Who cares what Satoshi said back then. What Bitcoin has become now is a complete sham with early adopters stoking the flames of FOMO to get rich quick at the expense of everyone else.
I wish cryptocurrency fans would stop smelling their own farts for once and realize they aren't the absolute geniuses in finance that they claim to be. It's arrogant.
And I wish cryptocurrency detractors would stop lick state boot, calling for bans and throwing out stupid arguments like energy usage.
While many in the coin space are arrogant from ignorance, I would argue that the detractors are universally arrogant with their ignorance.
Bitcoin people are trying to decentralize the world. Make the powerful less powerful. Free humanity from debt economies, inflation, weak fiscal policy and the slow theft of fruits of your labor.
AntiBitcoin people are trying to centralize the world. Empower the already powerful. Stamp that boot onto the face of humanity forever. Ensure that the state can always rob its people of their savings and lifes work, and force compliance with weak fiscal policy, negative interest rates.
I think I know which is on the correct side of history.
>Bitcoin people are trying to decentralize the world. Make the powerful less powerful. Free humanity from debt economies, inflation, weak fiscal policy and the slow theft of fruits of your labor.
I have looked at lots of potential money systems and I'd say most cryptocurrencies fall into the usual deflation speculation death that lots of government currencies (especially during the gold standard) have fallen victim to.
In fact, most currencies are heading down that route. The euro and yen are prime examples. It's kind of funny how people shout about inflation the most when it's been super low for a long time. They complain about inflation when their real problem is that they have no bargaining power because inflation target policies are also supposed to inflate wages. Bitcoin also doesn't solve the rentier problem with land. If your purchasing power magically increases with Bitcoin then the land owner just gets more of your money.
I am really tired of the anti debt crap. The only reason people would be against debt is that there are crazy people who are out of touch with reality who insist on permanent positive interest rates. Just think about the absurdity of hating debt when interest rates are negative. It's simply illogical.
>AntiBitcoin people are trying to centralize the world. Empower the already powerful.
Deflation is empowering the rich. That's what positive real interest rates do. If you have a lot of Bitcoin and Bitcoin goes up in value then you get more gains than a poor person with very few Bitcoin. Inflation and negative interest rates hurt those who are rich the most and hurt those who have very little the least.
>Stamp that boot onto the face of humanity forever.
Is this supposed to be some kind of joke?
>Ensure that the state can always rob its people of their savings and lifes work, and force compliance with weak fiscal policy, negative interest rates.
Savings are literally just a reduction in demand for labor. Reducing your demand for labor doesn't make anyone wealthier by itself. It's only because there are other people who want that labor that saving even earns a return. You are basically paid to reduce your demand so that other, more productive people get to have the scarce labor. If you reduce your demand for labor and nobody ends up demanding the freed up labor then you basically worked for nothing. The entire point of inflation and negative interest rates are to get this fact into your damn head. You are piling up a bunch of potatoes that spoil before you eat them. Stop that.
I fundamentally disagree with everything you have written, from definitions, to target of harms, to outcomes. I think your philosophy is dangerous and harmful.
So, No, I will not stop that. Thank Satoshi that I don't need to.
I choose to opt of your authoritarian and paternalistic
philosophies. I will always convert fruits of my labor into hard money, where you cannot hurt me.
It's true that the ledger is public but it isn't necessarily tied to your identity. You can use exchanges that do not require KYC to convert to a privacy coin like Monero, and then move that to fiat exchanges like Coinbase etc.
What exorbitant network fees are you talking about? For me it was only in 2017 when it was significant, but still smaller than what transferwise or international bank transfer usually takes from me (BTW make sure that you use a native SegWit address or lightning wallet for efficiency)
What "exorbitant network and miner fees"? According to https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/ transactions with 3 sat/byte are clearing within the next block. For a typical transaction of 400 bytes, that's around 17 cents.
Apparently? There is no real proof this has brought mostly normal people in Nigeria out of poverty, at least at large enough numbers to be believed. This is just some yarn spun up by proponents of cryptocurrency to rally more to their cause.
I'd be shocked if most people in Nigeria even have a personal computer and reliable internet. That's how impoverished most of them are.
> I'd be shocked if most people in Nigeria even have a personal computer and reliable internet. That's how impoverished most of them are.
I did a little research on this for a job last year and internet access/mobile phone ownership numbers are far higher than I expected. Mobile payments are already a very common form of transaction in Africa. The Gates Foundation mentioned that one of the big issues with their current infrastructure is middle-men fees when talking about remittances between African countries through to mobile credit, so crypto is actually a strong candidate to improve that area too.
Nigeria has a cell phone adoption rate of around 50% currently. People can trade crypto, do banking, money transfers, etc. on a cell phone. The idea that a desktop computer is required is a very old-school mindset. Similar to your "everyone in Nigeria is impoverished" comment.
Also, it's not about getting rich. It's about surviving when the government has all power to freeze your bank accounts, inflate the currency, etc.
Google: "what percentage of nigerians have cell phones"
Answer: "While Nigeria's mobile penetration rate is lower than developed markets, it is higher than the average across sub-Saharan Africa, standing at around 50% as of 2018, and estimated to rise to 130 million or about 60%-65% of the total population by 2025."
Also: Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Which, in this case, is to say that it may be that "there is no real proof that this has brought mostly normal people in nigeria out of poverty." But did you RTFA? It talks about how crypto is helping normal people. So there isn't evidence against this idea either. Maybe we should try to find out, rather than be dismissive.
Honestly, I vastly prefer OpenPOWER over ARM from a consistency in implementation perspective. Not to mention, at least with POWER9, no mandatory binary blobs or opaque management engine chips that can't be properly audited.
OpenPOWER is extremely expensive though. There is no universe in which I would pay several times the price for a high-powered x86 gaming PC/workstation just to have an open-source CPU and hardware like Talos. It has to be both open and affordable.
Fun fact: Ari Weinstein, the fellow mentioned in the article, is the guy behind the Shortcuts app baked into iOS (formerly known as Workflow - which I believe acquired Y Combinator funding). He's a world class prodigy, so seeing him tinker with Amigas before most of us even started Kindergarden is something to behold.
I wager once people have to start going back to work and all the free government money dries up, there will be a run on crypto to realize their gains en-masse, and this will trigger a massive wipe out for many latecomers.
Frankly, cryptocurrency being invented and created was a huge mistake for society at large. I hope the comeuppance isn't super destructive outside of cryptocurrency circles.
> I hope the comeuppance isn't super destructive outside of cryptocurrency circles.
This is one of my concerns too. I sock away a healthy % of my income in to traditional investments, and I aspire to one day own a home I can raise a family in.
The current asset bubble, which I personally believe is the wedge driving cryptocurrency apart from reality, is really hurting those of us with these rather mundane aspirations.
It depends... I think cryptocurrencies might be luring clueless people away from the stock market and into the crypto market, which is probably a good thing for the stock market even if it means lower returns in the short term.
Good in theory, but the stock market is booming and so is everything else. In the media this has recently been called the "everything bubble" and TINA (there is no alternative).
> Frankly, cryptocurrency being invented and created was a huge mistake for society at large. I hope the comeuppance isn't super destructive outside of cryptocurrency circles.
Satoshi Nakamoto did nothing wrong: hard to imagine, but Bitcoin started out as a crummy C++ GUI Windows application hosted on SourceForge and adopted almost exclusively by batshit insane people. It had no value: you could CPU mine it on any ordinary Windows PC. Many people refused to do even that because of how worthless BTC was at the time.
Enter the Libertarian/profiteer cohort, and the rest is history. Really think a bunch of you need to redirect your anger at the ICO game. Try to imagine Vitalik Buterin hard selling a clear gray market IPO on Reddit in combination with a high pressure countdown timer, and lots of fancy lawyers and Swiss foundations. That — the fact so many bitcoins were raised so easily for so little — is what unleashed the hellfire shillnado that has become synonymous with cryptocurrency in the modern era.
I'm still not sure I agree that Satoshi did nothing wrong, per se. But I really appreciate what you're saying, as this does afford some separation of the art (Bitcoin and Co.) from the artist (Satoshi).
Satoshi (whether it be he, she, or they) went into creating Bitcoin intended as a peer to peer cash that was easy to spend and outside of government control. Unfortunately, at least in the case of Bitcoin, it has turned into this slow, unwieldy "commodity" that is now rebranded as digital gold.
I do liken cryptocurrency as a sort of voluntary "redistribution of the wealth" but from the peanut gallery to early adopters and the already objectively "rich".
This really feels like a kind of "screw you, I've gotten mine" form of capitalism.
Perhaps... but cryptocurrency makes this far more blatant and obvious. It really is sold as some kind of pipe-dream and a miracle financial instrument.
Yet tell that to those who lost their shirts on Mt. Gox, Binance, any of the black swan events within the past few years, etc.
I wish cryptocurrency fans would stop smelling their own farts for once and realize they aren't the absolute geniuses in finance that they claim to be. It's arrogant.