The promise of crypto has not lived up to its initial excitement(economist.com)
economist.com
The promise of crypto has not lived up to its initial excitement
https://www.economist.com/special-report/2023/05/15/the-promise-of-crypto-has-not-lived-up-to-its-initial-excitement
131 comments
Waaay back, I thought Bitcoin was a cool technology, and convinced some friends of mine with businesses to accept it. We had a lot of fun with it - it was really cool to pay for your beer by scanning a QR code and seeing the transaction come through this public, distributed, tamper proof ledger, like magic, with no need for money, banks or any of the other financial infrastructure we're used to.
Sadly, the "crypto space" was quickly invaded by hordes of people who never really cared about the technology itself, how it works and what it's actually useful for. (and what it's not useful for)
These people, who know nothing about it, and for years had dismissed it as a joke, suddenly began to talk about it very seriously as a very serious "investment" in self-proclaimed "expert" capacity.
You know the type of person I'm talking about! We've all seen them, and most of us can probably count one or two amongst our friends.
The potential for cool applications of blockchains is still there, but so far it seems to me cryptocurrency has mostly just been abused as a vehicle for crazy, baseless manias, and little to no meaningful application.
Sadly, the "crypto space" was quickly invaded by hordes of people who never really cared about the technology itself, how it works and what it's actually useful for. (and what it's not useful for)
These people, who know nothing about it, and for years had dismissed it as a joke, suddenly began to talk about it very seriously as a very serious "investment" in self-proclaimed "expert" capacity.
You know the type of person I'm talking about! We've all seen them, and most of us can probably count one or two amongst our friends.
The potential for cool applications of blockchains is still there, but so far it seems to me cryptocurrency has mostly just been abused as a vehicle for crazy, baseless manias, and little to no meaningful application.
To quote myself[1]:
> First rule of designing anything is what I would call Tucker's Second Law: "if some cunt can make a buck by completely fucking over your system then that cunt will completely fuck over your system because that cunt is a cunt."
This, in essence, is really the problem with crypto. In many ways I think people took the banking crisis of 2008 and learned exactly the wrong lessons (because that, too, was a result of this "law").
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34889092
> First rule of designing anything is what I would call Tucker's Second Law: "if some cunt can make a buck by completely fucking over your system then that cunt will completely fuck over your system because that cunt is a cunt."
This, in essence, is really the problem with crypto. In many ways I think people took the banking crisis of 2008 and learned exactly the wrong lessons (because that, too, was a result of this "law").
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34889092
Same. I used to be really into BTC around 2011-2014 but then all the ponzi "price goes up" people jumped on it.
I like the idea of P2P cash but I don't want the casino.I don't wanna invest, I just wanna use it as money. It didn't work out so well for that.
I like the idea of P2P cash but I don't want the casino.I don't wanna invest, I just wanna use it as money. It didn't work out so well for that.
> then all the ponzi "price goes up" people jumped on it
Did the value of bitcoin actually go up, or did the thing you measure it by go down?
I will happily bet on the number of bitcoins in existence by say 2030. Would you bet on the number of dollars in existence by then?
https://i.imgur.com/rAFipGS.png
Did the value of bitcoin actually go up, or did the thing you measure it by go down?
I will happily bet on the number of bitcoins in existence by say 2030. Would you bet on the number of dollars in existence by then?
https://i.imgur.com/rAFipGS.png
So if everybody just bought bitcoin, everyone in the world would all be rich! Brilliant!
I measure it by pizzas per Bitcoin. It’s definitely gone up.
I sold all at 2014 that I had mined because exactly this. It went fast from maybe useful to just scam.
2011 was tea party anti-establishment doomers
I've looped back to crypto currencies three times over the last decade. Each time I started it with a bit of hope that the space progressed and it was time to invest, each time I was disappointed to see it only got worse.
Every project is either an obvious scam and money grab or has fundamental flaw(a) that make it useless for it's original purpose.
I'll stick with using the OG blockchain, git.
Every project is either an obvious scam and money grab or has fundamental flaw(a) that make it useless for it's original purpose.
I'll stick with using the OG blockchain, git.
I think there's plenty of room for improvement but..
I haven't met many people/anyone who went from dismissing it as a joke to taking it very seriously.
Either way, isn't "people not taking it seriously at first" one of the classic signs of disruptive innovation according to Clayten Christensen?
I haven't met many people/anyone who went from dismissing it as a joke to taking it very seriously.
Either way, isn't "people not taking it seriously at first" one of the classic signs of disruptive innovation according to Clayten Christensen?
There's no way of replying without coming off as an asshole so apologies but
> I haven't met many people/anyone who went from dismissing it as a joke to taking it very seriously.
frankly, then you very likely weren't a community participant during the early years. I don't think most people understand just how small and universally ridiculed, ignored and unknown Bitcoin was for the first couple of years.
> isn't "people not taking it seriously at first" one of the classic signs of disruptive innovation
I don't know who Clayten Christensen is, but that's a silly quote. Of course every new idea and technology that became successful started small, unnoticed etc, but it's pure survivorship bias to point only to the ones that made it. What about countless things that didn't? Taking seriously things no one else does is a not a particularly wise thing to do, 99.999% of the time there's good reason no one takes something seriously, and there is no real way for anyone to reliably identify the 0.001% of times you have something worthwhile.
> I haven't met many people/anyone who went from dismissing it as a joke to taking it very seriously.
frankly, then you very likely weren't a community participant during the early years. I don't think most people understand just how small and universally ridiculed, ignored and unknown Bitcoin was for the first couple of years.
> isn't "people not taking it seriously at first" one of the classic signs of disruptive innovation
I don't know who Clayten Christensen is, but that's a silly quote. Of course every new idea and technology that became successful started small, unnoticed etc, but it's pure survivorship bias to point only to the ones that made it. What about countless things that didn't? Taking seriously things no one else does is a not a particularly wise thing to do, 99.999% of the time there's good reason no one takes something seriously, and there is no real way for anyone to reliably identify the 0.001% of times you have something worthwhile.
[deleted]
Clayton Christensen has died (deseret.com)
onn Jan 24, 2020
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22141299
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22141299
> frankly, then you very likely weren't a community participant during the early years
What community? A sub-reddit? bitcointalk.org? How early is early to you? I found out about bitcoin and ethereum by reading Hacker News, I bought my first bitcoin when it was around $10 and most of my ethereum on the first day of the pre-sale and that's around the time when I started discussing crypto with my friends and family, some of whom are programmers but most of whom are not. I'm not sure what you're going on about regarding community.
> I don't know who Clayten Christensen is, but that's a silly quote.
Do you know what Google Search is though? Or maybe your point is that I spelled his name wrong by one letter? Either way, here you go:
"Improving a product takes time and many iterations. The first of these iterations provide minimal value to the customer but in time the base is created and the value increases exponentially."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma
Since you're on this website maybe you've heard of Paul Graham?
"Don't be discouraged if what you produce initially is something other people dismiss as a toy. In fact, that's a good sign. That's probably why everyone else has been overlooking the idea. The first microcomputers were dismissed as toys. And the first planes, and the first cars. At this point, when someone comes to us with something that users like but that we could envision forum trolls dismissing as a toy, it makes us especially likely to invest."
http://www.paulgraham.com/organic.html
> Of course every new idea and technology that became successful started small, unnoticed etc, but it's pure survivorship bias to point only to the ones that made it. What about countless things that didn't?
You're missing the point. I'm not saying that it's proof positive of it being a good idea, but that dismissing an idea on the basis of what other people think is a terrible idea. And no, every technology doesn't start out small or unnoticed (e.g. fire)
> Taking seriously things no one else does is a not a particularly wise thing to do, 99.999% of the time there's good reason no one takes something seriously, and there is no real way for anyone to reliably identify the 0.001% of times you have something worthwhile.
There's no way of replying without coming off as an asshole so apologies but, frankly, you sound like a boring person who doesn't think for themself and is probably a late adopter to most interesting things.
What community? A sub-reddit? bitcointalk.org? How early is early to you? I found out about bitcoin and ethereum by reading Hacker News, I bought my first bitcoin when it was around $10 and most of my ethereum on the first day of the pre-sale and that's around the time when I started discussing crypto with my friends and family, some of whom are programmers but most of whom are not. I'm not sure what you're going on about regarding community.
> I don't know who Clayten Christensen is, but that's a silly quote.
Do you know what Google Search is though? Or maybe your point is that I spelled his name wrong by one letter? Either way, here you go:
"Improving a product takes time and many iterations. The first of these iterations provide minimal value to the customer but in time the base is created and the value increases exponentially."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma
Since you're on this website maybe you've heard of Paul Graham?
"Don't be discouraged if what you produce initially is something other people dismiss as a toy. In fact, that's a good sign. That's probably why everyone else has been overlooking the idea. The first microcomputers were dismissed as toys. And the first planes, and the first cars. At this point, when someone comes to us with something that users like but that we could envision forum trolls dismissing as a toy, it makes us especially likely to invest."
http://www.paulgraham.com/organic.html
> Of course every new idea and technology that became successful started small, unnoticed etc, but it's pure survivorship bias to point only to the ones that made it. What about countless things that didn't?
You're missing the point. I'm not saying that it's proof positive of it being a good idea, but that dismissing an idea on the basis of what other people think is a terrible idea. And no, every technology doesn't start out small or unnoticed (e.g. fire)
> Taking seriously things no one else does is a not a particularly wise thing to do, 99.999% of the time there's good reason no one takes something seriously, and there is no real way for anyone to reliably identify the 0.001% of times you have something worthwhile.
There's no way of replying without coming off as an asshole so apologies but, frankly, you sound like a boring person who doesn't think for themself and is probably a late adopter to most interesting things.
I didn’t take cryptocurrency seriously because eth is slow - nobody’s going to wait awkwardly for five minutes while the transaction clears - and gas fees are insanely expensive - nobody will pay 40 dollars for a 5 dollar coffee because the network is busy - and it looks like that won’t ever change.
The Coinbase guy recently wasted half a million US dollars in gas fees on a lobbying project. It’s nuts. He could have funded a school. It’s not a good look for Coinbase.
I still don’t have any interest in eth but I’m very much interested in cryptocurrency now. There’s a bunch of more scalable and cheaper L1 tech. Not naming names as I don’t want to shill any particular projects but yes. Was not interested in cryptocurrency. Now interested in cryptocurrency.
The Coinbase guy recently wasted half a million US dollars in gas fees on a lobbying project. It’s nuts. He could have funded a school. It’s not a good look for Coinbase.
I still don’t have any interest in eth but I’m very much interested in cryptocurrency now. There’s a bunch of more scalable and cheaper L1 tech. Not naming names as I don’t want to shill any particular projects but yes. Was not interested in cryptocurrency. Now interested in cryptocurrency.
"They laughed at Gallileo, they laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown"
When people call something a dumb idea, the large majority of the time they’re right.
If your getting criticism, the most likely scenario is it’s because your idea won’t work, not that it’s world-changing.
If your getting criticism, the most likely scenario is it’s because your idea won’t work, not that it’s world-changing.
Don't forget about the shadowy cabal of beneficiaries of the status quo pulling strings in the background holding the good idea back!
I thought bitcoin was cool when coins were just a cent. I can’t wait for them to get back to a realistic price so they can actually be used.
I would like a digital currency, but as long as dufuses are incentivized to hype coins to trick others into making them rich these coins aren’t actually useful.
I would like a digital currency, but as long as dufuses are incentivized to hype coins to trick others into making them rich these coins aren’t actually useful.
The price is completely irrelevant, what matters is the perceived/expected rate of change in prices.
A deflationary currency disincentivizes spending, which reduces velocity, which aggravates deflation – a death sentence for two of the three properties of money (it's not a medium of exchange if nobody is exchanging it; it's not a unit of accounting if prices fluctuate strongly – and that includes falling prices).
I was also fascinated by Bitcoin in its very early days, from both a technical and an economical/monetary angle – the former fascination remains, but I'm pretty disillusioned on the latter after learning more about the nature of money and inflation (and especially how Bitcoin maximalists use a fringe economical model and definition of inflation to justify the design).
A deflationary currency disincentivizes spending, which reduces velocity, which aggravates deflation – a death sentence for two of the three properties of money (it's not a medium of exchange if nobody is exchanging it; it's not a unit of accounting if prices fluctuate strongly – and that includes falling prices).
I was also fascinated by Bitcoin in its very early days, from both a technical and an economical/monetary angle – the former fascination remains, but I'm pretty disillusioned on the latter after learning more about the nature of money and inflation (and especially how Bitcoin maximalists use a fringe economical model and definition of inflation to justify the design).
It has been a nice experiment to prove our intuition about deflationary currency and hording correct.
The other interesting aspect is in terms of Robert Shiller's narrative economics. What is most interesting to me is that the narrative economics and contagion were able to morph the currency narrative into something else so that the hording became a feature and not a bug in the narrative.
It is interesting how people can call BTC digital gold but disregard the downsides of gold at the same time in the exact same way deflation/velocity was ignored in the currency narrative. Gold was the "new" anti-central banking currency in the 70s that had its crescendo because of narratives and central bank policy at around a $3,200 all time high inflation adjusted price that we can't touch even 40+ years later. At the same time macro conditions were set up to take out that all time high price but BTC itself grabbed so much of that flow from gold.
Following the narrative dispersion that the all time inflation adjusted high for BTC is already in will be fun for years to come.
The other interesting aspect is in terms of Robert Shiller's narrative economics. What is most interesting to me is that the narrative economics and contagion were able to morph the currency narrative into something else so that the hording became a feature and not a bug in the narrative.
It is interesting how people can call BTC digital gold but disregard the downsides of gold at the same time in the exact same way deflation/velocity was ignored in the currency narrative. Gold was the "new" anti-central banking currency in the 70s that had its crescendo because of narratives and central bank policy at around a $3,200 all time high inflation adjusted price that we can't touch even 40+ years later. At the same time macro conditions were set up to take out that all time high price but BTC itself grabbed so much of that flow from gold.
Following the narrative dispersion that the all time inflation adjusted high for BTC is already in will be fun for years to come.
It's been so volatile, with the prices dependent entirely on hype regarding adoption, so there is certainly no conclusion at all to be made about deflationary currency - the impact of inflation on prices is essentially negligible compared to other factors. It also remains to be seen if the hype cycles will continue, because it hasn't been long since the last one.
Adoption as a payment method has likewise been dominated by regulation and expectation about hype cycles affecting the price.
I can't see why any of that would be different if the narrative differed to not include deflation. As long as it's new tech and a new unit of value to distribute, this is what you get
Adoption as a payment method has likewise been dominated by regulation and expectation about hype cycles affecting the price.
I can't see why any of that would be different if the narrative differed to not include deflation. As long as it's new tech and a new unit of value to distribute, this is what you get
Yeah, this was a similar kind of journey that I went on - heard about Bitcoin, was fascinated, started learning about money (started with things like the 'money multiplier', 'fractional reserve banking' etc., realised they didn't actually follow accounting rules and aren't how real banks work, eventually found the answers of how it works with stock-flow consistent accounting, endogenous money in banking, sectoral balances etc. - Monetary Economics by Godly and Lavoie is a good resource - I think a PDF is available if you look for it) and realised Bitcoin couldn't really work as actual money. It's still a very interesting thing from a theoretical point of view, but it's a shame the grifter culture that's grown up around it, and the huge amount of energy being used to run the system...
Deflation has a bad rap because its insidious form is caused by economic contraction. But other causes of deflation are neutral / positive and there isn't anything inherently wrong with it.
Go look up how much a 400 MHz processor (e.g. Pentium II) cost in 1997 vs. today. Processors get cheaper all the time, but it doesn't seem to harm demand.
Go look up how much a 400 MHz processor (e.g. Pentium II) cost in 1997 vs. today. Processors get cheaper all the time, but it doesn't seem to harm demand.
Both (too much) inflation and deflation are ultimately very bad for money:
Too much inflation ruins the "store of value" aspect; deflation disincentivizes trading it for goods and services, cutting into the "medium of exchange" aspect. Any drastic change of value/purchasing power, i.e. both inflation and deflation, make it useless as a unit of account.
> Processors get cheaper all the time, but it doesn't seem to harm demand.
Processors aren't purported to be money, though.
Too much inflation ruins the "store of value" aspect; deflation disincentivizes trading it for goods and services, cutting into the "medium of exchange" aspect. Any drastic change of value/purchasing power, i.e. both inflation and deflation, make it useless as a unit of account.
> Processors get cheaper all the time, but it doesn't seem to harm demand.
Processors aren't purported to be money, though.
Deflation really only has a bad name because the definition of inflation was effectively changes in the 80s.
We used to consider inflation to be the expansion of the money supply, deflation being the opposite. For whatever reason the word inflation was repurposed to describe and increase in *prices*. That metric is effectively useless though as prices are just a side effect of multiple factors including the total money supply, supply and demand of a particular good, technological innovations, etc.
Deflation as we see it today was actually a common thing historically. Prices for a good decrease in time as we become more efficient at producing it and as demand decreases when something better comes out.
We used to consider inflation to be the expansion of the money supply, deflation being the opposite. For whatever reason the word inflation was repurposed to describe and increase in *prices*. That metric is effectively useless though as prices are just a side effect of multiple factors including the total money supply, supply and demand of a particular good, technological innovations, etc.
Deflation as we see it today was actually a common thing historically. Prices for a good decrease in time as we become more efficient at producing it and as demand decreases when something better comes out.
> Deflation really only has a bad name because the definition of inflation was effectively changes in the 80s.
I wasn't alive at the time, but the modern definition makes a lot of sense to me: Monetary base is one of several factors impacting inflation, so conflating inflation and (an increase of) the monetary base seems quite confusing.
> Prices for a good decrease in time as we become more efficient at producing it and as demand decreases when something better comes out.
It's totally fine if some prices go down, but the more useful notion here is that of purchasing power.
When people expect the purchasing power of a currency to increase meaningfully, they start deferring purchases and investments (since most/all goods and services are expected to be cheaper tomorrow than they are today), which can cause inefficiencies just like inflation can.
I wasn't alive at the time, but the modern definition makes a lot of sense to me: Monetary base is one of several factors impacting inflation, so conflating inflation and (an increase of) the monetary base seems quite confusing.
> Prices for a good decrease in time as we become more efficient at producing it and as demand decreases when something better comes out.
It's totally fine if some prices go down, but the more useful notion here is that of purchasing power.
When people expect the purchasing power of a currency to increase meaningfully, they start deferring purchases and investments (since most/all goods and services are expected to be cheaper tomorrow than they are today), which can cause inefficiencies just like inflation can.
quickly invaded by hordes of people who never really cared about the technology itself, how it works and what it's actually useful for.
Not really disagreeing with you, but maybe Bitcoin wasn't really ever about an alternative currency for buying a few beers, just like gold isn't suited for that purpose. It is certainly possible, if the buyer and seller jump through some hoops to make it happen, as you demonstrated -- but it's slow and expensive for that use case. In the long run, maybe you're the person who really misunderstands what Bitcoin is "actually useful for."
Not really disagreeing with you, but maybe Bitcoin wasn't really ever about an alternative currency for buying a few beers, just like gold isn't suited for that purpose. It is certainly possible, if the buyer and seller jump through some hoops to make it happen, as you demonstrated -- but it's slow and expensive for that use case. In the long run, maybe you're the person who really misunderstands what Bitcoin is "actually useful for."
That was just us goofing around. What got me excited was mostly the enabling underbanked people argument for crypto. There's countless people all over the world who can't get a bank account, or if they could, can't get one that is reliable or useful enough for their needs. Eg, maybe the currency is too unstable, or maybe there's too many restrictions on international transfers and commerce etc etc. These people are left with cash and predatory "businesses" like Western Union as their only options. It's not fair and can and should change, but sadly, crypto has spectacularly failed to deliver on its potential here.
Has it? Crypto proponents all the time are talking about the unbanked and people in countries with unstable currencies. I really don't know, but what's the deal in El Salvador? in South America? Ukraine? Aren't people using it?
I cared about the technology: https://intercoin.org
Sadly I was too much of a socialist and there for the tech and utility. Suffice it to say that people threw money at memecoins way more than they threw up money at us, but we did raise a respectable amount in 2018: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1733567/000173356718...
My vision was mainstream adoption of crypto for all the right reasons. Every community having their own coin and their own monetary policy. https://intercoin.org/communities.pdf
I already had an open source social platform (https://github.com/Qbix) with people in over 100 countries so it seemed like building a payment platform on top of it made sense. So this is what I did:
Architected all the smart contracts on https://github.com/Intercoin
Bootstrapped with revenues and customers and paid our developers for years
Released all the smart contracts and documentation on our own platform here: https://intercoin.app
Got CertiK audits of our smart contracts: https://skynet.certik.com/projects/intercoin
Launched a show where I interviewed economists, regulators, and people like Noam Chomsky and Patri Friedman (grandson of Milton Friedman) https://youtube.com/intercoin
Made ways to raise money that are actually legal: https://community.intercoin.app/t/how-intercoin-helps-to-rai...
Built technology for people around the world to raise money for refugees: https://community.intercoin.app/t/fund-for-refugees
By the way, if you want to come and hear more about it, you're welcome to, we have demos at the end of every month: https://intercoin.app/event/ITR/Qwwsjokht
And we do it on our own platform, livestreaming through peer to peer broadcasting, the works!
Next on our roadmap is to release Intercoin Wallet (completely web-based wallet will try to fix major security flaws in the current Web3 ecosystem) and Intercloud (decentralized layer 1 solution that is NOT a blockchain)
But on HN we get lumped in with the rest of the Web3 bullshit and scam artists, so what can I say. This will probably be downvoted by people who never click a single link in the comment :-P
Sadly I was too much of a socialist and there for the tech and utility. Suffice it to say that people threw money at memecoins way more than they threw up money at us, but we did raise a respectable amount in 2018: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1733567/000173356718...
My vision was mainstream adoption of crypto for all the right reasons. Every community having their own coin and their own monetary policy. https://intercoin.org/communities.pdf
I already had an open source social platform (https://github.com/Qbix) with people in over 100 countries so it seemed like building a payment platform on top of it made sense. So this is what I did:
Architected all the smart contracts on https://github.com/Intercoin
Bootstrapped with revenues and customers and paid our developers for years
Released all the smart contracts and documentation on our own platform here: https://intercoin.app
Got CertiK audits of our smart contracts: https://skynet.certik.com/projects/intercoin
Launched a show where I interviewed economists, regulators, and people like Noam Chomsky and Patri Friedman (grandson of Milton Friedman) https://youtube.com/intercoin
Made ways to raise money that are actually legal: https://community.intercoin.app/t/how-intercoin-helps-to-rai...
Built technology for people around the world to raise money for refugees: https://community.intercoin.app/t/fund-for-refugees
By the way, if you want to come and hear more about it, you're welcome to, we have demos at the end of every month: https://intercoin.app/event/ITR/Qwwsjokht
And we do it on our own platform, livestreaming through peer to peer broadcasting, the works!
Next on our roadmap is to release Intercoin Wallet (completely web-based wallet will try to fix major security flaws in the current Web3 ecosystem) and Intercloud (decentralized layer 1 solution that is NOT a blockchain)
But on HN we get lumped in with the rest of the Web3 bullshit and scam artists, so what can I say. This will probably be downvoted by people who never click a single link in the comment :-P
> But on HN we get lumped in with the rest of the Web3 bullshit and scam artists
Any community is typically judged by their worst members. Much like a parent is judged by their worst child.
Don't feel too bad about it, its just the natural course of things.
Any community is typically judged by their worst members. Much like a parent is judged by their worst child.
Don't feel too bad about it, its just the natural course of things.
Is it a dead project now?
I searched on the coingecko link you provided and only see $3.9k in liquidity and a single $65 trade in the last 30 days.
I searched on the coingecko link you provided and only see $3.9k in liquidity and a single $65 trade in the last 30 days.
Just because speculators aren’t actively trading the token and volume bots aren’t creating fake volume wash trading doesn’t mean the proejct itself is dead at all.
One thing about US regulations… we did not want to get involved with making the secondary markets or whatever. Expect the community to do it. We don’t care about attracting speculators to pump and dump. We believe that once we attract CUSTOMERS then the speculators will turn up to make the market.
One thing about US regulations… we did not want to get involved with making the secondary markets or whatever. Expect the community to do it. We don’t care about attracting speculators to pump and dump. We believe that once we attract CUSTOMERS then the speculators will turn up to make the market.
I'm very curious the overlap of socialism and the design of intercoin, I wouldn't have picked up socialism by looking through the intercoin site.
I'm used to seeing socialism used at a national scale, was your vision to allow a much more local version of socialism with every town effectively running it's own socialist bubble? If not, how would a larger socialist system tie together all the individual currencies used managed by each town?
Sorry for the tangent, I've just never really thought of a hyperlocal version of socialism before!
I'm used to seeing socialism used at a national scale, was your vision to allow a much more local version of socialism with every town effectively running it's own socialist bubble? If not, how would a larger socialist system tie together all the individual currencies used managed by each town?
Sorry for the tangent, I've just never really thought of a hyperlocal version of socialism before!
Every community having their own currency and monetary policy makes no sense at a fundamental economic level.
If each member of my family has their own individual currency and monetary policy it would make economic sense for us to form a higher level structure and just have one currency and monetary policy for our whole family to make trade easier within our family. That process scales up to the level of country.
This idea failed because it doesn't solve anything economically. It actually just creates an economic bug.
If each member of my family has their own individual currency and monetary policy it would make economic sense for us to form a higher level structure and just have one currency and monetary policy for our whole family to make trade easier within our family. That process scales up to the level of country.
This idea failed because it doesn't solve anything economically. It actually just creates an economic bug.
Well that would have been my initial thought as well, but I don't know nearly enough about the project to say why it may not have gained a much traction as if hoped for. A team of likely very dedicated people put a ton of effort and passion into the project, I'm not willing to just write that off.
Agree with the specific is it not, we need more projects like this testing unique idea and sharing their lessons. In the crypto space specifically, we have learned very little to nothing from most projects because they just try the same model. I'm happy to see a project thinking differently regardless of how it turns out.
Now with regards to your specific argument, centralization and standardization aren't always the answer. It's a web of hyperlocal currencies the answer? No idea. But does that really mean we should centralize all power and stick with one currency and one monetary policy? Should we do that with other things like communication platforms, social media networks, and move all state powers up to the federal government? Would we all be better off with one global currency and one global back driving monetary policy?
Agree with the specific is it not, we need more projects like this testing unique idea and sharing their lessons. In the crypto space specifically, we have learned very little to nothing from most projects because they just try the same model. I'm happy to see a project thinking differently regardless of how it turns out.
Now with regards to your specific argument, centralization and standardization aren't always the answer. It's a web of hyperlocal currencies the answer? No idea. But does that really mean we should centralize all power and stick with one currency and one monetary policy? Should we do that with other things like communication platforms, social media networks, and move all state powers up to the federal government? Would we all be better off with one global currency and one global back driving monetary policy?
Do you know how the Internet is designed? It is a network of networks, and protocols like SMTP and HTTP can run over it to create global applications.
Why don’t we have one big network for everyone, and one-size-fits-all policies?
Why don’t we have one big network for everyone, and one-size-fits-all policies?
Sure. I consider utility tokens as libertarian socialism online. They are voluntarist (you opt into using them) and eliminate the extractive shareholder class (which is the reason why, say, Uber drivers pay half their salary to the “owners” of the platform). Selling shares was the old way of raising money and it is the reason why all Big Tech are monopolies. Facebook and Twitter are each controlled by one guy (Elon or Zuck), while gift economies like Linux or the Web enrich the world without a shareholder cabal around Torvalds or TimBL extracting rents. No one advises them “Competition is for losers, Build a monopoly” like Peter Thiel did. By being permissionless and open they have created far more wealth for the world than their capitalist counterparts.
Airdrops are a form of UBI, and can be used to put money in the hands of the public. Towns can use software to run their own monetary and fiscal policy without relying on the Banking system as the source and sink of their money supply. Banks do not issue money on the basis of public good, the more people need money the less likely they are to issue it to them in the form of credit. They make the rich richer and it is about generating about profits for their shareholders and depositors. In a UBI scenario, money is issued to everyone equally. Even the game Monopoly (which was originally designed by a socialist to illustrate the perils of capitalism!) has a UBI every time you pass Go, or the game doesn’t work.
A socialist alternative to a bank is a Credit Union. Imagine Intercoin letting anyone create a credit union and connecting all of them together like the Internet did for communication.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_socialism
It has been practiced by everyone from prehistoric tribes to today’s Housing cooperatives and worker-owned cooperatives and universities.
One of the oldest sites on the Web is run by an anarchist socialist, serves local communities and it has outcompeted all capitalist attempts to disrupt it and extract rents. You’ve definitely heard of it:
https://www.zdnet.com/article/craigslist-ceo-jim-buckmaster-...
Another of the oldest sites on the Web has quickly outcompeted all capitalist encyclopedias including the most famous ones like Britannica and Encarta, making them mere rounding errors in usage. That of course is Wikipedia. Jimmy Wales is not a socialist, he is a libertarian however.
I think the record is clear: open, permissionless systems outcompete closed ones in the end.
The word “socialism” triggers people to think “big government” even though capitalist systems typically have just as big of a government. But actually I want more decentralization, everyone to have access to tools to self-organize. I want a UBI and gift economies to voluntarily replace the contradictory for-profit capitalist institutions, like private ownership of public forums.
So I often say I’m a left-libertarian (like George Carlin or Russel Brand). I am trying to make an alternative to Big Government and Big Corporations, by giving software to empower people and unite communities.
Eventually, when towns have this system, people will be able to work 20 hour work weeks and spend the rest of the time with their family and voluntarily working on cool projects. However, until then, since we do still live in a largely capitalist system, I need some people to invest in our project so my team and I can pay for food and housing :)
If you want to get involved, you can invest your time and skills as a developer, designer, promoter, or you can invest money. If you want to know how investors can make a profit without buying shares just take a look at Ethereum’s early buyers, it’s a great example. It’s a pure utility play. No extractive shareholder class and no one restricting the ecosystem. It’s an even freer ecosystem than the Web!
So anyway if you want to get involved email me at greg at the domain intercoin.org
Airdrops are a form of UBI, and can be used to put money in the hands of the public. Towns can use software to run their own monetary and fiscal policy without relying on the Banking system as the source and sink of their money supply. Banks do not issue money on the basis of public good, the more people need money the less likely they are to issue it to them in the form of credit. They make the rich richer and it is about generating about profits for their shareholders and depositors. In a UBI scenario, money is issued to everyone equally. Even the game Monopoly (which was originally designed by a socialist to illustrate the perils of capitalism!) has a UBI every time you pass Go, or the game doesn’t work.
A socialist alternative to a bank is a Credit Union. Imagine Intercoin letting anyone create a credit union and connecting all of them together like the Internet did for communication.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_socialism
It has been practiced by everyone from prehistoric tribes to today’s Housing cooperatives and worker-owned cooperatives and universities.
One of the oldest sites on the Web is run by an anarchist socialist, serves local communities and it has outcompeted all capitalist attempts to disrupt it and extract rents. You’ve definitely heard of it:
https://www.zdnet.com/article/craigslist-ceo-jim-buckmaster-...
Another of the oldest sites on the Web has quickly outcompeted all capitalist encyclopedias including the most famous ones like Britannica and Encarta, making them mere rounding errors in usage. That of course is Wikipedia. Jimmy Wales is not a socialist, he is a libertarian however.
I think the record is clear: open, permissionless systems outcompete closed ones in the end.
The word “socialism” triggers people to think “big government” even though capitalist systems typically have just as big of a government. But actually I want more decentralization, everyone to have access to tools to self-organize. I want a UBI and gift economies to voluntarily replace the contradictory for-profit capitalist institutions, like private ownership of public forums.
So I often say I’m a left-libertarian (like George Carlin or Russel Brand). I am trying to make an alternative to Big Government and Big Corporations, by giving software to empower people and unite communities.
Eventually, when towns have this system, people will be able to work 20 hour work weeks and spend the rest of the time with their family and voluntarily working on cool projects. However, until then, since we do still live in a largely capitalist system, I need some people to invest in our project so my team and I can pay for food and housing :)
If you want to get involved, you can invest your time and skills as a developer, designer, promoter, or you can invest money. If you want to know how investors can make a profit without buying shares just take a look at Ethereum’s early buyers, it’s a great example. It’s a pure utility play. No extractive shareholder class and no one restricting the ecosystem. It’s an even freer ecosystem than the Web!
So anyway if you want to get involved email me at greg at the domain intercoin.org
The actual value of crypto as a technology seems to have receeded past visibility. At its origin, it promised enduring new forms of interconnected computing. But overwhelmingly, there seem to be no contemporary applications of any note, just endless cryptocoins of unremarkable note as far as the eye can see.
> At it's [sic] origin, it promised enduring new forms of interconnected computing.
Have you read the Bitcoin whitepaper? You should, it’s not that long. This is not what was promised. We were promised a decentralized peer to peer currency with a fixed supply that couldn’t be inflated at the whims of a central bank. We got that. And we sort of also got “new forms of interconnected computing”. We now have new types of zero knowledge proofs which were designed for smart contract verification but are more generally useful. We have things like IPFS allowing you to store data in a decentralized way. There’s helium, a mesh network for IoT devices. We have ENS. Then of course we have an endless supply of sophisticated financial instruments which you probably wouldn’t be able to access otherwise.
Your position is easy to take because it’s sort of the “default” that an uninformed person would believe, and those people will side with you.
Have you read the Bitcoin whitepaper? You should, it’s not that long. This is not what was promised. We were promised a decentralized peer to peer currency with a fixed supply that couldn’t be inflated at the whims of a central bank. We got that. And we sort of also got “new forms of interconnected computing”. We now have new types of zero knowledge proofs which were designed for smart contract verification but are more generally useful. We have things like IPFS allowing you to store data in a decentralized way. There’s helium, a mesh network for IoT devices. We have ENS. Then of course we have an endless supply of sophisticated financial instruments which you probably wouldn’t be able to access otherwise.
Your position is easy to take because it’s sort of the “default” that an uninformed person would believe, and those people will side with you.
> Your position is easy to take because it’s sort of the “default” that an uninformed person would believe, and those people will side with you.
Isn’t it also the position of the well informed that think crypto is BS and are waiting (14 years now) for a non-drug use case?
Isn’t it also the position of the well informed that think crypto is BS and are waiting (14 years now) for a non-drug use case?
You're poorly informed. I used it for donations. It's the only pseudonymous network-native currency that I know.
You can launder money with it also /sarcasm
> We were promised a decentralized peer to peer currency with a fixed supply that couldn’t be inflated at the whims of a central bank.
And instead we got a fixed-supply currency, completely incapable of adapting to supply and demand for money (which would be a precondition for price stability).
> Then of course we have an endless supply of sophisticated financial instruments which you probably wouldn’t be able to access otherwise.
This very much depends on where you're located, but personally, I really can't complain about a lack of access to powerful financial instruments, including a multitude of footguns. Crypto hasn't meaningfully (and especially not qualitatively) improved things for me. Do you have any specific examples?
And instead we got a fixed-supply currency, completely incapable of adapting to supply and demand for money (which would be a precondition for price stability).
> Then of course we have an endless supply of sophisticated financial instruments which you probably wouldn’t be able to access otherwise.
This very much depends on where you're located, but personally, I really can't complain about a lack of access to powerful financial instruments, including a multitude of footguns. Crypto hasn't meaningfully (and especially not qualitatively) improved things for me. Do you have any specific examples?
The value being completely unapparent & unappealing to the world sort of sells my prospective though, doesn't it?
Using block chain to store data or transact is incredibly costly & inefficient. Most of the systems surrounding those usages are an incredible obtuse pain in the ass, no fun at all. Most uses rely on one or more extremely intermediated centralized systems.
The whole thing seems bankrupt. There hasn't been a single notable use. The most well known use case so far beyond cryptocoins is crypto kitties.
Using block chain to store data or transact is incredibly costly & inefficient. Most of the systems surrounding those usages are an incredible obtuse pain in the ass, no fun at all. Most uses rely on one or more extremely intermediated centralized systems.
The whole thing seems bankrupt. There hasn't been a single notable use. The most well known use case so far beyond cryptocoins is crypto kitties.
Escaping fiat currency is essentially the only use case advertised in the Bitcoin whitepaper and it continues to be a notable use today.
If this use is not notable or compelling to you, then you are probably very fortunate (for now).
If this use is not notable or compelling to you, then you are probably very fortunate (for now).
Helium is kind of a failure tho. Last I heard it has very little users.
I'm into ETH big time, but there are not many applications for it that are worth the fees.
I'm into ETH big time, but there are not many applications for it that are worth the fees.
Probably because there never was any actual value to be had in the underlying technology. If there was someone would have found it at some point in the last decade.
That’s a bit overly dismissive, and I am usually the dismissive one when it comes to crypto.
IMO we’ll eventually have CBDCs which may or may not have a blockchain, but these things happen slowly.
I’ve always said that money is not fundamentally a tech problem, but a social problem. That doesn’t make the tech inherently worthless though.
IMO we’ll eventually have CBDCs which may or may not have a blockchain, but these things happen slowly.
I’ve always said that money is not fundamentally a tech problem, but a social problem. That doesn’t make the tech inherently worthless though.
I mean, it's been 14 years now, if some actual valuable use of strapping intentionally onerous calculations to a transaction model was waiting, you'd think we'd have found it by now.
When I said slowly, I meant slowly.
And like I said, it's not like we're waiting on a technical breakthrough: it's a social problem, and without getting too political... society can sometimes change insanely slow even when "solutions" have existed for a long time.
And like I said, it's not like we're waiting on a technical breakthrough: it's a social problem, and without getting too political... society can sometimes change insanely slow even when "solutions" have existed for a long time.
We aren't talking about novel particle physics here. It's a fucking database that's intentionally hard to write to.
I disagree. Although I have extreme cynicism so far, I am far from making a long term conclusion.
I think it's a hugely contemporary disease to expect short term results to indicate long term value, something tech in particular has made us totally wildly out of touch on. We have had two or three decades of ongoing massive tectonic shifts, and seem huge new entities arise, and I strongly feel this view has dis-tempered our expectations & realism about growth.
Worse, when there is a huge movement, when something is so ballyhooed & hype trained, the expectations are all the more wild.
I really think block chain has been utterly unable to show it's value, has failed miserably to even try to establish use cases or flows to express it's value on. But even still, after all this time, even while being a huge cynic of what's happened, I'm not going to deny that there are possibilities out there. That we did get so hyped, that the cryptocoins hype train so dominated took away the creative energy, stole the nutrients that real value might have used to establish itself & grow.
It's hard to imagine how we can get out of such deeply intermediated ridiculously centralized & incredibly costly & inefficient forms of block chains. But it's also not my field & I still easily can believe these are great enclaves of stability out there, places of value lurking, waiting to be found. I think in general we radically over dismiss tech as not valuable, if it doesn't meet our hockeystick growth expectations. I've seen web spec after web spec cast aside because only 0.3% of web sites adopted it after 3 or 5 years. I think we really need a radical realignment for how to expect technology adoption to happen. We need to allow ourselves much more Uncertainty about what is happening, and when things do go wrong, that is often less reason to cancel the idea, and more reason to restart the clock from 0, after mis-interpretation.
I think it's a hugely contemporary disease to expect short term results to indicate long term value, something tech in particular has made us totally wildly out of touch on. We have had two or three decades of ongoing massive tectonic shifts, and seem huge new entities arise, and I strongly feel this view has dis-tempered our expectations & realism about growth.
Worse, when there is a huge movement, when something is so ballyhooed & hype trained, the expectations are all the more wild.
I really think block chain has been utterly unable to show it's value, has failed miserably to even try to establish use cases or flows to express it's value on. But even still, after all this time, even while being a huge cynic of what's happened, I'm not going to deny that there are possibilities out there. That we did get so hyped, that the cryptocoins hype train so dominated took away the creative energy, stole the nutrients that real value might have used to establish itself & grow.
It's hard to imagine how we can get out of such deeply intermediated ridiculously centralized & incredibly costly & inefficient forms of block chains. But it's also not my field & I still easily can believe these are great enclaves of stability out there, places of value lurking, waiting to be found. I think in general we radically over dismiss tech as not valuable, if it doesn't meet our hockeystick growth expectations. I've seen web spec after web spec cast aside because only 0.3% of web sites adopted it after 3 or 5 years. I think we really need a radical realignment for how to expect technology adoption to happen. We need to allow ourselves much more Uncertainty about what is happening, and when things do go wrong, that is often less reason to cancel the idea, and more reason to restart the clock from 0, after mis-interpretation.
Ok, let me put this another way: we're approaching the life expectancy of a programming language, and something like 3x the life expectancy of a framework, and so far all this tech has to show is a knack for separating dumb from money and driving up grid electricity rates globally. A sizeable percentage of the "best minds" in fintech have made serious attempts (backed by huge stacks of cash) to make something out of this to no obvious benefit. You'll get no argument from me about the bullshit tech hype mill and the churn that results from it.
I think the problems is essentially that we had most of our worst minds working on crypto for a long time. Folks though there were incentives to do X, so almost everyone went out & got busy making cryptocoins.
We saw people put their bitshovel in the bitground and mine up bitgold. And suddenly unsurprisingly everyone wants to go bitmining.
Now that the bad incentive are much ameliorated, we can begin to see what real enduring uses might be. The bad systems aren't stealing all the oxygen.
I'd also say that I think platform evolves at a slower timebase than languages. Posix has been around for omg long now. We were almost a on SysV or very alike until very recent mass migrations off. Http3 is fancy as heck but it does very very nearly what http 0.9 did. Programming languages come and go much faster than these sort of things change. And the next jumps we keep looking to make, most involve pretty significant increases in scope (one counter example might be the Zircon microkernel, https://fuchsia.dev/fuchsia-src/concepts/kernel, but it has a sizable platform atop it again).
We saw people put their bitshovel in the bitground and mine up bitgold. And suddenly unsurprisingly everyone wants to go bitmining.
Now that the bad incentive are much ameliorated, we can begin to see what real enduring uses might be. The bad systems aren't stealing all the oxygen.
I'd also say that I think platform evolves at a slower timebase than languages. Posix has been around for omg long now. We were almost a on SysV or very alike until very recent mass migrations off. Http3 is fancy as heck but it does very very nearly what http 0.9 did. Programming languages come and go much faster than these sort of things change. And the next jumps we keep looking to make, most involve pretty significant increases in scope (one counter example might be the Zircon microkernel, https://fuchsia.dev/fuchsia-src/concepts/kernel, but it has a sizable platform atop it again).
> I think it's a hugely contemporary disease to expect short term results to indicate long term value,
Maybe, but why should humanity throw significant resources (mindshare, money, energy) at a technology that purports to solve a large number of important problems, yet doesn't have any track record of actually achieving any of it?
> has failed miserably to even try to establish use cases or flows to express it's value on
That burden is always on the proponents of a new technology.
Maybe, but why should humanity throw significant resources (mindshare, money, energy) at a technology that purports to solve a large number of important problems, yet doesn't have any track record of actually achieving any of it?
> has failed miserably to even try to establish use cases or flows to express it's value on
That burden is always on the proponents of a new technology.
> I really think block chain has been utterly unable to show it's value
It's just an append-only distributed database. If you need that for some application, then you find it valuable.
These discussions are often so hyperbolic-- Imagine saying that columnar databases have not lived up to their expectations (or have been unable to show their value) because postgres and mysql are still quite popular... it sounds about the same to me.
It's just an append-only distributed database. If you need that for some application, then you find it valuable.
These discussions are often so hyperbolic-- Imagine saying that columnar databases have not lived up to their expectations (or have been unable to show their value) because postgres and mysql are still quite popular... it sounds about the same to me.
It is an append only database. But being the world's universally-accessible infinitely-resilient append only database is a very notable difference from what came before.
The post bitcoin technologies have a lot of interesting other ideas too, about distributing computing, about roll-up transactions (where you can prove your writes without them necessarily be readable).
The post bitcoin technologies have a lot of interesting other ideas too, about distributing computing, about roll-up transactions (where you can prove your writes without them necessarily be readable).
> infinitely-resilient
This is complete hyberbole. The security of most blockchains can be quite explicitly expressed as a number (of hashes per second, coins of staking, or whatever the consensus mechanism of the day uses as its scarce resource for allowing appends to the database), and it's very finite.
Another very real danger is a lack of interest and/or economic incentives to keep it going. I wouldn't be surprised if we've already lost many terabytes of data on "infinite append-only ledgers", since disk space still isn't free, and massively replicated disk space even less so.
This is complete hyberbole. The security of most blockchains can be quite explicitly expressed as a number (of hashes per second, coins of staking, or whatever the consensus mechanism of the day uses as its scarce resource for allowing appends to the database), and it's very finite.
Another very real danger is a lack of interest and/or economic incentives to keep it going. I wouldn't be surprised if we've already lost many terabytes of data on "infinite append-only ledgers", since disk space still isn't free, and massively replicated disk space even less so.
Digital art where artists get paid and royalties are enforced, instant global money transfer, software standards for fractionalised investments in stocks real estate physical collectibles and other asset classes, retail without 3% going to visa, digital gold, a world where everybody has a friendly name for their public key and we can communicate privately, probably others.
You don’t need a blockchain to do those things.
Retail with digital cash is the closest, but as a consumer there’s no real benefit to me over visa and the “real” coins like eth and bitcoin are very expensive for purchases.
I think a central bank digital currency with transaction fees in the millionth of a cent (the real compute cost) would be so much better for retail.
Retail with digital cash is the closest, but as a consumer there’s no real benefit to me over visa and the “real” coins like eth and bitcoin are very expensive for purchases.
I think a central bank digital currency with transaction fees in the millionth of a cent (the real compute cost) would be so much better for retail.
You are correct that there is no benefit to consumers in saving retailers money. Additionally, Visa can terminate a Retailers account if they provide a discount for using an alternative payment system. This may not be in all markets in the market it exist in, it also may not be legal.
You are 100% correct regarding Ethereum gas fees. Transaction fees on current generation L1s are 0.0025 cents.
You are 100% correct regarding Ethereum gas fees. Transaction fees on current generation L1s are 0.0025 cents.
Digital art where royalties are "enforced" requires a dystopian DRM hellscape.
Digital "gold" is a meaningless term.
Retail without 3% going to Visa...instead some variable percent will go to transaction fees.
Digital "gold" is a meaningless term.
Retail without 3% going to Visa...instead some variable percent will go to transaction fees.
You are already in a dystopian DRM landscape and have been for 20 years since general purpose computing died and all computer hardware from your BIOS to your monitor cable already enforces DRM. The FSF was right. That’s off topic though.
Distributing royalties to artists is just something called programmable NFTs. It’s just cryptography - a program enforces the artist’s account is credited to allow a transfer and it’s not a big deal. artists are absolutely making money from this. It fixes an issue in traditional art where the resale value of an artists earlier works increases however, the artist doesn’t see any of those returns.
Transaction fees on modern layer 1 crypto platforms are 0.0025 cents.
The meaning of the term Digital gold is an asset that is not subject to quantitative easing from the government. I.e. one cannot mine vast quantities of Gold or produce vast quantities of new bitcoins very easily.
Pardon the edits, I am using voice dictation, as I’m having trouble using my hands.
Distributing royalties to artists is just something called programmable NFTs. It’s just cryptography - a program enforces the artist’s account is credited to allow a transfer and it’s not a big deal. artists are absolutely making money from this. It fixes an issue in traditional art where the resale value of an artists earlier works increases however, the artist doesn’t see any of those returns.
Transaction fees on modern layer 1 crypto platforms are 0.0025 cents.
The meaning of the term Digital gold is an asset that is not subject to quantitative easing from the government. I.e. one cannot mine vast quantities of Gold or produce vast quantities of new bitcoins very easily.
Pardon the edits, I am using voice dictation, as I’m having trouble using my hands.
> You are already in a dystopian DRM landscape...
This is a non sequitur.
"Some software uses draconian DRM" is neither the same as, nor a refutation of, "enforcing ownership of digital goods like art requires draconian DRM."
This is a non sequitur.
"Some software uses draconian DRM" is neither the same as, nor a refutation of, "enforcing ownership of digital goods like art requires draconian DRM."
Sorry landscape should have read Hellscape as you wrote but I was using voice dictation, as my fingers aren’t working.
I am not asserting that some software uses DRM as if DRM is the exception. I am saying that we are in the hellscape You described when nearly everything that wants to uses DRM.
I am not asserting that some software uses DRM as if DRM is the exception. I am saying that we are in the hellscape You described when nearly everything that wants to uses DRM.
> Digital art where artists get paid and royalties are enforced
This seems like a goal best solved by a good/fair/efficient legal system, not a technical problem. Recording ownership is easy; determining where intellectual property ends and fair use begins is where the complexity is at. I haven't seen NFTs etc. meaningfully address any of that.
> retail without 3% going to visa
Yes, card payments are quite inefficient, but not anywhere near 3% go to the card networks.
> a world where everybody has a friendly name for their public key and we can communicate privately
What's the connection to cryptocurrency here? We've had that way before Bitcoin.
This seems like a goal best solved by a good/fair/efficient legal system, not a technical problem. Recording ownership is easy; determining where intellectual property ends and fair use begins is where the complexity is at. I haven't seen NFTs etc. meaningfully address any of that.
> retail without 3% going to visa
Yes, card payments are quite inefficient, but not anywhere near 3% go to the card networks.
> a world where everybody has a friendly name for their public key and we can communicate privately
What's the connection to cryptocurrency here? We've had that way before Bitcoin.
> determining where intellectual property ends and fair use begins is where the complexity is at
recording ownership of digital goods at scale has historically been very difficult. fair use is important but does not help artists get paid. Please don’t read that is being anti fair use. It is rather that fair use is orthogonal to this problem.
> Yes, card payments are quite inefficient, but not anywhere near 3% go to the card networks.
Glad we agree on at least one of these. Visa is 2.9 percent plus some other minor fee I can’t remember right now.
> What's the connection to cryptocurrency here?
Usability. I guarantee you more people have crypto wallets now that have ever installed PGP, GPG, or any other similar app in the entire history of computing.
recording ownership of digital goods at scale has historically been very difficult. fair use is important but does not help artists get paid. Please don’t read that is being anti fair use. It is rather that fair use is orthogonal to this problem.
> Yes, card payments are quite inefficient, but not anywhere near 3% go to the card networks.
Glad we agree on at least one of these. Visa is 2.9 percent plus some other minor fee I can’t remember right now.
> What's the connection to cryptocurrency here?
Usability. I guarantee you more people have crypto wallets now that have ever installed PGP, GPG, or any other similar app in the entire history of computing.
> Visa is 2.9 percent plus some other minor fee I can’t remember right now.
No, that's the total that the merchant pays. The biggest chunk of that goes to the issuing bank and pays for credit card rewards which you get back as the cardholder in some form.
Credit cards (at least in the US) are a fairly efficient payment system, but as long as there will be card rewards, they effectively create a cash surcharge at all merchants that accept them: If you pay by card, the biggest chunk of these ~3% is kicked back to you, so the merchant usually just bakes that 3% into their prices, but you get the biggest part of it back. But since merchants usually don't have two sets of prices (although there are exceptions), cash payers end up net-paying more, i.e. indirectly pay for your card rewards.
This isn't the case in all countries globally; for example, in the EU, card interchange is capped to about 10% of what merchants pay in the US. As a result, merchant fees are much lower, but there are practically no more rewards.
No, that's the total that the merchant pays. The biggest chunk of that goes to the issuing bank and pays for credit card rewards which you get back as the cardholder in some form.
Credit cards (at least in the US) are a fairly efficient payment system, but as long as there will be card rewards, they effectively create a cash surcharge at all merchants that accept them: If you pay by card, the biggest chunk of these ~3% is kicked back to you, so the merchant usually just bakes that 3% into their prices, but you get the biggest part of it back. But since merchants usually don't have two sets of prices (although there are exceptions), cash payers end up net-paying more, i.e. indirectly pay for your card rewards.
This isn't the case in all countries globally; for example, in the EU, card interchange is capped to about 10% of what merchants pay in the US. As a result, merchant fees are much lower, but there are practically no more rewards.
Thanks for the info. I’m writing this from the UK where rewards are indeed close to zero. There are cryptocurrency based reward programs, I haven’t played with them myself though.
In the UK, the (domestic) interchange seems to be still capped to EU levels [1]. Accordingly, merchants pay much less than 3% on domestic card payments.
[1] https://www.visa.co.uk/dam/VCOM/regional/ve/unitedkingdom/PD...
[1] https://www.visa.co.uk/dam/VCOM/regional/ve/unitedkingdom/PD...
Blockchain can solve no problem (by technical means) which depends on the status of physical assets.
Which ironically also includes digital assets, on account of the analog-hole existing (you have to shoot light into eyeballs at some point).
Which ironically also includes digital assets, on account of the analog-hole existing (you have to shoot light into eyeballs at some point).
The contract pays a physical asset custodian for storage, property taxes or whatever other costs. So blockchain specifically provides a financial incentive for a custodian.
Eyeballs thing is true, but hasn’t stopped cryptography being effective in other areas for example, Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, Apple TV etc seem to be doing well despite the electrons reaching my eyeballs unencrypted. The same applies to collectible images, videos and code.
Eyeballs thing is true, but hasn’t stopped cryptography being effective in other areas for example, Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, Apple TV etc seem to be doing well despite the electrons reaching my eyeballs unencrypted. The same applies to collectible images, videos and code.
> The contract pays a physical asset custodian for storage, property taxes or whatever other costs. So blockchain specifically provides a financial incentive for a custodian.
How does a smart contract ensure the custodian is doing any of the things it assumes they are? What is the actual mechanism meant to be, that resists someone inputting "yes I definitely have this car here" when they do not?
How does a smart contract ensure the custodian is doing any of the things it assumes they are? What is the actual mechanism meant to be, that resists someone inputting "yes I definitely have this car here" when they do not?
This is correct, blockchain does not stop Fraud. I don’t think anyone is asserting that it does.
So then what value is the smart contract bringing to the situation?
There are many situations mentioned, but the same value proof of digital ownership brings elsewhere. Happy to answer for a more specific case if you want to provide one.
You haven't mentioned any situations. You haven't described what a smart contract is doing more usefully then a regular legal contract, of the type you would need to have to prevent fraud against your smart contract for the status of goods.
Yes I have. There are six mentioned here. I’m happy to go into detail on one of them if you like. Just tell me which.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35970568
Current generation L1s don’t use the term smart contract anymore because they have almost no resemblance to actual contracts. Rather they are on chain financial programs. I definitely make no attempt to compare on chain programs to legal contracts.
I have repeatedly stated that software cannot prevent fraud.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35970568
Current generation L1s don’t use the term smart contract anymore because they have almost no resemblance to actual contracts. Rather they are on chain financial programs. I definitely make no attempt to compare on chain programs to legal contracts.
I have repeatedly stated that software cannot prevent fraud.
You have repeatedly failed to explain what a smart contract is going to be doing that is providing any value in any of those situations, since as you say, "software cannot prevent fraud". Since trust in legal power prevents fraud, which is what a conventional contract represents, why would I need a smart contract at all to deal with any of those circumstances?
Specifically, what value is Blockchain providing that is not provided by a simple database run by the trusted party who would be necessary to execute any part of the actual physical interactions where all the value is provided?
Specifically, what value is Blockchain providing that is not provided by a simple database run by the trusted party who would be necessary to execute any part of the actual physical interactions where all the value is provided?
> You have repeatedly failed to explain what a smart contract is going to be doing that is providing any value in any of those situations
Completely agreed, I have not done that. As I’ve mentioned repeatedly, I just want you to pick one of the six use cases so I can answer your questions.
I’m going to respectfully end this conversation as I’ve tried to engage you in good faith and you’re not going to tell me what you want or simply don’t understand what I am asking.
Completely agreed, I have not done that. As I’ve mentioned repeatedly, I just want you to pick one of the six use cases so I can answer your questions.
I’m going to respectfully end this conversation as I’ve tried to engage you in good faith and you’re not going to tell me what you want or simply don’t understand what I am asking.
> But overwhelmingly, there seem to be no contemporary applications of any note, just endless cryptocoins of unremarkable note as far as the eye can see.
There is a use case. NFTs for example can be used for ticketing systems. Here is a real world use case which you can see for your own eyes. [0]
[0] https://www.ledgerinsights.com/uks-wembley-stadium-adopts-bl...
There is a use case. NFTs for example can be used for ticketing systems. Here is a real world use case which you can see for your own eyes. [0]
[0] https://www.ledgerinsights.com/uks-wembley-stadium-adopts-bl...
When most people say "a use case", they mean "a use case that is beneficial, and that provides enough advantage over existing ways to do the same thing that it outweighs the significant drawbacks of using a blockchain."
Ticketing isn't exactly a hard problem. It gains nothing meaningful by using NFTs for it.
Ticketing isn't exactly a hard problem. It gains nothing meaningful by using NFTs for it.
> When most people say "a use case"...
Nope. This is the original claim:
> ...there seem to be no contemporary applications of any note...
It is a valid use-case and it is an improvement, otherwise it would not be possible at all, especially when I gave a direct source proving that there is a real world business using NFTs to solve their ticketing problem, especially for anti-fraud purposes and all verifiable on a public blockchain.
> Ticketing isn't exactly a hard problem.
Is that why many are using NFTs for ticketing systems, including Ticketmaster? [0] [1] Looks like a great use case for NFTs and they seem to gain a lot from using them.
[0] https://boxoffice.sitickets.com/
[1] https://business.ticketmaster.com/business-solutions/nft-tok...
Nope. This is the original claim:
> ...there seem to be no contemporary applications of any note...
It is a valid use-case and it is an improvement, otherwise it would not be possible at all, especially when I gave a direct source proving that there is a real world business using NFTs to solve their ticketing problem, especially for anti-fraud purposes and all verifiable on a public blockchain.
> Ticketing isn't exactly a hard problem.
Is that why many are using NFTs for ticketing systems, including Ticketmaster? [0] [1] Looks like a great use case for NFTs and they seem to gain a lot from using them.
[0] https://boxoffice.sitickets.com/
[1] https://business.ticketmaster.com/business-solutions/nft-tok...
Now there's a pithy title that vastly understates the case. There was an article on here earlier about how the Secret Service take on crypto that pretty much utterly destroys all of the crypto hype mill talking points about decentralization, anonimity, etc. I'm glad that I've lived long enough to see that particular arc of bullshit run it's course.
I’m not sure anyone believed it to be anonymous other than those who misunderstand it.
You might need a refresher then. Rewind the clock about 12 years and there were folks involved in the development of blockchain tech that routinely hopped on every broadcast channel available to man to declare this tech would not only usher in an era of perfect anonymity to financial transactions, it would be so perfectly anonymous as to threaten fiat currency as a concept as it would hamper governments' ability to collect taxes.
Written byby someone who does not understand it much if at all. And I don't mean doesn't understand it like a technical person or cult like devotee, I mean they have very little surface knowledge. Typical of legacy media institutions.
"Crypto" initial excitement was self sovereign money. Later came the other stuff, the web3 smart contract stuff. I'd say bitcoin (little b, the idea, not just the network, other thinks like Litecoin and Monero qualify) quite live up to their initial excitement. I can store an arbitrary amount of wealth in my head that cannot be taken from me via legal processes, and I can send it to anyone I like and nobody can stop me. They can punish me, but they can't stop me. This is a revolutionary thing that IMO makes this supposed competition with traditional banking a no contest. There are selective pressures at work here. It has an algorithmically deterministic supply. I believe this is the future of money.
Crypto without the currency, not talking about cryptography, is basically just ethereum. That has definitely not lived up to the hype. We never got mist browser, swarm, bzz, all the things that originally constituted the whole web3 concept. What appears to have emerged is basically a large unregulated (and unregulatable) securities exchange. This in itself can be seen as a positive thing, I think it is, but it doesnt live up. There are a few very (not to understate, very very) interesting things being done with it, but this stuff was supposed to reinvent communication and incentive structures, allow people to organize in novel ways. This has not happened and it doesn't look like it is going to happen. Instead we get NFT cartoon drawings and meme coins, interspersed with a few really inventive financial tools here and there. It's looking more and more like this is going to replace stock exchanges moreso than allow people to create autonomous organizations that control real world assets anonymously with collateralized deterministic agreements that need no court system to resolve disputes.
"Crypto" initial excitement was self sovereign money. Later came the other stuff, the web3 smart contract stuff. I'd say bitcoin (little b, the idea, not just the network, other thinks like Litecoin and Monero qualify) quite live up to their initial excitement. I can store an arbitrary amount of wealth in my head that cannot be taken from me via legal processes, and I can send it to anyone I like and nobody can stop me. They can punish me, but they can't stop me. This is a revolutionary thing that IMO makes this supposed competition with traditional banking a no contest. There are selective pressures at work here. It has an algorithmically deterministic supply. I believe this is the future of money.
Crypto without the currency, not talking about cryptography, is basically just ethereum. That has definitely not lived up to the hype. We never got mist browser, swarm, bzz, all the things that originally constituted the whole web3 concept. What appears to have emerged is basically a large unregulated (and unregulatable) securities exchange. This in itself can be seen as a positive thing, I think it is, but it doesnt live up. There are a few very (not to understate, very very) interesting things being done with it, but this stuff was supposed to reinvent communication and incentive structures, allow people to organize in novel ways. This has not happened and it doesn't look like it is going to happen. Instead we get NFT cartoon drawings and meme coins, interspersed with a few really inventive financial tools here and there. It's looking more and more like this is going to replace stock exchanges moreso than allow people to create autonomous organizations that control real world assets anonymously with collateralized deterministic agreements that need no court system to resolve disputes.
At least crypto is unaffected by the AI nonsense and it is not going anywhere. For both crypto and AI, the genie is out of the bottle and they cannot be stopped. Not even this crypto project [0]. But of course, no-one cares until it is too late.
So instead of listening to bullshit articles like this one repeat the same arguments about cryptocurrencies, lets see what happens in the next Bitcoin halving cycle.
[0] https://worldcoin.org
So instead of listening to bullshit articles like this one repeat the same arguments about cryptocurrencies, lets see what happens in the next Bitcoin halving cycle.
[0] https://worldcoin.org
Not much of a crypto currency enthusiast but i find this paragraph amusing:
“The market value of all cryptocurrencies ballooned from $250bn at the start of 2020 to $3trn by late 2021. But it has since fallen back to just $1.3trn. ”
That is larger than the entire economy of some developed countries.
“The market value of all cryptocurrencies ballooned from $250bn at the start of 2020 to $3trn by late 2021. But it has since fallen back to just $1.3trn. ”
That is larger than the entire economy of some developed countries.
Yet I can still send censorship free bitcoin and store it on a napkin.
My choice quote from the article is that they consider a $1.3 trillion market to be "only".
That's just under $1 million for each copy of The Economist sold this year. Perhaps they have a distorted sense of size.
My choice quote from the article is that they consider a $1.3 trillion market to be "only".
That's just under $1 million for each copy of The Economist sold this year. Perhaps they have a distorted sense of size.
I don’t think it’s fair to value crypto at $1.3T as there’s a substantial amount of self dealing to inflate asset prices. I don’t believe the value of the NFT market either when people are selling things to themself and claiming a market value.
It’s like claiming the economy in Roblox has some massive amount when there’s no actual check or way to determine actual liquid value. If people wanted to sell all their crypto they aren’t getting $1.4T. If people want to sell $1.4T of US fiat, they are probably getting around$1.4T.
It’s like claiming the economy in Roblox has some massive amount when there’s no actual check or way to determine actual liquid value. If people wanted to sell all their crypto they aren’t getting $1.4T. If people want to sell $1.4T of US fiat, they are probably getting around$1.4T.
I'm familiar with regularass auction houses and they take a fat cut up to 20% per transaction. That's crazy but there's much less incentive to sell+buy when 20% is lost in the transaction. The NFT auction houses could take a cut that then gets distributed to all sellers or something like that. There has to be a loss in the transaction else the transaction means jack shit
Fits all my requirements for currency: isn’t “censored” (?) and can fit on a napkin
A password on a napkin that unlocks real fiat is actually very cool.
[deleted]
(disclaimer: I project managed the Ethereum launch in 2015)
The big problem with crypto is legal, and that problem breaks up into four categories.
1) legality of tokens of various kinds (are they securities? who can do what with tokens?)
2) KYC AML CTF PEP OFAC SOF issues: governments want to track who is who when money moves and many governments do it in many different ways
3) Taxation frameworks, and international harmonisation of taxation frameworks
4) Enforceability of contract when smart contracts are in the mix
None of these are technology problems. All of them are problems which the legacy financial system solves with huge numbers of staff wasting their lives pushing the same paperwork for every single transaction, while the industrial-scale money laundering happens inside of fully regulated financial institutions which go rotten and print money until they get caught landed with symbolic fines after laundering tens of billions of drug money.
If governments had made their mind up about *how they were going to regulate crypto* then all of this would have been sorted out years ago and we would have a simple, stable, efficient set of new financial rails, much like a re-invention of the credit card payment system or the SWIFT bank transfer system.
But because of a failure to give clear guidance for 8 years the technology is a swamp of unregulated and poorly regulated projects, because when the actual professionals show up they can't figure out what the law is, because the law hasn't been written.
MICA in the EU starts to provide the industry the necessary clarity to actually obey the (clearly written) law and mainstream into the regular world of commerce.
In the UK, see the UK Jurisdiction Taskforce which is disambiguating the crypto mess from the Judiciary on out https://lawtechuk.io/ukjt
And also the upcoming Law Commission work https://www.lawcom.gov.uk/project/digital-assets/ (warning: contains 550 pages of UK government legal analysis)
My company builds on the UK framework to enable buying and selling of physical assets across 170 jurisdictions on the same legal framework: http://mattereum.com
Anyway, it's a mess, but it's not the "crypto industry's" fault -- government's failure to establish clear legal rules has made institutional adoption by grown ups impossible.
As we get regulatory clarity it all goes forwards again!
The big problem with crypto is legal, and that problem breaks up into four categories.
1) legality of tokens of various kinds (are they securities? who can do what with tokens?)
2) KYC AML CTF PEP OFAC SOF issues: governments want to track who is who when money moves and many governments do it in many different ways
3) Taxation frameworks, and international harmonisation of taxation frameworks
4) Enforceability of contract when smart contracts are in the mix
None of these are technology problems. All of them are problems which the legacy financial system solves with huge numbers of staff wasting their lives pushing the same paperwork for every single transaction, while the industrial-scale money laundering happens inside of fully regulated financial institutions which go rotten and print money until they get caught landed with symbolic fines after laundering tens of billions of drug money.
If governments had made their mind up about *how they were going to regulate crypto* then all of this would have been sorted out years ago and we would have a simple, stable, efficient set of new financial rails, much like a re-invention of the credit card payment system or the SWIFT bank transfer system.
But because of a failure to give clear guidance for 8 years the technology is a swamp of unregulated and poorly regulated projects, because when the actual professionals show up they can't figure out what the law is, because the law hasn't been written.
MICA in the EU starts to provide the industry the necessary clarity to actually obey the (clearly written) law and mainstream into the regular world of commerce.
In the UK, see the UK Jurisdiction Taskforce which is disambiguating the crypto mess from the Judiciary on out https://lawtechuk.io/ukjt
And also the upcoming Law Commission work https://www.lawcom.gov.uk/project/digital-assets/ (warning: contains 550 pages of UK government legal analysis)
My company builds on the UK framework to enable buying and selling of physical assets across 170 jurisdictions on the same legal framework: http://mattereum.com
Anyway, it's a mess, but it's not the "crypto industry's" fault -- government's failure to establish clear legal rules has made institutional adoption by grown ups impossible.
As we get regulatory clarity it all goes forwards again!
Would you include political ideology as another problem? If bitcoin/ether fulfilled their potential, wouldn't that mean the US dollar would fall as the world reserve currency and thereby weaken the US government's influence? This seems to be the main reason for introducing a CBDC as it gives nation states complete control over their money.
It was entirely a grift, a reverse robinhood that shifted swaths of money from retail investors to a select few.
> crypto
Please stop using this prefix by itself.
Please stop using this prefix by itself.
boggles my mind how many people can't see any value in programmatic money
Everybody sees the value in programmatic money.
Nobody sees the value in your programmatic money, which might as well be Canadian Tire Money or Emperor Norton Scrip.
When a government issues a digital currency in exchange for the right to live there, people will use it. But nobody wants any currency that you drew with crayons. Even if you somehow convinced some other tech bros that someone else will pay even more for it some day.
Nobody sees the value in your programmatic money, which might as well be Canadian Tire Money or Emperor Norton Scrip.
When a government issues a digital currency in exchange for the right to live there, people will use it. But nobody wants any currency that you drew with crayons. Even if you somehow convinced some other tech bros that someone else will pay even more for it some day.
I see huge value in the idea. The problem is nobody has yet demonstrated a token that doesn't get taken over by speculators. When that happens it becomes useless as money.
And don't get me started about the "stablecoin" myth.
And don't get me started about the "stablecoin" myth.
The funny thing is that because the traditional finance systems were grandfathered in no one cares that they had been taken over by speculators long ago. And lets not even get started on the fiat pre-mine that is fractional reserve banking giving chartered banks the ability to mint new M0 currency, and only chartered banks. Which pragmatically means that ~4000 corporations in the USA get all the newly created currency.
When the value of the USD spikes to the point that a single dollar represents a year's worth of work at minimum wage, maybe then you can criticize it as being "taken over by speculators" in the same way that Bitcoin was.
... that's already happened? Cents used to be the dollar in terms of purchasing power. Inflation of the US fiat currency reached bitcoin levels a half century ago.
Being taken over by speculators is an unfortunate inevitability of any market.
We wouldn't claim houses are useless because the housing market has been taken over by speculators, at least in my city.
We wouldn't claim houses are useless because the housing market has been taken over by speculators, at least in my city.
Houses aren't money, and volatility in the housing market doesn't impact it's utility as shelter. And furthermore, the use of houses as a speculative vehicle is a huge problem that makes it very difficult for younger people to buy homes.
Houses are useless as money because their value keeps changing and they're worth too much indivisibly. But we don't even try to use houses to buy a pizza, so that's okay.
Digital money should be small enough to carry on your person, be divisible into small chunks, and its value should not wildly fluctuate from day to day. Bitcoin meets the first two of those criteria, but it violates the third. That makes it impossible to use Bitcoin to buy a pizza. (Although it did work for pizza for a brief time in the early days before its volatility became outrageous.)
Digital money should be small enough to carry on your person, be divisible into small chunks, and its value should not wildly fluctuate from day to day. Bitcoin meets the first two of those criteria, but it violates the third. That makes it impossible to use Bitcoin to buy a pizza. (Although it did work for pizza for a brief time in the early days before its volatility became outrageous.)
You can buy a pizza with it, you just can't price a pizza in it. You can't build business model and then say, "if I change X BTC for my pizzas, I will be profitable," because a.) You can't anticipate the price and b.) Your obligations are priced in dollars (or whatever currency)
Wait until March 2024. Then yes.
s1gnp0st(3)
oh look, another highly-compressible, hn circle jerk about the "crypto" boogeyman
tbh, i'm always impressed by no-coiner and armchair bitcoiner comments -- it's like listening to a straight-edge discuss psychedelics -- how can you comment on a space you *clearly* don't understand?
tbh, i'm always impressed by no-coiner and armchair bitcoiner comments -- it's like listening to a straight-edge discuss psychedelics -- how can you comment on a space you *clearly* don't understand?
It's like saying the promise of beanie babies has not lived up to its initial excitement, I mean OK what did you expect. People were excited about beanie babies. Was that bad? No, it's OK to be excited about things you like.
EDIT: everyone is downvoting me you guys must really hate beanie babies
EDIT 2: oh maybe they don't like my username. it's a joke name, people.
EDIT: everyone is downvoting me you guys must really hate beanie babies
EDIT 2: oh maybe they don't like my username. it's a joke name, people.
We’ve been over this over and over again. Tech is valuable. Alternative currency is useful in some countries. Speculation sucks. Electric usage is silly. Blah blah blah.
My bet is that crypto is going to disappear eventually.
My bet is that crypto is going to disappear eventually.
http://web.archive.org/web/20230516233219/https://www.econom...