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Why Cryptocurrency Is A Giant Fraud
- codevark 6y agoSo, is there a way to make a million by betting against it? PM me with details ha
- adamhearn 6y agoWhat happens to the value of gold once astroid mining begins?
- BuyMyBitcoins 6y agoI suspect not much will change. The Delta-V requirements for sending precious metals back to earth is insanely high. And, you’d be trying to send back some of the heaviest elements. But what point would that serve if you were to simply put the gold into an underground vault? I imagine any mined minerals would stay in orbit and people would “own” that material while never taking possession of it. It’s not too different from what we do today. If you buy gold for your IRA you’re basically purchasing a share of some gold hoard you’re never going to see.
- HWR_14 6y ago> The Delta-V requirements for sending precious metals back to earth is insanely high. Sending gold down to earth is very cheap. As a bonus, you can also take out a city you are tired of. In addition to owning orbiting gold, I imagine the real use will be to feed orbital factories, to produce satellites/space stations/rockets in orbit. Everyone on a space station can have a golden toilet. (edited: typo fix)
- deepsun 6y agoAckshually, sending _down_ is often more expensive to sending _up_. For example, if you want to burn something from Earth orbit in the Sun, you need ~30km/s, but to send it _up_, out of Solar system -- only ~15km/s. I recommend Kerbal Space Program game, it's really fun to do orbital maneuvers there.
- AstralStorm 6y agoCome on. Retrograde burns are cheap compared to sheer amount of fuel needed to escape real sized atmosphere not the tiny KSP one. (There are mods for realism there.) Oh, and instead of burning you can use solar sails too. Or shoot lasers or explosives at them to vaporize and give them momentum. The biggest problem is actually getting to the rocks, chunking them and then not causing a rerun of the movie Armageddon. (Which made changing asteroid direction seem way too easy.) Once the rock is on a trajectory, it will be rather hard to deflect in time, and even then could collide later on. Or hit a newly deployed space station. Once you fire it, you will end up ruining someone's day, somewhere and some time. It's a weapon of mass destruction.
- majewsky 6y agoThey referred to "sending down" in the context of "sending down to earth". It's not much use to spend effort mining gold just to haul it into the sun.
- XorNot 6y agoVery little - the Organization of Mining by Extraterrestial Companies will hold regular meetings to set their rare-earth and noble metal production targets to ensure price stability (profitability).
- almost_usual 6y agoDoes the asteroid hit Earth?
- AstralStorm 6y agoIt matters more where it hits and how big it is. If you want that material on Earth, it's best to break the rock apart in space in such a way that the chunks are still shielded from reentry heat, and send them on a good trajectory to crash somewhere empty and minable. Siberia and swathes of desert are a good choice.
- postalrat 6y agoHopefully we don't need to wait too long to find out.
- senectus1 6y agoIf they try to bring it to earth... probably bad things :-P
- sibeliuss 6y ago> Many discussions of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency—I am going to use “Bitcoin” and “cryptocurrency” interchangeably for convenience, even though Bitcoin is just a specific cryptocurrency Ok, umm, next please!
- samspenc 6y agoWhile I understand this reference interchangeability is technically not correct, most of my non-technical friends use the terms "Bitcoin" and "cryptocurrency" the same way: basically using one term to refer to the other.
- AstralStorm 6y agoThat's because besides the big three, and with most crypto transactions running on Bitcoin, it is true. Ethereum shares most of the problems for now while adding complexity of designing bug free contracts. (If that fails, someone will steal your gas.) Monero is the third and both smaller, maybe more private, more expensive to mine. And value of all three are rather strongly correlated.
- meowkit 6y agoArticle started out strong, but falls away from being persuasive pretty quickly. > Many believe in it because they have swallowed libertarian dogmas that do not reflect how the world actually works. Quite humble to assume they know how the world actually works. There are too many straw man arguments used about what core crypto enthusiasts/developers actually believe and want with no respective for narrative evolution over time. There is no steel manning of how crypto enthusiasts may respond to some of the criticisms leveled, and the author takes a cheap out- starting out with the assertion that they will use cryptocurrency and Bitcoin interchangeably, absolving them of any need to discuss other cryptocurrencies and their novel functions and goals. There is no criticism of the current fiat monetary system and its shortcomings (though admittedly I started to skim). Great article if you’re not interested in your viewpoint being challenged.
- jb_gericke 6y agoAgree, a lot of surface arguments and very disconnected / short-sighted in terms of the future of crypto and applications of block chain in general. Bitcoin as a cryptocurrency is nascent, and certainly has userland issues, especially if you're not somewhat of a technologist. The author misses the point in terms of how quickly things are evolving and will continue to evolve to bring down the usability gap. Secondly I think the author misses the point in just how powerful decentralization is.
- HWR_14 6y agoI kinda hit this in my post elsewhere, but what's the value of decentralization to me. Not the goldbug-like anti-Fed case, but the value of decentralized transactions.
- yeahsure 6y agoI must say, this article does a terrible job at presenting crypto currencies in a bad way.
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- almost_usual 6y agoBitcoin is dumb. Blockchain is interesting. The end.
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- _robbywashere 6y agoThis is an oldie. Try the new one “it’s bad for the environment”
- pattusk 6y ago> For the average currency user, why is it so important to get rid of banks and the government and these suspicious-sounding “third parties?” Yes, we all hate bankers, but is the tyranny of Venmo so oppressive that we should shed the U.S. dollar entirely and begin trading in an alternative currency? One can get a 3 to 12% APY on stablecoins on decentralized lending/yield platforms. Meanwhile, a 1+% APY on a savings account at a regular bank in the US is an anomaly. It doesn't have to be political or ideological, there is a good financial case to be made for crypto-currency based solutions.
- tablespoon 6y ago> One can get a 3 to 12% APY on stablecoins on decentralized lending/yield platforms. Meanwhile, a 1+% APY on a savings account at a regular bank in the US is an anomaly. It doesn't have to be political or ideological, there is a good financial case to be made for crypto-currency based solutions. If you're seeing differences like that, it's not an apples to apples comparison. Those greater yields almost certainly represent greater risk (like with junk bonds).
- pattusk 6y agoI don't think the comparison to junk bounds is fair, and higher yields do not necessarily have to represent higher (objective) risk. The Uniswap USDC-USDT Pool currently has an APY of 8.54%. There are certainly more risks than letting the money sit in a savings account: smart contract risk (hack), regulatory risk and a failure of either of the two stable coins to maintain their peg. However I'd describe each of these risks as "black swans". In contrast, a C rated junk bond these days will have around a 4% yield. I may be overly bullish on crypto, but I don't think the risk of investing in a company that is about to default compares to being a liquidity provider on Uniswap in the USDT-USDC stablecoin pool, where (asides from the risks mentioned above) your capital will sit at a constant (USD) value and accrue fees from traders.
- akvadrako 6y agoOn twino you can get 10% guaranteed for loans. And the only risk is the company goes under, though they've been running for years. It seems like in both the cryptocoin case and fiat case, the risk is priced similarly.
- vonsydov 6y agoThis same guy wrote this one https://www.currentaffairs.org/2021/04/surely-we-can-do-better-than-elon-musk https://www.currentaffairs.org/2021/04/surely-we-can-do-bett...
- HWR_14 6y agoI tend to agree with most of his points. I never understood the value of either decentralization and security through cryptographic signing. Just to use his analysis to compare to a credit card in my wallet. Decentralization: It takes almost no time to transact. The transaction is 100% free to me (the merchant pays for it, but I get charged the same price as a cash payer). Those both happen because of strong centralization. Security: Further, that strong centralization, and laws around it, provides the best security I can imagine. If goes wrong, I can call the company and get the charges reversed. For instance if I'm defrauded. If my credit card number winds up on a public website, I'm only out the use of it in the couple of days it takes for them to fed-ex me a new one. Privacy: Yes, my CC company (and the merchant) have all my purchase history. That's not great. But the blockchain makes my entire history public. I can hide behind a pseudonym, but that only works so long. If there's one indisputable thing over the past couple of decades, it's that fingerprinting exists and technical privacy is very brittle.
- akvadrako 6y agoIt makes sense if you are buying drugs with Monero. First, a centralized solution will not even allow you to make the transaction; they are in control of who you pay. And the privacy, while still not perfect, requires considerable effort to break. Maybe the FBI or NSA are doing it, but if so they aren't revealing it.
- intev 6y agoA straw man, facetious argument. Present the worst possible use case, show how it can help with that unintended use case and then point out a possible problem with even that use case.
- intev 6y agoThe article conveniently left out one of the most important reasons holding BTC could be valuable - beating inflation and government currency controls. The US is on a money printing spree and many are expecting high inflation. If you want to park your money and ensure it keeps growing in value to counteract inflation BTC seems like a good way to do it. In some countries, these effects are way more pronounced where inflation is significantly higher and capital controls are so stringent that you have limits on how many dollars you can take out of the country or what you can buy online with a credit card. In these countries, they don't want you to save in dollars because it keeps devaluing the local currency. In fact, they make it incredibly difficult to even get access to dollars. So what are you to do if you work hard, make money, and want to save? You know that your money is getting discounted every single year.