Like bitcoin was so crap when it was released it boggled my mind actually. I'm not sure what state it is in right now, because I stopped following it. Like every one of the talking points about it was outright false. Anonymity? Every one of your transactions is fucking public, where the fuck is anonymity in this? You slip once and now everyone knows what you bought. You take a banknote from my wallet, and you will never know where the hell did it come from. Atm, some shop, found on the ground? Even if some expensive forensic science is possible to be done, you can still launder money (I mean in actual washing machine here) and they can survive it no problem, and at that point it's probably without any evidence.
7 transaction a second. What the fuck is this? This couldn't handle a town of 20 000 in the mornings and evenings, but it's supposed to be a currency used worldwide .
Cheap transactions? When the price skyrocketed it was more expensive than using credit cards. And much more expensive. And at that point it became even slower, since you had to line up the pockets of miners.
Decentralized? As every capitalist venture the mining became monopolized by like 5 cartels. Hope they never collude for their own benefit...
Like billions of dollars have been defrauded from the ecosystem, because it attracted libertarians of the worst sort. Exchanges being hacked (running away with money). Mining equipment funded by crowdsourcing, then the enterpreneurs mined bitcoins on them until they became basically useless and only then they delivered. No regulation so painting the tape, pump and dump scams etc are common everywhere. All of just outright Ponzi schemes like Bitconnect it spawned(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCcwn6bGUtU). Fucking ICOs. No chargebacks so hope you don't make a typo when sending your money, so easy to use, your grandma could do it by the way. Billions of fake dollars printed out of thin air (don't get me even started on this Tether shit, seriously, what the fuck...).
And all of this amazing technology can be had for a low price of yearly energy consumption of a small western European country. Last time I checked it was on Norway level, who even knows where it is now.
I think blockchain currencies could be an incredibly useful resource to some sort of scientific socialist market state, but all of the existing blockchain currencies founded on the riches extracted from stolen land, stolen people, stolen labor power, and imperialism would need to be abolished first, and are a total fucking waste. Blockchain currencies in their current manifestation are being used to solve the wrong problem, and the whole concept of mining to achieve scarcity needs to be outlawed. The concept of a fully public, cryptographic ledger is redeemable though. Monetary policy could be directed by a socialist state, instead of moore's law and ecological destruction.
I used to do some computation for Folding@home and SETI on BOINC. Such projects would at least be useful as a basis for manufacturing scarcity (controlling inflation), as compared to Bitcoin mining which solves incredibly resource-intensive problems which have absolutely no utility at all besides calling dibs on a block. My issue is mainly that I don't think such a mechanism for producing scarcity is necessary. Bitcoin exists to isolate the value form from the influence of centralized monetary policy. For Libertarians this is a win because there is no Federal Reserve which can arbitrarily decide to start minting trillion-dollar coins, but it still doesn't prevent exceptionally wealthy people from stockpiling reserves of currency and influencing the market the old fashioned way like when we used to use specie (think Fort Knox but Bitcoin) .
For a socialist state, we could instead simply mint digital currency as needed the way the Fed does now (but not evil), while reaping the benefits of full financial transparency.
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Like bitcoin was so crap when it was released it boggled my mind actually. I'm not sure what state it is in right now, because I stopped following it. Like every one of the talking points about it was outright false. Anonymity? Every one of your transactions is fucking public, where the fuck is anonymity in this? You slip once and now everyone knows what you bought. You take a banknote from my wallet, and you will never know where the hell did it come from. Atm, some shop, found on the ground? Even if some expensive forensic science is possible to be done, you can still launder money (I mean in actual washing machine here) and they can survive it no problem, and at that point it's probably without any evidence.
7 transaction a second. What the fuck is this? This couldn't handle a town of 20 000 in the mornings and evenings, but it's supposed to be a currency used worldwide .
Cheap transactions? When the price skyrocketed it was more expensive than using credit cards. And much more expensive. And at that point it became even slower, since you had to line up the pockets of miners.
Decentralized? As every capitalist venture the mining became monopolized by like 5 cartels. Hope they never collude for their own benefit...
Like billions of dollars have been defrauded from the ecosystem, because it attracted libertarians of the worst sort. Exchanges being hacked (running away with money). Mining equipment funded by crowdsourcing, then the enterpreneurs mined bitcoins on them until they became basically useless and only then they delivered. No regulation so painting the tape, pump and dump scams etc are common everywhere. All of just outright Ponzi schemes like Bitconnect it spawned(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCcwn6bGUtU). Fucking ICOs. No chargebacks so hope you don't make a typo when sending your money, so easy to use, your grandma could do it by the way. Billions of fake dollars printed out of thin air (don't get me even started on this Tether shit, seriously, what the fuck...).
And all of this amazing technology can be had for a low price of yearly energy consumption of a small western European country. Last time I checked it was on Norway level, who even knows where it is now.
This is all good for bitcoin by the way.
I actually love Bitcoin because it teaches dumbass libertarians the need for regulations
It's really a condensed history of finance, banking and problems arising out of unregulated exchanges and banks.
I think blockchain currencies could be an incredibly useful resource to some sort of scientific socialist market state, but all of the existing blockchain currencies founded on the riches extracted from stolen land, stolen people, stolen labor power, and imperialism would need to be abolished first, and are a total fucking waste. Blockchain currencies in their current manifestation are being used to solve the wrong problem, and the whole concept of mining to achieve scarcity needs to be outlawed. The concept of a fully public, cryptographic ledger is redeemable though. Monetary policy could be directed by a socialist state, instead of moore's law and ecological destruction.
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:100-com:
I used to do some computation for Folding@home and SETI on BOINC. Such projects would at least be useful as a basis for manufacturing scarcity (controlling inflation), as compared to Bitcoin mining which solves incredibly resource-intensive problems which have absolutely no utility at all besides calling dibs on a block. My issue is mainly that I don't think such a mechanism for producing scarcity is necessary. Bitcoin exists to isolate the value form from the influence of centralized monetary policy. For Libertarians this is a win because there is no Federal Reserve which can arbitrarily decide to start minting trillion-dollar coins, but it still doesn't prevent exceptionally wealthy people from stockpiling reserves of currency and influencing the market the old fashioned way like when we used to use specie (think Fort Knox but Bitcoin) .
For a socialist state, we could instead simply mint digital currency as needed the way the Fed does now (but not evil), while reaping the benefits of full financial transparency.
Except one of the most popular crypto currencies can be used to simulate things like protein folding and all other sorts of shit (ethereum).
It's still all rather dumb though.
Crypto is lularoe for dudes
There's a crypto for that: https://gridcoin.us/
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