The promise of crypto has not lived up to its initial excitement

Just because speculators aren’t actively trading the token and volume bots aren’t creating fake volume wash trading doesn’t mean the proejct itself is dead at all.

One thing about US regulations… we did not want to get involved with making the secondary markets or whatever. Expect the community to do it. We don’t care about attracting speculators to pump and dump. We believe that once we attract CUSTOMERS then the speculators will turn up to make the market.

Sure. I consider utility tokens as libertarian socialism online. They are voluntarist (you opt into using them) and eliminate the extractive shareholder class (which is the reason why, say, Uber drivers pay half their salary to the “owners” of the platform). Selling shares was the old way of raising money and it is the reason why all Big Tech are monopolies. Facebook and Twitter are each controlled by one guy (Elon or Zuck), while gift economies like Linux or the Web enrich the world without a shareholder cabal around Torvalds or TimBL extracting rents. No one advises them “Competition is for losers, Build a monopoly” like Peter Thiel did. By being permissionless and open they have created far more wealth for the world than their capitalist counterparts.

Airdrops are a form of UBI, and can be used to put money in the hands of the public. Towns can use software to run their own monetary and fiscal policy without relying on the Banking system as the source and sink of their money supply. Banks do not issue money on the basis of public good, the more people need money the less likely they are to issue it to them in the form of credit. They make the rich richer and it is about generating about profits for their shareholders and depositors. In a UBI scenario, money is issued to everyone equally. Even the game Monopoly (which was originally designed by a socialist to illustrate the perils of capitalism!) has a UBI every time you pass Go, or the game doesn’t work.

A socialist alternative to a bank is a Credit Union. Imagine Intercoin letting anyone create a credit union and connecting all of them together like the Internet did for communication.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_socialism

It has been practiced by everyone from prehistoric tribes to today’s Housing cooperatives and worker-owned cooperatives and universities.

One of the oldest sites on the Web is run by an anarchist socialist, serves local communities and it has outcompeted all capitalist attempts to disrupt it and extract rents. You’ve definitely heard of it:

https://www.zdnet.com/article/craigslist-ceo-jim-buckmaster-...

Another of the oldest sites on the Web has quickly outcompeted all capitalist encyclopedias including the most famous ones like Britannica and Encarta, making them mere rounding errors in usage. That of course is Wikipedia. Jimmy Wales is not a socialist, he is a libertarian however.

I think the record is clear: open, permissionless systems outcompete closed ones in the end.

The word “socialism” triggers people to think “big government” even though capitalist systems typically have just as big of a government. But actually I want more decentralization, everyone to have access to tools to self-organize. I want a UBI and gift economies to voluntarily replace the contradictory for-profit capitalist institutions, like private ownership of public forums.

So I often say I’m a left-libertarian (like George Carlin or Russel Brand). I am trying to make an alternative to Big Government and Big Corporations, by giving software to empower people and unite communities.

Eventually, when towns have this system, people will be able to work 20 hour work weeks and spend the rest of the time with their family and voluntarily working on cool projects. However, until then, since we do still live in a largely capitalist system, I need some people to invest in our project so my team and I can pay for food and housing :)

If you want to get involved, you can invest your time and skills as a developer, designer, promoter, or you can invest money. If you want to know how investors can make a profit without buying shares just take a look at Ethereum’s early buyers, it’s a great example. It’s a pure utility play. No extractive shareholder class and no one restricting the ecosystem. It’s an even freer ecosystem than the Web!

So anyway if you want to get involved email me at greg at the domain intercoin.org

Every community having their own currency and monetary policy makes no sense at a fundamental economic level.

If each member of my family has their own individual currency and monetary policy it would make economic sense for us to form a higher level structure and just have one currency and monetary policy for our whole family to make trade easier within our family. That process scales up to the level of country.

This idea failed because it doesn't solve anything economically. It actually just creates an economic bug.

Clayton Christensen has died (deseret.com) onn Jan 24, 2020

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22141299

> frankly, then you very likely weren't a community participant during the early years

What community? A sub-reddit? bitcointalk.org? How early is early to you? I found out about bitcoin and ethereum by reading Hacker News, I bought my first bitcoin when it was around $10 and most of my ethereum on the first day of the pre-sale and that's around the time when I started discussing crypto with my friends and family, some of whom are programmers but most of whom are not. I'm not sure what you're going on about regarding community.

> I don't know who Clayten Christensen is, but that's a silly quote.

Do you know what Google Search is though? Or maybe your point is that I spelled his name wrong by one letter? Either way, here you go:

"Improving a product takes time and many iterations. The first of these iterations provide minimal value to the customer but in time the base is created and the value increases exponentially."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma

Since you're on this website maybe you've heard of Paul Graham?

"Don't be discouraged if what you produce initially is something other people dismiss as a toy. In fact, that's a good sign. That's probably why everyone else has been overlooking the idea. The first microcomputers were dismissed as toys. And the first planes, and the first cars. At this point, when someone comes to us with something that users like but that we could envision forum trolls dismissing as a toy, it makes us especially likely to invest."

http://www.paulgraham.com/organic.html

> Of course every new idea and technology that became successful started small, unnoticed etc, but it's pure survivorship bias to point only to the ones that made it. What about countless things that didn't?

You're missing the point. I'm not saying that it's proof positive of it being a good idea, but that dismissing an idea on the basis of what other people think is a terrible idea. And no, every technology doesn't start out small or unnoticed (e.g. fire)

> Taking seriously things no one else does is a not a particularly wise thing to do, 99.999% of the time there's good reason no one takes something seriously, and there is no real way for anyone to reliably identify the 0.001% of times you have something worthwhile.

There's no way of replying without coming off as an asshole so apologies but, frankly, you sound like a boring person who doesn't think for themself and is probably a late adopter to most interesting things.

When people call something a dumb idea, the large majority of the time they’re right.

If your getting criticism, the most likely scenario is it’s because your idea won’t work, not that it’s world-changing.

Deflation has a bad rap because its insidious form is caused by economic contraction. But other causes of deflation are neutral / positive and there isn't anything inherently wrong with it.

Go look up how much a 400 MHz processor (e.g. Pentium II) cost in 1997 vs. today. Processors get cheaper all the time, but it doesn't seem to harm demand.

Yeah, this was a similar kind of journey that I went on - heard about Bitcoin, was fascinated, started learning about money (started with things like the 'money multiplier', 'fractional reserve banking' etc., realised they didn't actually follow accounting rules and aren't how real banks work, eventually found the answers of how it works with stock-flow consistent accounting, endogenous money in banking, sectoral balances etc. - Monetary Economics by Godly and Lavoie is a good resource - I think a PDF is available if you look for it) and realised Bitcoin couldn't really work as actual money. It's still a very interesting thing from a theoretical point of view, but it's a shame the grifter culture that's grown up around it, and the huge amount of energy being used to run the system...

It has been a nice experiment to prove our intuition about deflationary currency and hording correct.

The other interesting aspect is in terms of Robert Shiller's narrative economics. What is most interesting to me is that the narrative economics and contagion were able to morph the currency narrative into something else so that the hording became a feature and not a bug in the narrative.

It is interesting how people can call BTC digital gold but disregard the downsides of gold at the same time in the exact same way deflation/velocity was ignored in the currency narrative. Gold was the "new" anti-central banking currency in the 70s that had its crescendo because of narratives and central bank policy at around a $3,200 all time high inflation adjusted price that we can't touch even 40+ years later. At the same time macro conditions were set up to take out that all time high price but BTC itself grabbed so much of that flow from gold.

Following the narrative dispersion that the all time inflation adjusted high for BTC is already in will be fun for years to come.

Ah yes, as follows from the well-known law of grifter equilibrium.

Has it? Crypto proponents all the time are talking about the unbanked and people in countries with unstable currencies. I really don't know, but what's the deal in El Salvador? in South America? Ukraine? Aren't people using it?

So if everybody just bought bitcoin, everyone in the world would all be rich! Brilliant!

I measure it by pizzas per Bitcoin. It’s definitely gone up.

I mean, it's been 14 years now, if some actual valuable use of strapping intentionally onerous calculations to a transaction model was waiting, you'd think we'd have found it by now.

The contract pays a physical asset custodian for storage, property taxes or whatever other costs. So blockchain specifically provides a financial incentive for a custodian.

Eyeballs thing is true, but hasn’t stopped cryptography being effective in other areas for example, Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, Apple TV etc seem to be doing well despite the electrons reaching my eyeballs unencrypted. The same applies to collectible images, videos and code.

You are already in a dystopian DRM landscape and have been for 20 years since general purpose computing died and all computer hardware from your BIOS to your monitor cable already enforces DRM. The FSF was right. That’s off topic though.

Distributing royalties to artists is just something called programmable NFTs. It’s just cryptography - a program enforces the artist’s account is credited to allow a transfer and it’s not a big deal. artists are absolutely making money from this. It fixes an issue in traditional art where the resale value of an artists earlier works increases however, the artist doesn’t see any of those returns.

Transaction fees on modern layer 1 crypto platforms are 0.0025 cents.

The meaning of the term Digital gold is an asset that is not subject to quantitative easing from the government. I.e. one cannot mine vast quantities of Gold or produce vast quantities of new bitcoins very easily.

Pardon the edits, I am using voice dictation, as I’m having trouble using my hands.

You are correct that there is no benefit to consumers in saving retailers money. Additionally, Visa can terminate a Retailers account if they provide a discount for using an alternative payment system. This may not be in all markets in the market it exist in, it also may not be legal.

You are 100% correct regarding Ethereum gas fees. Transaction fees on current generation L1s are 0.0025 cents.

> determining where intellectual property ends and fair use begins is where the complexity is at

recording ownership of digital goods at scale has historically been very difficult. fair use is important but does not help artists get paid. Please don’t read that is being anti fair use. It is rather that fair use is orthogonal to this problem.

> Yes, card payments are quite inefficient, but not anywhere near 3% go to the card networks.

Glad we agree on at least one of these. Visa is 2.9 percent plus some other minor fee I can’t remember right now.

> What's the connection to cryptocurrency here?

Usability. I guarantee you more people have crypto wallets now that have ever installed PGP, GPG, or any other similar app in the entire history of computing.

You can launder money with it also /sarcasm

You're poorly informed. I used it for donations. It's the only pseudonymous network-native currency that I know.

Escaping fiat currency is essentially the only use case advertised in the Bitcoin whitepaper and it continues to be a notable use today.

If this use is not notable or compelling to you, then you are probably very fortunate (for now).

> When most people say "a use case"...

Nope. This is the original claim:

> ...there seem to be no contemporary applications of any note...

It is a valid use-case and it is an improvement, otherwise it would not be possible at all, especially when I gave a direct source proving that there is a real world business using NFTs to solve their ticketing problem, especially for anti-fraud purposes and all verifiable on a public blockchain.

> Ticketing isn't exactly a hard problem.

Is that why many are using NFTs for ticketing systems, including Ticketmaster? [0] [1] Looks like a great use case for NFTs and they seem to gain a lot from using them.

[0] https://boxoffice.sitickets.com/

[1] https://business.ticketmaster.com/business-solutions/nft-tok...

When the value of the USD spikes to the point that a single dollar represents a year's worth of work at minimum wage, maybe then you can criticize it as being "taken over by speculators" in the same way that Bitcoin was.

Houses are useless as money because their value keeps changing and they're worth too much indivisibly. But we don't even try to use houses to buy a pizza, so that's okay.

Digital money should be small enough to carry on your person, be divisible into small chunks, and its value should not wildly fluctuate from day to day. Bitcoin meets the first two of those criteria, but it violates the third. That makes it impossible to use Bitcoin to buy a pizza. (Although it did work for pizza for a brief time in the early days before its volatility became outrageous.)

Houses aren't money, and volatility in the housing market doesn't impact it's utility as shelter. And furthermore, the use of houses as a speculative vehicle is a huge problem that makes it very difficult for younger people to buy homes.