For example flash loans allow uncollateralized loans for millions of dollars[0]. Or take KeeperDAO[1] or Dai[2] or any of the other meta protocols generating returns by providing utility. Also the sheer fact that this is all decentralized/identity-less is already a novel aspect.

[0] https://aave.com/flash-loans/

[1] https://medium.com/keeperdao/a-keepers-guide-to-arbitrage-mi...

[2] https://makerdao.com/en/

Filecoin is useful, but incredibly overpriced and its model unfortunately perpetuates ponzi-like investing[0]. Also deflationary monetary policy is awful if you want people to spend money. Why buy something today if it will be cheaper tomorrow?

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/mhpaar/file...

Said more in another comment below but decentralized finance is pretty big. There are a lot of novel ways to deploy capital there. Check out any of the projects listed here and feel free to dig in more/ask questions: https://defipulse.com/

Decentralized finance is pretty massive right now and has some really novel ways to deploy capital. It's not mainstream or outside of crypto perhaps but it is definitely based on strong utility.

Scroll down this list[0] and you'll find many projects providing a ton of utility (and some, I'm sure, that do not, but I'm definitely not claiming all crypto projects are legitimate/useful)

[0] https://defipulse.com/

Regardless of the scale, the counterpoint is that many of the utility-first investments listed are not, in fact, based on utility. They are speculative investments based on hopeful price increases.

What? Plenty of crypto projects have real utility. Also for a counterpoint: commodities such as gold and other precious metals are predominantly traded as speculative vehicles.

The author seems to say that Mars colonization is bad because colonization on Earth was bad, which seems like such a silly comparison it's not even worth addressing.

And then goes on to say that we should be focused on Earth... Can't we do both? Mars colonization is so far down the list of things killing our planet, and seems like a sane response to too-slow societal change.

Does Evergreen get fined for something like this? Is there enforceable law here? Or just say sorry and life goes on?

Isn't it the Evergreen?

Edit: Thank you for all the corrections, will leave this up for anyone else that's curious.

Wonder how that will be enforced given the decentralized nature of these contracts.

With places like Amazon? Most definitely.

Mining isn't exactly a fair shake either... at least in PoS more network participants are even able to "vote".

Staking better aligns incentives when compared to mining and most other alternatives.

This was a rug-pull, not a hack. The actual hacks you'll see today are significantly different from those of last summer so there's been some measurable progress.

Liability is a legal umbrella- I'm fairly confident they will at the very least freeze these funds (which isn't much for rug-pulled users but it's something). It's a federated network so well within their ability.

Many of these lists aggressively weight cost meaning any substantially expensive school self-eliminates regardless of quality of education.

As someone who lives in a fairly seasonal environment, how can I help?

that's a rough one to defend when this exists: https://www.wise.us/

Borrowers pay more than lenders. You get a cut of those fees as interest. There's risk there of course, but it isn't magic money or a ponzi.

Also worth noting though that "extra" energy per-tx increases the security of that tx. You aren't just paying for the system to function, you're paying for the system to be resistant to bad actors.

Do you know what Aave is or any of the other decentralized finance protocols?

Also: "the management of large amounts of money, especially by governments or large companies" it literally is shuffling money around.