Cryptocurrency is such a red flag for individual as well as organizational integrity failure that I sort of appreciate when some asshole outs themself with their pushing of the grift so I know they're horrible.
Alright please forgive me but can you go into depth or suggest any articles to read?
I'm in a crypto phase but let's just say a bitcoin only supporter. Everything else is pretty clearly a bunch of rugpulls but I feel btc stands alone.
Eventually I think countries will appreciate its qualities and can do really revolutionary things like evade US sanctions with no fear of being blocked by SWIFT or whatever other mechanism. Countries like NK or Iran can buy goods and pay nearly instantly without having to deal with banks that block their every move.
Also any source of energy will have miners attached to them as they can act as a buyer of last resort and therefore help fund power plants that already maintain base loads that will otherwise be wasted. I see that as a tremendous benefit. Personally I think nuclear is the way to go but until then this is a good way to help transition. And even then in terms of acting as a buyer of last resort it’s a novel concept most people don’t really appreciate.
Also I think fiat and the inflation hurts poor folks harder than most people in developed countries realize. Turkey has 100% inflation. Other countries have it worse. I feel like giving people an option to not lose all their money in a few years is an overwhelming benefit to their life.
Am I crazy? I feel like I’m not being crazy when I lay it out like this.
I don't know your angle, but you're coming at it from a "help humanity/improve society" angle, bitcoin's carbon footprint and energy expenditures alone make it a net negative. The fact that the latency between each transaction is so prolonged (and causes additional carbon waste and wasted energy with every transaction on the blockchain) means that anything approaching mass adoption wouldn't just further slow the system down, but it would only multiply that carbon footprint and the energy wasted to keep churning it out.
can do really revolutionary things like evade US sanctions
Bitcoin holders can and have been traced and arrested in criminal investigations, using their own blockchain transactions as a lasting (and in a way, public) record of what was done when. The "evasion" promise is marketing hype.
Also any source of energy will have miners attached to them as they can act as a buyer of last resort and therefore help fund power plants
This is a non-starter of an argument because of the sheer amount of waste that I already mentioned. "Help fund power plants" is a promise doomed by self-interest and profit motives. Bitcoin, for all but its truest believers which are a tiny minority, is a means to try to get rich, and even if it wasn't, funding a power plant with something that demands that power plant's output is like slashing and burning the rain forest while promising to use part of the revenues from the lumber and the soybean crops planted afterward to plant some trees.
Personally I think nuclear is the way to go but until then this is a good way to help transition.
That's fine to feel that way, but even "green" energy is wasted energy when cryptocurrency is involved, energy that could, should, and as time goes on, must go to other purposes unless we want a total societal collapse.
Also I think fiat and the inflation hurts poor folks harder than most people in developed countries realize.
Cryptocurrency grifters use poor people in distant lands as poster boards and marketing pitches for their latest Ponzi schemes all the time. This is a non-starter argument for me, too. Besides, with the bloated blockchain obligations behind every single transaction to verify it, how exactly are poor people supposed to benefit, let alone actually use, a speculative internet token that is primarily used for speculation and sometimes for black market trading? Are they supposed to stand around for a few hours before buying groceries, hoping not to lose their connection or for that matter to not lose their blockchain wallet to human error or deliberate phishing attempts on site at each "now accepting bitcoin" location, each and every time?
I feel like giving people an option to not lose all their money in a few years is an overwhelming benefit to their life.
Cryptocurrency does nothing to prevent this from happening anyway and in fact it already happens, no matter its "deflationary" promises because it's only rarely used as currency anyway and is (because deflationary promises) it's primarily used as a speculative asset, one that has no inherent intrisic value, you know, like a fiat asset with extra steps (including forking whenever the majority stakeholders decide on forking). It's a fiat currency with more waste and more jank and more latency promising to replace fiat currency. :nyet:
Am I crazy? I feel like I’m not being crazy when I lay it out like this.
I don't think you are, but I think you've unfortunately bought into a whole lot of hype and marketing and maybe a vague hope of getting rich while feeling good about "changing the world" with the new fiat asset, same as the old fiat asset, but with more planet-burning carbon output and energy wasted.
Eth developer here. Re: sanctions, the problem with any non-privacy coin is chain analysis lets you blacklist wallets that have interacted with North Korean wallets or whatever. On Ethereum we saw a mass blacklisting of addresses that had received money from Tornado, commonly used to launder exit proceeds. (Amusingly enough, this was also used to grief big wallets by sending them some money through Tornado.)
So as long as you depend on external companies that are subject to sanctions, you will have degraded utility for dirty wallets/coins. You'll have a two tiered system: wallets/coins that have access to US banking off-ramps and ones that don't. As Tornado showed, mixers don't really solve this because a motivated enough entity just blocks everything that uses the mixer.
The buyer of last resort argument is interesting, but I think this just "wasting" power in a different way. Bitcoin transaction fees buy it from the power plants, and then miners waste it. So Bitcoin subsidizes power plants. Why not just have the state subsidize power plants? You can be selective so that you're not accidently subsidizing coal, and instead of wasting the power you can put it into inefficient-but-not-0%-efficient energy storage. I know this is handwavey and not something the current US government would do, but so is creation of huge green power sources that need a buyer of last resort.
Proof of stake is just okay, privacy coins are great for doing crimes, credit card processors are godawful, but my experience with cryptocurrency has mostly just been new implementations of old finance stuff. Not a lot useful to regular people and it's been years.
You asked for some links and video. Here's a few on the side. Switch the prefix from "old." to "www." or back again for the links as you prefer for what you're reading them on.
I have some sympathy for these posters. It's hard to make a good argument without deeply understanding what you're talking about, and if you (correctly) are skeptical of crypto there's little reason to learn about it save a craven desire to make money. Out of these links the Gravel Institute is by far the best - crypto is a big speculative bubble and the rest doesn't really matter - but answers /u/Havanasyndromewaves's questions the least.
The second post tries to make a similar argument but gets bogged down in irrelevant details. It says that crypto has exchange value but no use value. Sure, but that's true of most financial assets. Quit explaining why crypto is a bad commodity, give a theory for how securities work, and explain how crypto is any different than a self-referential hype security like Tesla or GameStop. (And honestly, saying crypto is like those is already bad enough. We know those are bad investments.)
The first post is right about the broad strokes of crypto: it's generally not a useful technology in a world that already has centralized databases everywhere. But it's dead wrong whenever it gets technical, and IMO poorly defines the positions it's trying to debunk. Gish gallop type post, great quantity of poor arguments and rebuttals. Some notes:
First: Crypto is not an "asset". It's a token you hope to redeem for an actual asset.
This is a dumb sneer. Crypto is obviously an asset. It has a market price, you can buy and sell derivatives of it, trade it on margin or use it as collateral for a loan. It's not a "real asset" like land or commodities, it's a "financial asset" like stocks. If Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC were publicly traded, shares in the scam would be assets.
Blockchain has "smart contracts" - So-called "smart contracts" are neither innovative, nor very "smart". They're just a series of very limited IF-THEN statements that can be executed on blockchain transactions. A typical web server script is infinitely more smart and useful than a smart contract. Also, smart contracts are subject to the Oracle Problem.
Smart contracts are Turing complete, they're absolutely not limited to if-thens. They're ordinary computer programs executed in a big VM. The oracle problem is real, a big reason why most smart contracts are very limited in their interactions with the real world, and why crypto will probably have to give up the pretension of trustlessness to succeed.
Third, unlike 2FA, the design of blockchain actually makes it possible to fake ownership. Something much more difficult to do in non-blockchain scenarios. Here's an example. Using blockchain and smart contracts, it's possible to acquire an asset, use the asset for verification, then return the asset in a single transaction. So using blockchain for ownership/legitimacy is actually significantly less secure than most other methods.
This is a simple bug. Flash loans are a cool emergent feature that lets arbitrageurs do their thing without capital. The cost of a zero length, zero risk loan approaches 0. So much less capital is required to get a market working. This is generally good, you want to minimize the size of financial systems because they're basically vampires on the real economy.
The bored ape guys are IDIOTS for the way they did that distribution. Sniffing their own farts about NFTs being useful. Normal airdrops either directly send out the tokens or, if they want to pass gas costs onto the recipients, use a Merkle tree distributor or equivalent to do it based on a snapshot. If you insist on not doing a snapshot (probably to pump up the value of the NFTs) you should check the state from before the current transaction began, i.e. last block's balance. In 2022 only rank amateurs get got by flash loan attacks, we've known about them since like 2018 and the mitigations are not hard.
Alright please forgive me but can you go into depth or suggest any articles to read?
This is kind of a roundabout answer but I've really been enjoying Matt Levine's Money Stuff and he covers a lot of crypto since it's like catnip to finance guys who are used to less exciting crimes. He is technically well-informed and does a good job explaining the relevant comparisons to traditional finance. Often there are 1:1 comparisons to stuff that was developed and subsequently outlawed or obsoleted in the early 20th century. Lately the crypto content has been mostly defi because of FTX. He'll probably talk about Bitcoin again, especially if anything happens with Tether or MicroStrategy.
Cryptocurrency is such a red flag for individual as well as organizational integrity failure that I sort of appreciate when some asshole outs themself with their pushing of the grift so I know they're horrible.
Alright please forgive me but can you go into depth or suggest any articles to read?
I'm in a crypto phase but let's just say a bitcoin only supporter. Everything else is pretty clearly a bunch of rugpulls but I feel btc stands alone.
Eventually I think countries will appreciate its qualities and can do really revolutionary things like evade US sanctions with no fear of being blocked by SWIFT or whatever other mechanism. Countries like NK or Iran can buy goods and pay nearly instantly without having to deal with banks that block their every move.
Also any source of energy will have miners attached to them as they can act as a buyer of last resort and therefore help fund power plants that already maintain base loads that will otherwise be wasted. I see that as a tremendous benefit. Personally I think nuclear is the way to go but until then this is a good way to help transition. And even then in terms of acting as a buyer of last resort it’s a novel concept most people don’t really appreciate.
Also I think fiat and the inflation hurts poor folks harder than most people in developed countries realize. Turkey has 100% inflation. Other countries have it worse. I feel like giving people an option to not lose all their money in a few years is an overwhelming benefit to their life.
Am I crazy? I feel like I’m not being crazy when I lay it out like this.
I don't know your angle, but you're coming at it from a "help humanity/improve society" angle, bitcoin's carbon footprint and energy expenditures alone make it a net negative. The fact that the latency between each transaction is so prolonged (and causes additional carbon waste and wasted energy with every transaction on the blockchain) means that anything approaching mass adoption wouldn't just further slow the system down, but it would only multiply that carbon footprint and the energy wasted to keep churning it out.
Bitcoin holders can and have been traced and arrested in criminal investigations, using their own blockchain transactions as a lasting (and in a way, public) record of what was done when. The "evasion" promise is marketing hype.
This is a non-starter of an argument because of the sheer amount of waste that I already mentioned. "Help fund power plants" is a promise doomed by self-interest and profit motives. Bitcoin, for all but its truest believers which are a tiny minority, is a means to try to get rich, and even if it wasn't, funding a power plant with something that demands that power plant's output is like slashing and burning the rain forest while promising to use part of the revenues from the lumber and the soybean crops planted afterward to plant some trees.
That's fine to feel that way, but even "green" energy is wasted energy when cryptocurrency is involved, energy that could, should, and as time goes on, must go to other purposes unless we want a total societal collapse.
Cryptocurrency grifters use poor people in distant lands as poster boards and marketing pitches for their latest Ponzi schemes all the time. This is a non-starter argument for me, too. Besides, with the bloated blockchain obligations behind every single transaction to verify it, how exactly are poor people supposed to benefit, let alone actually use, a speculative internet token that is primarily used for speculation and sometimes for black market trading? Are they supposed to stand around for a few hours before buying groceries, hoping not to lose their connection or for that matter to not lose their blockchain wallet to human error or deliberate phishing attempts on site at each "now accepting bitcoin" location, each and every time?
Cryptocurrency does nothing to prevent this from happening anyway and in fact it already happens, no matter its "deflationary" promises because it's only rarely used as currency anyway and is (because deflationary promises) it's primarily used as a speculative asset, one that has no inherent intrisic value, you know, like a fiat asset with extra steps (including forking whenever the majority stakeholders decide on forking). It's a fiat currency with more waste and more jank and more latency promising to replace fiat currency. :nyet:
I don't think you are, but I think you've unfortunately bought into a whole lot of hype and marketing and maybe a vague hope of getting rich while feeling good about "changing the world" with the new fiat asset, same as the old fiat asset, but with more planet-burning carbon output and energy wasted.
Eth developer here. Re: sanctions, the problem with any non-privacy coin is chain analysis lets you blacklist wallets that have interacted with North Korean wallets or whatever. On Ethereum we saw a mass blacklisting of addresses that had received money from Tornado, commonly used to launder exit proceeds. (Amusingly enough, this was also used to grief big wallets by sending them some money through Tornado.)
So as long as you depend on external companies that are subject to sanctions, you will have degraded utility for dirty wallets/coins. You'll have a two tiered system: wallets/coins that have access to US banking off-ramps and ones that don't. As Tornado showed, mixers don't really solve this because a motivated enough entity just blocks everything that uses the mixer.
The buyer of last resort argument is interesting, but I think this just "wasting" power in a different way. Bitcoin transaction fees buy it from the power plants, and then miners waste it. So Bitcoin subsidizes power plants. Why not just have the state subsidize power plants? You can be selective so that you're not accidently subsidizing coal, and instead of wasting the power you can put it into inefficient-but-not-0%-efficient energy storage. I know this is handwavey and not something the current US government would do, but so is creation of huge green power sources that need a buyer of last resort.
Proof of stake is just okay, privacy coins are great for doing crimes, credit card processors are godawful, but my experience with cryptocurrency has mostly just been new implementations of old finance stuff. Not a lot useful to regular people and it's been years.
You asked for some links and video. Here's a few on the side. Switch the prefix from "old." to "www." or back again for the links as you prefer for what you're reading them on.
https://old.reddit.com/r/CryptoReality/comments/lq6xpq/the_defacto_list_of_cryptocurrencyblockchain/
https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoReality/comments/pyn7c9/why_crypto_is_a_worse_more_volatile_and_more/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=usertext&utm_name=CryptoReality&utm_content=t5_3xw8ak
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0AAUrMuMPlo
I have some sympathy for these posters. It's hard to make a good argument without deeply understanding what you're talking about, and if you (correctly) are skeptical of crypto there's little reason to learn about it save a craven desire to make money. Out of these links the Gravel Institute is by far the best - crypto is a big speculative bubble and the rest doesn't really matter - but answers /u/Havanasyndromewaves's questions the least.
The second post tries to make a similar argument but gets bogged down in irrelevant details. It says that crypto has exchange value but no use value. Sure, but that's true of most financial assets. Quit explaining why crypto is a bad commodity, give a theory for how securities work, and explain how crypto is any different than a self-referential hype security like Tesla or GameStop. (And honestly, saying crypto is like those is already bad enough. We know those are bad investments.)
The first post is right about the broad strokes of crypto: it's generally not a useful technology in a world that already has centralized databases everywhere. But it's dead wrong whenever it gets technical, and IMO poorly defines the positions it's trying to debunk. Gish gallop type post, great quantity of poor arguments and rebuttals. Some notes:
This is a dumb sneer. Crypto is obviously an asset. It has a market price, you can buy and sell derivatives of it, trade it on margin or use it as collateral for a loan. It's not a "real asset" like land or commodities, it's a "financial asset" like stocks. If Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC were publicly traded, shares in the scam would be assets.
Smart contracts are Turing complete, they're absolutely not limited to if-thens. They're ordinary computer programs executed in a big VM. The oracle problem is real, a big reason why most smart contracts are very limited in their interactions with the real world, and why crypto will probably have to give up the pretension of trustlessness to succeed.
This is a simple bug. Flash loans are a cool emergent feature that lets arbitrageurs do their thing without capital. The cost of a zero length, zero risk loan approaches 0. So much less capital is required to get a market working. This is generally good, you want to minimize the size of financial systems because they're basically vampires on the real economy.
The bored ape guys are IDIOTS for the way they did that distribution. Sniffing their own farts about NFTs being useful. Normal airdrops either directly send out the tokens or, if they want to pass gas costs onto the recipients, use a Merkle tree distributor or equivalent to do it based on a snapshot. If you insist on not doing a snapshot (probably to pump up the value of the NFTs) you should check the state from before the current transaction began, i.e. last block's balance. In 2022 only rank amateurs get got by flash loan attacks, we've known about them since like 2018 and the mitigations are not hard.
How could you possibly be on a crypto phase now
like lmao what? Im sorry, this comment is kind of rude, but i mean
This is kind of a roundabout answer but I've really been enjoying Matt Levine's Money Stuff and he covers a lot of crypto since it's like catnip to finance guys who are used to less exciting crimes. He is technically well-informed and does a good job explaining the relevant comparisons to traditional finance. Often there are 1:1 comparisons to stuff that was developed and subsequently outlawed or obsoleted in the early 20th century. Lately the crypto content has been mostly defi because of FTX. He'll probably talk about Bitcoin again, especially if anything happens with Tether or MicroStrategy.