atweiden

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151.
by atweiden 5y ago
When the PoW chain ‘pow’ forks into pow1 and pow2 with both sides claiming to be the original ‘pow’, the general public can compare the cumulative hashrate of pow1 and pow2 to ascertain legitimacy (see: Bitcoin v Bcash, 2016). In PoW, exter
152.
by atweiden 5y ago
See also: non-profit hijinks, e.g. individually managed funds and supporting organizations. With enough upfront capital and some administrative legwork, tax-free wealth management turns into “philanthropy”.
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by atweiden 5y ago
> Defi is only about 2-3 years old The history of defi can be traced back to mid-2013 (mastercoin) or earlier (colored coins). And what the cool kids are calling “defi” today was called “appcoins” and “utility coins” several years ago. I
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by atweiden 5y ago
There never was any real world application to cryptocurrency beyond what Satoshi invented in 2009 with Bitcoin — a global currency of fixed supply controlled by computer algorithms. Every coin launched subsequent to Bitcoin has been a money
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by atweiden 5y ago
“Digital gold” is just a euphemism for speculative store of value. Unlike most altcoins including several of the ones you mentioned, Bitcoin never (mis)represented itself as anything but that. Bitcoin never tried to say its use case was any
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by atweiden 5y ago
Or we could simply not use a blockchain for Doritos purchases. If we’re willing to do that — if we’re able to trade off “Fort Knox” security for Doritos — we can get dramatically higher speed and efficiency for those transactions, and the o
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by atweiden 5y ago
> It's really odd to me Lua is only used for games. It could take the same place Python has and many other things. It's a nice platform for scripting. I’ve written quite a bit of code in Fennel [1], a Lisp language which compil
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by atweiden 5y ago
I don’t quite catch your point. The chances your brain continues functioning over the next twelve minutes is not 100%, but 100% less some infinitesimally small fraction. 99.999999...% is as close physical reality ever comes to 100%. > Po
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by atweiden 5y ago
> BTCs "final" is just to wait some blocks its never final its just becomes incredibly unlikely to change the longer you wait. This is objectively worse than having a final state and on top of that it requires the history rathe
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by atweiden 5y ago
That’d be because Bitcoin awareness is c. 100% amongst altcoin investors. When an altcoin underperforms Bitcoin, its investors have traditionally realized the opportunity cost of holding it — particularly seeing as Bitcoin is the longest st
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by atweiden 5y ago
Centralization is key to imparting knowledge, establishing law and order, and securing our existence through terraforming the planet on an immense scale — which is what separates humans from animals. Scott Alexander uses the example of the
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by atweiden 5y ago
> I really don't know what you are talking about. ETH hit its all time high a few weeks ago (May 10th) both in terms of USD and BTC. Its still double it's ATH from its peak in 2018, before the crypto crash. > As to your othe
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by atweiden 5y ago
As anyone who was around to see the advent of “crypto TA” c. 2012 can attest, TA in the Bitcoin space started out as quantitative-themed narrative pumping, and it remains so to this very day. Crypto TA chartists self-promote and advertise c
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by atweiden 5y ago
That’s just a narrative, though. The practical reality is cryptocurrency valuation is driven by these narratives 100%. The other practical reality is the people pretending as if this reality doesn’t exist are increasingly perceived to be en
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by atweiden 5y ago
> So like yes, you can implement insurance and messaging and contracts with blockchain. Is there a need to do that? Does it make sense? Would that business work? (Zero percent of such businesses have worked) The tricky part of this, of c
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by atweiden 5y ago
> South Africa and Brazil have a common root cause of their crime problem: a tiny but grossly engorged upper class holds the majority of the wealth and income while everyone else eats mud. Studies correlating wealth inequality with crimi
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by atweiden 5y ago
Is the FemtoStar Credit Token a cryptocurrency? No, at least not by any usual definition of the term. While they are a digital system used to pay for service, and while they do make use of cryptographic signatures for se
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by atweiden 5y ago
> Crypto is a decentralized meme stock Yes — insofar as cryptocurrency market valuation is based entirely on narrative. No — in terms of it being possible to spend and store bitcoin sans trusted third parties. (E.g. a Chilean real estate
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by atweiden 5y ago
> I think the point is that at present the majority of cryptocurrency usage is in investment, trading, and hoarding- speculation as opposed to actually using it as a currency for everyday transactions. Which is in practice really no diff
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by atweiden 5y ago
The S&P is actually down since 1970 as measured in gold. Gold is strictly worse than Bitcoin on every front save for its ability to be used offline. (But even offline, gold transactions would require a great deal of care wrt anti-counte
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by atweiden 5y ago
> Nodes enforce the ruleset that miners must abide by, and can invalidate new blocks that miners generate. In practice, this means “nodes run by centralized exchanges”. Your narrative is fraught with risk. Basically “Bitcoin” is defined
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by atweiden 5y ago
Meme stock drum beating over social media isn’t the same thing as MLM. What’s the average PE ratio up to now on the S&P? Land, where? Real estate is just as inflated as the stock market if not moreso; it also comes with a tax liability
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by atweiden 5y ago
For a technology to be falsifiable, there needs to be an agreed upon method of measuring its fundamental failure. Even in cases like stablecoins where investors are provably losing millions of dollars on repeat oweing to fundamental design
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by atweiden 5y ago
> Crypto is opting out of real money is the same way buying an unstable stock is Cryptocurrencies are indeed traded like meme stocks — their value is 100% based on narrative. The difference is meme stocks can’t be electronically transact
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by atweiden 5y ago
> It shouldn't be much of a surprise to learn that the r/bitcoin sub, bitcointalk.org, and several other bitcoin communities are owned by one and the same person that have a history of censoring dissenting opinions. Just read u
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by atweiden 5y ago
Why is it “not useful” to opt out of the inflationary issuance of major government currencies?
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by atweiden 5y ago
Are “the many” being served by USD inflation rn? And can you name a cryptocurrency which is anything other than a speculative store of value, and not something whose market cap is based on drum beating over social media?
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by atweiden 5y ago
> You literally can't close the American brder. As a strict lower bound (based on CBP encounters) 3000 people walk through the desert or jump the fence every day, and statistically many of them have Covid. This is a constant source
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by atweiden 5y ago
> I think Ethereum 2.0 is currently demonstrating at scale that proof of stake works fine and can be secure against hordes of very incentivized hackers trying to cheat. That should hopefully bury the whole proof of stake is centralized a
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by atweiden 5y ago
> By that logic, diligent savers who put their money in a savings account to earn interest isn't "fair". It's fundamentally more fair to invest in expensive heavy machinery and dig precious metals out of the ground. I

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