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This is such a simplistic view of “the little guy”. The dollar system is set up such that they have to ‘invest’ or else they will never be able to afford a hous

by jl2718 6y ago

This is such a simplistic view of “the little guy”. The dollar system is set up such that they have to ‘invest’ or else they will never be able to afford a house. Savings will bankrupt them. Stocks are meaningless, just handing your money to rich people that will never give it back in hopes that you can sell it for more later. But the whole system looks like it’s in free fall, so that doesn’t seem likely. Crypto would have zero value if normal people weren’t scared and distrustful. I can’t recall a market mania that didn’t start with massive rises in home prices.

matheusmoreira 6y ago
> Crypto would have zero value if normal people weren’t scared and distrustful. That implies cryptocurrencies provide no value by themselves and is simply false. Ethereum is essentially a distributed virtual machine that anyone can pay to use. Monero offers complete financial privacy.
- rideontime 6y ago
  What sort of operations are people running on the Ethereum VM?
  - matheusmoreira 6y ago
    Currently the smart contract software projects are focused on decentralized finance since the only input necessary for that is ETH currency. New tokens, decentralized exchanges and so on. People created Chainlink to bring real world data inputs to Ethereum software. Data such as "package has arrived to its destination". It hasn't delivered on its promise yet unfortunately. If it ever does, all bets will be off.
  - throwaway_isms 6y ago
    I have multiple decentralized websites and even a search engine on IPFS (the p2p web3 protocol)
  - imtringued 6y ago
    I've seen interest bearing crypto accounts. You can get 6% APY on stablecoins. Any project that promises you more than that is calculating APY for the current day or hour. 40% APY for less than a single day is just misleading advertisement. Although I am generally against cryptocurrencies, I cannot be against the idea of building a decentralized banking system (cryptocurrencies are merely cash). I mean, if we get to do it with fiat, they surely deserve to do it with their cryptocurrencies.
- brazzy 6y ago
  >Ethereum is essentially a distributed virtual machine that anyone can pay to use. ...that is unbelievably slow, limited, difficult to use, and makes it impossible to fix bugs. It's absolutely fascinating in principle, yes. But in practice it's a solution in search of a problem.
  - matheusmoreira 6y ago
    > that is unbelievably slow, inefficient, and makes it impossible to fix bugs I don't dispute that. The real innovation lies in the decentralization. Unfortunately, decentralization is threatened by centralized mining operations who resist changes to the network such as migration to proof of stake. Bitcoin also suffers from the same problem with miners effectively controlling the protocol and as a result the coin has remained static for a long time. Monero seems to be having success avoiding the influence of miners. They adopted ASIC and GPU resistant algorithms which makes it viable to mine XMR on normal CPUs, allowing more people to participate and as a result making the coin more decentralized.
- jl2718 6y ago
  I’ll be the first one to say that crypto is often the superior system. But only due to the threat. A threat I happen to believe is very dangerous. Any security model only has value in the presence of a threat model. Other than that it’s just inefficient.
  - matheusmoreira 6y ago
    Indeed. The threat is real and will continue to be real for as long as governments exist. Maybe the threat is centralized authorities in general. My country experienced runaway inflation in the 1990s. In a desperate attempt to stop it, the president just froze everyone's bank accounts. The government took away everyone's money out of nowhere. So I don't really care how much energy cryptocurrency consumes. If it puts an end to government stupidity it's worth it. The more they hate cryptocurrency the better -- it means they can't control it.
imtringued 6y ago
>The dollar system is set up such that they have to ‘invest’ or else they will never be able to afford a house. Savings will bankrupt them. This is what happens when inflation is low, yet people consider inflation the devil. If the Fed could actually hit inflation goals this whole farce would be over. We'd be at the end of the long term debt cycle and a whole lot of fake value would disappear into thin air and after all the bad debt and bad companies have been cleaned up, there would be enough room for productive companies.

by jl2718 6y ago

matheusmoreira 6y ago

> Crypto would have zero value if normal people weren’t scared and distrustful. That implies cryptocurrencies provide no value by themselves and is simply false. Ethereum is essentially a distributed virtual machine that anyone can pay to use. Monero offers complete financial privacy.

rideontime 6y ago
What sort of operations are people running on the Ethereum VM?
- matheusmoreira 6y ago
  Currently the smart contract software projects are focused on decentralized finance since the only input necessary for that is ETH currency. New tokens, decentralized exchanges and so on. People created Chainlink to bring real world data inputs to Ethereum software. Data such as "package has arrived to its destination". It hasn't delivered on its promise yet unfortunately. If it ever does, all bets will be off.
- throwaway_isms 6y ago
  I have multiple decentralized websites and even a search engine on IPFS (the p2p web3 protocol)
- imtringued 6y ago
  I've seen interest bearing crypto accounts. You can get 6% APY on stablecoins. Any project that promises you more than that is calculating APY for the current day or hour. 40% APY for less than a single day is just misleading advertisement. Although I am generally against cryptocurrencies, I cannot be against the idea of building a decentralized banking system (cryptocurrencies are merely cash). I mean, if we get to do it with fiat, they surely deserve to do it with their cryptocurrencies.
brazzy 6y ago
>Ethereum is essentially a distributed virtual machine that anyone can pay to use. ...that is unbelievably slow, limited, difficult to use, and makes it impossible to fix bugs. It's absolutely fascinating in principle, yes. But in practice it's a solution in search of a problem.
- matheusmoreira 6y ago
  > that is unbelievably slow, inefficient, and makes it impossible to fix bugs I don't dispute that. The real innovation lies in the decentralization. Unfortunately, decentralization is threatened by centralized mining operations who resist changes to the network such as migration to proof of stake. Bitcoin also suffers from the same problem with miners effectively controlling the protocol and as a result the coin has remained static for a long time. Monero seems to be having success avoiding the influence of miners. They adopted ASIC and GPU resistant algorithms which makes it viable to mine XMR on normal CPUs, allowing more people to participate and as a result making the coin more decentralized.
jl2718 6y ago
I’ll be the first one to say that crypto is often the superior system. But only due to the threat. A threat I happen to believe is very dangerous. Any security model only has value in the presence of a threat model. Other than that it’s just inefficient.
- matheusmoreira 6y ago
  Indeed. The threat is real and will continue to be real for as long as governments exist. Maybe the threat is centralized authorities in general. My country experienced runaway inflation in the 1990s. In a desperate attempt to stop it, the president just froze everyone's bank accounts. The government took away everyone's money out of nowhere. So I don't really care how much energy cryptocurrency consumes. If it puts an end to government stupidity it's worth it. The more they hate cryptocurrency the better -- it means they can't control it.

imtringued 6y ago

>The dollar system is set up such that they have to ‘invest’ or else they will never be able to afford a house. Savings will bankrupt them. This is what happens when inflation is low, yet people consider inflation the devil. If the Fed could actually hit inflation goals this whole farce would be over. We'd be at the end of the long term debt cycle and a whole lot of fake value would disappear into thin air and after all the bad debt and bad companies have been cleaned up, there would be enough room for productive companies.