Which is why the pro-Trump tech folks are playing with fire. Exchanging potentially faster approvals/lower regulation for favored projects, for an environment where rule of law and institutions are weakened.
you've misread the comment, weakened rule of law and lesser regulations are two different things that (according to the comment) are being exchanged. For example firing Comey had nothing to do with regulations.
More law, better regulation comes from the same school as more code, better product. It’s obviously bullshit but novice practitioners and non-practitioners support the idea because they think all problems are solvable with more something.
The slow and messy process of reaching consensus (or close) via a complex web of institutions help “western” (in the sense that Kotkin uses) societies avoid really bad policy and adapt to mistakes.
Some people are frustrated by this and think it would be much better to substitute their judgment for this process. They don’t necessarily hold this view selfishly or maliciously, they are just short sighted.
I guess I agree. I tend to try to view others actions in best reasonable light, so I default to the idea that they are simply blind to their own limits, but mean well.
The pro-Trump tech folks are 90% about crypto. It's single-issue politics, like abortion or gun rights.
Scratch the surface on a SV Trump supporter like Marc Andreessen, and you'll find a big bag of crypto that they want to keep dumping on retail investors.
After Russian invasion of Ukraine, Germany said it permanently won’t support the opening of Nord Stream 2. NS2 has been Putin’s number one priority for opening so he could deliver gas to Europe while sidestepping Ukraine.
That’s obviously true. And once you accept that then the whole premise behind crypto is gone - if centralization is the only way to make it work, then traditional banking is preferred. All that’s left are use cases that are in the gambling and money laundering category.
I mine ETH. I have flexpool.io configured to pay me out after I accumulate 0.05 ETH which is about $140 right now.
They pay me out to my MEW wallet and the transfer costs me about $7.
I then have to transfer from my MEW wallet to my Coinbase wallet which costs me about $5 since I choose the MEW turtle speed which takes longer.
I then sell the ETH immediately because I realize how useless this crypto crap is for transactions or store of value. That costs me about $2.50.
So about $15 in fees to get my $140. You call that a great transfer of value network? I’ve mine cryptocurrency since you could use a GPU for BTC. There is no legitimate use for cryptocurrency today and I doubt there ever will be. It is structurally flawed in numerous ways.
I'm curious, why you don't just have the pool payout straight to your Coinbase wallet, especially since that is your consistent destination, so at least some of the transfer fees are avoided?
I could theoretically do that. But Coinbase says not to. And every single time I transfer ETH to Coinbase they give me a different wallet address to send the ETH to.
Bottom line, they say not to do it and I personally can't guarantee I'm sending the ETH to my Coinbase account with an old ETH address that I've remembered.
Mining profits are pretty low right now with EIP-1559 live, difficulty being so high and reduction in ETH price.
For example, one of my RTX-3070s is making about $2.10 per day after electricity costs. Before EIP-1559 on high volume days (ex: Shiba Inu launch) I was making $75 per day with just one card!
Supposedly Ethereum 2.0 is coming in June although that has been delayed repeatedly. So who knows when ETH will switch from PoW to PoS. I can't wait for that day to come because then there will be infinite used graphics cards readily available for sale. Everyone thinks they'll move on to Raven or ETC or other coins but those coins can't handle the hashrate that is current on ETH so I truly think PoW mining will not be profitable after Ethereum 2.0.
Let me know if you have any questions but basic setup I use is gminer on flexpool.io. It's dirt simple to set up if you have a 6GB+ video card (i.e. it has to have enough memory to fit the DAC).
I disagree. I believe there's a lot of areas where crypto can bring much more efficiency and transparency into financial markets, and that's a good thing. I agree the point is not to replace banks, but perhaps evolve them, bring about new types of financial institutions, products and instruments.
While I expect there are important new types of financial institutions, products and instruments that may be evolved by cryptocurrency experimentation, I would be extremely surprised if normal people could do a coherent analysis of the pros and cons of them, and expect they would not be able to distinguish the good ideas from the scams. I mean, look at how many people think literal lotteries are a good investment, or who are furious about the existence of inflation, or whose mind is blown when they first learn about fractional reserve banking.
I don’t know what you mean about efficiency, as there are multiple different ways to count this. Energy efficiency clearly isn’t a selling point, so can you expand on what you do mean?
I’m furious about the existence of inflation. I think it should really be called monetary debasement instead of inflation. Satoshi Nakamoto created Bitcoin in part to provide an alternative inflation free money option.
Why am I being naive or foolish to be furious about the existence of inflation? Is it a good thing that I simply misunderstand?
I am genuinely curious. Please help me understand.
I believe the accurate answer here is twofold:
- money is perpetually not supposed to be a great perpetual store of value relative to goods and services. Government policy aims for some inflation, fears too much and fears too little. Why? Because a bit of inflation is an incentive to use your money on more productive asset - eg don’t hold on to it but instead invest in a startup or go use someone’s services or goods (go to a restaurant!). The issues happen when inflation is so high that the money melts away before you have time to figure out how to use it productively. Deflation is also bad because then people stop spending on services, stop investing - and just hold onto money. (“No I don’t want to invest in this startup! I have the best investment I need, just holding onto my cash!”) That slows down the economy.
- either way Bitcoin doesn’t solve inflation in any way. It’s just another asset - that can go up or down or whatever, and happens to have gone up for a long time (just like Facebook stock) and then dropped a lot. Just like any stock or any asset, Bitcoin can have higher-than-inflation real returns or lower-than-inflation. And more recent returns have definitely been lower. What will happen in the future? Who knows. Same answer applies to the S&P500 and to Gold and to the new condo in my neighborhood.
Curiously, I was just thinking how I personally am often wrong about inflation right before logging back in to see what responses I’ve had to this comment.
One of the important things I tend to forget, is that effective rate of inflation is different for different people within the same economy.
This is because inflation isn’t just caused by just governments printing money, it’s also caused by a reduction in the availability of things to spend that money on and even the rate at which money changes hands (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velocity_of_money).
There’s also a totally unrelated argument that I can follow but not adequately repeat about the impact of various levels of inflation on consumer spending and the feedback that has on employment etc., but that’s not an argument that I expect to do anything at all to reduce anger.
> All you're doing is chattering on the web. You will never understand anything this way.
Is that why you feel justified throwing insults instead of engaging like an adult? This isn’t the only comment where you’ve directed insults my way. It seems you are only capable of name calling, not substantive discussion.
I believe the current state of affairs has governments holding a monopoly on lotteries and actively promoting and marketing said lotteries to the financially illiterate. The odds of coming out ahead are wildly better in crypto vs lotteries. Perhaps we should put an end to government-controlled scams such as lotteries before claiming that regulated industries can do no wrong?
I’m not saying regulated industry can do no wrong, I’m saying the graph of for frequency vs. quantity of wrong for regulated is smaller overall and closer to the axis than for unregulated.
I would counter with the great financial crisis of 2008 - and the stated reason for the creation of Bitcoin. Those were all regulated banks and financial entities that were deeply involved in a fraudulent scam to mis-represent the quality and contents of their mortgage backed securities. They took sub-prime mortgages and then added massive amounts of leverage and somehow the ratings agencies all gave them a AAA rating. This was all in a heavily regulated environment and as such it proved the need for a decentralized alternative.
My questions for those who trust in regulation:
-Why was no one ever prosecuted for this fraud?
-Why did regulation not work in the case if the 2008 GFC?
-If it didn’t work then, why would it work the next time?
It’s not really a counter though: for that you’d need to compare 2008 against markets with weaker or absent regulation.
I’m not sure the relative weighting of causes, between fraud, the misuse of Black Scholes[0], the elimination of various regulations which has been created at the end of the previous crisis, and the failures of credit rating agencies.
At least some of the fraud which did occur resulted in prison time.
[0] I did hear one of the big problems was everyone looking at the (Nobel Prize for economics winning) Black Scholes model, applying it inappropriately, and justifying this in the grounds everyone else was doing it. This is hard to fix, and group-think of this type is also very much the kind of failure mode I expect to happen more often in unregulated markets, but that doesn’t mean I don’t expect it to pop up everywhere given time.
> At least some of the fraud which did occur resulted in prison time.
Could you point me to any examples? When I looked into this the only person to serve prison time during this period was Bernie Maddoff and his great crime was stealing from the rich.
Thanks for sharing that link. It was very informative. They didn’t go far enough (e.g. None of the ratings agencies were impacted) but I’m glad to be proven wrong on this issue.
on a related note: I mentioned in other comment here that people will demand regulation. On the other hand, on numerous occasions I've stated that the next financial crisis will come from crypto. You already have wrapped tokens, tokens that wrap other yield making tokens, tokens that are just confirmation of collateral, yet they can be used as collateral elsewhere, tokens that can wrap multiple different tokens, NFTs that can wrap other NFTs, etc. etc.
Given the human nature, it's pretty much inevitable that some dirt will get lost in this chain, and we will face the exact same fate as we did with CDOs, just with different terminology.
What kind of efficiency are you talking about? It's far, far from clear -- at best -- that crypto can be more energy-efficient than traditional banking.
Transparency? Really? For whom? Do you want your taxes on the blockchain for everyone to see?
I am not an expert in crypto at all, but what I would love to see maybe, is some type of stablecoin supported by the USPS. USPS used to be in the banking business and are now looking into it again. Is there an opportunity for the USPS to support USDC, to replace money orders to help serve the underbanked?
Why wouldn't the USPS just be a bank, with accounts with the Fed and FDIC insurance though? The USPS not providing banking services is because Congress won't let it.
The whole premise behind crypto isn't gone. You can build centralized custody wallets on the blockchain and you still get programmable money, no middle-men for transactions and lower barrier to entry for innovation in financial services (and of course self-managed wallets for powerusers)
Where there's code, there are bugs. I don't want that in my money, thanks.
> no middle-men for transactions
At what cost? Most people don't care about censorship resistance, they want free/cheap/fast payments and transfers.
> lower barrier to entry for innovation in financial services
There's plenty of innovation in finance given the proper legal framework. See the number of fintech startups popping up every year. The only innovation we see in the cryptocurrency space is the recycling of old scams that are impossible in modern finance.
But none of that is true... transactions still require middle-men, and decentralised finance is fundamentally incompatible with financing. So we are left with "programmable money"... whatever that means.
In other words, people who can’t walk or can barely walk are likely not that healthy - is probably a more intuitive theory than walking causes better health.
> a more intuitive theory than walking causes better health.
Why? Genuine question. In todays world, people drive themselves in cars and then park themselves in chair for hours. Then, on other end there are people having physical work that is literally body destroying - or people who literally go too much all in sports.
Why would it be unintuitive that normal walking around, mild exercise related to easy day to day activity would be better for health?
Obviously that will be the case to some extent, but it doesn't necessarily explain the whole effect, given this part:
> Dose-response meta-analysis indicated a strong inverse association, wherein the risk decreased linearly from 2700 to 17,000 steps per day.
I expect (especially in the US) that many or even most people who could walk several thousand steps a day, don't. They talk about the 70+ age group separately, but most of it is talking about the general population and says the relationship holds.
Of course, this meshes with what we already know about the clear links to exercise causing better health - not just things like balance, less risk of injury, bone density etc. in older people but for anybody prevention of or improvements to things like non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (combined with diet), improvements for those with metabolic syndrome, etc. which all contribute to a lot of early mortality.
The question is can you really make it simultaneously cheap to trade and decentralized and always on. Or is the overhead of all that just make blockchain tech very awkward and suboptimal (especially since ultimately there's a centralized winery that honors the "claim" with actual wine - so no real need for decentralization). Instead why not just have a little centralized company that lets companies create ledgers of asset ownership for $300/month. If it's a real use case, any winery can sign up, etc.
Issue is blockchain tech doesn't actually solve anything
Transactions on most L2 chains these days are less than a penny.
There are dozens of popular mobile wallets that make viewing, sending, receiving coins / nfts trivial.
The problem that it solves is that there is no need for you imaginary ledger company to exist at all in a blockchain model, the winery cuts out a rent seeking service and the user gets a more secure and portable product.
Automation isn't just going to hit manual labor, blockchain and web3 will allow for the emergence of fully autonomous "companies" that operate via smart contracts.
Yep. Blockchain says I own this case of wine... but the other guy wont give me my wine! Who do I call? The physical, centralized police and the centralized legal system that back it. Without that legal system recognizing and honoring it, it's worthless. And if it all depends on my centralized legal system, then who cares about the decentralized blockchain. Might as well put it in a table in a database instance running on AWS, or in a written contract.
You could say the same thing about property deeds, contracts, etc. The fact that the laws of physics still apply in the world and thus people can still physically take things from you, harm you, etc. is hardly an argument against any specific method for establishing and recording ownership or contracts.
No, the basic problem is ownership rights over physical objects can't be enforced without coercive power, but blockchains and smart contracts can't use coercive power, therefore they would have to rely on an external entity to enforce such rights. But then the system is no longer "trustless", "permissionless", or "censorship-resistant", and therefore we have none of the supposed benefits of blockchains but we do have all of the inconveniences, which means at this point we're better off with a centrally-managed registry which at least is cost-effective.
This is a strawman. The entire ecosystem does not have to be 100% decentralised. There is massive utility in a trustless, permissionless, censorship-resistant contract layer connecting disparate centralised entities. A centrally managed registry would never be suitable for this task for a multitude of obvious reasons.
> There is massive utility in a trustless, permissionless, censorship-resistant contract layer connecting disparate centralised entities.
No, there's no utility in that, if ultimately enforcement relies on an entity that needs to be trusted and can override the blockchain.
> A centrally managed registry would never be suitable for this task for a multitude of obvious reasons.
Centrally-managed registries are already in use and have been in use for a long time, they exist in every single country, and entire markets depends upon them, but somehow they "would never be suitable for obvious reasons"? They have already been shown to be suitable, what on earth are you talking about?
I'm talking about a global, universal API layer supporting standardised contract enforcement and value transfer between applications. A centralised implementation of this would clearly be a bad idea.
If you don't see utility in this I don't know what to tell you.
> I'm talking about a global, universal API layer supporting standardised contract enforcement and value transfer between applications.
What does that even mean? How is a global API going to support the enforcement of a rental agreement? Or of a bond indenture? Who is actually going to enforce the contract? And what is the role of a global API in that? And what do you mean value transfer between applications? You want to transfer "value" (like a bag of rice?) between computer programs??? None of that makes the slightest sense. Meaningless gibberish intended to fool gullible idiots into thinking that blockchains are some kind of disruptive technology that is going to turn everything upside down. Nonsense. It's a pump & dump scheme, and little else.
Ignoring the condescending tone, value is already being transferred between computer programs. Trillions of dollars per year on Ethereum alone. A lot of the volume is undeniably speculation but denying that value can be transferred on blockchain is denying reality at this point.
Ethereum allows you to transfer digital tokens from one address to another. This is what it does. Calling this "transferring value between computer programs" is both inaccurate and pompous. It's like a truck driver insisting that you call them a "transporter of value". Nobody speaks like that. Your comments consist entirely of marketing buzzwords, which is unfortunate because this is a technology site and we're trying to have an honest discussion about technology.
I'm having an honest discussion. You have accused me of being "a gullible idiot", "pompous" and of using "marketing buzzwords" (which words?). You come across as being very emotionally attached to your negative opinion of the space.
Value can be transferred between programs through Ethereum. The tokens you mentioned have value, because people are willing to exchange them for money. So it's not an inaccurate statement. Web3 provides the standardised API through which these programs can communicate.
Don't twist my words, I never said that you were a gullible idiot. I said that using the term "transferring value" is inaccurate and pompous, and that you are using marketing buzzwords. And I stand by that, "transferring value" is an example of a marketing buzzword. It's not a descriptive term, because what is being transferred is digital tokens, which may or may not have value. Whether they have value is irrelevant as far as the technology itself is concerned. I don't have anything against you personally, but this is the way I see it.
If it helps you can read 'transferring value' to 'transferring digital tokens which have value on the market', the distinction is irrelevant to the point.
> Whether they have value is irrelevant as far as the technology itself is concerned.
I'd argue that it's not irrelevant. The whole point of the technology is, at risk of more 'marketing buzzwords', a decentralised way of moving value around (moving digitised tokens which have value on the market, around).
I had a look at your post/comment history. It's almost exclusively cryptocurrency focussed. I'm curious why you spend so much time discussing a technology you clearly don't think has a future.
It is irrelevant. An automobile engineer would not describe a truck as a "vehicle that transports value", despite the fact that most of the time trucks are used to transport valuable things. It's ridiculous. Nobody in finance refers to financial assets as "value" either.
Why are my comments focused on cryptocurrency? Because I like to discuss cryptocurrencies. I have thought a lot about them, and I think it's an interesting phenomenon from an sociological point of view. Plus, I like arguing with people who I think are wrong.
Imagine something like Robocop hooked up to the EVM, if you put your RealID in the escrow contract and then the ubiquitous camera network is unable to verify that you honored the transaction, well then you have 15 seconds to comply…
I worry that this is the endgame; you say "distributed organisation", I say "autonomous cyberweapon".
We're not that far from having a DAO that can bid on zero-days and use them against a list of targets of its choice. If a DAO can make POST requests it can launch exploits. A script kiddie without the kiddie.
Blockchain governs the DIGITAL sphere and in there can actually enforce. People who are trying to combine crypto with physical assets are a shrinking number. Focus on digital and its absolutely enforcable, to an extent not even governments can accomplish.
Not at all, blockchains can't enforce intellectual property rights either. For example, how is a blockchain going to stop an individual from using unlicensed content on their website?
With enforcable, what is meant is anything that can be programmed into a contract and be executed will be executed (enforced).
That can as an example be someone raising a million dollars for a crypto game by offering 10000 tokens for 100$ each. The million dollars are going to be unlocked in phases. 50k for proof of concept, 250k for alpha etc. Each phase have to be approved by the toke holders. If they dont agree that the proof of concept is good enough they can vote the unlocking down and there is nothing the game developers can do about that. That is what is meant by enforable.
We already know what "enforce" means. You said blockchains can enforce "digital" whatever that means. The only thing blockchains can "enforce" is that data are added to the chain according to some rules. There isn't any type of property right, digital or real, that can be enforced in this way.
I already explained what enforcement means in this context giving you a very concrete example. Why don't you show how that example is not what I claim it is. Instead of just repeating what you already said.
I can't help you see something you don't want to see.
> Why don't you show how that example is not what I claim it is.
Because, quite honestly, I don't what your claim is. You're saying that a blockchain can "enforce DIGITAL" which is a meaningless sentence. Are you claiming that you can write a program and execute it on a blockchain? Sure. I can do the same on my computer. This is not an example of enforcing property rights, which was what we were talking about.
You replied to a comment where I argued that property rights cannot be enforced with blockchain technology. So, yeah, it's pretty obvious that we were talking about enforcement of property rights.
> Focus on digital and its absolutely enforcable, to an extent not even governments can accomplish.
The Winklevosses came up with an elaborate system to store and secure their own private keys. They cut up printouts of their private keys into pieces and then distributed them in envelopes to safe deposit boxes around the country, so if one envelope were stolen the thief would not have the entire key.
the only thing the system can do is ask more and more from their users, but there is no way to know if the transaction is good: if it looks good, it is good.
so it can't enforce anything on its own.
a CC payment can look good, but it can be reversed because there other other channels, outside of the CC circuit, to prove those transactions are to be considered fraudulent.
There is no such mechanism in the crypto space, so basically they are good unless you have an issue that can't be solved by the chain itself.
Because the chain can't enforce anything.
p.s. note that I wrote the keys (plural) not the key (singular)
basically your answer is "have a multifactor authentication" but if that is broken by some malevolent actor, I can go to the police.
There's not true fro Cryptos, if they are stolen they are lost.
I have answered it and again you are answering it ex. here:
"A CC payment can look good, but it can be reversed because there other other channels, outside of the CC circuit, to prove those transactions are to be considered fraudulent.
There is no such mechanism in the crypto space, so basically they are good unless you have an issue that can't be solved by the chain itself."
This is a feature NOT a bug. It comes with it's own consequences of course but that's exactly what makes it enforceable just like physics enforce its laws.
This is a complete FAILURE to enforce property rights. If by stealing your car, I automatically own it, that means there are no property rights whatsoever.
No it's not. You are assuming that the entry on the ledger is a person it's not. It's a thing. I can steal all sorts of things from you in real life and if you don't know I stole them, then they will be gone forever.
You are still not understanding what is meant by enforcing.
> You could say the same thing about property deeds, contracts, etc. The fact that the laws of physics still apply in the world and thus people can still physically take things from you, harm you, etc. is hardly an argument against any specific method for establishing and recording ownership or contracts.
On the contrary, it's a strong argument for using those methods of establishing and recording ownership that are blessed by the relevant local legal system (or, sure, ultimately by those who control local violence, if you want to go all the way down). It's the reason why you get lawyers still insisting on using faxes rather than emails.
> This <legally enforceable contract> says I (should) own this case of wine... but the other guy wont give me my wine! Who do I call?
Answer: You have a cause of action for breach of contract. In UK/US/Aus/Canada/etc, you can "call" / take it to a court, and they may grant you the remedy known as specific performance, which is essentially a court order to do the thing that was promised. This remedy is available because the thing to be done was the transfer of property. The remedy is part of the law of Equity, a set of doctrines and principles that has been in development since the 13th century. It got its big break with people complaining to the King of England that "the law is too harsh, it should be fair!!!" and went from there, eventually becoming a huge body of law about exactly what it means to make the law fair, what principles to follow when doing that, and how to deal with the many categories of unfairness that come up regularly.
You might look at the DAO hack in this context and think, the Ethereum folks really threw out the baby with the bathwater when they decided to invent a new financial system that didn't have to play by the existing rules. Many people talk about ICOs etc taking us back to the 19th century and the Wild West, but smart contracts take us back hundreds of years further back, with echoes of literally the first people to complain to the King demanding a writ to remedy the injustice of the Common Law. If since then blockchain enthusiasts have come up with something better than Equity, I would ask that they let us know.
Main message from the people in The System to you: We have thought of all of these problems before, and we have solved them all before, and if ye who have spurned the legal system come running for help, ... we will actually welcome you with open arms, like we aspire to do for everyone else.
It is an argument against unnecessarily elaborate and complex methods of recording contracts like crypto.
A lot of important, trusted systems often don't have particularly sophisticated security in every single layer. Homes and mailboxes have simple locks. Online transactions have fairly basic digital integrity checks (ie. you connected to a bank's server using HTTPS with a secret cookie). Credit card chips and card readers are riddled with vulnerabilities. We still sign legal documents with like, pen and paper and a scribble that even children can forge.
These systems are still trusted because trust isn't established by infallible recordkeeping processes, it's the humans and the organizations and the written/spoken promises we make that matter. A legally recognized scribble is as trustworthy and useful as a foolproof NFT. Crypto's complexity adds very little in practice.
Sure. You need a state to enforce property rights.
But the point is that the centralized system that managed property deeds does not require an absolutely gargantuan amount of computation to be performed to do a basic transaction. And since I already need the state to enforce property rights, why not have the state also be involved in the recognition of who owns what?
Tether isn’t some new innovation that is it’s own animal. We know what to compare it to. The right comparison isn’t “the US Dollar.”
The right comparison is money market funds - they are very highly regulated. If a money market fund said “we are backed by very highly rated short term debt,” but they weren’t, that is 100pct a scam that has huge fines.
Just because Tether is in the crypto world doesn’t mean it’s now a magical novel currency. Still just a money market fund in a slightly different form.
Currently, mostly buying currency in Mir4. Apparently, you're going to be able to buy and sell characters soon. Mir4 you can mine currency in game and convert it to crypto or vice versa. So, I did the latter. That took two exchanges, multiple wallets,
and multiple days for a less than $50 purchase.
The other games I've tried (Gods Unchained, Axie Infinity, MyCryptoHeroes, Splinterlands, Sorare) are either too expensive or not fun.
Augur (prediction market) is pretty interesting, but it's off limits in my region. It's also Ethereum based, so high transaction fees.
I've also bought a few pizzas, gift cards, domains, supplements, VPN access, that sort of thing as well. I still check for a crypto option at most places I shop (including SaaS services), but I don't see it most of the time.
The guy is 65, has a net worth of $2bn. I genuinely don't think he gives a crap about bad mouthing bitcoin to save himself. He's won the game. At this point he's just trying to be credible and honest. There are crypto lovers who hear what he says, it hurts their emotions, so they rationalize his words as some sort of nefarious plot to subvert public opinion! But the explanation is simpler, it's just what he thinks.
