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We - humans - could have had digital money - fast and fee-less, micro-transactions, decentralization, secure, anti-spam. Everything Bitcoin claimed to want to b

We - humans - could have had digital money - fast and fee-less, micro-transactions, decentralization, secure, anti-spam. Everything Bitcoin claimed to want to be. Instead we - the tech community - got smug about scams. People here get smug even toward the victims of scams. The attitude has been 'Who gives a flying fuck about the details of any crypto tech, or the potential of digital money'. 'It's all a scam, so I don't have to learn anything about it'. The baby got thrown out with the bathwater. The people working on actually good crypto have nothing to do with SBF. The only way in which they're affected by this is the extent to which they get tarred with the same brush. Edit: Y'all proving my point. You really don't see that? ... Look at how many of these responses lack table-stakes domain knowledge, missed the point, lack all imagination, and yet have a condescending tone. It's wild.

ryandvm 3y ago
Mmm. Maybe. It's still not clear to me that you can have a decentralized, P2P verification network that can handle anywhere near worldwide transaction volume. It's also not obvious to me that cryptocurrencies have value beyond "buying things you're not allowed to buy".
- southerntofu 3y ago
  A decentralized P2P verification network is not hard. What's hard is building a global consensus to order these transactions, and there's not really a satisfying solution to that problem. > It's also not obvious to me that cryptocurrencies have value beyond "buying things you're not allowed to buy". The same could be said about cash but that's an important aspect of life. Whether we're talking about drugs (like cannabis or shrooms) or getting an abortion, there's quite a few things you may not like to be confronted about by your local police.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    > The same could be said about cash but that's an important aspect of life. But there are a ton of very obvious uses for cash aside from for things that are illegal. I use it every single day.
    - southerntofu 3y ago
      Sure, but that's true also with cryptocurrencies. You can make donations to non-profits / free-software with them, or acquire hosting services (web/dns/vps/vpn). I don't think technology is neutral in the general sense, but money (whether cash of cryptocurrencies), much like a pen and paper, is the kind of tool you can use for the best and worst purposes and there's not any way to change short of an orwellian dystopia.
      - JohnFen 3y ago
        > that's true also with cryptocurrencies To a much lesser degree. I wouldn't be able to use cryptocurrencies for any of the things I use cash for. But that wasn't what was being asserted. The original assertion was "It's also not obvious to me that cryptocurrencies have value beyond "buying things you're not allowed to buy"." The same thing cannot be said of cash. (I don't agree with the assertion I quoted, to be clear. Aside from buying illegal goods, it's good for evading banking regulations and fees, but that's neither here nor there.)
        pauselaugh 3y ago
        the two core, dare i say intrinsic, values of cryptocurrency are 1) immutable, public ledger requiring no single point of authority and 2) that authority having zero bias or regulatory oversight on any transaction outside of its protocol. 1's value being a traceable permanent record and 2's value is no direct stepping in between a transaction or control over a holding. both of those, to many skeptics, are actually negatives and give more control and power to sovereign entities, not less. i am not including the pseudoanonymity of it for two reasons, 1) depending on the crypto, currently the level of sophistication to transact in a manner that any given address cannot personally identify you requires massive amounts of personal responsibility / knowledge and most importantly to most people, effort and 2) because the major way the current digital fiat channels handle the transaction volumes that they do is that they're built on a foundation of authentication linking to personal identification, and so the theorycraft of "sure it has a huge ecological footprint but it could replace the many-many-many times larger ecoprint of the entire fiat banking system" is disingenuous to me because in order to actually replicate that, any main network would be a duplicate of the current authentications backed by men with guns, it would just allow that sidechannel of p2p to have it's wild west. i do find it a touch humorous that those who want to shatter the fiat-police complex are quick to engage the legal system to protect and recoup from bad actors.
southerntofu 3y ago
Wait till you realize that any form of money is a scam designed to extort riches from the poorest producers and make those riches climb the social pyramid. Tongue in cheek comment of course, but that's an argument that can be defended.
- astrange 3y ago
  It's more like a way to trick farmers into producing food for you even though you don't right that second have something they want.
  - southerntofu 3y ago
    I don't think that's it. They have to do it because they themselves have bills to pay. However, if we're not talking about big industrial farms, most farmers are very much below the poverty line and have massive debt. So it's not exactly a facilitator of mutually-beneficial transactions, but rather a pyramid scheme. Who will profit from the food sale? The middlemen. Who will profit from the little money that the farmer pockets? Banks, Monsanto, etc..
    - pauselaugh 3y ago
      astrange had the right context but characterized it not-so-correctly. Modern agriculture's origin involved power structures where farmers were forced to be unable to be self-reliant, and would instead trade their crops at a market to get the other things they needed. The powers that be then had a nice, centralized place to take their cut and exchanges to offramp goods into currency. we're seeing it all over again with crypto via fiat reliance
    - astrange 3y ago
      Farmers didn't have bills to pay prior to the invention of bills though; some of them were subsistence farmers, some ran on IOUs, and some were slaves. > However, if we're not talking about big industrial farms, most farmers are very much below the poverty line and have massive debt. Median family farmer in the US is a millionaire (or their household is anyway). You're thinking of farmworkers. > Who will profit from the little money that the farmer pockets? Banks, Monsanto, etc.. This is 70s New Leftism "evil corporations" thought, but it's a bad approach. Small business owners (petit bourgeois / local gentry) are more evil than corporations. Farmers, who are largely a kind of landlord, extra so. For instance, the reason factory farms took over poultry in the US is that chickens were originally not valuable because there wasn't a market for chicken meat for the longest time. So the farmers left it to their wives to run. Once it became popular, all the farmers sold their businesses to the factory farms, because having no business was less embarrassing than letting a woman run one.
Yadayadaaaa 3y ago
"We - humans" had already a perfect PoS system called "existing fiat system" and noone should have allowed the virus 'crypto/PoW' making so much co2
causality0 3y ago
Which one's the good crypto again?
yunwal 3y ago
Fast and fee-less? Does that work on a distributed ledger? Is there some magic I’m missing to make consensus quick and cheap? Micro-transactions were never going to be feasible considering gas fees required to run a sufficiently secure blockchain app. Decentralized? I’m still confused. Has anyone actually solved the Oracle problem with crypto? How are we actually getting decentralization? Anti-spam??????? Ok that’s literally just crazy talk right? In what way does crypto have anything to do with spam? Afaict everything crypto-related still requires an email address to sign up if that’s what you mean.
- mandmandam 3y ago
  Block lattice tech has been around for seven years. All your points would be answered by looking into it - it's not a secret. Eg, Nano uses it. It's been working, efficient, safe, fast (<1 second) and completely fee-less, for seven years now. The entire network could run on a single windmill. It's tending toward decentralization because there's no mining, no staking, and there was a genuinely fair distribution. Fee-less transactions come with bad actors spamming the network with microscopic transactions, like a DDOS. So, Nano uses a 'bucket' system to keep things moving. Tbh, this is exactly what I mean - all of this ought to be well known. People in general have a massive blind spot on what money actually is, and a weird reluctance to discuss what it could be. We're talking about all the crypto that doesn't work, so much so that people don't even know there's good and working crypto right now. We're talking about the scammers, instead of the people doing cool things without seeking glory for it.
  - pauselaugh 3y ago
    Nano is a great example against your point as well. Its design flaw is the ORV system requiring someone who just wants the elevator pitch and their life to be wildly more efficient via using digital currency that's faster, safer, cheaper than their debit card having to educate themselves on what-even-is an ORV, how does the voting work, how do you know what a good representative is, and so on. And, as with a lot of the cryptos working on different vectors of what efficiency means, it's also its strength. It's, you know, how it's fast. So yes, o boy, if people just adopted it, informed themselves about it, and used it in volume "phase 2" could commence and as with crypto it comes in the form of major traffic revealing scalability necessities. Unfortunately who is going to do that to see in X years what the issues are, when there are the grandfather cryptos that do what they do and work how they work (sidestepping the "how they were meant to work/layer2 protocols don't count/cup of coffee as priority or no" dramatics). And so its largest general population adoption, friction creating flaw is that people do not want to be their own bank. This is absolutely where the smugness from the tech sector comes from regarding the unwashed masses clicking excel macros from email scammers and uninformed people not having a functioning BS-detector and opting in to be the greater fool because they know there is bound to be many more greater fools than themselves. The other bit that was omitted in your "we fixate on bitcoin and nfts and failures and dismiss the advancements smugly" is how many more declared-better-than cryptos have there been that didn't even make it to the scalability discussion that mature cryptos have and have modified and built systems around the transaction issues? Case in point, you say "genuinely fair distribution" but that's a massive *citation needed. Back to genpop, they will never think it is fair if they didn't know about it and someone they consider their peer was able to obtain it with relatively less work or cost than they'd have to right now. One of the key features of bitcoin (and maybe a small handful others) were that there was no ICO, and no opportunity to be unfair past you were either there and aware or you weren't. Now that more people are aware of the space in general, you cannot simply flip the switch without bad actors doing their thing. That era will never happen again, it was those people (or mmm intel agencies) at the forefront of dropping the tech in the wild interacting with it. That said, there-and-aware with those early cryptos had a relatively massive near decade-long runway. I honestly would not know where to begin with assessing all cryptos around in 2020 to form an opinion on viability for 2030. Those good ol' days had what, 6-12 to sort out and work on? Between 2018 and 2022 there are around 1,000 dead cryptos alone. I don't have the time to parse them all out and barely have the knowledge to assert that one that is dead should not be and has something worth pursuing. I don't want my jadedness of being in the space for 15+ years at this point to lead me by the nose, but my bias would definitely be "if it was worth pursuing, one of the big ones' communities would pursue it as it means more value and a better product" (conspiracies about new world order digi-currency agenda aside). Case in point, NFTs. Those in the know understand the potential value of an NFT and how they're not just "goofy internet jpgs" and have built in versions of systems accomodating them, or, you know, let parallel tech be the guinea pig. I can see use cases for them regarding licensing, but I can also see very little incentive for any entity to lose their centralized power to accomodate a tech that directly usurps it over time.
lern_too_spel 3y ago
When will the cryptocurrency promoters understand that society doesn't want decentralization? People don't want scammers going around taking people's money without recourse, causing a burden on everyone else. They have explicitly entrusted governments to claw back ill-gotten gains. It is just a matter of time until regulations on on-ramps and off-ramps hits cryptocurrencies to the point where they have all the same regulatory costs as centralized ledgers with the additional computational cost of decentralized ledgers.
chpatrick 3y ago
We have that in Europe, it's called SEPA.
batch12 3y ago
To be fair, that was a very tiny baby in the tub. Maybe in theory crypto could have been a perfect system, but in practice humans are flawed. It was doomed. It is horrible that these folks lost their vision. They didn't deserve that. Even in the context of crypto apes. It's easy (but boring) to make fun of them-- again humans are flawed.
sheepscreek 3y ago
I see your point, and you honestly have one. However, nothing in this world works solely based on logic. How many times have we heard xyz was the more optimal choice but abc won out. It’s because trust and perception are the other equally important dimensions. That said, North America isn’t the only market for crypto. There are many thriving economies in the world with a broken currency. Argentina, to name one, is constantly weighing down by hyperinflation but the sheer grit and talent of locals is keeping the country relevant. Argentinians are always looking for ways to save their earnings without losing to inflation. All that to say, there are still “real” problems waiting to be solved for which crypto can be a solution. In the west though, if it ain’t broke - you know the rest.
lemmsjid 3y ago
It isn't just the tech illuminati who associate Bitcoin with scams. Everyone in our neighborhood now knows that it's a regular occurrence for older people to get emergency calls from the "gas company" and rush to the corner store's Bitcoin kiosk so they can pay and not get their gas shut off.They then realize it was a scam and post on Nextdoor, Facebook, etc. While I know that cryptocurrency is not a scam, and while I know that such scams pre-exist Bitcoin, that is absolutely the perception that it's getting in our community amongst non-tech people. Your edit, BTW, is interesting. You tar all the responses with the same brush, "missed the point", "lack all imagination", and then accuse them of having a condescending tone? Do you have a sense there might be a two way street? While you do have a point, there's a lot of reasons why human dishonesty, e.g. scamming, prevents us from having a great many nice things that we could otherwise have.

ryandvm 3y ago

Mmm. Maybe. It's still not clear to me that you can have a decentralized, P2P verification network that can handle anywhere near worldwide transaction volume. It's also not obvious to me that cryptocurrencies have value beyond "buying things you're not allowed to buy".

southerntofu 3y ago
A decentralized P2P verification network is not hard. What's hard is building a global consensus to order these transactions, and there's not really a satisfying solution to that problem. > It's also not obvious to me that cryptocurrencies have value beyond "buying things you're not allowed to buy". The same could be said about cash but that's an important aspect of life. Whether we're talking about drugs (like cannabis or shrooms) or getting an abortion, there's quite a few things you may not like to be confronted about by your local police.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  > The same could be said about cash but that's an important aspect of life. But there are a ton of very obvious uses for cash aside from for things that are illegal. I use it every single day.
  - southerntofu 3y ago
    Sure, but that's true also with cryptocurrencies. You can make donations to non-profits / free-software with them, or acquire hosting services (web/dns/vps/vpn). I don't think technology is neutral in the general sense, but money (whether cash of cryptocurrencies), much like a pen and paper, is the kind of tool you can use for the best and worst purposes and there's not any way to change short of an orwellian dystopia.
    - JohnFen 3y ago
      > that's true also with cryptocurrencies To a much lesser degree. I wouldn't be able to use cryptocurrencies for any of the things I use cash for. But that wasn't what was being asserted. The original assertion was "It's also not obvious to me that cryptocurrencies have value beyond "buying things you're not allowed to buy"." The same thing cannot be said of cash. (I don't agree with the assertion I quoted, to be clear. Aside from buying illegal goods, it's good for evading banking regulations and fees, but that's neither here nor there.)
      - pauselaugh 3y ago
        the two core, dare i say intrinsic, values of cryptocurrency are 1) immutable, public ledger requiring no single point of authority and 2) that authority having zero bias or regulatory oversight on any transaction outside of its protocol. 1's value being a traceable permanent record and 2's value is no direct stepping in between a transaction or control over a holding. both of those, to many skeptics, are actually negatives and give more control and power to sovereign entities, not less. i am not including the pseudoanonymity of it for two reasons, 1) depending on the crypto, currently the level of sophistication to transact in a manner that any given address cannot personally identify you requires massive amounts of personal responsibility / knowledge and most importantly to most people, effort and 2) because the major way the current digital fiat channels handle the transaction volumes that they do is that they're built on a foundation of authentication linking to personal identification, and so the theorycraft of "sure it has a huge ecological footprint but it could replace the many-many-many times larger ecoprint of the entire fiat banking system" is disingenuous to me because in order to actually replicate that, any main network would be a duplicate of the current authentications backed by men with guns, it would just allow that sidechannel of p2p to have it's wild west. i do find it a touch humorous that those who want to shatter the fiat-police complex are quick to engage the legal system to protect and recoup from bad actors.

southerntofu 3y ago

Wait till you realize that any form of money is a scam designed to extort riches from the poorest producers and make those riches climb the social pyramid. Tongue in cheek comment of course, but that's an argument that can be defended.

astrange 3y ago
It's more like a way to trick farmers into producing food for you even though you don't right that second have something they want.
- southerntofu 3y ago
  I don't think that's it. They have to do it because they themselves have bills to pay. However, if we're not talking about big industrial farms, most farmers are very much below the poverty line and have massive debt. So it's not exactly a facilitator of mutually-beneficial transactions, but rather a pyramid scheme. Who will profit from the food sale? The middlemen. Who will profit from the little money that the farmer pockets? Banks, Monsanto, etc..
  - pauselaugh 3y ago
    astrange had the right context but characterized it not-so-correctly. Modern agriculture's origin involved power structures where farmers were forced to be unable to be self-reliant, and would instead trade their crops at a market to get the other things they needed. The powers that be then had a nice, centralized place to take their cut and exchanges to offramp goods into currency. we're seeing it all over again with crypto via fiat reliance
  - astrange 3y ago
    Farmers didn't have bills to pay prior to the invention of bills though; some of them were subsistence farmers, some ran on IOUs, and some were slaves. > However, if we're not talking about big industrial farms, most farmers are very much below the poverty line and have massive debt. Median family farmer in the US is a millionaire (or their household is anyway). You're thinking of farmworkers. > Who will profit from the little money that the farmer pockets? Banks, Monsanto, etc.. This is 70s New Leftism "evil corporations" thought, but it's a bad approach. Small business owners (petit bourgeois / local gentry) are more evil than corporations. Farmers, who are largely a kind of landlord, extra so. For instance, the reason factory farms took over poultry in the US is that chickens were originally not valuable because there wasn't a market for chicken meat for the longest time. So the farmers left it to their wives to run. Once it became popular, all the farmers sold their businesses to the factory farms, because having no business was less embarrassing than letting a woman run one.

Yadayadaaaa 3y ago

"We - humans" had already a perfect PoS system called "existing fiat system" and noone should have allowed the virus 'crypto/PoW' making so much co2

causality0 3y ago

Which one's the good crypto again?

yunwal 3y ago

Fast and fee-less? Does that work on a distributed ledger? Is there some magic I’m missing to make consensus quick and cheap? Micro-transactions were never going to be feasible considering gas fees required to run a sufficiently secure blockchain app. Decentralized? I’m still confused. Has anyone actually solved the Oracle problem with crypto? How are we actually getting decentralization? Anti-spam??????? Ok that’s literally just crazy talk right? In what way does crypto have anything to do with spam? Afaict everything crypto-related still requires an email address to sign up if that’s what you mean.

mandmandam 3y ago
Block lattice tech has been around for seven years. All your points would be answered by looking into it - it's not a secret. Eg, Nano uses it. It's been working, efficient, safe, fast (<1 second) and completely fee-less, for seven years now. The entire network could run on a single windmill. It's tending toward decentralization because there's no mining, no staking, and there was a genuinely fair distribution. Fee-less transactions come with bad actors spamming the network with microscopic transactions, like a DDOS. So, Nano uses a 'bucket' system to keep things moving. Tbh, this is exactly what I mean - all of this ought to be well known. People in general have a massive blind spot on what money actually is, and a weird reluctance to discuss what it could be. We're talking about all the crypto that doesn't work, so much so that people don't even know there's good and working crypto right now. We're talking about the scammers, instead of the people doing cool things without seeking glory for it.
- pauselaugh 3y ago
  Nano is a great example against your point as well. Its design flaw is the ORV system requiring someone who just wants the elevator pitch and their life to be wildly more efficient via using digital currency that's faster, safer, cheaper than their debit card having to educate themselves on what-even-is an ORV, how does the voting work, how do you know what a good representative is, and so on. And, as with a lot of the cryptos working on different vectors of what efficiency means, it's also its strength. It's, you know, how it's fast. So yes, o boy, if people just adopted it, informed themselves about it, and used it in volume "phase 2" could commence and as with crypto it comes in the form of major traffic revealing scalability necessities. Unfortunately who is going to do that to see in X years what the issues are, when there are the grandfather cryptos that do what they do and work how they work (sidestepping the "how they were meant to work/layer2 protocols don't count/cup of coffee as priority or no" dramatics). And so its largest general population adoption, friction creating flaw is that people do not want to be their own bank. This is absolutely where the smugness from the tech sector comes from regarding the unwashed masses clicking excel macros from email scammers and uninformed people not having a functioning BS-detector and opting in to be the greater fool because they know there is bound to be many more greater fools than themselves. The other bit that was omitted in your "we fixate on bitcoin and nfts and failures and dismiss the advancements smugly" is how many more declared-better-than cryptos have there been that didn't even make it to the scalability discussion that mature cryptos have and have modified and built systems around the transaction issues? Case in point, you say "genuinely fair distribution" but that's a massive *citation needed. Back to genpop, they will never think it is fair if they didn't know about it and someone they consider their peer was able to obtain it with relatively less work or cost than they'd have to right now. One of the key features of bitcoin (and maybe a small handful others) were that there was no ICO, and no opportunity to be unfair past you were either there and aware or you weren't. Now that more people are aware of the space in general, you cannot simply flip the switch without bad actors doing their thing. That era will never happen again, it was those people (or mmm intel agencies) at the forefront of dropping the tech in the wild interacting with it. That said, there-and-aware with those early cryptos had a relatively massive near decade-long runway. I honestly would not know where to begin with assessing all cryptos around in 2020 to form an opinion on viability for 2030. Those good ol' days had what, 6-12 to sort out and work on? Between 2018 and 2022 there are around 1,000 dead cryptos alone. I don't have the time to parse them all out and barely have the knowledge to assert that one that is dead should not be and has something worth pursuing. I don't want my jadedness of being in the space for 15+ years at this point to lead me by the nose, but my bias would definitely be "if it was worth pursuing, one of the big ones' communities would pursue it as it means more value and a better product" (conspiracies about new world order digi-currency agenda aside). Case in point, NFTs. Those in the know understand the potential value of an NFT and how they're not just "goofy internet jpgs" and have built in versions of systems accomodating them, or, you know, let parallel tech be the guinea pig. I can see use cases for them regarding licensing, but I can also see very little incentive for any entity to lose their centralized power to accomodate a tech that directly usurps it over time.

lern_too_spel 3y ago

When will the cryptocurrency promoters understand that society doesn't want decentralization? People don't want scammers going around taking people's money without recourse, causing a burden on everyone else. They have explicitly entrusted governments to claw back ill-gotten gains. It is just a matter of time until regulations on on-ramps and off-ramps hits cryptocurrencies to the point where they have all the same regulatory costs as centralized ledgers with the additional computational cost of decentralized ledgers.

chpatrick 3y ago

We have that in Europe, it's called SEPA.

batch12 3y ago

To be fair, that was a very tiny baby in the tub. Maybe in theory crypto could have been a perfect system, but in practice humans are flawed. It was doomed. It is horrible that these folks lost their vision. They didn't deserve that. Even in the context of crypto apes. It's easy (but boring) to make fun of them-- again humans are flawed.

sheepscreek 3y ago

I see your point, and you honestly have one. However, nothing in this world works solely based on logic. How many times have we heard xyz was the more optimal choice but abc won out. It’s because trust and perception are the other equally important dimensions. That said, North America isn’t the only market for crypto. There are many thriving economies in the world with a broken currency. Argentina, to name one, is constantly weighing down by hyperinflation but the sheer grit and talent of locals is keeping the country relevant. Argentinians are always looking for ways to save their earnings without losing to inflation. All that to say, there are still “real” problems waiting to be solved for which crypto can be a solution. In the west though, if it ain’t broke - you know the rest.

lemmsjid 3y ago

It isn't just the tech illuminati who associate Bitcoin with scams. Everyone in our neighborhood now knows that it's a regular occurrence for older people to get emergency calls from the "gas company" and rush to the corner store's Bitcoin kiosk so they can pay and not get their gas shut off.They then realize it was a scam and post on Nextdoor, Facebook, etc. While I know that cryptocurrency is not a scam, and while I know that such scams pre-exist Bitcoin, that is absolutely the perception that it's getting in our community amongst non-tech people. Your edit, BTW, is interesting. You tar all the responses with the same brush, "missed the point", "lack all imagination", and then accuse them of having a condescending tone? Do you have a sense there might be a two way street? While you do have a point, there's a lot of reasons why human dishonesty, e.g. scamming, prevents us from having a great many nice things that we could otherwise have.