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Fixing wealth equality was never a narrative. In fact wealth incentives favoring early adopters were built in day 0. It’s impossible and maddening to keep the

Fixing wealth equality was never a narrative. In fact wealth incentives favoring early adopters were built in day 0. It’s impossible and maddening to keep the “movement” on track in messaging. Every era is less educated technically and cares less about ideological or political goals and more about the bottom line of making some wealth. So of course the movement is diluted. Influencers are rarely true cypherpunks and are the loudest by profession. But it doesn’t mean it isn’t working. IMHO the traditional finance system has only gotten more troubling since Satoshi’s whitepaper while crypto has grown more and more capable. It’s true there have been new challenges that have emerged, some of which are still ongoing, but that’s part of growth.

fossuser 5y ago
Yeah - I started off cautiously optimistic, but I've gotten more and more confident in its long term future. The DeFi tech is real, but early. Vitalik Buterin is a really good leader for Ethereum and development. Vitalik Interview: https://www.stitcher.com/show/rationally-speaking/episode/intellectual-honesty-cryptocurrency-more-vitalik-buterin-82142288 https://www.stitcher.com/show/rationally-speaking/episode/in... This is a worthwhile list to read through: https://danromero.org/crypto-reading/ https://danromero.org/crypto-reading/ The main issue for outsiders is that the industry is surrounded by snake oil salesman and people that don't know what they're talking about (the 'evil central bank' types), but the underlying tech is real and the potential is real (imo). If you look at it quickly you might dismiss it all, but I think that'd be a mistake. The ability to manage decentralized state is very cool, but there's a lot to build to make it viable (and as a result, there's a lot of opportunity). When something is hard, there's often value in making it easier. There's also a lot of stuff in legacy finance that requires humans to do and is slow. Multi-day financial transfers for clearing and high associated fees for wires (at some banks) - crypto options are much better and modern implementations of the legacy stack. The current state is still a bit unstable, and the UX is a disaster, but the future is clearly better (imo) in a way legacy systems will have trouble competing with. As an aside, 'wealth inequality' is a feature you want in effective capitalist systems (you can still protect the lower bound). http://paulgraham.com/ineq.html http://paulgraham.com/ineq.html In 1999 a lot of people recognized the value of the internet (though many still dismissed it [0]), but there was also a lot of dumb money and failure - loud people who didn't know what was going on. The web obviously became extremely economically relevant despite all of that. There's some similar potential here - I think it'll just take a while to shake out. [0] "By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s." -Paul Krugman (1998) Irony of the above quote is it's wrong on two levels - the internet, but also the impact of the fax machine (also huge).
- rawtxapp 5y ago
  Yes, the loud mouths on twitter and other social networks are definitely a turn-off and pretty annoying. For anyone who's looking into more serious/technical discussions, I think looking through github contributions, whitepapers, technical parts of bitcointalk and in depth interviews of legitimate contributors to the ecosystem (like Vitalik) is much more informative and has better signal to noise ratios.
- deregulateMed 5y ago
  I'm not convinced Vitalik is a great leader. Ethereum is currently an infinite coin like Doge. The miners have taken control and blew past the original soft cap of 100M Eth of EIP 669. I'm sure he made more mistakes, but that and the ETH classic debacle makes me think he's an idol to be worshiped. Heck POS is a reaction to the original ETH being unable to scale. Sure infinite coins can be fixed later, but the same can be said about Bitcoin. If POS works, it can be implemented on Bitcoin.
  - fossuser 5y ago
    POS is a reasonable trade-off to solve scaling and make DeFi practical (imo) - his blog posts about it and arguments make sense. > "Sure infinite coins can be fixed later, but the same can be said about Bitcoin. If POS works, it can be implemented on Bitcoin." In theory yes, in practice no. BTC community elevated a clear con-man fake Satoshi because he took sides in a block size political battle. They can't even agree to increase the block size. This lack of leadership is a problem, moving to ETH2 is a serious project and requires a leader, priorities, direction etc. I don't think BTC can do any of this.
  - doggosphere 5y ago
    If POS works, it can be implemented on Bitcoin. Yes, but can you convince the hardcore PoW maximalists to join your fork? IMO Bitcoin is doing its best to be a raw, pseudo-physical element. That means immutability, costs rooted in the physical world, etc. The community will change its protocols sparingly and slowly. To some who prefer rapid change and development this is unattractive. But to Bitcoiners, decentralization and immutability are the foundations of this new type of property. They are uninterested in technical gains that come with complexity and risk.
WalterBright 5y ago
> Every era is less educated technically and cares less about ideological or political goals and more about the bottom line of making some wealth. There is no bygone era of highly educated and high minded people.
- api 5y ago
  Why has the average reading level of news decreased over the decades?
  - root_axis 5y ago
    There isn't a singular cause, but the quality of mass media news programming has also decreased over the decades.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- cwkoss 5y ago
  2012-2013 bitcointalk forums had a lot of smart people talking about technology and building stuff. There was also dumb stuff, but I think I'd probably call it a "era of highly educated and high minded people"
  - cwkoss 5y ago
    I remember when someone built a 'crypto stock exchange' (for crypto projects, not traditional stocks) in a month or so. They launched it, and was a technically sufficient stock exchange. It eventually fell apart due to too many questionable projects being listed, and perhaps some additional regulatory factors - but it "worked"! Pretty cool that a 'garage-scale' team can make a functioning technolibertarian market so rapidly. (But also helped me learn to appreciate the utility of regulation :-P) IIRC I think Trendon Shavers/pirateat40's "miner financing" ponzi's implosion was a significant factor in taking it down. There were lots of cool little projects popping up every month. Gambling sites that allowed wagers to be made directly on the blockchain - most engineering was around proving to gamblers that outcome determination was being done fairly. Accountless websites where you'd log in by sending a small fraction of a bitcoin, and your address was used as your identity. When bitcoin was less than $20, it was exciting and easy to experiment with - who cares if the $5 you sent disappears - but then the price spiked, and so fees increased and all of the 'loose change' people had everywhere was suddenly a significant amount of money - exit scams became frequent and people stopped being willing to store small amounts with others, because that small amount could 20x in 4 years. Lots of small businesses posting that they'd accept bitcoin for their products. Found a lovely beekeeper's business that made great honey caramels and beeswax chapstick. I paid a teenager to custom make perler bead pixel art of Liu Kang and Raiden from the original Mortal Kombat (I think I may have paid multiple bitcoins for those :-P - hope they hodled!)

fossuser 5y ago

Yeah - I started off cautiously optimistic, but I've gotten more and more confident in its long term future. The DeFi tech is real, but early. Vitalik Buterin is a really good leader for Ethereum and development. Vitalik Interview: https://www.stitcher.com/show/rationally-speaking/episode/intellectual-honesty-cryptocurrency-more-vitalik-buterin-82142288 https://www.stitcher.com/show/rationally-speaking/episode/in... This is a worthwhile list to read through: https://danromero.org/crypto-reading/ https://danromero.org/crypto-reading/ The main issue for outsiders is that the industry is surrounded by snake oil salesman and people that don't know what they're talking about (the 'evil central bank' types), but the underlying tech is real and the potential is real (imo). If you look at it quickly you might dismiss it all, but I think that'd be a mistake. The ability to manage decentralized state is very cool, but there's a lot to build to make it viable (and as a result, there's a lot of opportunity). When something is hard, there's often value in making it easier. There's also a lot of stuff in legacy finance that requires humans to do and is slow. Multi-day financial transfers for clearing and high associated fees for wires (at some banks) - crypto options are much better and modern implementations of the legacy stack. The current state is still a bit unstable, and the UX is a disaster, but the future is clearly better (imo) in a way legacy systems will have trouble competing with. As an aside, 'wealth inequality' is a feature you want in effective capitalist systems (you can still protect the lower bound). http://paulgraham.com/ineq.html http://paulgraham.com/ineq.html In 1999 a lot of people recognized the value of the internet (though many still dismissed it [0]), but there was also a lot of dumb money and failure - loud people who didn't know what was going on. The web obviously became extremely economically relevant despite all of that. There's some similar potential here - I think it'll just take a while to shake out. [0] "By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s." -Paul Krugman (1998) Irony of the above quote is it's wrong on two levels - the internet, but also the impact of the fax machine (also huge).

rawtxapp 5y ago
Yes, the loud mouths on twitter and other social networks are definitely a turn-off and pretty annoying. For anyone who's looking into more serious/technical discussions, I think looking through github contributions, whitepapers, technical parts of bitcointalk and in depth interviews of legitimate contributors to the ecosystem (like Vitalik) is much more informative and has better signal to noise ratios.
deregulateMed 5y ago
I'm not convinced Vitalik is a great leader. Ethereum is currently an infinite coin like Doge. The miners have taken control and blew past the original soft cap of 100M Eth of EIP 669. I'm sure he made more mistakes, but that and the ETH classic debacle makes me think he's an idol to be worshiped. Heck POS is a reaction to the original ETH being unable to scale. Sure infinite coins can be fixed later, but the same can be said about Bitcoin. If POS works, it can be implemented on Bitcoin.
- fossuser 5y ago
  POS is a reasonable trade-off to solve scaling and make DeFi practical (imo) - his blog posts about it and arguments make sense. > "Sure infinite coins can be fixed later, but the same can be said about Bitcoin. If POS works, it can be implemented on Bitcoin." In theory yes, in practice no. BTC community elevated a clear con-man fake Satoshi because he took sides in a block size political battle. They can't even agree to increase the block size. This lack of leadership is a problem, moving to ETH2 is a serious project and requires a leader, priorities, direction etc. I don't think BTC can do any of this.
- doggosphere 5y ago
  If POS works, it can be implemented on Bitcoin. Yes, but can you convince the hardcore PoW maximalists to join your fork? IMO Bitcoin is doing its best to be a raw, pseudo-physical element. That means immutability, costs rooted in the physical world, etc. The community will change its protocols sparingly and slowly. To some who prefer rapid change and development this is unattractive. But to Bitcoiners, decentralization and immutability are the foundations of this new type of property. They are uninterested in technical gains that come with complexity and risk.

WalterBright 5y ago

> Every era is less educated technically and cares less about ideological or political goals and more about the bottom line of making some wealth. There is no bygone era of highly educated and high minded people.

api 5y ago
Why has the average reading level of news decreased over the decades?
- root_axis 5y ago
  There isn't a singular cause, but the quality of mass media news programming has also decreased over the decades.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
cwkoss 5y ago
2012-2013 bitcointalk forums had a lot of smart people talking about technology and building stuff. There was also dumb stuff, but I think I'd probably call it a "era of highly educated and high minded people"
- cwkoss 5y ago
  I remember when someone built a 'crypto stock exchange' (for crypto projects, not traditional stocks) in a month or so. They launched it, and was a technically sufficient stock exchange. It eventually fell apart due to too many questionable projects being listed, and perhaps some additional regulatory factors - but it "worked"! Pretty cool that a 'garage-scale' team can make a functioning technolibertarian market so rapidly. (But also helped me learn to appreciate the utility of regulation :-P) IIRC I think Trendon Shavers/pirateat40's "miner financing" ponzi's implosion was a significant factor in taking it down. There were lots of cool little projects popping up every month. Gambling sites that allowed wagers to be made directly on the blockchain - most engineering was around proving to gamblers that outcome determination was being done fairly. Accountless websites where you'd log in by sending a small fraction of a bitcoin, and your address was used as your identity. When bitcoin was less than $20, it was exciting and easy to experiment with - who cares if the $5 you sent disappears - but then the price spiked, and so fees increased and all of the 'loose change' people had everywhere was suddenly a significant amount of money - exit scams became frequent and people stopped being willing to store small amounts with others, because that small amount could 20x in 4 years. Lots of small businesses posting that they'd accept bitcoin for their products. Found a lovely beekeeper's business that made great honey caramels and beeswax chapstick. I paid a teenager to custom make perler bead pixel art of Liu Kang and Raiden from the original Mortal Kombat (I think I may have paid multiple bitcoins for those :-P - hope they hodled!)