2,639 karma · joined December 10, 2016
Opinions expressed are solely my own and do not express the views or opinions of my employer, friends, clients, etc.
Wonder how they determine if a review is unbiased or not. Any attempt at automating this process means someone else will figure a way to game the system over time.
Going through and implementing the nips for nostr is really fun. You can make a mvp version of a client in a afternoon.
Then proceeds to handpick what the real world uses of btc should be excluded from the argument.
No coiners are a special bunch.
To the people saying theres absolutely no use of cryptocurrencies, say that to people who were able to save some of their money when fleeing war torn regions. Tell that to people who whos pay-checks are getting stolen by banks. Tell that to people who are finally getting access to loans in impoverished regions. Tell that to activists banned by governments who get to fight another day. Tell that to people who’s governments devalued their currency who has basically got cut out of a way to trade.
Yes criminals use crypto! But these crimes didn’t magically appear because of crypto. Dont forget fiat has had a monopoly on these crimes before 2009.
https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/environment/air-land-wate...
If you show me one price and zoink! charge me another price you are deceiving me. That pretty much fraud to me and I will avoid your services.
So yes! IT IS the fault of fiat currencies.
The easiest way to withdraw my money was to ask the bank to convert my USD in to my local currency, and if I do that I lose close to 6% of my salary.
If I wanted to withdraw my money as USD, the only time I was allowed to do it is if I provided the bank with a valid flight ticket to prove I was going out of the country, and even then, I could only withdraw less than 40% of my monthly salary this way. (the % changes everytime the central bank wanted)
Every time I see people hating on crypto all I see is someone who either bet the farm on a get rich quick scheme or someone who comes from a very privileged background who haven't had a part of pey-check stolen by banks.
If you can't manage your own coins then btc is not for you, use fiat, trust the bankers[1][2] to hold your money.
[1]https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bank-america-customers-report... (January 18, 2023)
But parent's comment was aimed at the one lane for self driving cars comment.
So I don’t see how you comment could apply to it. Yes we have roads leading up to almost everyone’s house. But in the case of a dedicated self driving lane proposal it would be as impractical As giving everyone a railway track leading to their home.
> Trains are not owned by individuals.
Exactly. So instead of building infrastructure to improve moving a few people at a time, improving infrastructure that helps move a few hundred at a time seems like a better investment.
I have noticed doing this has massively reduced the amount of time I spend there.
[1] https://mashable.com/article/set-twitter-timeline-most-recen...
> A healthier starting point is a philosophical and systems examination of transparency, censorship, and how information proliferates, followed by systems and mechanisms that facilitate a favorable outcome. Anecdotal, sensational stories (like this Twitter Hunter Biden laptop cover-up) are exactly that: misleading anecdotes. They aren’t useful, and being caught up in them is not healthy.
This is the key takeaway in OPs post for me. I don’t think it matters if this is the right, left, up or down it’s about finding better ways to communicate that doesn’t depend on centralized organizations that are prone to corruption of this sort.
This keeps happening and we keep using centralized authorities, even when we start building systems that start off decentralized, they somehow end up being centralized. There's something wrong in the way we organize and think about things. We need to find a better way.
Try to set up an instance of mastodon, you don't need that much hardware if you are only setting it up for yourself. The official documentation is straightforward and easy to follow along.
The fun part is once you set it up you can interact with other people on other nodes, the more people you discover the more things you suddenly start to discover, I was trying this out for the past few days and honestly it feels like discovering the web for the first time. So many interesting people so many interesting topics.
In a lot of crypto currency circles people were questioning FTX, many warned about leverage.
* There can only be 21 million btc.
* If someone says you can leverage BTC they are selling you something that probably doesn't exist.
* If you don't hold your own BTC you don't own any BTC.
It's an alternative system that helps people store value.
>>take away retail and these coins will have much much less demand
I was talking about people who don't do due diligence and get caught in scams. Are you implying that retails is somehow the only ones that get duped by scammers like Sam Bankman-Fried ? There's plenty of people in retail who have done better than some so called institutions both in the crypto currency markets and the stock market.
Plenty of people in the crypto currency space were not so quick to trust that conman Sam Bankman-Fried. Many were even warning about him.
p.s Not everyone wants to take part in crypto currency markets to get rich fast. There's plenty of legit reasons for people to be in these markets. Its the get rich quick crowd, the scammers like Sam Bankman-Fried and the folk sitting in the sidelines critiquing it without offering a better valid alternative who are actually the problem.
FTX was a regulated exchange, so your alternative to crypto currencies is then broken as well, the regulators didn't then do their job, this scammer Sam Bankman-Fried was allowed to create fake money out of thin air and the regulators were not able to stop them.
If you can't follow the mantra "not your keys not your crypto currencies" or if you don't have the technical ability to hold your own keys then don't take part in it.
You let someone else hold your crypto currencies, don't take the time to check if the said people holding your money has any validity and then you lose all your money? it unfortunately is your fault for trusting a scammer, you got duped by a scammer, just because someone can run a Superbowl advert, get main stream media to call them an amazing vegan who's such an amazing role models to us all, or hire a few celebrities to say good about their company doesn't make them someone you can trust.
Crypto currencies and block-chains are still a very young and developing industry, its risky, there are thieves like Sam Bankman-Fried and then there are politicians and other special interest groups who will get in to bed with these scammers and try to take your hard earned money from you. Don't be a victim to this kind of scum.
Crypto currencies and blockchains are here to stay.
>> “if you can’t confidently exchange it for illegal drugs, it’s not a currency”
What?
An ecg device saved my dad's life, it caught a weird heart murmur he was having and alerted the doctors to an issue with his heart. He's now better becuase we detected it early, its so wonderful there are people like you working on these devices that makes modern medicine do its thing. Thank you!
Also, how do you prepare your coffee?
I have been feeling kinna the same about the internet for a while now too, there's so much noise on the internet now its hard to tell if you are talking to a real person with a real interest or someone trying to market something. But luckily, there are a few corners of the internet where you can discover new things.
For example, small reddit communities are still a lot like the old internet, you get to have really different perspective on things you care about in smaller communities. If you can ignore the bad, 4chan's /biz /g and /fit are interesting communities to lurk in.
When I was younger, mmorpg's were the best place to meet REALLY interesting people at, but these days there's not enough time to grind and hang out with people and other people my age don't have enough time to grind. Kinna sad though, but MMORPGS were one of the best things about the internet for me, it helped me learn a lot about making friends from all over the world, helped me meet people with really different interests than me. Trading, organizing/planning and archiving things together with a group of people who started off as total strangers and ended up being like family was a really wonderful experience. ESPECIALLY as an introvert this was one of the best ways I met people when I was younger, and some of them still remain my friends to this day. It was actually mmos that got me in to software development.
As for now, I am passionate about blockchains, I don't really care about how much BTC is right now, or what the price is going to be 10 years from now. But I like the promise of decentralized networks. To me, I find being able to put something up on a system and having the guarantee that it would be there many years later without anyone being able to take it down is a pretty powerful freedom. Yes there are people using this ability for bad/evil but its a technology that's here to stay no matter what anyone feels or thinks about it, and so if I can be atleast one of the people who build something that would help someone in a positive way I can go to sleep happy. Thanks to this passion of my I have met and had the pleasure to work with folks who genuinely care about making systems that benefit others.
Wow, this was long, if you are still here thanks for reading!
So the whole debate here, as far as I understand is, how ethical is all this. Is it ethical to squeeze every last cent out of a person looking to house themselves and their family?