All her tweets on the subject are great

>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"

I loved this tweetstorm, but I must say, it's never taken me weeks to take a BART trip, but it's definitely taken me weeks to clear a BTC transaction.

Like hey, BART isn't that bad.

Really? Her posts strike me as sophomoric at best. Just enough knowledge to seem rather than to be.

Except paranoid dorks are not the ones scamming. It's a completely different group of people who created the space, and completely different one that twisted it into a farce, created thousands of scam ICOs and altcoins that make no sense. Well, some overlap actually might be there, but not that much.

It was only a handful of engineers who "created the space" to begin with, so even though there isn't much overlap, it's pretty much always been a community made up of shady folks, it's only that the fraudsters have become less technically sophisticated and more brazen as activity has increased and the blockchain community has grown and continued to radiate cosmic rays of hype.

> always been a community made up of shady folks

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.

>Noone talks about people who created stuff that works and doesn't scam people. And there's a lot of such stuff.

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-...

True democratic and transparent electronic voting system is a legitimate use case for the block chain.

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.

>True democratic and transparent electronic voting system is a legitimate use case for the block chain.

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.

Nobody is talking magic. We have a system with characteristics that maps to problems we wish to solve and we try to do it.

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.

> True democratic and transparent electronic voting system is a legitimate use case for the block chain.

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.

Transparency of votes doesn't have to map to identity of voters. The blockchain is transparent, what you put inside is left to the implementer to choose.

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.

> It's always been nebulous talk of "potential" without any concrete uses beyond scams and criminal activity.

I suppose it might count as criminal activity, but as far as I know, it's the only way to donate to Sci Hub.

http://sci-hub.tw/#donate

Part of why bitcoin was semi viable before it's intentional scarcity killed all of growth potential is that any society needs a gray market of things that are illegal but often essential for social mobility(like pirated textbooks and academic papers, or unmonitored cross border communication).

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".

I didn't say they were evil, but most of the early activity around bitcoin was swirling around in the dark markets which I think is totally fair to describe as shady.

Those were the users, not the creators.

To this day nobody knows who Satoshi Nakamoto actually is, while that's not super shady it also ain't exactly transparent.

I wasn't referring to the users, but the creators and the users are inextricable, someone "created" all those dark markets where the users participated.

I would love to see a list of CONCRETE examples of cryptocoins that are doing good, productive things TODAY.

Not a list but:

"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."

I don't see how blockchain is relevant to that solution. Couldn't they do the same thing with any database-backed web app tracking account balances?

There you go if you want a list of concrete examples: https://pineapplefund.org/

> always been a community made up of shady folks

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.

Every time tech people invent a new way for people to interact, someone comes along and figures out a way to use it for a scammy interaction. And it's effective because it is new, which means it is both exciting and poorly understood.

The difference here is that there’s not much else. In contrast, things like the internet or web had tons of legitimate use from day 1.

Yeah, this particular technology is particularly vulnerable to scamming for additional reasons. Not just lack of widespread usefulness, but because it's also _close_ solving a real problem people think they have. And it's just legitimate enough that it has some valid niche uses, which lends an air of credibility to the whole thing. It's merely a scam, it's something which can be turned into a scam.

I discovered her twitter account during the uber trial. She is hilarious and worth following.

Agreed — her reporting for The Verge is consistently amazing: https://www.theverge.com/users/Sarah%20Jeong

> "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"

Why is something that paints anyone who has legitimate concerns about financial censorship and mass surveillance a "paranoid dork", one of the best tweet storms ever? It's exactly this kind of crude tribalism that prevents constructive civil discourse and encourages ideological narrow-mindedness and conformity.

If you care about surveillance, bitcoin is the last thing you want to be involved with: you’re creating a permanent non-repudiable record and gift-wrapping it for them!

My point is that the Tweet implies that being motivated by concerns over the government's control over our financial transactions is objectionable. It makes someone a "paranoid dork". That's a terribly derisive attitude toward something that can be an extremely reasonable concern.

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.

The problem is that using Bitcoin doesn't change the government's control over your transactions: you're just spending a lot of effort elaborately dancing around the issue. 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.

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.

The tweet author is not ridiculing them because Bitcoin has poor privacy and they think it doesn't. She's ridiculing them for wanting a censorship resistant form of money. It's the derisive attitude toward a reasonable desire that I'm criticising.

>>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.

I mean because yeah, fuck the paranoid dorks, right? /s

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 ...

I'm pleased to see that now that the price has fallen, the tone of BTC discussions in general has taken on a more sober tone amid the endless recriminations.

> Get out of my mentions unless you read the white paper at least five years ago or earlier

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.

Sarah Jeong posted that "crypto is short for cryptography" shouting-from-rooftops sketch a while back but I'm not sure where it's gone.

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.

This isn't an issue of bias from bad sources. I took issue with very specific complaints that were largely only true of Bitcoin, which has been undermined by corporate interests.

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.