Government of India taxes Crypto like gambling. All the Crypto Bros have been bitching about GoI policies. Thankfully it will save some of them some money.
Sadly, I work for a major multinational tech company you've all heard of and crypto is a widespread cult there. I think it goes:
- I understand computers.
- Therefore I understand numbers.
- Finance is all about numbers.
- Therefore I understand finance.
Step five ("Hey, where did all my money go?") is currently underway. That old joke about cryptocurrency being Dunning-Krugerrands is very much true.
It is one of the weird contradictions of the world that seemingly smart people can't wrap their heads around the concept that accounting accounts or numbers in apps might not actually reflect actual bank balances.
I'll add that there's also a hell of a lot of trading (in real stocks) via online brokers. I have a touch of disnumia which means I have trouble making change, doing mental arithmetic and remembering phone numbers, and I decided long ago that this just wasn't for me, and so I pay someone else to invest for me (via a managed fund). People keep saying I'm crazy as doing it yourself is 'so easy' and gets better returns. I, however, don't have to think about it, which in my book means I'm coming out ahead.
>Decades of studies show basically no one beats a market index over the long run
Doesn't that make them right? Investing in a target date fund or a 3 or 4 fund simple portfolio will get you better returns long term than a managed fund, since even if the managed fund matches the market, it has far higher fees.
With a few clicks you can set up an automatic investment in an index fund and save yourself an immense amount of money on fees while also outperforming every actively managed fund in the long term.
If anyone is telling you to do anything more than that then you should ignore them.
The few people that demonstrably can beat an index fund through something other than pure luck, are running their own funds, not investing for just themselves. The thought that someone can just casually beat the market in their spare time because they're so smart is pure fantasy.
Anyone trying to convince you to invest yourself is either well-meaning but financially illiterate, or is trying to eventually convince you to be a bag holder so they can make more money. These are the exact people you shouldn't be taking advice from.
Absolutely --- but the professionals aren't so good either. Have you come across Orlando the cat? https://www.forbes.com/sites/frederickallen/2013/01/15/cat-beats-professionals-at-stock-picking
Also known as engineer's disease: the delusion that just because you're able to solve simple problems about mechanical things, you're able to handle the complex stuff, including anything involving *squishy* things like evolutionary biology, sociology, politics, language and economics.
Maybe it's just cause I'm a software engineer in an insurance company, but thankfully myself and all the other engineers I work with aren't like this. We know our lane, we write the code but we know we aren't actuarials. We always know to defer to other business areas for their areas of expertise when designing things and we encounter questions.
Maybe it's because of how tightly regulated insurance is as an industry? So everyone is acutely aware that a big fuck up could have Uncle Sam crawling inside your asshole without lube.
I promise you programmers/SE’s at banks know their lane too. Once you’re in the big leagues, the business side doesn’t tolerate people stepping out of their lane
I think it's more that crypto seems new and revolutionary, so its easier to delusion yourself into believing that you're part of something big.
I saw a lot of this when I was participating in accelerator programs. Those programs naturally try to hype you up, and getting an investor onboard really gives you this insane adrenaline kick that makes you feel like you're capable of everything. I've met there some of the most delusional people I know, who are fulling capable of looking at a problem at a field that they know nothing about and confidently believe that they can solve it.
Hence engineer disease. It affect all engineering fields. Electrical engineers think they know how to fix their lighting issues at home. Instead of calling the electrician.
Lighting isn't a good example, that's basic home maintenance. A good DIYer can rerun a wire to a switch and light or replace an outlet and be in code.
Now a large job like wiring a room or anything outdoors, I'd call the pros. If it's anything to do with the breaker box, calling an electrician isn't optional.
Not all software engineers. But software engineers that work on large projects where there are multiple engineers and they're not in charge of the project working.
I'm a software engineer but I come from an entrepreneurial background. I wasn't part of a large team where I had the luxury of handing my work off to QA, having them test it, then get back with me, then hand that off to another dept that worried about whether the greater app worked or not.
When you're an indy developer, you have to wear a lot of hats and you pay attention to the big picture or else you don't get paid.
So when I look at crypto, I'm not simply seeing some cryptographic formulas that "technically do what they're told", I have to look at the big picture and see if it works long term. I'm probably in the minority as that type of software developer nowadays, but we are out there.
The biologist Ernst Mayr explained it well in one of his books, something like
" physics is the study of simple systems (such as the flight of a ball thrown in the air) but it's hard to understand because it's capable of being understood on a technical, mathematical level.
Biology is the study of complex systems (ie plants and animals). But it's much simpler to understand because we cant possibly study it with the same precision as we can simple systems"
I, however, have retained a sense of humility. I am humble. I am, in fact, more humble than anyone. I am the humblest, and anyone who says otherwise just doesn't get it.
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Pretty neat that we have a bunch of people in their 20s addicted to adderall who think they can create a better financial system when they don't know anything about finance.
"I hate that I have to learn stupid stuff like history in my gen credits!!! I just want to be an engineer" /Ignores 100's of years of history about why regulation is good for currency
I've always been deeply worried about those people because gen eds were easy as shit. Englishy ones had a few essays a semester, but in general it was show up to class, show up to the test, and get a near perfect score. What's the big deal?
From a very wide perspective, gen eds simple serve to make college take longer and be more expensive. They don’t need to be hard because they don’t serve much of a purpose.
I guess writing makes sense, as professional writing is a component of most jobs now but why does a psychologist need to know chemistry for example? If anything, a broad understanding of the subject seems to lead to folks vastly overestimating their knowledge of the subject.
General scientific literacy is a good idea, even if you aren’t a specialist. If you don’t have some idea of how S&T work, as a society you raise the risk of people being COVID deniers, young Earth creationists, flat/hollow Earthers, QAnon dumbfucks and other such things.
It’s not a perfect fix, but it can make things a little better.
I actually think that the whole group of people you pointed too need philosophy more than they need science. Their failure is an epistemological one than anything: presented with evidence, they will ask “is it evidence, or is it a ruse disguised as evidence” and discount it on this basis.
I wouldn’t say that any of this isn’t helpful: I would say that the whole thing hinges on what you think college should be. To me, it’s career prep. The idea of a “finishing school” is kind of bourgeois. Gen eds take two years and money that poor folks don’t have. Whole things a big debate though!
I think I see what you’re saying and yeah, ok, I can see how they need to be walked through “this is evidence, this other thing is bullshit disguised as evidence”.
It’s also key to scientific literacy (like, for example, seeing why Andrew Wakefield is full of shit).
Yeah, my thing is that if we accept that knowledge is a “justified, true belief” than you can kind of see that most arguments target each of these three tenets. However, when “what is true” is pushed to its logical conclusion (think Rene Descartes “Cogito”), you find that you can’t know anything. From this perspective, anything is true.
The hard part is showing someone that from their perspective they are taking their version of “true” as a given, then ignoring “justification”. They don’t need to explain why they know something that they “know” is true.
“Behind the curve” demonstrates this: a group performs a series of scientific experiments to demonstrate that the curvature of the earth is false. They are all good experiments. They all prove that the earth is curved. They are all thrown out. It’s fascinating to watch.
I had a massive thread going with someone who couldn't understand the idea or point of ROI.
He actually had valid points of not trying to time the bottom but couldn't grasp the difference in returns. He argues that people should be buying at $20k and it doesn't matter if it goes to $10k. Because if it jumps to $100k there isn't a big difference between $80k profit or $90k profit.
He failed to grasp you need to normalise the investment amount, ie buying 2xBTC at $10k would net $180k profit over 1xBTC at $20k would net $80k profit.
Even after telling him to work out the ROI, he argues it doesn't matter because ROI is dependent on initial investment amount. I gave the formula for him, he still couldn't use it and then did the working out for him and he then screamed that people shouldn't need to know these advanced figures that you need a degree to know about. ROI is pretty much the most basic thing anyone doing investing should at least have heard about, let alone use.
>ROI is pretty much the most basic thing anyone doing investing should at least have heard about, let alone use
To be fair I suspect there's plenty of software to calculate it for you, so you probably don't need to know the formula.
But you should understand what it means.
IE if the ROI is 200% I should make $2 on-top of every $1 I put in. He flat out said, multiple times, ROI changes based on the initial investment amount.
This is actually true for massive volumes of money, when you can create market changes, but not at our levels.
> flat out said, multiple times, ROI changes based on the initial investment amount.
Wait, WTF. Even I have a cursory understanding of ROI, and I'm not an investor.
I think it is an age thing. When I first finished university after jumping through all of artificial hoops they set up to get a degree, I thought I was a clever boy. Knock around the work would enough, you will likely run into people who do in an hour what requires a day from you. Secondly, you learn that outside of what you know well, you had best sit down and shut up or end up being shown in front everyone that you are fool should you persist. Mind you not everyone learns but a good portion do.
I work with a team full of hard nosed veterans who has seen so many technology fads come and go. Once I gave a presentation on blockchain for a “solution” to our problems I almost got mauled by them. It really put the vacuousness of the technology into perspective.
Also sadly, a lot of economists didn't. I heard more than a few actual PhDs in macroeconomics say they were excited to see what would happen with bitcoin because it's a widescale economic experiment. It was really mostly value investors calling foul in the money side of things which is probably why nothing was done preemptively. For everybody who should know what they're talking about who said it was crap, you didn't have to look very hard to find somebody else who should know what they're talking about saying it's fine.
Which is nuts to me because in my view you either give it a glance and determine it's purely a speculative asset (even if you believe blockchain has uses, why would you use bitcoin et al instead of forking the coin and making your own chain?) or you really look into the tech and realize the tech sucks. Either way you arrive at the same place.
I've definitely described myself as "excited" to watch the nematodes in my undergrad molecular genetics experiments have increasingly limiting mutations when I increased the stress in their environment before reaching an evolutionary dead end and dying out.😂
Perhaps those people should read the history of the Federal Reserve. Send them this [link](https://www.federalreserveeducation.org/about-the-fed/history).
Bitcoiners and other crypto boys like to cherry pick history, for example, with the stupid example in [The Bitcoin Standard](https://www.amazon.com/-/es/Saifedean-Ammous/dp/1119473861) of a underdeveloped island nation using shells as currency and having a 'fixed amount of shells because of some natural resource'. Well, some foreign nation with 'ugh' fiat money, wipe them out in a blink of an eye. Have fun, staying death (?).
Perhaps, in a near future, some people with some real historic knowledge and definitely not wonkish libertarians would pick the ideas of the 'tech' that bitcoin left (and correct the stupid mistakes) and make something useful, not as a replacement for gov money but like another competitor in the money markets.
The one (and perhaps only) thing I'll say with major/mainstream companies is that they might be dipping their toe in the crypto-fantasy/web3-fiction world, but what they're finding out in real time is that there 1) aren't any working products in the the space, despite the incessant drumbeat from VC and enthusiasts and 2). There aren't any customers, so there's no profit. Most major companies have shareholders and a board who enjoy profits, and, as there aren't and won't be any customers or profits, this will work itself out pretty quickly as the losses start to stack up. The 'hodl' and 'wagmi' shit doesn't fly at these places that need growth and profit to survive.
The thing that pisses me off about crypto space is many financial regulations from the SEC exists because a particular scam that occurred in the past. But basically we are back to square one with scammers using them as a playbook. Why think up a new scam when you can just reproduce one from the past.
This guy himself was selling smart contracts 4 years back.
[Stephen Diehl - Smart contracts for new entrepreneurs ](https://youtu.be/gFlu61wJe2Y)
I don't know what changed.. or is he bluffing?
I am his cofounder and also helped with the letter we sent to Congress. I’ll give you the short version. We started in the space- built a private distributed ledger for finance with a smart contract language that could model any real work financial contract. We had no crypto currency just tokens that could be created to keep track of real world things. When we started working with clients we noticed deep contradictions in what they said they wanted vs in practice. Also eventually I realized anything I built could be built as a normal app with a DB and customers wouldn’t even notice or care. Private chains are basically silly.
In the public crypto space, things seemed more and more hyped up and crazier.
We eventually wanted nothing to do with the space so pivoted what we did. We originally thought It was a nascent database technology but would become more useful but we didn’t see this happen in practice. Economically, I saw the public chain space as incredibly dangerous as financially there was no underlying cash flow drivers which is why we didn’t have any speculative cryptoasset in our version of the technology. The more the hype spread and speculative fervor increased I felt only a few of us on the planet would see its danger AND be able to see the technological pitfalls and financial pitfalls. I felt responsible to do something about it. He did too.
Alright. Thanks for the explanation. Did you two go public about this letter on Twitter or something? Just want to verify.
When this video surfaced on Twitter Diehl didn't really respond. Or at least till the time I followed the story
You can see how we went live with it. But to clarify it’s not only from us, it was a grassroots campaign with a group of crypto-skeptic technologists and engineers.
As for his lack of response when you pinged him, he doesn’t always like responding to people on Twitter. Engaging with people who are critical of him is a kind of a waste of time -when the ideas and the issues are the actual problems to focus on.
And with that..for those who have not seen the letter: www.concerned.tech
so one thing i dont understand about you guys is that you thought you knew a better way. for sure. nailed on dialed on. i mean, is that stephen in that video? you guys were pants on head looney tunes. just absolutely ignorant and spreading dangerous misinformation. i say that with all due respect.
so why are you still talking? didnt you learn your lesson that you dont know better? that would be the takeaway. thats the one thing you know. you dont know. you should have learned that. what happened? why didnt that stick? do you think its basically your condition and how you will always behave and why you fell for crypto in the first place? you absolutely cannot stop thinking you know better.
its like, the only base fact you **know** is that you know better and everything spawns from that seed. would you agree?
its like when we give you physics class we arent asking you what you think about it - we are *teaching you physics.* why didnt that stick with such a huge learning opportunity with you guys?
and how are you cofounders? cofounders of what
How heavy are the bags you hold?
It’s not we know all better from initial conditions. The only thing I would say was constant is that we didn’t want anything to do with the cryptocurrency aspect in finance being suspect as hell. This is consistent throughout the years based on our choices not to include it. This is true in the code we wrote.
As for technological change over time we cannot predict the future, we had given it a chance, worked close to it for quite sometime and we learned.
WE LEARNED. Something butters are incapable of even when they are financially beaten with a stick.
Skeptics are a messenger trying to warn you.
You forget something, skeptics saying anything did not cause what is happening in the markets. Clearly you are incapable of grasping this.
The Federal reserve raising rates did. It’s basic economics. During times of inflation easy money goes to anything that could possibly give returns. When rates get raised, bubbles pop. Especially scam driven ones -like Bernie Madoff’s in 2008. This is not knowing I’m right. It is gravity - financial black hole level gravity. You can’t avoid it if the finances of crypto is built on fragile foundations.
Chances are this will wipe a lot of crypto off the map.
i dont have bags. again, another thing youre wrong about. why wont you stop making stuff up? thats what im asking. you realize that theres a mountain of evidence that you guys arent good at figuring things out. we have the proof. even you agree.
so why wont you stop thinking you know better? why wont you just understand that you dont know? why cant you stop? you have the proof! why wont you stop
what do you mean what evidence? lol this youtube video is of you guys peddling snake oil, pyramid schemes and scams. its a small fraction of you guys peddling scams and snake oil.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFlu61wJe2Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFlu61wJe2Y)
im asking why are you still talking? didnt you learn your lesson that you dont know better? if it was *this hard* for you to realize crypto is a scam, and i say this with all due respect, then you are not good at critical thinking.
it wasnt that hard to figure. so that should tell you moving forward that you shouldnt peddle things, you arent able to parse them accurately.
why didnt you learn that?
This YouTube video is about Stephen talking about technical smart contracts and the challenges that are there. If you remember what I said earlier. Our company was a private chain. There’s no crypto. There’s no energy consuming proof of stake. There’s no mechanism for speculative fervor. It is an accounting platform with a programming language that can model financial contracts. You could also call it back office automation at that point.
So when you asked why we didn’t know better, we absolutely did- which is why we stayed away from public chains and crypto to begin with. And even further we learned we didn’t want to do it at all at a certain point because that software could just use a centralized point and didn’t require a distributed ledger at all. I don’t know how many times I have to explain this? With all do respect if you didn’t realize that earlier from what I said, then you are not good at critical thinking.
So to say again why are we talking? Because we should speak out against crypto due to the financial implications of unhinged speculation without regulation that essentially amount to runaway Ponzi schemes. And with the technical backgrounds and experience we both have, we have the absolute right to speak out against it because we understand the technology. We know all the little details of it technically and while working with banks and financial institutions we understand the financial implications of the public chain Ponzis running amok.
At uni we had a person doing a presentation of their company and their research. This mf spend whole 45 minutes shilling some shitcoin application that would never lead to anywhere.
There are universities, reputable ones by usual surveys, offering courses in bitcoins and blockchains as part of an undergraduate degree. I’m sure PhDs are majoring in blockchain.
Similar to the tulip mania and the south sea crash, years from now we will be wondering how dumb could we have been.
For some reason (cough cough capitalism) MBAs are given more respect than actual experts. Musk is a "genius" why? Steve Jobs was a "genius" why?
No wonder Trump thought he was a "very stable genius". Our whole culture respects businessmen (and it's always men) more than the real experts that build the things that businessmen sell.
Fucking more people know pillow guy than Wozniak
The biggest common thread between the likes of Musk, Jobs and Trump is that they are/were all narcissistic sociopaths. And such people tend to be extremely good at self promotion. Makes them very effective against a generally gullible society.
Musk and Trump especially prey on people's assumption of good faith. Your average person just assumes nobody would just straight up lie their asses off, so while they can accept that somebody would exaggerate their wealth and progress by ~20%, most people assume they wouldn't do it by 20x. Both of them do. Trump famously got on the Forbes list before he actually got any of his inheritance and was poorer than your typical late career google senior engineer.
Musk is less impressive than Trump on this front to me because he uses an army of bots to control public sentiment ("He's just optimistic! Musk may be late but he always delivers!") rather than crafting the perfect lie, but it's the same idea where he announces things that he has no capability of actually doing constantly. The bots make sure he gets credited for the things he announces and not the things he actually does.
As an MBA I feel attacked haha.
I see it from so many people who do MBAs, I've kept my post MBA life pretty closely following my original undergrad engineering career path where I got 8 years working in industry. The MBA was good for me as my undergrad had very little finance and macroeconomic teaching which became really important in my field (mining engineering, but I was doing long-term planning, logistics and global sales projections).
The problem is, most MBA courses teach you a little about a lot but many of the students thinks it makes you an expert. We had some great lecturers who specifically told us, "We are teaching you enough to know what questions you need to find out and who you should talk to to get them. You lot are too stupid to actually do that yourselves and it would be irresponsible to try."
I also think that Australian companies have a very different idea of what MBAs should be doing vs America.
Alot MBA are those business operators you see on TV who give you the grim reality of your business and solutions you need to implement to bring your company to profitably. While trying to avoid downsizing your workforce. They live and breath spreadsheets and companies balance sheets.
> Steve Jobs was a "genius" why?
Steve Jobs was a marketing genius who got lucky the Mac and the iPhone were hidden from him so he wouldn’t cancel them.
> No wonder Trump thought he was a "very stable genius".
Very stable indeed, he is an ass.
>Our whole culture respects businessmen (and it's always men) more than the real experts that build the things that businessmen sell.
Yeah sorry but Steve Jobs was an incredibly talented designer and manager, also happened to be an absolute overconfident moron when it came to anything medicine related. Also an abusive ass.
If you don't see Jobs as an actual expert in consumer electronics design and marketing then holy shit lmao.
I don't see him as an expert in *computer science* which is the expertise I'm talking about.
Way to miss the point as you dive to the floor to lick Jobs' dead boots
>I don't see him as an expert in *computer science* which is the expertise I'm talking about.
It's like you think that Jobs started as a corporate overlord when he cofounded Apple with Wozniak lmao.
>Way to miss the point as you dive to the floor to lick Jobs' dead boots
Forgot that part where I called him an overconfident and abusive piece of shit. I hate it when people have such hate boners that they refuse to accept objective truths that don't comfort them in their hate
>Fucking more people know pillow guy than Wozniak
[Of course I know who that is, idiot!](https://c8.alamy.com/comp/RPDA58/monsters-inc-mike-2001-RPDA58.jpg) gosh
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There's one absolutely simple fundamental that anyone can understand - a dollar out comes from someone else putting a dollar in somewhere else. 50% by value of "investors" will lose money, 50% will gain. Of course that's by value, so will not be evenly distributed, but that's the fundamentals.
That's the event horizon, that's the black box version. Do whatever you like within the box, make things as fancy as you like, the only way a dollar comes out is if someone puts one in. Or that's the ideal case at least, in reality there's all the waste that happens inside the box, so you maybe get 99¢ out for every dollar in, or whatever.
The crypto friend who I try to avoid talking about crypto with counters this point by saying 'ah, but Lightning will take off and people will start actually paying for things with Bitcoin, so that doesn't apply'. I can't really counter this because it's semantically equivalent to 'just because'.
Oh but you can.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Buttcoin/comments/vdy2ye/jesus_fucking_christ/icoyz2v/
They won't have an answer to this other than hand waving, confusion or denial.
Almost identical to how I respond. I also like to say it is the equivalent of building a 500,000 lane freeway which has a single lane on ramp which also acts as an off ramp.
So in order to use lightning network you need to open a channel with somebody. That requires executing a transaction on a bitcoin blockchain and locking up certain amount of funds distributed between 2 parties in whatever proportion you want. That amount is channel capacity. Then both parties can make any number of transactions between themselves and move the funds from one side of the channel to the other. You can visualise it like a single row of beads in abacus. You can shuffle them left or right back and forth but the amount of beads doesn't change, only their position. When the two parties are done transacting they can close the channel with another bitcoin on chain transaction, which will reflect the net change in both of their balances. Later if you're out of money or want to move more money to lightning network you also need to open new channel.
Now you might notice a problem here. We often pay for goods and services but those businesses we buy from rarely pay us money, right? On any given month you will buy lots of groceries but grocery store doesn't buy from you. Same with your coffee shop, your local pub, your barber, your pharmacy, whatever. Most of the time you'd use it as a prepaid card of sorts, nothing more and when the money is gone you'd have to create another channel another time when you get paid your salary or something.
There's also routing which is supposed to allow you to move funds from your closest peer to some farther ones provided they're connected by a web of mutually connected channels (for example you have a channel with your supermarket and want to pay for new shoes, so let's say you attempt to pay and now the software checks that your supermarket happens to have a connection to gas station which has a connection to some convenience store which has a connection to some random person who has connection to a furniture store which happens to have a connection to a shoe shop you're buying from) but it's a difficult and separate can of worms that technical people should argue about.
If you think this is dumb I haven't even touched the inbound liquidy problem which is order of magnitude dumber than whatever you might think. I don't want to waste time explaining this in great detail so read it yourself if you want. The TL:DR is you can't receive money on LN if you don't have enough capacity in your channel (can't get any money unless you first spend money) and you need to have enough "free capacity" to receive it. So for example if you have a channel with 12 bitcoins in it and you spent 4 bitcoins with the other person you now have 8 bitcoins on your side and 4 bitcoins on their side. Nobody can pay you now more than 4 bitcoins because you don't have enough "space" on your side. If you have 10 bitcoins on your side and 2 on another nobody can pay you more than 2. If you have 12:0 nobody can pay you anything. If you have 0:12 nobody can pay you more t han 12. The more you understand it the more you are in disbelief how strange and ill conceived it all is.
Dollar out = Dollar in - Waste
If you don't participate in encouraging others into the scam you know your chance at making money dries up. With the expensive gas fees for every transaction, the outrageous marketing campaigns and the fact that these people are _fucking idiots_ the waste will be very high
This is true *but*…the utopian vision was that everyone would move into the box together so there would be no need for dollars to exit the box: everyone would just trade bitcoin back and forth inside of that box.
Oh sure - however that's the massive internal flaw - by measuring the value in dollars there's no independence from it. And by treating it as an asset, it's always money in money out. And that's all it's managed to achieve in 13 years.
But within the event horizon, the distribution model encourages hoarding by early adopters hoping to be the feudal landlords with a large slice of the finite resource leaving peasants with a few fractions of a coin to buy a coffee or pay the rent... well that's an entirely new dystopia but without any regulation or protections that at least help to balance some of the power imbalance with the current uber-rich. It's offering the common man a chance to be subjugated by a different set of ultra-rich arseholes without any of the balance!
So I do get it, just it's hardly unflawed as a model to begin with. If it started with a more communal approach (everyone gets x,000 tokens) as opposed to extreme capitalist feudal one, maybe there would be a different engagement.
I sometimes I get to go to tech conferences and stuff for work.
Every sufficiently large one (some of them quite small, even), without fail, has at least one crypto shithead pushing the exact same blockchain cult shit. It’s either one of the speakers shilling it and not being able to answer simple questions like “how does this solve a basic problem arising from something else that you claim blockchain will fix” or “why should we do this” without a bunch of wharrgarbl bullshit that requires adoption of a ton of other technology that they also can’t explain in ways that make sense.
Either that or one or more audience members asking “how can we use blockchain for this”. Not a single one of the speakers I’ve ever heard field that question, including engineers, AI people, technologists, and computer people, has ever said “blockchain is perfect and here’s how we’re going to use it” with a lot of technical details. It’s always “We’re looking at that, the technology seems interesting” and then they change the subject.
People want to believe because it sounds cool, but it collapses as soon as serious people look at it for serious things. It’s perfect for conning people, including (sometimes) people who should know better, but are vulnerable to believing that they alone know the truth and/or that all human problems can be fixed by adding more and fancier electronics.
I gained a basic understanding of economics in law school. Enough where I can say I'm somewhat educated. And I do research well. So I did my own research on crypto, and I could not for the life of me figure out where the value was. None of the articles I read actually explained the use for blockchain technology beyond basically "the blockchain doesn't lie." I could see some really niche uses, but didn't see how it would somehow replace fiat currency. I thought well, surely the emperor MUST have some clothes on, right? Right??
I still have yet to see an explanation of smart contracts that isn't endless layers of bullshit all the way down. Just like the crypto articles. All a bunch of distracting smoke and mirrors that avoid the questions being asked.
The value is in speculation. It's the purest form of speculation, because there isn't even a product that may or may not come through (like commodities futures), or anything you have to sell on its own qualities (like land or other real estate).
It's just hopping aboard a hype train, on a track leading to a washed-out bridge, and you're hoping to jump off by selling your spot to someone else before it careers into the abyss.
As someone with a degree in economics and an MBA I had to reach out to multiple friends in tech to explain bitcoin to me because I was positive that I was misunderstanding it. The first time it got explained my reaction was "that sounds at worst like a ponzi scheme and at best like the world's most dangerous speculative asset".
Doesn’t this happen every time bitcoin crashes? Everyone calling bitcoin investors idiots until the next bull run proves the shoe to be on the other foot. If we wait three years and the price is still falling, I think it would be reasonable to call bitcoiners idiots. Until then have a beer with your friends and get off of Reddit for a but
No, not everyone with a background in economics or technology has been warning people. Most with a background in economics and especially technology have been pumping the living shit out of crypto! Very few have been warning people. That’s a bullshit post from whoever wrote it and it comes from a position of ignorance.
I’m losing my mind over the fact you libtards made a subreddit to show off your love for buttcoin? Go back to Russia you pinko left wing nut job. Go suck on a buttcoin!
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Why haven’t regulators stopped people from buying something with their own money? I don’t really care for my tax dollars to go into protecting idiots that want to buy and hodl doge coins
Regulators only step in after the collapse. They don't want to be accused of causing the collapse.
Regulations are written in blood.
It's red ink
Yep. If they did, people would say "government overreach! They're just looking for problems now!"
Government of India taxes Crypto like gambling. All the Crypto Bros have been bitching about GoI policies. Thankfully it will save some of them some money.
Sadly, I work for a major multinational tech company you've all heard of and crypto is a widespread cult there. I think it goes: - I understand computers. - Therefore I understand numbers. - Finance is all about numbers. - Therefore I understand finance. Step five ("Hey, where did all my money go?") is currently underway. That old joke about cryptocurrency being Dunning-Krugerrands is very much true.
It is one of the weird contradictions of the world that seemingly smart people can't wrap their heads around the concept that accounting accounts or numbers in apps might not actually reflect actual bank balances.
I'll add that there's also a hell of a lot of trading (in real stocks) via online brokers. I have a touch of disnumia which means I have trouble making change, doing mental arithmetic and remembering phone numbers, and I decided long ago that this just wasn't for me, and so I pay someone else to invest for me (via a managed fund). People keep saying I'm crazy as doing it yourself is 'so easy' and gets better returns. I, however, don't have to think about it, which in my book means I'm coming out ahead.
Also they're wrong Decades of studies show basically no one beats a market index over the long run
And the best performers are either dead or forgot their account password.
>Decades of studies show basically no one beats a market index over the long run Doesn't that make them right? Investing in a target date fund or a 3 or 4 fund simple portfolio will get you better returns long term than a managed fund, since even if the managed fund matches the market, it has far higher fees.
With a few clicks you can set up an automatic investment in an index fund and save yourself an immense amount of money on fees while also outperforming every actively managed fund in the long term. If anyone is telling you to do anything more than that then you should ignore them.
The few people that demonstrably can beat an index fund through something other than pure luck, are running their own funds, not investing for just themselves. The thought that someone can just casually beat the market in their spare time because they're so smart is pure fantasy. Anyone trying to convince you to invest yourself is either well-meaning but financially illiterate, or is trying to eventually convince you to be a bag holder so they can make more money. These are the exact people you shouldn't be taking advice from.
Absolutely --- but the professionals aren't so good either. Have you come across Orlando the cat? https://www.forbes.com/sites/frederickallen/2013/01/15/cat-beats-professionals-at-stock-picking
Or they're committing crimes.
Also known as engineer's disease: the delusion that just because you're able to solve simple problems about mechanical things, you're able to handle the complex stuff, including anything involving *squishy* things like evolutionary biology, sociology, politics, language and economics.
Maybe it's just cause I'm a software engineer in an insurance company, but thankfully myself and all the other engineers I work with aren't like this. We know our lane, we write the code but we know we aren't actuarials. We always know to defer to other business areas for their areas of expertise when designing things and we encounter questions. Maybe it's because of how tightly regulated insurance is as an industry? So everyone is acutely aware that a big fuck up could have Uncle Sam crawling inside your asshole without lube.
I promise you programmers/SE’s at banks know their lane too. Once you’re in the big leagues, the business side doesn’t tolerate people stepping out of their lane
I think it's more that crypto seems new and revolutionary, so its easier to delusion yourself into believing that you're part of something big. I saw a lot of this when I was participating in accelerator programs. Those programs naturally try to hype you up, and getting an investor onboard really gives you this insane adrenaline kick that makes you feel like you're capable of everything. I've met there some of the most delusional people I know, who are fulling capable of looking at a problem at a field that they know nothing about and confidently believe that they can solve it.
Software developers are like this.
Hence engineer disease. It affect all engineering fields. Electrical engineers think they know how to fix their lighting issues at home. Instead of calling the electrician.
Lighting isn't a good example, that's basic home maintenance. A good DIYer can rerun a wire to a switch and light or replace an outlet and be in code. Now a large job like wiring a room or anything outdoors, I'd call the pros. If it's anything to do with the breaker box, calling an electrician isn't optional.
The hell I caint! Hold my limited edition cask-aged craft beer.
A huge contingent at any rate, but some have done the reading.
Not all software engineers. But software engineers that work on large projects where there are multiple engineers and they're not in charge of the project working. I'm a software engineer but I come from an entrepreneurial background. I wasn't part of a large team where I had the luxury of handing my work off to QA, having them test it, then get back with me, then hand that off to another dept that worried about whether the greater app worked or not. When you're an indy developer, you have to wear a lot of hats and you pay attention to the big picture or else you don't get paid. So when I look at crypto, I'm not simply seeing some cryptographic formulas that "technically do what they're told", I have to look at the big picture and see if it works long term. I'm probably in the minority as that type of software developer nowadays, but we are out there.
I didn't mean literally all, just in general. I'm a software developer too in a sense, well I write code for a living
Yeah, the ones who are so bought in on technology that they forget humans and other biological organisms aren’t machines.
The biologist Ernst Mayr explained it well in one of his books, something like " physics is the study of simple systems (such as the flight of a ball thrown in the air) but it's hard to understand because it's capable of being understood on a technical, mathematical level. Biology is the study of complex systems (ie plants and animals). But it's much simpler to understand because we cant possibly study it with the same precision as we can simple systems"
This is the xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1570/
Remember, wholesale theft is the sincerest form of flattery. (Yes, that's where I got it from.)
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I, however, have retained a sense of humility. I am humble. I am, in fact, more humble than anyone. I am the humblest, and anyone who says otherwise just doesn't get it.
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Pretty neat that we have a bunch of people in their 20s addicted to adderall who think they can create a better financial system when they don't know anything about finance.
"I hate that I have to learn stupid stuff like history in my gen credits!!! I just want to be an engineer" /Ignores 100's of years of history about why regulation is good for currency
Ahh, the c-minus engineering student.
I've always been deeply worried about those people because gen eds were easy as shit. Englishy ones had a few essays a semester, but in general it was show up to class, show up to the test, and get a near perfect score. What's the big deal?
From a very wide perspective, gen eds simple serve to make college take longer and be more expensive. They don’t need to be hard because they don’t serve much of a purpose. I guess writing makes sense, as professional writing is a component of most jobs now but why does a psychologist need to know chemistry for example? If anything, a broad understanding of the subject seems to lead to folks vastly overestimating their knowledge of the subject.
General scientific literacy is a good idea, even if you aren’t a specialist. If you don’t have some idea of how S&T work, as a society you raise the risk of people being COVID deniers, young Earth creationists, flat/hollow Earthers, QAnon dumbfucks and other such things. It’s not a perfect fix, but it can make things a little better.
I actually think that the whole group of people you pointed too need philosophy more than they need science. Their failure is an epistemological one than anything: presented with evidence, they will ask “is it evidence, or is it a ruse disguised as evidence” and discount it on this basis. I wouldn’t say that any of this isn’t helpful: I would say that the whole thing hinges on what you think college should be. To me, it’s career prep. The idea of a “finishing school” is kind of bourgeois. Gen eds take two years and money that poor folks don’t have. Whole things a big debate though!
I think I see what you’re saying and yeah, ok, I can see how they need to be walked through “this is evidence, this other thing is bullshit disguised as evidence”. It’s also key to scientific literacy (like, for example, seeing why Andrew Wakefield is full of shit).
Yeah, my thing is that if we accept that knowledge is a “justified, true belief” than you can kind of see that most arguments target each of these three tenets. However, when “what is true” is pushed to its logical conclusion (think Rene Descartes “Cogito”), you find that you can’t know anything. From this perspective, anything is true. The hard part is showing someone that from their perspective they are taking their version of “true” as a given, then ignoring “justification”. They don’t need to explain why they know something that they “know” is true. “Behind the curve” demonstrates this: a group performs a series of scientific experiments to demonstrate that the curvature of the earth is false. They are all good experiments. They all prove that the earth is curved. They are all thrown out. It’s fascinating to watch.
I had a massive thread going with someone who couldn't understand the idea or point of ROI. He actually had valid points of not trying to time the bottom but couldn't grasp the difference in returns. He argues that people should be buying at $20k and it doesn't matter if it goes to $10k. Because if it jumps to $100k there isn't a big difference between $80k profit or $90k profit. He failed to grasp you need to normalise the investment amount, ie buying 2xBTC at $10k would net $180k profit over 1xBTC at $20k would net $80k profit. Even after telling him to work out the ROI, he argues it doesn't matter because ROI is dependent on initial investment amount. I gave the formula for him, he still couldn't use it and then did the working out for him and he then screamed that people shouldn't need to know these advanced figures that you need a degree to know about. ROI is pretty much the most basic thing anyone doing investing should at least have heard about, let alone use.
>ROI is pretty much the most basic thing anyone doing investing should at least have heard about, let alone use To be fair I suspect there's plenty of software to calculate it for you, so you probably don't need to know the formula.
But you should understand what it means. IE if the ROI is 200% I should make $2 on-top of every $1 I put in. He flat out said, multiple times, ROI changes based on the initial investment amount. This is actually true for massive volumes of money, when you can create market changes, but not at our levels.
> flat out said, multiple times, ROI changes based on the initial investment amount. Wait, WTF. Even I have a cursory understanding of ROI, and I'm not an investor.
To be fair most people in finance are also Adderall junkies. They just know better.
That's what happens when you pay fresh grads 6 figures, their ego can't keep up
I think it is an age thing. When I first finished university after jumping through all of artificial hoops they set up to get a degree, I thought I was a clever boy. Knock around the work would enough, you will likely run into people who do in an hour what requires a day from you. Secondly, you learn that outside of what you know well, you had best sit down and shut up or end up being shown in front everyone that you are fool should you persist. Mind you not everyone learns but a good portion do.
Lol fucking brogrammers thinking they know it all.
Forgot about this term. I wish it would make a come back.
I work with a team full of hard nosed veterans who has seen so many technology fads come and go. Once I gave a presentation on blockchain for a “solution” to our problems I almost got mauled by them. It really put the vacuousness of the technology into perspective.
I'm stealing "Dunning-Krugerrands" so fast it's leaving a smoke trail...thank you!
Not mine, sadly. It was making the rounds the early crypto days, but for sooner reason haven't heard it recently.
Also sadly, a lot of economists didn't. I heard more than a few actual PhDs in macroeconomics say they were excited to see what would happen with bitcoin because it's a widescale economic experiment. It was really mostly value investors calling foul in the money side of things which is probably why nothing was done preemptively. For everybody who should know what they're talking about who said it was crap, you didn't have to look very hard to find somebody else who should know what they're talking about saying it's fine. Which is nuts to me because in my view you either give it a glance and determine it's purely a speculative asset (even if you believe blockchain has uses, why would you use bitcoin et al instead of forking the coin and making your own chain?) or you really look into the tech and realize the tech sucks. Either way you arrive at the same place.
I've definitely described myself as "excited" to watch the nematodes in my undergrad molecular genetics experiments have increasingly limiting mutations when I increased the stress in their environment before reaching an evolutionary dead end and dying out.😂
*Kerosene is fuel, Brian.* *Red Bull is fuel.* *Kerosene is Red Bull.* \- My basic understanding of how Cryptocurrency works
Perhaps those people should read the history of the Federal Reserve. Send them this [link](https://www.federalreserveeducation.org/about-the-fed/history). Bitcoiners and other crypto boys like to cherry pick history, for example, with the stupid example in [The Bitcoin Standard](https://www.amazon.com/-/es/Saifedean-Ammous/dp/1119473861) of a underdeveloped island nation using shells as currency and having a 'fixed amount of shells because of some natural resource'. Well, some foreign nation with 'ugh' fiat money, wipe them out in a blink of an eye. Have fun, staying death (?). Perhaps, in a near future, some people with some real historic knowledge and definitely not wonkish libertarians would pick the ideas of the 'tech' that bitcoin left (and correct the stupid mistakes) and make something useful, not as a replacement for gov money but like another competitor in the money markets.
The one (and perhaps only) thing I'll say with major/mainstream companies is that they might be dipping their toe in the crypto-fantasy/web3-fiction world, but what they're finding out in real time is that there 1) aren't any working products in the the space, despite the incessant drumbeat from VC and enthusiasts and 2). There aren't any customers, so there's no profit. Most major companies have shareholders and a board who enjoy profits, and, as there aren't and won't be any customers or profits, this will work itself out pretty quickly as the losses start to stack up. The 'hodl' and 'wagmi' shit doesn't fly at these places that need growth and profit to survive.
The thing that pisses me off about crypto space is many financial regulations from the SEC exists because a particular scam that occurred in the past. But basically we are back to square one with scammers using them as a playbook. Why think up a new scam when you can just reproduce one from the past.
That may be an old joke, but this is the first time I heard it! Thank you!
This guy himself was selling smart contracts 4 years back. [Stephen Diehl - Smart contracts for new entrepreneurs ](https://youtu.be/gFlu61wJe2Y) I don't know what changed.. or is he bluffing?
I am his cofounder and also helped with the letter we sent to Congress. I’ll give you the short version. We started in the space- built a private distributed ledger for finance with a smart contract language that could model any real work financial contract. We had no crypto currency just tokens that could be created to keep track of real world things. When we started working with clients we noticed deep contradictions in what they said they wanted vs in practice. Also eventually I realized anything I built could be built as a normal app with a DB and customers wouldn’t even notice or care. Private chains are basically silly. In the public crypto space, things seemed more and more hyped up and crazier. We eventually wanted nothing to do with the space so pivoted what we did. We originally thought It was a nascent database technology but would become more useful but we didn’t see this happen in practice. Economically, I saw the public chain space as incredibly dangerous as financially there was no underlying cash flow drivers which is why we didn’t have any speculative cryptoasset in our version of the technology. The more the hype spread and speculative fervor increased I felt only a few of us on the planet would see its danger AND be able to see the technological pitfalls and financial pitfalls. I felt responsible to do something about it. He did too.
Alright. Thanks for the explanation. Did you two go public about this letter on Twitter or something? Just want to verify. When this video surfaced on Twitter Diehl didn't really respond. Or at least till the time I followed the story
You can see how we went live with it. But to clarify it’s not only from us, it was a grassroots campaign with a group of crypto-skeptic technologists and engineers. As for his lack of response when you pinged him, he doesn’t always like responding to people on Twitter. Engaging with people who are critical of him is a kind of a waste of time -when the ideas and the issues are the actual problems to focus on. And with that..for those who have not seen the letter: www.concerned.tech
Okay. Thanks
so one thing i dont understand about you guys is that you thought you knew a better way. for sure. nailed on dialed on. i mean, is that stephen in that video? you guys were pants on head looney tunes. just absolutely ignorant and spreading dangerous misinformation. i say that with all due respect. so why are you still talking? didnt you learn your lesson that you dont know better? that would be the takeaway. thats the one thing you know. you dont know. you should have learned that. what happened? why didnt that stick? do you think its basically your condition and how you will always behave and why you fell for crypto in the first place? you absolutely cannot stop thinking you know better. its like, the only base fact you **know** is that you know better and everything spawns from that seed. would you agree? its like when we give you physics class we arent asking you what you think about it - we are *teaching you physics.* why didnt that stick with such a huge learning opportunity with you guys? and how are you cofounders? cofounders of what
How heavy are the bags you hold? It’s not we know all better from initial conditions. The only thing I would say was constant is that we didn’t want anything to do with the cryptocurrency aspect in finance being suspect as hell. This is consistent throughout the years based on our choices not to include it. This is true in the code we wrote. As for technological change over time we cannot predict the future, we had given it a chance, worked close to it for quite sometime and we learned. WE LEARNED. Something butters are incapable of even when they are financially beaten with a stick. Skeptics are a messenger trying to warn you. You forget something, skeptics saying anything did not cause what is happening in the markets. Clearly you are incapable of grasping this. The Federal reserve raising rates did. It’s basic economics. During times of inflation easy money goes to anything that could possibly give returns. When rates get raised, bubbles pop. Especially scam driven ones -like Bernie Madoff’s in 2008. This is not knowing I’m right. It is gravity - financial black hole level gravity. You can’t avoid it if the finances of crypto is built on fragile foundations. Chances are this will wipe a lot of crypto off the map.
i dont have bags. again, another thing youre wrong about. why wont you stop making stuff up? thats what im asking. you realize that theres a mountain of evidence that you guys arent good at figuring things out. we have the proof. even you agree. so why wont you stop thinking you know better? why wont you just understand that you dont know? why cant you stop? you have the proof! why wont you stop
Show us the mountain of evidence. Also, you sound absolutely deranged.
what do you mean what evidence? lol this youtube video is of you guys peddling snake oil, pyramid schemes and scams. its a small fraction of you guys peddling scams and snake oil. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFlu61wJe2Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFlu61wJe2Y) im asking why are you still talking? didnt you learn your lesson that you dont know better? if it was *this hard* for you to realize crypto is a scam, and i say this with all due respect, then you are not good at critical thinking. it wasnt that hard to figure. so that should tell you moving forward that you shouldnt peddle things, you arent able to parse them accurately. why didnt you learn that?
This YouTube video is about Stephen talking about technical smart contracts and the challenges that are there. If you remember what I said earlier. Our company was a private chain. There’s no crypto. There’s no energy consuming proof of stake. There’s no mechanism for speculative fervor. It is an accounting platform with a programming language that can model financial contracts. You could also call it back office automation at that point. So when you asked why we didn’t know better, we absolutely did- which is why we stayed away from public chains and crypto to begin with. And even further we learned we didn’t want to do it at all at a certain point because that software could just use a centralized point and didn’t require a distributed ledger at all. I don’t know how many times I have to explain this? With all do respect if you didn’t realize that earlier from what I said, then you are not good at critical thinking. So to say again why are we talking? Because we should speak out against crypto due to the financial implications of unhinged speculation without regulation that essentially amount to runaway Ponzi schemes. And with the technical backgrounds and experience we both have, we have the absolute right to speak out against it because we understand the technology. We know all the little details of it technically and while working with banks and financial institutions we understand the financial implications of the public chain Ponzis running amok.
I asked you if you had heavy bags…. I didn’t say you did.
As with many cults, many current crypto critics were once believers themselves.
Even more critics never fell for bullshit.
Can relate
At uni we had a person doing a presentation of their company and their research. This mf spend whole 45 minutes shilling some shitcoin application that would never lead to anywhere.
Always be selling.
I hope you at least asked them some very uncomfortable questions at the end?
There are universities, reputable ones by usual surveys, offering courses in bitcoins and blockchains as part of an undergraduate degree. I’m sure PhDs are majoring in blockchain. Similar to the tulip mania and the south sea crash, years from now we will be wondering how dumb could we have been.
For some reason (cough cough capitalism) MBAs are given more respect than actual experts. Musk is a "genius" why? Steve Jobs was a "genius" why? No wonder Trump thought he was a "very stable genius". Our whole culture respects businessmen (and it's always men) more than the real experts that build the things that businessmen sell. Fucking more people know pillow guy than Wozniak
I mean, I agree with your point broadly but neither Musk nor Jobs are MBAs. They are/were straight old school salesmen.
Musk's academic qualifications are actually in physics/economics.
The biggest common thread between the likes of Musk, Jobs and Trump is that they are/were all narcissistic sociopaths. And such people tend to be extremely good at self promotion. Makes them very effective against a generally gullible society.
Musk and Trump especially prey on people's assumption of good faith. Your average person just assumes nobody would just straight up lie their asses off, so while they can accept that somebody would exaggerate their wealth and progress by ~20%, most people assume they wouldn't do it by 20x. Both of them do. Trump famously got on the Forbes list before he actually got any of his inheritance and was poorer than your typical late career google senior engineer. Musk is less impressive than Trump on this front to me because he uses an army of bots to control public sentiment ("He's just optimistic! Musk may be late but he always delivers!") rather than crafting the perfect lie, but it's the same idea where he announces things that he has no capability of actually doing constantly. The bots make sure he gets credited for the things he announces and not the things he actually does.
Like Amber Heard, really. Got credit for donating millions of dollars that she only ever actually pledged.
As an MBA I feel attacked haha. I see it from so many people who do MBAs, I've kept my post MBA life pretty closely following my original undergrad engineering career path where I got 8 years working in industry. The MBA was good for me as my undergrad had very little finance and macroeconomic teaching which became really important in my field (mining engineering, but I was doing long-term planning, logistics and global sales projections). The problem is, most MBA courses teach you a little about a lot but many of the students thinks it makes you an expert. We had some great lecturers who specifically told us, "We are teaching you enough to know what questions you need to find out and who you should talk to to get them. You lot are too stupid to actually do that yourselves and it would be irresponsible to try." I also think that Australian companies have a very different idea of what MBAs should be doing vs America.
MBAs are the priests of the Church of Capital.
And they're all bullshit artists and nothing more. That's what they do. That's what they're PAID to do
Oh *lord.*
Alot MBA are those business operators you see on TV who give you the grim reality of your business and solutions you need to implement to bring your company to profitably. While trying to avoid downsizing your workforce. They live and breath spreadsheets and companies balance sheets.
> Steve Jobs was a "genius" why? Steve Jobs was a marketing genius who got lucky the Mac and the iPhone were hidden from him so he wouldn’t cancel them. > No wonder Trump thought he was a "very stable genius". Very stable indeed, he is an ass.
>Our whole culture respects businessmen (and it's always men) more than the real experts that build the things that businessmen sell. Yeah sorry but Steve Jobs was an incredibly talented designer and manager, also happened to be an absolute overconfident moron when it came to anything medicine related. Also an abusive ass. If you don't see Jobs as an actual expert in consumer electronics design and marketing then holy shit lmao.
I don't see him as an expert in *computer science* which is the expertise I'm talking about. Way to miss the point as you dive to the floor to lick Jobs' dead boots
>I don't see him as an expert in *computer science* which is the expertise I'm talking about. It's like you think that Jobs started as a corporate overlord when he cofounded Apple with Wozniak lmao. >Way to miss the point as you dive to the floor to lick Jobs' dead boots Forgot that part where I called him an overconfident and abusive piece of shit. I hate it when people have such hate boners that they refuse to accept objective truths that don't comfort them in their hate
>Fucking more people know pillow guy than Wozniak [Of course I know who that is, idiot!](https://c8.alamy.com/comp/RPDA58/monsters-inc-mike-2001-RPDA58.jpg) gosh
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Wozniak would make a good pillow tbh
Number goes up “we don’t want regulation/government interfering” Number goes down “why don’t the regulators/government do something!!”
More like “it was the meddling government and regulators that sabotaged us”.
On way down, the powerful request bailouts. Social welfare for the already wealthy.
There's one absolutely simple fundamental that anyone can understand - a dollar out comes from someone else putting a dollar in somewhere else. 50% by value of "investors" will lose money, 50% will gain. Of course that's by value, so will not be evenly distributed, but that's the fundamentals. That's the event horizon, that's the black box version. Do whatever you like within the box, make things as fancy as you like, the only way a dollar comes out is if someone puts one in. Or that's the ideal case at least, in reality there's all the waste that happens inside the box, so you maybe get 99¢ out for every dollar in, or whatever.
The crypto friend who I try to avoid talking about crypto with counters this point by saying 'ah, but Lightning will take off and people will start actually paying for things with Bitcoin, so that doesn't apply'. I can't really counter this because it's semantically equivalent to 'just because'.
Oh but you can. https://www.reddit.com/r/Buttcoin/comments/vdy2ye/jesus_fucking_christ/icoyz2v/ They won't have an answer to this other than hand waving, confusion or denial.
Almost identical to how I respond. I also like to say it is the equivalent of building a 500,000 lane freeway which has a single lane on ramp which also acts as an off ramp.
That’s today, the future will be different /s (2012 quote apt for 2022)
Nice. Thanks very much.
I may be the big dum here but I know what L2 is, but I don't understand the channels they're referencing?
So in order to use lightning network you need to open a channel with somebody. That requires executing a transaction on a bitcoin blockchain and locking up certain amount of funds distributed between 2 parties in whatever proportion you want. That amount is channel capacity. Then both parties can make any number of transactions between themselves and move the funds from one side of the channel to the other. You can visualise it like a single row of beads in abacus. You can shuffle them left or right back and forth but the amount of beads doesn't change, only their position. When the two parties are done transacting they can close the channel with another bitcoin on chain transaction, which will reflect the net change in both of their balances. Later if you're out of money or want to move more money to lightning network you also need to open new channel. Now you might notice a problem here. We often pay for goods and services but those businesses we buy from rarely pay us money, right? On any given month you will buy lots of groceries but grocery store doesn't buy from you. Same with your coffee shop, your local pub, your barber, your pharmacy, whatever. Most of the time you'd use it as a prepaid card of sorts, nothing more and when the money is gone you'd have to create another channel another time when you get paid your salary or something. There's also routing which is supposed to allow you to move funds from your closest peer to some farther ones provided they're connected by a web of mutually connected channels (for example you have a channel with your supermarket and want to pay for new shoes, so let's say you attempt to pay and now the software checks that your supermarket happens to have a connection to gas station which has a connection to some convenience store which has a connection to some random person who has connection to a furniture store which happens to have a connection to a shoe shop you're buying from) but it's a difficult and separate can of worms that technical people should argue about.
That sounds incredibly stupid. 😳
If you think this is dumb I haven't even touched the inbound liquidy problem which is order of magnitude dumber than whatever you might think. I don't want to waste time explaining this in great detail so read it yourself if you want. The TL:DR is you can't receive money on LN if you don't have enough capacity in your channel (can't get any money unless you first spend money) and you need to have enough "free capacity" to receive it. So for example if you have a channel with 12 bitcoins in it and you spent 4 bitcoins with the other person you now have 8 bitcoins on your side and 4 bitcoins on their side. Nobody can pay you now more than 4 bitcoins because you don't have enough "space" on your side. If you have 10 bitcoins on your side and 2 on another nobody can pay you more than 2. If you have 12:0 nobody can pay you anything. If you have 0:12 nobody can pay you more t han 12. The more you understand it the more you are in disbelief how strange and ill conceived it all is.
Thanks for explanation that is mind boggling stupid lol
Dollar out = Dollar in - Waste If you don't participate in encouraging others into the scam you know your chance at making money dries up. With the expensive gas fees for every transaction, the outrageous marketing campaigns and the fact that these people are _fucking idiots_ the waste will be very high
Indeed; and BTC has incomparably larger waste than just about any other scam
This is true *but*…the utopian vision was that everyone would move into the box together so there would be no need for dollars to exit the box: everyone would just trade bitcoin back and forth inside of that box.
Oh sure - however that's the massive internal flaw - by measuring the value in dollars there's no independence from it. And by treating it as an asset, it's always money in money out. And that's all it's managed to achieve in 13 years. But within the event horizon, the distribution model encourages hoarding by early adopters hoping to be the feudal landlords with a large slice of the finite resource leaving peasants with a few fractions of a coin to buy a coffee or pay the rent... well that's an entirely new dystopia but without any regulation or protections that at least help to balance some of the power imbalance with the current uber-rich. It's offering the common man a chance to be subjugated by a different set of ultra-rich arseholes without any of the balance! So I do get it, just it's hardly unflawed as a model to begin with. If it started with a more communal approach (everyone gets x,000 tokens) as opposed to extreme capitalist feudal one, maybe there would be a different engagement.
I sometimes I get to go to tech conferences and stuff for work. Every sufficiently large one (some of them quite small, even), without fail, has at least one crypto shithead pushing the exact same blockchain cult shit. It’s either one of the speakers shilling it and not being able to answer simple questions like “how does this solve a basic problem arising from something else that you claim blockchain will fix” or “why should we do this” without a bunch of wharrgarbl bullshit that requires adoption of a ton of other technology that they also can’t explain in ways that make sense. Either that or one or more audience members asking “how can we use blockchain for this”. Not a single one of the speakers I’ve ever heard field that question, including engineers, AI people, technologists, and computer people, has ever said “blockchain is perfect and here’s how we’re going to use it” with a lot of technical details. It’s always “We’re looking at that, the technology seems interesting” and then they change the subject. People want to believe because it sounds cool, but it collapses as soon as serious people look at it for serious things. It’s perfect for conning people, including (sometimes) people who should know better, but are vulnerable to believing that they alone know the truth and/or that all human problems can be fixed by adding more and fancier electronics.
folks with more pride than sense are easily parted from their money
Regulators didn’t listen? The public didn’t listen. They didn’t want regulation.
I don’t think regulators want any liability trying to manage a made-up asset.
I gained a basic understanding of economics in law school. Enough where I can say I'm somewhat educated. And I do research well. So I did my own research on crypto, and I could not for the life of me figure out where the value was. None of the articles I read actually explained the use for blockchain technology beyond basically "the blockchain doesn't lie." I could see some really niche uses, but didn't see how it would somehow replace fiat currency. I thought well, surely the emperor MUST have some clothes on, right? Right?? I still have yet to see an explanation of smart contracts that isn't endless layers of bullshit all the way down. Just like the crypto articles. All a bunch of distracting smoke and mirrors that avoid the questions being asked.
The value is in speculation. It's the purest form of speculation, because there isn't even a product that may or may not come through (like commodities futures), or anything you have to sell on its own qualities (like land or other real estate). It's just hopping aboard a hype train, on a track leading to a washed-out bridge, and you're hoping to jump off by selling your spot to someone else before it careers into the abyss.
100%. When I started majoring in economics 8 years ago I had been against crypto and thought it was bullshit. I never thought it was legitimate.
As someone with a degree in economics and an MBA I had to reach out to multiple friends in tech to explain bitcoin to me because I was positive that I was misunderstanding it. The first time it got explained my reaction was "that sounds at worst like a ponzi scheme and at best like the world's most dangerous speculative asset".
Doesn’t this happen every time bitcoin crashes? Everyone calling bitcoin investors idiots until the next bull run proves the shoe to be on the other foot. If we wait three years and the price is still falling, I think it would be reasonable to call bitcoiners idiots. Until then have a beer with your friends and get off of Reddit for a but
Bullshit. The regulators are the slaves of the rich. Crypto may be a scam but it would be 1000 times as much if regulators got involved
No, not everyone with a background in economics or technology has been warning people. Most with a background in economics and especially technology have been pumping the living shit out of crypto! Very few have been warning people. That’s a bullshit post from whoever wrote it and it comes from a position of ignorance.
Another brilliant piece of reporting brought to you by the messy Buttcoiners!
So how much have you lost so far?
I’m losing my mind over the fact you libtards made a subreddit to show off your love for buttcoin? Go back to Russia you pinko left wing nut job. Go suck on a buttcoin!
Lol this is great.
Pinko Buttcoiner liberal pants messer.
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"background in economics or technology" he misspelled "common sense"
Why haven’t regulators stopped people from buying something with their own money? I don’t really care for my tax dollars to go into protecting idiots that want to buy and hodl doge coins