4 ms·

Now try doing that internationally.

by rlpb 6y ago

arcticbull 6y ago
Sure there’s tons of options. TransferWise, for one. Wire transfers. InteractiveBrokers. And they’re actually quite affordable. This has been a solved problem for a long time.
- rglullis 6y ago
  Now try doing that without a middleman.
  - arcticbull 6y ago
    Try doing that with Bitcoin lol, no merchants accept Bitcoin on either side and nobody gets paid in it so you have to convert dollars on one side to crypto for a 1-2% fee, transfer it for $10 fee to an exchange in the receiving country and then convert back to local units for a 1-2% fee. Also, why. It makes no difference.
    - rglullis 6y ago
      Are you sure you got the right username? You sound more of a bear than a bull. Back in 2014 I was consistently selling BTC to friends in Brazil at a rate that made perfect sense for them and even above the BRL-USD rate. This year I paid for all of my domain renewals using BTC on namecheap. Hundreds of dollars. You can go to a service I provide right now and you can purchase the services with ethereum and ERC20 tokens. I also accept Raiden, which can make the transaction cost virtually zero. I will reiterate what I asked in first comment: instead of just arguing with the amygdala, is there any chance you can establish a set of parameters and values that will make crypto (not necessarily Bitcoin, not necessarily Ethereum) something you consider worthy of a experiment, or are you forever going to believe that the status quo is the best we can do? > Also, why. It makes no difference. You playing the cynical permabear who sees no point in building on blockchain tech is no different from a corporate drone who does not understand why people work on Free software without any immediate financial reward. Even if Bitcoin fails, it has already paved the way for something that won't. You may not care about your freedom and self-reliance, but it ABSOLUTELY makes a difference.
      - arcticbull 6y ago
        > Are you sure you got the right username? You sound more of a bear than a bull. Well played, I upvoted you in no small part because of your wordplay there :) I see no point in building anything backed by proof of waste, it’s simply not a reasonable value proposition. It’s like trying to build coal fired cars. Yes you’ll build a car, but it’ll be wildly less efficient and strictly worse than all alternatives. That eliminates a good 90% of crypto currencies by market cap. Setting aside for a second that the market cap of a currency is a nonsensical metric, currencies are what you measure market cap in not of. Permissionless and irreversible are not things humans want or benefit from. Permissionless is what has allowed North Korea to fund its nuclear program with billions of dollars of cryptocurrency. It’s what allows ransomware authors to get paid and shut down schools and hospitals. It’s what allows laundering the proceeds of crime. It’s what allows rampant market manipulation. Decentralized prevents the currency from responding to externalities like births, and deaths, and pandemics. And that really knocks out the rest. The reality is trust is a huge optimization. Beyond that most solutions are cheaper, faster, simpler and map better onto human fallibility if implemented as a MySQL table in RDS. Then you can secure it with a Merkel tree and call it a day. No, I’m not bullish on crypto because it has yet to, in 12 years, do anything better than what’s out there today except separate suckers from their money. It’s great at that. And this is in spite of some of the smartest minds in the world working day and night to do so. If a single crypto product shows even a 1% improvement over a classical implementation along any axis I’ll eat my ... er, hat (yes, that’s a John McAffee reference) and buy your bitcoins at what I’m confident will be a dramatically higher price. > You may not care about your freedom and self-reliance, but it ABSOLUTELY makes a difference. There’s no such thing, we live in a society. So, I guess, I respectfully disagree but always appreciate hearing the other side.
        rglullis 6y ago
        Let's make a tally of analysis based on current implementation instead of potential of the technology, shall we? > backed by proof of waste Already claiming that PoW is the only possible approach. Off to a good start. > Yes you’ll build a car, but it’ll be wildly less efficient and strictly worse than all alternatives. The first electric light bulb was certainly less efficient than candles or oil lamps. The first airplanes could barely carry the pilot. Should we give up work on new technology simply because the current iteration is not better than the status quo? What a lame attitude. > That eliminates a good 90% of crypto currencies by market cap. You said it yourself. Market cap is a bullshit metric from the perspective of the technology. Irrelevant to the argument. What is relevant is that a good number of these different currencies are trying different approaches to solve different problems, or trying to implement different financial models, different levels of centralizations/trust, and so on. For every aspect of Bitcoin that you criticized, there has been a different project that tries to overcome that. Yet, you completely ignore it just because it is easier to look at what is wrong in the present instead of working to fix things for the future. > Permissionless and irreversible are not things humans want or benefit from Contradicted by the amount of people putting their time, energy and money on. YOU don't want it, fine. YOU don't speak for everyone. > North Korea, ransomware, money laundering. FUD and bullshit. Do you blame the use of petrol for enabling Al-Qaeda or left-wing dictatorships in Venezuela? You are very well aware that money laundering already existed before crypto. Have you renounced your use of banking systems because of all the drug and weapon traffickers that used HSBC to launder money for so long? Criminal activity and the need for spending resources in security is never going to go away. > Decentralized prevents the currency from responding to externalities like births, and deaths, and pandemics. Okay, that's the third statement based on the current implementation. Hat-trick! > The reality is trust is a huge optimization. Definitely! No serious person would challenge that. No serious person would also challenge that systems that are too optimized are more likely to fail in unpredictable ways and collapse after Black Swans. This is why decentralization is important. It's not about efficiency, it's about hedging bets to improve our chance of surviving catastrophes. > has yet to, in 12 years, do anything better than what’s out there today That's FOUR! This kid is on fire... > There’s no such thing, we live in a society. Societies. Plural. To be honest, I am more concerned about people that want to establish an "universal" society than I fear all of the scammers that try to exploit people in crypto.

Now try doing that internationally.

by rlpb 6y ago

Now try doing that internationally.

Sure there’s tons of options. TransferWise, for one. Wire transfers. InteractiveBrokers. And they’re actually quite affordable. This has been a solved problem for a long time.

rglullis 6y ago
Now try doing that without a middleman.
- arcticbull 6y ago
  Try doing that with Bitcoin lol, no merchants accept Bitcoin on either side and nobody gets paid in it so you have to convert dollars on one side to crypto for a 1-2% fee, transfer it for $10 fee to an exchange in the receiving country and then convert back to local units for a 1-2% fee. Also, why. It makes no difference.
  - rglullis 6y ago
    Are you sure you got the right username? You sound more of a bear than a bull. Back in 2014 I was consistently selling BTC to friends in Brazil at a rate that made perfect sense for them and even above the BRL-USD rate. This year I paid for all of my domain renewals using BTC on namecheap. Hundreds of dollars. You can go to a service I provide right now and you can purchase the services with ethereum and ERC20 tokens. I also accept Raiden, which can make the transaction cost virtually zero. I will reiterate what I asked in first comment: instead of just arguing with the amygdala, is there any chance you can establish a set of parameters and values that will make crypto (not necessarily Bitcoin, not necessarily Ethereum) something you consider worthy of a experiment, or are you forever going to believe that the status quo is the best we can do? > Also, why. It makes no difference. You playing the cynical permabear who sees no point in building on blockchain tech is no different from a corporate drone who does not understand why people work on Free software without any immediate financial reward. Even if Bitcoin fails, it has already paved the way for something that won't. You may not care about your freedom and self-reliance, but it ABSOLUTELY makes a difference.
    - arcticbull 6y ago
      > Are you sure you got the right username? You sound more of a bear than a bull. Well played, I upvoted you in no small part because of your wordplay there :) I see no point in building anything backed by proof of waste, it’s simply not a reasonable value proposition. It’s like trying to build coal fired cars. Yes you’ll build a car, but it’ll be wildly less efficient and strictly worse than all alternatives. That eliminates a good 90% of crypto currencies by market cap. Setting aside for a second that the market cap of a currency is a nonsensical metric, currencies are what you measure market cap in not of. Permissionless and irreversible are not things humans want or benefit from. Permissionless is what has allowed North Korea to fund its nuclear program with billions of dollars of cryptocurrency. It’s what allows ransomware authors to get paid and shut down schools and hospitals. It’s what allows laundering the proceeds of crime. It’s what allows rampant market manipulation. Decentralized prevents the currency from responding to externalities like births, and deaths, and pandemics. And that really knocks out the rest. The reality is trust is a huge optimization. Beyond that most solutions are cheaper, faster, simpler and map better onto human fallibility if implemented as a MySQL table in RDS. Then you can secure it with a Merkel tree and call it a day. No, I’m not bullish on crypto because it has yet to, in 12 years, do anything better than what’s out there today except separate suckers from their money. It’s great at that. And this is in spite of some of the smartest minds in the world working day and night to do so. If a single crypto product shows even a 1% improvement over a classical implementation along any axis I’ll eat my ... er, hat (yes, that’s a John McAffee reference) and buy your bitcoins at what I’m confident will be a dramatically higher price. > You may not care about your freedom and self-reliance, but it ABSOLUTELY makes a difference. There’s no such thing, we live in a society. So, I guess, I respectfully disagree but always appreciate hearing the other side.
      - rglullis 6y ago
        Let's make a tally of analysis based on current implementation instead of potential of the technology, shall we? > backed by proof of waste Already claiming that PoW is the only possible approach. Off to a good start. > Yes you’ll build a car, but it’ll be wildly less efficient and strictly worse than all alternatives. The first electric light bulb was certainly less efficient than candles or oil lamps. The first airplanes could barely carry the pilot. Should we give up work on new technology simply because the current iteration is not better than the status quo? What a lame attitude. > That eliminates a good 90% of crypto currencies by market cap. You said it yourself. Market cap is a bullshit metric from the perspective of the technology. Irrelevant to the argument. What is relevant is that a good number of these different currencies are trying different approaches to solve different problems, or trying to implement different financial models, different levels of centralizations/trust, and so on. For every aspect of Bitcoin that you criticized, there has been a different project that tries to overcome that. Yet, you completely ignore it just because it is easier to look at what is wrong in the present instead of working to fix things for the future. > Permissionless and irreversible are not things humans want or benefit from Contradicted by the amount of people putting their time, energy and money on. YOU don't want it, fine. YOU don't speak for everyone. > North Korea, ransomware, money laundering. FUD and bullshit. Do you blame the use of petrol for enabling Al-Qaeda or left-wing dictatorships in Venezuela? You are very well aware that money laundering already existed before crypto. Have you renounced your use of banking systems because of all the drug and weapon traffickers that used HSBC to launder money for so long? Criminal activity and the need for spending resources in security is never going to go away. > Decentralized prevents the currency from responding to externalities like births, and deaths, and pandemics. Okay, that's the third statement based on the current implementation. Hat-trick! > The reality is trust is a huge optimization. Definitely! No serious person would challenge that. No serious person would also challenge that systems that are too optimized are more likely to fail in unpredictable ways and collapse after Black Swans. This is why decentralization is important. It's not about efficiency, it's about hedging bets to improve our chance of surviving catastrophes. > has yet to, in 12 years, do anything better than what’s out there today That's FOUR! This kid is on fire... > There’s no such thing, we live in a society. Societies. Plural. To be honest, I am more concerned about people that want to establish an "universal" society than I fear all of the scammers that try to exploit people in crypto.