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Comment by _sm6n | Hacker News Reader

It's kinda sad that the pricing or market capitalization is the only thing that is being talked about in the "cryptocurrency community", instead of focussing on how the technology can be useful for society. Like for example if you look at /r/Bitcoin, there's a sidebar with "Submit text/link NOT about price", yet virtually every post is about price, even if just indirectly (Paypal joins the cryptocurrency bandwagon and the top comments are that this is good for the price). Searching for Bitcoin on YouTube is likewise not a good idea unless you want to listen to dudes rambling about the price for hours. Back when I bought my first Bitcoin, I couldn't care less about the price. I spent it almost immediately for servers and other digital services. I don't regret that I didn't "HODL" it. What really counts is whether it is sound money and all the speculation doesn't help in that regard. If anything, the usefulness of e.g. Bitcoin declines due to rising transaction costs and constant price swings.

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I think this is representative of a bigger problem within the developed world: the top problem on many people's mind is "Other people have money and I don't." This manifests in a lot of other areas as well: stock market speculation, people asking for government handouts, folks looking for get-rich-quick startup ideas, glorification of the "side hustle", etc.

And I think the root cause of that is that productivity growth in areas needed for basic survival - housing, health care, not getting screwed (legal) - hasn't grown nearly as fast as productivity in consumer goods. Combined with population growth and the entry of the developing world into the developed world, it means that more people are increasingly chasing the same limited pool of houses and doctors, and basically all disposable income goes to them. The focus on get-rich-quick schemes is a rational reaction to being stuck in a game of musical chairs where there are not enough chairs to go around.

Bitcoin's value is fundamentally monetary in nature. Bitcoin itself (less so the cryptocurrency space as a whole) is about financial sovereignty, stable monetary policy, robust uptime guarantees, and resistance to manipulation in the governance.

You are _supposed_ to buy and hold Bitcoin for a long time, because Bitcoin is most important where it gives you an alternative when government money is poor (or even just as a threat to governments that are making monetary decisions - they need to know that their population has a viable alternative if their currency doesn't add enough value).

That necessarily drives a big focus on price.

Also, it is finally a replacement for all the IOUs in the financial system. The financial system is currently IOUs all the way down. Caitlin Long talks about this on a recent Real Vision interview.

"The market structure is fundamentally built on layers of intermediaries and settlement of both securities and payments happen on a delayed net settlement basis. By contrast in crypto, the markets are decentralized, no layers of intermediaries, settlement happens on a real time gross settlement basis..."

This makes me wonder. What is the optimal size of the population for a given country/territory/planet?

That is, the size of the population at which the welfare/wealth of the median individual is maximized.

Given that, as you say, prime land, prime housing, prime infrastructure, prime tourist destinations don't easily scale, yet more people enable better technologies/more efficient production of other consumer goods and services.

Have too few people (in the extreme - a dozen), and you cannot have many nice things - not enough people to create nice art, build houses and cars and computers. Have too many (in the extreme - 100 billion), and there is too much competition for the same houses and tourist spots and what not.

Also depends on how you split it. I'd wager a lot of metropolitan areas are over already. Smaller cities are close to the maximum, but most people in the middle class or lower will feel it is way over already simply due to the cost of things.

There are quite a few fields you could at least slash in half overnight too. Bureaucracy is one: here (small European country) we have way too many managers and people that are only there to move boxes around and cause communication overhead to explode, offering practically no benefit whatsoever.

Right - also, the more people you have, the less attractive automation becomes, even if you already have or are close to achieving the technology.

That’s an elegant and insightful way to describe what’s going on in the developed world. Do you have a vision for a way out of the quagmire of speculation affluenza for the few and envy for the many without opportunity to you know.. make things again?

No, I believe the root cause is that there is so much more stuff to buy in today’s world, and advertising has grown so powerful and visibility of products has increased so much that people can’t resist urges to buy things. So we need more and more money.

I look back at things you could buy 30,40,50 years ago, much of it sucks and doesn’t compare to what you find today. Back then you didn’t need much money because there wasn’t much to buy. I look at the ads and they’re garbage, not engaging at all and doesn’t convince me to want the product. And because people weren’t posting pics of things they purchased to some social media, seeing something cool that I might want to buy usually only happened when going over to a friends house, or seeing a random passerby in the streets. And that meant those people were usually close to your own economic class, so the items weren’t out of your league.

I would say the problem is that there is a big gap between affordable consumer goods and unaffordable things like housing. That makes saving on little things like coffee shops seem pointless, as you are still not going to save nearly enough to make a difference when it comes to buying a house.

Yes it's musical chairs; through monetary policy, reserve banks keep pulling out chairs and thus inflating the value of remaining chairs... Then they'll claim that this is all to prevent global warming.

All this is actually starting to make me doubt global warming. The banks certainly never gave a damn about global warming before. Do I think that people in power suddenly became more altruistic over the past few years? No, from my experience, they became much more selfish! The whole timing with Greta Thunberg media hype followed by COVID19 then multi-trillion dollar bailouts followed by talks of 'green new deals' and the great reset (which is actually just a continuation of existing policies; not a reset by any definition of the word) is starting to all look a bit too convenient.

I've seen first hand how money can corrupt everything. So I'm wondering if it is the science which is attracting the money or the money which is attracting the 'science'. All the climate models are oversimplified and phony; it's pseudoscience... They have tens of thousands of different models and each year they cherry-pick the ones which guessed correctly... Then they keep switching to newer models which keeps proving them right claiming that they did so to keep up with technology (of course not because they were running out of correct old models to cherry pick from)... It's a joke.

I'm not sure I follow your logic here. You're saying that central banks are keeping interest rates low in order to prevent global warming? Generally speaking, I would assume low interest rates = higher economic activity = increased CO2 emissions; not the other way around.

They're using man-made global warming as story to justify their unjust inflationary policies which are in fact all about control and centralization of wealth and power. Global warming could just be rhetoric to convince those people who can see the injustice of what's happening to justify why it needs to happen in this unjust way.

It's a way to justify why we should all be playing the game of musical chairs instead of the game of 'make more chairs' or even 'make more chairs, but each person should only have one chair'.

It all stinks like corruption. If you really wanted to solve global warming, the best solution would be to limit population growth, you could just give people tax incentives to have fewer children. Could be implemented as UBI: You get less basic income if you have more children. That is a much simpler and fairer solution and doesn't require deceiving billions of people with an epic global monetary ponzi scheme. Also we could get rid of useless bureaucratic jobs which are making the lives of billions of people miserable.

„Don‘t ascribe to malice what can be ascribed to stupidity“ (stupidity and short term, well intentioned, but in the end egoistic thinking, I would add)

"Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice" - Grey's Law.

You just need a handful of people to independently see a few opportunities to profit from different activities (which are related in non-obvious ways) and together they can effect great malice without any single individual being aware of their collective malice.

The Upton Sinclair principle ensures that the perpetrators of malice are not aware of it: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

Only the victims of malice can see it as such, the perpetrators are the last to see it.

Wow, really cool, thanks for the pointers!! I was always thinking in these terms but never explicitly looked for other people's takes

Very divisive territory you are getting into here :D

Just wanted to add that the track record of predictions about the environment doesn‘t shine a bright light on the (popular) science in the ways you mentioned. Just have a look at the club of rome report. When a part of science gets overly politicised you should get wary.

I think you are too harsh on money. Power corrupts people. Whether thats in the form of a Communist dicatorship, Capitalist dictatorship, winning the lottery (money is a form of power), being a town sheriff that doesn't pay a lot but lets you shoot people and throw them in jail. Power corrupts, it's not necessarily money.

I'd suggest following ethereum and it's founder Vitalik. He's explicitly said things like, "If all that we accomplish is lambo memes and immature puns about "sharting", then I WILL leave.

Though I still have a lot of hope that the community can steer in the right direction."

He has worked with the UN world food program, and posts a lot of material on voting, economic fairness, and social aspects of blockchain in general. It seems like he is genuinely interested in using blockchain for general societal good, rather than just speculative price chasing.

DAO rollback made them untrustable for me. You do you but a key required feature of my cryptocurrency should be sovereignty.

I hear this criticism a lot. And I don't disagree with it fundamentally, but I would be interested to hear how its advocates justify the decision. How do the Ethereum founders attempt to rebut it? Are there any good counterarguments?

I wasn't involved in Ethereum that early. But in retrospect I find it allowable/acceptable.

The reasoning is Ethereum is an early project, its design is highly centralized like a startup because very few people have the convictions and breadth of knowledge that Vitalik and co. possess. It's aspirations are not the same as Bitcoin: Bitcoin wants to provide value by being irrefutable property. Ethereum wants to be the world computer.

Ethereum's technical complexity makes Bitcoin look like a Ford Model T, while Ethereum is trying to be a space ship with warp speed capability. Obviously it is not the within the spirit of blockchains to conduct a rollback to save people's funds from hackers. But at that early stage, it might hurt adoption more than help if people get burned so badly. If we look at the tradeoffs, I think its worth it. If people prefer absolute immutability, they can use Ethereum Classic.

Ethereum was only about a year old at the time. When Bitcoin a year-and-a-half old, it had a bug that required a five-hour chain rollback.

Bitcoin people will object and say that was a bug with the blockchain itself. However, sample code on ethereum.org had vulnerabilities similar to TheDAO's bug, so arguably it was a platform issue on Ethereum as well.

There have been large thefts from contracts since then, including a >$100M theft from Parity, the most popular client at the time. Parity made several attempts to get another fork to recover their funds, and they were roundly rejected by the community.

>Ethereum was only about a year old at the time. When Bitcoin a year-and-a-half old, it had a bug that required a five-hour chain rollback.

>Bitcoin people will object and say that was a bug with the blockchain itself. However, sample code on ethereum.org had vulnerabilities similar to TheDAO's bug, so arguably it was a platform issue on Ethereum as well.

I think the main difference here was that bitcoin never had a "code is law" belief, whereas ethereum did.

Propose another large Bitcoin rollback and see how the community reacts. The idea that the longest chain always wins has been a core value in Bitcoin since its inception; the manual rollback was a complete violation of that.

It was also necessary for success, but the Bitcoin community has little grounds for moral superiority here.

I'm pretty sure that rollbacks to fix bugs in the chain itself would still be ok today.

Some rebuttal:

1) There wasn't a rollback of the blockchain - the method to fix this was an irregular state change (I.e - at block z, change balance at address x to address y). This was only possible because the nature of the attack left all of the compromised funds locked in place for 30 days. Arguably, if it required a rollback of the blockchain, people probably wouldn't have gone along with it. (Though node operators and miners may still have as evidenced by the bitcoin supply bug and rollback in 2010)

2) The funds in the DAO at the time were roughly 14% of the total supply at the time. This is ~1.5x the amount of ether currently custodied by the largest ether custodians today.

3) The common argument of this event being a slippery slope and that it would lead to frequent recovery of hacked funds has turned out to be false.

4) Since the state change was introduced as a software upgrade, node operators (mining pools & infrastructure providers) all had to opt into the change - which a large majority did. This would indicate that most organizations and individuals were either in favor of this solution or were apathetic to the solution

I'll preface the following by saying I fundamentally disagreed with rolling back the DAO as the entire purpose of these networks is immutability and their trustless nature.

The reasons for it, even on their own, all make a lot of sense:

- Ethereum has always wanted to move to Proof of Stake, a move that would have been impossible if 25% of the networks funds were suddenly in the hands of a nefarious actor.

- The DAO was intended to seed development into projects that would benefit ethereum and the blockchain space as a whole. It was an incredible amount of capital that was all intended to help evolve the network. Losing all this capital and momentum would have been detrimental to that goal.

- The DAO was arguably an unlicensed security and losing the funds of that many investors would have been a problem for many who had a hand in building it. By returning investments, they basically made this a non-issue.

So again, do I agree with the choice? Absolutely not, you should not proclaim "code is law!" until it's inconvenient for you. Did they have a choice? No, the roll-back was inevitable as soon as the DAO contract was deployed.

In the end, this is software used to reach consensus in a distributed manner. I don't see it much differently than any other hard fork; the stakeholders reached consensus.

not just DAO rollback, they're basically changing every key protocol rule at whim. most of their nodes run on aws. I was interested earlier but now i'm big skeptic of Ethereum quite centralized IMO

Ethereum removed the 100M soft cap on EIP 669.

This was quietly slipped through with no debate. ETH shouldn't be trusted.

Can you provide evidence of no debate, and reasons on why the soft cap is a bad idea when transactions burn eth anyways and the eth inflation rate is around 4% per year, and slated to drop to 0.5%-2.0% with the transition to ETH 2.0?

typical monetary policy issue, if it is easy to change - they will keep changing

EIP669 was a difficulty bomb delay. The difficulty bomb was never intended to make monetary policy. The point was to keep upgrades from failing to deploy due to node operator complacency. The difficulty bomb forces them to upgrade their code in some way, either to the upgraded version, or to the same old version with a bomb delay.

Issuance right now is 2 ETH/block. The white paper just promised 5 ETH/block forever.

https://ethereum.org/en/whitepaper/

Inflation is good for currencies / anything that's meant to be used.

One exception to this that pops to mind is computers, which have gradually gotten cheaper. Even though you always get a better one if you wait, it hasn't deterred consumers.

That's not a exception; in fact it's probably the most blatant supporting evidence available for "Inflation is good for [...] anything that's meant to be used.". Computers have been undergoing borderline hyperinflation (factor of two every year-and-a-half or so) for decades, and this is extremely good for anyone who wants to use a computer.

You got it the wrong way round. Deflation means when prices are dropping. The price of computers has fallen over time predictably and exponentially, and yet that hasn't stopped people from buying them. The Keynesian argument against deflation is that it disincentivizes people from spending money as they expect prices to drop. This disincentive hasn't prevented the computer industry from being a huge success. The fact that you know that if you wait some time you can get a faster and cheaper computer doesn't prevent you ad infinitum from buying computers.

Kinda unintuitive, but if you look at processing power as a currency, it is actually undergoing hyperinflation (number of computers + processing power increases every year). Meaning you buy a computer, assuming its value will drop (due to the inflationary nature).

> if you look at processing power as a currency, it is actually undergoing hyperinflation

So in relation (for this particular scenario) the USD is undergoing hyperdeflation..?

Whatever you call it the psychological effect with computers is the same as with a rising bitcoin price - you get more bang for the buck the longer you hold off on your purchase.

> So in relation (for this particular scenario) the USD is undergoing hyperdeflation..?

Relative to computers/processing power, yes, although you generally wouldn't describe it that way, since USD is (comparatively) stable with respect most other stores of value - it's computers that are changing in value, so it's computers that should be described as undergoing inflation.

Relative to (the relevant average of) other stores of value, dollars are undergoing inflation, just more slowly than computers.

Except processing power is not a currency, so it's the opposite way round...

If you're looking at USD as the base asset, computers are undergoing inflation, not deflation. Both USD and computers are inflating in supply, but computers are inflating faster (in terms of processing power at least)- hence the continuous drop in price. You could argue USD is deflating in comparison to computers, but computers are not deflating in comparison to USD.

Edit for a bit more clarity: Inflation / Deflation is relative to a "base asset" which is considered unchanged in value. For USD this is normally a standard basket of assets (foreign currencies or a "market basket").

> Meaning you buy a computer, assuming its value will drop (due to the inflationary nature).

Exactly. Similarly, if you buy a dollar, its value will drop (though not as quickly).

OTOH, bitcoins are the opposite of both dollars and computers: bitcoins are deflationary, and rise in value. This is a terrible property for a currency, since it encourages speculation and hording in preference to circulation.

I don't think its fair to say it's "the only thing", although I'll give it that its the most popular aspect that it's talked about.

The truth is excitement and hype around price is the lowest common denominator for people interested in cryptocurrency so naturally it would be the most visible topic.

Tech around this is still very... technical, young non-vital, niche.

I understand why people worry and even discard the value of price-obsession, but (at least for bitcoin) price of the token (along with other variables that indicate adoption) is crucial for security and growth of the platform.

Even Satoshi recognized that hype-cycles would be important for adoption of bitcoin.

> The truth is excitement and hype around price is the lowest common denominator for people interested in cryptocurrency so naturally it would be the most visible topic.

Echoing this, I'm involved in several more technical cryptocurrency groups, and there is little reference to the price, even today. Pretty much all of the discussion is around the technology itself, and what it can do.

What can it do exactly though? A lot of talk about decentralization and distributed database and Yada Yada Yada. I'd love to find a good use case for blockchain but so far it's elusive

Cash on the internet. Basically, the ability to send money to someone else without any intermediary, in the same way that you can hand cash to someone else when selling something on craigslist, etc. This is particularly helpful in cases like gift cards where fraud is a problem, and margins are thin, and industries that are blocked by other payment processors [0]. We can argue about whether or not all of the opportunities are a good thing for society or not, but crypto does solve a problem for them.

[0] https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/14/business/mastercard-visa-disc...

Prime example with Pornhub right there, along with all other things Visa/Mastercard has decided to block over the years (Wikileaks comes first to mind).

> We can argue about whether or not all of the opportunities are a good thing for society or not, but crypto does solve a problem for them.

Agreed. I'd argue that being able to buy drugs online is a great solution, but there are good arguments against it as well.

Crypto is also immune to confiscation of funds, due to whatever reasons (tax fraud investigation, whatever), this can also be argued whether it's a good thing or not. Many countries have banks and governments that most certainly can't be trusted.

The bottom line with crypto is what I would expect Americans in general to appreciate - freedom/choice.

And yet, in the same week that Bitcoin hit an all time high, Pornhub

(a) changed its policies radically within days, spurred by the threat of being dropped by credit card processors (thus demonstrating that they had no faith in cryptocurrency picking up nearly sufficient slack).

(b) those changes were almost universally considered to be for the better (a crackdown on non-consensual porn), so if cryptocurrency HAD succeeded in stepping in, it arguably would not have been a social good.

Bitcoin is the use case for blockchain.

/r/bitcoin is basically one giant pump and dump subreddit. Every now and then there are helpful threads that talk about actual progress being made in terms of the Bitcoin protocol/protocols that live on top of it (Lightning), but they're never really upvoted that much and don't spark a lot of conversation.

That being said, I think that major Bitcoin forums like /r/bitcoin serve a good purpose because it acts as a containment board for people who just want to talk about the price.

I get the impression that 99% of those invested in crypto just want their investment to perform well, and could care less about any project specifics.

Right. I couldn't care less if my stock transactions are processed by a computer algorithm, a group of cybernetically enhanced punk goblins in a vault below the Stock Exchange building, or intergalactic aliens. As long as it's processed.

Thank you for this, and I totally agree.

The price of Bitcoin is largely irrelevant given how interesting the tech. that powers it actually is.

Bitcoin is a fluid that aims to power a hydraulic machine, and once Lightning gets to where it should be (it's been a while, yes :\), my bet is that many of the naysayers will have no choice but to take a second look at it.

The rise in price is just a side-effect.

Up until 2015, price talk was heavily discouraged in /r/Bitcoin.

It was all about adoption - new merchants accepting it, new people spending it, new use-cases enabled by its peer-to-peer electronic cash and immutable and permissionless record-keeping functionality, etc.

Everything changed after the 'purge', where the head moderator took a harsh stance against members trying to build consensus for a hard fork that would help realize Bitcoin's potential as a global peer-to-peer electronic cash, and started banning people left and right. The Bitcoin subreddit turned into a full time price pumping forum after that.

Ironically, Bitcoin saw more rapid price growth before 2015, when the primary topic of discussion was consciously steered away from price, than after.

>It's kinda sad that the pricing or market capitalization is the only thing that is being talked about in the "cryptocurrency community", instead of focussing on how the technology can be useful for society.

The serious crypto currency developers out there who are working on Bitcoin, Ethereum, Stellar, and a few others are definitely focused on how the technology can be useful for society and they have been so for years.

That's why their prices are going up (over time, not today specifically)... because a lot of people with a lot of money see the potential value of holding them.

But yes in general 99% of the "community" you see in crypto related social media spheres only cares about price and profit, I would agree with that statement.

> It's kinda sad that the pricing or market capitalization is the only thing that is being talked about in the "cryptocurrency community" Clearly price is a big topic of conversation. Nothing wrong with that.

But you are very incorrect if you believe that is the only topic of conversation. Perhaps using /r/Bitcoin is not a valid sample size.

In my day job, I'm neck deep in blockchain and cryptocurrency use cases - and there are conferences, webinars, real-world enterprise adoption, etc.

Can you cite those use cases?

We're using blockchain technology to build a decentralized cloud where users can store data on remote hosts without having to trust them, and without giving up ownership of the data.

The blockchain is a critical part of the infrastructure because the hosts need to be paid for the services they provide, but as untrusted entities we need assurances from them. Also, if you don't have a blockchain in the middle you need something like PayPal in the middle, which is a single point of failure.

Nobody talks about anything but price and manipulation in gold bug forums. Bitcoin in digital gold, not digital money.

While I do agree that crypto needs to step away from the current "investment vehicle" mentality and be treated more like a "currency"... I'm still lost how yet another currency is going to help society. Im not trying to be an ass, I'm being serious on figuring this out. I constantly see this argument with no real logic other than trying to essentially use Marxist ideals of "redistribution of wealth" to a disenfranchised demographic. Yet trying to distribute a computer based/useful currency to folks that dont have running water let alone electricity also confuses me. Tag on that the current distribution of bitcoin is in the realm of 30% of users own some 90% of bitcoin wealth. That's a pretty shitty interpretation of redistribution of wealth. In truth, it pretty much follows the realized implementation of Marxism throughout history, "everyone needs to redistribute wealth to me and my friends and away from the people who already have it".

Just saying "this will help the poor because they have nothing" over and over with no real plan, let alone action, doesn't make it true.

One guy I argued with once told me about him donating his bitcoins to buy pizzas for people who needed it. Which, cool. That's awesome. But the donation argument makes it sound like people dont donate dollars or euros. Or even like theres some grand mechanism that makes bitcoin better than traditional currencies... even though crypto gets converted to traditional currency so it can become useful.

> Just saying "this will help the poor because they have nothing" over and over with no real plan, let alone action, doesn't make it true.

I used to work at a bitcoin company, and we had large user communities in countries where the local currency was subject to very high inflation, and access to stabler currencies (like dollars or euros) was severely limited. We were actually helping proper deal with real problems, and we were proud of it.

Then the investment-tool-for-rich-white-kids mentality took over. :(

Okay... how does bitcoin differ from an unstable traditional currency? Both are subject to high and low swings to inflation and deflation. The one thing bitcoin has not been in its history is stable. This still ends up to being the equivalent to "there are 14 standards, let's make a standard to unify them... there are now 15 standards". Plus, all you described was a currency exchange with an extra step. You could replace bitcoin with rice commodity, wheat futures or Tesla stock and achieve the exact same thing. Again, "redistribute to my pocket" with extra steps.

Look, I'm not trying to be a dick, but bitcoin was sold on the lie that it helps poor people. You're not wrong for wanting to help poor people. But people need to come to the realization that bitcoin has been Theranos-like the whole time. It's a waste of time if you're goal is to help the poor.

Ranging 2015—mid 2017, BTC was slowly going up in price, in a nice steady fashion. It wasn’t until late 2017 that things went completely apeshit.

At any rate, the price instability is exactly that — unstable. It’s not systematic hyperflation. For when you don’t have access to conventional forex, it’s better than nothing.

> You're not wrong for wanting to help poor people. But people need to come to the realization that bitcoin has been Theranos-like the whole time. It's a waste of time if you're goal is to help the poor.

Yeah. That’s a large part of why I used to work at a Bitcoin company.

In the discussed scenario, Bitcoin is more secure than a traditional currency.

The local regime cannot take your Bitcoins away from you, which it could by hyperinflation, reform etc with the traditional currency. In other words, the trust in the owner of the currency is in fact higher.

Local gangsters as well, cannot take your Bitcoins away from you as easily. You have a higher chance at keeping your stash.

> Local gangsters as well, cannot take your Bitcoins away from you as easily. You have a higher chance at keeping your stash.

I can see what you're doing, you won't get away with this.

Bitcoin is a non-sovereign, hard-capped supply, global, immutable, decentralized digital store of value. It’s an insurance policy against monetary and fiscal policy irresponsibility from central banks and governments globally.

It's useful for moving money from countries with capital restrictions into USA dollars. I know a few people from SEA who use BTC for exactly this purpose.

You do understand the underlying principle as to why cross country capital transfer investigations are done... right? As a hint, look up cocaine cowboys and miami banks (particularly suntrust).

While I get it's beneficial for average citizens looking to save a bit on tax/duty fees... it's a lot like wearing a condom when both of you dont care to know each other's name. You have that practice for a reason.

In a country where the local regime is the party engaging in unethical, unlawful conduct, some factors change their algebraic sign.

If you're looking for more substantive discussion among Bitcoiners, touching on its relation to economics, politics, and society, YouTube and Reddit are not the spots. I'd try Twitter. Start with @saifedean and go from there.

Twitter is an odd suggestion. I think the highest signal-to-noise ratio is probably podcasts. I'd start with 'On the Brink' and 'Uncommon Core'.

Thanks for the suggestions. I was mainly recommending Twitter as a jumping off point.

A cursory glance at his feed did not instill confidence. Seemed like a pop business huckster.

Yes because he is. These are the people who are spearheading this whole environment being criticized in this thread.

Substantive discussion on twitter?

> how the technology can be useful for society

I think it's important to separate Bitcoin itself from the general concept of blockchains as a new type of data structure. Personally I think the real benefits to society will be had by applying Bitcoin's concepts to brand new unrelated things, and hopefully Bitcoin mindshare can help spark that creativity in people. To me, someone saying "The Blockchain" is like someone saying "The Linked-List". They're not thinking about it generically yet.

A blockchain is a lot more than just a data structure, it's an entire governance system that needs a community around it and active maintenance, continually running nodes, etc.

It is more like a discord server than it is like a data structure.

I think this is an important point. So many people compare bitcoin to a regular stock. While there are ways you can compare the two, there aren't as many use cases for stocks as there are with bitcoin. If people would focus on that we could really change the way the underbanked access capital. It could be the thing that tips the scale to build equitable access to capital.

You need to make a distinction between Bitcoin and other cryptos. For the past 6-7 years, bitcoin has defined itself as being a “store of value”, rather than doing anything technically new. With this being the only goal, nothing matters except for the price. Other cryptos such as Ethereum, Cosmos, and Ava have more of a technical focus.

Nano solved this on reddit by splitting off a nano_trading. That way the main channel is free of all the price bullshit.

The higher the price, the more useful Bitcoin is.

Bitcoin can’t technically handle casual use. Perhaps the new ethereum will achieve that. The price is the only changing thing about Bitcoin.

Bitcoin is useless for any legal activity.

change my mind with an actual existing application that's not done by anything else.

Transferring international remittance on a weekend. good enough for you?

not bad but omg the fees. who does that except 4 nerds in morroco

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