this post was submitted on 09 Apr 2024
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Let me know when the crypto community gets key security perfected so I can buy some glorified airplane points from a guy named catfucker88 or whatever. In the mean time, I’ll use normal cryptography libraries and leave the headassery to others.
Who hurt you?
A few extremely beautiful women but they got consent beforehand and I hold no grudges. If I’m honest with myself, I mostly enjoyed it.
Did they scare you from crypto? Perhaps they sold all of your assets and hid the proceeds in crypto?
I’m genuinely curious why the disdain for a censorship resistant, global state machine.
Is it selective? Like are newer high speed L1 ledgers like sui and solana hated by you just as much? Do you just hate memecoins?
No, I’m just a Democratic socialist software engineer with an economics background. I’m pretty much exactly who would think blockchain is unimpressive tech and would be suspicious of the libertarian utopian economic theories behind it.
A lot of it is that I see most of the mistakes of the 1800’s American free banking era being repeated. There’s a lot of intuitive-seeming economic ideas that have been discredited by real world events. Most crypto enthusiasts buy into one, whether it’s goldbugism or Austrian economics or whatever. Most of the economic theories behind bitcoin were things we usually learned the hard way are not effective.
And so, of course it’s ripe with scams. Sometimes, what sounds like common sense is actually just some mistake humans make every time we forget history. I was originally hopeful the tech would make things like international remittances cost-free (and disrupt Western Union or whatever) but it really hasn’t.
And, like it or not, we have a carbon budget. Off-grid Bitcoin mining using solar or wind doesn’t bother me. Have fun with that. But if any part of it requires more burning of coal or natural gas, it’s a net negative to humanity even before we get into money laundering and scams.
I think I have considered the merits — you mentioned avoiding government oppression — and still think the negative outweigh the positives. But I sometimes smoke so what do I know?
It’s such a huge industry which often gets attention due to its scams and ponzis. That part bugs me. It’s like getting in a tizzy about the SWIFT network because people gamble in Las Vegas.
The stablecoin market and surrounding tools for remittance, lending, settlement, etc are quite different from influencers pumping $CUMROCKET or whatever nonsense they come up with.
Being able to test and observe the crazy economic theories you’ve mentioned is kinda fascinating. And the game theory involved.
Permissionless, programmable, globally synchronized ledgers bring new trustless value transfer capabilities which certainly shouldn’t be completely written off because of some grifters or economic idiots.
And in the context of this conversation, gathering some ideas and lessons learned from an industry using keypairs with retail consumers to protect trillions in value is certainly worth consideration.
I’m genuinely hopeful it becomes something. Sometimes, after a bubble bursts, people find out the true upside. Like when the dot com bubble burst, there was suddenly all this super cheap infrastructure and bandwidth. That allowed a lot of innovation.
The bubble bursts every 4 years.
Bitcoin dies constantly