[sennight]

> Crypto has become a very polarizing topic with people...

Certain people. I was involved from the beginning, and most of the OGs just shrug at the present day noise - the convert zeal being long exhausted by all the complaints about how PoW makes Mother Gaia cry. The people who have a crazy level of investment are the tech journalists that took very public positions badmouthing bitcoin. That is probably also true of anyone else who can't resist calculating how much their mistake cost them when they compared bitcoin to beanie babies at $150.

> ...which certainly needs to happen for it to have a future too, but governments...

Firing first in a duel, global economy style - that is why the foot dragging has been so protracted.

[kalleboo]

It's not quite the beginning but I bought Bitcoin anonymously using cash from Mt Gox in the rally up to $15 before it crashed back down to $5, and then ignored my wallet until it added many zeroes before I sold.

I still think that, as a concept, it's dumb as shit, even thought it was profitable for me. I just got lucky.

[sennight]

Huh, everything about what you said seems off to me.

How did you anonymously fund your account at Mt Gox? Because I only remember them taking bank wires. I don't remember them ever having any kind of payment provider that would have accepted anything like pre-paid Visa cards, and in any case: by the time btc was at $15 - there was only one money transmitter (that wasn't a bank) allowing btc related transactions. I know this because I was debanked by two banks and had my paypal account suspended around that time.

How did you come to learn about bitcoin, this "dumb as shit" concept? Buying drugs on Silk Road? Because most of the early people came to it from reading the white paper after seeing it posted on the cipherpunk mailing list, or on a board discussing Austrian-economics/anarcho-capitalism... for those people it was a political act - not an investment (as you seem to view it).

[kalleboo]

> How did you anonymously fund your account at Mt Gox? Because I only remember them taking bank wires.

Here in Japan you can make domestic wires anonymously using cash at an ATM (since it's such a cash-based society), and since Mt Gox was based in Japan you could fund your account with a domestic wire transfer

> How did you come to learn about bitcoin, this "dumb as shit" concept

Probably on IRC? I can't recall. It was still early enough that I got like 0.001 btc from one of those "btc faucets". It was fun when it was just this distributed tech demo, before people took it so seriously. The technology is cool.

What's dumb as shit is the idea of basing the future of finance on it.

[sennight]

Well you definitely have a very abnormal way of coming to it. I've encountered people who came to it for the pure love of technology - but they usually gravitate towards one of the shitcoins because they actually harbor a bit of greed and feel they "missed the boat".

> What's dumb as shit is the idea of basing the future of finance on it.

As I said, I burned through my convert zeal a long time ago... but your situation does have me curious. Do you have any formal experience with the backends making up the global financial system? Because I do, and it blows my mind that anyone trusts it at all. The US has, in recent years, proven itself to be such an awful steward of the global reserve currency that it is at the point now where multiple militarily weak states are openly discussing replacing the petrodollar with something else. A few years ago that would have resulted in a coincidental horrific end for them, but after the naked weaponization of the international financial system against Iran and then Russia... well the end is very near. All that is to say that it is now clear that everyone now knows a fiat currency controlled by a single interest makes a poor global reserve. Combine that with the likely future in which software agents need to directly handle money in order to pay their own bills... and meatspace money won't work, because humans are thieves with access to fraudulent chargebacks. What alternative could there be besides a crypto currency? I'm not saying it will be bitcoin, because there have already been several fedcoin lead balloons floated, but bitcoin has thrived in an incredibly non-permissive environment (economic, technological and political) for a long time now.

[starttoaster]

> I still think that, as a concept, it's dumb as shit, even thought it was profitable for me. I just got lucky.

What, specifically, do you find dumb as shit? I don't want to come across as confrontational here, but it's difficult to gauge how much a person knows about blockchain, its uses, current pitfalls, and the technology's mission. And these conversations usually end up in one of two ways for me depending upon how much the person on the other end actually knows. Either they know next to nothing besides how to buy and sell it, in which case, the conversation almost always tends to lean into pointless vitriol; or they actually know a lot about the current crypto industry, see it for all its weaknesses and none of the potential, and are willing to have a civil conversation.

Frankly, like the other user, I'm in the boat of thinking that our current financial system is in desperate need of some kind of overhaul. Blockchain/crypto could be a part of that overhaul, but doesn't necessarily have to be. But it's clear to me that something needs to change.

Anyway, I'm just always curious about other people's thoughts. I'd say the majority of people I talk to on this topic though just jump straight to abusing the person that's pro-blockchain-as-a-concept without having substantial reason for disliking it besides:

1) it's a huge waste of the world's non-renewable energy resources, which is not necessarily true, it's mostly only true for blockchains like Bitcoin or Ethereum PoW, there are blockchains that require substantially fewer resources to be a player on the chain.

2) That crypto prices fluctuate too much when cashing back out to fiat. This argument seems short-sighted, because in a possibly ideal situation you would never need to liquidate to a fiat. In an possible future (for blockchain) you would be able to pay for your morning coffee at a PoS terminal using your crypto wallet directly and there's possibly a government system that lays out the purchasing power of a coin. I use the word "possibly" a lot here to point out that there are probably competing theories on ideal implementations of crypto as a general and worldwide currency.

3) That the transactions per second (TPS) that a blockchain can handle aren't comparable to systems like VISA. That seems true, for now. Blockchain is still very much in the early stages of development, culturally and technologically. Keep in mind, fiat currencies have been around for nearly a millennia. A technical solution to replace an ancient system needs engineering time and public adoption.

If you have other reasons for thinking blockchain/cryptocurrency is dumb as shit, I'm very interested. And genuinely, I'm not being sardonic or anything else when I say that.

[sennight]

It has been a long time since I last debated this stuff, so it is funny to see the same talking points from 10 years ago.

1) PoW is the only way that is actually decentralized. If you want decentralized power over the currency - PoS will never work on a long time horizon, because you'd need some way of representing stake that is just impossible. As far as the whole "waste" complaint: relative to what? I've never seen a comparative study that included the entirety of the existing financial system. The academic papers I have seen complaining about bitcoin were full of comically bad errors: using geolocation to try and pin mining operations to nearest power plants, estimating hashes per watt based on FPGA or first gen ASIC miners, etc.

2) Bitcoin volatility has been going down every year, which makes sense given wider participation. Volatility is obviously different from price.

3) Bitcoin has had the capability for offchain transactions a long time now - using smart contracts with onchain settlement, so this really isn't a real concern any longer.

[starttoaster]

> 1) PoW is the only way that is actually decentralized. If you want decentralized power over the currency - PoS will never work on a long time horizon

There are proof systems that are not truly Proof of Work and are also not Proof of Stake. But sure, you're not wrong that proof of stake is not truly decentralized. Anyway, suffice to say I was not talking about Proof of Stake.

But you do bring up some thoughts that I've had previously, with regards to the energy waste in comparison to exactly what. Thanks for reminding me of it.

[sennight]

> There are proof systems that are not truly Proof of Work and are also not Proof of Stake.

Got any examples in mind? Because the only stuff that I can think of besides the two are convoluted Rube Goldberg methods of concealing what is actually PoS. Take any one of the goofy token based protein folding style coins as an example. Unless you are thinking of some kind of premined fedcoin, which is closer to a giftcard than a cryptocurrency.

[starttoaster]

I'll refrain from talking too much about it, as I'm actually somewhat associated with the project, so take that as a disclaimer. But the first example that comes to mind is Chia's Proof of Space (and Time) which requires some amount of initial computationally expensive work to be performed to create what is essentially your hashes on disk, and then your farm (their verbiage for "mine") can be ran off of external hard drives connected to a Raspberry Pi.

Anyway, I'll forgive you for maybe not knowing about it, as it's a much smaller and newer project than the likes of Bitcoin or Ethereum. It's a nice project to point out though, as you don't need to be a whale to be a player and sign blocks. I just run about 24 terabytes of plotted out space on spare drives that I had laying around that I rotated out of my Plex server. I still get a win every now and again, but my cost to get going was extremely minimal.

There's a lot of FUD spread around about Chia chewing through SSDs for the initial work portion, which is maybe somewhat true? I used a couple of SSDs to generate my plots that I now use for video game storage that are perfectly healthy, so my advice to people spreading that FUD would be to use higher quality SSDs that are rated for high TBW (terabytes-written.)