The fact that you're the highest-ranked comment on this page shows that, at least for Hacker News, people are getting some sense knocked into them.
5-6 year ago I'd get continually downvoted on Hacker News for comments like that.
5-6 year ago I'd get continually downvoted on Hacker News for comments like that.
Back then we were talking about trustless digital cash. That was what people were excited about. It had the potential to fix a lot of the problems with the current banking system. It was exciting and seemed like it could change the world.
Nowadays Bitcoin and crpyto in general is synonymous with investment. When you see it in that light it looks completely different. Opinions haven't necessarily changed, we just stopped talking about the original thing.
To think Bitcoin was created as a scam seems very cynical to me. I believe Bitcoin was created for good reasons but standard human behaviour ruined it. It wouldn't be the first time that's happened.
That was the scams selling point and how they clouded peoples judgement: Make it sound like it can change the world for the better. Even in 2010/11 when my brother and I were talking to the founder of the Avalon miners there was plenty of skepticism floating around.
This is a fact that has been evidenced by ever increasing amounts of wealth concentration in the hands of fewer and fewer individuals over the past 50 years. [1]
Unfortunately, it seems cryptocurrency is a just an extension of the many of the systems we already have that are described in fiat amounts.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/pikettys-inequal...
Because cryptocurrency is also a fiat system where the money holds no real value and is manipulated by various entities, only the fiat is declared by a private group of computer nerds instead of the government.
This isn't a scam. If I give everyone in the comments $100k, by "next year" some will have $1m and some $0 -- and, in general, we'll all be a little better off.
Its the nature of any advantage that it compounds, and compounding advantages of any kind produce dramatic inequalities (of sex, money, creative achievement, etc.).
Bitcoin isnt a scam because it produces an unequal outcome -- any system which works to increase the general welfare will necessarily operate on and compound inequalities.
It's a scam because as time passes the general welfare *does not increase*, indeed, it plummets!
People holding coins arent opening factories, building houses, teaching people, etc. Nothing is happening. They're litterally just twiddling their thumbs.
What's actually happening is that poorer fools are joining late in the game, whose money comes from actual labour... and supply the initial parasitical early-stakes with exit-cash. Ie., they wait for 10yr do nothing; you work for 1mo and do lots. Your productive labour becomes their exit. It's welfare for the rich.
Inequality isnt the issue here. It's the particular type of "theft" taking place. It is, in a very real sense, an actual scam.
I guess maybe the argument is you can do something with metals or video games or pokemon cards. But it's hard to believe that a special Charizard has a utility permitting million dollar valuations.
Palladium is a genuinely useful material, and has significant industrial uses. If it gets expensive, that's just markets. If it gets too expensive, alternatives will be researched and hopefully developed. And that is fine.
Crypto fraudsters are trying to tell us that their coin is legitimately useful for ... something, while it is actually an entertainment product. In my view, Doge is one of the few legit crypto coins because it was initially marketed as entertainment. People would donate Doge to each other for fun. Some of the file storage coins may also be legitimate, because you spend those on distributed storage, which is an actually useful service.
But the majority of crypto coins and NFTs are marketed as something useful or a legitimate investment, when they are not.
As with all things, the key to making money in a capitalist system is having money to begin with.
The stock market has in fact led to more people growing their wealth. While not perfect, it has come a long way from the days where only the wealthy could access it.
That's because population grows exponentially.
If we have a massive contraction in population I suspect a lot of common wisdom about economics won't hold true.
For starters, any increase of output with a decrease of input labor is by definition an increase of productivity, individual, net, all of it.
For two, AI hasn't proven anything beyond quickly doing grunt labor. Quickbooks & Excel didn't put the CPA trade out of business, an algorithm that identifies a cat in a picture or whatever reduces overhead, not eliminating professions.
Tangenitally I am, however, very excited at AI's prospects in reverse-engineering and rewriting code, a long-lived fantasy that we can actually un-fark many old or particular programs and systems that are currently hardware dependent or just not worth the man-hours to do the transcription from, say, 16 bit to 64 (or 128, or 256, wherever the future goes).
Lastly, robots have been around since the 60s, industrially and standardized. They do good work, consistently, reduce cost and thus prices and floors of production. The automotive industry is bigger than ever, and more top heavy. This is good, no?
No-one dreams of working on an assembly line for Ford, and unlike the common-wisdom ideal of teenagers & inexperienced workers starting in the service industry and working up & out to better professions, I don't know of anyone who realistically has a career plan of 20 to 60 working their way up from floor sweeper to head of district in any enterprise.
There is this weird pessimism that comes on the tails of this breakthrough in labor leverage, that we're going to put ourselves out of work and have to sit around and then starve to death or get UBI because we're incompetent, when 100 years ago the plurality of Americans were subsistence farmers. Society alters to meet social needs, what we're really talking about is introducing a ton of slack into industrial labor. That isn't a waste, it's the potential for great expansion in so many other fields (think what resources were sunk into industry during Cold War that then turned to softer industries after 1989. Maybe the fantasy here is we should have the best and brightest of us, I dunno stay as mechanical engineers and work for GE or UTC building better stealth bombers instead of looking to FAANG and writing better ad service algorithms).
More energy is always a better thing for society. Labor saving tech is equivalent to increasing the sum of energy available to society. I don't cry because the ladder of the old gold union benes at John Deere were pulled up while I was in gradeschool, I went in search of a better opportunity than the one that wasn't there. The difference may be that "this will affect millions simultaneously!" but so hasn't every transformative technology.
Last-lastly, to make a general economic argument I never see: tens of millions without labor drives up supply which drives down wages. Robots and AI make everything for a fraction of cost (comparable to shipping manufacturing to slave, I mean indigenous, labor overseas for pennies-on-the-dollar in 1970s), so reduced wages maintain balance with cost of goods & services. Entrepreneurs can now exploit a larger labor force with diverse skills to explore new ventures with reduced costs on all front due to labor-saving tech and labor-bloated workforce. This leads to new ideas and extrapolations previously unviable or with a too-high floor of cost to entertain. Trillionaire tech CEOs who own everything divvy out grants like feudal lords funding weird idea-people like Leeuwenhoek with his curious "micro-scope".
Not ideal but that's still more than a starved populace voting demagogues for bread doles.
With Bitcoin et al being deflationary it means that goods will be cheaper tomorrow than they are today. This promotes hoarding, not purchasing. You would expect to get a pay cut every year, not a raise. This grinds the gears of economic activity. You are being incentivized not to spend your money unless you absolutely have to, which is the death knell of any functioning economy.
While there are certainly problems with the current model, cryptocurrency simply makes them worse.
Imagine a terrible world where people are incentivised to buy stuff they don't need and barely want; we'd be drowning in crap and burning up the Earth to make it.
I don't think that means that bitcoin is going to be successful, but fiat currency is either going to become less important or more coercive as people become aware of what inflation does and try to escape it.
Crypto is just another arm of capitalism, subject to those same problems and more of its own making. Crypto is going to need "just ten more years to take off" for long enough for us to completely fuck up this planet, and by then this little pissing match will be completely irrelevant.
I don't blame people who were skeptical of the ideas in the beginning, but as BTC sits at $40k, with entire countries adopting it as legal tender, with ~15% inflation in the US, and with financial war (civil and internal) breaking out at increasing scope and scale, it boggles the mind people can still write such dismissive takes without at least pausing for a moment to consider if they've made an error.
The development of trustless globally agreed upon ledgers is as big of a development as the printing press and gunpowder, and it's fundamentally tragic that smart people are so wrapped up in cynicism they're still determined to ignore it and not help direct it in a positive direction.