No, your cryptocurrency cannot work

https://gist.github.com/joepie91/daa93b9686f554ac7097158383b97838

by zdw • 5 years ago

105 155 5 years ago

gist.github.com

29athrowaway2• 5 years ago

There is no harm in trying.

frankbreetz3• 5 years ago

There is harm in using to much energy, when we are on the brink of climate crisis.

There is harm when people get swindled out of money.

There is harm with criminal organizations have ways to get huge amounts of capital.

shoulderfake• 5 years ago

Maybe go after industrial giants polluting the earth not bitcoin miners if you wanna fix climate change.

pfisch3• 5 years ago

"There is harm with criminal organizations have way to get huge amounts of capital."

Because this isn't already the case...

meowkit• 5 years ago

There is harm in using to much energy, when we are on the brink of climate crisis.

You don't fight this on the demand side. You fight it on the supply side.

There is harm when people get swindled out of money.

Take responsibility for your life. The government is not your friend.

There is harm with criminal organizations have ways to get huge amounts of capital.

This is happening in the current economic system, and would be easier to fight if all transactions were on transparent ledgers.

ezekg• 5 years ago

There is harm in using to much energy, when we are on the brink of climate crisis.

There are cryptocurrencies that do not use as much energy as Bitcoin.

Really, none of your points are problems without solutions.

29athrowaway2• 5 years ago

Many cryptocurrencies were created with none of those ideas in mind.

Bitcoin is an energy hog, but not every cryptocurrency has to be Bitcoin. Ethereum doesn't use as much energy.

Criminal organizations use regular banks too. In fact, many financial organizations are undistinguishable from criminal organizations.

logicalmonster• 5 years ago

There is harm in using to much energy, when we are on the brink of climate crisis.

I would argue that the only climate crisis that exists is a distinct lack of imagination. Nuclear Energy has already solved all of humanity's energy needs for decades and does so in a far more environmentally friendly manner than any renewable energy solution that currently exists.

There is harm when people get swindled out of money.

Fiat currencies do not protect people from inflation. In fact, they're designed to enable it and systematically rob you of your savings and purchasing power without you even seeing it. Who's swindling who?

There is harm with criminal organizations have ways to get huge amounts of capital.

Do criminals sometimes use crypto? Of course.

Do you know what they use far more of? Dollars, Euros, Yuan, Yen, and other fiat currencies.

Criminals get a lot more mileage out of fiat currency than moving their funds around on a public ledger.

dane-pgp6• 5 years ago

if the currency is controlled by those who have most of it, how is this any different from government-issued currency

The difference is, if a cryptocurrency is mismanaged, people can sell their holdings and buy a better-managed currency, decreasing the value for those who have the most to lose.

That provides a selective pressure towards good economic governance, which doesn't exist with too-big-to-fail central banks that can require you to use their product because of legal tender laws and tax payments.

Also, programmable money is inherently more valuable because of new use cases it enables, like smart contracts. That is why diversifying into cryptocurrency is better than simply diversifying into a foreign government-issued currency.

Full disclaimer: I do not own, and have never owned, any cryptocurrency.

Hamuko3• 5 years ago

Who wants to buy your mismanaged cryptocurrency when you're looking to dump it?

simias• 5 years ago

The problem is how you define "good economic governance". For instance a controlled amount of inflation is generally considered to be good for a currency, as it incentivizes investing your money instead of hoarding it non-productively.

But if there's one thing that most cryptocurrency investors usually don't want, it's inflation. Actually, the more deflation the better.

And that's the catch really, because there's nothing forcing you to use a cryptocurrency like you have to use a government-issued currency, the cryptocurrency has to reward early adopters if it wants to become popular. This in turn makes cryptocurrencies, IMO, have patently bad economic governance, since the deflationary spiral makes them unusable for anything beyond pyramid schemes.

Also, programmable money is inherently more valuable because of new use cases it enables, like smart contracts

Meh, smart contracts are not so smart, and not so contractual. It's just a very inefficient scripting mechanism that doesn't really buy you all that much. Suffices to see all the modern cryptocurrency "dapp" that run on centralized, trustful chains just because they're unusably expensive to run on true decentralized blockchains.

See all the stuff running on the BNB chain that's 1/ not decentralized and 2/ just a bunch of pyramid/ponzi schemes with no practical use beyond speculation.

hrhdkdlfnrne• 5 years ago

The difference is, if a cryptocurrency is mismanaged, people can sell their holdings and buy a better-managed currency, decreasing the value for those who have the most to lose

You can so the same with fiat, which is why people in badly managed countries tend to use USD instead of their worthless currency.

The fact that Americans are not flocking to Euros, British Pounds or what not shows you that only a minority think that dollars are worthless paper. And yes, you need to buy bread and pay taxes, I'm talking about savings which americans keep in dollars.

ViViDboarder• 5 years ago

The difference is, if a cryptocurrency is mismanaged, people can sell their holdings and buy a better-managed currency, decreasing the value for those who have the most to lose.

Selling requires buyers. If everyone decides to dump the currency, who do they sell it to? Maybe someone is willing to take the risk on it, but if so, likely at a small fraction of what many paid to buy in.

That doesn’t sound like a safety mechanic to me.

dane-pgp6• 5 years ago

who do they sell it to?

Aquaman?[0]

No, fair point, I didn't think that through. I suppose I thought that the whales would try to prop up the price (and increase their control) by buying out those who had lost confidence, but you're right that this isn't guaranteed, and nor is a return on investment for those leaving.

That doesn’t sound like a safety mechanic to me.

Even if the doubters aren't able to exit without taking a loss, the risks of the cryptocurrency losing value should still provide a strong incentive for good management by those who hold a lot of it.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-w-pdqwiBw

sargun• 5 years ago

I wonder what the authors opinion on Helium would be: https://www.helium.com/

SideburnsOfDoom• 5 years ago

I think there's a clue in the title.

1ark• 5 years ago

If you suck it in, you'll talk funny?

goldcountry• 5 years ago

Well apparently the people of El Salvador would beg to differ.

frankbreetz3• 5 years ago

i think you mean the president of El Salvador would disagree. it is quite an unpopular policy amounst the people of El Salvador.

delaaxe• 5 years ago

So unpopular that people are protesting in the streets https://twitter.com/Crypto_Daily/status/1432715470902284306/...

beardog• 5 years ago

The gdp per capita of El Salvador is $3798 USD which is about $10.40/day.[1]

To have a bitcoin transaction mined within roughly an hour on sep 6 2021 costs $11.44[2], making bitcoin unusable for many Salvadorans, especially for small transactions. Yes, lightning network and centralized payment platforms exist on top of Bitcoin, but these defeat the purpose of bitcoin and add complexity.

1 https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location... 2 https://bitcoinfees.co/

frankenst12• 5 years ago

I would assume that the ability to receive remittances at practically zero fees without any intermediaries and a monetary supply that can't be censored or controlled by the government is more valuable to the people of El Salvador than the fact that they are transferring Bitcoins over a layer 2 network (Lightning Network) instead of the much slower and more expensive layer 1 network (Bitcoin blockchain).

xur17• 5 years ago

Yes, lightning network and centralized payment platforms exist on top of Bitcoin, but these defeat the purpose of bitcoin and add complexity.

It's important to note that the "centralization" of lightning (a statement that I somewhat disagree with, but can understand the basis of) doesn't mean that other parties can steal your money. You the sender decide what route your payment takes, and as such the worst a participant can do is block your payment from arriving at the destination. And, if this occurs, you can just find another route, or open a direct channel to the node you are trying to send to.

gfodor3• 5 years ago

Prediction: we will see this kind of analysis being repeated verbatim (perhaps with the names changed as the scope, scale, and nature of decentralized ledger technology evolves) for the rest of human civilization, just like we have seen it repeated verbatim for the first decade of Bitcoin.

Bitcoin != Cryptocurrencies != Blockchain != Sybil mitigation mechanisms != Decentralized ledgers != Distributed decentralized consensus

Each of these will unfold on distinct dynamics and have various trade offs as they do.

xupybd2• 5 years ago

I keep waiting for the Crypto ponzi scheme to burst. It doesn't and I don't understand why. I'm convinced by this that I don't understand economics at all.

Hamuko3• 5 years ago

I think the quote "the stock market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent" can be very much applied to cryptocurrency as well.

torben-friis• 5 years ago

With a corollary, "the stock market can remain irrational long enough for you to profit from something valueless".

It's of course risky, but cruptocurrencies can be a perfectly valid source of money, as long as you just risk spare money. You don't need to trust it to be a valid investment, you just need to trust that enough people will believe it is.

dboreham3• 5 years ago

Because if you draw the boundary around the ponzi scheme wide enough nobody realizes it's a scheme. E.g US$

jrockway• 5 years ago

What's the scheme? You can stuff US dollars into your pocket and exchange them for goods and services pretty much anywhere in the world. That's not a ponzi scheme -- that's currency.

agumonkey• 5 years ago

I have a feeling that this market stays up because the previous one has just enough flaws to allow the other to be believable, whether or not crypto will provide something useful.. I don't know.

NicoJuicy• 5 years ago

Yeah me too, it should be clear with the whole tether thing by now that it's way way overrated.

But noon-techies i know bought an experiment with it and i was kinda suprised. I guess they are going for too big to fail.

A lot of "big money" had joined the crypto thing and it's making themv curious: "eg. all these big corporations can't be wrong".

I don't blame that they try now though, although I warn them. It's really getting surreal.

Note : I left crypto behind me in late 2017 at 18 k. Didn't trust it anymore and nothing changed.

ryanSrich• 5 years ago

It’s only been around for 10-ish years. As someone that is interested in crypto, and actively participates in not only buying, but using it, I think we’re a far ways off from the bubble bursting completely. Market cycles will happen, projects will die, but I think crypto is here to stay. The bigger question is how far does it spread. It works incredibly well at putting money into the hands of people that have never had it before. The number of high school and college drop outs that I know, who now have more money than most people on earth is staggering.

arcticbull15• 5 years ago

Into the hands of a couple of people. It's an unproductive asset meaning all it can possibly do is redistribute the money that new entrants provide and split it between existing holders and miners.

It is fundamentally negative sum, and the narrative of prosperity is driven by existing holders to attempt to claim a larger stake of fiat.

Ekaros3• 5 years ago

10 years is also a good point. As most of that in general have been bull market in economy. So we really haven't seen how will crypto do in proper bear market...

throw0101a• 5 years ago

I keep waiting for the Crypto ponzi scheme to burst.

Previously Ponzi schemes were limited in geographic area, so you'd be limited to the number of marks you could go after, either through travel limits or the number of people you could meet through 'friends of friends'. This could grow a bit if you were 'successful' enough and could establish a reputation (e.g., Madoff).

Online schemes do not have geographic limits and so there's always a fresh source of unknowledgeable persons to go after.

Further, most traditional Ponzi schemes are of the form that you'll receive x% returns (e.g., dividends) per year, but Crypto is more akin to:

In finance and economics, the greater fool theory states that the price of an asset is determined by whether you can sell it for a higher price, at a later point in time. On assets where the theory applies, it is implied that the asset's intrinsic value is less important than the increase in demand, however irrational it might be. The person buying the overpriced asset later on, for a higher price, is deemed the greater fool.[1][2][3][4]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_fool_theory

Animats2• 5 years ago

Because we haven't had a recession yet which caused a major net outflow from cryptocurrencies.

Some cryptocurrencies can survive a major net outflow, but some, especially the stablecoins with weak backing, (i.e. Tether) cannot.

The big lesson of cryptocurrencies is that the market for money laundering services is much larger than previously supposed.

Ekaros3• 5 years ago

I'm waiting for whole stock market and everything else to burst... But when you think about how central banks and governments are handling it and all the money around it makes lot more sense how it is still going on.

overgard• 5 years ago

Well, there's always value in enabling money laundering and purchasing of illegal goods. Bitcoin has lots of uses, I just don't think they're the ones the doe eyed idealists like to talk about.

matheusmoreira19• 5 years ago

It doesn't burst because it's not actually a ponzi scheme.

xupybd2• 5 years ago

You are correct, there are no dividends but this part of the definition applies.

"The scheme leads victims to believe that profits are coming from legitimate business activity, and they remain unaware that other investors are the source of funds"

I believe this holds as I don't think most of the investors understand crypto. It is a magic black box so they don't know where the value comes from.

belorn• 5 years ago

As long it can be used as a currency it will keep a value above zero. It will die just like any other currency, which is to say the day when the market refuse to take the currency in exchange for goods.

megameter• 5 years ago

One lesson of the medieval period is that that when the previous society(Rome) breaks down, a period of mysticism sweeps in, from which the new society emerges. This happens on a smaller scale with e.g. "Great Awakenings". Mysticism normalizes a reality, and therefore it doesn't obey the rules of reason, rather, great efforts are made to rationalize its existence from a pragmatic beginning. Philosophers cannot reach agreement on what is good for people, so religious experiences fill in the gap, and that's always been the case with the economy too.

People used to believe that conquests made wealth; gradually they became convinced that productivity made wealth. Productivity is now on the chopping block, since it is seen as something that's killing the planet with inexhaustible resource demand. We're looking for the next way of seeing things. Crypto doesn't make sense now, and I say that as someone deeply invested in it, but it has that kind of potential to change our frame of reference after an awkward transition takes place. Maybe it makes sense if we go further with it. The experiment is in progress, but it's already exceeded the usual bounds of a cult or scam.

lamontcg• 5 years ago

Crypto still is small enough that a couple billion dollars can bail the system out. It only took a few billions to pump it up to $25k in 2017. At some point the amount it takes to bail them out will be larger than any of the billionaire true believer investors are willing to throw into the pot and will exceed their ability to agree with each other to risk that much to save it.

It isn't really an economic problem, it is more like a poker game.

The next market crash will probably be from a substantially higher peak and will take proportionately more to bail it out, and it is also going to be complicated by governments taking the opportunity to crack down on it so "regulatory risk" will be very high. 2022/2023 are probably going to have a high risk of the game collapsing.

Won't be 100% though so it could come back and another ~4 years from now we could be seeing yet another bubble blowing up in crypto. I wouldn't get too emotionally attached to hating crypto or believing that a sudden regulatory attack on crypto is going to manage to pop crypto in the near term (and what China did recently was the kind of crackdown that everyone believed would kill it, but its dragging itself out of the hole again).

Right now chances of it popping in the short term are probably very low, and nobody is going to seriously take a run at regulating it because they don't want to be responsible for the fallout (similarly to how nobody did shit about Madoff's Ponzi until he went cash insolvent in 2008 due to the financial crisis).

gbasin• 5 years ago

Insert midcurve meme here. This reads like massive cope.

One thing I've learned the hard way in life is when something goes on for years that I don't quite understand, and yet it keeps growing and getting more popular, usually I'm the one that's wrong.

gfodor3• 5 years ago

A good tell on this one for this post specifically is it is writing down a fairly obvious, oft-repeated “rebuttal”, which is largely predicated on the people being rebutted being entirely compromised by greed and/or ignorance. This person would be incapable, it seems, to steelman his/her opponent given the contempt for them, so that backstops the notion their analysis is mostly noise.

kevingadd2• 5 years ago

Does the rebuttal being "fairly obvious, oft-repeated" somehow mean that nobody actually uses it or it somehow doesn't deserve mention? If people are repeating it, they're repeating it.

arcticbull15• 5 years ago

Insert midcurve meme here. This reads like massive cope.

Cope is the single worst, dumbest argument you can possibly deploy because it means nothing other than you are unable to or uninterested in refuting any points levied.

It's a strongly left-curve argument to engage with your meme.

While the truth is, if you'd invested in TQQQ the majority of time over the last 5 years you'd have had a better return than BTC. I could make the same exact cope argument about that, but of course, that's a worthless argument.

Every single day you're missing out on an investment that performs just as well as any crypto investment. Investment opportunities are like a bus route: there's always another one coming down the pike.

Let's focus on the facts instead?

I'm led to believe this isn't r/Bitcoin.

[edit] remember: right + broke, and wrong + wealthy are both completely valid outcomes.

anonymoushn4• 5 years ago

It looks like there are maybe 12 months out of the last 60 months when buying TQQQ and holding until today would have beaten buying BTC and holding until today.

GDC7• 5 years ago

Every single day you're missing out on an investment that performs just as well as any crypto investment. Investment opportunities are like a bus route: there's always another one coming down the pike.

The thing is that crypto is the only one which doesnt have a huge barrier to entry.

In any event you are right, the only thing that matters is your confidence on what is gonna happen, then even if the movement in price isn't as big as crypto then if you are absolutely sure you can use leverage and make the same amount.

right + broke, and wrong + wealthy are both completely valid outcomes

True but man, must be great to be individual with the lowest IQ in the hood and have the biggest house.

The happiest people on Earth are the people who succeed out of pure luck, but they are so self confident that they are not aware of that.

meirelles• 5 years ago

I can't emphasize enough on this! The future doesn't give a damn about your reasoning, no matter how much well-tightened it is.

Before us, uncountable incredibly smart people got mistaken. As Elon said, the most entertaining outcome is the most likely. And guess what, entertaining outcomes are unpredictable. He might be wrong, which ironically illustrates what I've just said.

smoldesu• 5 years ago

I've worked on DeFi since 2014, I'd say the vast majority of things said here are perfectly reasonable. All cryptocurrency is a bubble at the end of the day, and if you don't have an exfil plan for your investments then you had better be prepared to get two big bags of nothing when you cash out.

cblconfederate2• 5 years ago

that's a good heuristic

frazbin2• 5 years ago

My hope is that tokenized ledger-based distributed consensus mechanisms win, while using them as a currency loses. Like, what if the correct price for a good cryptocurrency is low?

amin• 5 years ago

What's a "tokenized ledger-based distributed consensus mechanism" in plain English?

frazbin2• 5 years ago

i was thinking of algorand, personally.. but all cryptocurrencies are

1. tokenized: we care about moving 'units' of 'value' between 'accounts'

2. ledger-based: having an immutable record of previous state changes

3. distributed: progression of state is determined by many participants who may not share a common goal

4. consensus mechanism: this is what the system gives us: a set of rules which if followed allow parties to agree on the contents of the ledger.

3np• 5 years ago

We tend to call this "blockchain", but it's a bit of an overloaded, abused and misunderstood term so it can help to be specific.

pfraze• 5 years ago

The points in this post are all legit, but I think it misses a couple things.

The blockchains are all controlled by some kind of plutocracy (people with wealth) as the gist describes. However there is a relatively complex dynamic between the miners/executors, the protocol developers, and the community. A blockchain protocol is a shared contract between them and the power to change that contract requires some kind of consensus between multiple parties. At one point, Bitcoin was using signals from miners to show adoption of a protocol change, which AFAICT amounted to a weighted vote, weighted by mining power. I would argue that makes the miners similar to a legislature, and makes the protocol similar to a legal system. These are the rules for social computing networks, after all.

Whether any of this is really more meaningful than the alternatives, I can't say. You could argue that PoW and PoS tie wealth too directly to the "legislature" membership and we ought to use a democratic vote to decide the miners/executors. Or we should just appoint 3 or 5 different legal entities to run the system, and put each of them under some kind of standards body, etc etc etc. It's hard to say. All of these approaches involve complex tradeoffs.

My broader point is that the original framing of blockchains (that they're not controlled by anybody) was wrong, but the reality is still relatively interesting.

kevingadd2• 5 years ago

I think the way mining power ended up centralized kind of undermines the legislature comparison, though in some countries like the US the legislature is certainly manipulated enough to probably function in a similar way.

beambot• 5 years ago

You could argue that PoW and PoS tie wealth too directly to the "legislature" membership and we ought to use a democratic vote to decide the miners/executors.

Hence the advent of the DAO for governance alongside the actual utility tokens.

Animats2• 5 years ago

PoW and PoS tie wealth too directly to the "legislature" membership

There is that. But nobody seems to be able to make an alternative work. Etherium postponed proof of stake yet again. What was the excuse this time?

Amusing potential alternatives:

- Proof of Space. Nodes have to be some minimum physical distance apart, like a few kilometers, so you can't have "mines". This might be feasible via some low-orbit satellite network you can use to establish approximate location.

- Proof of Hate. Nodes are run by organizations that hate each other, so they won't collude.

godelski• 5 years ago

I think we should also be clear that the proof systems do distribute control differently.

POW requires large investments and knowledge (to create a mining infrastructure). POS is a lot easier for people to get involved. Even though the wealthy can just invest more in POS systems there is still a more level playing field as they do not need the logistics of building mining factories and all that. Any wealthy person can simply invest. This dynamic creates the potential for a more distributed network than the POS system, although it still is biased towards the wealthy class. I'd say that this is still more fair (far from being fully fair) than Chia's system where you need hardware and technical knowhow. You're essentially making the space more competitive. Then you have PiCoin's "Proof of click" where you're just proving you can click a button every 24 hours. Wealthy still get control as they can get people to be the "sub-miners" (earning team/pyramid scheme) that normal people can't achieve. Though this is fairly easy to emulate. This still allows the wealthy to just get wealthier.

I think there is still a long way to go to determine the most fair system, but just because there is some consolidation doesn't mean that the systems are equally exploitable by a wealthy class. Ether2 is more decentralized than BitCoin, although there is a fair amount of consolidation. I doubt we will end up with a fully decentralized system (by any proof system) but the question is rather how do we make a proof system that has sufficient competition that it becomes difficult for a single entity to take control? POS is better than POW in this respect and we should note that. But we do need something better than POS.

The article does not make these distinctions and does undermine the questions within the cryptocurrency communities. It is a difficult problem to solve but we do need to be clear that the different proof systems aren't equally centralized. There's probably no way to prevent the wealthy from continuing to get wealthier from these systems, but the question is if a blockchain can become sufficiently decentralized that meaningful collusion will be near impossible to make. We are seeing steps in that direction.

jimjimjim• 5 years ago

Thank you sincerely for posting a concise rebuttal to all of the goal post moving linguistic exercises that occur whenever anyone dares to mention anything negative about the Bitcoin/Blockchain world.

JackFr• 5 years ago

In general I fully agree with the author but he goes too far here:

There are no useful cryptocurrencies today, and there will not be any at any time in the near future.

Clearly criminal enterprises have made good use of cryptocurrency in the past few years.

arcticbull15• 5 years ago

The Mafia is a big fan of Bitcoin and Monero. [1]

[1] https://protos.com/mafia-italy-bitcoin-monero-paying-colombi...

DamnYuppie• 5 years ago

The Mafia was even bigger fans of organized labor, government contacts, real estate, construction, and cash.

The only argument less persuasive and over used than that one is “think of the children!”

matheusmoreira19• 5 years ago

That's interesting. Contrary to most claims, there are people right now who are actually getting paid in crypto.

This will be an excellent test for Monero's privacy features.

chizhik-pyzhik3• 5 years ago

Ethereum has utility for creating financial derivatives. Have you heard of "defi"? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decentralized_finance

arcticbull15• 5 years ago

Were derivatives not possible before? Certainly transaction fees in traditional finance aren't $200-$1000 when you're buying a futures contract. I think it's like $3.

dboreham3• 5 years ago

Depends on the definition of "work" which I don't see clearly set forth in the article. I think the author may mean "is decentralized" but then you get into the problem of what does that mean, exactly...

matheusmoreira19• 5 years ago

Decentralized means there's so many nodes on the network governments can't hope to shut them all down and stop transactions from being processed. Anything else is centralized.

pfisch3• 5 years ago

He acts like he has an energy usage argument for POS and then misleads and pivots really hard away into another direction.

Makes his whole essay kind of silly since he leads with this big energy argument that then crumbles immediately and he tries to use this kind of sleight of hand misdirect instead of acknowledging that entire argument doesn't matter when discussing cryptocurrencies in general and not just Bitcoin.

dboreham3• 5 years ago

He could also have argued that PoS doesn't really work (or at least is at present unproven) but instead chose to accept it as real.

pfisch3• 5 years ago

He could've made lots of arguments. But he frontloads this irrelevant energy argument and spends almost 40% of the essay on it.

It really hurts his case.

literallyaduck2• 5 years ago

What if we allowed controlled coins (no mining just simple database). Skip the Crypto and use transparent well vetted technology to keep the transactions. Don't pretend to offer anonymity. Don't inflate the supply. Publish the transactions publicly.

Edit: clarification of meaning no mining

anonymoushn4• 5 years ago

I think people tried this and called it Liberty Reserve and went to prison for 20 years.

literallyaduck2• 5 years ago

From what I can tell they were laundering money, something harder to do with public transactions.

Operating a financial institution with permits, and identification of participants might not draw the ire of the US government.

With the transparency and lack of anonymity I would imagine the usefulness to criminals would be minimal.

madradavid• 5 years ago

The person who created the gist has this on their website "Available payment methods include PayPal, Bitcoin, and SEPA transfers." http://cryto.net/~joepie91/

joepie91_2• 5 years ago

Correct. I am one of the seemingly handful of people who actually tries to use cryptocurrencies as currencies (and have been doing so since getting involved as an early adopter).

I can assure you that that has become more and more difficult and risky over the years thanks to speculative vultures and the dynamics described in the gist. If anything, this should tell you that I'm not some armchair complainer who doesn't understand how it works.

I'm also not sure why you seem to be implying some sort of conflict of interest here, since I am arguing against it.

matheusmoreira19• 5 years ago

Why not accept Monero as well? Unlike bitcoin, it's actually viable to use it as a currency.

latchkey• 5 years ago

And in practice, almost the entire network is controlled by a small handful of large mining companies and 'mining pools'. Not very decentralized at all.

This is a common misconception. Miners are not tied to a single mining pool and can switch on a whim.

bootloop• 5 years ago

As are a lot of other financial tools. Some are more obvious in cheating you for your money, some are not.

Make the best out of it because the system is not designed in your favor.

matheusmoreira19• 5 years ago

This is a failure of bitcoin itself. The mining algorithm lends itself well to expensive specialized hardware. Normal people were cut off from the network, centralizing it.

People realized this was a mistake long ago. Monero was updated to use new algorithms to ensure CPU mining remained viable. It's easy to mine monero as a result. More people do it and as a result the network has a greater degree of decentralization.

Shame that bitcoin will never be dethroned. It's a shitty coin.

chrisfosterelli2• 5 years ago

It feels disingenuous to start with this:

Whenever the topic of Bitcoin's energy usage comes up, there's always a flood of hastily-constructed comments by people claiming that their favourite cryptocurrency isn't like Bitcoin, that their favourite cryptocurrency is energy-efficient and scalable and whatnot.
They're wrong, and are quite possibly trying to scam you. Let's look at why.

And then, 20 paragraphs later, agree they are indeed not wrong:

The only redeeming feature of proof-of-stake (and many other proof schemes) over proof-of-work is that it does indeed address the energy consumption problem

I think the author has a reasonable point about the centralization problem, but I'm not sure why they spend such a large amount of time discussing the energy usage just to eventually agree with the people they're criticizing.

I don't know that the average person cares about the centralization problem, especially if they don't use the currency, like they do about the energy usage problem. This seems like an odd attempt to connect the two.

matheusmoreira19• 5 years ago

I'm not sure why they spend such a large amount of time discussing the energy usage just to eventually agree with the people they're criticizing

It's an incoherent argument designed to provoke an emotional response. Cryptocurrency must represent what, 0.5% of global energy usage? It's literally nothing. Yet we have all these people using their computers manufactured in China to write about how cryptocurrency is destroying the planet.

chrisfosterelli2• 5 years ago

I agree -- I think it's trying to provoke an emotional response.

For the sake of discussion, though, I do actually think the energy usage is an important problem.

There's a lot of things I don't "get", but ultimately most of them don't harm anyone and have nothing to do with me. I recognize many people who see benefit in cryptocurrencies might feel the energy usage is small overall compared to the potential in the technology. For the people that don't "get" cryptocurrencies, the energy usage takes it from "has nothing to do with me" to "it's harming the planet". I think it's important to resolve this issue because it will otherwise harm adoption.

Additionally, proof of stake seems viable. In a world with accelerating climate change, it seems to me increasing energy efficiency should be a moral imperative. Why do something inefficiently when more efficient means exist?

mikl• 5 years ago

When talking about the world, one of 8 billion people, 0.5% is a massive figure.

rytill4• 5 years ago

It’s essays like this that make me realize that many detractors don’t get it yet. If users decide that a chain is too centralized, they can move to a different one, much more easily than moving to a different traditional financial system. In addition, a transparent plutocracy is better than an opaque oligarchy or dictatorship.

civilized3• 5 years ago

"If users decide that Facebook is too centralized, they can move to a different social network"

rytill4• 5 years ago

That quote implies that the subject is providing some value to users that makes it worth staying on the network. Do you believe Ethereum, Bitcoin, or other networks are providing value to people?

If you believe there is value, you must simply disagree with the implementation, degree of centralization, principles, etc. I'm curious which project you think has the best qualities.

If not, you should have no qualms with leaving the network.

dane-pgp6• 5 years ago

I would guess that it's easier for someone with an Ethereum wallet to send money to someone with a Bitcoin wallet than it is for someone on Facebook to send a message to someone's Mastodon account.

My guess may be wrong, as I don't have any of the above, but I think that your analogy overlooks the interoperabilities of the systems you are comparing. To some extent, the lack of interoperability is the only thing keeping people on Facebook.

matheusmoreira19• 5 years ago

I wish. Technologically speaking, bitcoin is the worst coin. It does literally everything wrong. Unfortunately, it was the first and continues to be the most well known coin. It attracts a lot of undeserved attention that should have been directed towards much better coins like Ethereum and Monero.

rytill4• 5 years ago

It is the most well-known one, but Ethereum is the one with the most users and DeFi. What is your critique of Ethereum?

* Just saw your edit with the coins listed. I agree, but I also think it's just a matter of time before a DeFi system gets more attention than Bitcoin.

cblconfederate2• 5 years ago

That might all well be true, but how do you explain its popularity? Someone should do a sociological analysis of the rise of cryptocurrency. Each generation picks its bubbles, for social signaling and competition. For millenials and the like, expensive houses and expensive cars etc (the old world's bubbles) are useless, and they re just baiting us to sustain them. We are increasingly aware of how pensions and social security are also unsustainable bubbles (at least here in yurop). So we bubble up the things that cater to new lifestyles, the phones, the airbnbs, some possibly unsustainable but cool bubbles like tesla. But if we really don't want to cater to the old plutocracy, we bubble up imaginary coins and thin air promises like NFTs. Why? because it's ours , not theirs and it's visibly possible that our bubbles will cause their bubbles to deflate , and we ll be free of the leashes that 90genarians are holding on the economy. So , as a signaling and generational wealth vehicle cryptocurrency can and will work, because it s a tool, and it doesnt matter if it's imperfect.

jlykins2• 5 years ago

I don't know how this got written without including the words "double spending." I'm shocked how many people have opinions about cryptocurrency without reading Satoshi's surprisingly accessible Bitcoin whitepaper: https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

Preventing double spending is the reason for all of this hullaballoo, no more, no less. It's easy to create a distributed ledger, but hard to create one where you cannot double spend, hence mining and staking.

You can't double spend physical cash because you can't give someone else a physical object and have it too.

You can't double spend your fiat because your bank says to your counterparty "trust us bro, he didn't double spend" and your bank is pretty trustworthy.

You can't double spend your bitcoin because to do so you'd have to have more than half of the computing power in the world, which is pretty tough to do, and even if you did actually succeed at double spending it would render your investment worthless, because all transactions are public and someone might notice the double spend and the value of bitcoin would plummet.

Soon, you won't be able to double spend your Ethereum because if you did, everyone would notice, point it out to everyone in the network that you double spent, and then everyone would automatically slash your Ethereum stake to zero going forward and carry on without you.

That's all. It has nothing fundamentally to do with voting or economic distribution or proving ownership of scare resources or anything like that. It's about preventing double spending on a distributed ledger of transactions.

If you solve double spending, then yes, your cryptocurrency will work.

(reposting this from the github)

Ekaros3• 5 years ago

Multi spending fiat used to be pretty easy actually. Write a check, use credit card outside credit limit with slow transactions. And so on. Only thing was that on other side you had banks who were friendly with governments.

perl4ever• 5 years ago

Focusing on "solving double spending" as though it were the one thing that represents the entire financial system seems to me kind of like imagining that the global transportation system can be replaced by some sort of algorithm with the singular function of ensuring large metal objects don't physically coincide.

jlykins2• 5 years ago

"Solving double spending" doesn't represent "the entire financial system" but it does represent the entirety of why we have miners and stakers, which seems to be the main point of contention by those who describe themselves as "anti-crypto."

Geee• 5 years ago

Users (who run full nodes, and everyone can run one!) actually make decisions in Bitcoin. There's no voting or democracy; everyone is free to run whatever version they want (or make their own version). When users run different versions (with different validation rules), it creates a fork in the blockchain. Miners are dumb and greedy; they just follow the most profitable fork. In practice, upgrades and forks are coordinated in order to minimize disruptions.

In the end it's like any software; everyone can run whatever version they want. When open-source software is combined with monetary policy, it gets little bit more interesting. No user is willing to run a version of monetary policy that makes their money worse, thus it's guaranteed to be the best form of money, now and forever.

Energy use is the cost that has to be paid for predictably sound money and global monetary network that is open to everyone. If 0.1% of world's energy goes into securing it peacefully, then it's a very low price to pay.

joel_ms• 5 years ago

Crypto really is the grotesque despressive clown staring our desperate civilization in the face, while futily screaming about our all consuming absurdity.

Crypto works fine in a world that is not addicted to burning fossil fuels.

Unfortunatly, we live in a world that is not only desperately addicted to them, but literally subsidizes the consumption of fossil fuels.

No, your cryptocurrency cannot work

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