You just recreated consumer banking.
So in the brave new post-Fiat world we're thinking of, how does getting a mortgage work, exactly?
The house I'm in was financed by my wife and I purchasing a plot of land, for cash, then offering that land as security to a bank, who then created a loan for a fairly sizable chunk of cash with which we paid a builder to construct the house.
In the all-cryptocurrency world, who creates the crypto in the getting-a-mortgage process?
This begs the obvious question: contract law is all about enforcement. Clearly no one would be right to dispute you own this land and home, you have the deeds and the tax history, which could all be hashed on to the blockchain right now for a nominal fee. But the fact is that the State is what upholds the court system and the need to prove this and they hold the threat of theft and violence if you don't comply and arbitration in their 'legal system' is expensive, slow, and arcane. People being thrown out of their own homes they paid for in full in 2008 was real because the banks created all these complex derivatives and no one knew who owned what in the those CDO and MBS. So when things got messy, and the banks claimed the home the sheriff's showed up and did what they always do: rendered unto Caeser. You may pay your taxes that directly pays their salaries but they work for the State, not you the resident and home owner.
This is why we don't need technologists in Bitcoin as much as we need other professionals like legal people to help create an automated arbitration system, divorced entirely from the whims of Mankind: you can clearly prove you've owned this land and home and when you made the purchase(s) for it and the tax history in a timestamped and verified way on the the ONLY immutable ledger, amazing... but we cannot and do not have an enforcement system to ensure you are entitled to keep this land and home should an adversary come and take it other than violence.
And this needs to be solved, which is why I would hope HN would be a good breeding ground for such thought instead of this endless non-sense about Bitcoin is just for speculation, as if hedgefunds and FOREX markets aren't a hotbed for illicit, corrupt and even more complex legalized forms of gambling in the fiat Word. And have caused the collapse of the economy countless times in just the 20th and 21st Century that always ends up in hotwars in the end, fought mainly by the people who ironically just wanted to protect their homes from 'foreign adversaries' when it's most often the domestic threat they should have been most vigilant about.
Hell, most people don't even realize that the FOREX is the biggest Industry in the entire World, and yet people just forget about things like LIBOR interest rate rigging when it's convenient and time to bash Bitcoin on here.
We get it, you missed out on making billions in fiat by ignoring it, get over you not going to be Chamath or Elon and help build the future we all want and maybe have a chance of creating a post-scarce World.
No. That is simply not possible with anything resembling today's technology. We'll have flying cars on a Mars city before automated arbitration on real world matters.
> help build the future we all want and maybe have a chance of creating a post-scarce World.
Except fixed supply currency is going back in the other direction. And the hard parts about eliminating scarcity have nothing to do with the monetary system.
Besides, you still haven't explained how lending works with bitcoin but without banks making up extra bitcoin.
Note: using bitcoin to refer to any fixed supply currency, whether it's bitcoin, Eth, gold or anything else.
I don't disagree about its current feasibility, but I think that's mainly so because of a distortion of incentives and that so many are invested in this model (the few) despite how horrible it is (to the detriment of the many) as so many people are incapable of doing anything else at this point.
They would sooner die than consider opting for something that they know will end their way of life if successful and this terrifies them rather than excites them about starting something new in life; the sad reality is the legal system is already getting disrupted as we speak all over the World and it's innovating at the edges, but also manifests as distrust and disillusionment and lost of confidence in even basic things like anti-masker, vaccine conspiracy, and refusing to follow curfew and business closures and can lead to having the National Gaurd in Washington DC due to the storming of the Capital by imbeciles fomented by Trump.
All of these are legal matters that are complicated and messy, without a doubt, but the current legal system is to blame for why so many loss confidence as it cannot solve them either, and we can easily be overrun with a 'burning of Alexandria' situation if we don't attempt to solve these problems. And I mean in the next decade given how fast things are escalating not just in the West but in Asia: Thailand, Hong Kong and Mynmar are all in revolt right now for obvious break down in trust with thier systems and legal systems. The CCP is the benefactor from these disolving in the region as they can expand their influence in the turmoil and they simply don't care how corrupt their legal systems are or how they appear to the outside World and will disappear you if you resist which is where I think this is all heading.
> Except fixed supply currency is going back in the other direction. And the hard parts about eliminating scarcity have nothing to do with the monetary system.
WHAT?!!!
This smacks of outright detached privilege only HNers can conjure up from its ivory tower, go to countries that suffer from hyperinflation and still suffer from severe capital controls after that period all of which prevent wealth creation before you make such a claim.
Otherwise I cannot take you seriously as your ignorance is almost palpably painful to me... I've lived and worked in Eastern Europe in the last decade and I went to baja before the revaluation of the peso in the 90s quite often as tourists, and the amount of poverty is incredibly sad... it was crazy to see how my single dollar bill bought 1000s worth of X in pesos down there. I honestly would buy absurd stuff like 10kg of packaged laundry detergent because it cost something absurd like 96 cents and I had a story to tell when I got back to school.
Ill still remember to this day how upset I felt as a kid using quarters on the arcade machines outside the store instead of going to the counter and exchanging my USD to credits for 'free play' tokens, and then suddenly realizing how spoiled I was and how the $10 I spent in that store after a few hours probably helped feed the owners entire family for a week. It's funny how much those experiences make you grow up, and I fear you cannot relate.
What you have just said is just beyond belief and I cannot seriously take what you say serious.
I can address lending as that is already a thing, BTC is the collateral and fiat is the lent out. But the short is we just revert to a satoshi standard rather than whole Bitcoin (satoshi is 100 millionth of a Bitcoin)... But I seriously don't feel like I can muster the energy to go into depth as to how that would look like because of how struck I am by that statement.
I'm not trying to be a SJW trigger queen, but that is just so painfully ignorant that my head literately hurts now and I have to get offline for a while.
The problem is, at this point it's like arguing for communism. It's an utopia. It could happen but I wouldn't bet money I'd lose sleep over on it.
It's probably more likely that an asteroid will hit the planet and we'll all go extinct before you're able to change the minds of most of humanity.
Heck, communists even managed to get a hold of a global superpower which actually tried to take over the world and they still lost! Good luck with Bitcoin/cryptocurrencies :-)
Hyperinflation is merely the symptom. If you think you can cure a failed state by treating it's symptoms you are just going to make things worse through ignorance.
>What you have just said is just beyond belief and I cannot seriously take what you say serious.
The unfortunate reality is that the problems lie much deeper than in just something as irrelevant as the currency.
Think about it. If you can buy 10kg of laundry detergent for $1 how come that country didn't simply export its ultra cheap products and grew its economy that way? You know, like China. Why is China different? It's easy. China had competition in Hong Kong and an easy model to copy and most importantly, the government did copy the working model and invested into a capitalist China.
Here's the thing. Governments can make and break their countries. A crappy deflationary currency will never achieve anything.
For hyperinflation, I have been born and continue to live in Romania, a country that went exactly through that in the 90s, to the extent that a loaf of bread that was initially maybe 10-20 ROL would cost 10k ROL. I remember as a child not being able to afford popcorn when going to the park with my grandparents, or my grandfather selling his old car and buying the family's first color TV with the money. I remember living as a family of four in a 2 bedroom apartment (my parents had their bedroom, while my brother and I shared the livingroom until we were in our twenties).
But that wasn't the problem of our economy, it was just what kept it (barely) working! If we couldn't go to hyperinflation, we would have simply not payed salaries or other debts.
The problem of the economy was that we had sold most of our communist-era industry for parts in a quest for 'privatization' and a 'free market', and were left not being able to produce locally or export almost anything. Even today, we are a temperate, extremely water-rich plains country that imports a good segment of its food - to the absurd degree that we are importing fruit from Holland and Israel among others.
Of course, poor governance and corruption played a huge role as well. The government promising ever higher pensions and salaries for state employees, the works. But those problems would not have gone away if people were getting bitcoin instead of Lei.
Scarcity is a problem of production, not of money. Money itself is almost immaterial. If we could produce enough food, water, energy, cars, fridges, computers, furniture etc. for every single person on Earth, and all of their children, to have all they need at the same time, we could renounce money entirely, Star Trek style.
You have a terrible understanding of economics (and of the plight of people who lived through hyperinflation, like myself) if you think that people in a country experiencing hyperinflation would fare any better if they could trade in BTC instead of the de-valued fiat. The only ones who would be better off are the rich, whose reserves of cash would not suddenly lose their value. But people who live off wages would see pay cuts and eventually just stop getting payed if the currency were forced to a global standard instead of suffering inflation.
Note: there may be cases where a country, often a dictatorship, simply prints money out of stupidity, and also forces the population not to trade in foreign money. This is not the most common cause of hyperinflation, and it is significantly better fixed by BTC, since that is more or less as easy or hard to outlaw as the ownership of dollars.
Oh, and guess what - the country got richer and better without the currency having to go through deflation! In fact, bread still costs 10-20k ROL, and a PC still costs 40-50 million ROL, we just 're-branded' our currency to RON at a fixed 1:10k RON:ROL exchange rate to make the numbers more manageable. We started having productive industries with products that others wanted to buy, and governance got better (we still have huge problems and some of the poorest regions in the EU, but that is besides the point).
I'm not saying it's realistic with the current model, but these are all just software problems at the end of the day, what makes it slow, arbitrary and inefficient is the Human component. I look forward to a World where we can count judges and lawyers on a single sheet. The US's problem is regulatory capture from vying interests and lobbyists, that won't be possible if a smart contract is what is needed to approve or decline as their is no Human to corrupt, and while that seems insane just look at how much is done Online from the brick and mortar World from the 90s.
> For hyperinflation, I have been born and continue to live in Romania, a country that went exactly through that in the 90s, to the extent that a loaf of bread that was initially maybe 10-20 ROL would cost 10k ROL. I remember as a child not being able to afford popcorn when going to the park with my grandparents, or my grandfather selling his old car and buying the family's first color TV with the money. I remember living as a family of four in a 2 bedroom apartment (my parents had their bedroom, while my brother and I shared the livingroom until we were in our twenties).
That's for the context, I worked with many Romanians when I did my Ag apprenticeship in Germany; Dictatorship and the collapse really took a toll on that Society that people still pay to this day.
> But that wasn't the problem of our economy, it was just what kept it (barely) working! If we couldn't go to hyperinflation, we would have simply not payed salaries or other debts.
That's a very Central Banks apologist view, that I think doesn't hold up to reality, but you're entitled to your opinion of how you've internalized the experience. Also consider that as Romania entered the EU it still isn'e exactly immune to the many maladies that came from entering and the PIIGS nations showed how detrimental not having control of your currency is when Germany will devalue it to support its export based economy.
> Scarcity is a problem of production, not of money. Money itself is almost immaterial. If we could produce enough food, water, energy, cars, fridges, computers, furniture etc. for every single person on Earth, and all of their children, to have all they need at the same time, we could renounce money entirely, Star Trek style.
I agree, but I think it's only a part of it, but the need to discuss such lofty goals as post-scarcity is an absurd notion when you're dealing with such challenges as mass hunger and poverty in your life. Productivity and efficiencies are not a big concern when you cannot afford basic things like food/water/soap, which falls on deaf ears. Having at least a stable currency, which I'd argue you don't have, nor do I in the US despite it being the World's Reserve currency and represents opposite sides of the spectrums. I agree, with you conclusion, though: money is means not an end. We're still in the transitional phase, Bitcoin represents another vital step toward the need to do away with the concept of money (even the immense abstraction of it, ans all it is private keys/data).
> You have a terrible understanding of economics (and of the plight of people who lived through hyperinflation, like myself) if you think that people in a country experiencing hyperinflation would fare any better if they could trade in BTC instead of the de-valued fiat. The only ones who would be better off are the rich, whose reserves of cash would not suddenly lose their value. But people who live off wages would see pay cuts and eventually just stop getting payed if the currency were forced to a global standard instead of suffering inflation.
Do I? I mean one of the things that is remarkable consistent in these hyperinfalted currencies is captial controls, in which the central banks refuse to allot more than X amount of YOUR currency per day, and even in the EU will make transaction above an arbitrary amount is illegal. Hell, in Cyprus they had bail ins, in Spain their was talk about 'corralito' which is essentially the same thing. Do I need to talk about how horrendous the situation in Greece was, which uses the EUR and still suffered the same situation.
I'm not trying to make light of your situation, far from it I actually really sympathize with you, but I've dedicated the last 19 years of my life to addressing this very core problem and lived and worked in these countries and assessed them with these type of analysis.
> Oh, and guess what - the country got richer and better without the currency having to go through deflation! In fact, bread still costs 10-20k ROL, and a PC still costs 40-50 million ROL, we just 're-branded' our currency to RON at a fixed 1:10k RON:ROL exchange rate to make the numbers more manageable. We started having productive industries with products that others wanted to buy, and governance got better (we still have huge problems and some of the poorest regions in the EU, but that is besides the point).
> Oh, and guess what - the country got richer and better without the currency having to go through deflation! In fact, bread still costs 10-20k ROL, and a PC still costs 40-50 million ROL, we just 're-branded' our currency to RON at a fixed 1:10k RON:ROL exchange rate to make the numbers more manageable. We started having productive industries with products that others wanted to buy, and governance got better (we still have huge problems and some of the poorest regions in the EU, but that is besides the point).
No, you didn't: but this also helps me see what the core of your logic fallacies are particularly with the omissions of the trade requirements from being a core EU nation, and your dismissal of being the poorest region in the EU is much more poignant than you are making it out to be.
> You just recreated consumer banking.
While I personally detest the notion of such a model, and things like GME show why that is: I realized that after 10 years we really are going to have to simplify this tech to that level in a way that it's indistinguishable to the old model if we are onboard them at all. Which is why Kraken taking the lead in this is happening [0].
We collectively opposed this system so much that once we on boarded all the nerds we had a massive blindspot and didn't take pause and realize that the immense complexity to work and use Bitcoin on an everyday basis would be near impossible for the average person who struggled with HS math. And that's often who needs this tech the most, as they often the first to fall victim to the pernicious and illegal actions of banks with things like compounding overdraft fees, mortgage scams etc...
I was used to having to use run a full node on QT with no smart phone for the first 4-5 years so it's all simple to me now, but that is all relative to where you start and when I started I couldn't even code enough to do more than a simple 'Hello world' command but with time I became a founder of a fintech start up and then developer and consultant at a multi-national corporation because this tech evolved so fast and demanded I keep up, so it was a massive learning curve but more than anything I was ready and willing to learn; which I KNOW most people don't want to do.
HN is also a very good cross section that makes me keep coming back at ATHs because even amongst tech workers many keep talking about how 'bad' the tech is without taking the time to even look into it beyond the sensationalist headlines the media makes up as fact and they repeat the same tired narrative, and they too are reluctant if not entirely incapable of undertaking what we think is 'simple' but also the best deterrent for the inherit corruption of the fiat World and also the basis of OPSEC and is best inculcated in a simple mantra: not your keys, not your Bitcoin. Out thinking your enemy and creating new way to route around their absurd system is exhausting, and spending time playing factorio and with legos is fun.
You'd think for a place like HN that is so quick to pat itself on the back for learning a new programming language and boasting about it here in some perverse form of virtue signalling as an autodidactic impresario they'd be the first to see the immense novelty Bitcoin holds (and to an extension it's Blockchain and it's verification, and consensus model) and the fun challenge to understand it would be and ultimately why some of the world's best cryptographers (who at their core have to love to solve complex problems and learn new skills along the way) work in this space. This sentiment is a total contradiction to the philosophy the early days of Silicon Valley had, but has given way to this more petty and servile wave of infantile 'technologists' that are beholden to FAANG so this is clearly what happens when even 'smart people' get things wrong: they try to justify their errors with these campaign smears. Which is why I'm glad so many are leaving CA, hopefully it can go back to it's cypherpunk roots it had in the 80s and 90s.
So, rather than commit to endless Pyrrhic victories trying to fight this with ideological fervor and an unfounded hope people will just eventually 'learn on their own' I realize that time is the most pressing issue, COVID was just a reminder how quickly things can change for the worse, and we should just offer these service as an inevitability for those whose mindsets are not apt to a paradigm shift.
It's crazy to see just how many on HN are incredibly jealous and over all envious about Bitcoin's success, you'd think they would be elated that open source tech is what disrupted finance, but then you realize how many are only 'successful' in Life because of their monetary net worth measured in fiat and how they ignored or simply dismissed Bitcoin because it was too complicated. Their work is not their own, and they are beholden to their employers for identity and purpose, and Bitcoin is just a reminder of why it might have been a waste of time when M1 and M2 spikes happen.
For those of us who worked in Bitcoin professionally we can point and extrapolate the value we derived from it, and some of us can even point to landmark legislation, thought to be impossible, that had to be changed in part because of our efforts and that gives us a form of satisfaction they will never have. So even if it wasn't the safe, or even profitable undertaking sometimes it was worth it because money may be important but it isn't everything.
We got two of the biggest names in Fintech (Musk and Dorsey) on our side, one being the richest man on the planet stating crypto will be used on Mar's economy; but we really need the new wave of users so we should also just acquiesce and create the walled gardens and gaurd-railed sandboxes they so desperately pine for, in hope that one day they could remove the training wheels if they so choose.
They thought they had it so good, for so long, so now when something comes along and shows them that their jails are opened they suffer from a sort of anxiety when they're not in one, so I say: lets just build it for them, but give them a key they can keep inside and use if and when they are ever ready, while the rest of us continue to operate as we always intended Bitcoin to be.
Ultimately dapp (I hate that term but have long since grudgingly accepted that it's become ubiquitous in the industry) development is just normal web app development except that you might also be making AJAX requests to a blockachin and possibly also writing your own smart contracts. Writing your own smart contracts is a somewhat distinct skillset, but the rest of it is just normal web app development.
That's too broad a question, and really depends on the ecosystem, but I'll narrow it down for you if you want just want one obvious use case and I can expand as I go: verifiable proof of ownership.
Something like Melvin Capital shorting 138% of GMS's stock would be impossible in a properly regulated Market, one that prohibits endless speculation and the wanton destruction of Capital for the sole purpose of making money gambling to take a business down as the outstanding shares cannot simply be willed into existence if they need to be cryptograhpically verified and exists solely on a blockchain, but most likely a sidechain/colored-coin system that still has the same properties.
Naked Short selling maybe technically illegal, but that is in name only and in continues unabated to this day, hell the SEC refused to look into this obvious collusion between various hedge funds (citadel/melvin/Steve Cohen) but speculation about trying to go after Elon for taking to Social Media and talking about Bitcoin is enough to warrant a possible investigation?
Also, deed ownership, be it land or property: government's entering hyperinflation and dissolving is a perfect time for asset forfeiture on a national level (nationalizing) by the vying faction and is responsible for so much unnecessary misery and wasted Human Capital: I wish I still had this interview that really touched me it was with Suboi, a now famous Vietnamese rapper, but relatively unknown at the time and her parent's issue with trying to convince the Vietnamese government that they owned the home before the War happened but they tried to make all kinds of excuses to repossess it as she was growing up: its the basis for her song 'Đời' talking about her father's attempted suicide and thier monetary troubles as a result of this dispute with the government.
Same thing happened in Katrina with FEMA and settlement checks as ownership of the home had been on a legacy basis that had roots from sometimes from colonial times.
Lastly, and most vivid to me is over coming censorship, but specifically financial censorship: I did it and I could write a book on the matter. But suffice it to say, I was really touched by Paxful's work recently as they just built their 4th school in Nigeria instead of 'moonboi'ing it' and buying 'lambos' with the wealth their startup created and have instead focused on help build the the Nigerian economy and it's entrepreneurs to create wealth all while their Government is actively trying to deem it as the source of all it's problems, not least of which ~12 inflation per annul that is a direct result of poor monetary policy coupled with even worse insular laws and ossified fintech solutions.
My most ambitious and craziest goal/aspiration of all is something Elon just made possible with adoptiong Bitcoin and making it clear a crypto will be used on Mars: Bitcoin serving as the medium of exchange for inter-planetary trade and commerce, and a settlements network.
Banking even in the West doesn't even work on weekends or past 5pm and people are just assuming we can keep carrying that corpse on our backs as we are slowly getting closer to becoming an multi-planteray species is beyond me and I cannot emphasize how critical that will be in just the next 2 decades.
Voting is another one that should also be clear, given Trumps fomenting of violence in the capital reminding why its best to have open and free elections that can be verified by anyone in real time. Several countries have attempted this so I'm not going to into depth as the information exists, and that's just focusing on what we've created in the last decade, I think the next 2 are going to be an even more interesting ride as I cannot even what is next and this tech moves so fast.
UBI would be another one, but to be honest Aurora failed and we didn't gain much useful info from it's failure, so this is one we have to wait for Nation states to fail (even more than the US has with unemployment apparently) at and we can quickly iterate from there as the technology is just way more robust and capable now.
It didn't short 138% of GME stock. GME short interest increased to 138% while Melvin and many other hedge funds were shorting it. Melvin didn't do that singlehandedly.
> Naked Short selling maybe technically illegal, but that is in name only and in continues unabated to this day, hell the SEC refused to look into this obvious collusion between various hedge funds (citadel/melvin/Steve Cohen)
There is no evidence these firms colluded or engaged in naked short selling. Naked short selling is when you sell short a security without first entering into a contract to borrow the security. Short interest is orthogonal to naked short selling.
You corrected yourself to include that they weren't alone, but whatever... but that still doesn't change the fact that this would be impossible to do if it were a blockchain based system with these parameters built in, you cannot fictitiously create more of something that exists in order to benefit you or your industry and then suspend trading when things get out hand in that blockchain environment, as its completely out of your hand and the fraud in impossible to forge. And clearly with a trillion dollar market cap, and growing, we proved that it pays to play by the rules.
> There is no evidence these firms colluded or engaged in naked short selling. Naked short selling is when you sell short a security without first entering into a contract to borrow the security. Short interest is orthogonal to naked short selling.
Ok... we're done. This is going no where, keep downvoting as that seems to be your only recourse but you being blind to this obvious reality that SEC is selectively applying the Law (which also happens to apply to OTHER Naked short selling) isn't changing the fact of how obvious this collusion was and nothing I say will change that.
You want to pretend these markets are fair, go ahead, and I'm not going to waste my time... But my points for Blockchain based tech solutions that exist are already there and your make believe arguments notwithstanding will not make them go away.
Ok, I stand corrected, and I don't mind accepting that, but that doesn't diminish the value of my response; none the less I appreciate the correction.
Why? Shorting above 100% doesn't "create more of something". Why would a blockchain based trading system prevent me from short selling a stock based on what other people are doing? I've got the stock in my wallet. It was loaned to me by Bob. I can sell it to you right now. Why can't I sell it?
Because it adds no value when shorting is nothing more than a predatory model to extract wealth from the useful (entrepreneurs) to the useless (speculators). Consider the World's riches man only became so when the speculators made Tesla the most shorted company.
I think this shows, once more, that the Capital Markets as we're forced to believe are anything that and more a massive casino with reckless gamblers with connections to central banks endless money printing. And that's my problem with this more than anyting else, it's not fair, its not efficient it's a forced construct by the entrenched powers to create even more entrenched and systemic gaps in wealth and Society.
Do I really need to talk about 2008?
First they ignore you,
then they laugh at you,
then they fight you,
... and then they buy bitcoin
Also noticed the same in regards to kubernetes, only in the last six months has it become "acceptable", and yet it is everywhere and used for everything. Just plain ignorance. But, as the above quote tries to show, lightly, eventually Bitcoin wins.
The fiat World is not Capitalism, it's so far detached from it that even comparing it to that shows just financially illiterate most are; but it's true Bitcoin doesn't solve many things, least of which is financial equality, but that is why founders and early adopters should be awarded: we took all the risk and built the infrastructure.
What differs is we have a vested interest in the new adopters succeeding and applying their Human capital and resources to this to create a more sustainable that does ensure it is FAIR. The Fiat World is incredibly unfair, and that is what i think keeps so many from even seeing the many benefits of Capitalism, which I subscribe to (Anarcho-Capitalism) but I understand is inherently flawed.
Still, its far more sustainable and beneficial and has already proven to be able to accelerating the advent of renewable energy and more distributed approaches to problem solving without the need for a centralized entity. And for most of my Lifetime that was never thought to be possible, outside of open source tech online, let alone something that could shift the very paradigm for a non-destructive system that treats Capital like an endless dole from the State and Central Banks based relationships.
I've been focused on being a multi-planetary Species but the truth is if we haven't solved this glaring issue caused by fiat we have no way of colonizing a planet if we have a business cycle bust/collapse and hyperinflation every 8-15 years, and the aver age of fiat currency is 40 years, which is nothing since Mars will take centuries to millennia but most of the proponents of this fiat system cannot even fathom this, let alone the need for the developing World to enter industrialization and higher standards of manufacturing for us to even have SLIGHT chance and making this happen.
Again, I don't think most people are financial literate, let alone deep thinkers on more than just the basic question like: why does my iphone cost so much.
So true. I wish I had had the opportunity to live in the golden age cypherpunk CA of the 1970-1990s.
> Their work is not their own, and they are beholden to their employers for identity and purpose, and Bitcoin is just a reminder of why it might have been a waste of time when M1 and M2 spikes happen.
So true. If only they could listen. But they are too emotionally invested in their mistakes. So they try to find meaning and happiness with the peanuts that are thrown at them.
> They thought they had it so good, for so long, so now when something comes along and shows them that their jails are opened they suffer from a sort of anxiety when they're not in one
Thanks a lot for taking the time to write that. It helps me understand them better.
Like you, I have tried to understand the people who single hand reject crypto on HN.
My conclusion is that it is due in part to the golden jail (good paying job in FANG tech) + not wanting to bite the hand that feeds (corporate overlords / governmnent) + intellectual laziness coming from a mix of a golden jail + old age (most people here seem to be over 40) - but the icing on the cake is this anxiety.
I have talked with some people like arcticbull (a HN permabull on all things crypto) and he said he also has the irrational fear of being defrauded.
I think it is a manifestation of the anxiety you describe: the fear their effort were meaningless.
> lets just build it for them, but give them a key they can keep inside and use if and when they are ever ready
The airdrops were like that. I have seen myself very intelligent people sell their airdrops for a handful of dollars. In a way, this free crypto was lost on them. They got a few burgers. More patient people got at least a car.
If you have friends you want to help, don't give them crypto: they will immediately sell it, regardless of the price, because they are afraid of the variance and not very rational. They are the kind of people who would eat the seed gains instead of planting it. They are unable to think long term (maybe from growing up poor, or having to work a job to get money?)
Instead, keep the crypto for them, and bestow a part of it when the time is right, in fiat, at an amount you think adequate to their immediate needs. You can always give them more later.
But I always thought giving them the benefit of the doubt was the best strategy only to see how absurd it was for being so trusting... still I think it doesn't matter, we have so many of the Silicon Valley king makers on our side, YC included, so they will just follow when the time comes.
I wish I could find the academic research paper, but their was study on massive paradigm shifts throughout History and it concluded that in some of the most momentous, from things like the US and French revolutions to the migration of users from Myspace to Facebook, it was only between 5-15% of a studied populace to make them successful, and the rest just follow what those aforementioned do.
This is incredibly sad to me, because while I detest the spying business models this generation of SV guys work under, I always respected their intelligence which is why I keep coming back here, now I'm seeing they are susceptible to the same rationalizations that we see in the so called 'normies' that made ultimately made us bond despite disagreeing on talents/skills/interests as technologists.
Still... I think we're only now entering the enterprise and institutional adoption curve, they have a chance to pivot and use their immensely bloated salalries and still do ok, but I don think that is what is the core issue: they have delusions of being Chamath, or Elon being some low tier coder not realizing that the paradigm they function in is antithetical in ever creating another wave of Chamths let alone another Elon.
They will sabotage you and your startup, and even short the living fuck out you if you're already public while praising your efforts in public, if they have the slightest chance and fund both sides so that at best they will use you to get a fat IPO exit for something as stupid as doordash that relies on consolidation of any Industry for Megacorps.