Mozilla Foundation pausing cryptocurrency donations
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The amount of money people actually donated or spent with crypto has always been minimal. (Wish I had harder numbers to back this up, but you can see second-order effects from e.g. Steam adding Bitcoin support but then taking it away. Or how Bitpay has stagnated heavily, while a purely investment/speculation platform like Coinbase is worth billions.) However, for a long time, the benefit of accepting Bitcoin as payment was the marketing. Accepting crypto signaled that you were a cool company, you could put out a press release and the news media would run articles about how X service is now accepting cryptocurrency for payments.
The same thing happened again years later with "blockchain." Remember Kodakcoin? Remember Long Island Blockchain? Nothing ever really surfaced from these initiatives, but again, it was all about that big marketing hype that came from saying your company was going to use blockchain for... something.
Where it gets interesting is... what if crypto becomes anathema? What if accepting crypto or holding crypto starts become so closely associated with directly causing climate change, that no company is going to want to be openly associated with crypto, NFTs, etc due to the negative association?
You have one side hyping up Web3 as the next evolution as the web, but if the perception of crypto continues to be that it's a significant contributor to climate change -- regardless of how true that may be -- we could see a major decline in mainstream support.
(but, you'd have to be careful to check the claims and such, and, if you can't or don't have time to check the software yourself, you might have to trust a 3rd party evaluating the system, and possibly there wouldn't be any such organization that you would trust who has done such a check.)
From your lips to God’s ears.
I’ve often wished there were a way to organize against crypto, since the incentives are so high for true believers to organize for it and find more people to buy into the ecosystem.
From my perspective, it's a peaceful revolution against a corrupt global status quo.
The only people hurt by this false perception (bitcoin makes renewables more profitable by acting as a buyer when nobody else will) are people who don't buy bitcoin. And it's their loss.
What would you say to someone in el salvador who's happy accepting bitcoin because they no longer have to trek to ATM's and risk getting mugged?
It's not though. It's broadly a combination of ignorance of how the present system actually works, tinfoil hat economics and anarcocapitalist libertarian ideology.
It replaces one set of corruption (accountable to the people) with a whole new set of corruption. Money laundering, crime, wash trading, tape painting, spoof orders - an Inspector Gadget run shadow bank in the Bahamas printing ersatz dollars - the whole shebang. Out with the old criminals technically accountable, in with new criminals definitely unaccountable. This is strictly worse by all metrics. And that's before we even broach how terrible deflationary money actually is in practice.
> The only people hurt by this false perception (bitcoin incentives clean energy production and makes renewables more profitable) are people who don't buy bitcoin. And it's their loss.
If you build a bunch of green energy then waste it all, you haven't incentivized anything. You've just wasted a bunch of green energy - without that benefit accruing to the actual grid. Any time the price goes up so does the budget for waste. It's everyone's loss.
> What would you say to someone in el salvador who's happy accepting bitcoin because they no longer have to trek to ATM's and risk getting mugged?
I would say if they're happy with digital money they can open a Wise Multicurrency account.
But they're not happy accepting bitcoin. [1, 2] They're being forced by an authoritarian dictator to accept it, at gunpoint.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/technology/majority-salvadorans-do-n...
What kind of data would change your mind?
To quote Bitfinex right before they fired up the Tether printer:
BTC could tank to below 1k if we don't act quickly
[1] https://cryptonews.com/news/how-merlin-lost-patience-trying-...
Iirc the btc/eth market caps are more than the amount of "printed" USD throughout the pandemic.
Does tether printed act the same on inflation as USD printed?
Not evident what that has to do with the Tether printer?
And btw, do you have any links on the hedge fund connection, and Alameda and Cumberland?
Shortly after that exchange, they realized they could just take the money out of the Tether bank account, and use it to satisfy their withdrawal requests. I speculate this is the moment they realized that they did not have to actually back their USDT, and turned on the printer.
> Of course, prolonged bouts of that would've reduced trust in crypto and exchanges, reasonably so.
I think that is a completely reasonable alternative explanation.
> And btw, do you have any links on the hedge fund connection, and Alameda and Cumberland?
Check this out. Protos did the legwork to figure out where all the USDT issuances were going. Of $96B in outbound distributions to market makers, $36B went to Alameda and $24B went to Cumberland. That's almost 70% of all distributions ever made to large accounts.
[1] https://protos.com/tether-papers-crypto-stablecoin-usdt-inve...
Not only that, is another way for us to save money in cash since we have an extremely limited to other currencies (we have 50% annual inflation so saving in our national currency isn't an option)
Tell me, where are you from? Do you have free access to other currencies where you live? Because I don't, and where I live we have 50% inflation (even 100% for groceries). It's not taxes when we don't get anything in return and we can't even save in the currency we are paid.
I'd like to see how you live here for a year.
Again though, why not USDC?
But yes, is another way many freelancers are paid here, it's not just bitcoin and ETH, many use stablecoins.
I only find kinda selfish the comfortable position to be against ALL cryptocurrencies (which don't do such a damage to the climate like bitcoin.) while living in the first world, even those
Why?
>The value that supposedly backs your local currency simply does not exist
Tell me something I don't know...
>Is it not fairer that everyone gets 50%?
What? Why? Why should anyone working for abroad let the government decide how much money they get from their hours spent working?
All the more reason why cryptocurrencies might be useful to blue collar people.
You think you have used less energy than the average El Salvadorian who uses BTC? It's really entertaining to see the watt-police coming out when many of these same people have A/C or heat turned up in their house way beyond the maximum survivable bands of the temperature range.
but you can not fix a broken thing with another, even more broken thing (which is this greedy cryptomania)
it is broken government that is the problem and it causes far more ills than monetary inflation
what needs fixing is government. you cannot have a stable meaningful life, society, economy without a semi-decent government that is accountable, democratic and somewhat competent
if the financial system still needs fixing after you fix government it would probably be a marginal patch and not starting from zero
Please understand that people like me who live in third world countries have third world problems, worrying about the climate change is sometimes not in the top of our priorities when we don't even now if we'll have 50, 100 or 30% of anual inflation. And I find unfair how sometimes we are told and scolded by the first world when they didn't get there via green policies, really.
But please take at heart my previous comment. Climate change may sound like an elite concern but it is not. It is actually representative of our deepest global problems.
The reason that the so-called "third world" still has third world problems is that political and economic systems everywhere ignore environmental and social conditions, focus on resource extraction, enriching a few elites etc.
Some form of digital technology would surely help us solve those very difficult problems or at least make them less painful and unsustainable, but cryptocurrencies is nowhere close to do so. It is simplistic, economically more than naive, has the wrong builtin assumptions about society (complete lack of trust) etc.
In any case, good night and good luck
This actually better reflects the way man is, where society works when most people are relatively honest and a minority of criminals and sadistic politicians, bankers, police, tax authorities should be distrusted.
I'm all for people using crypto to use a little less A/C, heat, or drive less to balance it out if those in a warm (or cool) comfy house are a bit upset about it. Probably shouldn't be compelled though unless you're gonna create a Watt Police.
And everyone harmed by the rather sizable ecosystem of outright crime that takes advantage of cryptocurrency.
You don't really believe this, do you?
They aren't:
https://cointelegraph.com/news/some-salvadorans-claim-funds-...
“Making renewables profitable” is the same talking point as “utilising excess power” as I see it, or at least a minor variation of it.
Yes, and landmines make blood donation more profitable, but that doesn't make them a net moral good.
In other words - increases energy prices for everyone.
What better way to make something stick then make peoples livelihoods depend on it?
https://twitter.com/carsonturner/status/1477520574620606465
And I just saw this article on Barron's today which compared BTC to a tech stock rather than a store of value like gold.
https://www.barrons.com/articles/coinbase-marathon-digital-m...
How about we rally to completely ban crypto. Talking about this isn't going to solve anything.
Is that your position on this, or am I missing something?
Thinking specifically about the identity space for a moment, it certainly brings a new approach to solving a set of problems that still has yet to be solved well.
Should something be banned on the grounds that it’s not ready yet, or hasn’t evolved fast enough?
Plenty of tech on the cutting edge will appear this way before it has matured.
Back in 2022, we’re now looking at a technology that has not, for all its promises of a glorious future, has not produced anything but centralized Ponzi-as-a-Service platforms, a way for organized crime to move money, and smokestacks. At least asbestos and freon had some utility.
I'd argue there's a bit of false equivalence in this paragraph, but for sake of argument:
Leaded gasoline also solved an actual problem, and the industry innovated/evolved beyond that.
Facebook solved an actual problem, and created many more. I still recognize its value even if I refuse to use it myself.
I'm sure there are edge cases, but history is not generally on the side of those who have pre-emptively banned things before they come to fruition.
The problem I see with this current line of discussion is that most proponents of banning throw the baby out with the bathwater, and pretend this is all a single product called "crypto".
Banning "crypto" would be like banning insulation because of the issues with Asbestos.
And also because it’s not necessary; existing regulation will get us most of the way:
- if you are, in effect, selling a security, let this be regulated this like any other security
- if you are, in effect, running a bank, etc.
- if your coin X acts like an intermediary for transferring money to hostile jurisdiction Y, then regulate transfers to X like transfers to Y. Forbid these if necessary.
- if your manufacturing process is needlessly wasteful then forbid this manufacturing process (globally) under threat of forbidding your product
Etc
In 1999, you probably couldn’t use a Discover card in your local shop either, 13 years after Discover was founded. It took many years and many lawsuits to make headway against Visa/Mastercard.
Universal acceptance isn’t the right measuring stick here.
Even if a shop uses either of these cryptocurrencies, it is comically slow to be used as such anyway rendering them useless. Not to mention the volatility impact.
So please tell me retail shop I can make a purchase using cryptocurrency that is fast, truly decentralised, eco-friendly and doesn't have exorbitant fees.
We both know the obvious reasons that cryptocurrencies enable rampant ransomware [0], multiple rug pull scams [1], pointless NFTs [2] and is totally unregulated, I'm seeing crypto bros heralding 'we need decentralisation and web3' when this is all owned by VCs [3] And don't get me started on the Tether fraud [4].
I was being _generous_ in seeing if cryptocurrencies passes the 'retail shop test' and it can't even do that without burning the planet up making useless computations.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/us-treasury-warns-c...
[1] https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2021/12/17/defi-rug-pull-sc...
[2] https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3dyem/investors-spent-milli...
- Spam has been a problem since the inception of email, and the majority of email is spam. We don't ban email.
- Baseball cards are similarly pointless. So are in-game cosmetic items. We haven't banned those.
The problems you're describing are mostly unrelated to crypto, have existed, and will continue to exist whether crypto remains.
This doesn't mean there are no valid criticisms of crypto - energy concerns are real, and need to be addressed - but if you wish to ban crypto for the reasons you've cited, you need to widen the scope of what you hope to ban.
Once banned that is where they will reside, I hear that Monero is thriving in that (illicit) environment, as well as Bitcoin, Ethereum (paired with Tornado)
But for now banning is likely.
Come on. There are people in this very thread who are using it to evade draconian currency controls their governments have imposed. Are they lying?
Whether the positives outweigh the negatives in Crypto is subject to debate. But to refuse to acknowledge that ANY positives exist is outright bizarre.
There are lots of things I strongly dislike (eg: religion, guns) but to insist that there are absolutely zero positive aspects to these things in certain contexts would be intellectually dishonest.
While I don't directly pay with crypto, I still use it to pay for things at my local shop.
The UK has banned crypto derivatives: https://www.fca.org.uk/news/press-releases/fca-bans-sale-cry... and Binance. I suspect further action is coming against unregistered crypto outfits marketing to UK consumers.
If you're referring to proof-of-stake, that technology has already arrived, seeing as how multiple of the top 10 blockchains by market cap (Solana, Cardano, Terra) use it - and consequently do not have the negative impact on the environment that e.g. Bitcoin and Ethereum currently have.
Would you risk life in prison?
The state has tanks and drones that rain death and destruction from the sky. What could the crypto people possibly do to counter that?
It would be very different if some crypto fanatics started an insurgency over wanting to have their computer money. I definitely would side with the state over them and I have a feeling most folks would.
Do you think a domestic occupation would somehow go better?
> I definitely would side with the state over them and I have a feeling most folks would.
In order for a cryptocurrency ban to actually have any real effect on the actual crypto fanatics (i.e. the ones who would be willing to take up arms to defend cryptocurrency), the US would have to pull some very draconian online censorship measures that would absolutely peeve the average American. Short of that, it would be comparable to the US' existing "ban" (via the DMCA) of digital piracy: pretty much ineffective, without pirates needing to take up arms as outright insurgents to defend it.
Paying someone in instantly with less fees in a decentralised P2P manner with an energy efficient and stable blockchain.
I see no cryptocurrency that can do this above legitimately. Most of them are owned by questionable foundations, crypto scammers and power hungry VCs.
Just because you don't doesn't mean nobody does.
A digital Las Vegas casino, where everyone is 'hodling', trying to get rich by losing their money while not using it for payments at all.
Still doesn't change the fact that it's all a house of cards based on waste and still exhibits a ponzi scheme (Proof of Stake is still bad) with no value.
I can't think of any other usecases out there other than scams, ransomware, money laundering and illicit trade on darknet markets. Is that what you mean by other usecases?
What does crypto do better that the current system can't do? I cannot think of any in crypto that the current system already does better.
I can see that Monero is a complete success story where Bitcoin failed in its original vision. But then again it can't get out of being used outside of darknet markets, so it is generally unusable and banned by most companies, exchanges and fiat off-ramps.
It is possible for this to go to ALL cryptocurrencies.
That ain't a fact; again, proof-of-stake exists and is used for no less than 3 of the top 10 cryptocurrencies.
> and still exhibits a ponzi scheme [...] with no value
Just because you refuse to see the value in something doesn't mean it's "a ponzi scheme with no value".
> Proof of Stake is still bad
Care to quantify how?
> I can't think of any other usecases out there other than scams, ransomware, money laundering and illicit trade on darknet markets.
Really? You're incapable of thinking how it might be used for licit trade? Or for decentralized finance applications? Or for arbitrary computing, in the case of e.g. Ethereum and Cardano? The technology has already been used for these things.
> What does crypto do better that the current system can't do?
Sending and receiving money electronically with minimum fees, maximum speed, and no limitations on how much or how little of your money you can send or receive. No, I ain't talking about Bitcoin; I'm talking about the countless other cryptocurrencies that have made transaction costs and speeds an actual priority - you know, almost as if blockchains are a new technology and not done evolving.
Hell, even if we do talk about Bitcoin in that context, its "slow" transaction settlement time is still considerably faster than those of credit card networks; I'm sure you've noticed that when a credit card transaction is "accepted" it still takes a day or more to actually move out of "pending" status and fully reflect on your card statement, whereas with Bitcoin the same level of assurance (if not more) happens within 10 minutes on average.
> It is possible for this to go to ALL cryptocurrencies.
It doesn't need to; not every single cryptocurrency needs to succeed at its goals for the concept of cryptocurrency to be useful or beneficial to society.
Your argument is still at cost to the planet and other people's money in this MLM scheme that we cannot deny exists.
Proof of Stake is pointless and defeats the point of decentralisation as many of these coins claim to be with venture capitalists and whales holding most of the coins.
Also most of these blockchains are pretty much beta, just don't work and scale at all. You might as well use the current system instead.
We both can see that DeFi applications are mostly scams [0] leading to people losing their money or having an expensive and pointless refund process when it all goes wrong. [1]
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2021/11/24/22800995/constitutiondao...
These are by and large wrappers around the existing systems; they "fix" it the same way things like Lightning fix Bitcoin's transaction speed (for example): by offloading off the main network.
> 13 years and still no progress.
Credit cards have had a 20-or-so year head start, and they only recently (i.e. around the same time as the advent of cryptocurrency) started to significantly evolve beyond magnetic stripes. Wire transfers are even worse off in terms of evolutionary speed. 13 years is still young.
> Your argument is still at cost to the planet
Not with proof of stake.
> and other people's money in this MLM scheme
By this logic literally every asset bought and sold in a market is an "MLM scheme".
> Proof of Stake is pointless
It only seems that way if you're deliberately ignorant of its vast advantages over both proof of work and centralized systems - particularly, the sheer lack of a "cost to the planet" and the ability to scale without ever needing to incur such an externalized cost.
> and defeats the point of decentralisation as many of these coins claim to be with venture capitalists and whales holding most of the coins
There are proof-of-stake blockchains like Cardano that actively penalize centralization and encourage decentralization (specifically by adjusting stake rewards such that any stake pool above some equilibrium becomes unprofitable).
> Also most of these blockchains are pretty much beta
But not all; again, 3 of the top 10 are already proof-of-stake, with billions of dollars' worth of currency being transacted every day. Some are still being actively developed; that doesn't make them "beta", just like how Linux is both production-ready and still actively developed.
> just don't work and scale at all
The users of them - and the billions of dollars transacted through them - beg to differ. And we're still in the early stages; there is still plenty of room for scalability to improve: https://iohk.io/en/blog/posts/2021/09/17/hydra-cardano-s-sol...
2. Stop accepting crypto because you're green, get another PR bump
Also, I haven't seen Mozilla associated with positive PR for a long time. Much as I love Firefox, it's dead on mobile.
What's wrong with Firefox for Android?
(Firefox for iOS is just reskinned WebKit, like all other iOS browsers, but hopefully Apple has to open this up soon)
about:config is currently disabled, so for instance setting proxies no longer work. Ah, I see one of the … 18 supported extensions is a proxy setter.
Basically they shipped premature beta software and abandoned the stable working version.
Nightly supports about:config but stable does not.
Only a specific short list of extensions are supported.
Still beats Chrome hands down. But it used to be better.
It's my primary browser on mobile and always has been. What am I missing?
Chrome on mobile without uBlock is as bad as you would expect.
Kiwi and Brave are both Chromium based, and on mobile both are faster/less jittery than Firefox. Especially on web apps that have some level of interactivity with CSS transitions and transforms.
Kiwi has excellent support for Chrome extensions including UBO, and Brave comes with adblocking built in. Samsung Browser has adblocking as well.
And those choices are literally rebranded Chrome - which means they're likely going to be victims of Chrome Extension Manifest V3 nerfing content blockers in various ways (especially once Chrome fully sunsets MV2), no?
Bitpay publishes their merchant mix and it's literally all money laundering and crime havens. 45% (!!) Gift Cards. 15% "Internet." 12.25% "VPN." 9% "Computer games." [1]
That's 81.25% the darkest shadiest industries out there.
Which is my silver coin purchase being used for, money laundering of my legally reported electronics design or is it my criminal enterprise of liking silver?
At least to me, they look more intriguing than all the older crypto currencies. I always wondered why you would bother with all these inefficiencies for some lofty idea of 'decentralisation' when we have run of the mill consensus algorithms and distributed systems that just work.
I'll explain: today our government forbids us from buying foreign currency such as the US dollar (200 tops for a really REALLY small portion of the population) so a black market has been at place since the prohibition started many years ago. In this market each dollar corresponds to 200 pesos while the government states each one costs around 100 pesos.
So, if you work for a company outside, and the pay you 1000 usd, you get 100,000 pesos when you could get 200,000 in reality. Not only that, you also are forbid from buying dollars, so if you want to get them to avoid our rampant inflation (50% average, around 100% for groceries) you only have the black market which is around 200 pesos.
I know about the damages to the cliamte of crypto mining but consider also that there are some beneficial uses of these currencies for people like me who don't live in the first world.
But I digress. Mozilla is a US org, but it has worldwide outreach, and the product is certainly used worldwide, so it shouldn't be American-centric in its decision-making in any case.
FWIW I don't think the decision adds up to anything either way, to be honest. It's not going to meaningfully affect global warming, and it's not going to meaningfully affect the usefulness (or not) of cryptocoins. It's just a PR stunt - a silly one, but certainly not something worth getting riled up over regardless of one's stance.
Just to clear something up: I'm not actually all that bullish on existing cryptocoins myself - Bitcoin clearly has many problems, and it's not just energy wastefulness. What I'm interested in is radical political and economic decentralization in general, from an extreme left libertarian perspective. Decentralized money ought to be a part of that, somehow, and blockchain seems like a workable approach in principle, but it isn't there yet. I hope it will be someday.
But in the meantime, something that lets people in, say, Venezuela send or receive money from US - or, for that matter, lets people in US send or receive money from Iran - is a worthwhile tool to have.
I'm inclined to agree.
> But I digress. Mozilla is a US org, but it has worldwide outreach, and the product is certainly used worldwide, so it shouldn't be American-centric in its decision-making in any case.
I agree. But the discussion is about Mozilla embracing cryptocurrencies. The fact that there are parts of the world where cryptocurrencies might be an evil that helps someone locally doesn't mean that Mozilla has to embrace that evil. Mozilla is not operating under the adverse conditions that may rightfully incline someone towards cryptocurrencies.
> FWIW I don't think the decision adds up to anything either way, to be honest. It's not going to meaningfully affect global warming, and it's not going to meaningfully affect the usefulness (or not) of cryptocoins. It's just a PR stunt - a silly one, but certainly not something worth getting riled up over regardless of one's stance.
I think it's entirely reasonable to be upset that an important organization does PR stunts.
> Decentralized money ought to be a part of that, somehow, and blockchain seems like a workable approach in principle, but it isn't there yet. I hope it will be someday.
Decentralized flow of money is one thing. A decentralized supply is another. To me, the latter is giving up on society. Because some governments are evil, we throw out the whole concept of a benign government serving the people – i.e. a well-organized society.
> But in the meantime, something that lets people in, say, Venezuela send or receive money from US - or, for that matter, lets people in US send or receive money from Iran - is a worthwhile tool to have.
Perhaps. But it doesn't excuse Mozilla jumping on it. If someone from Venezuela relies on Bitcoin and wants to donate the Mozilla, and Mozilla only accepts donations in fiat currencies, what's the problem? That person will just buy fiat currencies with their Bitcoin, and donate them to Mozilla. There's no reason Mozilla has to start embracing Bitcoin!
The problem with centralized supply of money is that it creates a single point where too much power is concentrated. Even when governance is democratic, concentration of power invites its abuse - and the larger the scope of such a government, the more lucrative the abuse. Within a small, tightly knit community that has direct democratic governance, directly controlling its internal monetary supply is fine, because power can be kept in check at that scale. But you still need some common medium of exchange for those communities to interact economically.
The problem with Bitcoin isn't that supply is decentralized, but rather that it's hardcoded as fixed in the long-term - because the people who created it were gold bugs. But that's not a fundamental problem with cryptocurrencies - you could have one where the supply grows steadily, or better yet, one where such growth is controlled collectively by actual users of the currency.
China already did, what's to stop yours?
And it's mainly freelancers, IT workers, designers, etc. But the number of people who work this way is increasing every year since we are running out of options as well (no jobs besides delivery apps, working for the state doing basically nothing, etc.).
Kinda related: IT companies from our country are already complaining that there is an "unfair" competition because we get paid, for example 2000 USD, which is a very low sum for IT workers abroad but is a huge number for us while these companies can't even compete with that number for the same employee.
So I believe sooner or later the government will take advantage of their complains to try, somehow, to control the money inflow from people who work for companies abroad.
Do you know how much a talented computer programmer gets paid in Argentina (or is that what you mean by IT)?
I'm thinking that Argentina seems like a good place to go to start a startup. What do you think? What problems would I run into aside from language?
Most probably, the average salary here is about 5000-6000USD/year if you're lucky and have a legally registered job(about 5-10% of the population). Most people have informal jobs and make less than that.
> Do you know how much a talented computer programmer gets paid in Argentina (or is that what you mean by IT)?
I have a friend working for MercadoLibre at a senior engineer position and last time we talked he was making almost 1000USD/month. I work remotely for a foreign company and make 4000USD/month having half of his experience.
> I'm thinking that Argentina seems like a good place to go to start a startup. What do you think? What problems would I run into aside from language?
As much as I'd love for this country to move forward, companies are leaving more than coming to the country, it's a TERRIBLE place for startups due to:
1. Aggressive taxing that gets worse and worse every year that passes
2. Terribly slow times for legal processes, like getting your paperwork done to start your company
3. We have a track record of the state wanting to confiscate bank funds
4. Depending on the trade you choose, you might face heavy opposition from the current monopolies, like it already happened with taxi unions against Uber, or MercadoLibre putting pressure to prevent Ebay from coming to the country.
Maybe if you come from a wealthy country it may not seem like too much of an issue as it might look cheap, but I personally tried to have small business multiple times and time and time again some new government measure or tax or government change made it unsustainable.
A government that wants tight control over currency exchange will treat crypto the same way it treats other foreign currency: limit exchange, or ban it, etc.
A ban doesn't mean that something stops, a ban means that it becomes extremely difficult, a punishable crime, and the risk-to-reward ratio becomes significantly diminished.
Likewise, the inverse is also true. CB radio was illegal in the UK, but it was hugely popular, then, overnight, upon it being made legal, it died. Most people lost interest because it was no longer exciting. You see the same thing with legalizing cannabis. Sure, you'll get hardcore consumers and enthusiasts, and people using it for medical reasons, but it's no longer cool/edgy/interesting, and when it is so accessible.
Could really go either way, but when it comes to money, people don't tend to fuck around.
Argentina isn't the US or UK. There was a video an Argentinian pointed out to me of a vendor selling black-market goods right in front of the tax office. No one gives a fuck. Violating Argentina's insane tax code is sport for their populace. Once you become big enough corruption and ol boy network with the tax authorities will negotiate what percent of your income you lie about, usually you keep like 70% off the books by the account of one accountant from a large construction company I interacted with.
"A ban doesn't mean that something stops, a ban means that it becomes extremely difficult, a punishable crime, and the risk-to-reward ratio becomes significantly diminished."
I think I was crystal clear.
It definitely is not extremely difficult. Even tangible stuff like pot that doesn't have nearly the value density (you can fit billions of USD crypto on a wallet stored on memory smaller than 1/8th bag of pot) was extraordinarily easy to obtain for me as a kid in a place where it was illegal both by state and federal government's law. And there's no drug dog to sniff it out.
A chinese citizen could laughably easily obtain crypto.
I know ex-military folks that can survive in the wilderness just fine, but your average person wouldn't, and this is about the 99%, not the 1%.
What next? The phones available in the country have a specific ROM that doesn't offer VPNs? Already happening. Not even accounting for leaks in VPNs, and whether someone can trust a VPN provider. We already know that the major providers sell netflow data.
Learning to read takes way more time and energy than learning to use crypto behind a VPN, but we do it in part because it makes us successful. Basically every child learns this complex task. It actually turns out that just spending time to practice a procedural task is a perfect substitute for intelligence, for many many tasks. I think obfuscating traffic is one of those where maybe some people will take a lot longer than others but almost everyone could learn. If VPN or tor becomes a critical component to someones livelihood they will learn to do it or someone will profit from dumbing it down enough that they're able to.
China outlawed crypto mining early last year, resulting in a two-thirds drop in the hashrate within a month. Even then, the order of magnitude was wrong for it to be "the best way of exporting coal," which by the way China is a large net importer of; https://ccaf.io/cbeci/index estimates the whole Bitcoin network at 14 GW, but China's electrical production averages 850 GW, and overall energy consumption is some 4500 GW, 2500 of which is still coal.
So, at best, China could only have been exporting about 1% of its coal consumption in the form of Bitcoin (though in fact much of its Bitcoin mining was renewables-powered), and now it has mostly stopped doing even that.
The hashrate fell 53%, hitting bottom in July, didn't finish recovering until December, and still isn't consistently above its pre-prohibition peak, so "much of the drop in the hashrate" wasn't picked up by anybody.
prohibit any business to accept crypto as payment, ban crypto exchanges from operating in your country, ban banks of your country to accept transaction that they suspect coming from cryptocurrency exchanges
You can still have your crypto wallet, but what use is it if you can't exchange it in your local currency? You can always meet someone in an ally or travel outside the country and bring cash back in but these are solutions that don't scale.
Also just because crypto can't be spent by most local vendors doesn't mean it's not valuable. Stocks can't be spent either but if you had a traditional bearer certificate like in the old days (paper stock with no owner except by merely holding the paper) it was just fine for trade and people did just that in the Weimar Republic when they had hyperinflation.
Worst case you can just spend the crypto in foreign location, import the goods and sell them locally.
As for your trade example I would like to see the details of that. There are not a lot of vendors that accept crypto and those who do, use 3rd parties which then usually require some amount of KYC (even if it's is minimal). Combine that with how many vendors are actually able/willing to ship to the country in question and you are left with a very small set of online stores. Add shipping costs and custom fees that will eat in your margin. So yes in theory you can setup an import/export company empire in order to exchange your crypto into local currency but that is pretty much the definition of "not scaling".
My point is: if a country wants to make cryptocurrency useless they can totally do it.
I can't imagine it would be a warm feeling for someone with tax liabilities in Argentina to have a white-market bank account in a friendly country nearby.
Is there a reason why no one banks in Paraguay? There is a dude standing by the bank with a shotgun waiting to blow the head off of any robber, I felt very safe there and their service was quite professional and honest. More so than the street exchangers. I wouldn't have hesitated to open an account there if I needed to.
There may be other reasons. Here in Argentina 21 years ago the government confiscated all dollar-denominated bank deposits and replaced them 1-to-1 with pesos, which you weren't allowed to withdraw more than a few at a time, so you had to watch helplessly as your money lost 75% of its value overnight. If I had to guess which South American countries something like that would happen in next, I'd pick Venezuela, Bolivia, Paraguay, and Argentina again, in that order. But that's not because I have deep knowledge of Paraguayan politics, so I could be wrong.
Cryptocurrency, fiat currencies, and arguably even metal coins derive their value from the existence of a market which will take them. Bring a bitcoin (as in a wallet private key, not the concept) to 1990 and nobody will pay you for it. Therefore, a government doesn't need to ban you owning cryptocurrency - it just needs to crack down on the businesses you would spend it at accepting your cryptocurrency. And it doesn't really even need to ban that, it just needs to crack down on their suppliers, and so forth.
Your local pizza place that takes Bitcoin only accepts it because that money is in turn spendable by them to buy flour and oil and cheese - either directly, or by giving it to someone who will give them local currency with which they can buy flour and oil and cheese. If the government presses hard enough on those links, your local pizza place will stop taking Bitcoin, and then they won't have to ban you from owning Bitcoin at all, you won't be able to do anything with it.
Their ban has the effect of preventing centralized exchanges from providing services in China. But there's no practical way for them to crack down on decentralized exchanges and/or people trading them in-person.
In the above hypothetical case, if his government were to ban use of crypto, he'd still be better off in the sense that the government isn't going to be able to just find the coins hidden in a mattress the way they might with physical money. It'd be illegal either way, but one way would be much harder to trace.
This is of course ignoring the volatility involved in holding crypto, which somewhat weakens the stated benefit given that the goal seems to be to avoid volatility of the local currency.
I believe history will show cryptocurrency to be even more resilient than cash as an international, sometimes private, means of transferring value between individuals.
People will do what it takes to survive. Regulations can slow but never stop “illegal” workers.
Incidentally, your defense of BTC is pretty much "it makes it possible to skirt laws and taxes" which seems to be the elephant in the crypto living room.
Skirting the law is required in Argentina. I can see the appeal for Argentinians.
But it's a silly idea. It's not going to happen, and the point of my comment was to explain why.
The debt that was imposed on you is inhumane and you shouldn’t have to pay it. The resulting attempts to solve it by selling public infrastructure only makes it worse.
Throwing crypto into the mix is pure insanity. It’s just gambling at a crippling ecological cost.
Cryto is fixing economic structural problems for the parent poster.
Cotton: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/feb/18/the-d...
Plastic: do you really need a link for this one?
Obviously I stand by the rest of my statement (even if X is better than Y, that doesn't mean that we should oppose proposals to improve X)
What I'm saying is: why replacing a bad solution with a slightly less bad solution when you could instead adopt a good solution[1]? Reminds me of those power plants being converted from coal to natural gas "because gas is clean".
[1] e.g. an electronic currency not based on proof of work or, you know, just print on paper, a renewable resource that is not as resource intensive as cotton and certainly better than petroleum based plastics. Hell, I'll even bring compostable bioplastics in the mix of possible solutions. These are all better than cotton and plastic.
Edit: made the comment slightly less snarky in tone. Forgive me it's been a long morning.
I posted to point out that money isn't made out of paper. That's not really the same as condoning the impact of the cotton and oil industries.
100% rag content paper is still paper.
Where do you draw the line between paper and fabric? Is there a meaningful line to draw? Is cotton rag paper? Is spun rayon paper? Rice paper? How about yarn made out of spun recycled paper ( https://spinoffmagazine.com/how-to-paper-chase-spinning-pape... ) or paper made out of non-wood based sources ( https://www.intechopen.com/chapters/69880 )? How about paper made out of calcium carbonate ( https://www.stone-paper.com/en/why-stone-paper/ )?
In the end it is Argentinians who vote or not vote, protest or not protest. I was born in Italy after decades of extreme debt that we pay to this date to our creditors. It is the responsibility of the previous generations in the end and it falls on us.
Or rather the country should tell the creditors to get bent, and the private 'owners' of all the public infrastructure and resources that were stolen along with anyone surviving from the ford/carter administration (and anyone who inhereted it) should have all their assets seized and split up between the various countries they looted.
Your grandparents didn't vote for mussolini or almiranti and argentineans didn't vote for pinochet. The debt you 'owe' is likely being collected by the same groups of people as well as some in the UK and the rest of Europe.
If someone colludes with your corrupt government to steal something from you then rent it back to you, don't say 'oh well it's my fault, better pay up'. Take it back and lock them in a cell.
If I beat your parents to death, take your house, then claim you owe me for cleanup and have to be my indentured servant to pay the interest my government should give it back to you along with anything I own to pay for therapy and lock me in a cell. Countries should be no different, and we shouldn't let the murderers off scott free because they signed a piece of paper saying they were collectively 'Shell' or 'The US Government'
Let me guess... have you mostly experienced life in developed countries with relatively stable financial system, non-fluctuating consumer goods prices? There are a ton of people living under extremely corrupt and dysfunctional financial systems, whose #1 concern in life is to make sure their purchasing power does not disappear the next day. For them, land, gold, and bitcoin solve a problem. Americans with simplistic "I <3 Bernanke" opinions sure assume that will "worsen" stuff; true or not, it is irrelevant to the individual in such countries who will keep on trying hard to accumulate every non-cash asset they can get their hands on.
https://www.reuters.com/markets/europe/bitcoin-network-power...
When you live in a, for lack of a better word, "shithole country", you don't plan too long into the future; you play it by ear and find a way to live the next day. One thing to note, though, is that once a technology entrenches the black/gray markets in a society, the rulers and their sons and daughters are almost certainly participants too, and that reduces the incentive/ability to shut things down completely.
https://www.wired.com/story/visa-outage-shows-the-fragility-...
But no one cares about useful traditional financial products, as you can't create a ponzi scheme fueled by money laundering with useful traditional products.
>But no one cares about useful traditional financial products, as you can't create a ponzi scheme fueled by money laundering with useful traditional products.
You can't create a ponzi scheme or perform money laundering with traditional financial products? Really? That's your claim?
I'm not here to defend crypto, but let's keep the discussion factual.
> I'm not here to defend crypto, but let's keep the discussion factual.
You can’t speculate on the currency itself, driving its value up and down as part of your own ponzi scheme.
Or rather, for major currencies you can’t. Maybe you can manipulate tiny currencies of tiny nations that way, but those usually end up using the EUR or USD anyway.
Those aren't the people using crypto, though. And to the extent that people are using crypto as alternative to their local currency, they're almost all using it for some form of laundering (e.g. wealth extraction from the PRC).
Objectively, crypto has been far more volatile than fiat currencies as a whole, not less. BTC is literally down 16% over the last three weeks! If you want stability just buy a bunch of diverse money market or national bond securities; that strategy survived the great depression and WW2, it can surely handle a pandemic recovery.
How do you know?
>>And to the extent that people are using crypto as alternative to their local currency, they're almost all using it for some form of laundering (e.g. wealth extraction from the PRC).
Laundering in a country like the PRC with extreme capital controls is not necessarily a moral evil. It could very well just be an attempt to guard wealth from a repressive government that is known to confiscate the wealth of those who fall out of favor with the political elite.
By arguing against crypto, you are arguing for the PRC having more control over the people of China. But I guess that's par for the course for the anti-crypto crowd.
>>Objectively, crypto has been far more volatile than fiat currencies as a whole, not less.
Stablecoins are not volatile, and their usage is skyrocketing:
https://techstory.in/inflation-jumps-to-36-in-turkey-liras-v...
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/we-should-improve-society-som...
Inheritance acts against this principle.
What I think you mean is a fair world socializes the success by removing the ability for consensual trade/gifting of resources from a person of one generation to another. But that is also unfair because it uses coercion on individual success.
If you remove the ability to pass on success, I would just quit my job and abandon my children. Why try if they gain nothing.
Scientific knowledge usually goes into the public domain through patents and other information-sharing techniques. We didn't lose Newton's, Einstein's, and all our other scientific forebears' knowledge because they died. Come on.
> But [socializing successes] is also unfair because it uses coercion on individual success.
Coercion isn't always necessarily unfair. It depends on context and on what your society's values are. If one of your children takes all the candy away from their siblings, and you redistribute the candy to your other children, that's a type of coercion to enforce fairness.
If you believe that a fair and just world is one where, by the sheer luck of being born to wealthy parents, you get advantages that others don't; and that you get to build on that wealth by keeping everything you accumulate based on that and get to pass it to your children, where the cycle repeats endlessly -- well, then, you have differing values than the rest of us. But that doesn't mean that alternatives are "unfair."
> If you remove the ability to pass on success, I would just quit my job and abandon my children. Why try if they gain nothing.
Or, you could not be a dick and instead spend it while you're living on your children's education, or give your excess earnings to charity.
But if I use it it is unfair. You said to be fair, I quote, "the success of any individual would only depend on their own actions and work." That means I can't use Newton's work because that is not my own action or work. If I use it my sucess depends on his action and work too.
> If one of your children takes all the candy away from their siblings, and you redistribute the candy to your other children, that's a type of coercion to enforce fairness.
I don't follow how that is fair. One child just robbed another child, that seems the essence of unfairness. This is even more apparent when I say "one farmer worked hard and bred 9 cows while the lazy farmer barely fed his one. I took 4 cows from the hard working farmer and gave them to the lazy one so both had 5."
> instead spend it while you're living on your children's education
But that would be unfair as the child would benefit unfairly from my success rather than solely his/her own.
No it isn't; everyone gets to use it by nature of it being public knowledge.
> You said to be fair, I quote, "the success of any individual would only depend on their own actions and work."
I said no such thing.
> I don't follow how [redistributing candy among siblings] is fair. One child just robbed another child, that seems the essence of unfairness.
Usually, when a child gets all of everything compared to their siblings, it's because the first child got it unfairly in the first place. Redistribution in this case is correcting for the original unfairness. Note the fact pattern I stated: one child "took the candy away."
> This is even more apparent when I say "one farmer worked hard and bred 9 cows while the lazy farmer barely fed his one. I took 4 cows from the hard working farmer and gave them to the lazy one so both had 5."
So what you're telling us is that you don't actually have children and this whole thread is just some libertarian claptrap. Okay then.
Your rebuttal is outrage at the number of children I have?
>No it isn't; everyone gets to use it by nature of it being public knowledge.
The definition of fair presented on the thread we are on specifically said, "In a fair world, the success of any individual would only depend on their own actions and work." If you want to change that definition then why are you arguing with me? My whole point was the absurdity. Newton's work was performed by Newton, not you or I or any other living person.
>Usually, when a child gets all of everything compared to their siblings, it's because the first child got it unfairly in the first place
That's far from a given. I was an only child but had best friends with a lot of people with siblings who commonly had scenarios with winner-take-all for certain goods because of chores they did, gambling, won a game, whatever. But it's true, unfairness does exist in the world. I never said unfairness doesn't exist at all.
>one child "took the candy away."
Yes it is unfair to take away things that one obtained consensually, like to take away someone's inheritance.
>I said no such thing.
Sorry I was quoting the original quote we both responded to above, I didn't realize you were actually disagreeing with it. If that was not your belief then you aren't really even rebutting against me because my rebuttal was against this statement I replied to and then you replied to me.
[reproduced here ]
In a fair world, the success of any individual would only depend on their own actions and work. Inheritance acts against this principle.
BUT THE PERSON I REPLIED TO SAID, "In a fair world, the success of any individual would only depend on their own actions and work". What do you not get about that? You're AGREEING WITH ME that by the OP definition using scientific knowledge is "unfair."
If it's never obtained by the heir in the first place because it's taxed before the property comes into the heir's possession, is that still unfair?
Does that same logic also apply to income taxes that must be paid post-earnings? How about sales taxes? And if taxes are unfair, how do we ensure all the public things we want as a society get funded, if we assume everyone is equally selfish, while avoiding the free-rider problem?
The more you pull on this thread, the more you begin to realize that we can't live in a functioning society without us all sacrificing.
Yes, that's back to one kid stealing from the other kid. Only the kid stealing is the government.
>Does that same logic also apply to income taxes that must be paid post-earnings? How about sales taxes?
Yes
>And if taxes are unfair, how do we ensure all the public things we want as a society get funded, if we assume everyone is equally as selfish as you?
If you want something, you trade for it, obtain it through consensual pact (like insurance or farm co-op), beg, do it yourself, or seek charity. Something that involves not stealing. You don't steal from others.
>The more you pull on this thread, the more you begin to realize that we can't live in a functioning society without us all sacrificing.
Exactly, you sacrifice by performing labor and engaging in trade and you get what you want. It's unfair to say I want a pony or a free CT scan and I'm going to rob that rich guy to get it. Do you go robbing guys in suits to feed starving African children?
I think most of us would prefer not to have to go back to pre-Roman times. We get a lot more done when we as a society (if not necessarily individually) agree to what outcomes we want and what the rules are, and are forced by law to contribute to make it happen.
> You sacrifice by performing labor and engaging in trade and you get what you want. It's unfair to say I want a pony or a free CT scan and I'm going to rob that rich guy to get it. Do you go robbing guys in suits to feed starving African children?
Gee, you caught me!
Seriously, there's a huge difference between an individual robbing someone of something that's rightfully theirs by law, and the law (to which we, through representatives acting on our behalf, have agreed) saying everyone has to contribute their fair share to a common cause we think is just.
I've never voted for a representative who was in agreement with taxation, and I've never agreed to be taxed. If you want to elect to do that voluntarily I have no problem with you doing that. I never even agreed that US government is legitimate. So nah, I don't agree.
>We get a lot more done when we as a society (if not necessarily individually) agree to what outcomes we want and what the rules are, and are forced by law to contribute to make it happen.
I don't take this to be fact. Government monopolies tend to be inefficient and free-rider problem can be rampant.
> has to contribute their fair share to a common cause we think is just.
If something is just and you want to pay for it there's nothing stopping you. Not a big fan of men with guns saying I have to pay to bomb brown in the middle east or fund nun-raping insurgents in Central America. I have looked into waiving my social security rights for instance, but that requires you to file a form 4029 and be part of a religious organization that has been around since about 1960. As an atheist I'm unable to file these forms to waive my rights. I would happily do so if the law is updated.
>Seriously, there's a huge difference between an individual robbing someone of something that's rightfully theirs by law
So which is better, taxing someone to bomb brown people in the middle east, or robbing a guy in a suit and feeding starving children in Africa? To me they're both bad but the robber sounds slighlty better if not because less people are killed with the ill-gotten gains. So yeah there is a difference, I think the child-feeding robber is better than the tax-man.
Please, use this line if you ever end up defending yourself in court! I will bring the popcorn.
Sorry, but you don't get to opt out of democracy because you don't like the tenet that binds everyone to the laws made by our representatives. If you want to change the system, vote for someone who is aligned with your selfish views; but don't expect most civilized, equity-minded people to agree with you. Or if you really don't like it, there are probably other countries that would welcome you.
(To be clear, I also don't agree with many of our Government's policies and actions. There's probably not a single person in our country who agrees with everything our Government does, but disagreement combined with tolerance of imperfection is the price we pay for a system that's proved to be better than all the alternatives we've tried so far. But there's a big difference between trying to influence what we do within our Constitution, and complaining that modern society interferes with my rights to live at maximum individual efficiency -- everyone else be damned -- and that we should all just look out for ourselves.)
At least now we understand you take joy in suffering of others.
>don't expect most civilized, equity-minded people to agree with you
You say that what they vote for represents them. If what represents them is bombing little Afghani kids or staging coup in central and south America (and by your statements, it does), I have no desire to be in agreement with such savages.
>Sorry, but you don't get to opt out of democracy because you don't like the tenet that binds everyone to the laws made by our representatives.
So your response is basically, fuck you do what I say and follow my political system, leave, or get gunned down by government agents if you resist inevitably being ordered to court. You sound like the selfish, others be damned one not I. Wow, how "fair" that sounds on a thread that was originally concerning fairness.
>and that we should all just look out for ourselves
This is a presumptuous and arrogant statement that ignores the charitable and personal contributions I've (and others) made to others without taxation. You think I haven't looked out for others with contributions performed outside of government? Not everyone is so selfish as you may be that they wouldn't help others if not forced at gunpoint.
>there are probably other countries that would welcome you.
Except I would still have to file US taxes and report bank accounts unless I renounce US citizenship, but that cost thousands and has to be done abroad. Even if you leave the US, you can't escape the coercion of US government nor US taxes (either at least filing, or paying the ~$2000 "exit tax" of renouncing). FATCA mean merely having US place of birth many worldwide banks are afraid to take me, US citizen or not.
Well, if you don't do these things, you are a criminal. That's pretty much the textbook definition.
> Wow, how "fair" that sounds on a thread that was originally concerning fairness.
You have a strange conception of fairness. Fairness doesn't mean you get to do what you want regardless of what the law says. Fairness is about having rules apply uniformly to everyone. Some, including me, also believe it means having a level playing field for competition (again, subject to boundaries to protect fairness), where new entrants aren't privileged because of who their parents were and all that entails. (This latter goal is nowhere near achieved yet, and I fully admit I'm a beneficiary of this privilege, as are all American citizens to some extent.)
> This is a presumptuous and arrogant statement that ignores the charitable and personal contributions I've (and others) made to others without taxation.
Good for you. I bet you have a Black friend, too.
> Except I would still have to file US taxes and report bank accounts unless I renounce US citizenship, but that cost thousands and has to be done abroad.
Time to get started! It sounds like it should be worth it to you.
Nah you leave.
>Well, if you don't do these things, you are a criminal. That's pretty much the textbook definition.
I don't have any problem with criminals who operate non-coercively, like people who drop acid or don't pay taxes. I don't equate law with morality (or fairness). To me often to be a criminal is to be the good guy.
> Fairness is about having the rules apply uniformly to everyone.
Nah fairness to me means no coercion. If 51% whites vote blacks have to be their slaves, that's democratic but definitely unfairly and coercive. Same if 2 of 3 siblings vote their house is a country and the law is they get the marble of the third. Democracy here is some people voting for a representative who represents some bombs into others. How many old people do you have to put out on benefits to justify one dead Iraqi, in your opinion?
>Good for you. I bet you have a Black friend, too.
Basically your flippant dismissal of private charity and your smugness of funding social programs at gunpoint. Not surprised though. Why don't you head up to the Red Cross office and tell them "good for you, I bet you have a Black [sic on 'B'] friend."
Did I even tell you what race I am, or are you just racist enough to think me having a black friend means something different? Or is it just you think no one who is black could possibly have an ideology that involves finding taxes illegitimate? Do you see the black mind as different or something? I want to get a real understanding of how deep your racism seeps.
I think we've reached the end of this conversation with a clear understanding of the type of person you are. This is a garden-variety description of egotistical selfishness -- a person who is totally unwilling to follow rules that seem subjectively unfair to him, regardless of objective fairness, and despite the fact that the vast majority of others are willing to follow these rules, even if they disagree with the details.
We create law to reflect what our shared morality and conceptions of fairness are, even though we admittedly don't have perfect laws yet. If you don't understand that, you don't understand the essence of democracy; you are fundamentally an anarchist. Worse, you are a hypocrite: You gladly take full advantage of the protections the law affords you, while expressing disdain for the protections and fairness-guiding that the law affords others.
I'm done with this thread.
Yes, I selfishly didn't want to put a gun to the head of the individual who doesn't want to pay a tax to build a gigantic wall to keep out a former president's perceived boogey-man, the Mexicans. I'm selfish that way.
You'd have fit in great on the slave patrols, calling those running the underground railroad egoistical law-breakers who violate "our shared morality and conception of fairness". Yes Yes we both have a clear picture of each other, don't we?
I understand democracy very well. Two of three children vote to take the third child's marble, that's democracy. The majority whites vote to have minority blacks as their slave, that's democracy. Most Americans support legalizing pot? Nah fuck it we'll keep it illegal anyway; that's American democracy.
>you are fundamentally an anarchist
Wow, you sure found me out. What was it that finally betrayed me, my intense dislike of supporting the tasks that allegedly represent the majority like waterboarding foreign nationals, or my intense disdain for coercion? What if I were gay? Then I'd be double bad.
I am an anarchist. Am I supposed to feel bad about that? I don't, it feels great to not have to justify in my head why I support a system that kills thousands of innocent people worldwide in the last couple decades, many of them innocent children whos last moments were concrete ripping apart and tumbling on top of their heads, smothering their family as the bombs collapse the structure in which they live.
>Worse, you are a hypocrite: You gladly take full advantage of the protections the law affords you, while expressing disdain for the protections and fairness-guiding that the law affords others.
Ah yes, the fairness-guiding of the assets of the marine veteran who had over $80,000 seized by a police officer for no fucking reason by the side of the road [0]. Or the protection for a taxidermist to be threatened by agents for refusing a warrantless search of a wildlife officer. Or how about the amazing protection of Daniel Shaver at the La Quinta where he played an impossible game of Simon Says and won an execution by an officer who was paid pension for life because killing an innocent person hurt his feelings so bad. Your fascination with black friends will particularly make you interested in the great protection the law afforded Breonna Taylor, where the only charge the police received was for the shot that they missed.
I don't wish these protections on myself, my friends, not for anybody.
Or perhaps here's the part where you allude that because I grudgingly pay my taxes but consider them illegitimate, I don't get to walk on the pot-hole ridden road outside of my house that I unwillingly paid the government to do in a slow, wasteful, and inefficient manner. Yes I am quite the hypocrite for walking on the road I never asked the government to build but they took my money for anyway. How dare I use that which I paid for.
>I'm done with this thread.
That's a shame, I was really looking forward to more of your racist rants alluding about how the color of the friends I have is supposed to mean something. Or how because I engage in private charity and helping of others, I'm less moral than you the moral one who feels great because they were forced to help others through a wasteful and bloated government bureaucracy.
But I really thank you for the laughs. Maybe the next time I spark up a blunt, I'll stop and think to myself "lawless egotistical selfishness" and think back about dear Otterley, who left my company far too soon.
(Not the GP, and don’t necessarily onboard with that perspective, but) this can’t be the only way forward, even if the majority of the time it should be. In fact, to keep it working you need to always consider the existence of the “opt-out lever” you outright reject here. The United States itself is founded on and asserts this principle. Of course you meet with resistance of the incumbent if you try to take that route, but that does not imply impossibility in the long arc of time.
That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”
— Declaration of Independence of the United States
The problem here is that some short-sighted people believe, incorrectly, that they don't have to accept the bad parts of democracy along with the good parts; that they are exempt from society's responsibilities; and that anarchy is the solution to the problem that we collectively make decisions that they sometimes don't agree with. They don't make things better; they complain and whinge and don't move the needle in any meaningful positive sense. And they don't see the countless ways in which anarchy is worse than democracy. The human race has tried anarchy; it didn't work long ago, and there's no way it's going to sustain a planetary population of over 3 billion souls.
The Internet has made the problem worse: Whereas these people used to be universally derided as nut jobs who lived on the fringe and communicated via tracts dispatched through the mail, now they can participate in self-congratulatory circle jerks in "safe spaces" on the Internet with hardly anyone sane interrupting them with a dose of reality, history, or common sense. I fear it's going to get worse before it gets better.
Banning and unbanning alcohol was an exercise in democracy in accordance with constitution. The lawmakers recognized for federal government to control intra-state commerce without any other constitutional nexus, they needed to amend the constitution.
Then the government decided to 'opt out of democracy because you [they] don't like the tenet that binds everyone to the laws made by our representatives.' Ever wonder why it took an amendment for federal government to regulate intrastate alcohol trade while no such amendment was passed for controlled substance act regulating intrastate drug trade? It's because the federal government decided to 'opt out of democracy' because it didn't like the 'tenets that bind everyone to the laws made by our representatives.' There's no constitutional nexus for the NFA regulating intra-state produced machine guns nor the CSA regulating pot grown in your own house for your own consumption. It's mere decision to opt-out facilitated between new-deal era corrupt supreme court and politicians who ironically ignore the 51+% in keeping pot illegal.
>he problem here is that some short-sighted people believe, incorrectly, that they don't have to accept the bad parts of democracy along with the good parts;
Well the government has decided that by ignoring the constitution. I've decided we shouldn't accept pure democracy at all; not that we have that.
>The human race has tried anarchy; it didn't work long ago, and there's no way it's going to sustain a planetary population of over 3 billion souls.
I'm not sure any pure political system has been tried if you're going to be pedantic. You don't need aggressive coercion to sustain 3 billion souls. Anarchy is an aim for 'society on a voluntary, cooperative basis without recourse to force or compulsion.' For instance, I've both been to and fought/volunteered for one of our closest examples to anarchism in Rojava, and it is actually becoming one of the most stable and prosperous regions in Syria. Guess that was just me 'whinging and complaining' though, and it wasn't pure idealistic anarchism so I guess it doesn't 'count.
> that they are exempt from society's responsibilities;
Apparently defined by the 51%, like 1800 era blacks 'responsibility' to be slaves.
> They don't make things better; they complain and whinge and don't move the needle in any meaningful positive sense.
Guess the charity, volunteer teaching, donations, and actual fighting I've done for a more anarchistic-like region of world were all just me complaining and whinging. Oh and my oh so virtuous paying of taxes! If only we were all as virtuous as Otterley.
>The Internet has made the problem worse: Whereas these people used to be universally derided as nut jobs who lived on the fringe and communicated via tracts dispatched through the mail, now they can participate in self-congratulatory circle jerks in "safe spaces" on the Internet with hardly anyone sane interrupting them with a dose of reality, history, or common sense. I fear it's going to get worse before it gets better.
Are you calling HN some safe space for anarchism? I've been derided nearly every time I've defended anarchism here. In this instance it's merely a democratic idealism clap-trap on your end to try and shame by ad hominem my showing the absurdity of OP's definition of unfair. A definition by which any use of others' scientific research is unfair, because fairness is in their words when 'the success of any individual would only depend on their own actions and work.' That's what this thread was about and this deep diving into politics is your own self-congratulations to regain whatever sense of pride you lost due to defending an ignorant and thoughtless statement.
Otterley quote below is very instructive:
>The consumption of alcohol was once forbidden by the Constitution; thank goodness that's no longer proscribed
Have you ever stopped to think about WHY no amendment was needed to ban intra-state produced drugs as done in the controlled substance act even though it was needed to ban intra-state alcohol by federal government? How it could possibly be interstate commerce for the government to control merely where you store non-commercial use goods in your own state a la gun-free school zone act?
The government has long since dropped the charade of following the constitution; they themselves have "opted out of democracy."
But if you follow this thread, most of it is him/her just trying to out me as an anarchist (something I've freely admitted anyway) as some sort of ad-hominem way of disproving my point of the absurdity of the definition provided of unfairness, under which scientific research would clearly be excluded from those acting fairly. It's the political version of suggesting I'm wrong because I'm gay.
The spread of private property and contracting rights, and the consequent rise in wealth, is credited for the largest reduction in poverty in human history:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/07/the-pol...
https://www.csmonitor.com/World/2016/0207/Progress-in-the-gl...
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2013/06/01/towards-the-end...
Extreme poverty is a much greater evil than inequality.
In most situations, money is a zero-sum game. Any wealth you make is by taking it from others. That's not fair or desirable.
For a fixed money supply, money is zero-sum. Wealth is not. If more stuff is made, and you're envisioning a system where that money commands all the goods, then same money commands more goods. That is desirable. But regardless of money system, if you make more goods and services then there are more goods and services.
and how is crypto better than gold or equities for this purpose?
(they have to convert it back to fiat in order to spend it is an incorrect assumption, increasingly so even in the US)
They transfer it to someone else/currency exchange location (if not totally banned) and get cash when they need to purchase something, or directly barter with crypto. You don't always need to exchange it with fiat. In such environments, often crypto payment would be superior to cash. (BTW this is not unique to crypto. People could utilize USD/EUR in countries with crappy currencies.)
- can't the government impose whatever rules they want at that step, like the US government does?
I suppose no one does something illegal ever. /s
This is the thing that is hard to comprehend for people in countries where "following the law" is somehow considered absolutely moral and also a reasonable burden. There are jurisdictions that you cannot survive without breaking some law every second. Using VPN to circumvent internet censorship is also illegal in countries with such conduct but regular people do that anyway.
- how is crypto better than gold or equities for this purpose?
Gold and equities, and most importantly land used to partially serve those purposes, depending on the jurisdiction. Crypto is an alternative with pros and cons. The major pro is difficulty of confiscation and ease of transfer across borders if the country destabilizes and you want to immigrate. It helps with geopolitical diversification of assets.
Prices and the financial market all boil down to communication systems. Inflation alone is extremely costly and keeps the poor poorer all around the world. I won't get into the carnage of how bankers live and their consequences to society.
Blockchain is costly to run, but I'd day it's way, WAY cheaper than what we have today.
There's the extreme example of Argentina and many others. Even the U.S. is starting to see the burden of this system.
And for how long do the Chinese people will work for pennies of a dollar to keep the American dream while the U.S. print fictitious money at will?
Talk about sustainability, but how sustainable this is? I don't think this system will evolve to something decent. Something new has got to rise and replace it.
Breaking the law is a requirement for survival there. Basically all the big employers have to do it, no one seriously pays all their taxes as they can be non-hyperbolically over 100%.
You may want to acquaint yourself with taxation in Argentina. There is a tax just to put money in your bank account. To deposit your money. I recall it being small but above 1% but I can't remember the amount off hand (Edit: 0.6% for business account transaction) [0]. I'm not sure if there's any mandatory exchanging to pesos when depositing, but that may be the case. I'm not Argentinian. If that is the case it makes things way worse.
You have to bring the USD into the country somehow. I think crypto is a convenient way to do that which avoids capital controls imposed when entering the banking system. I guess you can bring in gobs of cash on your person and that works as well, although there's the tradeoff of being robbed or whatever. But bringing in USD sounds OK too for some people and it is very easy to smuggle in border with Paraguay as there is basically no control at the border. For some it may be a personal preference.
[0] https://www.doingbusiness.org/content/dam/doingBusiness/coun...
Anyway, yes, non-discriminating electronic money movement is a great product that improves the lives of many people. Blockchains are a very bad implementation of that concept and remove a lot of its potential value. If we are able to get some other one working, it's for the better.
What is a good reason that cryptocurrencies have seen practically zero real-world adoption in the same approximate timespan that Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, et al managed to integrate deeply into our societies? And of course by adoption I don’t mean HODLing, I mean cryptocurrencies being used as the currencies they are claimed to be.
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/BTC-USD/history/
43,565.51 on January 6, 2022
36,833.88 on January 6, 2021
How's Not Mimblewimble going?
This seems like it implies that a deflationary currency would be better, but it does not, because in a deflationary economy, the behavior of the rich would change. In effect, the rich would keep most of their wealth in cash, while the middle class and the poor would not be able to change their behavior at all. The middle class family that has 50% of their wealth tied up in a house would still have that wealth tied up in a house because they actually need to live in it. A rich investor who owns hundreds of houses in the current economy would, however, move their wealth into cash and sell the houses. It might help the housing market, but it would screw up the currency market in exchange, and would probably not do anything for wealth disparity.
In short, "wealth" is the ability to make a wider range of choices. Both paths, deflation and inflation, favor the wealthy over the poor because of this.
I agree that Bitcoin would be a lot more useful if its value were less unstable.
And nobody should be using common currency as a store of value.
The USD is designed to have a bit of inflation, i.e. it's not supposed to be a store of value on purpose.
Use as a store of value is a significant part of what we're talking about here. You said, "Argentinians who want to avoid their own currency would be 10x better served by USD than BTC." Why do you think Argentines want to avoid our own currency? Part of it is that it's useless for export; nobody abroad has AR$.
But the main reason is that designed-in secular inflation makes it a shitty store of value. This was specifically mentioned in the comment you were replying to: "Not only that, you also are forbid from buying dollars, so if you want to get them to avoid our rampant inflation (50% average, around 100% for groceries) you only have the black market which is around 200 pesos." Bitcoin has its own problems, like volatility, but it doesn't have that one.
Why would you claim that people wanting to "avoid rampant inflation" would be "10x better served by USD than BTC"? We can now discard the hypothesis that you don't know about the secular inflation of the US$, since you explained it yourself in your own words in the comment I am replying to. It seems like you were being, at best, careless with the truth.
Governments do such things to try and paper over economy shortfalls, keeping everything running kinda-less-bad-ish than if they just let it fail and start over.
When you are in this situation where a USD only gets half as many pesos as the free market dictates, that means a peso is only worth half as much as the government is trying to pretend it is, and (this is the point of the currency controls) they are trying to allow only the 50% of most productive usages of USD to go ahead, possibly in the hopes of getting enough USD back into the country that they can get the free market value back up to where they think it should be, and then stop pretending.
Please provide references, even in Spanish will help:
[1] https://www.lonelyplanet.com/argentina/a/nar-gr/money-and-co...
[2] https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/argentina-central-b...
[3] https://ambcrypto.com/argentina-crypto-adoption-is-high-but-...
Also pos is being worked on. It will be an option soon.
Not to mention the energy currently used by traditional financial services and banks.
We are talking about a small small fraction of the worlds energy use. Its virtue signaling by wealthy 1st world people who simply dont get it.
I wouldn't be surprised if all of the media attention it gets is mostly because of how much most everyone hates it. It is the thing that tech inclined people love to hate watch.
On HN it certainly gets a lot of hate, but there's not so much in the mainstream right now. I don't think the Lakers would have agreed to a sponsorship where they play in the BP Oil Fracking Arena, for instance.
I genuinely hope for the environment that other schemes work out, but we’re not there yet.
[1] https://github.com/ethereum/pm/blob/master/Merge/mainnet-rea...
If PoW weren't a climate disaster it would have very obvious appeal due to its orders of magnitude simpler implementation.
Edit: You can learn more here -- https://consensys.net/blog/news/the-state-of-the-merge-an-up...
Even outside of any hypothetical technical complexity, a system that explicitly pushes all the power to those with the most money seems antithetical to the point.
- Solana - Cardano - XRP - Terra - Polkadot - Avalanche - Polygon
That's the majority of actual chains in the top 20, since many of the rest are tokens running on top of other chains (USDT, USDC, SHIB, BUSD, &c)
In general, starting a clone of proof-of-stake Ethereum is a very popular way to make a new chain.
As for the philosophical point, PoW isn't really different. It takes tremendous capital investment to produce enough hash rate to ever mine a BTC. These are all more or less systems in which the rich get richer and the not-rich get to gamble.
There are dozens of new networks launched over the last two years, they are all PoS.
> Even outside of any hypothetical technical complexity, a system that explicitly pushes all the power to those with the most money seems antithetical to the point.
What power do PoS stakers have? They select the order of transactions. That's it. The goal is to distribute this role across enough people so that they cannot collude to censor a transaction. That's essentially the only goal.
Three of the top 10 by market cap are already on proof-of-stake.
The difficulty bomb will effectively be the end of proof of work as far as I know. I apologize if that is wrong. I used to be an Ethereum miner long ago but haven’t done it for some time.
https://twitter.com/davetroy/status/1478017698676228099
It basically claims that cryptocoins are "sound money", and that "sound money" is inherently racist. I tried to follow the logic in that thread, and, so far as I can tell, it boils down to something akin to "Hitler was a vegetarian, ergo, vegetarianism is bad".
You also have the rise of BTCPay Server and lightning.
This is how the current wave of “web3” marketing started: everyone in cryptocurrency saw the bad reputation building and, being keenly aware that the only value was what you could find a buyer for, started hawking “web3 and pumping up things like NFTs trying to find new reasons for people to put real money into the system.
There really is a place for a decentralized currency to replace paypal, but none of the cryptos live up to it. In fact I just tried using crypto again a few days ago and it was a terrible experience just like it was 10 years ago. My bitcoin transaction took over 30 minutes to verify so I tried changing to ethereum, and the transaction fee there is $8...
USDC would make for a suitable candidate but of course, it's got $25 transaction fees on ETH. USDC-SPL maybe. The last time I tried to move some USDC-ETH, it was cheaper and more convenient to just have FTX wire me the money ($0) then wire it from my bank account to the recipient ($0).
In reality though, a CBDC is probably the best way forward.
My lightning transfers take 1 second and cost less than 1 penny.
How can the cost of the transfer be less than the cost of the energy it is claimed it uses? I could never figure thst out.
Off-chain transactions (like lightning, or from one exchange account to another at the same exchange, or from one account to another at the Salvadorean "wallet") can of course be quick and cheap, like any centralised banking.
If you're truly interested in a decentralized currency there are other projects focused on that.
There are two wallets that are using newer tech to make cheap + fast transactions happen (while still being decentralized + secure):
- Argent - Uses zkSync which is an L2 that compresses transactions and writes them to Ethereum - costs about 25c per transaction right now.
- Dharma - Uses Polygon which is it's own chain that posts a hash of everything that happened to Ethereum at regular intervals - costs < 1c per transaction right now .
So it has nothing to do with any organization encouraging transactions or not.
It wouldn’t stop demand when considering a competing theory that all the transactions are speculation, so nobody is missing anything if one place wont accept donations, or that place using their platform to reverse policy on accepting crypto.
A single Google Search: 1,080 J
A single Solana transaction: 1,837 J
One eth2 transaction: 126,000 J
Watching an hour of television on a 40 inch+ LCD TV: 540,000 J
https://solana.com/news/solana-energy-usage-report-november-...
DuckDuckGo claims to be carbon negative, btw:
Are you sure? It's easy to send your message anonymously on the Hand, but I (and many others I've met out there in the real world) have zero interest in acquiring cryptocurrency, regardless of price or potential payoff. It seems more like the biggest tulip trading ponzi scheme in history.
I do enjoy the entertainment it's provided me since I first encountered it in 2008.
I'm not even rich... just disinterested in accumulating wealth in such a stupid manner which contributes no tangible benefit back to society.
Not good at all and looks mostly a pump and dump scam to me.
The question is when will the party be over for most late comers to the Solana ponzi scheme.
What? There is no fucking way mining is using anywhere near 50% clean energy.
And using any energy for proof-of-waste is awful. That clean energy could've been used for something productive rather than a hashing lottery.
> on this basis
That's far from the only problem. The bigger problem is that this "technology" only works for crime and does not work as an actual regular currency.
Then somebody should make crypto coin which is exclusively run on renewable energy so it would be considered moral accepting it as donation.
There is no ethical use of proof of work cryptocurrency.
Is there ethical use of your idle CPU time?
The correct framing is in regards to what the CPU is doing when it isn't idle.
If that happens, I will be 100% sure what's in peoples heads!
Profits / Self benefits are the most powerful, natural forces of the world. If you want any positive changes, you should harness them rather than fight it.
I think this is going to increasingly become true, and I think it may lead to an interesting and divisive future. I suspect that if Ethereum actually does fully transition to Proof of Stake and the network doesn't suffer any serious issues for a year or two afterwards, its price may surpass Bitcoin's in a few years, and decisions to use/trade/hold Bitcoin vs. Ethereum will become exponentially more ethically, politically, culturally, and tribally charged than they are now.
If that turns out to be the case, I also predict Bitcoin will one day move to a different consensus system that consumes less energy - but it may take a decade, several hard forks, and the (metaphorically) bloodiest internet flamewars and in-fights ever seen before it actually happens.
Actually, people wouldn't choose something that doesn't work, just to signal their irrational ethics. Ethereum is not designed to be money, and it has huge array of problems in addition to using weak PoS consensus in the future. It is not properly decentralized, and therefore it can't deliver the promise of money that is equal for all people in the world. In my opinion, it's highly unethical to push Ethereum or other corruptible systems using this environmental narrative.
Most people in Bitcoin, especially big investors, know the difference between these systems, and wouldn't use a PoS currency for any price.
Mark my words, when Ethereum switches to PoS, its price will crash.
Depends on the definition of mainstream support.
I think that almost everyone that is vested/pro crypto hasc an interest in showing it here.
Normally opinions here are similar to what tweakers ( a popular dutch site for tech enthusiasts) has.
But with crypto there's a huge difference, eg. https://tweakers.net/nieuws/181606/tesla-stopt-met-bitcoin-a... people dislike crypto there, with mentioned reasons.
Even while the "investing" in crypto topic is pretty active: https://gathering.tweakers.net/forum/list_messages/2056096
https://gathering.tweakers.net/forum/list_topics/129
Note: main site for tech enthusiasts in Belgium+Netherlands. So for 28 million people.
The only thing that can kill it is legislation.
And even that ain't a silver bullet.
Therein lies a huge part of our societies problems : people base their beliefs on perceptions rather than digging into the truth of the claims they choose to follow. This creates division, strife, and carries huge social costs.
And, if their claim is objectively wrong---i.e., if bitcoin is less harmful to the climate that the legacy monetary system (with its unbridled government spending and profligate international wars---what's the petrodollar system's true cost if we include all the oil tankers, office buildings, Brinks trucks and The US 7th fleet sitting in the Indian Ocean?), then choosing to ignore the truth could actively harm the climate more than choosing the better money.
> Dabble in @dogecoin? HODLing some #Bitcoin & #Ethereum?
> We’re using @BitPay to accept donations in #cryptocurrency
The tweet prompted a strong reaction from Mozilla founder jwz: https://twitter.com/jwz/status/1478022085737803776
> Hi, I'm sure that whoever runs this account has no idea who I am, but I founded @mozilla and I'm here to say fuck you and fuck this. Everyone involved in the project should be witheringly ashamed of this decision to partner with planet-incinerating Ponzi grifters.
And Brave is more than just a "fork."
I believe this.
I'd like to understand how, exactly, moving from a non-profit foundation's browser to a for-profit corporation's fork of that browser with a built in ad marketplace is a net win for my privacy. That seems like a net loss: the incentive is now to make money off of me, and the browser is actually running non-website code with that goal in mind.
* Machine learning for ads is done locally; can't be evil
* Trackers and third party ads are blocked.
When is FireFox going to block third party ads and trackers?
> * Machine learning for ads is done locally; can't be evil
There are too many moving pieces to this to dissect in a single comment. But to roughly sum them up: just about every adtech company that promises "privacy preserving targeted advertising" via ML uses some information-theoretical definition of privacy that doesn't align with normal user's intuitions about the word "private." We saw this with k-anonymity schemes, and we'll see it again when these schemes attract more scrutiny.
And on top of that: Brave's own site implies that local ad ML is currently opt-in only[2].
[1]: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/enhanced-tracking-prote...
I see the part about trackers. What about ads? Does it also block YouTube ads? That's a really nice feature built into Brave.
> just about every adtech company that promises "privacy preserving targeted advertising" via ML
The difference here is it happens in the browser. Does ML happen in Chrome?
> Brave's own site implies that local ad ML is currently opt-in only
Your reading of that isn't correct. The opt in is for ads. And local machine learning comes along with opting in.
Ads are the way the internet can be funded. For most free sites, they need to either be subsidized by another income (see say a personal website that you host yourself - you pay for the domain and hosting if it's not local). Or by either selling a product (see many software companies), or lastly by using ads (see YouTube, Vimeo, and numerous other video sharing sites)
I understand targeted ads being a nuisance and vehemently despise the datamining that supports said systems. But ads in general aren't an evil until they obfuscate the core material of a site. When you block ads, especially on YouTube for creators who use the platform to attract ads and sell their content then you prevent people who've worked to supply their income. If your issue is the ethics that are at odds with Alphabet and the privacy concerns, your fight is with your government to restrict them, Alphabet's own trackers (which you can work towards disabling).
I’ve also contributed a significant amount to an open source developer on GitHub directly through Brave.
https://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nomo.html
I led Mozilla on all tech decision making from 1998 through 2014.
Does this mean I was "supplanting" myself by doing Brave? No. In doing Brave, I certainly was not supplanting jwz, who had nothing to do with Firefox (born as mozilla/browser in 2001, over two years after jwz quit).
jwz and I were among the actual, full-time job, staff@mozilla.org Mozilla founders. There was no "Mozilla" to work at then, it was Netscape employing almost all staff members, with Chris Blizzard of Red Hat dotted in. Mozilla was not spun out until 2003 summer, when AOL laid off most of Netscape but kept three of us mozillans for a few months to complete the transition to the new nonprofit.
Don't get me wrong, I'm definitely not a fan of cryptocurrency, but I'm also less than impressed with jwz's maturity. If I didn't know he founded Mozilla, I would've taken him for an angry teenage kid trying to be edgy on the internet.
Regardless, it's sad to watch Mozilla debase themselves, not only by supporting crypto at this stage of the game, but with cringeworthy meme language like "HODL." That was funny for about a week during the Gamestop fiasco; a year later it's another "how do you do, fellow kids" moment.
Dogecoin IS a meme and has/had a multi-billion dollar cap. Can't blame Mozilla for openly scraping the bottom of the barrel with their marketing.
Yes I can. It makes them look cheap and corny, and weakens their credibility.
> Dogecoin IS a meme and has/had a multi-billion dollar cap
Sure, for about a month, a year ago. It's old news. Anyone still "HODLing" Doge is just a speculator who missed the last wave and is desperately hoping it'll come back so they can sell out.
Point is, Mozilla is wasting their time by marketing to that crowd. Scraping the bottom of the barrel is a bad look.
Beggars can't be choosers.
If this move was done out of desperation, then they're dead in the water as an organization. More likely, some tone-deaf middle management team thought it would be a good "trendy" outreach initiative.
He still maintains XScreensaver, but now his day job is the ownership of a bar/pizza/venue establishment.
Probably a better fit for him.
If I call Mozilla and offer to donate a million shares of the dirtiest Earth-polluting company, they should take them. Exit the position. Their mission is not to be picky about how legal money arrives.
They're not beholden to any obligations to maximize donations (already a dubious claim, absent evidence that people were actually donating with cryptocurrencies) in manners they consider unacceptable.
Put another way: you wouldn't be surprised if the ASPCA refused donations in the form of shares in PuppyKicker Inc. Mozilla's decision here warrants a similar response.
If I was in charge of Mozilla's finances (which I'm not), I would be perpetually anxious about Google yanking their money as soon as its lawyers are sufficiently convinced that another browser vendor's marketshare sufficiently deflates any accusations of monopoly.
They’re essentially saying “PuppyKicker Inc. is a stock. Therefore, all stocks are bad.”
What’s the carbon footprint of accepting a large donation from Google? How many flights, full time staff are involved with ensuring this?
Their decision is short sighted for many reasons, including the unpopular truth that in the long term they will need to natively support cryptocurrency “Web 3” features to survive as a competitive browser.
If Phillip Morris wanted to become a big donator to the Cochrane collaboration, they would refuse by policy.
Do you think they're wrong, and they should take the money?
How much CO2 pollution is each transaction responsible for, and how much would it cost to offset that CO2?
It seems like there should be some threshold above which the donation will include within it the funds needed to compensate for its externalities, but I don't know if it's possible to create a smart contract that only allows donations above a threshold amount.
You would also have to factor in the pollution from e-waste generated by miners buying and replacing ASICs, although that's harder to quantify.
But we should also consider whether engaging in such a transaction is worthwhile as a matter of principle. If the organization's goals include environmentalism, does legitimizing Bitcoin by advertising their acceptance of it run counter to those goals?
Bitcoin’s pollution is not strongly correlated with its transaction volume.
It’s a famous rare collectible. People will mine it whether there is a high volume of transactions or not.
369.49 kgCO2eq. https://www.forbes.com/sites/philippsandner/2021/11/19/bitco...
> An average Bitcoin transaction has a size of 670 bytes on the Bitcoin blockchain, representing an estimated carbon footprint of 369.49 kgCO2eq. Given a price of USD 50 per metric tonne of CO2eq, the compensation of one average Bitcoin transaction costs USD 18.47.
Near 0. PoW is about agreeing on what the current state is. A transaction itself doesn't cost very much energy. If you were to process 0 transactions for the next agreed upon state it would take just as much energy as processing thousands of them.
Whether there are zero or a million¹ transactions in a block: the power to mine it is the same.
There is a misunderstanding that hashing power is related to throughput. That correlation does not exist. Hashing power is a function of the price of a Bitcoin.
¹yes, I'm aware of the limts imposed by block sizes. But that too has nothing to do with the power.
edit: For example: "Tesla used to accept Bitcoin as payment, but once Elon Musk realized that it was making him look like a PIPG, he had to reverse course."
Why not just "Planet-Incinerating Grifter," or PIG. Then it also applies to Big Oil executives :)
That's not to defend Big Oil or its shills. That industry should've been hamstrung years ago like the poison market it is. But it might be why HN gets extra riled up about crypto while letting other things slide.
Then look at the ION decentralized identity project Microsoft and others are building in top of it, or Peter Todd's decentralized document integrity attestation project, opentimestamps.org/, or how the bisq.network project has innovated a historically new way of working, where contributors are paid for improving a software project, yet no one is in charge and no funds or data are pooled, avoiding honeypots.
about:config -> network.http.referer.XOriginPolicy -> set to 2It has nothing to do with having enough impact (twitter lol) and market analysts to buy very low, announce owning millions of BTC and accepting BTC for Tesla, then selling a month later around peaks. And then doing exactly the same with Doge. Then doing it again in 2021. Oh, yes, the first sentence was about the trading value peak in 2017-2018. Nope, must be a coincidence.
Tesla sold 10% of its BTC position. It still holds BTC on the balance sheet.
At their core, Ponzi Schemes are investment funds which pay existing investors with funds collected from new investors [1]. There's really no way of looking at cryptocurrency where this is an accurate analysis.
Generally, existing cryptocurrency investors are not "paid" by the "fund" (currency) in any capacity. This is true for BTC & ETH, which represent the bulk of the crypto market.
The more common argument is that anyone can create a new currency, hype it up, drive market value higher, then exit at the expense of new investors. That's a totally legitimate concern, and it happens far too often; but its not a ponzi scheme. The accurate term would be "pump & dump".
There are many shades of gray between a pure pump & dump and something more legitimate. "Hype" (also known as "Marketing") is something every investment vehicle partakes in; from BTC (far beyond the "hype" phase) to DOGE (I'd label that one as "mass insanity") to TSLA (a fraction the revenue of many other auto manufacturers, but significantly higher value? how'd they get there?) to even PFE (this comment is Sponsored by Pfizer [2]). There are obvious examples of this behavior in the crypto community, but its simply not happening among major currencies; taking a pump & dump "scheme" to a billion dollar valuation is exceedingly rare, and there are currently ~90 coins with a market capitalization above $1B.
Where one does see it happening, in my opinion, is with (most) NFTs. Many holders won't admit this, but there's no reality where 99% of them will be worth anything after the initial purchase; their goal is to shill and liquidate. However, I'm cautious in extrapolating this concern to the "technology" of NFTs, and even further to all of crypto; its similar to asserting all of emerging med-tech is a scam because Theranos was. Ultimately, investment vehicles don't need to "make sense" to have marketable value; but that doesn't mean critical thinking is unnecessary when evaluating it.
There are some currencies, including ETH2, which stake and return an APY on investment. This could adequately, though somewhat inaccurately, be interpreted as being "paid out by the fund"; but the reward doesn't come from new investors. Where it comes from depends on the currency, but with ETH2 it is effectively minted from thin air. This is an inflationary action, which could (again, adequately but inaccurately) be interpreted as "taking money from new investors" (by lowering the value of each ETH they purchased). However, this concern is mitigated by the inflationary effect impacting all ETH holders, not just new investors, and the deflationary counter-effect from london hard-fork transaction fee burning.
ETH is currently still inflationary, but only through a delicate balance of PoW-style minting, PoS-style reward issuance, and london fee burning. The zeitgeist in the ETH community right now is to achieve deflation, for better or worse.
The statement that proof-of-stake APY represents "being paid out by the fund" in the context of evaluating cryptocurrency as a ponzi scheme, is very tenuous. Crypto is, at least in the US, not a currency; its a USD denominated investment vehicle. Being given more crypto does not "pay out" your USD investment, any more than a stock DRIP would be a "payout", because there is no "out". It does not allow you to exit the investment; on the contrary, it increases your investment.
Its totally fair to dislike crypto; I'm certainly in that camp. But its critically important to understand the mechanics, engineering, and economics of why its such a harm to society before one begins levying blind criticism.
[1] https://www.investor.gov/protect-your-investments/fraud/type...
It was a mania in retrospect, because it blew out of proportion, but there's nothing intrinsic about the asset which would have made it deterministically, conclusively obvious to a knowledgeable investigator that a crash was in-bound (beside, maybe, its biological nature; biological investments are irregular). Rather, it was unsustainable because of the price; but what price is sustainable for tulips? What price is sustainable for bitcoin?
Markets are very, very weird; probably because human behavior is weird. An undeniable axiom: Markets can remain crazy longer than you can remain solvent. And at some point, a "crazy" market isn't crazy; its just the market. Many would say that a $10,000 engagement ring is a crazy asset to purchase; yet thousands upon thousands are sold & resold every year.
I like it.
Hey, let me check if he still checks the HN referer and insults us if we follow links from HN to his blog:
https://www.jwz.org/blog/2022/01/today-on-sick-sad-world-how...
Edit: Aw, nope, looks like he got rid of it
Project Code Rush - The Beginnings of Netscape / Mozilla Documentary [1]
A single Google Search: 1,080 J
A single Solana transaction: 1,837 J
One eth2 transaction: 126,000 J
Watching an hour of television on a 40 inch+ LCD TV: 540,000 J
https://solana.com/news/solana-energy-usage-report-november-...
1779.11 kWh per single Bitcoin transaction would be
One Bitcoin Edit: Block Mined: 6,404,796,000 J
One Bitcoin Transaction on a Block: 2,287,427 J
One Credit Card Transaction: 5,351 J
Edit: Since the source isn't exactly clear if one transaction is a reference to one block mined or one transaction on that block, I'm going to assume it is for one block mined. I'm going to estimate one block contains 2800 transactions.
Kind of tells you a lot about humanity.
The testnet for the second phase of ETH2 - which is when the execution chain is merged into the Beacon Chain so that Ethereum can fully switch from PoW to PoS and reduce its energy consumption by 99.95% - was launched on December 20th, 2021:
https://blog.ethereum.org/2021/12/20/kintsugi-merge-testnet/
The second phase is expected to be completed before the end of 2022.
I mean, how many times have we had to diffuse the difficulty bomb? How many more times will we?
I guess we at least agree that your definition of "vaporware" is a lot stricter than mine. Hell, even Duke Nukem Forever came out eventually, so I may very well be wrong.
The bellow comment calling it “vapor ware” is ignorant.
I've been reading variations of the line "Ethereum is only weeks/months away from Proof of Stake" since probably early 2019.
Also doesn't Proof of Stake introduce another set of problems?
No, you haven’t. POS was, at best, a year plus away in 2019. No one credible was suggesting “weeks” back then… the beacon chain wasn’t even close to live yet.
ETH2’s beacon chain launched in Dec 2020 successfully, and has been running over a year in parallel with tens of billions in staked currency protecting it. This launched on time. The plan was originally:
1) beacon chain
2) sharding
3) the merge
The merge is when PoS takes over for PoW. The roadmap was changed in mid 2021 to push #3 before #2. That’s what’s about to happen, and I would even now put it in “months” . It won’t be “weeks” until a merge block # is announced, which will itself be weeks after the announcement of a successful testnet campaign (often multiple).
That's the main problem when it comes to this topic, isn't it?
https://www.axios.com/cryptocurrency-scam-crime-popularity-r...
You know there is this company I heard of that has a long history saying some nice things about cigarettes. Maybe I should buy some.
Considering 40% of all of Bitpay's transactions are for "Gift Cards" [0] (a la money laundering), it seems to be that this blog is being as charitable as possible to CC to get their numbers.
The fact is, there is no actual evidence of this extreme prevalence of crime within the crypto space that you allege.
This is not congruent with the gift card example. There is no comparable product that is known to be used in the majority of cases for money laundering.
You want to talk about Ponzi? Crypto has nothing on the Fed. The global financial structure is a planet-incinerating Ponzi scheme, so the point of targeting one minuscule subset of it is suspect.
I'd be surprised if Uncle Sam decided to drop the dollar and lose the influence it provides.
A blockchain based "e-dollar" is certainly possible, but Bitcoin will forever be a hugely wasteful online casino.
wrong,
the tweet prompted a strong reaction from people, founder jwz then reacted too few days later
I wonder if someone could fork it and take all the people from Mozilla who are actually contributing to the technical mission (a small group these days!). Brendan Eich would've been perfect for this, but he's got his own browser now and wisely chose to use chromium as the base.
I stopped using Firefox years ago because of such “improvements” they obsess over instead of stewarding one of the very few web browsers which could have helped keep the web open but is instead borderline controlled opposition.
But if we were to buy the premise, whether Mozilla can't or chooses not to use the money for browser development doesn't matter in the slightest.
And I think there's a pretty big citation needed on "they can't". Sure, they can't divert non profit funds in to the for profit corporation. But they could use it to build open source software with strategic alignment - like funding Rust.
join us!
(More generally, forking a browser is generally a doomed prospect: even Mozilla and Google struggle to keep up with vulnerabilities and standards churn. Most other forks of Firefox are laughably/irresponsibly stale, and most "forks" of Chrome are really just reskinned Chromium builds.)
Say what you want about Brendon Eich, but I wish he forked Firefox for Brave. That's the kind of effort that Firefox deserves, because it's by no means a bad browser. Putting aside some relatively minor performance issues (that don't manifest with average use), it's a great browser and I hope it sticks around for the sake of still allowing a good level of ad-blocking and such.
And yes, Firefox pretty much still exists in this form because of Google. That relationship has also accelerated the decline of Mozilla.
Chrome was designed to be "forkable" and put in different wrapper UI. Firefox was at that time battling to get rid of XUL and add a basic sandbox. Then pwn2own decided not to include Firefox in another year hacks because Firefox made no improvements at all in previous 2 years. This hurt me to hear as a long time Firefox user, had to be hurtful to Firefox management and developers too, but that was the fact. Mozilla lost their way in 2010-2017 and can't recover from that, the gap was too wide. Mozilla thought that after defeating IE and Safari they can't lose the market.
Mozilla had an opportunity to make Firefox modular but burnt it with Servo.
https://www.eweek.com/security/pwn2own-hacking-contest-retur...
Uh, [citation needed]?
Firefox was a valid target in Pwn2Own 2021: https://www.zerodayinitiative.com/blog/2021/1/25/announcing-...
Nobody attacked Firefox successfully, but that's hardly a point against it. I don't know what "made no improvements at all in previous 2 years is supposed to mean", either, since we had just released a major overhaul of the optimizing compiler a few months before Pwn2Own: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2020/11/warp-improved-js-performan....
> One change in the 2016 event is that the Mozilla Firefox Web browser is no longer part of the contest.
> “We wanted to focus on the browsers that have made serious security improvements in the last year,” Gorenc said.
https://www.eweek.com/security/pwn2own-hacking-contest-retur...
Literally provided citation in my comment above.
But nowadays, not all cryptos are proof of work based. Plenty of major crypto projects are based on proof of stake and offer fully fledged smart contract features to support Web 3 apps. I don't think proof of stake crypto is more energy intensive than the hundreds of thousands of servers and data centers needed for the traditional financial system.
I think a smarter move would be to only accept crypto currency donations from these greener chains.
https://www.lynalden.com/proof-of-stake/
I suggest this analysis because folks tend to state their preference for POS while only mentioning the energy costs as the only factor in their calculation. I do think it worth considering these other tradeoffs as well.
All of the financial systems today may keep a dozen or so copies of a financial transaction for a limited time span. They do so using as cost-effective means as possible (they’re a for-profit business). They also do it under extremely well coordinated economies of scale.
From the get-go any reasonable distributed ledger application (regardless of PoW, PoS, etc) keeps many thousands of copies of that consensus ledger. In the case of Bitcoin it’s roughly 13,000 nodes so at least 1000x as many resources as the centralized financial systems we have today. Oh yeah - and it grows forever. As I’ve noted before if you buy a beer for $3 with Bitcoin there will end up being 13,000 or more records of that transaction FOREVER.
With 10 years since inception and an absolutely tiny transaction volume (compared to say, Visa) a full Ethereum node requires at least 6TB of storage space. Bitcoin is the big one and it has roughly 500K transactions/day. Visa alone has a billion. With any real traction these ledgers will end up at petabyte and exabyte size very quickly. Oh yeah - and you’ll still need tens of thousands of copies. Each of these nodes still needs gigabytes of RAM, fast CPUs, bandwidth, etc in addition to the insane storage requirements.
Note that I’m talking about the distribution and storage of the ledger itself. Mining and PoS have nothing to do with that - these 1000x inefficiencies persist even with PoS.
The nodes themselves are the massive resource and energy issue that are just hiding behind PoW right now.
Learning how critical it is for everything to have a lifecycle was one of the turning points of my career (and I learned it over a decade into it). I’m guessing from your comment you haven’t learned it yet, so I’d invite you to keep an eye on all the lifecycles you deal with in the near future.
A currency that's based on energy has been speculated about for decades, such as by Buckminster Fuller, which he called the Kilowatt Dollar: http://roperld.com/science/CurrencySystems.htm
Bitcoin is the first attempt at such a money that might actually work. https://tftc.io/martys-bent/issue-1053/
If you're curious about the connection between Bitcoin and the energy sector these are worth looking at.
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvtGQ-7O1Tw
* https://bitcoinmagazine.com/business/bitcoin-energy-use-comp...
* https://youtu.be/b-7dMVcVWgc
* https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/bitcoin-is-humanitarian-...
I think people are vastly underestimating the impact of Bitcoin embedding itself within the energy sector, and providing an accessible and permissionless escape hatch to millions (billions?) of people whose currencies are hyper-inflating.
this is very apt. after exhausting the worlds resources guarding our money from each other maybe we'll reflect that it was money that was the bad idea and bitcoin was just an implementation detail
It's not exactly feasible to return to a barter system, unless you have some other way of solving the "double coincidence of wants" problem?
One of the innovations of Bitcoin is that it serves purely as a monetary good, so there's no other demand for it outside of it serving its role as money. Counter that with gold which has many other applications.
To be fair, fiat achieved this too, but it came with disastrous trade-offs...
You know Christmas lights in the USA use up more energy than the Bitcoin network does for the same period? Is that "wasted"? Ultimately that's up to the spenders of that energy to decide.
While most shitcoins and NFTs will tumble, the topcoin rallies are not going to stop until the economy gets roaring back and inflation is controlled.
It's hard for a person to understand a solution when its fortune depends on not understanding it. The Fed just mentioned they might raise rates for a blip on the stock market. Imagine what they do if they actually raise them. Oh, noes, the USD might actually hold some value! How will the economy recover if people's savings aren't stolen?!
There are numerous articles every week about the “great resignation” and staffing shortages in foodservice and other industries as everyone leaves for higher paying jobs.
Wages are going up. It’s not the end of the world.
> Most are desperately looking for opportunities to make enough returns.
Stock market has been outpacing inflation just fine. Classic investment advice still holds.
Those “returns” in crypto can only come from selling coins to someone else in the future. It relies on a constant stream of convincing new people to turn over their real money in exchange for virtual money.
> While most shitcoins and NFTs will tumble, the topcoin rallies are not going to stop until the economy gets roaring back
What a weird thing to say when the economy is roaring, unemployment is low, and top cryptos are steadily declining.
HN readers generally understand inflation, but when I see questioning bitcoin's energy cost, I wonder if those questioning it really understand the high costs of manipulating the price system through inflation: that manipulation causes the boom and bust cycles due to malinvestments.
Just to add some numbers: bitcoin is responsible for 0.1% of global carbon emissions, and will decrease (as a %) as CO2 emissions of other sectors grow: https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/currencies/bitcoin-...
Doesn’t seem like an appropriate comparison.
And yea, I’ll keep my bitcoin holdings under one percent of my overall investments if I continue to hold it at all. At this point I only have it because of FoMo.
It's not clear what bitcoin is providing, other that a self-sustaining speculative market. As such, even 0.1% of global emissions is particularly egregious.
It's pretty clear:
1. A way to store value without it being stolen by governments.
2. A secure way to pay without the fees and limitations that banks and governments impose on us.
3. A way to freely speculate
In summary: It's providing financial freedom. If you prefer financial slavery, that's fine, you can still have your fiat money.
If emissions are too high, then let's increase emission taxes.
I've never understood this. You're still living somewhere; the government can knock down your door and gently rubber hose[1] you into handing over your supposedly state-proof cryptocurrency. Indeed, there's probably a strong positive correlation between "legitimately afraid of the government taking my money" and "my government wouldn't bat an eye at torturing me to get my bitcoins." But for the average bitcoin user, it's more of a LARP than a reality.
I think there's ample real-world data against (2), and (3) is, well, the problem.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber-hose_cryptanalysis
Yes, but that requires more effort than just saying "hey bank, freeze that guy's account" or saying "Hey central bank, just print money like there's no tomorrow"
> Indeed, there's probably a strong positive correlation between "legitimately afraid of the government taking my money" and "my government wouldn't bat an eye at torturing me to get my bitcoins."
I don't think the correlation is that strong. Government taking your money, or shenanigans like the Argentinian corralito (against 100% innocent people, mind you) can happen even in democratic countries, but it's stranger, and requires more resources for the government to torture you, including psychological torture.
This is a thought terminating cliché and not only obviously wrong but dangerously so.
You don’t get points for looking like you’re next-level. Your lifestyle is most likely at least as wasteful as mine (I’d wager more so), so what you’re doing here, is finding an excuse for it.
Do you know what is the carbon footprint of choosing an SUV when a compact car would suffice summed over everyone who did that? Frankly, I do not know, but I suspect it is more than 0.1%
Cars are actively harmful to society [1] while cryptocurrency provides free exchange of value unhindered by authoritarian governments.
The hypocrisy of those suggesting we ban cryptocurrency while they use cars is staggering.
Just so you're aware, the link you've posted is pointing out that Bitcoin could grow from 0.1% to 0.9% of total CO₂ emissions.
Bitcoin may be one of the very few sectors that doesn't have any sort of plan for decreasing CO₂ emissions in the future.
Proof of Stake (PoS) is the most popular, but there are others.
That Mozilla statement is unjustly labelling a whole sector, they should know better than doing that!
IIRC, didn't Ethereum say about a year ago that they're planning on moving to a Proof of Stake at some point?
It should be said though, that while crypto mining surely contributes to the GPU shortage, it is only one of many factors.
"Sure social media can be harmful, but on the other hand there's Mastodon and Jane's Wholesome Baking Forum showing you can do better, so there's nothing to worry about."
Scale matters. Probably 99% of crypto trading takes place on destructive PoW platforms.
PoS has a political problem, as it's plainly a plutocracy. It makes it harder to pretend that magic cryptomath has solved society's issues.
But I guess such narrative makes it easier for you to defend your position in your own mind.
These theories are completely lacking in nuance and, frankly, aren't at all convincing. Further, it's incredibly jarring when a discussion that is premised on the merits of a technology derails into an almost _purely_ political argument of which I'm apparently on the wrong side of, despite never once saying I think that the unbanked don't deserve better, for instance.
It is utterly ubiquitous. If you don't approach the subject like this then good, but if you don't see these people crawling out of the woodworks on HN lately, you aren't looking.
web3 solves the identity and privacy problems web2 created
dApps are actually a boon to open source by offering monetary incentives to create working open source solutions
NFTs are doing the same for art and expression by separating ownership of a piece and access to it
If Mozilla was concerned with energy consumption they'd stop USD donations.
Effectively money is a form of communication; and when Mozilla bows to social pressure and social anti-crypto hysteria - they're continuing what they've always done - which is focus on insulating users, protecting users from risks, while also failing to foster a healthy ecosystem. Why do we have an arms race between people who want to violate privacy and people who want privacy? Why do we have so much sound bite media, with hugely emotional banner headlines and warped narratives? Why are the walled gardens so much more successful than the web (in the sense of much of the creative work and creative community moving to native apps?). We have these phenomena because there is no legitimate way for people to have direct transactional and healthy relationships on the web with respect to money. Mozilla is not "helping the web" they are hurting the web. Their fixation on the wrong things injures the ecosystem. They shouldn't waste their time begging for crypto, but what they should do is enable people to pay each other.
Human beings don't speak like that. Just say what you're doing. It will be enough for people, and not enough for others. But for the love of god knock it off with the super-polished robotic corporate PR nonsense.
The question is, in this future, will Bitcoin be celebrated or hated by those who hate it now? I think the later. Because ultimately all hate for it is politically driven by those who fear a loss of power that it could cause for them(or their political leaders, or thought leaders, or shepherds).
Perhaps the question is: do banks / fiat money institutions cause more damage to climate, or crypto mines. My gut feeling is a close tie.
Less than 2% of Mozilla's revenues are from contributions, so it's cheap for them to symbolically thumb-their-noses at something.
I know you don't really think climate change is a problem. You drive a car, fly, the whole thing. So just buy crypto and be done with it, please.
We're early, but it's getting kinda late, just do it.
And Mozilla doesn't live on donations anyway (they are used to finance "initiatives" of various sorts).
That seems...consistent with VC insistence that “Gen Z gets Web3”.
It's not consistent with what Web3-invested VCs want people to take from that, though.
In an ironic sense, definitely. It shows that they have better sense of the real value of web3 than the people pushing it
[1]: From my experience a lot of the crypto “community” online is Gen Z, but most of Gen Z is not pro-crypto. All thumbs are fingers sort of logic.
On the other hand, the other 99% of gen z regularly comments about how they’ve “stolen” your NFT after screenshotting it.
I've been interested in it around the time ETH came into picture, smart contracts sounded interesting. Seeing how it played out in practice convinces me the tech is fundamentally inferior to status quo for the things they propose it solves, and at this point I think it's been long enough to judge.
The only people I know using crypto in personal circles use it to dodge income taxes, order drugs or gamble (not particularly judgemental towards either, just super annoyed how it keeps polluting public discourse).
What do you know about bitcoin's lightning network?
How would you respond to people in el salvador who are very happy with it?
https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2021/9/8/salvador-protest-...
When trains ran on coal there was pretty much no alternative. Also more economical trains generally were in preference.
There is alternative to crypto _today_ which does not require unreasonable amounts of energy. Cryptobros don't care just like they don't care that crypto energy consumption only seems to go up.
The scale of ETH's decarbonisation feels slow by our typical software standards (although it is not a single piece of versioned software nor owned by a single company) - but shorter relative to some other global-scale decarbonisation efforts; it is slated to merge this year.
No matter... there is no need to engage with PoW if this is your primary concern. If desired, Mozilla could have led a stronger force toward PoS chains by only accepting crypto donations in (say) Tezos, rather than just closing the possibility of donations entirely.
Reason that I give donations in BTC is that it's impossible to do so in regular ways, like with bank transfers. In the european country where I live, I'm excluded from banking services all over the country. Why isn't that a common life feature for other humans here? Well, a majority of the country chose to implement laws that restrict my access to everyday needs. In short, I'm categorized by law as an african immigrant without residency status. It's been like this for 5 years since I landed in Europe.
So, I have capital in the form of cash (earned by doing menial jobs and developing my own software projects) but I can't spend it online because I don't have the allowed ID !? I clean and do gardening in the homes of people who later choose to implement laws that forbids me to have a have my own home, my car, medical treatment... Then after those daytime gigs that pay shit money, I go back to my "home office" then open my laptop to start coding or learning. The next day: rinse and repeat.
A donation is like a financial thank-you note! Accept it or not, it's your choice. As, a user of various Mozilla products, I'm grateful of their work and all that they build and make freely accessible. Thanks to them, I'm able to earn a living (food, transport and housing), to gain capital that is 10x of what I'd bring in without Internet-related work.
Crypto is a tool that's beneficial to whomever can make use of it. BTC is not under control of a single human or a small team. Its decentralized nature makes me a truckload of hope to live day after day in a racist country. Those priviledged citizens complaining about crypto's climate impact are similar to those who want to ban nuclear reactors. They have fantasies in their mind larger than their collective egos and technological ignorance. They have houses full of household robots (which I compete with nowadays while cleaning houses) where they daydream about some naive version of the future. Instead of screaming illogical facts in public discourse, why don't you pick up all your belongings and go live in civilizations with much less basic infrastructure and tech prowess? What's stopping you? When will you give up your comfort? Let's stop with the hypocrisy.
As a donor, I will give in BTC to others. The habit is in my DNA. In the real world, I'm an undocumented immigrant. In the online world, I'm myself and free to make use of my full potential. Mozilla's browser is one of the gateway to the worldwide web. Firefox doesn't ask me my ID to start having fun or working online. Firefox and Bitcoin are tools that I enjoy and will always cherish for their great utility in my digital projects. I will not trust the opinion of anticrypto people because they have countless choices in their lifespan and mine are limited by default.
I recognize that use Trump is risky as he is very polarizing - however there is something uncannily similar on the rise of both of these events. Both in that neither had an agenda but caught on like wildfire - I hope that crypto somehow ends up benefiting the world. I don't see it at this point but remain open to seeing successful projects.
You mean Bitcoin, Ethereum? Since they are the biggest ones currently 'destroying' the planet? I'm sure there exist eco-friendly cryptocurrencies that are suitable for donations?
But never-mind though, Bitcoin and Ethereum = ALL cryptocurrencies somehow.
So back to receiving Google's money.
Funding for Firefox development comes from Google, which is pushing Chrome in such a way that is destroying the web.
Funding for Mozilla's non-Firefox projects probably comes mostly from Firefox users.
I want to donate to Mozilla exclusively for Firefox development - yet the only thing that my money will not be used for is Firefox, and I strongly disapprove of many of their other projects that my money would actually go to.
This is just a mess.
But even then, there's no guarantees on how the money gets shuffled around.
So as long as Google is funding Mozilla, and Firefox, their mission statement is beyond destroyed.
Mission failed successfully.
The announcement also does not say no better crypto policy could be put in place it just says they are reviewing the policy. In all likelyhood though yes, they aren't going to accept crypto as hardly anyone uses eco-friendly forms of crypto to the point it's worthwhile to try to push for donations via that means.
2. Retail payments are an abstraction above currency. When I pay with a Visa card, I may be spending cash, “credit”, crypto, etc… Visa/MC is probably the most pervasive non-Fiat/cash retail payment method in the world and it currently works with crypto thanks to Coinbase and others. Then you have Venmo, PayPal and the many others that work well in retail. There are / will be lots of great retail solutions that are abstracted from the base value store.
3. Crypto is very useful for P2P and B2B payments without approval from gov, banks, etc.
4. I lived in Argentina for a while and it’s true about the taxes and corruption. When I lived there I had to pay rent in cash but often the banks would just close or stop withdrawals. Crypto is better for this application (P2P payment, not super time sensitive).