Blockchain technology is going to change everything: the shipping industry, the financial system, government … in fact, what won’t it change? But enthusiasm for it mainly stems from a lack of knowledge and understanding. The blockchain is a solution in search of a problem.
I saw this on Reddit and it looked like all the commenters thought crypto was pointless/looking for a problem.
In reality crypto does solve a problem. It lets you store and transfer value without having to trust a small number of people/entities. That’s it.
Is this a good thing? Debatable. Will this help the rich or will it help the poor? Debatable.
My biggest issue is that cryptocurrencies basically try to be a remedy for an issue capitalism created, but at the same time they do not aim to transform capitalism but only to give a more pleasant alternative. Most of the times they can’t even be used for day to day shopping by regular people, so their only purpose, or at least it’s main purpose ends up being speculation by middle class white boys in first world countries.
Everything novel will eventually end up as a speculative asset. In ages past, the amount of money available to be invested and the amount of investments (mostly) matched. But as the world grew more wealthy, suddenly there were many more people (even some middle class) who had surplus wealth to invest.
However, the number of investment opportunities either didn’t much grow, or grew modestly. And now there’s a mismatch.
This causes those with surplus wealth to chase ever-riskier opportunities, to fall for all sorts of scams, and to speculate in all sorts of assets… even to the detriment of markets.
The thing I find ironic is that this seems to be an actually valid criticism of capitalism, but one that I never hear spoken among the so-called and self-identified anti-capitalists.
As for Bitcoin, its development is now in control of those who seek to develop it only as a speculative asset. It can never become a currency alternative at this point, they’re actively steering it away from that original goal. The rest will fare little better, given that there is rising sentiment (especially among the left, but not only among them) to ban cryptocurrency outright over concerns (legitimate? I can’t say) that it will result in even more frightening climate change scenarios. We’re probably only years away from outright bans (though how they’d police that is difficult to say, might require crackdowns on general computing itself).
Crypto wars :D
If white boys in middle class countries now have a something good, that is great. I think it is Venezuala that now uses Bitcoin for every transaction (not sure how). My main objection to crypto is the cheating by some who introduce the currency, so there are a few who control it, but still more people than in fiat. If it hurts central banks, I am all for it. It seems to have the ability to spread power around more. But, there are criminals in every field. I saw a video last night that some were calling for regulating “stable coin” more. I think that could just make people turn to other cryptocurrencies. Buyer beware, yes, that is with ANY product.
I am very turned off by the men treating crypto like gold-mining, though. I see their videos and comments and think they look like half-starved wolves ripping apart prey. Calm the f*ck down and try to show some restraint or class.
You’ll find that our overlords can’t care less what happens to banks. Only lowly people like us depend on banks for our savings and daily payments. The bourgeoisie owns the means of productions and vast areas of land, has private security and the police licking their boots.
As much as i’m against money, replacing money controlled by the State (eg. anonymous cash) with money controlled by private corporations (eg. far-from-anonymous Bitcoin controlled by Bitmain & friends) doesn’t sound like a great idea.
In the past they cared enough to create wars over it. If people agreed more on definitions, conversations would be more productive:
bourgeoisie boo͝r″zhwä-zē′ noun The middle class.
That tended to mean small to medium sized business owners in the old movies. I am not too worried about them. Conglomerates (BigTech, BigPharma, BigFarm, etc.) scare the hell outta me. These are the overlords and many of their names will never make the official Top 100 Richest People list because they prefer to not be targets or get too much attention.
Less well off people were sour about the bourgeoisie because they could see them and sometimes had to interact with them. They were jealous. They couldn’t see their real enemy and never knew their names or faces probably. They could never move in those circles.
In the past they cared enough to create wars over it. If people agreed more on definitions, conversations would be more productive:
bourgeoisie boo͝r″zhwä-zē′ noun The middle class.
That tended to mean small to medium sized business owners in the old movies. I am not too worried about them. Conglomerates (BigTech, BigPharma, BigFarm, etc.) scare the hell outta me. These are the overlords and many of their names will never make the official Top 100 Richest People list because they prefer to not be targets or get too much attention.
Less well off people were sour about the bourgeoisie because they could see them and sometimes had to interact with them. They were jealous. They couldn’t see their real enemy and never knew their names or faces probably. They could never move in those circles.
One problem is that everyone conflates “cryptography” and “blockchains” with “cryptocurrency”.
Cryptography is math that allows basically everything on the internet to work.
Blockchains are a conceptual append-only database that use cryptography and are convenient to decentralize.
Cryptocurrencies just combine these technologies to make a currency.
Unfortunately cryptocurrencies are very convenient for scammers, so most people associate blockchains with scams, but that’s just because they are unaware of the ways in which they themselves depend on these technologies.
Ostensibly,
gitstores commits in a blockchain, so essentially every company in the world relies on blockchain technology.Not exactly. Yes the data structure is similar (directed acyclic graph), yet Bitcoin deals with the issue of building a centralized/global consensus, which git couldn’t care less about. git is actually decentralized and you can reference multiple sources of truth (remotes) which Bitcoin can’t handle and that’s why so much resources are burnt building consensus.
I don’t think we need a blockchain to make a cryptocurrency. GNU/Taler seems like the best and most innovative approach to cryptocurrency i’ve seen so far (and certainly one of the very few that doesn’t look like a scam) and is not based on blockchain but rather doesn’t try to build a global consensus at all (unless i’ve misunderstood it).
Yeah, git is more of a block tree, but the commits have a commitment to the previous commit, so there is still an underlying chain!
It’s true there is no consensus feature, though, I would argue that it’s a component of a cryptocurrency, instead of a Blockchain, but it’s all semantics. I could even argue that signing commits, can create a global consensus.
“Bitcoin cash” and the other Bitcoin-derivative-forks are basically “remote heads” for Bitcoin.
Idk exactly about GNU/Taler, but I concede that Blockchains are not essential for cryptocurrencies, or even decentralization, but it’s just that they’re common features
GNU/Taler is NOT a currency it’s just a way to use existing currencies whether fiat/cryptocurrency to make payments anonymously. Cryptocurrency refers to any digital currency that uses a blockchain/other distributed ledger technology to record transactions and issue new units, and that uses cryptography to prevent invalid transactions
I agree with your interpretation, but from my perspective GNU/Taler is all i expect from a cryptocurrency: enable me to make low-cost/high-privacy digital payments. A promise which BTC/ETH/others are 100% incapable to hold (at least so far, and in the foreseeable future).
none of those are intended for private transactions.Monero is a coin that exists for the purpose you want
Thats not true either, you don’t have to bind talers to another currency. They are just tokens that can represent whatever value you want. You can issue some at random and let the users figure out the value, just like with your cryptocurrencies.
https://docs.taler.net/?
Oh, really? How many shareholders does Bitmain have? What about the exchanges used? Now, how many people have root on their servers? How many law enforcement agencies (supposedly who side with central banks) could raid their office and gain root access? How many people develop your wallet? How many people audit it to make sure there’s no backdoor?
All about human interactions is trust all the way down. If you try to replace human trust with something else (eg. machine-built consensus) you still have humans to trust but it’s much less obvious and so the people who hold the actual power are much less accountable to the rest of us.
I assume by this you mean the bitcoin mainnet and you are implying it is centralised because of mining? I agree but there are other cryptocurrencies that are less centralised. Also, you don’t need to use an exchange to transfer value with crypto, you can buy peer-to-peer on sites like localbitcoin.
This is an interesting point I think. I think sometimes the control is anonymous and sometimes it is not, for POW you can identify some large miners and for POS you can identify some large holders (e.g. exchanges).