What's the use of crypto again? Because I think it's kinda useless. Just like NFT's
Not that I can or will wholly defend crypto. That just doesn't seem like a relevant complaint.
I do question the desire for everlasting permanence of the blockchain. I know we like to keep real estate deed records and such going back as far as we can, but even there we have limited utility of that. Encasing it in a technical solution that expands to cover more transactions does feel limited in usefulness. Largely ironic/funny that it makes it incredibly unsuited to criminal use.
They bring the probability that you will be harassed by police/landowners/elements/civilians when residing in an area way down. Personally, I take the harassment and sleep on the street. But it's not easy and many would pay not to.
> collectible card games
You have fun when you play them. People pay to have fun.
> collectibles at large
Idk some people just get weird addictions. I put collectables at large in the same bucket as crypto, no defense there.
> fashion at large
Looking good is more likely to get you laid. People like getting laid, and will pay for it.
Also note that time shares typically are securities, in my understanding. In contrast to a house, which is not. My argument there wasn't to identify some other things that are or are not securities, but "things that are kinda useless." In the case of timeshares, I'd say they are actively more harm than good.
The marketing you're talking about is for the investors. By the nature of the product, the users have powerful adversaries and are probably operating in secret. You can't expect their use cases to show up in the marketing, that would defeat the purpose.
Sure, you get the bad with the good. There are definitely unsavory things going on under the covers. But you have to weigh that against the misbehavior of the powerful in a world where they're more difficult to coordinate against due to a underdeveloped crypto.
It's a trade off, but I think it's a worthwhile one.
This is the part I don't understand. How does cryptocurrency make it easier to coordinate people than all the other tools we have to coordinate people?
This happened with thepiratebay and DNS. It happened with wikileaks and paypal. It happened at the ISP level with Signal during recent unrest in Iran. It happens with the US banking system anytime somebody manages to get somebody else on one of the OFAC lists. It happens to would-be radicals on twitter all the time.
On the other hand, systems that don't involve implicit custodial trust don't have these problems, which is why journalists in China occasionally publish on Ethereum, because the Chinese censors don't have a single-point-of-failure to attack.
I don't think that currencies are an especially interesting application (although the wikileaks case is an example where they are relevant to group coordination). It's just that the currencies are what gets hyped because they're relevant to the investment side--without them, there's less money to build the other stuff.
Another example which I expect to emerge, but which I don't think has been developed yet, would be the use of NFT's in a successor system. If the leader of a movement gets apprehended or incapacitated and they don't check in after a certain number of blocks, then a contract moves the leadership token to their successor. This denotes the successor's signing keys as authoritative, and the leader's (presumably compromised) keys as deprecated. If you keep signatures on-chain you can also tell which ones were registered at a time when they were valid.
You couldn't do this on AWS, somebody would just compel AWS to remove the data they don't like, you need something like a blockchain. But it only works if enough people are running nodes to make attacking all of the node operators infeasible. For that you need to provide incentives, and now we're back to cryptocurrency.
For me it comes down to whether you think dissent is more important than preventing all of the shady business that goes on in secret online. I do, so I'm pro-crypto. The currency bit is an ugly necessity which I hope we can find a way to get rid of.
But there are myriad ways of coordinating without relying on a systems that involve implicit custodial trust. More so now than ever.
But I get the sense we're talking about different things here. I was talking about coordinating activities with groups of people. You seems to be talking about payment systems.
> If the leader of a movement gets apprehended or incapacitated and they don't check in after a certain number of blocks, then a contract moves the leadership token to their successor.
You could use blockchain for this, but equally you can use any of several other methods to achieve the same effect.
> For me it comes down to whether you think dissent is more important than preventing all of the shady business that goes on in secret online.
For me, this doesn't enter into is. I do think dissent is critically important. I don't see how blockchain is essential to doing that. Why bring in something as tainted as cryptocurrency when there are other options?
Suppose you're a journalist in a place with an oppressive government. You have information about government behavior that you expect will cause protests. You're not an activist though, so you don't want to actually plan those protests.
Suppose I'm an activist in the same country--I'll plan the protest--but we don't know each other. We've got a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend... kind of relationship.
Ideally you could post the information somewhere, and then our mutual friends could post annotations which validate it. They'd be attaching "I was there and I saw this happen" kind of information. I would then see this information because I explicitly/transitively trust people who have validated it. The government can inject disinformation about it, but it just gets ignored unless they manage to get us to explicitly trust their agents about this kind of thing (presumably this will be prohibitively expensive).
The government will find us and hurt us if they catch three or four of us coordinating in this way. But if there are thousands of us, it will be a different story. So we need to collect a critical mass of validations, and we need to plan the protest, and we need to do it in a way that the government can't prevent and which doesn't betray our actual identities to the government--at least not until we all show up at the protest site.
I'm working on this app, by the way. I intend to have pluggable backends so it won't be coupled to a specific blockchain--you could use it over ssh for instance, or a thumb drive, or via a shared S3 bucket--but it's the blockchain backends that I expect to be most useful in situations with many stakeholders and truly aggresive adversaries because it's not realistic to expect users to maintain the system of file transfers necessary to ensure that the annotations dataset converges in a way that gets the message and its validations from journalist to activist, or from activist to other activist.
Sneakernet / file transfer will be the first backend that I support. What should I support second?
What is tamper-resistant enough that the government can't remove the data, lacks dependency on a naming system which can be tampered with to hide the data, and is also public enough that all parties can access the data and know that the version they're accessing is the real one, if not a public blockchain?
Granted, there may be solutions that are not technically a blockchain. I'm curious about Kademlia DHT's, for instance. I wonder if SSB can be used here. But so far as I can tell, all serious contenders are, if not blockchains, blockchain-like.
Governments can't shut down crypto nearly as easily due to its decentralized nature.
I also find it interesting that the pro-cryptocurrency argument centers around being antigovernment. So it's a political thing, not a practical thing. That automatically means cryptocurrency has no chance of mainstream adoption. People who don't agree with the politics of it will avoid it because they don't want to be associated with those politics.
> Tech that mediates a relationship between two users should not give special powers to a third party.
It's not anti-government, it's anti-tampering. I'm most concerned with government tampering, but that's just me. I can exchange tokens with somebody who is concerned with alien tampering (something I don't worry about in the slightest) and we can all disagree about the "why" while still agreeing on the "what".
Maybe there's a subset of users that would prefer to have some authority they can appeal to when something goes wrong. That's fine, crypto isn't for them right now. But I suspect that those authorities will eventually abuse their position of trust. When it happens, I hope crypto is a nice enough place for them to turn to. As it stands there's a lot of work to do for that to be the case.
Many clear examples of it being used to coordinate in opposition to fiat because the governments can't be trusted. And it's working far as I can tell. We just don't hear about it in the first world because our culture is so apathetic about anything happening in poverty oppressed nations.
Worth adding I'm not pro-crypto or anti-government. For transparency I have less than $10 grand in crypto which is no big deal for me to lose overnight. I think there is a good enough case to invest but not enough to make it large part of my portfolio. I don't believe the hype but also think throwing it out with the bathwater is likewise unnecessarily absolutist.
"People who don't agree with the politics of it will avoid it because they don't want to be associated with those politics"
Tell that from the majority of crypto users who reside in the third world and derive actual value from it. They are not politically homogenous (leftists and rightists use crypto on the third world) and most probably don't care much for decentralization as a means of political action. They just want something that works and is less corrupt than the incumbent system.
The advantages of crypto should become pretty clear at that point.
The idea that it's just criminal enterprises that benefit from being able to participate in markets without interference is laughable at best given the increased interconnectedness between banks and the regulators themselves, especially not even 6 months after a rash of major banking failures within the traditional financial markets.
There is very little reason to have a favorable opinion of the SEC following the 08 collapse given their own hand in it or the banking failures existing now, especially when they refuse to clarify their position on what is or is not a security so people CAN legally operate in the space. It appears to many both inside and outside of the space that the SEC is wielding its regulatory arm to create winners and losers, and with their own track record it's a failing proposition.
It may be hyperbolic, but the holocaust was a legal activity in Nazi occupied territory.
Lucky enough VC is now going to ml