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> I've been using Bitcoin to get paid for a couple of years at this point How do you turn your Bitcoin into food, housing, utilities, and other necessities? >

> I've been using Bitcoin to get paid for a couple of years at this point How do you turn your Bitcoin into food, housing, utilities, and other necessities? > And, yeah, 13 years after the internet's invention was 01982 The Internet was not available to virtually anyone in 1982 much less 1969. Nor was the ARPANET of 1969 even remotely similar to the Internet. TCP came about in 1974. IPv4 in 1982. > So why does Bitcoin have tens of millions of users It doesn't. It has a lot of speculators, and a handful of users. And no one knows or could possibly know how many there are. etc.

kragen 5y ago
> How do you turn your Bitcoin into food, housing, utilities, and other necessities? I sell it for dollars to people in person; some of the dollars I have to change into Argentine pesos before I can spend them. Isn't that how everybody does it? > The Internet was not available to virtually anyone in 1982 much less 1969 It was available to almost anyone who knew someone who had access, which is the same situation as Bitcoin. Precisely what Maciej is complaining about is that so little of the economy is hooked up to Bitcoin is that most of us can't buy a pizza with it without going through intermediaries. > Nor was the ARPANET of 1969 even remotely similar to the Internet It was remotely similar; it provided telnet over a packet-switched network, with routing. You could argue that substantial technical changes happened in Bitcoin over the last 13 years, too. Maciej did, in fact, make that argument: he pointed out in particular the dramatic shift to centralized intermediaries like Coinbase (the ANS.NET of Bitcoin?) and from CPU mining to GPU, FPGA, and then ASIC mining, as well as the proliferation of alternative cryptocurrencies. We could also mention segwit, the BCH schism, Lightning, BIP39 and Electrum seed phrases, and lightweight clients like Electrum. Those changes are not over yet. So the situations are in fact quite closely parallel.
- jfrunyon 5y ago
  > I sell it for dollars to people in person; some of the dollars I have to change into Argentine pesos before I can spend them. Isn't that how everybody does it? No, most people just spend their currency directly on the things they need to purchase, actually. > It was available to almost anyone who knew someone who had access That's not even remotely true, and is also a tiny number of people. > It was remotely similar But... it wasn't. As I already have shown. The ARPANET, then the Internet, have all gone through steady evolution. It has not spent 13 years stagnant or regressing in terms of either design or use. Just because you read somewhere that "ARPANET was the predecessor of the Internet" does not mean that ARPANET was the Internet.
  - nwienert 5y ago
    This is willfully ignorant and motivated reasoning. Crypto has more uses than I care to even list, in fact it’s quite easy to come up with many of them, but it’s weird that people who’ve set in their ideology against it won’t ever budge. In another thread I listed out a handful, and it was so interesting to see people do what always happens in political fights: they take a small subset of the idea or just one of the things that they feel they can best counter, and counter that, conveniently ignoring that they aren’t really engaging with the point at all but rather very small branches of the argument. If you care to see, it’s in my comment history not long ago. And the thread is fascinating because at best the replies just cherry pick and do semantic tricks like this. Crypto has a wealth of interesting uses. Tech company co-ops, incentivizing content curation, new and organic stock distribution mechanisms for open source projects, and of course the giant one of providing a far better investment and transfer vehicle to the non-first world countries. I mean, I can totally see the arguments that it is wasteful, or a bubble, overhyped, and not reaching its potential. But the ones who say it has no or next to no uses are in my opinion on the same plane as Krugmans “the internet will be less useful than the fax machine” or the classic Slashdot iPod “less space than a nomad” comment. It may take even 20 years to prove it, IMO that’s not unreasonable, but it will be claim chowder I’ll be happy to revisit. If proof of stake works out, there’s no doubt the next Google will be a crypto company that gives revenue back to the user base to incentive good contribution. Content sites absolutely will be totally disrupted. Well look back at writing reviews for the Yelps and Googles as being anachronistic, “why did we used to give all this content to the largest company in the world for free”. Instead, a crypto-based Yelp or Reddit that used a coin and distributed it fairly in relation to contribution would absolutely blow up. I think VC is also better done with coins in general. Take any traditional tech company that has nothing to do with crypto and just change one thing: instead of paying early adopters who help the platform grow $150 bucks, which is nothing, pay them in what is essentially a micro-dose of stock. That’s a 10x more incentivized early adopter because they actually could make something more than lunch money. The reason crypto is blowing up isn’t because it’s a ponzo scheme. It’s because laws around accredited investing are truly the most egregiously disgusting instantiation of class warfare ever to exist, and finally small guys have a chance to do what the wealthy have been doing since forever: take their extra money and invest it. All the “pure” crypto companies are total bullshit, minus many BTC and ETH, because they have no product. That I agree with. But in time you’ll see a huge growth in companies that are simply normal tech companies with novel tech/uses, but who build in community ownership, rewards and incentives that actually share profit with their user base. Again: why do people not get paid for contributions to Pinterest, Yelp, Reddit? These are companies paying millions of dollars to employees, and 100% of their content is given to them by users. In a better world they are actually run by the community, owned by the community, and developed in the open.
tetherino 5y ago
January 1, 1983 is considered the official birthday of the Internet.

kragen 5y ago

> How do you turn your Bitcoin into food, housing, utilities, and other necessities? I sell it for dollars to people in person; some of the dollars I have to change into Argentine pesos before I can spend them. Isn't that how everybody does it? > The Internet was not available to virtually anyone in 1982 much less 1969 It was available to almost anyone who knew someone who had access, which is the same situation as Bitcoin. Precisely what Maciej is complaining about is that so little of the economy is hooked up to Bitcoin is that most of us can't buy a pizza with it without going through intermediaries. > Nor was the ARPANET of 1969 even remotely similar to the Internet It was remotely similar; it provided telnet over a packet-switched network, with routing. You could argue that substantial technical changes happened in Bitcoin over the last 13 years, too. Maciej did, in fact, make that argument: he pointed out in particular the dramatic shift to centralized intermediaries like Coinbase (the ANS.NET of Bitcoin?) and from CPU mining to GPU, FPGA, and then ASIC mining, as well as the proliferation of alternative cryptocurrencies. We could also mention segwit, the BCH schism, Lightning, BIP39 and Electrum seed phrases, and lightweight clients like Electrum. Those changes are not over yet. So the situations are in fact quite closely parallel.

jfrunyon 5y ago
> I sell it for dollars to people in person; some of the dollars I have to change into Argentine pesos before I can spend them. Isn't that how everybody does it? No, most people just spend their currency directly on the things they need to purchase, actually. > It was available to almost anyone who knew someone who had access That's not even remotely true, and is also a tiny number of people. > It was remotely similar But... it wasn't. As I already have shown. The ARPANET, then the Internet, have all gone through steady evolution. It has not spent 13 years stagnant or regressing in terms of either design or use. Just because you read somewhere that "ARPANET was the predecessor of the Internet" does not mean that ARPANET was the Internet.
- nwienert 5y ago
  This is willfully ignorant and motivated reasoning. Crypto has more uses than I care to even list, in fact it’s quite easy to come up with many of them, but it’s weird that people who’ve set in their ideology against it won’t ever budge. In another thread I listed out a handful, and it was so interesting to see people do what always happens in political fights: they take a small subset of the idea or just one of the things that they feel they can best counter, and counter that, conveniently ignoring that they aren’t really engaging with the point at all but rather very small branches of the argument. If you care to see, it’s in my comment history not long ago. And the thread is fascinating because at best the replies just cherry pick and do semantic tricks like this. Crypto has a wealth of interesting uses. Tech company co-ops, incentivizing content curation, new and organic stock distribution mechanisms for open source projects, and of course the giant one of providing a far better investment and transfer vehicle to the non-first world countries. I mean, I can totally see the arguments that it is wasteful, or a bubble, overhyped, and not reaching its potential. But the ones who say it has no or next to no uses are in my opinion on the same plane as Krugmans “the internet will be less useful than the fax machine” or the classic Slashdot iPod “less space than a nomad” comment. It may take even 20 years to prove it, IMO that’s not unreasonable, but it will be claim chowder I’ll be happy to revisit. If proof of stake works out, there’s no doubt the next Google will be a crypto company that gives revenue back to the user base to incentive good contribution. Content sites absolutely will be totally disrupted. Well look back at writing reviews for the Yelps and Googles as being anachronistic, “why did we used to give all this content to the largest company in the world for free”. Instead, a crypto-based Yelp or Reddit that used a coin and distributed it fairly in relation to contribution would absolutely blow up. I think VC is also better done with coins in general. Take any traditional tech company that has nothing to do with crypto and just change one thing: instead of paying early adopters who help the platform grow $150 bucks, which is nothing, pay them in what is essentially a micro-dose of stock. That’s a 10x more incentivized early adopter because they actually could make something more than lunch money. The reason crypto is blowing up isn’t because it’s a ponzo scheme. It’s because laws around accredited investing are truly the most egregiously disgusting instantiation of class warfare ever to exist, and finally small guys have a chance to do what the wealthy have been doing since forever: take their extra money and invest it. All the “pure” crypto companies are total bullshit, minus many BTC and ETH, because they have no product. That I agree with. But in time you’ll see a huge growth in companies that are simply normal tech companies with novel tech/uses, but who build in community ownership, rewards and incentives that actually share profit with their user base. Again: why do people not get paid for contributions to Pinterest, Yelp, Reddit? These are companies paying millions of dollars to employees, and 100% of their content is given to them by users. In a better world they are actually run by the community, owned by the community, and developed in the open.

tetherino 5y ago

January 1, 1983 is considered the official birthday of the Internet.