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Cryptocurrency as the next significant stage for computing technology, not just an investment


andihow

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maybe i should have posted this in the bitcoin thread but i feel like the topic in its entirety deserves its own. any other SHARKS on watmm? I made like 30 bucks on Ethereum today. whos trading/holding what? bitcoin? litecoin? kanyecoin? anyone have any theories or speculation on anything?

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  • 1 year later...

Cryptocurrency discussion thread.  Anyone heavily invested?  Invested a little bit?  Obsessed with it?  Think it's a scam?

 

It's most definitely not and once you understand the value it provides to society you will never go back

  • Unseizable and invisible (brainwallet)
  • Indestructible (all we need is ONE copy of the blockchain to survive and we can restart from there and know for a fact it's a real copy by seeing if the chain hashes backwards correctly, it's like a horcrux)
  • Uncensorable (use Tor and Monero)
  • Sound money, can implement any monetary policy trivially, such as deflationary i.e. holding gives you gains by definition
  • Decentralized, can't be controlled and manipulated by individuals at the expense of others (except 51% attack which is unfeasible for heavily decentralized coins)
  • Cryptographically secure

 

I can go on and on.  If you know you know, if you don't I suggest you research.  Don't miss out on the next stage of human social organization.  Decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs).  Trustless smart contracts.  Identityless store of value.  This isn't even just about finance or currency.  It's also not just about Bitcoin, that was just the first step.  

 

  • Bitcoin = first cryptocurrency, most battle tested, decentralized, and integrated with society
  • Ethereum = first robust smart contract platform
  • Monero = first robust anonymous coin

It will continue to get even weirder.  There are now coins that don't use blockchains in the traditional sense, but instead Directed Acyclid Graphs (DAGs) such as Byteball and Raiblocks, which can be visualized as many blockchains split off at arbitrary points and forks, but always moving forward and never looping backward.  They aren't quite as robust yet but they will be soon.  Who knows what else will come.  

 

Regardless of the technology, the most important impact will be in third world countries without sound monetary policies, and instead hyperinflated currencies ruled by dictators.  Most of us don't see the need for cryptocurrencies because we live in first world utopias in comparison, but these people can be holding money one day and have it be worth 10x less the next day.  They need access to the global economy free from their country's exploitative shit currencies, and cryptocurrencies give them that

 

Ironically, if centralized fiat currencies were cryptocurrencies, they would be the type called "shitcoins" i.e. garbage coins pre-mined and controlled by a few people.

 

Edited by cyanobacteria
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There are serious environmental concerns to cryptocurrencies but they only apply to Proof of Work (PoW) blockchains which require heavy computation to create.  As described above, DAG based cryptocurrencies, and even in the future Proof of Stake (PoS) blockchains, will cut down on environmental costs significantly

 

Furthermore and most important, the goal is to eliminate all centralized monetary corruption inherent to fiat currencies.  If we have cryptocurrencies as widespread financial assets, anyone in any country can take part in a global economy.  We don't need permission from any government, we don't need support, we don't need shit.  The cat is out of the bag, it's too late.  Never again will people be dependant upon predatory banking systems and the corrupt centralized fiat producers of the country they live in.  This will eliminate so much market efficiency that we can eventually

 

  • Eliminate all predatory money transfer fees
  • Eliminate all predatory banking fees
  • Eliminate all predatory purposeful-inflation economic value extraction perpetrated by centralized authorities
  • Eliminate many financial service industries such as brokerage firms and investment firms.  Your stocks can be cryptocurrency tokens whose ownership you can prove with your private keys instead of through an agreement that a centralized authority will just say you own the stocks.  Dividends can then be distributed in the form of some other dividend distribution cryptocurrency automatically, programmatically, without any human intervention or service fees
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In the same way that the internet brought free, uncensorable word-speech to the world, cryptocurrencies will soon bring free, uncensorable financial-speech to the world.  This is the most important point.

 

The internet let anyone say anything they want to anyone securely.  It lets anyone receive any information they want and transmit any information they want.  But before it was just text and raw data.  There was no linkage to the real world i.e. physical objects

 

Now that there is an unsensorable means of financial information communication, that linkage exists - a political prisoner can merely publish a cryptocurrency address and receive as much financial help as donators want to give, without anyone ever being capable of stopping that from happening.  The same goes to any organization.  This of course allows illegal things, but it's impossible to stop that by definition

 

All new freedoms allow bad people to do new even worse things.  That's the nature of freedom.  But the benefits always outweigh the cost.  Free speech allowed criminals to communicate secretly.  Is that worth censoring it?  No.  Similarly free financial speech will allow the same, but the benefits for humanity vastly outweigh the drawbacks, especially since much of the "drawbacks" are merely defined to be drawbacks by those in power instead of being actual legitimate drawbacks (for instance drug illegality which makes no real sense and clearly isn't based on an interest in public health)

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So, how much money have you made? Have you gained your fortune?

 

Yes, it's this simple. Regardless of all the theories you could attach to it, imo.

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I'm just waiting for a great economic collapse, it's way overdue.

 

Stock market is bursting at the seams yo

Edited by Gocab
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Personally think a collapse like 07/08 is unlikely, but a downturn is around the corner. Most likely due to the ending of the current quantitative easing policies of the FED and equivalents around the world. Interest rates must return to normal again and it'll inevitably harm the current bubble-growth. So, yeah, the current growth-rates don't reflect actual growth but rather a bubble. But I don't think the underlying actual economy has much to lose. As it's still in the recovery phase from the previous collapse, imo.

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Bitcoin and other cryptos seem too scammy, volatile and cumbersome to be a viable replacement for fiat money. I wouldn't mind alternatives and a radical re-thinking of the current money system, but I am not sure cryptocurrencies are the answer. 

Edited by azatoth
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Coin farms are not a solution to anything.

 

I take that back, it's a great way to launder and increase the value of black market money.

Edited by Gocab
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I bought some bitcoin, ether, and bitcoin cash a couple of months ago. Things went well and then it didn't. I don't mind though because I haven't really lost any money yet.

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it has a lot of potentially desirable qualities, but moving to cryptocurrency will not remove the vicissitudes of human politics from economic decisionmaking.

 

25:35 onwards, but the whole talk is well worth it:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2Zpkz7lK-s

 

it's notoriously speculative and there just isn't enough confidence from enough people in it for its value to stabilise and for it to actually become viable. furthermore the likelihood of established interests just giving up their control over the current system in order to make way for a something more flexible and egalitarian is about zero.

 

wait and see, is what many people (myself included) are thinking.

Edited by usagi
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mate of mine spent £150 on ripple (xrp) a few weeks before xmas and he's now at well over a grand.

 

he hasn't cashed out yet but i don't blame him. it looks like it's on a fucking warpath at the moment.

 

XRP is a garbage centralized shitcoin, he should not be holding it.

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older IT boffin head mates are all over it, but i'm not prepared to risk my hard earned equity for anything currently, worked too god damn hard to get a foothold

 

but still get regular updates, "wanna invest?" emails but the only people who i've seen profit to an extensive extent so far were laundering from shenanigans anyway

 

its a seriously interesting subject though, so cheers for the links, but 2018 has enough on its plate

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Since I live in a wood shack in Siberia, what is the monetary value of bitcoin really based on? What makes it 'scarce' enough so that it has some sort of value? Is it the cryptography and the computing power needed to encrypt/decrypt stuff? And all that real money being spent buying bitcoins and paying transaction fees at the end of that cycle is picked up by the lucky guy with the best rig?

 

Last month, hackers stole 56 million eur from NiceHash wallet in our country. So I think hackers are the new bank robbers and that might be a serious security issue with the whole concept.

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USD money supply is about $14 trillion (going by M2, a decent measure of money supply). That means the "market cap" of USD is about 14 trillion.

 

BTC has been around $250 billion in market cap.

 

14000000000 / 250000000 = 56

 

there's one fifty-sixth as much money in BTC as there is in USD.

 

almost 2 percent

 

that's enormous for a home-made currency that has major technical obstacles to scalability. i think major gains from its current value will be slow.

 

 

 

regarding the other cryptos, it seems likely that some better designed coins will soon supplant BTC. the question is, what is the fate of cryptos? what purpose do they really serve? 

 

all the talk of "cryptography" falls flat on my ears. any webpage that is https is encrypted. hyping encryption as though it's a virtue is dumb. of course it's encrypted.

 

i think the core value of cryptos will remain their black market significance for a while. the coin that wins out will be the one that keeps the criminals anonymous and happy.

 

the only really significant value i can detect in cryptos, aside from that, is the appeal of bypassing the "establishment" and having a currency with a money supply that isn't determined by a government.

 

i could see a crypto catching on generally. would be interested to hear people talk of the virtues of the different coins' tech.

Edited by very honest
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