5 ms·

I meant the web3 phase of it. But as far as crypto, as soon as it starts to even plausibly compete with any aspect of the finical system, it'll be regulated to

I meant the web3 phase of it. But as far as crypto, as soon as it starts to even plausibly compete with any aspect of the finical system, it'll be regulated to oblivion -- even if it were a good idea. No government on the planet would tolerate a rival private army, nor likewise a rival private economy. It's tolerated at the moment because crypto is just casino chips, and mostly a "useful honeypot" for exposing its criminal users via pretty transparent public records. However blockchain is also just such bad technology with no competitive use cases -- unlike herbal life products, you can't drink a blockchain ledger. My sense is that the emporer here is so naked, and the product so useless, that each time the fantatics try to undress him, many realise the issue. There's lots of routes to crypto's downfall, and all of them are vastly more likely than any "application" taking off.

nathias 4y ago
you might remember we live in a world with multiple countries
- cguess 4y ago
  And literally none of them would tolerate a private economy. The entire point of the state is to hold a monopoly over currency and police powers, without those you get Somalia in the 90's.
  - uni_rule 4y ago
    There's also El Salvador, for however well that's treating them.
  - nathias 4y ago
    Most of them tolerate private economies to a degree, and most abandoned their currency monopoly by using the dollar as a reserve currency and use Mastercard/Visa oligopoly for digital transactions already.
  - public_defender 4y ago
    > Somalia in the 90's. Or Lebanon right now, which has USD as a competing currency rather than crypto. I tend to agree with this perspective--that all states should see a private economy as an adversary--but there are a lot of states that can't effectively resist forces like this. That said, is there really a proven use case where people are using cryptocurrency to buy burritos? I think the private economy meme is out over its skis. I have seen places where you can buy a six dollar latte or a bag of cocaine with Bitcoin, but these are use cases which are heavily predicated on a functional underlying fiat currency.
emporas 4y ago
>However blockchain is also just such bad technology with no competitive use cases -- unlike herbal life products, you can't drink a blockchain ledger. The commodity which is called gold was indispensable in the ancient times. Metal vessels which cannot be oxidized were the best way to drink liquids, like water or wine. Pottery made out of clay is not ideal, because it's porous surface absorbs the wine taste, so when you put water in it, you taste the wine of the previous night. So, a commodity with an absolutely unique user case, tends to increase in price. Drinking water is a so frequent and fundamental human activity, that the best commodity for that user case, it follows that would be pretty expensive. Blockchain has a unique user case as well. It's purpose is to decrease the amount of spam in the internet, by making it more expensive. Is there any better way to stop spam, instead of making it more expensive? I would love to hear about it! Energy annotation of information, is the only way to go, if you ask me. Blockchain can be used by citizens to attest to ownership as well. This however is not a unique use case, government does that as well. One can easily imagine citizens chopping off the ownership of a house in 100.000 pieces for example, and putting that in the blockchain. You want to buy up a cup of coffee? Transfer the 1/100.000 of it to the coffee shop. Does the coffee shop wishes to track all their ownership they gained selling coffee? They wear their oculus headset, and they can keep track of all the points in the city in which they own a piece of it. Aside of these points, cryptocurrencies, exchanges and crypto are ridiculous, people should invest in something which they understand.
- mjburgess 4y ago
  I think the blockchain as a deliberately computationally expensive ledger is an interesting idea, and at least a plausible account of what resource could count as a commodity. It is certainly why BTC tends to have a implied floor around cost-to-mint; but that is more the psychology of its use. It's floor is zero, as with anything: whilst a token on a blockchain has no productive value below its (energy) cost-to-mint, that doesnt create buyers at any positive price. One issue is that I don't see deliberately making computation less efficient as something unique to blockchains: we can make present systems abitarily energy-intensive by adding hash-computation work to them. We dont need immutability and distribution to do that. However, I'm not sure in a world wish such high negative externalities on energy consumption, selling deliberately high energy cost computation is plausible. Unless spam can be shown to have similar externalities, as a problem, it's vastly less significant than our global energy crisis. Services which perform computation to reduce spam, almost certainly, perform far less than the blockchain alternative. Minting a coin for each YT video uploaded is a vastly inferior solution than: 1) YT charging for posting videos; 2) YT building & running anti-spam systems; 3) YT charging users for access to videos; 4) YT requiring users having to hash something before uploading, so costing them some energy, etc. Indeed, (1) solves all the problems in a vastly more efficient way for every person involed.

nathias 4y ago

you might remember we live in a world with multiple countries

cguess 4y ago
And literally none of them would tolerate a private economy. The entire point of the state is to hold a monopoly over currency and police powers, without those you get Somalia in the 90's.
- uni_rule 4y ago
  There's also El Salvador, for however well that's treating them.
- nathias 4y ago
  Most of them tolerate private economies to a degree, and most abandoned their currency monopoly by using the dollar as a reserve currency and use Mastercard/Visa oligopoly for digital transactions already.
- public_defender 4y ago
  > Somalia in the 90's. Or Lebanon right now, which has USD as a competing currency rather than crypto. I tend to agree with this perspective--that all states should see a private economy as an adversary--but there are a lot of states that can't effectively resist forces like this. That said, is there really a proven use case where people are using cryptocurrency to buy burritos? I think the private economy meme is out over its skis. I have seen places where you can buy a six dollar latte or a bag of cocaine with Bitcoin, but these are use cases which are heavily predicated on a functional underlying fiat currency.

emporas 4y ago

>However blockchain is also just such bad technology with no competitive use cases -- unlike herbal life products, you can't drink a blockchain ledger. The commodity which is called gold was indispensable in the ancient times. Metal vessels which cannot be oxidized were the best way to drink liquids, like water or wine. Pottery made out of clay is not ideal, because it's porous surface absorbs the wine taste, so when you put water in it, you taste the wine of the previous night. So, a commodity with an absolutely unique user case, tends to increase in price. Drinking water is a so frequent and fundamental human activity, that the best commodity for that user case, it follows that would be pretty expensive. Blockchain has a unique user case as well. It's purpose is to decrease the amount of spam in the internet, by making it more expensive. Is there any better way to stop spam, instead of making it more expensive? I would love to hear about it! Energy annotation of information, is the only way to go, if you ask me. Blockchain can be used by citizens to attest to ownership as well. This however is not a unique use case, government does that as well. One can easily imagine citizens chopping off the ownership of a house in 100.000 pieces for example, and putting that in the blockchain. You want to buy up a cup of coffee? Transfer the 1/100.000 of it to the coffee shop. Does the coffee shop wishes to track all their ownership they gained selling coffee? They wear their oculus headset, and they can keep track of all the points in the city in which they own a piece of it. Aside of these points, cryptocurrencies, exchanges and crypto are ridiculous, people should invest in something which they understand.

mjburgess 4y ago
I think the blockchain as a deliberately computationally expensive ledger is an interesting idea, and at least a plausible account of what resource could count as a commodity. It is certainly why BTC tends to have a implied floor around cost-to-mint; but that is more the psychology of its use. It's floor is zero, as with anything: whilst a token on a blockchain has no productive value below its (energy) cost-to-mint, that doesnt create buyers at any positive price. One issue is that I don't see deliberately making computation less efficient as something unique to blockchains: we can make present systems abitarily energy-intensive by adding hash-computation work to them. We dont need immutability and distribution to do that. However, I'm not sure in a world wish such high negative externalities on energy consumption, selling deliberately high energy cost computation is plausible. Unless spam can be shown to have similar externalities, as a problem, it's vastly less significant than our global energy crisis. Services which perform computation to reduce spam, almost certainly, perform far less than the blockchain alternative. Minting a coin for each YT video uploaded is a vastly inferior solution than: 1) YT charging for posting videos; 2) YT building & running anti-spam systems; 3) YT charging users for access to videos; 4) YT requiring users having to hash something before uploading, so costing them some energy, etc. Indeed, (1) solves all the problems in a vastly more efficient way for every person involed.