So, what do you think about BitCoin?

[LexiMax]

On 1/9/2022 at 9:44 AM, AndrewB said:

The vast majority of people pay the vast majority of their expenses using bank transfers instead of withdrawing cash and delivering it by hand, because doing so saves a lot of cost and headache. So if you're pinning your hopes that this will never happen with bitcoin, I think you will be disappointed.

 

Government taxes have to be paid in the government's native currency  As long as that is the case, you can wheel and deal in whatever magic beans you want on your own time, but eventually it's turning into USD (for Americans), either at a loss or at a gain that you now owe extra taxes on.

Edited January 10, 2022 by AlexMax

[Bridgeburner56]

1 hour ago, AlexMax said:

 

Government taxes have to be paid in the government's native currency  As long as that is the case, you can wheel and deal in whatever magic beans you want on your own time, but eventually it's turning into USD (for Americans), either at a loss or at a gain that you now owe extra taxes on.

Governments will also never accept payment in something as volatile and unpredictable as crypto currencies.

[holaareola]

Re. the use cases of blockchain, I see the core useful properties being transparency and tamper-proofing. That's useful in any relationship where there are incentives to cheat or hide info -- i.e most of them. There's still much potential for chicanery at the meatworld-to-bitworld junction, but that's another conversation.

 

A few use cases:

 

- Charity donation transparency see exactly where the money is going (there are tons of companies already doing this, not super large scale though).

- Supply/cold chain tracking and verification (My girlfriend works in certification and a bunch of companies are already using this. Amazon has their own solution, Nestle use it).

- Insurance for the unbanked (a bunch of pilots already live - mostly on Ethereum, unfortunately)

- Art authenticity and chain of custody (bunch of big auction houses already using)

- Digital identity

- Voting

- Polling

- In the UK at least there are a load of really shit systems and middlemen to go through when buying property.

 

I'd really like to see one large public good chain operated by a bunch of public international entities (doing away with the disgraceful wasteage of PoW), but in practice I think outsourcing the trust to Amazon on HyperLedger or wevs is probably good enough, it's not like they're going anywhere or can afford to be caught frauding about.

[Major Arlene]

1 hour ago, holaareola said:

Re. the use cases of blockchain, I see the core useful properties being transparency and tamper-proofing. That's useful in any relationship where there are incentives to cheat or hide info -- i.e most of them. There's still much potential for chicanery at the meatworld-to-bitworld junction, but that's another conversation.

 

A few use cases:

 

- Charity donation transparency see exactly where the money is going (there are tons of companies already doing this, not super large scale though).

See Save the Kids

1 hour ago, holaareola said:

 

- Art authenticity and chain of custody (bunch of big auction houses already using)

 

Ask all the artists and game designers on Twitter whose art has been minted without permission

1 hour ago, holaareola said:

 

- Digital identity

Fantastic, a great way to get doxxed (anyone can see the blockchain, right?) 

Also, see the Evolved Ape case

 

Blockchain doesn't really give a more efficient way of doing any of these things, because they're still generally accessed on regular-ass websites that could die at any moment if a domain isn't renewed. 

[Toilet_Wine_Connoisseur]

my thoughts on anything crypto:

[holaareola]

19 hours ago, Major Arlene said:

See Save the Kids

Ask all the artists and game designers on Twitter whose art has been minted without permission

Fantastic, a great way to get doxxed (anyone can see the blockchain, right?) 

Also, see the Evolved Ape case

 

Blockchain doesn't really give a more efficient way of doing any of these things, because they're still generally accessed on regular-ass websites that could die at any moment if a domain isn't renewed. 

>> See Save the Kids

That's crypto!

 

>> Ask all the artists and game designers on Twitter whose art has been minted without permission

Story of the internet. Stolen content all over the place, unconsensually shared vids up on the porn sites everyone uses and worse before TOR was a thing.

 

>> Fantastic, a great way to get doxxed (anyone can see the blockchain, right?)

That's not how it works, and it's a bit weird to not know that encryption is a feature here. Estonian govt uses blockchain to protect their citizen's records while giving them direct ownership of their own data.

 

>> Also, see the Evolved Ape case

Why? Just another NFT scam, no?

 

I feel like I got a reaction here rather than actual thought, probably originating from disgust at all the scams, NFT bullshit, and horrendous energy wastage in crypto-world. Rightly so, for crypto-world. But as I said, blockchain is already used in a lot of places and industries. Examples above confuse the worst uses of a tool with the tool, and show a high level of certainty with a low level of understanding.

[Major Arlene]

19 minutes ago, holaareola said:

>> See Save the Kids

That's crypto!

 

21 minutes ago, holaareola said:

>> Ask all the artists and game designers on Twitter whose art has been minted without permission

Story of the internet.

 

So that kind of defeats the whole purpose of "art authenticity and chain of custody" no? at this point it's no different than a regular-ass digital/paper trail. 

 

22 minutes ago, holaareola said:

>> Fantastic, a great way to get doxxed (anyone can see the blockchain, right?)

That's not how it works, and it's a bit weird to not know that encryption is a feature here. Estonian govt uses blockchain to protect their citizen's records while giving them direct ownership of their own data.

 

Fair enough.

 

25 minutes ago, holaareola said:

>> Also, see the Evolved Ape case

Why? Just another NFT scam, no?

 

Yes. Except this time, we have no idea who the person actually is who did it, other than the pseudonym "EvilApe". While blockchain can trace back to a wallet, it does not require that people have any identifying details attached, which makes it a FANTASTIC vector with which to scam. There's still no accountability in the real world, which has been the complaint of financial scams for decades. 

 

27 minutes ago, holaareola said:

I feel like I got a reaction here rather than actual thought, probably originating from disgust at all the scams, NFT bullshit, and horrendous energy wastage in crypto-world. Rightly so, for crypto-world. But as I said, blockchain is already used in a lot of places and industries. Examples above confuse the worst uses of a tool with the tool, and show a high level of certainty with a low level of understanding.

 

Unfortunately this is the way blockchain is being pushed to the general public, so all that good that blockchain is potentially doing is wasted on these schemes and scams. If you can drown out the crypto bullshit with the actual uses, that's fantastic! But this is where it's at- Elon leveling Dogecoin with a single tweet and a rug pull every waking hour. 
(I also typed that original response on mobile so it's a little less thought-out than my normal ones). 

[magicsofa]

23 hours ago, holaareola said:

meatworld

This gives me an idea... MeatCoin

Its acronym will be... MEAT

It will be just like other cryptocurrency, except it has actual physical coins...

[Bridgeburner56]

11 hours ago, holaareola said:

But as I said, blockchain is already used in a lot of places and industries.

Still waiting for someone to show clear, ubiquitous, unique (ie not already easy to achieve with existing tech) usefulness of this 10 year old technology.

[SleepyVelvet]

On 1/11/2022 at 5:29 PM, Major Arlene said:

Blockchain doesn't really give a more efficient way of doing any of these things, because they're still generally accessed on regular-ass websites that could die at any moment if a domain isn't renewed. 

 

Good point.  While there's inherit rigidness to a blockchain, not everyone is gonna carry around a napkin with a bunch of numbers on it and do math everytime someone has to do anything.  I guess it will always rely on an outer layer of maintanence/access tech, as well as rely on the social contract giving it value in the first place.

I still think it's less of a meme than the US Dollar, though.

I like blockchain concepts but am not sure what to make about its criticisms.  Someones got to do the job of being be critical.  So let me belly flop onto the pile too.  

puts on mask

It is me, nnnvork!  I have uploaded my genome and a lossy encoding of my thought patterns into The Singluar One-World Blockchain

^TM as an NFT, and I assigned ownership of it to myself.  I have transcended as an NFT Lich, muahahaha!  Do you know those "free" mandated Covid-19 tests that you need a Google account to get for some reason and all your personal info?  Well, now everyone's DNA (and other things) has been uploaded and sold to the elites as NFTs.  And because they are so stupid, I convinced them that it means they literally own people's souls, for some reason.  They put their hands on their chins in and said, "hmm... I mean duh, of course we own them, the blockchain says so.  It's just facts and logic".  Now they think that they own people, while legal structures conveniently align around that very same concept too.  They totally are not just turning a blind eye to things because it's convenient in the short run or anything.  It totally won't bite them in the butt later on or something.

takes off mask

I hope the above meme doesn't get snipped and used to farm hysteria in-and-of itself too, overshooting it's initial intention and causing its own dark age.  However, either way, there is at least one thing that can save us against the maligned, depraved mis-use of blockchain technology, and that is...

also blockchain technology.  I'm pretty sure you can always spin up another blockchain if the first one(s) become depraved, and with a different social formation surrounding the new one (which hopefully pops and deflates the previous bad one).  As far as I know there's inexaustibly different "hash-functions-and-alike" you can use that don't overlap too much with the one-another. - Err. I'm not sure if their spacing w.r.t eachother runs into physical limits like the "heat death of the universe" or "number of available atoms" either.  I don't think they do but it's tough to wrap my head around cuz I have a 95 IQ.  It's probably wrapped up in stuff like the Riemann Hypothesis and the "structure of chaos" in how patterns splinter and fall apart as they span outward anyways.

^{[REDACTED section from original ramble; stuff about observations on how certain concepts and fear propagate through social networks]}

For some earlier predictions in this thread: I can totally see a boom-bust cycle of dollars feeding a corny blockchain rush that eventually implodes on itself, and the length of the dark age following it being partially determined by the amount of net-excess of anti-blockchain sentiment - past what is worth it.  "Ook, dollar bad. blame dollar!" "no. NFT bad. blame NFT. Oook!".  Noistradomus has spoken.

(mfw when I'm just trying to be a humble butt-plug cowboy, but end up feeling compelled to try wrangling in cycles of ragnorok themselves, which I could just be hallucinating anyways or even contributing to.  i should've gone into furry porn instead of computer science.)

[Ludi]

On 1/10/2022 at 4:13 PM, Bridgeburner56 said:

Governments will also never accept payment in something as volatile and unpredictable as crypto currencies.

As they shouldn't. Let us not forget what happened in South America.

[Ludi]

On 1/11/2022 at 4:31 PM, Toilet_Wine_Connoisseur said:

my thoughts on anything crypto:

I second this

[Mr. Freeze]

Good news everyone! Now we'll ruin the environment while grinding some shitty sword in an MMO! It's a rollercoaster into a grave!

 

"90% of people will not play a game unless they are being properly valued for that time," Ohanian claimed in the podcast. "In five years, you will actually value your time properly, and instead of being harvested for advertisements, or being fleeced for dollars to buy stupid hammers you don't actually own, you will be playing some on-chain equivalent game that will be just as fun, but you'll actually earn value and you will be the harvester."

 

of COURSE this idiot works for Reddit

[insertwackynamehere]

Lol he doesn’t just work for Reddit he founded it 

[Gez]

45 minutes ago, Mr. Freeze said:

"90% of people will not play a game unless they are being properly valued for that time," Ohanian claimed in the podcast. "In five years, you will actually value your time properly, and instead of being harvested for advertisements, or being fleeced for dollars to buy stupid hammers you don't actually own, you will be playing some on-chain equivalent game that will be just as fun, but you'll actually earn value and you will be the harvester."

Yeah, if the game is actually fun, the value you get for your time is the fun of the game.

 

If you get paid for your time, it's not a game, it's work.

 

Also if 90% of people are getting money to play video games, then that money will be micropeanuts. You can't have a system where a majority of the population are actually paid meaningful money so as to do nothing productive. And if you could, then you wouldn't need crypto for that.

[Mr. Freeze]

It's terminal cryptobro brain: "If I can't turn everything I do into receiving a speculative asset what's the point?" 

[Kool Belzero]

Bitcoin seems a bit lame

[msx2plus]

bitcoin was a way for the average person to safely purchase "interesting chemicals" from reputable vendors with front-facing public reviews/trust statistics and was a huge benefit to harm reduction among those who wish to safely engage in "personal chemistry experiments" when combined with other harm reduction practices. it was a window into the world of decriminalization and accessible information. crypto turning into a speculative shitstorm and mainstream knowledge has kind of a put a damper on that and i'm sure many will end up going back to acquiring "what's available nearby" which is always worrying.

[Azuris]

So the russian central bank suggested to ban Crypto Currencies.

I can imagine that Russia does as China did and Countries as Kasachstan will follow (being close to Russia).

 

So maybe mining Farms will search for a new Country they can cheaply use Energy.

 

[kristus]

As someone who struggled to see what problem or improvement crypto was supposed to solve. This video by Folding ideas made an excellent job of diving in to the fenomena and dissecting the issue for me. 
 

 

[RDETalus]

There's a few interesting ideas in decentralized finance but I haven't seen any come to fruition. If you don't know what that is, imagine a banking company, but instead of a CEO and employees managing everyone's financial operations, you have piece of code (the CEO) and hundreds of decentralized personal computers (the employees) executing that code (the financial operations). I know a couple of friends that recently started a crypto organization to buy and operate a fast food franchise via blockchain governance.

 

[Mr. Freeze]

Bitcoin Is Just a Crappy Tech Stock Now.

 

Hey isn't it kind of interesting that all the pro-Bitcoin posts here dried up right as it went to 30k? 

[PsychEyeball]

Sadly it seems as if there'll always be someone to carry the wethered corpse of Bitcoin and swear it still is the future, despite multiple and repeated cases of it being, well... not that.

 

Even if Bitcoin were to be something that the common person could tap into, would you trust a currency that's prone to randomly crash without any warning? I sure wouldn't.

[AndrewB]

11 hours ago, Mr. Freeze said:

Bitcoin Is Just a Crappy Tech Stock Now.

 

Hey isn't it kind of interesting that all the pro-Bitcoin posts here dried up right as it went to 30k? 

 

Remember, I was telling people to buy it around $100

[gwain]

Bit coin is garbo invest in monero/wonero if you value any type of safety or privacy

 

 

[Bridgeburner56]

1 hour ago, AndrewB said:

 

Remember, I was telling people to buy it around $100

And Alex Jones correctly predicted 9/11, doesn't mean I'm going to listen to anything else he spews. Broken clock ... twice a day ... right ... etc

[DJVCardMaster]

I think all crypto-currencies are an amazing way of creating a decentralized exchange rate, not controled by the state, that also meets the trust it need by the people to be accepted as what it is, money, something that represents a value and can be exchanged by goods or services, or whatever. It's the AnCap dream. I do believe in economics so I'm pretty fine with them, in fact, in my country, saving in crypto-currencies rather than our country's currency (Argentine Peso: 50% annual inflation), is just more reliable, even though the crypto's values can be non-reliable for people that saves in an already reliable currency such as the US Dollar or Euro, plus, they can't be regulated like the Dollars (We can't buy more than 200 USD per month, legally, and we can only buy them at a halved price the market says it has), so many people is just putting their trust into them.

* They usually have a limited quantity, so they'll stop being generated at some point when we reach that limit (No inflation because of printing notes)
* Crypto wallets are usually pretty reliable if you know some digital security which is a must in general
* Its value is determined by the market and by the people who decide to invest in them, only backed up by the trust of the people towards said crypto
* Harder to steal than physical money, it's a fact that everybody has money on a digital wallet,bank or credit/debit card, instead of having it physical, so that's a plus.

People trust in them because of how they are designed, regular use currency is trusted because notes have seals or stuff that says "this note is not fake", coins are made of hard to find materials and are hard to craft for regular beings, but cryptocurrency has its way to be reliable because of encryption, and how impossible it would be to fake them, they are just like a pretty sofisticated password generator.

A great technology for the years to come, in the other hand, NFT's are a filthy fraud, just a Ponzi scheme, and someone is going to lose for some to win with them, not only that, but they are used for stealing art or other things and fucking with intellectual property of everybody's craftings. It's a problem, that will exist, as long as people keep falling on them, just like Herbalife, Amway or all of those frauds.

I also hope for people to stop speculating about the value/price of each crypto and start using them as actual currencies, instead of messing around like if that was some kind of dystopic metaverse Wall Street.

[AndrewB]

9 hours ago, Bridgeburner56 said:

And Alex Jones correctly predicted 9/11, doesn't mean I'm going to listen to anything else he spews. Broken clock ... twice a day ... right ... etc

 

Someone asked where the bitcoin people went, I kindly responded.

[DSC]

Speaking of Alex Jones, I just want to quickly share one of my favorite insane lines he has ever spoken: "You see, 666 is a doubling of 33. And 33 is pi".

https://web.archive.org/web/20141014091516/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HO_8wznxdj4

[LexiMax]

13 hours ago, DJVCardMaster said:

they can't be regulated like the Dollars (We can't buy more than 200 USD per month, legally, and we can only buy them at a halved price the market says it has),

 

Bitcoin can be regulated.  Here in the US, they are considered an asset, and you are expected to pay taxes on their appreciation like an asset.  And if you don't pay your taxes, the IRS will eventually come after you, based on what they find in the public bitcoin ledger.  I imagine that if enough of your countrymen follow your example, the Argentine government might decide to regulate it similarly to dollars.

 

They can regulate because they are a government and can legislate and enforce their edicts with violence.  Bitcoin has no organized government backing it up while also having a public ledger that can be un-anonymized if you have the resources of a nation-state.  It is unfortunate that your country is (presumably) in a state where you find using Bitcoin superior to your country's native currency, but being the "least bad" option doesn't make it good (though perhaps your only realistic option at the moment).

 

The other things you bring up are kind of missing the point of what a currency is supposed to be.  A good currency is supposed to be relatively stable and absorb fluctuations in the market; plus have just have a teeny little bit of inflation (not 50%), in order to encourage investment and economic activity as opposed to hoarding.  A good currency is also supposed to be easy to undo mistakes - if someone steals your credit card, you can call the company and report it as stolen, as opposed to having your hands tied due to the theft being set in stone into the distributed ledger.

Edited January 26, 2022 by AlexMax