A large % of people now believe that the finance industry only exists to work against them and make an elite minority rich. There's a strong sense of "Fuck You, I Got Mine" from the last generation, so the current generation is saying "Fine, I'm going to invent my own system... with Black Jack, and hookers!". Crypto/DeFi is creating a sense of euphoria and hope against a backdrop of helplessness where people are thinking "I will never own a home", "I will never be able to afford to retire" etc, so why not take a punt on the next big thing?
I was intrigued by some comments on HN the other day that dApps are where all the 'innovation' in crypto is today, so spent some time looking in to it.
After many hours I couldn't find anything even remotely interesting.
Let everyone have a home, eat and drink as much as they need, receive proper education and healthcare, and thrive working for something they see interest in not a paycheck/boss and you'll see terrorism will be entirely rid of.
In the meantime, i agree it's a reasonable expectation that people can exchange money freely with the caveat that there should be taxes. As much as i hate taxes because they will fund police terrorizing my neighborhood, big corporations for their next nature-destroying megaproject, and cameras everywhere in the big cities, they are important as long as we live in a capitalist system to ensure we have basic public services.
A system like GNU/Taler is really interesting because it promises buyer's secrecy while retaining public accounting for receivers so that they can be subject to taxes. Cash is better of course as anonymity is guaranteed on both sides, and that's precisely why the chief scammers are pushing for the abolition of cash... so much of informal economy/solidarity would disappear overnight i'm having nightmares over it.
Are there sufficient people interested in cleaning toilets, dealing with the mentally ill/infirm, working in crawl spaces and attics, working on a farm an hour plus from everything?
Want to buy a cool car? Do some cleaning on the side.
There's people interested in caring for others and/or growing food on the countryside. Cleaning toilets is a task nobody does by pleasure but i don't see a reason there should be a specific class in society handling undesired tasks for the others.
Why can't we take turns doing what HAS TO be done? I've lived in communities for about two decades now and it's never ever crossed our mind we should designate someone to clean the toilets for others. I'm happy to do it every now and then if you're happy to do the same.
What happens when someone does not take their turn?
Or maybe you just don't care to exploit other people you live with, in which case you're free to go and do that elsewhere because that's the norm in all of capitalist societies.
I’ll cut to the chase. My point is your concept of society does not work at scale. You will have people that want to use the system, you will need to use force and adjudicate in the system, and you will need something more than good vibes to serve as incentives.
Because we'll kick them out. I'm always up for doing things i don't particularly enjoy because there's value in them, but I certainly don't want to live with someone who treats me like a slave.
> you will need something more than good vibes to serve as incentives
Sure. But you'll probably concede that we live in a world run by psychopaths where children in schools are taught how to become psychopaths themselves. The first thing we teach children is "copying is cheating" and we're wondering why we're fucked? I'm not saying there's a time and place where everything will be perfect and we can all live happily ever after (i'm not a hippy), but there's very rational reasons for the ways everything around us is bad, and very rational courses of actions to fix those.
Abolishing property as State-mandated religion doesn't mean that some people won't have more than others (this would be ridiculous). But at least it would mean that nobody would sleep on the streets while there are empty homes, and nobody would starve while there is wasted food. Both ridiculous situations are the consequence of private property and require considerable amounts of force and resources to apply. It obviously is not working at scale, as we can see from environmental damage and previously-unimaginable levels of inequality.
It’s hard enough to get many married couples to live like this, and even harder for small extended families. I would assign something very close to 0% as the probability for viability of this on a country or global level.
Sharing and cooperative play come long before anything resembling an individual assignment.
I am not aware of any functional society exists today without the use of compensation on a notable scale, certainly not notable enough to be able to defend itself.
Certainly our technologically advanced civilizations as they exist today are founded on capitalism, but I am not sure that is required, it has just become such an ingrained concept that "no one would ever do these unsavory tasks if we didn't threaten them with starvation and death" that we have difficulty imagining any other possibility.
None that I'm aware of, though I am not entirely convinced it is impossible for the reasons I stated. I am forced to wonder: what is the virtue of scale like that if it is largely built on the back of human suffering?
There’s a whole theory of competitive advantage [0] where I’m better doing some things than others. I’d rather do the thing I’m good at and use the money to pay others to do stuff I’m marginally worse off doing.
I’ve lived in communities for a few decades and every day it crosses my mind that I want to establish a price for someone to come clean my toilet.
[0] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/comparativeadvantage.as...
You're not wrong, but it's not (all) about efficiency but rather about solidarity and social cohesion. As an example, in Japan, children clean the school:
* https://www.japantimes.co.jp/life/2001/11/30/lifestyle/kids-...
* https://www.thejapanguy.com/japanese-kids-clean-their-classr...
* https://www.quora.com/How-do-Japanese-students-feel-about-th...
Yeah, that's precisely what's wrong in our society that it appears normal to pay for inconveniences to disappear. Except of course for most of us who don't have money so we get paid shitty wages for making other people's inconveniences disappear. If such jobs were the highest paid, that would be less of a problem of course. But the highest paid jobs under capitalism are the least useful to society at large because they don't produce anything (CEOs, managers, financial/legal advisors, marketers, etc).
> I’m better doing some things than others.
That makes sense. However some tasks such as cleaning are not skilled labor. Yes it requires (some) learning, but by the second time you've cleaned a toilet you pretty much know how to do it for the rest of your life. Cleaning a single toilet takes about 5 minutes and is not much effort (contrary to doing that for a living)That makes sense. However some tasks such as cleaning are not skilled labor. Yes it requires (some) learning, but by the second time you've cleaned a toilet you pretty much know how to do it for the rest of your life. Cleaning a single toilet takes about 5 minutes and is not much effort (contrary to doing that for a living). Have you considered why you're so reluctant to do it?
> I’ve lived in communities (...) my toilet
We're probably not living in the same kinds of communities then if you've got a personal toilet. In the communities i've resided in everybody's got their personal room but everything else is communal.
This might be able to be rectified under the current system by giving money to the lowest paid, so that they can go to school and learn a trade which they find has a more acceptable price:undesirability ratio. Ideally, everyone will have the option to not have to do tasks like cleaning toilets, and hence everyone will have to do it themselves or pay a lot to get someone else to do it.
It's funny, I had a conversation with a roommate that went something like I said I hated dishes, and that I'd rather be outside in the cold, under the car lifted on jackstands, draining the oil and replacing it and servicing the oil filter, coming back in and cleaning up. For both our cars. And my roommate seemed shocked. It seemed like such a bigger task to them than just quickly cleaning the dishes and throwing them in a rack to dry. But I just hate doing the dishes. And I don't mind changing the oil in the car.
I disagree, it’s what is awesome about our society. It’s a feature, not a bug.
I’ve gotten all the character I’ll get from cleaning toilets and I’m happy that someone else is willing to do it for me.
There’s no way toilet cleaner will be a high paying job because the skill set is so low. As with most manual labor. Low skill set means lots of people will do it means low wages.
I understand how to clean a toilet and the time involved. I choose not to do it. I won’t make me a better person to do it. I have considered why I’m reluctant and understand pretty completely. I grok why I don’t want to clean toilets. I’m comfortable with my understanding in this area.
It’s also ok that we value these experiences differently. I don’t have to convince you to pay someone to clean your toilet. I just have to convince you to continue letting me, and others, pay for toilet cleaning.
High supply relative to demand or low demand relative to supply means low wages.
It is possible (and very real in many areas) that there are low numbers of people willing to clean toilets in a given area compared to the demand. It could be due to government assistance providing them enough such that they do not need to clean toilets to meet their needs.
It could be better job opportunities opening up nearby such as higher paying factory work. It could be that they move away from the area due to higher real estate prices. There are myriad causes for a low skill task to have few willing suppliers for the labor to perform that task.
I feel like the real litmus test here is: given that the maid is cleaning your toilet, would you freak out if the maid took a dump in your toilet AND then cleaned it? That cuts to the heart of whether they're a fellow human doing exchange-value with you as a true equal, or whether they're a class that should not be using the employer's private toilet.
I would bet you maid services like that are very strict about not blurring that line, knowing that some people are paying to set up a class dynamic they expect to be honored.
Ha, no of course not. I also think it’s not a very good test because almost no one would care. Me not being able to afford to buy things or not being skilled enough to command a high wage doesn’t mean I’m not equal as a human being, it just means I can’t afford things.
I would expect that maid services are very strict because some people are super picky about their toilets. I know people who won’t let family members use their toilet, much less some stranger. It’s not worth the risk for a maid service to lose the work. Not really a good indicator of valuing humans.
Maybe a better test would be whether I allow a maid to drink from my water or something like that.
If everyone is taken care of, these jobs should come with some extra benefits - both socially and financially. Remember all those bs commercials thanking essential workers toward the beginning of Covid? What if society really appreciated its essential workers and compensated them like it did?
Cleaning toilets is somewhat unpleasant, but there's immediate feedback on your performance (the before and after is clear), and people should appreciate the people that keep them clean. There should be an understood, and spoken, sense of "Thank you" for the people keeping them clean.
Perspective -> feeling - > actions. I don't think this is a particularly difficult issue to navigate, but it would require a shift in perspective.
The person I was responding to was arguing against compensation as a concept in general.
All I'm saying is we can do much better than this.
First, I didn't say democracy good, monarchy bad... My point is precisely that western bourgeois democracy is pretty flawed. It is however better than the absolutist monarchies of the 1700s and 1800s.
>some humans are bad actors, therefore it doesn't matter how your society functions, there will always be people who exploit the system. The only reason you think monarchies is bad is because historical monarchs have been abusive. But there have also been abusive democratic leaders. Humans are the problem, not the systems we create.
That's just silly. A well designed system has institutions, checks and balances that prevent bad actors from wrecking the system. An absolutist monarchy has none. Can't you see how that matters? Taking your argument to its conclusion, then absolute monarchies, bourgeois democracies, direct democracies, soviet-style totalitarianism... it's all the same! All it matters is if you're lucky that the people in charge are good.
Specifically about COVID though, I don't know about where you are, but here in France "thank you" for health workers was perceived to be very insulting. Because when the government continues to dismantle all forms of public services and keeps on overworking hospital workers (most of whom have months or even years of paid vacations they could never take because of understaffing) and destroying all their social benefits, it's hard not to take this as "fuck you".
What does this mean? It is the nature of animals to evaluate and rank each other, least of all for mating purposes. Not using money will not change that, and another proxy will be used.
> Specifically about COVID though, I don't know about where you are, but here in France "thank you" for health workers was perceived to be very insulting.
It was the same in the US. The thank you and hero nonsense was seen through by all, but I guess plausible deniability is worth it amongst the managing class.
Not at all. Competition is not the norm in the natural world. There's the entire field of ethology to study if you'd like to know more.
If you need a quick intro, "Mutual Aid" by Peter Kropotkin is really dated science-wise (it's almost 120 years old) but is still a pretty good read. If you're into TV stuff, i'd recommend Adam Curtis' series "The trap" and "The century of the self" which explore the topics of how competition and self-interest have increasingly been guiding principles of (at the time) western societies and how we've tried to apply such principles (eg. game theory) to other fields where they in fact do not apply.
Or one can look at data from myriad of dating apps and websites. I would not believe anyone if they told me they did not rank possible partners in life on a variety of metrics such as health, wealth, tribal affiliations (family/other network), intelligence, humor, etc.
> I would not believe anyone if they told me they did not rank possible partners in life on a variety of metrics
That sounds really close to the definition of a psychopath, and is definitely not how most people live their lives/relationships. Adam Curtis in "The trap" touches on this topic and how only psychopaths and economists used to behave like according to "measurable rational self-interest". With the commodification of everything (including oneself through social media) it's fair to bet more people behave like that nowadays than previously, but it's still really far from everyone.
Why would you not believe me if i told you i have feelings and affinities that cannot be measured or ranked and do not reflect a material interest? Why is it so hard to accept that not everybody lives through live the same way that soulless suit-heads do?
> Why would you not believe me if i told you i have feelings and affinities that cannot be measured or ranked and do not reflect a material interest? Why is it so hard to accept that not everybody lives through live the same way that soulless suit-heads do?
Why would you not believe that I have a long, committed, happy relationship today that I arrived at through consciously ranking and evaluating qualities of my current partner and other people that I met? Why is it so hard for you to accept that humans are inherently judging and comparing creatures? Why do you think that to just think about important life choices like a partner doesn't make you a "soulless suit-head"? If you want to live your life that way, go ahead.
The fact that you and even most people seem to let your subconscious steer you with important life decisions doesn't affect me. But I don't see why you have to indirectly call the other user names (psychopath, soulless suit-head) just because they do things differently than you. Are Indian and Chinese parents who perform arranged marriages also psychopaths or soulless suit-heads just because they choose matches for their children based on a variety of metrics? Does it make Chinese or Indian culture soulless or psychopathic since they've been doing this way before the "commodification of everything"?
Competition for mates literally forms and morphs most animal species.
> I would not believe anyone if they told me they did not rank possible partners in life on a variety of metrics such as health, wealth, tribal affiliations (family/other network), intelligence, humor, etc.
I certainly do, and this is commonplace to the point of cliche. Think of Indian or Chinese arranged marriages where the parents openly and blatantly choose and approve of partners based on what you said: health, wealth, family, etc. It's a documented fact and I've seen it personally that some Chinese parents even disqualify women over 30 or so as partners for their children (to the point there's a word for it: "leftover women"). In the West some people are squeamish about consciously evaluating and ranking people, but everyone still does it, even if it's subconscious, unless you literally throw a dart at at list and pair with whoever you hit. We just talk about it indirectly: having a "type", being "compatible", having similar interests, getting along, having things in common, avoiding "red flags".
I at least certainly have based my relationship evaluations based on conscious ranking and metrics, and it's led to the incredibly happy, successful relationship I'm in now.
Competition IS relevant, but it's in the context of other drives like group-oriented behavior, and it is cooperation that some people seem to have a hard time understanding. Cooperation and group behavior is every bit as powerful and rewarding as competition is, and every bit as natural.
I feel like we get into trouble when we try to isolate one side of things and dismiss the other. You're correct that western societies (probably not exclusively western societies) have erred, in leaning way over to the 'competition' side.
You could say law of the jungle except for jungles don't operate in this simplistic way. More like law of the capitalism, which tries to deify one behavior and demonize the other.
I'm not convinced Kropotkin is the final answer here, but he sure serves as a good window into the 'cooperate' side which is unreasonably suppressed in western society.
edit: just saw that you replied to "maybe money isn't needed at all" so my reply is not really relevant
Hence the hotels and fast food and other low paying fields complaint about not finding workers since the government gave them an option.
If everyone was fluent in English and could type well, then the price of rote white collar office work would go down and the price of hard labor and public facing and more undesirable work would go up. Which is what has been happening in the last decade.
It's a nice thought, but I don't think this is actually true. Osama bin Laden and a number of the 9/11 hijackers were actually well-educated, well-off engineers of various sorts, for example.
Aaaaah, I get what you did there! Took me a minute or two, during which time I was finding examples of How Some Bank Crime...
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/outrageo...
https://www.icij.org/investigations/fincen-files/hsbc-moved-...
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/netflix-documentary-re-exa...
But also:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-09-24/westpac-money-launder...
https://www.austrac.gov.au/austrac-and-cba-agree-700m-penalt...
2) The articles say that HSBC laundered billions. This likely means it was $3-4Bn at most, but let’s assume it was $19Bn (because if it was $20Bn they would have said tens of billions). These transactions were probably earning HSBC a few basis points. I can’t say for sure since I’m not aware of the market price of criminal transactions, but I suspect the premium was not much higher than a regular transaction for the simple reason that it would make the transaction appear obviously criminal. But let’s say it was 200bp (so 2%, and that’s likely an order of magnitude higher, but for arguments sake). Then HSBC probably made about $400mm - costs (remember, assuming a very high $19bn in transactions). So a $1.9Bn fine is extremely high, being 5x HSBC’s revenue from the transactions assuming very favorable numbers, and not considering the non monetary penalties, such as probation, etc.
3) Finally, if Apple is found guilty of illegally promoting a monopoly through their App Store policies, would a fine of $7Bn be considered laughable, considering it’s about 5 weeks of Apple’s income? And in Apple’s case, the company operates fairly cohesively, and the App Store almost exists for the sole purpose of encouraging hardware sales, so there’s actually an argument to be made to base the penalty on Apple’s total income as a company. OTOH, banks tend to have fairly independent divisions, because they are highly regulated, unlike the likes of Apple, and there are all sorts of restrictions preventing the divisions that are making the kind of transactions from even interacting with most of the rest of the company. Apple collaborated more with its competitors to illegally suppress employee pay than this division of HSBC likely collaborated with any other division in HSBC (and they likely had to actively evade scrutiny from the middle office).
I’m not trying to argue that the punishment was appropriate. However, what I am arguing is that if a non banking company was found to have done something similar, they would have faced punishments that were a much tinier fraction of what HSBC faced. And that’s even before we factor in the fact that banks are orders of magnitude more regulated than nearly any other industry, with them being required to set up entire departments that account for over 10-20% of their workforce purely to ensure they can meet government regulations. Something pretty much no other industry, especially the tech industry, has to do.
Any shortcomings in the punishment imposed on HSBC was a result of leeway’s given to companies in general.
It really feels like protectionism for the status quo. Which is totally understandable and predictable in the context of basic human behaviour and motivations; the king of the hill will not make it easy for anyone to displace them.
What I find interesting, as opposed to surprising as such, is the myriad ways in which politicians explain these situations away in simultaneously calling the slap-on-the-wrist a big deterrent to such behaviour in future, and playing this slap-on-the-wrist as if it's somehow in the interests of the voting population.
[1] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/netflix-documentary-re-exa...
In the past few weeks crypto has shut down energy infrastructure, meat processing, and a major ferry service.
It's also burning 1% of the world's electricity and rapidly growing.
Criminals will abuse any technology that benefits them.
You're conflating cryptocurrency with ransomware attacks.
Yes, because that is the very definition of capitalism: people own, others work. That's the reason modern forms of slavery, colonization and patriarchal control were developed, historically.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_capitalism or Silvia Federici for some great perspectives on the control of births/sexuality, patriarchy of the wage and oppression of women under capitalism.
> people are thinking "I will never own a home"
A lot of people i meet from the younger generation don't care at all about owning a home. They feel concerned that the privileged elites are ruining the show for everyone and by the next decade we'll be more and more struggling for drinkable water and basic survival.
Punks were derided for their "No future" stance, but it looks like the entire world has gone "No future" and just keeps fucking up as much as they can. Spending billions of KWh on blockchains so rich people can speculate on buying their own number (correct me if i'm wrong but to me a NFT is just a number) is just part of this.
We have to stop this madness, abolish private property and the capitalist industry entirely and go back to communal living and producing stuff based on actual needs, not dumb single-use Internet of Shit products and other planned-obsolete non-flashable-single-purpose computers.
> After many hours I couldn't find anything even remotely interesting.
The only interesting "dApp" i've seen so far is radicle.xyz, a decentralized forge built on top of git. Still i'm skeptical of tying money and financial incentives into my software development practices, but at least those folks (free software people) had the decency to make crypto-payments optional by adding opt-in Ethereum integration. Clever move.
You say this as if numbers have no utility. Is an IP address "just a number"? What about a /8 cidr block? How much energy should we be allowed to spend to secure global address space and provide a secure implementation of identity for all people? This is one of the actual concrete uses of NFT tech, (see Urbit Azimuth.)
> We have to stop this madness, abolish private property and the capitalist industry entirely and go back to communal living and producing stuff based on actual needs, not dumb single-use Internet of Shit products and other planned-obsolete non-flashable-single-purpose computers.
Good luck making a non-disposable world where nobody has domain over their own numbers or is allowed to have their own distinct and unique identity secured by a leading consensus protocol. I for one am glad that you and others of a like mind are not empowered to tell me or anyone else that I can't have my own number if I want it, or to secure it with as many megawatts and global collaborators as I can muster.
Because you know what happens when private property is abolished? Spoiler, only the well connected and powerful will hold private property, and overall the scope and impact of inequality even broadens.
Edit: I'm getting downvotes but not sure which part you disagree with! Have you ever lived in an area where private property was abolished? (They tried this in Lithuania and USSR and that's exactly how it turned out! When nobody is allowed to own resources, who decides how they are allocated?)
"To each according to his need" sounds great until you get to see what an actual functional implementation of that looks like, and it turns out that Stalin is the one who is in charge of it all.
If only a few people can own private property then you haven't abolished private property, you've just limited who can own it.
This was the main issue caused by the massive state control of Marxist Leninist countries like the Soviet Union -- by centralizing all control within one single political party you essentially just replace an economic elite with a political elite. Couple that with the democratic centralism you often find in these single party ML countries and suddenly you have something that's a lot less like the communal living the OP was referring to.
I'm not saying abolishing private property will be some magical fix all, but I also don't think using the soviet union as an example of why it won't work is a good example. You could have a society where usage of resources is governed by consensus rather than "lol stalin said so" but consensus is obviously a lot harder to do on a global scale than a small communal village
Someone or something has to be at the helm of the command economy. I'm definitely not saying we should "go back to communal living and producing stuff based on actual needs" but I am saying that without a rigorous system for distributed consensus, you really don't have a chance of achieving this.
Many Bitcoin hodlers actually have an expectation of becoming extremely wealthy, despite having done nothing for society, because they've been swept up in the speculative mania and volatility.
Gold bugs don't generally have this expectation. Gold is no longer a broadly accepted currency, and even the most vocal of gold bugs are only expecting a 2x or 5x return in the next few decades, assuming the $ does collapse. They only preach an expectation that N bricks of gold, where N will buy a house today, will buy them a house 50 years from now. The attitude is one of wealth preservation rather than speculation. It's a reasonable expectation assuming the demand for and supply of Gold remains balanced.
Expectations about inflation/deflation are important drivers of these phenomena (not the only ones of course) and if we break the paradigm with cryptocurrencies then it's possible the stickiness problems of deflation could be solved.
What is interesting is that this setup has been exploiting youth for a long time. Its only now that, with crypto, GME, AMC, the younger investors can ramp up the volitility in the market, creating more risk for older more established investors, who then need to pay to reduce their expose to that risk.
There a lot more to this that further blurs the morality of positioning yourself within this power struggle, but ultimately, its just market forces at work.
At the end of the day, this revolution could be stymied by actually providing the next generations with a foreseeable path to home ownership, a family with good education and healthcare, and the american dream, without having to yolo it all, even on an engineers salary. But it seems the next generation is only path to enact change is by staking their assets for generational speculation war.
NFT is mostly driven by the elite, with common people acting as useful idiots to them by talking, tweeting, watching SNL skits about it.
This is extremely apt, because in the end they went "in fact, forget the system!" and realized you can just make money from the hype without actually building anything usable.
And what on earth makes them think cryptocurrency doesn't exist simply to make an elite minority rich? Just because it might be a different minority doesn't change the equation. And oh by the way, there is absolutely 0 government protections in the new system. Don't get me wrong, over the last 70 years a lot of the protections in existing financial institutions have been watered down, but I'll still take an FDIC backing on my bank account over: "oh no we got "hacked" and all of your wallets are gone, sorry about that!"
And that's because it is true. The vast majority of the financial services industry is designed to screw people over.
The only thing an average citizen can do is let them skim off as little money as possible. Buy stocks in solid companies, and hold on to them for a long time. Index mutual funds with minimal administration overhead. Things like that where you can invest a portion of your life's savings without getting screwed over too bad.
I don't know where to begin with a comment like this. It's being so heavily reinforced by social media, but is so hyperbolically outside reality that I honestly don't know where to start.
It's similar to saying that the vast majority of the medical industry only exists to make people sick. Do people die on the operating table? Sure. Do people contract illnesses in hospitals? Yes. Is the VAST MAJORITY of medicine DESIGNED to make people ill? Convincing someone who believes this is impossible, because it's such an extreme view it cannot possibly be based on logic or evidence.
The financial system is a vast and complex. It's as old as the first Egyptian farmers. Do you honestly believe it was DESIGNED to screw over humanity since inception?
Is it so impossible for you to imagine the utility of bank accounts? Futures contracts? Mortgages? Bonds? Stock Exchanges? Fiat money? If these are all just elaborate scams, why does every society on Earth use them since literally 3000 BC?
Banks have rules on what they can use the money in your savings account for. They have government backed insurance.
Regular stocks are also heavily regulated. Financial reporting requirements, disclosures, auditing, etc.
Why does all this regulation exist? Because people we getting screwed over, and it was bad enough the government had to step in.
The mortgage industry was not heavily regulated enough, and what happened there? A large financial crash. And who got bailed out? The banks, many of whom were somewhat complicit and profiting off the situation.
Who didn't get bailed out? The little people.
This is still happening now. Most hedge funds, high frequency trading, the lure of day trading, and may other schemes exist to siphon off money from regular people.
Think for a minute about the hedge fund manager who gets tens of millions in bonuses. Where does that money come from? Ultimately the companies and other investors. That money could have gone into higher wages for the workers, but instead is being funneled to a few elites.
Since ancient times, the powerful have sought to retain and grow their own power. They use whatever means are available to them. It can be the use of force, but things have gotten more sophisticated.
I think the analogy still holds here. Medicine is highly regulated because people sometimes die as a result of medical intervention, and as a result of that regulation (hopefully, but debatably) less people die, but that doesn't prove that medicine is designed to kill people.
I really don't think so.
Let me tell you a little story.
Banks have offered checking accounts (now usually via debit cards) for a long time. Everyone understood how they worked, and if you wrote a check, it would be refused payment if you didn't have enough money in your account. This is the classic bounced check, and the merchant would be angry with you.
Fast forward to the 2000's. Banks changed the rules, and now (unless you explicitly disallow it) if your check was going to bounce, they will instead charge you an overdraft fee. Even if your account was in the negative by one cent.
All in the name of profit, because the fee would be like $35. And of course, this hit the poorest people the most. And let's not talk about check cashing services, which really screw over the people.
Now if banks stopped there, that would be one thing.
However, one of the "innovations" that Wells Fargo came up with (it was innovated for the profit margin, for a little while) was to re-order transactions any way they saw fit.
Suppose you have $5 in your checking account. This morning, you deposit $50, and in the afternoon, you withdraw $30, secure in the knowledge that you have $55 in your account. Seems safe, right? You're doing the right thing, and playing by the rules, you'll still have $25 left. You are still out and about, so later, you take out another $5 for a meal. No problem, you still have $20 left.
But Wells Fargo changed the rules. They decided that all the transactions coming in on the same day could be ordered (serialized in database terminology) in whatever order they decided. So they would process the $10 withdrawal first, charge you a $35 overdraft fee, and then apply the deposit, leaving you at -$10. Then, when you take out another $5, this is allowed, but because you're already negative, they charge you another overdraft fee, so now you're sitting at -$50.
That is innovation in the modern age of the financial industry.
And perhaps it's also true that crypto has also made an elite minority rich?
What crypto presents is the opportunity for lay people to take financial power from the finance establishment. I think that’s why people are so excited.
This has been my issue with dApps as well. It's always "thing that does some stuff with ETH" which is only valuable and interesting if you already assume ETH is valuable and interesting. I guess most people make the leap of faith by putting money into them, but on sheer technical merit, dApps just aren't that interesting.
(un-disclaimer: not affiliated, not an owner, not a user)
Q: Is this a pyramid scheme?
A: No! It's a sarcophagus scheme!
Land in desirable locations is a scarce good and land owners extract an economic rent via rising land prices which makes housing unaffordable. That same dynamic exists with cryptocurrencies with a limited supply. You buy early and the value of the cryptocurrency rises as more people start using them.
In both cases the hoarding instinct is drowning out productive activity. When land becomes too expensive you cannot afford to live on it. When Bitcoin becomes too expensive you cannot afford to pay with it. Of course this is under the assumption that you need a fixed amount of land and the equivalent to that would be that you also need a fixed amount of Bitcoin.
The primary difference though is that with land people voluntarily decide to move there because the location is attractive. Cryptocurrencies aren't popular enough to justify choosing them over government currencies. People are buying cryptocurrencies because they are going up.
NFT is just the last in a long series. Before that we had the Lightning network that would revolutionize payments and make cryptocurrencies actually usable, ICOs that would revolutionize startup founding etc...
I wonder how long the cryptocurrency world will manage to maintain this facade of being a miracle tech in order to justify the insane amount of money poured into it, while at the same time continuously failing to deliver on everything.
When a system becomes corrupt and dysfunctional and normal transactions and savings become ineffective or illegal, cryptocurrencies have proven themselves as a viable means of escape. The value of that is hard to understate.
I agree that a lot of other applications are overhyped, and that there is a lot of bloat and excess in the crypto space. I think their core use case and value is in providing an extremely difficult to block form of value storage despite restrictive and irresponsible governments. The value of that depends on how restrictive and irresponsible your government is being.
but isn't any cryptocurrency still directly tied to some fiat currency? Unless everyone uses crypto then at some point it gets exchanged for dollars at which point the low value of the dollar in a place like Venezuela is realized and you're stuck in the same situation but with more hassle.
Crypto might well potentially shine under such circumstances, or under your view of what such circumstances might be, but the truth on the ground is apparently different.
It doesn't really seem like a long-term solution or one that'd help more than a small amount of people.
Yes, crypto is mostly focused on financial apps, so they are harder to understand than "send me 140 chars and we make a timeline of it".
To be honest, that example is also the weirdest one to actually break through, and together with Snapchat the ones who took it farthest into almost unusable and still made bank.
(Yo, and I think a number of other tried even further down that street but has failed AFAIK.)
Then nothing happens for a decade or so, and then Google finally publishes a first version of their engine that takes 30s to search among a couple hundred websites. Effectively unusable, but hey, it's the early day! Bullish!
I also disagree that cryptocurrencies are "hard to understand", it's only hard because their promoters feel the need to obfuscate with technobabble how dumb and ineffective 99% of proposed blockchain solutions are. It's hard to understand because there's nothing to understand.
> Then nothing happens for a decade or so...
I guess you took the comfortable position to choose starting point of the internet as 1998, but what about 1980's or 70's? It was rather slow progress, just as you described.
> I also disagree that cryptocurrencies are "hard to understand"
I was referring to financial apps in general. For most people to think about interests and investments is a challenge even with fiat currencies.
I agree though that a major crypto/blockchain revolution hasn't happened yet and probably it will never replace the current internet, but it will co-exists and be much more significant than today once a group hits a sweet spot with UX, utility and adoption.
Once the bean counters enter a tech field, they suck all the fun.
What are the other aspects of NFTs (in the art world or elsewhere)?
For the art world, they are a new medium and can be used to secure provenance. In the rest of the world they are being looked at as mediums for selling tickets or keys to access unique experiences (an art piece/door/puzzle that activates or lights up if presented with a valid NFT as a simple example) among many theoretical use cases.
A lot of crypto stuff doesn’t make sense unless we get Decentralized Identities (DIDs) right, so things like NFTs can be associated with with a user.
https://www.artworkarchive.com/blog/what-every-art-collector...
About your question: hicetnunc.xyz is basically like Instagram but with an easy option to support the artist by buying their creations directly from them as a NFT. They can showcase their creations, get discovered, and make some money on top.
If someone sees my work, they will buy an original piece. Or buy merch. Or buy a print. Or pay me to teach.
Or I think the main reason is that I like to make art and like people to see it. It makes me feel good for people to see and comment on my work.
Why not buy directly from them without an NFT? What does the NFT bring to the table? Isn't what your describing what places like Etsy already do?