The blockchain/cryptocurrency space is mostly fraudulent

Anyone old enough to remember what the press said in the 90s about the Internet will recognize the similarities.<p>The Internet is full of fraudulent websites. It&#x27;s full of porn. Email isn&#x27;t as warm as a hand-written letter. Communicating online isn&#x27;t professional. Etc.<p>Guess what, all those things were true but they turned out not to matter. You can do whatever else you want in a network that also carries porn. You learn to dodge fraud. Email is freaking convenient once everybody is using it, standards of behavior change, etc.<p>Cryptocurrency may be something or it may not. It&#x27;s in very early stages. Even those who are interested have trouble following everything that is happening. But it&#x27;s not even Internet-in-the-90s. It&#x27;s Internet-in-the-70s. You can be skeptical about it, you can ignore it, but I don&#x27;t see why someone would spend so much of their time being opposed to it.

&quot;“Any time the author mentions “central banking”, he seems to only be referring to the “US Federal Reserve” as if that was the only central bank in the world. The fact is that many central banks have failed in the past, and is failing today (see Venezuela). That is not a leftist or rightist position, that is just reality. He also makes a huge and inexcusable omission of the 2008 financial crisis and the Occupy movement under which Bitcoin was created from. This omission is intellectually dishonest as the Occupy movement and “too big to fail” are leftist movements that parallels Bitcoin’s development. In summary, the author’s thesis is incorrect and over simplified. Even if he was correct, the viewpoint is so narrow (looking at Bitcoin in the current American political context) that his analysis has limited use.”<p>Emojipaste is broken so… emoji face with rolling eyes….&quot;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;standardcrypto.wordpress.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;07&#x2F;30&#x2F;whiny-academic-whines-about-bitcoin&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;standardcrypto.wordpress.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;07&#x2F;30&#x2F;whiny-academ...</a>

One point of contention re: inflationary vs deflationary currencies:<p>When most Bitcoin proponents I&#x27;ve talked to say that Bitcoin is deflationary, they mean in the context of &quot;bitcoin as exclusive currency&quot;. I.e. there are theoretically a finite number of coins, so in a world where they&#x27;re actually used to buy milk and eggs they theoretically would increase in value over time, ergo deflationary.<p>Unfortunately I find most Bitcoin adherents have at best a partial understanding of monetary theory (not that I can claim total mastery of that subject) in particular when it comes to understanding deflation&#x2F;inflation. Inflationary systems can survive for many years in relative stability (cf. our current system) whereas in a deflationary system there is a financial disincentive to participate in the economy writ large, because your coins will be worth more if you just let them sit in your bank account. It encourages hoarding behaviour where large piles of coins sit dormant&#x2F;stagnant and the engine of economic activity shuts down with lack of activity.<p>I know people who bought 1000 bitcoins for pennies back in 2010 and they seem to be willingly blind to this, because of course bitcoin is not widely used. It&#x27;s just something you buy for $X hoping to ride the next bubble of speculation and sell for $(10 * X) so you can cash it back into fiat currency and retire at age 35 to your oceanfront property you just bought.<p>A vanishingly small number of bitcoin enthusiasts seem to <i>actually</i> want btc to replace all fiat currencies.

was ready to give this a shot, but what??<p>&gt; They do not meet any of the standard tests for money (especially the three classic criteria of store of value, medium of exchange, and unit of account)<p>That&#x27;s a really difficult claim to swallow. Especially without further explanation than a wall of citations that I&#x27;m not going to bother chasing because I know the claim is false. At least provide a quick synopsis&#x2F;summary for why crypto fails at any given one of those.<p>Bottom line: Most cryptocurrencies may not be <i>very good</i> at any of those, but that doesn&#x27;t mean they aren&#x27;t used in those capacities at all.

I don&#x27;t follow the blockchain world very well, but he makes an interesting point about it. Are there any projects, other than a few cryptocurrencies, that have impacted any industries significantly?<p>I feel like we are all still waiting for blockchain to be adopted by something that makes it really useful.

Hard to argue with the lack of meaningful blockchain projects outside of cryptocurrency even though untold billions were invested.

It might be worth noting that one of the authorities the author refers to, Emin Gün Sirer, has started his own cryptocurrency project, Avalanche. His critiques of the blockchain space are thus presumably a bit more nuanced that the author&#x27;s own.

Re: BTC is not money<p>In addition to attacking the &quot;BTC is money&quot; argument by claiming it isn&#x27;t really a medium of exchange, I would take exception at saying it&#x27;s any sort of &quot;store of value,&quot; either.<p>As I understand it, 1 BTC is born after somebody cracks a specific SHA-256 hash. Okay? Big deal. That means all you can really say is that whoever successfully mines said BTC came up with the answer to a very specific math problem.<p>Granted, that does require a significant expenditure of resources (electricity to power mining equipment), but, who cares? Just because I put time and work into creating something does not make it automatically worth anything.<p>As far as I can tell, there is nothing else that gives BTC its value other than &quot;proof of work,&quot; and the fact that enough people <i>believe</i> it&#x27;s worth money. I have mentioned how &quot;proof of work&quot; clearly does not imply any particular value to a thing. So, that basically leaves the idea that BTC is worth something because people believe it is, and that sounds an awful lot like those dirty <i>fiat</i> currencies BTC and crypto people in general like to deride.

Cryptocurrencies are an innovation and they have value. We can debate the extent of this and what practical applications can really be built. However, outright dismissing them as garbage does no justice to the debate.<p>Bitcoin is a good , fairly decentralized expression of digital scarcity at the very least and can be a store of value.

Crypto is just a digital asset that is very damaging to the environment and it is not like fiat currency because there is no exclusive market under it.

I worked for a blockchain startup that was not in the ICO space -- they had a compelling pitch if you didn&#x27;t examine it too closely.<p>Now that I&#x27;m gone I think it was a &quot;well intended&quot; venture that could only survive on milking the flush VC market.

I&#x27;ve never seen centralization as such a bad thing. We need a human to fix things when they go wrong. If my bank account or my visa card get stolen, eventually there is somebody I can talk to to get this fixed. If there is an economic crisis or runaway inflation, people smarter than I am are at least going to try to mitigate it. When the shit hits the fan for unprecedented, unforeseen reasons, we can resolve that with judgment and fairness. This centralized human factor can go terribly terribly wrong, but it&#x27;s no less necessary for it.

This is a good example of gish gallop: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Gish_gallop" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Gish_gallop</a>

This is a dumpster fire of bad (often self-quoted!!) arguments against crypto.

I think it took about 13 years for Beanie Babies to rise and fall, but it was really only on the market for about 6 of those years.

Any critique of blockchain should mention git.<p>It should start with: &quot;how is this better than the global information tracker?&quot;

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;dS7YE" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;dS7YE</a>

If cryptocurrency had the &quot;money&quot; aspect removed, we wouldn&#x27;t be having these arguments, as it&#x27;s indefensibly bad from a technology standpoint. It doesn&#x27;t scale, wastes energy, encourages fraud, has buggy&#x2F;immutable &quot;smart&quot; contracts, is &quot;anonymous&quot; yet a public blockchain, etc etc.<p>It&#x27;s been a &quot;startup&quot; for 10 years and the only product-market fit so far is for speculators, darknet sellers, tax evaders, betting&#x2F;gambling sites, and straight-up Ponzi fraud. However, it&#x27;s like catnip to a certain section of libertarians and get-rich-quick types - who want to replace the Fed with an early-adopter oligarchy.

&quot;the vast majority of whom span the ideological spectrum from the moderately far right to outright Nazis.&quot;<p>Honest question, is blockchain now another category in which political affiliation now decides how you are supposed to feel about it? I don&#x27;t really understand why that would be.

&gt;cryptocurrency is fraught with fraud<p>Ya know, unlike fiat markets with marketcaps 100x the entire crypto space. Those are 100% legitimate.<p>&gt;literal Nazis<p>Nazis use currency? :O jfc Nazis drank water too. The sooner Reductio ad Hitlerum gets invoked, the sooner I stop reading.

&quot;Overwhelming evidence shows...&quot; - the whole article is a great example of many of the tactics journalist employ to manipulate people&#x27;s opinions.

Just observing that every time this guy publishes a paper about crypto, there&#x27;s a bull market.<p>* David Golumbia, “Cryptocurrencies Aren’t Currencies. They Aren’t Stocks, Either” (Motherboard, Aug 22, 2017)<p>* David Golumbia, The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism (University of Minnesota, 2016), chapter 5

Almost nothing about the technology itself. Some juicy quotes from the author:<p>&gt; [...] and the far-right actors who gave birth to the ideas of cryptocurrency and blockchain in the first place. Repeating these claims only helps to promote their values, the values of those with the deepest vested interest in the “revolutionary” aspects of blockchain, the vast majority of whom span the ideological spectrum from the moderately far right to outright Nazis.<p>&gt; David Gerard writes that “they are small computer programs. In conventional IT jargon, these are called ‘database triggers’ or ‘stored procedures,’ and they are considered bad software engineering that should only be used when you absolutely have to.”<p>&gt; It may seem improbable at first glance to think that there might be connections between the pursuit of artificial general intelligence (AGI) and white supremacy. Yet the more you examine the question the clearer and more disturbing the links get. (from another article)<p>I leave you to decide whether the article is worth reading...

Right off the bat it shows three bad things about crypto-currency. And yet each of those three have been steadily and consistently improving. But apparently rather than iterating it’s better to just stop?<p>Ah, then the author shows their true colors. “Conspiracy theory”, “nazi”, “right wing”. This is an unserious hit piece meant to bully left-leaning people into sabotaging research and development in the web3 space.

Some folks just dont get it and it shows.

&gt; Part I. Outright Falsehoods<p>&gt; Cryptocurrencies are money, cash, or currency<p>&gt; They simply are not.<p>OK, but on the other hand, they are?<p>&gt; They do not meet any of the standard tests for money (especially the three classic criteria of store of value, medium of exchange, and unit of account).<p>I followed the link, did the reading, and came to the opposite conclusion.

Over the last several years I&#x27;ve come to the realization that most &quot;cryptocurrency is garbage&quot; posts boil down to the author underestimating or ignoring the financial realities of those living in other countries or circumstances.<p>There are those that live in countries with hyperinflation or US sanctions that don&#x27;t think that cryptocurrency is garbage.

It feels like people don&#x27;t understand the development curve of technology. This reminds me of that famous 1995 Clifford Stoll article on why internet is terrible. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.latimes.com&#x2F;business&#x2F;hiltzik&#x2F;la-fi-mh-actually-that-offbase-20150227-column.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.latimes.com&#x2F;business&#x2F;hiltzik&#x2F;la-fi-mh-actually-t...</a><p>Things take a while to develop.