xtal posted:

I was talking about Putin, who owned your state in much the same way you described.

divabot posted:

my psychic powers tell me that if this guy didn't star in greece.txt, he should have

xtal posted:

That's really up to each group to decide for themselves voluntarily. I don't make any claims aside from that. But if you can't imagine a society where people don't need the state to do everything for them, maybe that's a you problem? It's a pessimistic and defeatist attitude to say "that world would be poo poo because people don't do anything, and by the way, I won't either." Be the change you want to see in the world, P. Barnes!!

Shumagorath posted:

Mimesweeper posted:

they printed about a billion "dollars" worth of tether out of thin air, boy this cryptocurrency sure is better than filthy fiat eh?

Powershift posted:

They changed their wording to say tether is backed by assets, not cash. So they print a billion dollars, buy bitcoin with it, bitcoin goes up, they now have 2 billion dollars worth of bitcoin, print another billion tethers, and so on and so forth.

orange juche posted:

Holy gently caress this is exactly what they are doing isn't it.

wid posted:

If anything, this just makes me sad at the state of government oversight on finance regulations. Scams have adapted with technology while regulators have not. But then again, MLMs are still legal so I guess it's more like capitalism at work, where the fear of shutting down new business ventures is bigger than the fear of new ventures being scams that could ruin a few people. The real people is "a few people" is now scaled by the internet which means the entire planet is at stake.

LordArgh posted:

Why number go up

quote:

When you see a large Tether “print,” said Harborne, it means a handful of wealthy clients have essentially preordered batches of tethers, days in advance, to then dump on the market—often before it’s begun to surge. Tethers are useful to these large holders, who can trade them—paired to Bitcoin, Ether, Litecoin and other coins—on high-liquidity exchanges that don’t accept fiat currencies.

divabot posted:

tether

this is a guy from iFinex company Ethfinex, explaining their current acceptable story for what tethers are doing


now this is bitfinex, so it's lies. but they believe that this is an acceptable lie - even as it's a direct description of how to manipulate a crypto market with tether printing.

Clocks posted:

I have a question. One of the only "real" arguments I see about "blockchain/cryptocurrency is the future!" is the fact that it's decentralized. How would this work on an actual currency and what are the actual benefits? Obviously I'm aware that centralized banks/governments have hosed up (hyperinflation from simply printing money for example) but my imagination is too weak to imagine how a decentralized currency would, well, work. (I suspect this is some kind of libertarianism type handwavium "privatize everything! road upkeep!? someone else will pay for it!" but I'm legitimately curious what the use case is.)

Clocks posted:

I have a question. One of the only "real" arguments I see about "blockchain/cryptocurrency is the future!" is the fact that it's decentralized. How would this work on an actual currency and what are the actual benefits? Obviously I'm aware that centralized banks/governments have hosed up (hyperinflation from simply printing money for example) but my imagination is too weak to imagine how a decentralized currency would, well, work. (I suspect this is some kind of libertarianism type handwavium "privatize everything! road upkeep!? someone else will pay for it!" but I'm legitimately curious what the use case is.)

Clocks posted:

I have a question. One of the only "real" arguments I see about "blockchain/cryptocurrency is the future!" is the fact that it's decentralized. How would this work on an actual currency and what are the actual benefits? Obviously I'm aware that centralized banks/governments have hosed up (hyperinflation from simply printing money for example) but my imagination is too weak to imagine how a decentralized currency would, well, work. (I suspect this is some kind of libertarianism type handwavium "privatize everything! road upkeep!? someone else will pay for it!" but I'm legitimately curious what the use case is.)

Clocks posted:

I have a question. One of the only "real" arguments I see about "blockchain/cryptocurrency is the future!" is the fact that it's decentralized. How would this work on an actual currency and what are the actual benefits? Obviously I'm aware that centralized banks/governments have hosed up (hyperinflation from simply printing money for example) but my imagination is too weak to imagine how a decentralized currency would, well, work. (I suspect this is some kind of libertarianism type handwavium "privatize everything! road upkeep!? someone else will pay for it!" but I'm legitimately curious what the use case is.)

klafbang posted:

Think of this as using bit-torrent instead of downloading from a web-site. Using bit-torrent you can get a file even if the original host is no longer available. Using bit-torrent also makes it a hell of a lot easier to illegally download stuff because there is no central server to stop or do forensics on. Bitcoin has a lot of the same characteristics: for better and for worse, it is much harder to control money on a blockchain.

Mimesweeper posted:

The ledger is public and available to everyone, law enforcement has never had any trouble following the money when they feel like investigating something.

klafbang posted:

Think of this as using bit-torrent instead of downloading from a web-site. Using bit-torrent you can get a file even if the original host is no longer available. Using bit-torrent also makes it a hell of a lot easier to illegally download stuff because there is no central server to stop or do forensics on. Bitcoin has a lot of the same characteristics: for better and for worse, it is much harder to control money on a blockchain.

This has genuine advantages if you live in a country where you cannot trust banks and governments. I was surprised when I had to get a bank account in Russia; I was told to be careful not to show my Mastercard to the teller and especially not let them see my PIN; they genuinely didn't trust their banks. Countries doing hyper-inflation exhibit the problem at the state level.

Bitcoiners take that to the extreme and don't trust banks and governments in first world countries and believe that using bitcoin is better because it removed control, ignoring that money politics can be good (see for example how Iceland and even greece are recovering after the 2008 crisis). Inflation is a very good thing because it keeps the economy going, etc.
[...]
TL;DR: bitcoin is inherently inefficient by design so you should only use it if you need the characteristics (trustlessness) it provides. Nobody who can actually mine bitcoins needs that.

HELLOMYNAMEIS___ posted:

I have a couple of friends who have Bitcoin, so I got them each this coin and this bill as gifts. The other commented that "heh, that bill could actually be a paper wallet, so that it would really be worth 1 bitcoin!". I asked how that would work, since the Ron Paul Bitcoin check image has always confused me in this regard, and he was like "well, a paper wallet is where you print the private key to your wallet on paper" and I replied "but wouldn't the payer still have the private key? It was his originally, the 'paper wallet' is just a copy?". He was like "well, yeah, but you could use it to transfer the bitcoin to your own wallet - then it'd be yours!". It was then that I finally got paper wallets - and realized that the only way to tie Bitcoin to a physical asset is the one used by one of the first Bitcoin startups, where even the owner of the Bitcoin does not know the private key until a tamper-evident seal is broken. You transfer the Bitcoin to the address of the coin, and the only way to use it is to break the seal to get to the private key.

Coolguye posted:

so i know i've said some of this in this thread before (and the first part will definitely be below specifically your caliber), but there's new folks in here so i'm gonna repeat myself a bit.

blockchain technology, at its core, isn't some sort of fundamental revolution, despite what hype guys for the hippest new crypto might say. it is a vision of triple-entry bookkeeping as laid out by the economist Dr. Yuji Ijiri in the late 80s. so in addition to having a debit and a credit for a single transaction like you would see in your bank account, you also have a set of very detailed notes about the action that caused the transaction to occur. one transaction, 3 entries. the reason this is such a big deal is twofold:

1) accounting, obviously, is something that touches pretty much every industry out there. so despite being evolutionary rather than revolutionary, blockchains could affect so much that people still need to take notice across disciplines.
2) the switch from single entry to double entry bookkeeping was one of the major technological advancements that enabled the mammoth expansion of commerce and prosperity that we called the European Renaissance. there's lots of reasons to be very excited about a similar explosion of wealth and prosperity that could be enabled if the next link in that chain is welded tight and strong.

aside from straight financial accounting, one of the other places that something that looks a lot like traditional accounting is ERP (enterprise resource planning) systems. this is how factories get the x tons of iron and y pounds of ball bearings they need to make z units of the whizbang 5000. in an ideal world, you would be able to trace a specific lot of iron and a specific delivery of ball bearings and tie them directly to a specific run of whizbang 5000s. that way in the case of a recall or inquiry you could easily tell EXACTLY where the problem was and fix it efficiently.

we do not live in that ideal world. we are not even close. ERP systems are bloated, complicated, and tend to be full of bugs and holes so procedures can be ignored or deliveries can be falsified or lost. some of this is execution, but much more of it is the basic inconsistencies surrounding their ethos. they basically ape the double-entry bookkeeping system wherein a courier hands off a package and it is scanned, which "debits" the package from him and "credits" it to the warehouse or factory. this works awkwardly at best because the system struggles to compare like and unlike. while two dollars are indistinguishable from one another to a financier, two packages are VERY distinguishable from one another to a manufacturer. and since one package can be converted into an arbitrary number of products, the equivalencies get even more complicated and weird.

blockchains legitimately offer a lot of relief in this because the bitcoin experiment has already solved the problem of arbitrary numbers of inputs becoming an arbitrary number of outputs in their basic transaction model, and the ethereum experiment has provided a really, really good start at arbitrary naming of these inputs and outputs in ERC20 tokens. so how to solve these long-standing problems in ERP systems are actually quite well understood and there's lots and lots of ways to go about solving them. i personally have given professional input on 7 such proposals. it's also extremely seductive to talk to consumers about - you can hear the robot voice at the start of that dumb meme video rationalizing about how someone would like to know where their stuff comes from. there is, fundamentally, a vision of the world where you could get a burger at mcdonald's with a QR code on the box, and you could scan that QR code to get a blockchain trace showing exactly which barn your beef came from, which field the wheat came from, where it was all slaughtered/processed, and what route it took to get to your corner mcdonald's. it's a lovely goal.

the thing is that people tend to stop thinking about this problem on the software side. certainly, one can make a blockchain that does all of this. one can even spin up a demo with mocked inputs to show exactly how it would work. but where, exactly does all of this data come from?

this is the tricky thing about ERP blockchains - they necessarily have a hardware component that finance/currency blockchains do not have. there's an entire hardware supply chain around the gathering of the data that would go into this blockchain - everything from scanners and scales to conveyors and containers. nobody likes to talk about that because it's boring, which is what makes the space so incredibly rife for scammers. they can present an extremely detailed vision of how their blockchain will work, and the economic model that would theoretically reward the distributed community of people that are witnessing and verifying each datapoint. it still all falls completely apart if you don't have a line of affordable and easy to use hardware or a plan to piggyback on existing designs (lol, gfl). but people tend not to think about that at all so they'll just dump millions into it and drive the price up, the founders will sell all of their made-from-nowhere funny money to excited rubes, and everyone acts surprised and appalled when they peel off into the sunset in a lambo loaded with cocaine because "the software was so good! everyone said it would work great!!"

spankmeister posted:

https://twitter.com/maasalan/status/1143786641909342209?s=09

spankmeister posted:

https://twitter.com/maasalan/status/1143786641909342209?s=09

NtotheTC posted:

I think my favourite thing about that is that American Buttcoiners will read it and start frothing at the mouth becuase an unregulated currency means the BAD GUYS get all that freedom too

klafbang posted:

Mining achieves consensus by requiring immense computational power to lie. This archives eventual consistency under probabilistic assumptions. Furthermore, the butt network is so fixated on the proof-of-concept way they do it that they cannot change it. Many of the other bitcoins, try other ways of mining. Some use other algorithms, some try instead doing usable computations instead of waste of time (for example, if the computing power used for playing the lottery to the tune of first world country energy consumption was instead used to research cancer, it would be a lot less dumb). Bitcoin cannot do that because the entire network is centralized to a few large actors (completely contrary to the design), and they do not want their investment in equipment that can mine butts efficiently in one single way.