scottiebarnes

But does it disgust you when companies discriminate based on age/gender/sexual orientation/race/disability/religion/etc?

Should corporations be accountable to society in some way, or do we trust them to "do the right thing"?

https://twitter.com/LukeDashjr/status/1593227756841578496

Go figure

Relevant 'The Wire' clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBdGOrcUEg8

I mean, I guess you're right in that nobody gambles with the intention of losing.

Tech valuations and headcount grew ridiculously in the last few years. Ex: FB head count: https://www.statista.com/statistics/273563/number-of-faceboo...

If people are surprised at the size of layoffs, I'm guessing its their first recession?

What holds up gold or bitcoin is firstly the trust of the society that adopts it, and secondly the inability for any party to rapidly debase it.

This is how you end up with the US government installing a military base over a huge stash of gold, called Fort Knox. They don't do the same for silver and copper.

Whose the sucker when they tell you that limitless, growing, roll-over debt is a actually a feature of the system? Who pays the price when a government hands over billions of dollars to bailout the financial/auto/x industry?

> assets linked to governments or value generating corporations will have value for the foreseeable future

"foreseeable future" means whats exactly? UK pension funds were about to collapse until they were bailed out by the government. How foreseeable are events like these, wiping out people who have otherwise done nothing wrong?

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/oct/06/bank-of-eng...

Obviously you're not going around trading ramen and cigarettes, but if you live in a some closed system like a prison, then yes, anything of value can be used as a currency. History shows many societies have used many different things as money. Eventually gold out-competed those monies and became the de facto standard for money. You forget that US dollars were originally promissory notes for redeeming gold at a bank; this is what gave US notes value (trust that you could get gold for the notes), and the de-pegging of gold gave birth to the experiment that is modern day banking.

Any currency or "thing", be it fiat, crypto, or commodity, is given value by people who trust and believe in it. If you get more people to adopt and have faith in it, its value goes up. Once people stop believing in it and seek to escape it, its value goes down.

This is why oil is priced in US Dollars; this creates demand for dollars and gives the US government power. This is also why the Brtish pound tanked recently; people didn't like the direction of the newly elected British government, and sought to sell their GBP denominated assets.

So if your definition of ponzi scheme is "people trying to get more people to adopt it because it enriches them", then yes, all currency systems are "ponzis", they compete and have incentive to take value from other currencies.

The value of open source networks is adoption, and people will not adopt a crypto that has been hijacked and controlled by any entity.

The process of any "thing" organically becoming money looks like the following: 1) Collectable 2) Store of value 3) Medium of exchange 4) Unit of account

Gold followed this path over 8000 years as it emerged as the strongest money through international trade. Societies in many places used different kinds of money at different points in times: feathers, gems, giant immovable boulders, etc. But those monies were always displaced by technology, when they could be collected or mined faster or more efficiently, resulting in debasement. Gold was the best store of value because it could not be rapidly debased; its scarcity allows it to only inflate by a few percent a year, and it maintains a pretty constant stock-to-flow ratio.

And so being common enough to be popular, but rare enough to be difficult to obtain, gold became the world's "money". Ironically central banks still hoard gold, with the US having the largest storehold in the world. However the US and world powers would terminate the gold standard, unpegging dollars to redeemable gold, allowing for government control over the creation, distribution, and management of money. Historically, ancient fiats have failed, and I suspect with a long enough time horizon, 100% of all fiat currencies will fail. But we now run an experiment in which the ability to grow unlimited debt is a "feature", where central banks determine the cost of money for society, where the creation of new money or its policies is easy, and decided by a few.

Bitcoin is a decentralized, censorship resistant, permissionless network. It acts a ledger, a way of keeping track of nominal value in a way where anyone can participate (send/receive, create addresses) from anywhere in the world. It is open source programmable money. Compared to gold, it is magnitudes cheaper to transmit, store, and secure. The protocols are defined and transparent which makes its creation rate predictable. The supply is finite, and so it cannot be easily debased, making it a powerful store of value.

From my perspective, there is no "web3" community. The consequence of easy money is you get a lot of bad products that inevitably fail. This is not limited to crypto, this is the tech industry in general (social networking, big data, social commerce, location based social, etc.). Groupon, Google Wave, Foursquare, delivery service X, etc, they come and go. So I don't put much stock into the hype, there will always be fads and trends.

> level 2 networks haven't lived up to their initial hype

https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-capacity Lightning capacity is up and to the right: this is people running nodes, risking their money on beta software. Nodes are up, channels are up. Will this be it? Who knows. I'm a patient person, laying a railway cross country takes time.

What you're also missing out is on how the current monetary system and monetary base work, and why central banking is problematic. You've lost probably more than 10% of your own buying power over the last year at no fault of your own, and you never questioned it. The housing market is now impossible for average people to enter (especially in cities), as easy, low interest money has inflated home values and the house price to income ratio has gone steadily up and to the right. These are signals of broken money; this is what blockchains are looking to solve.

^ Correct url

> And your statistics is not saying much. Relevant is real life.

The statistics are real life: they represent people committing time and resources by hosting nodes and risking their btc to use on a developing, experimental live network.

But what you're doing is the equivalent of looking at early 90's internet, not understanding it, and pronouncing, 'This is stupid, nobody will use this 'Internet' to meet other people. People aren't going to order their pizzas online. Just ask anyone on the street; nobody knows what internet is, and therefore this is a failure.'

Mmmm, I understand you're looking for a convenient way to mathematically equate the two on a per transaction basis for comparison's sake, but its just really difficult. For example, your several bitcoin networks in parallel doesn't really exist, because separate networks running in parallel are not interoperable (Bitcoin vs Litecoin). You lose the utility of network effects, etc.

Its like comparing energy costs of bicycles and ocean freighters, but no amount of bicycles could ever tow freight across an ocean.