It was cool in 2010 when I was like 14 and had an iPod touch but didn’t have wireless Internet access at home because my parents didn’t understand the concept of a router and thought they would have to pay for it, plus christian concern over porn and corruption on the net. So I could go to like McDonalds or whatever, download all of these game review articles, web novels, and whatever else I was into at the time so that when I got back home I could still interact with the web.
Nowadays, yeah I don’t really get the point. Everyone’s permanently plugged in so a regular bookmark is fine. Also in case anyone was concerned, my buddy eventually gave me his old router and I secretly set up WiFi in my house so I was good for the rest of the time I lived at home 👍
Also in case anyone was concerned, my buddy eventually gave me his old router and I secretly set up WiFi in my house so I was good for the rest of the time I lived at home 👍
Strict parents create sneaky teens. My mom’s way of grounding me from the computer was taking away my keyboard. She figured that without a keyboard, I couldn’t use it. I had a spare keyboard buried under my bed. I also quickly figured out how to use Windows’ accessibility options in case I was ever truly without a keyboard or mouse.
Funnily enough with this explanation I finally get what Pocket is, because I thought modern Pocket was something different and not the same thing from back then.
Have never used it, but doesn’t it download the whole article? So if source becomes unavailable, you still get an archived copy similar to other services like archive.org.
Don’t know. Lutris offered to install the Community Update so that’s what I did. Direct3D 10 seemed to work best for me. But I have only walked a little bit around the tutorial so far.
Other than patches to fix bugs, I recommend against most of the highly praised mods.They change a lot more of the gameplay abc story than people usually admit, and you lose that original feeling of the game.
Here’s the BS I had to deal with: -I was dealing with health issues when I was working. -My former coworker actively tried to make my condition worse. -I reported them for this to management & HR -Got fired, as they had friends in HR. -They filled out the unemployment paperwork wrong 4 times. -The unemployment case was so messed up, the local government got involved.
The positives. -Company deamed at fault and heavily scolded by the government. -I got paid more on unemployment than when working. -I make ~25% more at my new job.
-I got paid more on unemployment than when working.
How did that one happen? That’s the unbelievable part to me - unemployment is basically capped to a percentage (usually 50%) of what you were making when working and vacation pay and partial pay (paychecks from part time work) etc any other non-gift pay also deduct or delay from how much you end up getting paid, at least where I live.
Unemployment counts the last 5 quarters. If you get fired before a quarter ends it doesn’t count it as a full quarter.
I left a different job making a lot more because of my health. I knew the manager at this new job and he saw I wanted a position that I was already in. Less hours, about the same pay.
When I was unemployed it counted the vacation I was reimbursed upon my leave from the previous company and the massive amount of overtime I was making from the previous job. If they would have fired me 4 days later, I would have been in the new quarter and gotten a lot less.
A capitalist company with a CEO earning what CEOs earn, and a board of directors maximizing profit, does not get to shame me for wanting to get paid as much as I can.
One of them was my current employer when I was arguing about not managing to keep people on my team.
And I said exactly that, except didn’t walk out naturally. In another frustrated discussion I almost yelled “You can’t CHOOSE not to compete with them!”
She also might be trying to place herself as a contender for the 2028 election. If Trump wins and doesn’t completely up end the two term limit then in 2028 the Republican party will need a new presidential candidate. If he loses he may not live to see the 2028 election and it’s the same thing. She’s only doing what every sycophant and nonconformist has done throughout human history, planning ahead for when the king dies.
If you want a trustless system, you have to sacrifice performance. At least the proof of stake blockchains like Ethereum don’t use that much energy, and you get a pretty cheap and fast transaction with layer 2 solutions on par with credit card transactions.
Sure, but what real-world problem does a trustless solve? I thought this was all very interesting years ago but now that we’ve had blockchain for years it seems it’s only good for illegal or morally questionable transactions.
Bingo. Capitalism has thus far rejected the blockchain, which is generally evidence that it doesn’t solve an important problem either efficiently, safely or cheaply.
To be fair, there are plenty of other reasons capitalism might have rejected blockchain: market failure, interference by government, etc.
I’m not saying that to defend cryptocurrency, by the way, but rather to point out that capitalism isn’t perfect at allocating resources in every situation.
capitalism is generally terrible at allocating ressources. It will always win to externalize costs, and if the people footing the bill cannot participate in the market, like for instance future generations, the result is always a self destructive system.
Bitcoin had its official ETF approved and started the other week and Ethereum is soon to follow. so I would say capitalism is very much not rejecting blockchain technology. Didn’t blackrock and other giants put a ton in?
I don’t know why this is surprising. Capitalism is an economic system where the goal is profit. So, why would capital do anything other than seek profit? Nearly all technological advances have occurred through government or institutional investments, then capital flocks to it when someone finds a way to profit from it.
Thinking block chain is a solution to anything is naive. It does nothing to change the underlying system, or the incentives that drive our economy. Like any system, the interconnections between the things that make up the system, and the goal of the system must change otherwise everything will just settle back to the status quo.
For example: media streaming is becoming cable tv again. Nothing fundamentally changed about the system of delivering media, or the goal of the system which is to drive profit. Thus, we are moving quickly back to the same model of paying for media (renting it really) and watching ads to increase the revenue of the provider
Bitcoin had its official ETF approved and started the other week and Ethereum is soon to follow. so I would say capitalism is very much not rejecting blockchain technology. Didn’t blackrock and other giants put a ton in?
Right?
Also, look at its price. It dipped, and came right back.
If anything, the financial consensus around this is exactly the opposite of what was being presented.
Would you trust your money with a bank in China? It was only a year ago that people lost their savings and couldn’t withdraw money for food after a major bank was on the brink of bankruptcy due to the Evergrande scheme.
I guess you can call it questionable, but if I buy a VPN, I’m not going to pay with a credit card linked to my name. I use Monero. If I want to transfer money to my family in another country, crypto is faster, cheaper, and has no restrictions. I can’t even pay my student loans from my home country because my current bank blocks foreign credit card transactions, even if they are important.
This is very niche and not something an average Joe needs, but cryptocurrency isn’t for the average Joe to begin with.
See I think more nuanced takes like this are good. I’m not familiar with the Chinese banking issue that you are describing, but it sounds like deposit insurance (like the FDIC) might be a better solution than cryptocurrency, and it’s definitely better understood. Since the real world value of cryptocurrencies are so volatile they are a questionable store of value, and taking a risk on a poorly regulated bank might be better than taking a risk on storing your money in a volatile and unregulated security like cryptocurrency. Honestly it’s hard to know which is the better risk. So it could be better or it could be worse.
I agree with your point about transferring money internationally, and even within the US transferring money used to be a real pain. So I’m still interested to see if cryptocurrency can be a better medium of exchange or medium of transfer than traditional ways, or at least give traditional systems incentive to improve. But again the volatility is a concern so for most people the best move is probably to get in and out of the crypto market as quickly as possible or else risk getting a vastly different amount of money out of it than you put in. Admittedly it could appreciate, but when I’m transferring money to someone I don’t want that to simultaneously be an investment. The few times I have used Bitcoin to purchase something the whole process has taken hours, and there’s no guarantee there won’t be price swings — a lot could happen in those hours.
I appreciate the brutal honesty about cryptocurrency not being for the average Joe. It’s not that long since many cryptocurrency boosters were hoping it would replace fiat currency, but now that I think about it I haven’t heard as much about that recently. In its current state it is really not for the average Joe.
Legal money transfers are not a use case. Crypto is simply much more expensive to maintain. All these mining rigs and all that electricity must be paid for.
If it seemed cheaper, then either:
the banks were charging inflated fees. That can be fixed only once. (And it should have been fixed by government). ETA: Doesn’t work, after all. It can only be the other 2.
It was masked by price fluctuations. Eventually, someone else must pick up the tab. Can’t work long-term.
Costly regulations/taxes were dodged.
Under the spoiler is something I wrote recently to explain how crypto is not like stocks.
spoilerLet’s look at how stocks get their value. A company sells shares to get funding. Say, you want to make microwave dinners. You need to hire people, an industrial kitchen, packaging and packaging machines, ingredients, and probably a whole lot more. The company takes in revenue from selling the dinners, which pay for the running costs. Anything above that may be reinvested or turns into profit. The profit is paid to the stock-owners to pay them for their investment. Now the question is: What is the value of a stock? Imagine you take out a loan. That gives you money right now, in the present. You pay back the loan with the money that you get from your stocks; your share in the profit. Now imagine that the company goes out of business (and the value of the stock becomes $0) right as you are done paying back the loan + interest. Then that loan was the present value of the stock. In theory, the value of a share is the present value of the future money that you get paid. Of course, one cannot know how much that is, so this is useless for actual investing. Still, the market price of a share should be the best guess of people with money. If the stock is trading higher than someone’s guess, they sell. If it’s lower, they buy. So the market cap should reflect the future profits. But what’s the value of a crypto-coin like bitcoin? Let’s start by thinking only about a coin being used to transfer money. And to make it easier, let’s say that coins are only exchanged for money once a day. Say people want to transfer 10 million USD each day. The senders buy coins for 10 million USD. They don’t care how many coins that gets them, only that the coins represent 10 million USD. If there are 2 million coins being sold on the market, then each coin must transport 5 USD and that will be the market value. New coins are constantly being “mined” to pay for the upkeep of the system. Let’s say that’s 100,000 coins per day. The intended receivers of the 10 million USD sell their coins to get the money. The miners also sell their coins to pay their bills. So the next day you have 2 million + 100,000 coins on the market. The senders again want to transport 10 million USD, so they buy the 2,100,000 coins on the market. The market value of a coin is now ~4.76 USD. Adding more coins lowered the value of the coins. That is inflation. The “missing” money goes to the miners to keep the system running. That’s not a problem for senders and receivers. Transferring money costs money, however you do it. (That crypto is an extremely expensive way to do this, is one underlying reason why it has no adoption as a payment system in the normal economy.) So far, you wouldn’t expect anyone to store or “hodl” coins. The value is just going down. But obviously, this is only true as long as the amount of USD to be transferred stays constant. If the system is more widely adopted and more money is transferred (outpacing the inflationary effect of the newly mined coins), then each coin has to transport more USD and the “value” goes up. Now, if you believe that adoption continues to grow, it becomes a reasonable strategy to stash some coins to sell them later at a higher “value”. Maybe the problem is already obvious, but let’s continue to take it slow. So, let’s say, it’s a bit later. There are 15 million coins and they are to transfer 100 million USD. The market price of a coin is now $6.67. (Let’s also say that there are no more coins being mined and the upkeep is paid some other way.) Now we bring in some venture capitalists. One day, they buy coins for an additional $50 million. Now the coins trade at $10 per coin. 15 million coins bought for $100 million + $50 million, right? The VCs now have 5 million coins. But note where the money went. It went to the transfer receivers when they sold the 15 million coins for $10 each. They got a windfall profit. That’s how it goes in crypto. All the money that people “invested” by buying coins is gone. It was either used to pay miners/for the system upkeep, or early adopters took it and ran. It’s all gone. That’s the big difference to shares. If the VCs sell their coins again, they lose. Because when there is only 100 million USD in the market for 15 million coins, they would only get 6.67 USD per coin. The money that they spent is gone. If they want to make a profit, new money has to come from somewhere. There are only 2 ways to achieve this. One is continuing adoption. If more money were to be transferred, with the same number of coins, the price goes up. They can siphon off some of that money by selling into that market. But that lowers the price again, so that only yields a profit if adoption increases enough. The other is that someone else also removes coins from the market. If there are fewer coins for the same (or a decreasing!) amount of money being transferred, then the market price will also go up. (In this scenario, too, they would be siphoning off money that other people are trying to transfer. The cost of transferring money would be increased for no very good reason; not a great feature in a payment system.) But note that this, too, lowers the price again. That only yields a profit, if “hodlers” sequester the coins sold by the VCs for a higher price than the VCs paid. I’m not saying this is a Ponzi scheme because everyone has heard that already. So that’s it. If you want to know the effect of 50k bitcoin on price, you need to look at the trading volume (minus wash trades): How many bitcoin are actually “in use”? You also need to know how many of these coins will be promptly removed from the market by “hodlers”.
Legal money transfers are not a use case. Crypto is simply much more expensive to maintain. All these mining rigs and all that electricity must be paid for.
Various currencies are moving away from the proof-of-work model, FWIW. Ethereum was mentioned in this comment chain as one of them.
Which doesn’t solve the economic problem. (Good for the environment, though)
Ethereum has proof of stake. That means someone has to deposit Ethereum, tying it up. It could be exchanged for money and invested in stocks or bonds, yielding a return. This is only economically feasible if the stake yields the same return as a comparable investment. This profit has to come from the users.
A competing payment system, based on sensible, modern technology also needs computers and the internet but not a stake. It must be cheaper.
The stake is supposed to keep people honest, because it can be taken if fraud is detected. Normally, fraud is dealt with by putting the perpetrators in jail. Being known by name is proof of stake.
Users have to pay extra just so that some kingpins in the back can remain anonymous. Do you want to for that?
It also doesn’t solve the other deal-breaker (in the spoiler). Whenever you transfer money through crypto, you risk that some “investor” siphons off some of it.
Since the real world value of cryptocurrencies are so volatile they are a questionable store of value
It will not be so volatile if it’s primary means of transaction for everyone(obviously not yet). Value of thoose cryptos are just like the values of normal money in different countries.
For example, if you can buy an apple for 10 shitcoins, instead of buying it in USD, then the value is not volatile. The problem arises when the apple is 5 USD and you have to transfer the shitcoin amount which is equal to the exchange rate of 5USD at that time.
This is true, but it’s hard to see why we would ever move from fiat currency to cryptocurrency as the primary means of exchange. Currently cryptocurrency’s advantages are modest and its disadvantages are substantial, and I haven’t seen a lot of movement toward fixing that balance. I’d like to give traditional finance channels some competition to reduce fees, lock-in, and inconvenience, but cryptocurrency is going to have to get a lot better for average people if it’s going to be a real alternative.
Advantages of cryptos is that they are decentralised. Just like lemmy is decentralised, no single entity or government control the money. Transaction happen from peer to peer. No middlemen involved. I don’t understand the disadvantages yet except environmental concerns. I heard coins like ethereum switched to proof of stake model which is more environmental friendly.
I don’t understand the disadvantages yet except environmental concerns.
As you point out, PoS basically solves the environmental concerns. (Some people might say it still consumes too much power but I disagree, I think power consumption under PoS is acceptable).
This is just my opinion, but I think the big disadvantage is cryptocurrencies are a pain in the ass to use. Lengthy story about what a pain it’s been to use them in Spoiler tag. I think this story is a bit of an outlier since I hit all of these issues, but the fact that a technically inclined person who is just getting back into cryptocurrency after a long hiatus can have this much trouble with it does not speak well use ability or safety.
::: I have a few coins I mined back in the day (before switching all my computing power to BOINC), and I saved off my wallet.dat from those wallets. I wanted to use them recently, so I reinstalled the wallet software. That worked, but then I had to download the entire chain again, so I had to wait more than a day to actually use the coins. Putting cash in a bank is faster if I’m already a customer of the bank. If I’m a new customer I might have to wait, but the point is cryptocurrency doesn’t have a clear advantage here.
The coins I had weren’t Bitcoin, but the shop I wanted to buy from only accepts Bitcoin. So then I had to exchange mine for Bitcoin and pay transaction fees. I guess you could say it’s my own fault for holding a less-popular coin but I’m not sure cryptocurrency is living up to its own hype if there’s exactly one or two coins that you have to use, just like how in the US there’s no real alternative to USD.
I found a no-account exchange, and I had to carefully enter keys and figure out amounts of coin > BTC. And I had to trust the exchange to give me what I wanted. If the no-account exchange didn’t exist, I would have to create a whole new account on a website I don’t entirely trust just to exchange one coin for Bitcoin. That’s a layer of trust in a “trustless” system. I also don’t like creating yet another account with my info in it — yet another way that cryptocurrency is not better than traditional finance.
Then not only did it cost transaction fees, it took hours for the transaction to go through. I could pay more for it to go faster, but now we’re talking about fees that far exceed those of credit cards or regular money transfers. Then I had to send the Bitcoin to the online store and wait for that transaction to clear. More time and more transaction fees. The purchase worked without a hitch, but it wasn’t any better than using a credit card.
I had to buy extra BTC because it’s really difficult to know exactly how much you’re going to pay including transaction fees, so after the transaction went through I tried to turn my remaining Bitcoins (I think it was worth ~$13?) back into the kind of coins I keep, but I set my transaction fee too low and the trade I set up expired before my coins went through. Luckily I had given the exchange a refund account, but that meant I had to wait over 24 hours before my transaction actually happened, and then the exchange had to send back my Bitcoin, incurring fees at each step.
While waiting I tried to cancel this Bitcoin transaction, but the software I used didn’t support that. So then I tried to extract my private key to enter into another piece of software, and that was surprisingly difficult. I thought cryptocurrency was supposed to put me in control, but without a LOT of technical knowledge I was just as powerless as I’d be with a bank that froze a transfer. I asked for help on a few forums and some people tried to help but the whole thing was confusing and eventually I had to give up and just wait for the transaction to go through.
Then I had to do the BTC > mycoin transaction again, and this time I think the fees were 5-10% of the amount I was transferring. That’s way more than Venmo’s immediate transfer fee or even credit card fees (I think those are around 3%?).
I will say that during this process I discovered the Electrum wallet, which is very good and works on a lot of platforms. Some of the issues I had would not have happened if I had used that all along. But there are so many wallets out there it’s hard to know which one is best and obviously when I started this process no one told me it was the best. And maybe it’s not and that just my opinion.
In summary, I’m interested in cryptocurrency and kind of enjoyed using it in the way learning new things can be fun. But it was slower, less convenient, and more expensive than regular currency. Cryptocurrency boosters are going to have to improve all of these problems before it’s competitive with regular currency, and I don’t see a lot of discussion about how much these pain points suck and how to improve.
Trusting Humans is literally a security flaw. Any system with trust you can find examples with fraud and abuse from those who held power by holding that trust.
We trusted bankers to invest our money, and some short sold the housing market with that money
I could go on, but trust really is a security issue. Decentralization has its efficiency issues, but saying “Bitcoin uses as much power as the 90th largest nation” is peanuts when you consider the energy inequality that America spends and compare what Bitcoin delivers with that energy versus how much energy centralized banks need to deliver a system that’s easier to fraud
More seriously, every system can be used for fraud. The question is whether the solution is actually better overall. We could prevent all wire fraud by returning to a cash-only economy. But that would be hugely inconvenient and therefore create a huge drag on the economy compared to a world where we can do electronic transfers even though electronic transfers open us up to wire fraud. Returning to cash-only is not worth the increase in security, and it opens us up to other issues (e.g., bank runs and someone stealing all the money under my mattress).
And while power use is a problem with Proof of Work coins, it’s not my biggest concern about cryptocurrency because Proof of Stake can fix that issue. It’s a shame that the biggest coin now is PoW but hopefully that will change. The bigger issue is “is cryptocurrency better than traditional currency?” So far it hasn’t proven to be better except in extremely limited circumstances. And a lot of the ways cryptocurrency is better will go away if governments start regulating it like other forms of finance. Having your money in cryptocurrency won’t protect you from the police and courts.
We trusted bankers to invest our money, and some short sold the housing market with that money
Okay? You could do that with cryptocurrency if traders started accepting cryptocurrency for shorts. The only reason you can’t do that today is traders won’t accept cryptocurrency for shorts, and that’s basically security through obscurity.
I didn’t say cryptocurrency was any better or worse for fraud and abuse than regular currencies. Honestly I have no idea which one is better or worse for fraud and abuse. I’m just saying it’s not clear that the particular way that cryptocurrency is more secure than regular banking is actually beneficial.
Exactly, and using Bitcoin does not solve that because you still have to transact with humans. If you buy something with Bitcoin and the seller never sends you anything, you’re out of luck. Your money is gone.
If you use a regulated financial system you have some options. If you paid with credit card you can charge back and dispute the charge. Your money in the bank is backed by insurance that is guaranteed by the government.
Bitcoin only cuts out the middleman. Every other issue of trust with the recipient still exists, and those are the problems regulation solves, and the reason fraudsters love Bitcoin so much.
With all the information available at your fingertips being ignorant is a choice.
“this parallel financial system can also serve a tangible social good, offering an onramp to the financial system for people who would otherwise be left out. In countries where the vast majority of the population is unbanked, national currencies are no longer a safe store of value, remittances comprise a hefty portion of GDP, and international sanctions complicate connections to the global economy, a virtual currency that doesn’t require an intermediary to approve transactions can be a vital lifeline for survival”
This isn’t Reddit, you don’t have to turn every discussion into a fight. I’m genuinely interested in cryptocurrency for reasons such as the article you linked: there are areas where traditional finance genuinely has failed to meet people’s needs. Providing a medium of exchange for the unbanked is a great example of something it could possibly help with, and I think that’s a good thing if it happens. But we should also be able to talk about the problems with cryptocurrencies and the cases where it doesn’t work as well as traditional finance. And if this prediction doesn’t pan out and cryptocurrency doesn’t become a major way of banking the unbanked, we should be able to consider what could accomplish that goal. It might be a different cryptocurrency, or a new thing inspired by cryptocurrency, or something that has nothing to do with cryptocurrency. After all, cryptocurrency is not a goal in itself.
I’ve never been in Reddit so I can’t talk about it but I wouldn’t have been so harsh if you hadn’t already stated that it seems only useful for illegal and immoral activities when it’s so easy to find, if you are “genuinely interested”, that it’s not the case.
Can the unbanked still benefits from crypto these days though? How can you cash your crypto without doing KYC? Even localbitcoin got folded due to increased regulation. If you can pass KYC, then you’re probably not the unbanked. Less and less business accept crypto these days, it’s hard purchase daily necessities without cashing out your crypto (except probably in venezuela).
I mean thats really what I’m talking about. Africa, Central and South America, I know they benefit substantially from technology, because local banks can be so unreliable.
I was hoping it would help me save on international transfer fees when I was an overseas postdoc, but it would have actually cost more between the exchange fees and my time setting up all the exchanges in various countries, meanwhile also introducing risk in me being robbed of said money and screwing something up and introducing myself to some sort of tax liability. Needless to say, I continued to just pay for the bank transfers
That’s really the thing, isn’t it? In my experience cryptocurrency fees are quite high. I bet there’s a way to find a lower fee but then I’d have to do a ton of research and hope it’s accurate. I’d rather just pay a bank that requires me to do no research.
It cannot be cheaper, other than by avoiding taxes and regulation.
Consider sending money from US Dollar to Euro:
Sane way: An intermediary (IE a bank) handles this. You give them USD and they give the receiver Euros. This involves some service costs and 2 bank transfers.
Because people exchange money in both ways, the banks need not run out of either Euro or USD. In the background there is the currency market, on which the proper exchange rate is haggled out, which takes care of imbalances in cash flow.
Crypto way: You give a crypto exchange (an intermediary) USD and they give you crypto. This already involves 2 transfers and service costs. One of those 2 transfers is a crypto transfer, which is much more expensive (IE uses more resources) than a bank transfer.
This is already more expensive and then you have to do the same thing again to cash out.
And then we are still not done. Say there is an imbalance in that more people transfer money from USD to Euro than vice versa. That means that crypto becomes more expensive in USD and cheaper in Euro. There’s more demand in terms of USD and more supply for Euro, right?.
That creates an arbitrage opportunity. You can exchange USD for Euro, and then buy crypto for Euro to sell for USD. This closes the circle and puts everything back to the initial state. But to do that, we still have to exchange the real currencies. So now the markets bake the cost of exchanging currency into the crypto prices. At a guess, for some currencies (probably not so much Euro/USD), that would have a significant effect. I’m thinking smaller, poorer countries that send many migrant workers, who send money back home. These workers would not only end up paying the insane overhead of the crypto system, but also, still, most of the normal, direct exchange costs (if they relied on crypto).
There’s a case to be made for a currency that facilitates illegal transactions, or transactions that corporations object to. Just because something is legal in your country doesn’t mean it might not be unjustly restricted. Or could just be unjustly illegal in your country or another country. The problem of course is that distributed currency also facilitates things that should be illegal.
But WikiLeaks is a good example - their legacy is a little mixed now, but when they first came on the scene they were doing work which was a valuable service to the public. If you wanted to donate money to support wikileaks you couldn’t because the credit card processors shut them off. Blockchain lets you get around that.
Likewise it’s the combination of distance and direct - I can give $5 in cash to my local leaking consortium, but I can’t give $5 to the leaking consortium on the other side of the world without relying on the knowledge and consent of third parties.
I agree there’s something to be said for this — If you have a above-board business that credit card companies don’t want to service because they think it makes them look bad, that should not shut you out of electronic payments yet that’s basically where we are at least in the US.
This is a little hard to balance with the fact that the same things that let you circumvent gatekeepers like credit card companies also make it attractive for genuinely immoral things, but that’s a trade-off. Every currency can be used for immoral things and just because cryptocurrency might make it a little easier doesn’t mean it’s inherently immoral.
Mailing someone cash means you need to know their address, you have to wait however long for the mail to arrive, you can’t prove they received the cash, it’s possible the cash was stolen en route and anyone who might wish you harm like an adversary government can observe the transaction.
With crypto you face similar problems. You need an address, waiting is shortr, rugpulls and other scams are one of the biggest use cases so getting crypto stolen seems common. You might be able to verify that crypto was revceved but as with any trustless paymet solutions the issue is that getting the item you ordered is the part where trust is needed the most. Good luck asking back money when you get an empty box.
You’re right about ordering goods and not having a recourse if they’re not delivered. Of course in the case of supporting an organization that will be less of a consideration.
In the case of needing to know an address it’s much different to give out an arbitrary string of numbers as an address than information which represents your physical location.
No disagreement that there are myriad examples of problematic uses for crypto. My first comment was in response to the question about what are valid use cases. It seems clear there are some, even if it’s not as universal as some true believers claim.
If we’re playing by area, I seem to have won. But also, when was the last prosecution for mailing cash (where it wasn’t part of a more significant crime?
it’s only good for illegal or morally questionable transactions.
Good thing laws are always just and everyone agrees that following every law is the most important thing a human being can aspire to do in their lifetime.
^^/s
Seriously though, I’m someone that uses credit for 90% of my purchases, but I also enjoy consuming cannabis and I’m well aware how horrible it would be if it wasn’t possible to make “illegal or morally questionable transactions.”
Oh nice, that’s how high Solana’s TPS has gone in testing (in practice it hovers around 5-10k TPS). There’s also newer chains like Aptos that claim to be able to handle 150k TPS with subsecond finality. Of course, neither of these chains are very decentralised, but at least they aren’t fully permissioned and centralised. Especially on a network belonging to a partisan, anti-competitive, anti-trust law-breaking, Wikileaks funding thieving Israel supporters like Visa.
Bitcoin is open-source software, a network of nodes running Bitcoin core, the source code for which you can find here: github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin
Morals are a consequence of free will, which Bitcoin does not have. There are valid moralistic concerns about Bitcoin, but they are related to the impact of Bitcoin, rather than whether it is a moral system.
General question, because I don’t give a shit about blockchain to research it.
Does it have a way to quickly and effectively handle fraud? And don’t tell me “there’s no way to commit fraud” because people can steal wallet passwords no fucking problem. With most banks they will actively track fraud, cancel those transactions, and restore your funds and possibly shut down the card automatically while still allowing the account to exist so you can access your money. Is that the case with blockchain?
It depends on whether you’re interacting with the blockchain directly, or via a custodial solution more appropriate for end consumers. Same like how you don’t get a refund if you operate a western union branch and fuck up the wire.
Yes. There are Escrow services in crypto that hold and issue chargebacks, but it is to to you if you want to use such a service.
centralized crypto exchanges also have fraud combatting teams. An example is that exchange that sponsors kitboga, the youtuber who screws around with Indian scammers. They lock scammers’ accounts from withdrawing but not depositing so they keep sending victims’ money to these accounts, and then eventually they lock the accounts and transfer the money back to the victims.
Obviously an issue with this approach is the scammers can just use decentralized wallets, but recently exchanges started blocking transactions to these too unless you provide KYC info about them, so they’re trying at least.
If you do things right, you can be relatively safe from fraud and scams, but most people won’t do things the right way.
13.15 is the average number of transactions per second. Max TPS (57.91) is the largest recorded TPS, not the capacity of the blockchain. Max TPS will rise as more people use layer 2. Layer 2 solutions can handle 2,000-4,000 TPS, and there are 24 commonly known ones that can do these transactions in parallel.
I think it depends on the layer 2 solution, but as far as I understand, each of these layer 2 solutions independently have 2000-4000 as theoretical max, and only after bulking transactions together do they affect layer 1, so you should be able to add all layer 2 together for the total.
I guess the spatial sharding update will further increase the maximum number of transactions you can bulk by a factor or two so an individual layer 2 solution becomes comparable with visa, but I don’t think that update is coming to Ethereum in several years. Then again, Ethereum needing to perform 60,000 TPS is likely not happening this decade either.
For now at least, layer 2 is fast and cheap, although a bit difficult to use.
Yes but 65000 TPS for Bitcoin would likely have the planet glowing much brighter in the infrared… possibly even the visible, for all the heat we’d need to dump.
I’m personally advocating for Ethereum which is Proof of Stake and uses a fraction of the energy Bitcoin does.
However, correct me if I’m wrong here because I’m not that much invested in bitcoin as a tech or investment, but isn’t almost half of the energy used on bitcoin generated from renewables? I could swear I saw an article about it somewhere.
Although nowadays people seem busy heating up the world telling AI to cheat on their homework, so I wonder if this is a problem with society rather than technology.
It may very well be renewable. I’m really more referring to the inefficient way in which the sums are calculated. Those data centers get warmish.
And yeah, AI is just the next thing we decided to punish our GPUs with. Crazy how we’ve used that part of the computer these last few decades…
I’m more engaged in a chat gpt session that I am staying up till 4 am watching line graphs of crypto prices, guilty as charged 😁. Not sure what comment it makes about society other than “we seem pretty lonely, everything ok?”
That’s just proof of work chains like bitcoin. Ethereum doesn’t have intense calculations and nodes instead use their staked money as liability to offer proof of transactions.
However, correct me if I’m wrong here because I’m not that much invested in bitcoin as a tech or investment, but isn’t almost half of the energy used on bitcoin generated from renewables? I could swear I saw an article about it somewhere.
It’s still wasted energy. If it wasn’t used on bitcoins, it would have been used on other things - some of which had to be powered by fossil fuels.
Mining is a great way to deal with excess energy from solar farms.
When solar power plants produce more energy than needed, that means we have to shut down some of the plants temporarily. This is costly, and also means we require alternative energy for cloudy and rainy days. Solar still produces energy on these days, but not enough.
If we make more solar plants so we can have enough energy even for cloudy days we instead get too much energy on sunny days, and we are forced to shut down the plants temporarily, and this is essentially wasted money for these electric companies, so why would they want more solar plants?
Producing a lot of plants just to expect them to run with low efficiency and with half of them shut down on sunny days is wasteful and costly.
However, if we instead have mining rigs consume the excess energy, we get a stable energy flow, because mining rigs will turn on and off based on the cost of electricity. Supply and demand stabilize.
My coworkers give me shit for not working late all the time. Like, I work late when I absolutely have to or get permission to make up missed time. I refuse to stay just because lol.
At my last job, I would clock-watch like a kid in school and bolt out of there when it got to be 5. No fucking way was I staying there any longer than I had to.
Soon I’m going to be part of our safety management team, I respect this type of attitude. I don’t want all of our employees being exhausted all day, that’s dangerous. Go home, get rest, relax, come back 100% tomorrow. Any other attitude is unsustainable and irresponsible. I do appreciate the need to SOMETIMES work overtime. I’d really like to understand the positive feedback loop that’s involved with excessive overtime but that’s not my specific field of study.
The general reaction to this post being “Who’s Matpat?” is super interesting to me. And the comments saying that Tom Scott and Matpat aren’t old are also interesting since they follow the trend in Lemmy of the average age being a lot older than any other social network. I’m Gen Z and primarily consume content via a very Zoomer-heavy platform, YouTube, and the only other social network I have is Lemmy, which I’d say is very millennial-dominated. Which is why I stayed on Lemmy when I first got on here in June, since I liked the difference in opinion on the same topics on Lemmy and YouTube. Nothing related to the post, just something I’ve noticed for a while but never shared.
This place is a lot like what the older Internet from the 80s and 90s was like, just a bunch of disjointed seperate individually run forums and communities run by passionate individuals in a world of digital anarchy where you can find something new every day. One minute you're downloading guitar tabs handwritten by some random metal fan, to reading about some guy named Steve's tribute website to his pet dog the next.
I think that's what draws us in and keeps us here for the older folks.
I feel like people not knowing this Matpat person may also just be a case of the channel being called “The Game Theorists”.
I have seen videos of that channel suggested, but never clicked on any, because it looked like typical content mill stuff to me. If you don’t watch any videos, you’ll only ever read “The Game Theorists”…
I remember YouTube being millennial dominated. I wonder if it’s just a phase before realizing you’re throwing comments into the void and by being a central social site that still allows anonymity, it just invokes trolls - like xitter.
Wait till you find out YouTube isn’t that old and came about because some horny dudes couldn’t find the video of Janet Jackson’s boob. I mean, 18 is ancient for the internet and other tech, but I’d say it goes beyond just being a website with its social prevalence.
To be fair, I didn’t know his handle was MatPat, because I only knew about him as “the Game Theory guy I stopped watching almost ten years ago”. If you told me Game Theory was quitting the internet , I would know who you meant.
People are actually in this thread discussing how feasible this is as if it were a real plan down to calculating specific costs and supporting them with URLs.
I mean, it’s a bummer when the bougie burger places do this, but when the taco trucks and teriyaki shops near me started costing more than $2 a taco or $10 for a plate of yakisoba, I knew shit was getting hard out there.
Makes me wonder what people are paying for bread, Kraft cheese (or a knockoff of the same) and butter/margarine.
Seriously, a single grilled cheese shouldn’t be more than $1, it should be much less… At least in materials… The cost of grilling it and cleaning up and whatnot should still be really cheap. Even if you wrap the sandwiches in wax/parchment paper or whatever and serve it, you should still be able to make a profit per sandwich. Whether you would be better off doing this rather than getting a job at McDonald’s or whatever… That will depend on how popular the food truck is…
There used to be a vending machine in a hosiptal near me that would heat up a premade grilled cheese sandwich for £2. Being a vending machine in a hospital, they had to be making at least enough to cover the costs plus wastage. I’d say that somewhere with high footfall, especially on a cold day, you could make at least some profit from this.
Just saying the concept works, ppl DO want a simply Sammy for a buck and the ingredients are less as 30% of sales price even with some real decent toppings. But renovation (and extreme rent) only allows multi nationals to compete at busy places like city central stations etc.
Gaslamp district in San Diego had a cafeteria like this years ago, guessing it’s no longer a thing, but simple cheap menu would have steady customers, maybe profitable, it’s the business development people who would oppose.
Ah yeah, an enlightened centrist meme, coming directly from the deranged minds that think trying to take the middle road when one the sides is blatantly against human rights is a moderate position.
Bruh whoosh much… the meme is quite literally from the prospective of the Ruling class and saying that both issues are the same to the Ruling Class as long as it doesnt threaten the Status quo of their strangle hold on Wealth and their ability to extract it from the Working Class…
Not worth engaging with the “centrist are evil” people. They just cant accept other pov’s that arent theirs, specially if it implies their side should make a compromise. Im pretty sure they hate even more non partisan people rather than the team party they are suposed to hate because that is thinking outside the box and they dont like that very much.
Imo thats just a result of the partisan american culture war bullshit doing its intended purpose: divide and conquer.
To bad most of the media comes from hollywood and a lot of us non american people get indirectly involved in their bullshit.
dyed purple hair is a right-wing dogwhistle for “SJW man-hating feminist”, who are more often leftists than they are liberals. You don’t have any issues with social justice or feminism, do you?
I’ve never seen someone with purple hair and thought “this indicates that they would have a problem with me calling for labor to seize the means of production”. Yeah there’s plenty of liberals with dyed hair, but plenty of communists too
I genuinely try to avoiding judging peoplr based on outward appearances, I know way to many hippies and people who generally look like what the right tries to characterize as leftists, that were hard core tRump supporters/forced birth hardliners.
Political cartoons are built on charactiture. Otherwise the mr monopoly man would simply be a giant who owns diaper companies and has captured two people and put them in a cage resulting in them shitting themselves.
It’s one of those memes that I can see from someone who thinks that the democrats are Marxists or from someone who gets really mad when you say that Marxism isn’t the end all be all of communism.
Either way, it comes with the failure to acknowledge that the culture war is one group trying to exist and the other being convinced to hurt them by the capitalist class.
I’m not sure why centrism is so hated here. As long as you acknowledge one side is more damaging I don’t see a problem with it. The other side might have less problematic views but they both subsist off of each other and thrive by creating vitriol between each other. It shouldn’t be taboo to not support either one. This meme doesn’t even really seem like its attempting to make that point anyway, although I understand how you could see it that way.
If you acknowledge one side as worse than another it isn’t centrist. That would be taking a position.
The fence sitting of centrists say both sides are bad and not dealing with issues is why centrists are hated. They don’t offer anything other than the ‘Both Sides’ argument.
At least that in what I have gathered my observations.
I understand the dislike for people that take no position whatsoever, but the hate for centrism I’ve seen extends beyond that. I’ve been called an enlightened centrist for simply not supporting either party, but I guess that might just mean those people were mistaken.
Being between two ideologies is not a virtue in and of itself. Refusing to align with either of 2 generally shitty Capitalist parties, and being a centrist, are completely different things.
It depends on why you aren’t supporting either party. If it’s because the libs are too radical and the conservatives are too fascist, then you’re a centrist liberal. If you’re legitimately outside the scope of those two, such as to the left (or somehow to the right), then you aren’t a centrist.
Being extreme isn’t wrong either. The strength of a position with respect to current society says nothing about the founding logic for said position. Climate change, for example, must be radically acted on to prevent even worse results from happening, and it must happen now or we will suffer even more.
I don’t support either one because in many ways I think they are effectively the same. My views are certainly more in line with liberals and I think they are much less directly harmful than conservatives, but the parties themselves are more or less the same to me.
Neither of them effectively push the policy I want, and both purposely create an unnecessary divide between each other. They both need the other to be the antagonist to continue creating this strange dramatic version of politics.
Parts of my family refuses to speak to one another purely because of this. Their views aren’t even that far off from each other, but neither of them actually understand each other’s views. All they understand is the manufactured hate between each other.
Again, I think conservatives usually cause the most problems, but the other party can’t exist in its current form without someone to be angry at. There is no actual motive to stop the problems from being caused, so they are only amplified and worsened.
Both are actively creating a worse place to live in, and I wouldn’t support either one regardless of whatever views they claim to have.
Okay, so it sounds like you’re a leftist, and likely to agree that the bourgeoisie deliberately pits the Proletariat against itself as a means to prevent unified action.
It’s not incorrect though. If we’re worried about the erosion of human rights, it distracts from the fact that corps own our government. Not that that means we shouldn’t fight the erosion of human rights as well. That’s the brain dead centrist take.
The problem is where you draw the line. It’s a fucking shame to democrats that Nancy “insider trading is OK when I do it” Pelosi is still politically relevant, but what are we gonna do when the alternate choice is a fascist?
Oh I’ll still be voting for the lesser of 2 evils dont get me wrong, i dont fuck with lemmygrad.ml at all anymore because they have deleted multiple comments ive made arguing for the necessity of voting for the lesser of 2 evils to protect the Prolitariat long enough for class conciousness to grow in America.
Grad is full of tankies. They stan just about every adversary to the US because their whole belief system is “American imperialism bad” so they’ll unironically defend north Korea, China, Russia, USSR, etc. Hell, a few of em have “Stalin” in their name. Last month they were celebrating the hamas attack on Israel. They support Russia in the Russia-Ukraine war. Check meanwhileongrad for more interesting tidbits.
I feel like half the stuff posted there is to disenfranchise young leftists enough to keep them from voting for Democrats in 2024 inorder to allow mask off fascism to take hold of American politics, but not enough to get them to practice any real praxis and keep them regualted to having purity politics circle jerks while doing nothing to challenge the status quo. Putin is the biggest Imperial threat on the planet. While Stalin also holds the lions share if the blame for forcing revolutionary Marxism to stall out in the dictatorship of the Prolitariat stage. They also aren’t defending the actions of those countries as much as they are recontexualizing them. We should learn from previous socialist experiments and take what was good from them into the future as much as we should recognize and strive to leave their failures in the past. Eithet way we must recognize that the Capitalist Status quo is not working out what so ever for tge vast majority of humanity and something has got to give.
You got it pretty much spot on, though I’ll nitpick here
They also aren’t defending the actions of those countries as much as they are recontexualizing them.
They’re whitewashing history. Yes, if you want to try communism, it’s critical to understand where previous attempts failed. They don’t, and they don’t want to.
Putin is the biggest Imperial threat on the planet.
And yet they still support him. I got banned from grad for 3 years for telling a mod to stop throating putin’s cock. I’ll see if I can pull up the exchange, it was pretty funny. He immediately whatabouted the US working with nazis after wwii. Like, yeah bud that was bad, I agree, tell me how that justifies invading Ukraine right now though?
Lemmygrad doesn’t deny real genocides or celebrate genocide AFAIK. Please let me know if that’s not the case; I wouldn’t want to be a part of a community that does that.
This is obviously a leftist meme making fun of liberal and conservative fighting. It’s from the perspective of someone to the left of liberals, not between liberals and conservatives.
That makes more sense. I was wondering why they were both saying the same thing when typically you’d expect liberals and conservatives to be arguing. Those to the left of liberals see everyone as “liberal,” as in free markets and whatever, not political left/right, or at least the hexbear folks do.
Took me a bit longer than I’d like to admit to get what they were going on about when everyone was called liberal lol
Well, the rich seems to like the stuff the batshit insane right are spewing. Plus, they also benefit from those policies, like abortion bans, child labor law regressions, and of course tax cuts for those earning 6 figures at minimum.
America’s “left” is also not fighting these insane policies effectively. It’s like they’re pointing fingers at the GOP and going “Hey, that’s bad.”
From the left perspective in the US it’s basically the Democrats who are the “enlightened centrist” position, if not center-right, because they think capitalism is redeemable if it has the right branding etc, and success in the system is at least in theory available to everyone. The right faction are more honest in how they embrace and take joy in how this system runs on exploitation, and are obviously more dangerous in the current climate. The Democrats have to be dishonest because they have to take an inherently exploitative economic arrangement and give it a positive spin.
I don’t remember it being slow, but I think that’s just because the slow pace was part of the intention behind the show. Offices are slow, horrible places to work when we’re talking about corporate environments. So it added to the horror that they made many in-office experiences drag out, and it hit really hard as a result.
So yeah, I agree, but also… I loved/hated it (mostly loved it).
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