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They might benefit later when the price of the hardware plummets after a bigger crash... who am i kidding, this is ruining everything. The whole crypto craze
by lawlessone 9y ago
They might benefit later when the price of the hardware plummets after a bigger crash...
who am i kidding, this is ruining everything.
The whole crypto craze is starting to remind me of "The Shoe Event Horizon " from the Hitch Hikers Guide.
- carbocation 9y agoReminds me of the paperclip optimizer. The singularity is us.
- lawlessone 9y agooh god that too.
- booleandilemma 9y agoAre cryptocurrencies the Great Filter?
- notahacker 9y agoOr Bostrom's Paperclip Maximiser (edit: someone else got there before me) Ironically if you draw a Venn diagram of "people who are worried about a dystopian future in which badly-designed AI reallocates enormous portions of the world's resources to an utterly useless end" and "people really into promoting and mining crypto" you might not need a second circle
- SimbaOnSteroids 9y agoSublimely ironic this future is turning out to be.
- jacquesm 9y agoClick at your peril: http://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/ http://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/
- freeflight 9y agoI should have heeded the warning, this thing goes places, literally!
- lawlessone 9y agoMaybe Satoshi was actually an Alien AI transmitted to us so we destroy ourselves.
- TeMPOraL 9y ago> Ironically if you draw a Venn diagram (...) Actually, this turns out to be not true. https://www.lesserwrong.com/posts/MajyZJrsf8fAywWgY/a-lesswrong-crypto-autopsy https://www.lesserwrong.com/posts/MajyZJrsf8fAywWgY/a-lesswr... The LW crowd was among the earliest people who were aware of Bitcoin, and utterly failed to exploit it for some reason.
- ghaff 9y agoI'm vaguely curious if there's a typical profile of the people who are going to go bankrupt, lose homes (if they have them), etc. when this whole house of cards comes crashing down.
- nukeop 9y agoYou sound very confident. Why don't you short the cryptocurrencies you are sure are going to "come crashing down" to make a lot of money?
- ghaff 9y agoSee The Big Short. Markets can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. I'm also not aware of reliable mechanisms to short cryptocurrencies broadly.
- currymj 9y agoI would like to do this but I don't have several million dollars lying around to get in on the futures market. And I'm sure as hell not going to keep a margin account at any cryptocurrency exchange.
- nukeop 9y agoYeah, somehow all the crypto naysayers always refuse to put their money where their mouths are. I wonder why.
- currymj 9y agoin 2015 i thought cryptocurrencies would probably appreciate so i bought a reasonable amount that was within my ordinary-consumer budget and my appetite for risk. i did okay. if i wanted to do the same thing now but short, i probably could, but wild swings in price would probably result in my being wiped out after a margin call, on top of which ordinary people have no access to any kind of collar. if an asset is difficult to short, you are more likely to end up with a bubble. so, if i'm going to reciprocally assume bad faith, bitcoin bulls have a reason to make short-selling systemically impractical.