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Unfortunately for the author of this amazing (and cringeworthy) exercise, skeptics often put in a lot of effort, but receive practically no reward compared to t
by blunte 9y ago
Unfortunately for the author of this amazing (and cringeworthy) exercise, skeptics often put in a lot of effort, but receive practically no reward compared to the con artist.
Even the people who agree with and appreciate the effort of the skeptics are few compared to the number of irrational people who gladly follow the cons.
This is a bit radical (and probably outside the interest of HN), but if we somehow could remove personal financial need from society, imagine where our technologies might be driven?... instead of where they typically get hijacked and driven.
Television was once lauded as the future best thing to ever happen to education, but we know how that turned out. Same with the internet and web. And so on. Blockchain technologies are now the hottest and most ideal way to build a scam, because the audience is greedy and the technology is well beyond the comprehension of the average person.
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- ivm 9y agoNot radical at all, greed ruins everything. The more we can decrease it in society – the more freedom we'll all get.
- vortico 9y agoHow do you suggest we do that?
- aaron-lebo 9y agoBuild great stuff and don't be greedy - set an example. Make those greedy over mediocrity look bad. Build for the sake of building, because that's reward enough.
- WaxProlix 9y agoThis naive approach likely leads to the head-down artist or creator being exploited by the greedy manager/agent/parasite/whatever, not some sort of life changing event for those who see this person's work and suffering with profit left on the table.
- aaron-lebo 9y agoIf you're naive, but not being greedy doesn't require naivety. In fact it probably requires some awareness to understand that money can be an anchor. You're making $140k a year. Nice. How much of your time and attention and energy are you trading for that? Is it worth it?
- dsacco 9y agoMaybe that's enough of a reward for you, but personally I work because I like to get paid. The fact that I enjoy my work immensely is just a happy accident. There are things I enjoy doing even more than my work - much more so! - and if I did not need to get paid, I'd be doing those things instead.
- proofofstake 9y agoJust wondering: If you got so rich from crypto currency that you could retire, would you retire? Start your own company? Just do fun stuff? Or keep working? I myself work, to occupy myself with interesting problems, so I would keep doing this, regardless of my wealth.
- dsacco 9y agoWealthy enough to really never work again? Yes, I'd absolutely "retire." I'd still "work", in the sense that, say, angel investors work, or people own real estate; I'd also still write software in my free time. But for the most part, no I wouldn't continue doing what I do now because I'd stop consulting and I would never again be an individual contributor. I'd probably devote "professional focus" to investing and academic research in math and cryptography while traveling all over the world like Tom from Myspace. I think in conversations like this the dimension people like myself are talking about is freedom. I'd still work on what I'm passionate about even if I was wealthy, I would just cease doing it in a way that I don't have total control and direction over my work. That circles back to my original point - my passion for my work is not nearly enough of an incentive for me to do it if I'm not doing it with total autonomy.
- adrianN 9y agoOnly give power to people who don't want it.
- ivanstojic 9y agoThere's an SF writer I really like for his books in the vein of this. His name is L. E. Modesitt, and some of his books that discuss this are the "Parafaith War" and probably the best "Adiamante."
- adrianN 9y agoIt's a pretty old idea. The Bene Gesserit surely got it from Other Memory. They just figured out how to make it practical.
- mattkevan 9y agoIn Douglas Adams's books the president of the universe is completely powerless because anyone who wants to be president should absolutely not be given any real authority. The real ruler is a man living in a shack in the middle of nowhere who only cares about his cat and an occasional glass of whiskey.
- blunte 9y agoThat's where some of us are destined to end up, I'm afraid. :)
- ivm 9y agoBy observing our behaviors and eliminating harmful ones, i.e. through mindfulness of one's actions and motivations.
- dsacco 9y agoGreed appears to me to be fundamentally intrinsic to human behavior and culture. I don't think it's realistic to try to get rid of it. Rather I think it would be more effective to use it as an incentive and actively limit its negative externalities.
- ivm 9y agoThere are lots of "fundamentally intrinsic" harmful elements of human behavior and culture but civilization is slowly getting them under control.
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- Powerofmene 9y agoBut there is a vast difference between getting something under control and getting rid of it.
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- ghthor 9y agoGreed as we see it today is a symptom of our economics system. The system encourages greedy behavior, you win if you act greedy. I'm currently working on simulations attacking this problem, focusing on systems that discourage competitive actions and encourage cooperation and equality. A resulting society based on a more egalitarian economic system wouldn't be a utopia, but I hypothesize that we can create a much better world by attacking the root of all out systems and what types of behaviors it rewards.
- ivm 9y agoI believe it's an educational/cultural problem and not a systematic one. Bad actors will corrupt any system out of greed for wealth and power.
- nine_k 9y agoIf we removed financial (that is, material) need from society, we'd be in an utopia of endless plenty. This has been dreamed about for millennia. While not theoretically impossible, some children a society has a number of practical problems, like the human psychology. (Reworking humans is in the same ballpark. Being replaced by by other species, or machines, might be good — for them.)
- thinkloop 9y agoA "scam" implies intent, it's very possible/likely that a lot of icos have good intentions, but are inherently complicated and hard to implement.
- jonathankoren 9y agoTrue. I also think that it becomes a scam when you give up, and keep the money that's left. Say what you will about Secret (anyone remember that app?), but they returned money when they stopped. ICO funded projects? Who knows? Maybe just buy lambos as the author said.
- blackrose 9y ago> ... but they returned money when they stopped. After they took a couple mil for themselves :) [0] [0]: http://www.businessinsider.com/secret-founders-pocket-6-million-in-25-million-fundraise-2014-7 http://www.businessinsider.com/secret-founders-pocket-6-mill...
- jpttsn 9y agoI think the upsides of "greed" outweigh the downsides. Getting rid of greed to thwart con artists would be throwing out the baby with the bath water.
- wpietri 9y agoI don't think true personal financial need drives much of this. Anybody smart enough to pull off a con like this could get an adequate job and make enough to live comfortably on. I think the problem comes from people who won't stop there. Some are just sucking voids of desire; they always want more. Others want to be on top, to be number one. In my view, these people are broken. So personally, I wonder about how we keep broken people in check, and how we rework society to produce fewer broken people. There's a great bit in Iain Banks's Player of Games where the main character, who is from a post-scarcity utopia, visits a classic stellar empire, one clearly a stand-in for the worst parts of our current culture. The rich, imperial upper class types he's talking with have a hard time understanding the main character's lack of interest in owning. They ask, "Could you have a planet?" His take was roughly, "Well, I'm sure you could find an empty planet and land on it, but what would you do with it?" It's something I think of often when I'm dealing with people trapped in a scarcity mentality.
- RodericDay 9y agoSounds like... Karl Marx, to be honest. Private property has made us so stupid and partial that an object is only ours when we have it, when it exists for us as capital … Thus all the physical and intellectual senses have been replaced by … the sense of having. You see this everywhere. Rich people who don't have time to be home buying up vast swathes of land, locking up public gardens for personal perusal.
- shhhs 9y agoHow about we say no to Communism?
- csomar 9y agoI don't think this would work out. Think of it, most of what we do (fighting each other) makes sense on a nihilistic basis. If we are peaceful, suddenly existence doesn't make any sense. And we are just better off killing our existence. Fighting for existence is what pushed humans (or living creatures) to exist up to this day.
- abrkn 9y agoNew review is up! https://shitcoin.com/openbazaar-what-happened-to-bitcoins-ebay-killer-app-436b52aaff93 https://shitcoin.com/openbazaar-what-happened-to-bitcoins-eb...