Bitcoin is a Cult
adamcaudill.com
adamcaudill.com
The leading zeros are the "proof-of-work". The bitcoin mining algorithm tries various nonces and generates many hashes until it finds one with (currently) 18 leading zeros. Surprisingly, much of the Bitcoin community doesn't know this and think that the leading zeros are special.
The 21e800 is supposedly 'special' because it relates to the E8 'Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything'. A physics theory proposing a basis for unified field theory.
Anyways, people have mistakenly calculated the odds of such an occurrence and believe it to be exceedingly rare. They are claiming that someone must have left it there and that it is either the result of:
1. A quantum computer
2. Time travelling
3. Something related to the Bible
This doesn't really make sense and we can calculate the odds ourselves. It works out to roughly 3%. (1 - ((16^6 - 1) / (16^6)) ^ 500,000 blocks) = 0.03.
There are 18 hashes with the leading non-zero digits 21e8
There are 3 hashes with the leading non-zero digits 21e80
There are many other "vanity hashes":
(57ea1 or steal) https://blockchain.info/block/000000000057ea16558140e0b3995a...
(1055e5 or losses) https://blockchain.info/block/00000000001055e54d1d11bae837d5...
These things are not rare, but as mentioned in the article, people have ascribed a sort of religious aspect to them. It's really weird.
I also wrote about this today. If you're interested in some of the other weird responses see: https://medium.com/@thisisjoshvarty/lets-talk-about-hashes-o...
The same thing happens with "interesting" serial numbers on money, though. This seems like an equivalent example.
To be more explicit: I don't think that mistaken beliefs/superstition on the part of users should necessarily reflect on the usability or practicality of anything they use.
It's pretty much always infeasible to enumerate that space, but generally speaking there are a looooot of things that could qualify as special-looking enough to be included. All forms of english, foreign languages, language abbreviations, leet-speak, slang, pop-culture-inspired references, etc.
The odds of randomly tripping across something "special" eventually are pretty good. And bonus points if eventually one of those special coincidences is vaguely time-correlated with a real-world version of itself (eg, the number happens to be in the news, the slang word was recently used by a celebrity, etc).
Lots of paradoxes you can construct with infinitite recursion or self reference in the absence of time.
In this case, interesting is fundamentally a temporal concept and there is only a paradox if you pretend that it isn't.
I don’t think the solution is related to time. Rather, it’s simply a matter of recognizing that it’s ok for something to be well defined that does not exist. The notion of an interesting natural number, such that it’s a binary property and being the smallest natural number, just doesn’t work. Thus we can conclude that there’s no such thing as “interesting” as defined like this. You can fix it by making interestingness a continuous value, or using a definition such that being the smallest number in a set isn’t enough to be interesting.
In the interesting number paradox a solution can be related to time (or recursion depth) such that, as the person you were responding to mentioned, the first few otherwise not interesting numbers can be considered interesting without considering all not otherwise listed numbers as interesting. The wikipedia page gives a different example solution involving time.
But there are definitely other 'interesting' numbers people could come up with.
So what you're saying is basically that there's no way to tell whether it's Jesus or Mohammed or Buddha that might be trying to communicate with us, because any of them might be using any of their magic codewords? /s
I have obsessive compulsive disorder, so unfortunately these cosmic peccadillos really throw my brain for a loop!
Maybe someone else remembers the details.
That's because most of the Bitcoin community is speculators and get rich quick types due to the frothyness of the space, whom neither know nor care to know about the mathmateical and cryptographic underpinnings of bitcoin.
Is it me or does it seem like this kind of stuff is everywhere now? Maybe I just consume lots of crazy people media.
"Bitcoin is a cult" is click bait. People have been engaging in numeric paradolia with financial systems forever. "Dow hit 666!" Etc.
The headline reads like it's only a cult, which isn't the case. Even the most critical observer must concede that these distributed networks are novel and interesting.
The farther you move from social media, the less cult-like things get. The best discussion remains on listservs, and there is a lot of interesting and substantive discussion occurring.
https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-d...
Apple - You can argue Apple, the hardware company, is a cult. The fans are rabid in their support for the company. Often the discussions are not at all civil and in this particular case there is no financial incentive.
Let's move even farther away.
There are cults for clothing companies. Companies that make drinks. Gaming companies. Youtube streamers. Heck, there even cults in processor companies.
Take for example AMD. I have had chats with people who just get livid when Intel vs. AMD conversations come up and I am thinking to myself "We are talking about CPUs right?".
There are even cults with Operating Systems. Just ask the nix vs. Windows folks. Those discussions get heated.
So I am not sure what he is trying to argue here. There will always be folks developing who will have a civil discourse and try to make the currency better and then there will be the peanut gallery. That comes with anything that gains wider exposure.
Even now, when the price is in the toilet, a lot of really smart people are having sane discussions across sub-reddits. And those very smart people are still checkin in code and making improvements.
This has happened before. During the BBS era and ARPA Net era, a lot of people said those things were "cute" and only used by underground cult figures. They said that people who believed in the "internet" were dillusional that a global network would ever happen. They also said that it would have limited impact on society. They said it would stay largely with universities. Newspapers laughed. Television networks laughed. Music companies shrugged it off. But the one thing I learned from both those eras is if there are a lot of smart people working in it then it is not to be discounted.
These services were launched to solve a practical problem. Bitcoin was launched as the manifestation of an ideology.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Internet_during_the_Cold_W...
If it helps, replace “practical problem” with “a problem customers will pay you to solve.” ARPANET had that. Bitcoin, on the other, never had an original sale. It was mined as a curiosity and then jumped from narrative (“currency of the future!”) to narrative (“store of value!”) to narrative (“mostly goes up!”)
Nevertheless, the internet turned out to be transforming from its original purpose. We can sit here and argue about cyrptocurreny but the game is young and we wont know what it will turn into in 30 years. Just like the people in the 70 and 80s didn't know how transforming the internet would become for our society.
Sure. But it’s still a customer making a purchase. That purchase grounds the project in someone’s need. A need they’re willing to trade for. The “trades for” part is important, since it references the status quo.
Financial assets, particularly speculative assets, don’t solve a need. They promise to solve a future need. (Sometimes they don’t.) Part of the discipline of speculating investing is knowing when to pull the plug.
Bitcoin solved some practical problem in someone's mind too, even if that problem was "how do we get private money into the 21st century?".
According to Wikipedia, Apple has sold 1.2 billion+ iPhones. Are you going to tell me that all of those people are going to “rabidly” support Apple?
No way.
What you are seeing is a very vocal very small minority.
What I said applies not only to Apple but to a lot of different groups of people.
Bitcoin sold itself as a cult from the very beginning so it's no surprise that all manner of cults have congregated around the technology. Bitcoin is an interesting example of a paranoid technology: it purports to be "trustless" and perfectly "fair" and it requires only a "faith" in math. The reality is very different but it's no surprise such a marketing pitch would appeal to the paranoid style that dominates these groups.
Communities that don't value trust accumulate paranoiacs and then become prone to delusion. This is the self-defeating logic that dooms cults in the end: delusions can persist for a while, until they don't, and the real world wins. With Bitcoin I suspect the real world will win once the miners, having extracted 95% of the value from the trade, leave and turn their fleets towards more profitable ventures. This is the real bubble [1] at work, after all, and compared to this all the schemes and schemes and wacky delusions promoted by the holders is nothing.
Frankly that's besides the point these days. Lurk in cryptocurrency subreddits for a while and see that hardly anybody talks about the technology anymore, it's all about "memes" and very dubious projections. Things like this for instance: https://i.redditmedia.com/51566F6-xO0zIBDD7HzYRZyEGhDpMqQpAr... (fresh off the bitcoin subreddit front page).
I mean, look at TFA, part of the confusion stems from the fact that many people in the community simply didn't know how PoW functions (or even what it is in the first place). It's not about technology anymore, it reads like a Multi-Level Marketing forum. Nobody cares about what it is, they just want to get rich.
Even articles about a potential application of Blockchain technology are generally met from an angle of "what coin is this going to pump?" See for instance: https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/8ti8z9/thek... . Nobody talks about anything besides trading.
They were interesting when the bitcoin paper was released.
Then people (outside of the cult) realized that you Do Not Need A Trustless System. Society is built on trust. Wasting ENORMOUS amounts of power just to replace a few trusted entities with 51% of the network is a horrible idea.
Nope.
Anything you can do with blockchain you can do simpler and easier and cheaper either with a standard database, or something like git with signed git commits and a trusted third party.
The blockchain exists to try to remove trusted third parties but leads to every increasing energy consumption or order to fuel incentive for "proof of work", and the coin concept is a flat out ponzi scheme.
All these ideas need to get relegated to the dustbin of history.
I'm not sure which version of history this guy was on, but it clearly hasn't been the one I followed. He's describing a past that never was.
Read the old Bitcoin Talk posts. It took years for Bitcoin's technical ideas to become well-understood by even a fraction of the user base.
Pick any year after 2010 and you'll find that the vast majority of Bitcoin users were in it to: (1) stick it to the man; (2) make a buck; or both.
Interest in the technology itself motivates only a tiny fraction of users.
It was always dollar is worthless and bitcoin is going to replace it, and drugs and assassination markets will run in the open fueled by bitcoin, no taxes will be paid anymore, and government will be powerless to stop any of this.
That last part is the key qualifier for this line of criticism: there were quite a few people who were interested in the tech but also understood it and economics well enough not to become boosters.
I've started calling conspiracy theories the "religions of the internet" to make a point to my dad whose understandable distrust of the mainstream narrative has lead him to give more trust to the anti-establishment churches like https://themindunleashed.com that publish conspiracy theories, badly informed opinions on real science news, and pseudo-science mixed in with some real science news.
His reaction to mistrusting the mainstream was to shift his trust somewhere easily identifiable as untrustworthy (to someone educated in the sciences) atleast partly because it acknowledges his mistrust of the mainstream and presents the only-mostly-wrong ideas in a fleshed out manner and authoritative tone.
Some observations and layman speculation:
I've just started reading Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harrari which suggests that there is a strong biological tendency toward adopting unsubstantiated beliefs to enable human cooperation at scale he called them collective myths.
I've also once met a sincere flat earther, but I suspect his ideas arose from doing too much LSD before encountering the idea of tracing his beliefs to their root axioms.
That first time you had to explain to your mom or aunt what Bitcoin is becsuse they saw it on TV news or radio - that’s the time it became too risky for retailers to trust it.
Today we’ve linked instant payment methods to our credit cards, if the card isn’t rfid enabled on its own. So you just swipe your payment method and you’re done.
We even have a banking app that lets you instantly transfer funds between you, between banks as well, for free. Called mobile pay. So smaller stores that can’t afford to have a credit card system, use that.
So that’s on the payment side. It’s also extremely tedious, and expensive, to turn the bitcoin into actual cash + taxation makes selling a coffee with crypto a bad business case.
Honestly though, I think it’s mostly down to a complete lack of demand.
Technically, this has always been the case, but there was a false belief that 0conf transactions were secure, because Bitcoin clients rejected double-spend attempts by default (as a DoS protection). This prevention of double-spending unconfirmed transactions was never part of the protocol though, and it was made clear when Replace-by-fee was added, which shows how clients can easily replace existing transactions with new ones, without changing the Bitcoin protocol.
There's still a crowd who believe that 0conf transactions are fine, and RBF should be removed (eg, the Bitcoin Cash developers), but it's really just ignoring the reality that RBF is not an enforcible protocol rule, but a client-side policy in the software. It's probably fine to use 0conf for small transactions because it is manageable risk, similar to accepting credit cards where payments can be reversed.
Another possible solution to faster payments is with payment channels, where the risk of double-spending is mitigated by hashed time-locked contracts which are transmitted between parties and not broadcast over the Bitcoin network until one of the parties wants to reclaim their funds onto the Bitcoin network. Since the parties are just exchanging HTLCs over a TCP connection, they're practically instant, the fees are low or nil, and there is a potential privacy improvement by not revealing every transaction into the Bitcoin ledger. This is in development (minimally working on Lightning Network now), but proceeding quite slowly.
If Bitcoin is going to have widespread global usage, these problems need to be overcome so that it is as simple, or simpler to use than credit cards for the average user. It possibly is simpler to set up for merchants already, if they're technical enough, because they don't have to involve 3rd party payment processors.
The other side to it is that we take credit cards for granted in the developed world, and often miss that there are a billion or more people without banks in the developing world. These are the people who have the real use-case for Bitcoin. A single user can set up a Bitcoin node on a smartphone in some remote village, and suddenly bring banking capability to their entire village. I think that's a very strong use case. People are also using it to hedge against their national currencies which are being hyper-inflated by their own governments - as is happening in Venezuela right now.
I simply don't know what problem BTC was supposed to solve.
Creditcards are robbery, they are not very populair and cost retailers money. Why does everyone want to make money from transactions? We are talking about a basic service that costs less than a cent.
Citation needed.
Well on the popular claim. Yes they cost retailers money, so do debit cards, so does cash.
In the UK debit cards are the most popular means to do a retail transaction - in terms of numbers of transactions (it's been plastic in terms of value for years). Credit card transactions from 9% in 2013 to 11.5% in 2016. Debit card from 32% to 43%. Cash decreased from 52% to 42%. 'Plastic' has never been more popular.
Average cost of taking sash has remained fairly stable, but the cost of taking debit and credit cards has plummeted in recent years, in line with their increased popularity.
In 2016, credit cards cost 0.5%, Debit 0.25%, Cash 0.15%.
Non card costs (including things like paypal) is at 1.7%.
Figures from https://brc.org.uk/media/179489/payment-survey-2016_final.pd...
The reason Bitcoin hasn’t seen much usage is that it’s worse on every one of those metrics. There just isn’t a non-ideological market for a slow, expensive system with no fraud protection.
Fair enough. Government bonds let countries deficit spend. They are also a stable store of value. These attributes make them useful.
Bitcoin is neither of these. Like government bonds, it does not behave like money.
Bitcoin is however similar to a government bond in that it a) has value, b) is not directly useful for consumer transactions. Also, I dunno that behaving like money can be put in such stark binary terms.
Nothing is eternal. That doesn’t make everything ephemeral equally risky. Bitcoin is a speculative asset. Speculative assets are volatile by design (you want them to go up).
More critically, government bonds’ role as a store of value is ancillary to their core purpose: to enable public deficit spending.
> Bitcoin is however similar to a government bond in that it a) has value, b) is not directly useful for consumer transactions
My cat has value and is useless for consumer transactions. That doesn’t make him a government bond.
For which there (a) is zero evidence and yet (b) are lots of unsophisticated investors throwing money at. This combination is well known in financial engineering circles, which has had a habit of dreaming up assets with inobservable specialness since the days of John Law.
Bitcoin is very early, it's core infrastructure, it's going to take time to get established, and once it does get established it's going to change society as much as electricity did.
We’ve yet to make it work though. Decentralized voting is too vulnerable and mining is too anti-climate, so it’s really all turning out to a big pile of nothing.
My colleagues in banking are running into the same issues.
The only place I’ve seen blockchain put to good use is at Maersk, who runs their claims of ownership on the tech. Because of port corruption, the claim of ownership linked to a container is more expensive to ship than the container itself, even though it’s a single a4 document. Their blockchain isn’t really decentralized though.
By comparison the arpanet had an instant use case, so did electricity. They took time to spread, like everything new does, but they are very different from the blockchain in the way they weren’t searching for a reason to exist.
Obviously useful things have obvious uses.
Other types of digital international payments have also been made a lot easier. You don't need to sign an agreement with a credit card company or a bank to start accepting money from a blockchain, you just run a node an you are good to go. Especially for use cases where payments are typically high risk or denied altogether (shipping expensive hardware, adult entertainment, or any business with a generally high fraud rate and chargeback rate).
Blockchains also allow for completely transparent, auditable, provably fair gambling, something you simply can't achieve in the physical world.
------
A lot of the blockchain projects that have kicked off do not understand the limitations and uses of blockchain technology. For example, decentralized land ownership and decentralized voting are both things that you fundamentally can't get fully secure using a blockchain. Land is a physical asset, and it will always be a government or police force that ultimately decides who owns a property. The blockchain may say one thing, but that result has to be defended in the physical world by someone who agrees with the blockchain results.
Voting is the same way. Identity is inherently centralized, there is no way to connect a physical human being to a single identity in the digital world unless there's some centralized entity like a government managing the ID system.
One big use case that's around the corner but needs more foundational technology work is point of sale payments. It seems like the adoption curve has been going backwards on those for blockchain, however this is because layer 1 fees have been getting more expensive, and attackers have finally started exploiting weaknesses like zero confirmation payments, something that originally a lot of blockchain proponents asserted was secure (core developers never endorsed this notion, however core developers rarely had control of the blockchain narrative). As more user friendly, more secure, and more scalable solutions like the lightning network come online, we will see point of sale payments using blockchain technology pick up again.
We're still probably 1-2 years out from the lightning network being production ready, so merchants are still generally discouraged from using it for daily business. But it's going to get there and when it's ready the scalability will be on the order of tens of millions of daily users.
We have the cryptography and technology to get from tens of millions to hundreds of millions, but again that's technology and research which is just now coming out, won't be in production for another 5-8 years by my estimations.
Whether or not you choose to believe it, there are tens of thousands of businesses out there today tackling markets and buyers that would be completely unavailable to them without the use of blockchains. And that's because blockchains make payment rails viable that simply aren't viable when you are stuck with traditional systems like credit cards, paypal, stripe, and bank transfers.
https://old.reddit.com/r/BitcoinMarkets/comments/6rxw7k/info...
What I do know and have known is that anyone that believes the “it’s decentralized” part about any cryptocommodity is a damn fool. The database might be but nothing else. There are at any time a dozen people that could utterly destroy bitcoin with some well placed shenanigans.
If you believe bitcoin can’t be crashed by a handful bad actors I fully encourage you to put your 401K in.
> Some of the employees of Blockstream also put forth some proposals, but all were so conservative, it would take bitcoin many decades before it could reach a scale of VISA.
I hate to bring it to you, but no big decentralized network where everything happens on a single chain will ever reach VISA scale. I'm not sure why people think Bitcoin can do this. I do not work for blockstream and I think just scaling this up is a terrible idea. I only know a handful of technical people who disagree.
> After this free and open source software was released, Theymos, the person who controls all the main communication channels for the bitcoin community implemented a new moderation policy that disallowed any discussion of this new software. Specifically, if people were to discuss this software, their comments would be deleted and ultimately they would be banned temporarily or permanently. This caused chaos within the community as there was very clear support for this software at the time and it seemed our best hope for finally solving the problem and moving on.
IMO the chaos did not come from content moderation but from different groups of people who all claimed their software (bitcoin XT, bitcoin core) was the real bitcoin. And not many people understood what was going on. There was definitely some support for bitcoin XT, but it was always minuscule compared to bitcoin's IMO. This has nothing to do with either Theymos nor Blockstream.
I think the main takeaway about /r/bitcoin is that bitcoin claims to be this decentralized democratic technical project where anybody can contribute but in reality many of the places where discussion takes place are completely censored and controlled by entities who aren't transparent about their intentions like Blockstream and Theymos. This also applies to /r/btc for Bitcoin Cash shills.
Where is this claimed? The technical project is just another open source project, not very decentralized. The idea of bitcoin is that you (the user) can decide what software you want to run, if you don't agree with rules imposed by a certain software project you not run it or run an older version. This (as well as how the network works) is decentralized. Ofcourse Reddit and other social media channels are not decentralized, and neither is development of the different node implementations.
I don't think there exists a way to collaborate on any technical open source project in a truly decentralized way. I love to be proven wrong, do you know any project that is? So no BDFL (Linus, Guido), no foundation and actual decentralized contribution?
See my previous comments on that topic for some more info:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15774816
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15033611
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15033489
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15026822
There is a group of "altcoin" (ICO and non-Bitcoin coins) investors who have put together a terrific social media team and spread nonsense like this. They run a "The_Donald"-esq subreddit called /r/btc who's head moderator is Roger Ver, convicted felon (sold explosives online and renounced his US citizenship). Somehow Roger Ver bought the domain Bitcoin.com, and has been using it to promote a different coin, "Bitcoin Cash", and outright saying it "is Bitcoin". Of course He's heavily invested in sites like Shapeshift which allow you to buy altcoins... and I assume links like this (posted by"singularity87" who is a top /r/btc poster) are designed to spook people into switching to ETH, Bitcoin Cash, etc. It's bizarre nonsense.
Perhaps some kind of coin where everybody in the world is issued the same amount or something.
That’s an interesting idea for how a currency would work and I’m half tempted to ask you to explain if everyone had the same where is the value in it... but more tempted to suggest you develope a currency based on human fingers as most of us start with the same number.
Every wallet, not every person.
That is why the Monopoly game was created. All players start with the same amount of money and the same rules. Skill and mostly luck accumulates all money in the hand of just one player. Monopoly games can be long, be it is not so long until one player has everything.
The real question is, who would mine for N years when it is basically unprofitable? Since everyone else can have the same mining opportunity and the value is approximately constant. An early adopter would only get up to a 2x advantage over someone joining in year N, but would need to put in N years of mining to get that. Also, if demand does not increase as expected, the currency value will half year on year. Nobody will invest in this kind of currency when there are many others "promising" potential 100x gains by overly rewarding early adopters.
You'd also never actually guess the right rate at which adoption is going to grow, and you'd jinx whatever values you expected by specifying them, because there'd be an attitude of "If I can start mining in year N, and still have essentially the same opportunity as everyone else, I'm not gonna bother investing right now, I'll do it when it's close to the time." As a result, you'd end up with nobody actually participating initially, smart people would invest during peak supply, and everyone else would FOMO as the supply rate is declining, which is effectively the same as happened for Bitcoin.
Of course, the process Bitcoin underwent can't really be repeated. Most altcoins are get rich quick schemes, which utilize the log function of coin supply to pre-mine or whatnot to give the "founders reward," with the expectation that if the currency gains any popularity and has liquid markets, the founders can cash out before anyone realizes their currency is useless.
What would be the point of such a currency? Trade and wealth exist because of inequalities. Having the same amount of a currency is same as having none of it!
Bitcoin isn't magic beans, it has been successful due to these people that you're (implicitly) chastising.
"The term cult usually refers to a social group defined by its religious, spiritual, or philosophical beliefs, or its common interest in a particular personality, object or goal" [1]. Membership connotes devotion. That is different from network effects. For example, telephones benefit from network effects. Buying a telephone does not join one onto a cult.
(Buying Bitcoin, alone, does not admit one into a cult, either. It’s the behaviour of the community around Bitcoin that exhibits cult-like tendencies.)
In that case, is Bitcoin really a cult? or is there a cult that is using Bitcoin?
To the telephone counter-examples in the responses: early telephone users were probably "culty" until the mainstream adopted it for useful stuff.
Telephones strapped onto the telegraph network. After that, they were “leased in pairs” [1]. It wasn’t until 1889 that switches were deployed. Only the could these bilateral-only phones begin talking to each other. (This is also when network effects began emerging.)
TL; DR Telephones, like most useful technology, established themselves in a small niche and then scaled from that base. Its success in its niche wasn’t driven by zeal, but by usefulness.
[1] https://www.thoughtco.com/history-of-the-telephone-alexander...
Then there is some land registry in some African country. Had it not been for the magic of the bitcoin then the evil thugs in the government would have stolen all of the peasants land.
I have been told of other examples, by cult members that know nothing of finance and nothing of programming. But, if you locked me in a police cell and the only way I could get out was to provide further examples, then I would be stuck there for a very long time!
Nonetheless the two examples provided deserve further scrutiny. In the case of Wikileaks, if I was able to respond to the assertion of the believer (which would not be possible as they do not listen), then I would point out how little it costs to host a website and how 'cryptome.org' has been going for years doing a similar/much better thing for two decades without the site owner having to solicit big bucks to keep the thing going. I would also point out that Julian Assange was in it to monetize it and how that behaviour is questionable, tantamount to warmongering.
But, when you are dealing with belief, facts are no use. Critical thinking is of no use. Experience is of no use. (Side topic, John Young from Cryptome on Wikileaks: https://www.cnet.com/news/wikileaks-estranged-co-founder-bec...).
So if the believer gets into a discussion with someone that knows facts then they a) shout louder and b) move on to the next bogus example of where blockchain goodness has saved the world, e.g. with the land registry in Africa example. Specifics are lacking, if it is all on the public ledger then surely the believer should be able to prove one instance of one poor African farmer who has his property secured by the magic blockchain? Surely this would be a Google search away? Of course they are too busy for that, trading their alt-coins 24/7, unable to stop for pedants that have trite 'I have a bridge to sell you' arguments.
But then the true cult isn't about hard fact things from the past, it is about the wonderful future that is to come. So any hard questioning of concrete evidence of blockchain success stories pivots to the paradise promised. No matter what your profession the true blockchain believer will try to interest you in how blockchain will revolutionise whatever it is that you do.
If you are a lowly fruit picker then you get told that blockchain will revolutionise things so that those organic strawberries you pick will soon be notched up to some farm to consumer blockchain 'technology' so that the consumer won't be fobbed off with those fake organic strawberries. Because it will be decentralized and on a public ledger nobody will have the wool pulled over their eyes. All sounds good but if you are that lowly fruit picker then you know a little bit about the industry and know that is not going to happen.
Or, if you are further up the food chain, e.g. in dentistry and fix people's teeth for a living, then you get told about how a blockchain startup is going to revolutionise dental records.
The patronising attitude gets worse if, heaven forbid, you are a developer. In your career you may have worked in many sectors and in many industries but you can't think of a single blockchain application that would make your work better or deliver better deliverables for a single client. However, the believer will be able to tell you that soon there is a blockchain application for whatever it is that you do, so rather than slave away for months on that complicated integration that you are working on you might as well give up now as 'very soon' this 'app' is coming out that will enable you to do it all in a fraction of the time.
The believer in the blockchain probably does not have a day job so they do not understand how preposterous is their proposition, but your domain expertise can be dismissed as you don't understand how blockchain is going to revolutionise everything.
Of course none in the cult can do any useful programming. Yes there are people with day jobs that hold a few coins and enjoy speculating on them from time to time, but these folk are not hardcore cult members. The true cult members see themselves as above the programmers of the world, they see 'developers' as like sheep that can be herded by them to do things for a few table scraps from the blockchain geniuses such as themselves.
Recently I learned of a multi-billion dollar air-drop where the founders would hold onto a few tens of billions of these altcoins and the developers of the world would be given an opportunity to develop save the world green applications. So through the generosity of the blockchain believers and their unique abilities to incentivise developers the world would be saved. There is this view that developers are simple folk and that they just need the right blockchain platform to work with. These developers are almost mystical, thousands of them from all over the world will just turn up to work for free on their blockchain platform in some open-source type of way whilst they do their 'fintech' part, holding on to the billions of alt-coins they kept back for 'the founders'.
The cult members also have an amazing excuse for being skint. Much like how real cult members in real cults of the religious flavour don't have day jobs or money, blockchain cult members can't do real work. So they are skint. But they can always claim their funds are in this greater world of crypto and they don't have any 'fiat' right now as 'everything is locked up until the EOS mainnet goes live' or some other spurious story.
So maybe that is it, a genuine 'startup' success that actually uses blockchain, the ability of the believer to scavenge real cash, food and whatnot from their parents, friends and partner because they always have a good excuse for not having any 'fiat'.
It is a decentralized name registry that maps domain names to public keys and IP addresses, removing the need for Certificate Authorities and resolving Zooko's triangle [1].
I do agree that blockchain is insanely over-hyped, has very few real use-cases and mostly used as a PR tool in ways that makes no sense. Sound money and cryptographic identity registries are among the only reasonable use-cases that I can name.
>"hashing is one thing that’s considered safe from quantum computers."
Why is it safe? Is this because the number of cubits that will be available in the near future would be too small for something like SAH256? Something else entirely?
The problem here is simple: people have too much money at stake now. The solution is not so simple, given this is a technology about money.
But I do feel that it may be possible to learn from all of this, and preserve what is useful and use technology to eliminate the negative influence. For example, preserve the incentive mechanism for decentralising certain services (which could have genuine benefits for some use cases) while ensuring there isn't a publicly tradeable token or that if there is that it is protected by a stablecoin mechanism to prevent speculation. (Just one example.)
[1] https://bitsblocks.github.io/bitcoin-maximalist [2] https://bitsblocks.github.io/crypto-facts
> Cargo cult programming is a style of computer programming characterized by the ritual inclusion of code or program structures that serve no real purpose.
> Cargo cult programming can also refer to the practice of applying a design pattern or coding style blindly without understanding the reasons behind that design principle.
Apparently seeking to 1) get around Know Your customer rules using your account or 2) escalate into your linked US bank accounts.
Purpose 1) will land you in serious legal jeopardy for a mere ~70mBTC per day, while purpose 2) will drain your bank account at some point.
Quite cheap compensation for being a sink for toxic side-effects of money laundering &/or theft.
They have expanded a lot since last year. Can they keep this up? How much Tether can they print?
Cult: a system of religious veneration and devotion
directed toward a particular figure or object.
Religion: a pursuit or interest to which someone ascribes
supreme importance.
The argument crypto currency supporters have is always Venezuela or the European banking crisis (hilarious because citizens didn't actually lose any money). If our banking system DOES collapse your crypto wallet won't save you.
I would wager a small fraction of technically-literate paranoids and conspiracy theorists own Bitcoin. More plausible: people with some other tendency buy and then, when asked for an explanation, rationalise with conspiracy theory-like reasoning. (My guess for the tendency: gambling affinity.)
So you must be happy, since most Venezuelans may be millionaires now! (but let's just forget about the fact that 1M+ from their currency is valued as less than a dollar; and that this value loss have destroyed their lives)
Besides they are using USD and foreign banks in Venezuela not crypto currency. The rich in Venezuela haven't lost a cent I am willing to bet. And last but not least: bitcoin doesn't solve a single systemic problem Venezuela has. Its a corrupt failed state that could have been a South American Norway. Technology won't save it.
so are your thoughts about Bitcoin from their (those whose lives were saved because of cryptos) point of view, obviously.
>Besides they are using USD
A few may. But in such violent place, saving cryptos is cheaper than saving in any (physical) cash. Easier to trade as well, since banking is not THAT accessible and illegal USD trading have its safety's costs.
>bitcoin doesn't solve a single systemic problem Venezuela has.
all fiat is a systemic problem. According to Austrian School of Economics. Don't get me wrong, I'm not appealing to authority or anything. This is not meant for you. Someone might read our comments, care to actually know what's going on and look further into it.
Finally, just because some are having fun about mystery in a social network doesn't mean they are a cult. I myself think satoshi is probably dead (frozen) and will reborn in the future because bounty-hunters will demand his coins, some kind of long-way holder. This is just fun.
The cult is just a small visible part of it but is a pretty minor aspect of it. BTC would exist without the cultists as long as Russian or Saudi assets need to be transfered without too much oversight.
Liquidity, though.
As such it only works for entities who don't have vast amounts of capital, eg. people who can't afford an army of tax lawyers to create complex legal tax evasion schemes to pay less tax than the rest of us.
If I worked in your criminal enterprise, I'd could tell your deputies "look at this chump, throwing money away. I'll hire trucks to haul cash and boost our profits by 20%. Help me 'replace' the leader and I'll split those gains with you."
Using Bitcoin to surreptitiously move large quantities of funds is almost always riskier and more expensive than traditional money-laundering techniques.
No. My knowledge comes from anti-money laundering training.
Depending on how fast one needs to move, money laundering fees go from 5% to 30%. Bitcoin is cheaper than that per se. But include the costs of anonymising and cleanly cash out, and you're just adding cost and risk over a wire transfer between fronts.
How do you propose cashing out? Your cronies aren’t going to want their wages in Bitcoin.
> I'm not spending MY 30k, I'm spending YOUR 30k
Practically speaking, if you steal my money it’s now your money. More money is better than less money. In any enterprise, criminal or legitimate, there are systemic incentives for maximising pay-out.
It's more liquid than real estate, which is widely used for money laundering.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/15/researchers-finds-that-one...
Money Laundering tends to be smallish sums deposited over time, resulting in large amounts. You can't wash 100MM in one go.
Terrosist Financing tends to be a very large number of small transactions from multiple global sources in a very short space of time into one account/wallet/location. Like crowd-sourcing, in fact exactly the same as crowd-sourcing.
Less risky than Bitcoin? In the end you have to get it out of the blockchain to be useful, so that's where the pointers from a law-enforcement perspecive are.
It is vastly easier to launder money through regular channels than through a method that by it's definition records every transaction.
You would have to be a total moron to go through all the hoops to use it otherwise. Its kinda like running desktop linux in that way.
For the same reasons it sucks for individuals (volatile, slow, expensive, publicly recorded, difficult to spend and difficult to convert), it sucks for criminals.
So, what, you'd have to be a total moron to go through the hoops of installing Linux as well? Do you think before you comment?
Your 100% figure is wrong given that I, at least, don't match any of your description. You can't go around claiming this kind of nonsense.
Of course if your money starts in your "books" before being converted into cryptocurrency then yeah, it's useless. But that's not the use case, it's more about laundering money that's not in the books to begin with (corruption, black market, undeclared sales etc...).
I believe that right now the main deterrent to this scenario is the same reason people don't use cryptocurrencies for legit use cases: it's wildly unstable and you have to convert it to dollars or some other "fiat" to do anything with it.
However, if you want to receive bribes, you just create a new wallet, you receive the bribes in BTC and either change them somehow in dollars or pay a premium to receive some services directly paid in btc (I am sure many people would be happy to receive BTC payment at a 30% discount).
Tax evasion works the same: you receive some payments that you do not declare in BTC. It works exactly the same way people use cash to evade taxes, except that here you don't have to transport luggages full of banknotes.
Another feature of BTC is that it can't be seized. Cash, gold, paintings, they all can be. BTCs are much easier to protect.
You just made it more appealing and useful, since taxation is theft. Some "criminal" assets are incorrectly classified as criminal, so that's another +1 for Bitcoin.