4 ms·

What's the use of crypto again? Because I think it's kinda useless. Just like NFT's

taeric 3y ago
I could ask the same for a lot of things, though? Time shares, collectible card games, collectibles at large, fashion at large, etc. Not that I can or will wholly defend crypto. That just doesn't seem like a relevant complaint. I do question the desire for everlasting permanence of the blockchain. I know we like to keep real estate deed records and such going back as far as we can, but even there we have limited utility of that. Encasing it in a technical solution that expands to cover more transactions does feel limited in usefulness. Largely ironic/funny that it makes it incredibly unsuited to criminal use.
- jakear 3y ago
  > Time shares They bring the probability that you will be harassed by police/landowners/elements/civilians when residing in an area way down. Personally, I take the harassment and sleep on the street. But it's not easy and many would pay not to. > collectible card games You have fun when you play them. People pay to have fun. > collectibles at large Idk some people just get weird addictions. I put collectables at large in the same bucket as crypto, no defense there. > fashion at large Looking good is more likely to get you laid. People like getting laid, and will pay for it.
  - taeric 3y ago
    Do note that the SEC's argument is usually along the lines of "if anybody is buying this to make money, then it is potentially a security." The "common enterprise" part makes it a bit different, but only a bit. Also note that time shares typically are securities, in my understanding. In contrast to a house, which is not. My argument there wasn't to identify some other things that are or are not securities, but "things that are kinda useless." In the case of timeshares, I'd say they are actively more harm than good.
alwayslikethis 3y ago
Permissionless electronic worldwide payment. That's it. An optional but good to have part is anonymity, which you get with Monero.
fullshark 3y ago
Economic actvity that you don't want a bank or government body to stop, so: illegal activity.
- foodjinn 3y ago
  Mastercard and paypal have both shut down legal activity in the last 4 years on the backs of government decisions or targeting legal, but politically inconvenient activity and there seems to be no slowing down on that avenue. Pornhub is one recent major example of that. The idea that it's just criminal enterprises that benefit from being able to participate in markets without interference is laughable at best given the increased interconnectedness between banks and the regulators themselves, especially not even 6 months after a rash of major banking failures within the traditional financial markets. There is very little reason to have a favorable opinion of the SEC following the 08 collapse given their own hand in it or the banking failures existing now, especially when they refuse to clarify their position on what is or is not a security so people CAN legally operate in the space. It appears to many both inside and outside of the space that the SEC is wielding its regulatory arm to create winners and losers, and with their own track record it's a failing proposition. It may be hyperbolic, but the holocaust was a legal activity in Nazi occupied territory.
matheusmoreira 3y ago
Monero is private and perfectly usable for payments. I've gotten paid in Monero, works great. People just need to start using it.
__MatrixMan__ 3y ago
Crypto is for coordinating group behavior in the presence of powerful adversaries (e.g. governments), always has been.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  Umm, OK. Funny that's not how it's been marketed. But I'm baffled as to how cryptocurrency is better for doing that than all of the other ways of doing that.
  - __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
    The drugs I've bought with cryptocurrency have been cheaper and of better quality than the drugs I've bought with dollars, by a wide margin. So there's that. The marketing you're talking about is for the investors. By the nature of the product, the users have powerful adversaries and are probably operating in secret. You can't expect their use cases to show up in the marketing, that would defeat the purpose. Sure, you get the bad with the good. There are definitely unsavory things going on under the covers. But you have to weigh that against the misbehavior of the powerful in a world where they're more difficult to coordinate against due to a underdeveloped crypto. It's a trade off, but I think it's a worthwhile one.
    - JohnFen 3y ago
      > in a world where they're more difficult to coordinate against due to a underdeveloped crypto. This is the part I don't understand. How does cryptocurrency make it easier to coordinate people than all the other tools we have to coordinate people?
      - __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
        If you rely on systems that involve implicit custodial trust (i.e. not crypto) to coordinate with your homies, and you have powerful adversaries, your adversaries will compel those custodians to prevent you from communicating with your homies. They also might find you and hurt you. This happened with thepiratebay and DNS. It happened with wikileaks and paypal. It happened at the ISP level with Signal during recent unrest in Iran. It happens with the US banking system anytime somebody manages to get somebody else on one of the OFAC lists. It happens to would-be radicals on twitter all the time. On the other hand, systems that don't involve implicit custodial trust don't have these problems, which is why journalists in China occasionally publish on Ethereum, because the Chinese censors don't have a single-point-of-failure to attack. I don't think that currencies are an especially interesting application (although the wikileaks case is an example where they are relevant to group coordination). It's just that the currencies are what gets hyped because they're relevant to the investment side--without them, there's less money to build the other stuff. Another example which I expect to emerge, but which I don't think has been developed yet, would be the use of NFT's in a successor system. If the leader of a movement gets apprehended or incapacitated and they don't check in after a certain number of blocks, then a contract moves the leadership token to their successor. This denotes the successor's signing keys as authoritative, and the leader's (presumably compromised) keys as deprecated. If you keep signatures on-chain you can also tell which ones were registered at a time when they were valid. You couldn't do this on AWS, somebody would just compel AWS to remove the data they don't like, you need something like a blockchain. But it only works if enough people are running nodes to make attacking all of the node operators infeasible. For that you need to provide incentives, and now we're back to cryptocurrency. For me it comes down to whether you think dissent is more important than preventing all of the shady business that goes on in secret online. I do, so I'm pro-crypto. The currency bit is an ugly necessity which I hope we can find a way to get rid of.
Demmme 3y ago
Destroying our planet even faster by tons and tons of Asics garbage and CO2 production Lucky enough VC is now going to ml
Kaytaro 3y ago
Giving individuals the power to be their own banks is not useless. Unpractical maybe, but not useless.
cultureswitch 3y ago
Imagine your business or employer is suddenly blacklisted by payment processors over political/cultural reasons. The advantages of crypto should become pretty clear at that point.
- greenie_beans 3y ago
  imagine your crypto wallet being blacklisted by a 51% attack, over political/cultural reasons.
  - sebzim4500 3y ago
    This hasn't happened to any large coins though, whereas people have had their bank accounts frozen for political reasons.
    - greenie_beans 3y ago
      imagine when the bank was invented and somebody said, "imagine if somebody's bank account is frozen for political reasons." and somebody said, "this hasn't happened to banks yet, but somebody's satchel got robbed for political reasons"

I could ask the same for a lot of things, though? Time shares, collectible card games, collectibles at large, fashion at large, etc. Not that I can or will wholly defend crypto. That just doesn't seem like a relevant complaint. I do question the desire for everlasting permanence of the blockchain. I know we like to keep real estate deed records and such going back as far as we can, but even there we have limited utility of that. Encasing it in a technical solution that expands to cover more transactions does feel limited in usefulness. Largely ironic/funny that it makes it incredibly unsuited to criminal use.

jakear 3y ago
> Time shares They bring the probability that you will be harassed by police/landowners/elements/civilians when residing in an area way down. Personally, I take the harassment and sleep on the street. But it's not easy and many would pay not to. > collectible card games You have fun when you play them. People pay to have fun. > collectibles at large Idk some people just get weird addictions. I put collectables at large in the same bucket as crypto, no defense there. > fashion at large Looking good is more likely to get you laid. People like getting laid, and will pay for it.
- taeric 3y ago
  Do note that the SEC's argument is usually along the lines of "if anybody is buying this to make money, then it is potentially a security." The "common enterprise" part makes it a bit different, but only a bit. Also note that time shares typically are securities, in my understanding. In contrast to a house, which is not. My argument there wasn't to identify some other things that are or are not securities, but "things that are kinda useless." In the case of timeshares, I'd say they are actively more harm than good.

alwayslikethis 3y ago

Permissionless electronic worldwide payment. That's it. An optional but good to have part is anonymity, which you get with Monero.

fullshark 3y ago

Economic actvity that you don't want a bank or government body to stop, so: illegal activity.

foodjinn 3y ago
Mastercard and paypal have both shut down legal activity in the last 4 years on the backs of government decisions or targeting legal, but politically inconvenient activity and there seems to be no slowing down on that avenue. Pornhub is one recent major example of that. The idea that it's just criminal enterprises that benefit from being able to participate in markets without interference is laughable at best given the increased interconnectedness between banks and the regulators themselves, especially not even 6 months after a rash of major banking failures within the traditional financial markets. There is very little reason to have a favorable opinion of the SEC following the 08 collapse given their own hand in it or the banking failures existing now, especially when they refuse to clarify their position on what is or is not a security so people CAN legally operate in the space. It appears to many both inside and outside of the space that the SEC is wielding its regulatory arm to create winners and losers, and with their own track record it's a failing proposition. It may be hyperbolic, but the holocaust was a legal activity in Nazi occupied territory.

matheusmoreira 3y ago

Monero is private and perfectly usable for payments. I've gotten paid in Monero, works great. People just need to start using it.

__MatrixMan__ 3y ago

Crypto is for coordinating group behavior in the presence of powerful adversaries (e.g. governments), always has been.

JohnFen 3y ago
Umm, OK. Funny that's not how it's been marketed. But I'm baffled as to how cryptocurrency is better for doing that than all of the other ways of doing that.
- __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
  The drugs I've bought with cryptocurrency have been cheaper and of better quality than the drugs I've bought with dollars, by a wide margin. So there's that. The marketing you're talking about is for the investors. By the nature of the product, the users have powerful adversaries and are probably operating in secret. You can't expect their use cases to show up in the marketing, that would defeat the purpose. Sure, you get the bad with the good. There are definitely unsavory things going on under the covers. But you have to weigh that against the misbehavior of the powerful in a world where they're more difficult to coordinate against due to a underdeveloped crypto. It's a trade off, but I think it's a worthwhile one.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    > in a world where they're more difficult to coordinate against due to a underdeveloped crypto. This is the part I don't understand. How does cryptocurrency make it easier to coordinate people than all the other tools we have to coordinate people?
    - __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
      If you rely on systems that involve implicit custodial trust (i.e. not crypto) to coordinate with your homies, and you have powerful adversaries, your adversaries will compel those custodians to prevent you from communicating with your homies. They also might find you and hurt you. This happened with thepiratebay and DNS. It happened with wikileaks and paypal. It happened at the ISP level with Signal during recent unrest in Iran. It happens with the US banking system anytime somebody manages to get somebody else on one of the OFAC lists. It happens to would-be radicals on twitter all the time. On the other hand, systems that don't involve implicit custodial trust don't have these problems, which is why journalists in China occasionally publish on Ethereum, because the Chinese censors don't have a single-point-of-failure to attack. I don't think that currencies are an especially interesting application (although the wikileaks case is an example where they are relevant to group coordination). It's just that the currencies are what gets hyped because they're relevant to the investment side--without them, there's less money to build the other stuff. Another example which I expect to emerge, but which I don't think has been developed yet, would be the use of NFT's in a successor system. If the leader of a movement gets apprehended or incapacitated and they don't check in after a certain number of blocks, then a contract moves the leadership token to their successor. This denotes the successor's signing keys as authoritative, and the leader's (presumably compromised) keys as deprecated. If you keep signatures on-chain you can also tell which ones were registered at a time when they were valid. You couldn't do this on AWS, somebody would just compel AWS to remove the data they don't like, you need something like a blockchain. But it only works if enough people are running nodes to make attacking all of the node operators infeasible. For that you need to provide incentives, and now we're back to cryptocurrency. For me it comes down to whether you think dissent is more important than preventing all of the shady business that goes on in secret online. I do, so I'm pro-crypto. The currency bit is an ugly necessity which I hope we can find a way to get rid of.

Demmme 3y ago

Destroying our planet even faster by tons and tons of Asics garbage and CO2 production Lucky enough VC is now going to ml

Kaytaro 3y ago

Giving individuals the power to be their own banks is not useless. Unpractical maybe, but not useless.

cultureswitch 3y ago

Imagine your business or employer is suddenly blacklisted by payment processors over political/cultural reasons. The advantages of crypto should become pretty clear at that point.

greenie_beans 3y ago
imagine your crypto wallet being blacklisted by a 51% attack, over political/cultural reasons.
- sebzim4500 3y ago
  This hasn't happened to any large coins though, whereas people have had their bank accounts frozen for political reasons.
  - greenie_beans 3y ago
    imagine when the bank was invented and somebody said, "imagine if somebody's bank account is frozen for political reasons." and somebody said, "this hasn't happened to banks yet, but somebody's satchel got robbed for political reasons"