Technology
This is the official technology community of Lemmy.ml for all news related to creation and use of technology, and to facilitate civil, meaningful discussion around it.
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My point is that you're comparing an unregulated scam-infested free-for-all with a regulated industry that has audit requirements from here to Pluto.
You're trying to make it seem as if the banking system is as bad as cryptocurrency/NFT/web3 scene. It's not, not by a long shot. It's far from perfect, obviously, but that's like saying "hey let's all drink gasoline; it gives you a hell of a kick, and you can die of drinking regular water anyway too".
yes because bankers using their customer's funds to speculate then losing it all having to be bailed out by the government using taxpayer's funds isn't horrible, having your purchasing power be devalued by central banks isn't horrible, having your account frozen because of some faulty algorithm isn't horrible and being blocked from the financial system because the government said so isn't horrible
No, all of these things are horrible. But also none of these things is solved by cryptocurrencies/NFTs/web3.
crypto with strong monetary policy can never be minted by a tiny minority
no one can stop you from receiving funds
no one can stop you from borrowing/lending using a defi protocol even if the developers add checks to the front end you can always just use your own front end
you can vote on the direction of monetary policy in crypto
you can vote on the direction of defi protocols
you can send funds to anyone in the world for a few cents
if you don't like the direction a crypto is going in you can fork it and go your own way
Six mining pools control over 80% of all Bitcoin mining. Who controls these pools? Pretty sure it's not the majority of Bitcoin users.
Tell that to the person that used the DAO contract to receive funds from it, and then Ethereum hard-forked to stop them from receiving these funds. Or anyone who has a blacklisted wallet. :-)
I mean, how does these two things — the Ethereum hard-fork because of DAO bug, and wallet blacklists — not show that clearly the whole crypto sphere is just bull? That's literally the most basic promise cryptobros make; and yet it simply does not hodl.
And then you can use the borrowed funds to gain voting majority and empty a Proof of Stake coin. 🤣
...but your vote will not mean much, since the whales will have their way anyway.
And the vote will be safely ignored.
Come on, try harder. This is amateur hour!
Those six mining pools cannot mint more btc and there are other cryptos other than btc
That's ethereum you moron there are literally several other blockchains in existence that have not hardforked to reverse a transaction. How is someone using their borrowed funds to do something unethical disproving my point that no one can stop you can from borrowing funds . When have whales ever stopped ethereum classic users and other hard forks from moving away from the monetary policy of the original chains. Most defi protocols don't ignore the outcome of votes no one forces you to use a particular one
Of course they can. That's literally what they do, it's just called "mining". But also, if they pooled together and got over the magic 50% of global mining capacity, they could just rewrite history, moving any BTC any way they wanted.
Please either stop calling me names, or get more creative. This uncanny valley of dank aggro is unamusing.
Also, Ethereum happens to be one of the most popular blockchains. If that's not indicative of the rest of community, what is?
Also also, are you saying Ethereum is a failed project because of the DAO hard-fork?
Also also also, that's like me claiming that this little local bank I know here around the corner doesn't do unethical stuff and so that disproves your whole point about banks being evil. So are banks not evil, or is cherry-picking not a winning strategy? 🤔
It is not only the blockchain in existence so it's completely stupid to treat it as the representative of all projects in the space when they're built by different team teams with different philosophies, governance and monetary policy it's like saying because c is the lingua franca of the programming world that all other programming languages must share the same inherent flaws they're different projects they so it only makes sense that they should be judged differently. It's an unfinished project since it's hard to say objectively whether it's failed or not it has a quite a lot of applications running on it some good ones and a lot of bad ones too subjectively I would say that it's not even if I don't agree with it's philosophy it clearly has a userbase that doesn't mind it. Some banks are evil I wasn't saying all banks are evil the point I've been repeatably been trying to make that it's completely unfair to smear a group based on the actions of some individuals
Dunno man (I assume you're a guy, please correct me if I'm wrong), the link in the original post mentions a lot of other blockchains that seem to have all sorts of problems.
Also, waiting impatiently for your insightful take on blacklisted wallets.
A quick glance at the link only shows ethereum and solana related news as you know already ethereum has had a history of censorship since it's inception and solana isn't even a decentralised blockchain it utilizes a handful of beefy nodes to achieve consensus neither projects' developers have ever really been known for being true believers in decentralisation in the fullest so none of them can be seen as guides of the best in the space.
blacklisted wallets are terrible you can connect your own front end to the smart contract if you're technical/use another front end to the smart contract done by someone else if you're not technical/use another defi protocol
How unfortunate that even freedom-loving cryptobros allow their projects to do such horrible things. Who woulda thunk it! It's almost as if it's more about financial stakes than "freedom" or whatever. 🤔
I literally just said that they're aren't that and it's a mistake to think of them as that the space like everywhere else is full of people with different values and to some it's completely ok if projects do hardforks for bailouts because they don't care about decentralisation
No true cryptobro, gotcha.
But also, it's a mistake to think of the banking sector as a single thing, as that space like everywhere is full of people with different values. Right?
some people like crypto to make big bucks
some people like crypto because cool cryptography and decentralised solutions are interesting to figure out because they're naturally inefficient
some people like crypto because it's really cheap to send money back home to Nigeria
some people like crypto because government blocked them from the formal banking system
some people think we will all use crypto
some people think we won't use all crypto but view it as another option to have if hyperinflation happens
And yet somehow they all refuse to deal with the scammers in their midst, and many seem to react to any suggestion that this might be a problem with denialism, name-calling, and whataboutism.
how can I and other ethical people possibly deal with all the scammers in the space? can you stop all criminals from using your national currency to do illegal acts?
I can recognize this is a serious problem. I can push politicians to help regulate it. I can (and I have) work with NGOs and journalists to reveal corrupt banksters. I can then demand them being punished.
Or, I could call people names and try to change the subject to problems in some other kind of system.
One of these is ethical. The other is called "being an enabler".
Also, let's make two more things clear:
How a piece of technology is designed influences what it's good for. A butter knife and a butcher's knife are different for a reason, and one of them is really hard to use to kill someone.
And if a system keeps doing a thing, even if we close our eyes and insist it's not supposed to, if for long enough this is not getting fixed, clearly it's part of the system's purpose.
The whole crypto sphere has been designed very clearly with libertarian-right ideas at the base. So it perpetuates libertarian-right power structures ("rich get richer", etc). This is not going to lead to any more "freedom" in the world, because it never meant to. It meant to allow some select lucky few get stupid rich and powerful without going through the current structures of power.
At best, it's a shake-up on top, not a revolution of the people. It's sad so many idealistic people got caught in it.
how can something can be neither good or bad but not neutral.All knives can be used to harm someone. Majority of the rich people in the world have gotten rich because of their closeness to the government whether the US or Cuba, it's how close you are the government that has made majority of the world's rich where they are today and not any true entrepreneurial skill/their own private property.
You really gotta read some Graeber.
maybe one day I will, you should read about all anarchist societies that have ever existed/that still exist and all works published by authors who predicted the end of capitalism
Yeah, like Graeber. "Debt: First 5000 Years" is very much on-topic here. He goes deep into how pre-market societies worked and how capitalism came to be (and tears apart the founding myths of economy in the process). Fascinating read.
Problem is, cryptocurrencies are intrinsically capitalist. They support and perpetuate capitalist power structures. Consider this:
Yay another book written by some guy that complains about modern society makes broad generalizations about human nature and money, idealizes pre-industrial societies and complains about capitalism without offering any real alternative but basically just saying we can do better just what the world needed.
there are not intrinisically capitalist because they use subsidies and other things non existent in a perfectly free market nor is it surprising the wealth distribution of crypto is uneven since most people don't use them as a replacement to fiat/even know of them at all never mind the fact that you can freely purchase them from a exchange and nothing stops one from doing so
I vaguely remember how in some other thread someone insisted I read a whitepaper before I comment on a thing. You know them perhaps? 🤣
You might want to read up a bit about the difference between the terms "capitalism" and "free market".
Anyway, that was fun. Let's do it again some time.
Yes and you never did that so why should I act in good faith and do the same for you
My mistake I should’ve said a capitalist market economy
The banking system is fully regulated as you've pointed out but it's full to the brim with criminals many of them with the formal blessing of the state so regulation wouldn't solve anything. No one can force people to do the right thing over and over we tell newcomers to run your node, do due diligence on development teams, read the terms and conditions of the dapps you use, don't store your keys on exchanges/in the cloud etc and people don't listen just like how governments have warned people for centuries about drugs and people have ruined themselves and their families.
You asked what can one do, I answered. I've been doing my part about the financial sector. Perhaps it's time you do yours about the cryptoscams, instead of insisting nothing can be done.
I can't force developers to stop working on bad projects I can only withhold funding from them and encourage others to do the same it's not my responsibility to ensure that no scams exist because that would be impossible I can only guide people to the information and the decision to use/not to use is up to them
And yet you focus on whataboutism after somebody posts one of the best sources of information about recent cryptoscams.
fuck off it with your claims about whataboutism i just said I don't use/nor provide support to any of the applications/blockchains mentioned just like the traditional finance world there are risks are involved and it is your responsibility to avoid scams and the best sources of information on scams what a joke there are so many well written blogs, academic papers and podcasts etc that go into detail all about what's wrong in the space from people who are actually knowledgeable about distributed systems and economics some of what is even there aren't scams but just news about people not/accepting crypto, bug releases and user stupidity
Bad form, really.
Sorry, whataboutism and No True Scotsman. Right, you do use both.
I have not seen you say which chains/solutions you do support. Every time I provided sources on how screwed up a particular popular one (Bitcoin, Ethereum, etc) is, you just move the goalposts ("I don't support that particular one"), while hand-waving about "traditional finance".
Fact of the matter is: one has way less chance of getting screwed out of their money in traditional finance than in crypto. And, if that does happens, one has way more chance of getting their money back, and of getting the scammers brought to justice. It's far from perfect, and far too many people still get scammed. But it's orders of magnitude safer than crypto.
Now, if you'd like to perhaps be explicit for once (other than dropping f-bombs) and commit to saying what exactly do you support, instead of constantly moving the goalposts, that would be great.
You pointed out that btc mining is dominated by a few groups that is irrelevant as they cannot mint more than 21 million btc into existence unless all miners voted to undo this which they aren’t very likely to do because their votes have to take into consideration all constituents of the chain since they derive their income from them even if they decided to do that I could still just choose to use a version of the chain that does enforce the rule/use another existing chain/even create another currency myself in the traditional finance world if my country’s central bank decides to raise their inflation rate to 50% I cannot remain on a version of the currency that maintains the 7% inflation rate in a lot of developing countries around the world central banks do exactly this and citizens have zero means of recourse yes they could the usd, euro etc but the government could expropriate this as well and this has happened in argentina and other states. I support btc, cardano, ergo, oxen monero and nym none of which are listed in the op. Decentralised finance because of the decentralised nature obviously doesn’t have the same legal protections and other advantages of traditional finance and this is known from the getgo just like with traditional finance you’re told the benefits and drawbacks and it’s up you the user to make your choice no one in either sphere is holding a gun to your head saying you must use my particular bank/blockchain/defi application for defi you can have the option of being able to view/modify the source code of the blockchain/smart contracts ( the only notable exception to this being legal tender where states compel you to use a particular currency/ies whether fiat/crypto to pay debts, fees and taxes in)
Hi yeah were gonna cut off your internet and/or power.
How are you gonna pay for potato's now?
https://usa.inquirer.net/75522/the-blockstream-network-and-other-ways-to-send-bitcoin-offline https://todayshomeowner.com/living-off-the-grid-generating-your-own-electricity/
Bro this is literally a meme you can not say that these two disconnected articles imply there's a systemic solution to governments stopping crypto. Literally try and convince one person in real life around you to do this in the case that crypto is made illegal.
I GIVE ZERO FUCKS WHETHER OR NOT SOMEONE DOES SOMETHING THE FACT THAT IT IS POSSIBLE IS ENOUGH OF AN ANSWER TO OP'S QUESTION AND IF PEOPLE ARE THREATENED THEY WILL FIND THE ENERGY TO DO SOMETHING THAT CAN HELP THEM
Is that what you're going to say when the fruit stand tells you they dont accept crypto?
What is this scenario? Why am I buying fruits using crypto from a vendor that has no advertisement saying they accept crypto?Why am i buying fruits overall? Why wouldn’t I just tell them that’s fine and just buy from another vendor that does accept crypto?