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> thinking about something along these lines... There are some solid ideas behind cryptocurrency and perhaps your example is an illustration of how those good
by crispyambulance 5y ago
> thinking about something along these lines...
There are some solid ideas behind cryptocurrency and perhaps your example is an illustration of how those good ideas could work. Many of the proponents of cryptocurrency describe such use-cases and it seems perfectly sound and air-tight on the surface.
But the current reality is that the OVERWHELMING use-cases of crypto-currency are wild get-rich-quick shell-games, illicit trade and tax-avoidance schemes. This is showing no signs of sobering up, in fact it has become worse. People keep saying that it will "settle down" but there is NO EVIDENCE for that.
The truly disturbing thing about cryptocurrency is that it reveals the possibility that "money", as a concept, is NOT necessarily a medium to exchange goods and services. It is something much more complex and fluid. Cryptocurrency, as a currency, takes all the awful and volatile hidden features of money, accelerates them and makes them overt and central to it's operation.
I think many of us find that idea repulsive. If crypto (as it currently exists) becomes the money of the future, it will mean that the vast majority of the population who earn money by exchanging their labor will find themselves at the mercy of wild and random fluctuations in the value of their labor. Their labor will mean less or more not because of what they actually do, but because of completely unrelated fluctuations caused by "millionaires" and institutions acting on whims, or even joking around. You could argue that it happens now with dollar money, but that kind of fluctuation has been almost always slow. Crypto promises to make crazy fluctuations the norm.
Vitalik Buterin, for example, famously donated ~1 billion "dollars" towards India COVID relief. Except that it wasn't really dollars, it was some cryptocoin that he was gifted ("shiba-shitto" or something like that). That value plummeted almost immediately. I don't know what it is now, it seems the news orgs have lost interest in the story. I do hope that India COVID relief got something out of it, but would have been better if they didn't have to hire crypto people to process that "money" into something useable when they're dealing with a pandemic.
- jazzyjackson 5y agoHere’s the SHIB donation, looks like it’s quoted at 350,000,000 USD now [1] and the relief fund has a transparency page linking to their wallet and bank and grant transactions [2] I agree with you btw just wanted to link to context [1] https://etherscan.io/tx/0xb65bcbb85c1633b0ab4e4886c3cd8eeaeb63edbb39cacdb9223fdcf4454fd2c7 https://etherscan.io/tx/0xb65bcbb85c1633b0ab4e4886c3cd8eeaeb... [2] https://cryptorelief.in/transparency https://cryptorelief.in/transparency