kravens_last

The tragedy of the commons.

We are in the early phases of a recession. The tech-cession is already in full swing. Inflation is through the roof.

There are very few jobs hiring relative to layoffs. Every optimization, no matter how stupid, matters.

Capitalism rewards the razor thin margins, regardless of how filled with puss and scum those margins are.

"Uncanny valley" is actually the opposite of what you mentioned.

The uncanny valley hypothesis predicts that an entity appearing almost human will risk eliciting cold, eerie feelings in viewers. For CGI and things that have visual queues, the minute differences in movement and facial muscle contractions contribute tremendously to our emotional responses to the "realness" of the thing.

ChatGPT has no such thing as it's virtually impossible to differentiate between an AI bot's writing and a human being's writing. It simply typically reads as concise and grammatically correct, if generic, university educated writing.

I actually WISH that there was a "tell" that allowed for an "uncanny valley" like experience, but chatGPT is as close to real as "real" is.

WeChat succeeds because it's a state sponsored monopoly. It would not have existed in a free and mature market in any western capitalist style economy.

Alluded to a Saudi hire of some sort.

This is true, but the flaw in your reasoning, and in the raison d'etre of NFT's in general, is that social consensus is the be all, end all.

There isn't really the problem of acquiring a 100% perfect copy of an asset in the real world. You can approximate an item, but you can't literally get the same exact thing down to the molecular composition. On the internet, this is absolutely possible (replace molecules with bytecode), and is I'd argue, one of the defining features of it.

The true secret sauce behind modern property rights is the enforcement through legal authority. In the event of a dispute, courts have potentially a few hundred years' worth of precedence. Following that, there are proven legal procedures to remove a person from unlawful possession of another's property, which hold penalties ranging from monetary fines to loss of freedom.

And the driving force behind that is social consensus, but on a case by case basis. There will be no such thing with NFT's. It's simply impossible to build it in.

> not everyone buys Crypto to sell in a week and make more USD

True. Recent price action seems to suggest that people actually may end up with less USD.

> I personally believe that bitcoin's volatility is not by design and will not last forever.

If the entire premise of bitcoin's valuation is an open market exchange based on supply (finite and fixed) and demand (variable), then logically, the outcome is perpetual volatility.

There will be zero cases where demand will flatline because this has never in human history occurred organically. For unforseen reasons (a business deal gone bad, a divorce, etc) a btc whale may decide to liquidate, causing a cascading effect of running out of USDT, bringing the entire market crashing down. Bezos may decide to add 4B worth of liquidity to BTC as a speculative portion of his portfolio. Shit like this will happen and only add to more volatility in valuation.

Would you rather stably losing purchase power at a predictable pace over time (fiat) or exponentially unstable purchase power in perpetuity (bitcoin)?

> But what is the platform used for? Converting energy into human comfort, or just another layer of financial engineering?

This is essentially the "problem" at heart of all crypto "currencies". There is no real world use case that imparts human value, apart from its utility as a speculative vehicle to grow wealth.

Every new DeFi application is a new layer to lock in current adapters who would've otherwise already cashed out. Crypto as a currency is a concept dead in the water because of the perverse incentives of finding every corner of arbitrage between non distinguishable (and frankly worthless) alt tokens/coins.

The entire world of crypto is nothing else but an experiment of how much one could financialize a fully non-regulated, intangible, and imaginary "good" based on nothing but greed.

It's not an issue of simply having scams. The issue is that, by its very nature, the ratio of scams to legitimate functional work is likely 1 million to 1, and the entire ecosystem does not only revel in this, but actively encourages even more scam-like behavior. This all stems from blockchain as a concept's decision of baking in valuation to EVERYTHING.

It's the purest distillation of the "greater fool theory" in human history.

I'd rebuke your framing of leaving the morality of it aside. The more valid framing of a debate for new technology should be to prove that there are non scam-like applications of the technology that are superior to currently existing ones.

Elon may be a negative press magnet, and Tesla may not be a perfect vehicle, but for a company to go from concept car being made fun of on Top Gear to the car I see most on the street here in my city (more than corollas and camrys even), is unheard of.

I just hope that critical mass is reached AFTER the supercharger infrastructure is set in place.

You're probably completely unaware that the excessive money printing (quantitative easing) you seemingly blame on democrats was proposed and initially implemented by by a Bush appointee (Bernanke) and then more recently and more famously done by a Trump appointee (Powell), both in cases where the alternative would've been a global financial catastrophe not seen since the great depression.