Ethereum: A number of hard forks turn out to be scams
decryptmedia.com
decryptmedia.com
I followed cryptocurrency just casually out of curiosity for awhile but the association between that and scams and crime and such are just so high I have to wonder if I'm alone or if there really eventually is a perception problem.
Obviously you could argue "hey just money has that problem" maybe, but for some reason I don't make that association.
According to the article, many real people who likely consider themselves experts in this "field" were at least initially fooled.
I don't think your comparison to real money is wrong at all. Look, we can mostly all understand what real government issued money is. If people into crypto were first forced to understand what it is - the entire system would disappear in an instant.
I've said it before, there are geniuses in the cryptocommodity game. But they aren't the ones trying to buy low and sell high and concerned about forks. They're the ones pumping out SEO-invested ICOs, running exchanges, selling newsletters and books (or whatever the current version of that is). War is profitable if you're the arms dealer, not the solider.
A lot of people who thought they were bitcoin "experts" lost all or most of their coins to MtGox.
And for all anyone know, they could have stolen it all from their own customers.
Not really, the vast majority of people have no real idea of how it works, beyond the simple cash transfer. In fact, the term "government issued money" is evidence of that - almost all money is created by commercial banks, not government.
We know money in the same way that people in ancient times knew the Sun - its workings are just regular enough that we can predict its effects on our lives tomorrow, without having to actually understand nuclear fusion or radiation.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kellyphillipserb/2018/11/26/ohi...
Of course, the theory may well be wrong, as evidenced by e.g. Somali shilling still being in use, even though there's no government backing it in any practical sense for decades.
According to what I read the "stability" prior to the central bank was a result of an equilibrium between the value of a note and the value of the paper it was printed on. Since there wasn't a central government printing money, it didn't decline further, but tying up $100 in paper to represent $100 seems pretty suboptimal.
It seems like that for any problem that you could conceivably use a cryptocurrency to fix, we can easily find other solutions that are actually much cheaper and much more efficient.
That's not to say there aren't any problems that cryptocurrencies are better at, there could be, but so far no one has discovered them.
Buying drugs is a great use case
1. At some point you want to get fiat back out, thus associating your identity to transactions. While there are some exchanges that are less stringent on verification requirements, the tie is pretty simple to see via the surveilled central banking system in most countries that tends to maintain the strict-ish verifications.
2. Exchange for goods. Unless this is off-chain, it’s again pairing a physical good back out somehow in an exchange of things.
Once the blockchain tiramisu becomes less like a delicately constructed interaction of tech and more like a modular/mature stack, perhaps the UX barrier to entry will be low enough to reap the network effect.
Stop using that “early days” cop out. It still has the same fundamental issues.
Ethereum is 4 years old, and the vast majority of "tokens" even younger. Crypto is very much still early. I don't mean this as a "cop out" but rather a sober reality of how much further the tech has to go.
Would it not be more fair to compare crypto progress to that of the early internet? It took most of a decade of development before the modern internet was born, another decade before the bubble burst and a few more years before pundits stopped calling it a fad, and recognized the business value.
We should all be skeptical of those who would over promise and under deliver on new technology, but I can't imagine why we wouldn't assume an optimistic stance towards it.
I wouldn’t expect to be taken seriously after leading with that...
The Internet was always growing in capacity, size, population and applicability. At no point was there anyone ever saying anywhere "gee, we have so much Internet, what shall we ever do with it". Even during and just after the dot com bubble the Internet itself still continued growing.
Comparing cryptocoins to the Internet, the thing that massively changed virtually all aspects of human life in the past few decades, is...
Meh, it's far more volatile than gold. What it has done is proven it's value as the cash-equivalent of the internet for illicit trade.
It is hard to say how much bitcoin (and other cryptos) are used for illicit trade but one simply has to log onto a darknet market and look at the number of reviews for specific product listings, or for entire seller accounts to see that likely tens of millions of dollars a day in exchanges are occurring across 'publicly known' darknet markets, the bulk of that for drugs although still a decent amount for digital services like credit card dumps as well as fake identification/documents/coupons, weapons etc.
I even found human remains for sale on a darknet market while attempting to get a rough idea of how much commerce is taking place on them early last year. Multiple sellers had basically every major bone in the human body for sell including dozens and dozens of skulls . Now, you can buy skulls on the clear net but they're often well-handled medical specimens. I got the very distinct impression these were absolutely grave-robbed remains.
Or the ERC721 token interface for representing in-game assets that can move across gaming worlds.
Adoption of these open standards means a large number of applications can be accessed from the same wallets.
The same thing could be said about airdrops.
The 2 forks he's referring to are Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin SV in case anyone was wondering.
Last time I tried Core fork of Bitcoin, it was useless, it had $30 transaction fees (due to artificial block size limit).
I was scammed out of my money, couldn't move it. This isn't fixed yet, fees will appear again when transaction volume increases.
Meanwhile with Bitcoin Cash I was sending $1 to Venezuelian for less than $0.01.
- Featuring voice-over video explaining why _this_ coin is the most decentralized and secure.
- A team page showcasing an absurdly large number of team members with stockphoto-like profiles photos.
- A roadmap, of which they're all on stage one.
- Whitepaper linked from primary navigation.
They just have new shiny tech bullshit to baffle people with. Twenty years ago they would be running pump-and-dump penny stock scams with Canadian small-cap mining stocks.
But maybe I'm too naive =/.
It's like someone starting a company "Nike Shoes", getting mad when people disambiguate them from Nike with "NShoes" ("hey, that's not my branding!"), and insisting that people call Nike "Nike Core".
What makes cryptocurrency politics so uniquely toxic is that people will align themselves with a faction because they have $5 invested. The barrier to conflicts of interest are so low that it makes you wonder if anyone is speaking earnestly on even the most trivial issues, like the person above who asserted that Bcash didn't exist despite a quick google proving otherwise. Though some people even do the same thing when you mention Golang. ;)
He called "Ethereum Classic" but it's chosen name and not just ETC or something.
I wonder at what point is a high percentage of scams just so many people just don't want to chance it?
At least with banks or whatever we expect some safety net to some extent ... the irreversible crypto... man that's rough.
Now if you'll excuse me, I need to check my Dogecoin Wallet...
I've been saying that since their decision how to handle the DAO. The devs have a special vip() function that effectively allows a hard fork if the devs lose money. And that vip() is located on the updater on each ethereum miner's machine.
Don't let these small bumps distract from the greater picture and all the amazing work the developers at Ethereum, Bitcoin etc are doing.
Same with crypto. The projects people actually care about and follow aren't scams. Bitcoin, Ethereum, Nano, etc are not scams.
Sure there are some scams out there but they are mostly obvious. Just like email. But because some people have a personal crusade against crypto they like to play up the obvious scams as commonplace when they really aren't.
Remember that the point if cryptocurrency is to enable finance in the absence of good government. It's useless if you like your government.
Nobody knows what the "point" of cryptocurrency is, and every enthusiast has a different opinion on that topic.
"as an atheist what is the meaning of life? What is then the meaning of society? What is the meaning of ... ? "
It would be a lot simpler if we all simply served the commercial bankers, or perhaps the central bank or ... because then we wouldn't have to carry "the burden of having to ponder the meaning of our lives"
edit: slightly modified
[1] https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-largest-Bitcoin-transaction-...
One use case of bitcoin, that is very similar to emails actually is being able to transfer value 24/7 rather than 9-5 on weekdays.
One of the main points of bitcoin is that it makes transactions irreversible. In the current financial system, many transactions can be reversed, which is a feature, not a bug.
Nothing prevents a crypto client from similarily stalling a payment until you are sure you want to pay...
...and then all you need is fraud protection, monthly billing and airline miles and you've invented the credit card.
Perish the thought. It doesn't even take any malicious actors to be a scam. It's a new kind of scam: a Nakamoto Scheme.
To your https://prestonbyrne.com/2017/12/08/bitcoin_ponzi/
> victim factories, which in the next crash will produce hundreds of thousands of howling investors with little formal legal recourse due to four years of inaction on the regulators’ part.
How did we get here? As https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2018/04/05/debunking-bu... points out:
> It’s been nine years. Nobody has a practical use case for blockchains proper.
It's now closer to ten. Same article:
> Git gives you pretty much everything offered by the business case for blockchains. The one thing it doesn’t do is add a ridiculously wasteful proof-of-work mechanism for who’s allowed to add transactions to the <s>blockchain</s> repository
Now, this leads to your second statement:
> Don't let these small bumps distract from the greater picture and all the amazing work the developers at Ethereum, Bitcoin etc are doing.
Which is what?
This ties back to it being a scam: without a practical use case, it lacks any intrinsic value and the only reason people temporarily paid a lot for it were downright scams (Tether), hodl zealots, other hype. It won't take a few more years and it'll settle on its true value which is zero.
ps. The Washington Post already in 2015 summarized this madness:
> So the Bitcoin faithful have tried to not only convert people, but also convince them to martyr themselves, financially-speaking, for the crypto cause. It goes something like this. - Hey, do you want to hear about the future? It's a digital currency called Bitcoin that lets you spend or move your money online without paying any fees. - Sounds great. How does it do that? - Well, Bitcoin saves you money by making transactions irreversible. - So ... if I get scammed, I got scammed? There's nothing I can do about it? - Yes. - Okay, but is it at least easy to use? - The thing is, I don't actually use it. I just hoard it. I'm waiting for some greater fools to push up the price by using theirs. - Oh. - Yeah. So you should buy some Bitcoins and use yours. - I'll get back to you on that.
Of course, you could call all these "Bitcoin faithful" malicious actors if you so want...
> despite billions of dollars of investment, and nearly as many headlines, evidence for a practical scalable use for blockchain is thin on the ground.