I’m going to keep this short but I just fell down the rabbithole of crypto again and maybe it isn’t as bad as I thought. Many of their ideas are very similar to the fediverse’s. The idea of decentralized finance using a stablecoin sounds awesome to me. (though i’d much prefer to live in a world where money isn’t needed) Maybe the technology is actually good but the techbros and scammers ruin it with their false promises and complicated words. Hopefully, in a few years after the rest of those scammers have moved on to scamming with AI this tech could be truly used for meaningful purposes.
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Nah man, crypto was built in the circles of libertarian goldbugs in an attempt to privatize the dollar. Ultimately the aim of crypto is the opposite of the fediverse: to take away (theoretically) popular control of the dollar and throw it into corporate hands.
Can I have a source for that? That doesn’t seem to be the case.
The source is me. I’ve been following through somethingawful’s buttcoin thread since 2011 and then on and off through political subreddits. One of the biggest things is that they HATED government-backed “fiat” currency and saw bitcoin as a replacement for the dollar (Even though bitcoin is also fiat and had notorious stealing issues and was just as unstable then as it is now)
well, fiat money is issued by a central authority and its value depends entirely on the faith people have in that central authority. Compare that to monetary systems based on the gold standard, where a unit of currency has a fixed value in terms of gold. When the dollar followed the gold standard, it was technically possible to exchange dollars at the bank for a fixed amount of gold. While with fiat, you could say that the market decides how much gold one dollar is worth.
Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are more like gold or silver than they are dollars or euros or whatever other fiat currency. The value that gold itself has is determined by a lot of things, but ultimately it comes from its rarity. You can if you want go out into the hills and spend time and energy digging up gold. Likewise, you can if you want spend time and energy mining bitcoin. This is why people often say bitcoin is digital gold - it’s rare and it takes time and energy to find.
Gold is a fiat currency. There are things that are far rarer and harder to extract that are worth far less. Sure, the metal itself has some intrinsic uses, but that’s not where most of its value as a currency comes from. It’s just pretty and lasts a long time, so we decided it made a good currency. That’s still an arbitrary decision, and if we collectively decide we don’t care about that anymore its really not worth much more than copper is for its usefulness and rarity. It’s valuable because it is the original fiat currency.
You are insane lol
In my opinion, the idea of crypto/blockchain is fairly naïve unfortunately.
Crypto/blockchain is not truly decentralized; the developers of the chain and its protocol retain total control over it in a similar manner to governments over their own currencies. They can invalidate old coins, issue new ones, debase the currency – whatever they want.
What is decentralized is the ledger itself, in that the database of the chain is distributed across many computing nodes. This is in fact bad because it results in:
- Slowness in processing. This is why BTC transactions take so long to settle.
- Potential foreign control of the database. An attacker who exploits a flaw in the protocol, or a miner that has a majority of the blockchain under their processing power, can rewrite the ledger however they want. They can double spend coins, revoke transactions, or … well, anything.
- Automated contract resolution. This is bad because contracts are (and have been) exploited on every blockchain to drain legitimate wallets of funds – either because the contracts themselves are badly written, or the software they’re implemented in is easily-exploitable.
Overall a centralized ledger would be a far better idea for most blockchains than a distributed one… controlled by a trusted entity, rather than a bunch of crypto devs… with human oversight instead of automated contract resolution…
And we’ve just invented actual currencies.
Yes. Blockchains will only remain as decentralized as their underlying incentive structure. In the case of Bitcoin, it turns out that form of “proof-of-work” was subject to Capitalism Attack. That is, there was someone with enough capital to commission the design and manufacture of highly specialized silicon, and their resulting competitive advantage led to the network consolidation we see today: specialized machines competing for who can burn the most electricity.
Ethereum fucked up in a different way. They did learn from Bitcoin’s weakness, and switched from an “open” proof-of-work blockchain to a “closed” proof-of-stake system …
… once again facilitating Capital Attack. Because who can buy the biggest stake? Yeah.
Once again, market forces (combined with extremely dubious design choices in their smart contract API) led to the centralized garbage we see today.
But it is possible to redirect the Capital Attack, judo style, and render it impotent. Look into “proof of space and time” if you’re interested in learning more. Carefully aligned incentives and weaponized Scaling Challenges can give the little guy a chance and send the Big Capital Gang back to their dirty-tricks drawing board.
You sound like you wouldn’t like rust.
The programming language? I like it just fine, I prefer Go but Rust is great too.
The actual idea of crypto is reaaallly cool: a decentralized trust system that enables incredibly difficult to fake transactions and records without the need for a trusted third party.
Unfortunately a lot of the implementations relied on ‘capital’ as the proof of trust - GPU work (money) and number of controlled instances (money) are two big ones. Which really all led them down the path of ____coin which is fundamentally incompatible with the ideal of ‘no third party can govern trust’ because suddenly whichever party that has all the proof of trust is now the third party that can govern trust and approve transactions. Someone can own a ___coin.
Crypto could have been a decentralised system that can keep public records, documents, ideas, etc. - it can guarantee authorship and date if a user is willing to submit identity information. Lots of actually useful functions!
don’t waste your time, the scammers have polluted peoples ideals on it for the time being. can’t say i blame them. Next round will be national ids and regulated trading channels, the users won’t even know or care that it’s blockchain.
people don’t care about the database, just make it work.
For the time being, yes. However, the underlying tech is based on good ideas and maybe in the future it can and will be used.
i agree, i work in the industry, but bringing it up on socials outside of crypto communities has been just a way to get flamed of late.
people are angry I understand and others just really love thinking they have ahigh horse based on headlines.
im just building now, everyone will be crazy for it again in a year.
I think most stablecoins are a bad idea as they require a trusted third party such as paxos, circle, binance, etc that can be pressured to freeze your funds by governmyths. I personally use monero to make transactions
Yea idea of it is awesome, but sadly unrealistic
Maybe i’m naive but I have some hope that after a couple years the whole thing will be forgotten by the techbros and could be used by normal people.
Not until it solves a problem for less money than existing solutions and faster. Last time I tried it cost 15 dollars to move 30 dollars in etherium, and took 5 minutes or so.
Oof that’s rough. How long ago was that. The problem it solves for me is the control that rich people and the federal reserve have over my finances. I’d rather it all be done in a decentralized way.
Well, that problem cant be solved in capitalism, which is problematic
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