https://twitter.com/sarahjeong/status/953464303960469504
> All of this has gone too far!!!!! It was fine when you paranoid dorks were out there scamming each other, please leave the normies alone!!!!!!!!!!!
>Internet rando 2: What about people who live under oppressed governments with unsound currency
>Me: Only if the problem with their currency is that it's not volatile enough and the transaction speeds are too fast
>"People are sick of the Federal Reserve, sick of bailouts, sick of inflation. You know what we need? Internet money with the usability of PGP and the stability of BART service"
Like hey, BART isn't that bad.
That's not fair. Shady folks are just getting more publicity. Noone talks about people who created stuff that works and doesn't scam people. And there's a lot of such stuff. This space is growing because of such people, despite the shady folks.
No, there isn't. It's always been nebulous talk of "potential" without any concrete uses beyond scams and criminal activity. There have just been iterations of tools for those areas. Then you have the near-religious libertarian True Believers who promote as a matter of faith, regardless of what the reality is.
This article remains ever-so-relevant:
>Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain
https://hackernoon.com/ten-years-in-nobody-has-come-up-with-...
The fact it's hard to not only implement correctly, but to promote to society does not mean it's not relevant.
Good things take time.
Remember that people thought for some time that general relativity and the Law of large Numbers would never have practical applications.
As always with these claims (that, as noted below, have not actually been implemented and so can only be speculated on), the question isn't whether this could be done with the blockchain, but rather whether this requires the blockchain to be done.
All too often the claimed magical things the blockchain will allow can be implemented far more easily with other, existing technology. So far it's a solution in search of a problem.
Nothing wrong with that.
The fact crypto is riddle with quick money making claims and project using the blockchain for sheer buzziness tends to make skeptics extra pessimistics in their views.
It's unfair to the technology.
We have a transaction oriented temper proof distributed transparent database.
Those are objective features, and they deserve we give them a try.
Full public transparency isn't that great a property of a voting system.
And it's hard to call it a "legitimate use case" before it's successful.
And come on, it's a highly experimental technology whise use cases impact the most controversial aspects of our society : money, vote, accountability, transparency, power to the masse.
Of course it's going to take time and fail in many spectacular ways.
I suppose it might count as criminal activity, but as far as I know, it's the only way to donate to Sci Hub.
The problem for bitcoin arrived when people begun to see it as something that could be more then an underground activity and started treating it like an investment object and essentially reinvented the old failed concept of "wildcat currencies" with an intentional scarce currency, something made viable by the libertarian refusal to even look at the real world history of economics.
What we now have is a bitcoin economy thats hit a hard(intentional) limit of growth forcing people to branch away from bitcoin as the revolutionary application of blockchain in a world where some minor advances are made in actually using the underlying theory for something other then scams, creating a market ripe for new wildcat currencies pretenting to be be "what bitcoin failed to become".
"UN’s World Food Programme Builds on Ethereum Blockchain Money Transfers"
https://www.ccn.com/banks-begone-uns-world-food-programme-bu...
"The pilot alone is said to save the agency $150,000 a month while eliminating a staggering 98% of bank-related transfer fees, according to Munich WFP innovation lab chief Bernhard Kowatsch."
This is so clearly false that it overshadows the rest of your comment. You _cannot_ claim these things without proof and your point is so easily disproven that it's not worth the time to even do so.
And since we're on the subject, Bitcoin allowed individuals to get around the financial blockade against Wikileaks a few years ago. It has also allowed Venezuelans, who have been driven to abject poverty by their government, to get their capital out of the country and the reach of their government.
As for privacy, there are other cryptocurrencies, like Monero (ring signatures) and Ethereum (potential to create ring signatures, and since the Byzantium hard fork, zk-SNARK proofs), that open the door to significant privacy.
Some other cryptocurrencies try to deliver anonymity but even if the technology eventually delivers they'll have the same problem that almost everyone needs to get real money out of the system and that's where the normal banking laws kick in. Outside of a few cases where someone can do entirely unregulated remote work most people are going to need to convert to or from local currency to pay their bills or receive income.
>>This shows up in both examples you cited: if the Venezuelan government wants to enforce capital controls, the people who used Bitcoin are going to wish they'd smuggled suitcases of cash out of the country instead because they've left a durable paper-trail of their transactions behind.
It does want to enforce capital controls but it is far more costly and difficult to do so against users of Bitcoin than users of against traditional trusted third party controlled intermediaries.
It's not a simple matter for the Venezuelan government to determine which pseudonymous transactions on a cryptocurrency blockchain belong to which Venezuelan resident. It is also much more costly to enforce a law against many thousands of end users versus a handful of large intermediaries operating in the country.
Do you really think it's equally easy for the Venezuelan government to enforce capital controls with the traditional financial system and with cryptocurrency?
>>even if the technology eventually delivers they'll have the same problem that almost everyone needs to get real money out of the system and that's where the normal banking laws kick in.
Yes it won't be perfect but it will increase the cost/difficulty of mass surveillance of financial transactions. Many of the measures that would be needed for a government to prevent private use of cryptocurrency would be politically unpalatable.
That's a closet NIMBY if I ever heard one. It was FINE when they were only stabbing each other in the bad neighbourhoods, but PLEASE leave the normal neighbourhoods alone!!!! NOW all of this has gone too far ...
Love it, thanks for sharing.
It does seem like she is making the mistake of conflating Bitcoin with general crypto however, which can be misleading to her audience.
Bitcoin indeed suffers from slow transaction speeds and extreme volatility.
Other coins, truer to the original vision, fair much better in those respects, and with wide adoption and usage, the volatility would subside.
I think when she refers to Bitcoin, she also means every other piece of madness that has come after it including altcoins/cryptocurrencies on the whole; and does not play favourites.
Edit: Here's some evidence - https://twitter.com/search?q=%40sarahjeong%20cryptocurrency
I'm sure similar searches on related terms will reveal a similar sentiment very opposite to yours.
The ICO / ponzi scheme / overnight stock expert craze is ridiculous and I do not take part.
But Bitcoin Cash (closer to the vision of the original bitcoin whitepaper that she herself mentions, which she should know Bitcoin has now deviated significantly from) has been a transparent, expansive, and welcome addition to my other payment channels, much like Bitcoin used to be in the heyday.
I enjoy using it when and where I can, I enjoy the decentralization, the lack of reliance on the banking system, etc.
I am precisely that narrow part of the population she is highlighting.
Most of her points are entirely correct, but besides her conflation of some of Bitcoin's problems with other cryptocurrency, she ultimately discredits me and others who understand exactly what the point of cryptocurrency is, and its benefits to our lifestyles, with the dismissive phrase, "See you at Burning Man."
She must associate cryptocurrency with a specific kind of character and then attack that character instead, in order to drive her argument. That's fallacious and misleading.
More specifically, Google doesn't want the SEC to hold them liable when they go after some of these fraudsters.
* sites abandoning adsense because they don't want to be associated with cryptocurrency
* users installing adblockers because they don't want to be running monero miners
We are definitely in a very hype driven cryptocurrency bubble right now, and there are a lot of naive folks who are probably going to lose money to it.
And yet somehow, we haven't really managed to make any cryptocurrencies an actual, widely accepted, payment alternative, for anyone other than a few people with special circumstances (government restrictions on currency exchange, criminals demanding ransoms, funding organizations that governments are trying to shut down) or people who are fairly technically competent.
There's a chance the lightning network could be the last piece of the puzzle to make cryptocurrencies actually usable for payment, though even still, I have a hard time seeing most places wanting to accept payment in an asset as volatile as Bitcoin.
Or maybe we'll see a coin backed by fiat currency and real, regulated banks on Stellar, where you don't have nearly the same scalability issues nor gigawatts of power wasted just to try to solve Sybil attacks. If you have a coin backed by fiat currency, and low transaction costs, businesses are a lot more likely to accept it as payment as most of their expenses, taxes, debts, and so on are in the local fiat currency rather than than in any cryptocurrency.
I have an even harder time seeing any of those people who invest in bitoin using their coins for purchases.
I'm pretty sure whatever "newbie guides" exist out there purposely lead people to this awful state.
Using "crypto" to abbreviate "cryptocurrency" causes a lot of confusion, as the "crypto" in "cryptocurrency" was already an abbreviation; "cryptocurrency" is short for "cryptographic currency."
People who know nothing about cryptography or even that cryptocurrency uses cryptography get confused if they are looking for information about cryptocurrencies and instead find more general purpose resources on cryptography (like https://crypto.stackexchange.com/ or https://www.reddit.com/r/crypto/).
I know that this is a losing battle, like getting people to stop using "wiki" as an abbreviation for Wikipedia (which is just one out of many wikis), but I figure that as long as we're talking about people not knowing much but investing in it anyhow, I really encourage everyone to stop using "crypto" as an abbreviation for "cryptocurrency."
Now a similar population at large has decided the new usage rules. It's normal, it's just evolution of the English language. By this point, "crypto" is indeed widely used as a short term for Cryptocurrencies also.
People who know nothing about things are going to get confused either way. The society can't form every single rule just so every person who doesn't know anything will have a clear mind. If they want to learn something, they will. And learning that "crypto" can mean two things, in a language where it's already commonplace for terms to mean different things in different areas - is not a huge thing.
Yes, this is why I say that I know this is a losing battle.
I mostly care about it in the context of technical forums like Hacker News. While the word may have a different meaning for the population at large, when you're having a discussion on a technical forum you should generally try to learn how words are used in that context.
This is somewhat like the different meanings for the word "theory" in a scientific context and in general use. In general use, "theory" means an idea that may not yet have been tested or proven, somewhere around the meaning of "idea", "hunch", or "hypothesis", while in a scientific context "theory" indicates something that has been tested successfully and is well accepted.
While the use of "theory" in the broader sense is well accepted in general use, using it in that sense in a discussion about scientific theories is confusing; so if someone does that in such a discussion, I am likely to point out the stronger meaning of the word in scientific usage.
So likewise, while "crypto" as an abbreviation of "cryptocurrency" is already fairly widespread (though I think still niche enough that there's a tiny chance a concerted effort could change usage patterns), I at least want to make sure that folks getting involved in technical discussions are made aware of the earlier definition of "crypto" and are made aware of the confusion that can be caused.
People hear ads about how you need to move over your 401k and discount the whole space as a scam. The scams are crowding out the innovation, drawing potentially disastrous regulatory scrutiny, and as a whole setting back a legitimate budding industry substantially.
I hope that when regulators finally do step in, they are able to take actions that stop the scams without destroying the underlying technology.
A few, but the vast majority have latched onto it because they think it will make them rich. Almost no one buying into cryptocurrencies could explain a blockchain if their life depended on it.
Self-interested value creation has generated the vast majority of great achievements in the world. I don't see what wrong with that being a primary motivation to invest time and resources into something?
Why else should people do it? Only for fun or altruistic reasons?
If that was the case then cryptocurrencies would still be novelty on the internet only known to nerds. That may be safer and harmless and idealistic but it would be entirely insignificant.
Nearly all big developments requires risk, experimentation, and early failures until it matures into a stable and well understood technology.
Every time I hear about Bitcoin or cryptocurrencies on mainstream radio/media they always mention it's volatility and risk. Google results are full of stories about it. The association between risk and cryptocurrencies are essentially common-sense these days, as it rightfully should be. I'm not sure why everyone's acting like it's some big secret we need to protect people from.
If it's an explicit scam or ponzi scheme then yes that's a problem worth worrying about, and we already have plenty of laws, regulations, and agencies to deal with that already. But I don't quite agree with automatically lumping all paid mentions of cryptocurrencies and blockchains into that category.
The hell it has. Polio vaccine? Symphonies? Cathedrals? The Sistine Chapel? Representative democracy? The works of the great philosophers? The moon landings? The Mars rovers?
I'd say, make a list of the top 100 "great achievements in the world" and strong odds are, they're either done by some poor but intensely driven person, or a government that represents a lot more than one self-interested value creating person.
Well the OP I was responding to suggested that people were doing it because "it's a powerful idea and because the underlying technology has a lot of legitimacy to it".
This gets repeated ad nauseam. Maybe it might be time to consider that this tidal wave of scams IS the way the technology is changing the world?
> People hear ads about how you need to move over your 401k and discount the whole space as a scam. The scams are crowding out the innovation, drawing potentially disastrous regulatory scrutiny, and as a whole setting back a legitimate budding industry substantially.
I accept your reasoning. But cryptography was all the time about how one can "scam" another person or prevent being scammed (where "scammed" in this case means e.g. that the cipher is broken).
To give a concrete example: MITM attacks on, say, Diffie-Hellman key exchange (just the standard textbook MITM attack if DH is used without any certificate) is in this wording just scamming the user that he has a secure connection while in reality someone can eavesdrop it or even modify sent messages. Of course the standard solution for this exact problem is to use X.509 certificates. But the "scamming" does not stop here: Of course a malicious person immediately thinks about more sophisticated attacks such as replay attacks to scam the user and again of course the protocols use methods to prevent this.
In this sense my counterclaim is that this does not "paint a really sour picture of the space as a whole", but just presents the "ordinary man" with what cryptography has been about for decades in a completely realistic (though in this case perhaps somewhar painful) way.
This genuinely frightened me.
The cases they told about were pure scams where the fraudsters stole the cryptocurrencies directly.
It seems shoe shiners can come in many forms. But that was the particular one for me to unload all of my bitcoin and other crypto and get out while I was ahead.
I'll be surprised if the whole space doesn't completely crater sometime this year, a bunch of ordinary people get shafted, and the SEC steps in and knocks some heads. There's no way I'm getting near this until after the dust settles.
He is the spokesman/brand ambassador for "Bitcoiin".
Yes that is two "I"s.
There is the "bubble" word again. So how about our economy, isn't that a bubble too?
What is a bubble? I still see too many places in the world where the sales price for a house is easily 10x the price it actually cost to build it. Banks? Quantitative easing? Startup's? Or at what point will Google look like a bubble itself?
Governments and Banks have learned that the crypto-currency revolution can replace a significant part of our current economy. Whether that's good or bad news, calling it a bubble is foolish and cheap IMHO.
So yeah there is some intrinsic value.
edit: the value of the share (in the old good days) is the discounted cash flow. you invest in a business, then business pays you the share of the profits (hence - share) in the form of dividends. AMZ share does NOT pay any dividends, nor does grant you any voting rights. nothing. zero. this is your intrinsic value.
If the total value of share prices drops below the value of the assets, you can buy all the shares, take the company private and sell off all the assets to make money.
Assets (vs liabilities) thus can put a floor on the value of a stock price.
it is amazing that no one seems to be able to answer simple question - what financial benefit do i get from ownership of an AMZ share? other that selling it to a bigger fool.
Yes, I spend a lot of time annoyed.