[Discussion] Cryptocurrency

Cryptocurrency! Either it's going to disrupt everything and usher in a new era of artistic and consumer freedom, or it'll hasten the climate apocalypse while largely benefitting a tiny number of investors. Let's yell about it!

maverickz wrote:

The idea that the dollar, or the US itself, will suddenly collapse in the next 5, 10, or 20 years is utter fantasy.

All of this should be bolded.

The cruel irony for all the folks wishing the downfall of the US is that a collapse of the global systems the US has set up might inconvenience America, but it would absolutely cornhole the rest of the world.

The United States because of WHERE it is (not who it is) enjoys structural advantages that pretty much make it immune to global instability. It has two oceans separating it from its nearest capable competitor. It has natural resources sufficient to fuel its continued growth and prosperity. It enjoys borders with two friendly if not downright affectionate neighbors who constitute over 70% of its international trade. It has a river system that constitutes nearly 1/3 of the world's navigable inland freight networks. It has command over 1/3 of the world's fresh water. And it neighbors countries with growing demographics that can fuel the American labor force into the foreseeable future.

Even if the US decides to stop playing Vice Principal to the world and pulls back to its 1941 isolationist policies, Americans will be fine. It will suck not getting cheap sh*t at Walmart, but we will be fine. China, otoh, will fall into flesh eating anarchy as will most of East Asia. The Middle East and South Asia will be seas of radioactive glass. Who knows what fresh hell Europe will be? But the US is playing Civ in cheat mode.

Paleocon wrote:
maverickz wrote:

The idea that the dollar, or the US itself, will suddenly collapse in the next 5, 10, or 20 years is utter fantasy.

All of this should be bolded.

The cruel irony for all the folks wishing the downfall of the US is that a collapse of the global systems the US has set up might inconvenience America, but it would absolutely cornhole the rest of the world.

The United States because of WHERE it is (not who it is) enjoys structural advantages that pretty much make it immune to global instability. It has two oceans separating it from its nearest capable competitor. It has natural resources sufficient to fuel its continued growth and prosperity. It enjoys borders with two friendly if not downright affectionate neighbors who constitute over 70% of its international trade. It has a river system that constitutes nearly 1/3 of the world's navigable inland freight networks. It has command over 1/3 of the world's fresh water. And it neighbors countries with growing demographics that can fuel the American labor force into the foreseeable future.

Even if the US decides to stop playing Vice Principal to the world and pulls back to its 1941 isolationist policies, Americans will be fine. It will suck not getting cheap sh*t at Walmart, but we will be fine. China, otoh, will fall into flesh eating anarchy as will most of East Asia. The Middle East and South Asia will be seas of radioactive glass. Who knows what fresh hell Europe will be? But the US is playing Civ in cheat mode.

Any sense of how bad things will get for US citizens before they fight back, if ever? Or are we poors just fu-ked from the go forever?

Depends on what you mean by fighting back. There seems to be some building momentum in organized labor.

Would also remind that not only does USA have all the advantages Paleo outlines, think about other competitors.

What does China have, exactly, besides lots of human capital? It shares a border with (lol) "Russia" and has mountains keeping India at bay. And then a whole bunch of smaller kid brother countries in the western Pacific that really don't like it. And not like how US conservatives rail against Mexico. Like, fund a bigger military and cozy up to the USA.

I say all this not out of some jingoistic appeal to patriotism. Rather, I say it so that Americans can wake up, understand we have many advantages and have a responsibility to prepare our fellow humans to stop global climate change, wars of aggression and generally bad behavior by states.

Top_Shelf wrote:

Would also remind that not only does USA have all the advantages Paleo outlines, think about other competitors.

What does China have, exactly, besides lots of human capital? It shares a border with (lol) "Russia" and has mountains keeping India at bay. And then a whole bunch of smaller kid brother countries in the western Pacific that really don't like it. And not like how US conservatives rail against Mexico. Like, fund a bigger military and cozy up to the USA.

I say all this not out of some jingoistic appeal to patriotism. Rather, I say it so that Americans can wake up, understand we have many advantages and have a responsibility to prepare our fellow humans to stop global climate change, wars of aggression and generally bad behavior by states.

Among the many problems China faces (and they are all very significant), primary among them is the issue of demographics. They are in uncharted historical territory in that they are the first country that is growing old before it grows rich. They simply don't have the generation of younger workers that can support either the expected social services or economic expansion the country needs in order to maintain national cohesiveness or order. The social contract for the last 30 years has been one in which Chinese people would tolerate the inconvenience and corruption of the CCP so long as standards of living continue to improve. That, however, is coming to an abrupt end.

The vaunted Chinese "human capital" is no longer a competitive advantage. As the workers age out of the system, wages will inflate. They are already higher than you will find in Vietnam, Cambodia, and other parts of SE Asia and the value of their manufacturing is not high enough to compete with the likes of Korea, Taiwan, Japan, Europe, or the US. In a lot of ways, I think we are looking at peak China either now or in the next 5-10 years.

Their banking systems and the tethering of pretty much all public debt to their real estate bubble is going to experience a significant implosion as well. All of that was dependent on 9+% annual GDP growth and as that slows down, it will become clear exactly how much of it was a pure momentum play.

PS. I spoke with the sustainability officer at my company a few weeks ago and I mentioned how crypto was basically a needless environmental disaster. He responded by saying that when China banned crypto mining, their energy use dropped by enough to power a medium sized Central Asian republic.

maverickz wrote:

The idea that the dollar, or the US itself, will suddenly collapse in the next 5, 10, or 20 years is utter fantasy.

I do agree that a sudden melodramatic collapse is highly unlikely and more of a fantasy than anything else.

However, I would also argue that the US already has been in the early stage of a collapse for several years, though it would be an exercise in futility to quibble over any specific catalyst or inflection point.

That said, just because a nation enters an early stage of collapse doesn't mean it will inevitably go through the entire process. The years leading up to the Civil War were an early stage of collapse as well, and even though the US proceeded to the point of outright civil war, we did eventually succeed in recovering from that. I would argue, though, that much of our decades of relative stability in the "American Century" were a result of our mobilization for two world wars and the international prestige, soft power, and economic influence we built up as a consequence of our involvement and mobilization for those two world wars.

Essentially that's the crux of the stress for many of us. Anyone who isn't at least upper-middle class is definitely starting to feel the effects of this early stage of collapse, and some of those in the upper-middle or higher are beginning to feel it a bit as well. Additional complication stems from the simple fact that human civilization as a whole is feeling the impacts of epochal climate shift and early biosphere collapse. Is it too late to stop the US from collapsing in the coming decades? No, certainly not. Is it too late to preserve the Subatlantic Holocene climate? A growing plurality of climatologists think it is, which is terrifying. To that point, the process is already underway in the international scientific bodies that define and refine geological (and thus climate) epochs to define the end of the Holocene entirely, with a subsequent Anthropocene epoch already underway.

I think most people read that and their immediate response is "oh that's just silly scientists, always wanting to come up with new names and definitions" rather than "oh sh*t, epochal divisions are actually quite substantial and delineate major distinctions in climate, geology, and the biosphere; maybe this is actually serious enough that we should reconsider how our civilization both impacts and is impacted by this planet".

TL;DR - Most of the nations in the world are experiencing some early form of collapse right now, including the US. We should take our response to this seriously rather than handwaving it away as fantasy or alarmism.

“Collapse” probably isn’t the right word for it because it has connotations of it being a fast, sudden state change. Dying nations very rarely collapse, they tend to just a gradually unravel and disintegrate until either something else takes over or they find a way to rejuvenate themselves/reach equilibrium.

Paleocon wrote:

Depends on what you mean by fighting back. There seems to be some building momentum in organized labor.

Either real systemic reform at home that will improve the lot of people or the rise of a movement and or organization dedicated to its overthrow or replacement by any means necessary.

Annnd yeah. I know how this sounds. It sounds childish, but I keep reading things about how 68 percent of US citizens are like 3 months or one minor medical crisis away from homelessness, about how a lot of Americans #1 desire is to go to the dentist. Its sickening. Its like we're cattle being driven down a chute to the dude with the nail gun.

Crypto will unravel faster than the US economy.

The money is already gone. People are in the process of discovering that they didn't lose their money when whichever casino/exchange they bought into collapsed. The money was lost when they bought the crypto currency.

I recommend Attack of the 50' Blockchain to help explain why all crypto is bad and wrong.

Drazzil wrote:
Paleocon wrote:

Depends on what you mean by fighting back. There seems to be some building momentum in organized labor.

Either real systemic reform at home that will improve the lot of people or the rise of a movement and or organization dedicated to its overthrow or replacement by any means necessary.

Annnd yeah. I know how this sounds. It sounds childish, but I keep reading things about how 68 percent of US citizens are like 3 months or one minor medical crisis away from homelessness, about how a lot of Americans #1 desire is to go to the dentist. Its sickening. Its like we're cattle being driven down a chute to the dude with the nail gun.

The last time we had such a meaningful, positive sea change in American politics was the civil rights era. The current era we are in is, in large part, a continuation of the Reagan backlash. If you look at the tools the Civil Rights folks used, they are mostly being utilized by the backlash folks more effectively than progressives are using theirs.

If you want that kind of meaningful change, it requires the kind of sustained, thankless grinding that brought us the gains we got in the 60's. That grinding is noticeably lacking in today's Left.

I keep saying this, but it keeps bearing repeating. Recruit local candidates. Research ALL of your candidates in your primaries. Raise money. Campaign. Organize donors and voters into PACs. Use those PACs to influence your representatives. Hold your representatives to account and move their positions. Build your own third rails and energize them. Until you have exhausted these options (not just voting and complaining about it), you're skipping right to defeatism and despair.

We aren't a perfect democracy, but there are literally people dying in China and Russia for the rights we possess here.

The US won't be fine.. we are just as vulnerable if not more so to climate change than everybody else..

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/aChVfo4.jpeg)

Investors: "Ah yes, the very rare seven-legged spider. A bargain at that price!"

Paleocon wrote:
Drazzil wrote:
Paleocon wrote:

Depends on what you mean by fighting back. There seems to be some building momentum in organized labor.

Either real systemic reform at home that will improve the lot of people or the rise of a movement and or organization dedicated to its overthrow or replacement by any means necessary.

Annnd yeah. I know how this sounds. It sounds childish, but I keep reading things about how 68 percent of US citizens are like 3 months or one minor medical crisis away from homelessness, about how a lot of Americans #1 desire is to go to the dentist. Its sickening. Its like we're cattle being driven down a chute to the dude with the nail gun.

The last time we had such a meaningful, positive sea change in American politics was the civil rights era. The current era we are in is, in large part, a continuation of the Reagan backlash. If you look at the tools the Civil Rights folks used, they are mostly being utilized by the backlash folks more effectively than progressives are using theirs.

If you want that kind of meaningful change, it requires the kind of sustained, thankless grinding that brought us the gains we got in the 60's. That grinding is noticeably lacking in today's Left.

I keep saying this, but it keeps bearing repeating. Recruit local candidates. Research ALL of your candidates in your primaries. Raise money. Campaign. Organize donors and voters into PACs. Use those PACs to influence your representatives. Hold your representatives to account and move their positions. Build your own third rails and energize them. Until you have exhausted these options (not just voting and complaining about it), you're skipping right to defeatism and despair.

We aren't a perfect democracy, but there are literally people dying in China and Russia for the rights we possess here.

So... f-cked then.

A Crypto Winter King Wants to Reanimate the Industry

The so-called crypto winter has wiped out $2 trillion in digital currency market value since November, and many investors have gone into hibernation. Yat Siu, the head of Hong Kong-based Animoca Brands Corp., is on the offensive.

Animoca, Asia’s biggest investor in blockchain projects, is assembling a vast portfolio of finance, gaming, and social media companies, more than 340 in all. The goal, says Siu, is to give people ownership over their virtual properties and break up the empires of Meta Platforms Inc. and Microsoft Corp., which he describes as “digital dictatorships.”

Siu’s strategy was informed by the digital currency crash of 2018, when he turned his small video game studio into a crypto investor. The startup purchased a stake in the maker of CryptoKitties, a Pokémon-like game with virtual cats that can be bought and sold with digital money, and kept buying. Just four years later, Animoca is one of the crypto industry’s most influential investors, with backing from Sequoia Capital and George Soros.

“If people say this is a crypto winter, then 2018 was the crypto ice age,” Siu says. “Now is the time to deploy more capital, not less.”

Even the concept of ownership in the games is questionable. In March, Animoca shut down its three-year-old racing game, F1 Delta Time, after failing to renew a branding license with the organizers of Formula One. Players who’d spent hundreds of dollars on drivers and car parts for the game were suddenly left with worthless blockchain tokens. Animoca gave away assets for other racing games as compensation, and an Animoca-backed studio called 99Starz plans to make a racing game without the Formula One license that will support versions of the old game’s NFTs, Siu says. He says this shows the enduring value of blockchain-based assets.

Erm.... I dunno a lot about Gamers, but I do feel VERY sure that they are not going to particularly be interested in playing the wholly un-branded "Basketball Stars Associated" instead of NBA 2K, for all the MANY issues its player base has with it.

Via PC Gamer:

As for what's happened to all those precious NFTs, well, for all intents and purposes they no longer exist. It's worth noting the developers are attempting to compensate owners of those now-worthless NFTs with replacement tokens for one of the company's other blockchain-based racing games. Affected players can be compensated in various ways, including Replacement Cars, or a "Race Pass", or "Proxy Assets", which "will be used in the future to obtain NFTs to products across the REVV Motorsport ecosystem." In other words, you get a token for your token. A perfectly secure investment!

Indeed, while Animoca's gesture might seem like a company doing right by its customers, the whole point of an NFT is that it is supposed to convey security and permanence to a digital object. It's supposed to say "this thing exists with a uniquely attributable value". Hence, for Animoca to turn around and say to their customers "Oh no, these NFTs are entirely replaceable" makes a mockery of the whole endeavour. It's like a museum accidentally smashing their only Fabergé egg, only to immediately wheel out a second Fabergé egg from a warehouse filled to the roof with Fabergé eggs.

“Now is the time to deploy more capital, not less.”

I assume every person who says this or something similar is just someone trying to goose the price back up long enough so they can privately cash out at a profit.

Stengah wrote:
“Now is the time to deploy more capital, not less.”

I assume every person who says this or something similar is just someone trying to goose the price back up long enough so they can privately cash out at a profit.

Hey, you know your unlicensed securities fraud!

The Crypto Geniuses Who Vaporized a Trillion Dollars

A TRILLION dollars.

And, because we never learn from anything:

1 - They'll be back with some new, f*cked-up from the jump plan.
2 - Hulu or someone will make an awards-bait series about this that will broadly fail to really, critically examine they did and the culture that led us to this happening, along with its victims.

Eh, most likely they will die of natural causes at a conference in India.

Prederick wrote:
Indeed, while Animoca's gesture might seem like a company doing right by its customers, the whole point of an NFT is that it is supposed to convey security and permanence to a digital object. It's supposed to say "this thing exists with a uniquely attributable value". Hence, for Animoca to turn around and say to their customers "Oh no, these NFTs are entirely replaceable" makes a mockery of the whole endeavour. It's like a museum accidentally smashing their only Fabergé egg, only to immediately wheel out a second Fabergé egg from a warehouse filled to the roof with Fabergé eggs.

This quote from the article displays a fundamental misunderstanding of economics. Nothing has uniquely attributable value, because nothing has objective value - value is _always_ subjective relative to humans and is context sensitive (what use is gold in the apocalypse?). The Faberge egg is not valuable because it exists, it's valuable because people like its beauty and historical artisanship. Today we could easily create a warehouse full of eggs exactly like that one, and they still wouldn't be worth as much.

The NFTs they are talking about did not lose their security or permanence. They just lost their value because the context changed. Animoca's mistake wasn't using NFTs, it was setting up a contract that did not recognize the permanence of the items. If they had set up their contracts correctly, the NFTs would probably have become _more_ valuable because they could no longer be obtained in the game.

This issue is not unique to NFTs in any way. There are numerous historical examples of collectibles, art, and various other items losing value because the context changed or people lost interest.

FTX told to stop lying about deposit protection in the sternest possible way

Forcing me to agree with Aetius is not the worst thing about NFTs, but it's near the top of the list.

Aetius, I think his point was that *uniqueness* is a selling point of NFTs. To then turn around and say "Haha, your NFT is gone, here have another one that's totally different, it's the same as" makes a mockery of that claim. The other part of your statement, that some part of value is subjective, is obviously correct. (Other parts, like uniqueness/rarity are fixed.) But the idea of NFTs is to take a system that minted tokens that were functionally identical and each valued the same as the next (prices move uniformly for the entire tranche of a coin) and turn it into a system that offers *unique* items, each valued independently of others on the same chain.

I'd say his point still stands, simply because NFTs (unique items) are not supposed to be coins (fungible tokens).

BTW, the value of an object - it's material or monetary worth - can be fixed by external factors like rarity, while its price changes. This can even drive exchanges; consider the refugee who trades a Rembrandt for train tickets to another country for his family, in wartime. The uniqueness and perhaps the open market value of that Rembrandt has not changed, but that inherent value leads to a desire on the part of the benefactor to provide a service that would otherwise not be available. Value is the same; price has changed.

I think value and price is a distinction without a difference. Value is necessarily reflected in price, and is rooted in context specifically between the buyer and seller. For your Rembrandt-for-a-train-ticket, in a wartime context, the painting is less valuable than a train ticket to the seller. That is its value. A Rembrandt has no intrinsic value, but there relatively broad context that assigns it a high value to both buyers and sellers - my localized context in wartime substantially lowers that value. In a peace time context, it would wildly unusual for a seller to agree on a train-ticket value.

EDIT: NFTs were a ridiculous proposition at best. Any claim to digital uniqueness is silly, especially when the unique part is something that almost nobody cares about. The are an excellent example of price and value being the same thing.

Value is perceived worth, so things like circumstances and rarity play into it. A Rembrandt will always have huge value because there are so few of them, because of what's been paid for them in the past, and because of their beauty. Price is the actual amount of something a good or service is exchanged for. This is why we can say something is undervalued, or feel we got a great deal or were ripped off - because the transaction price differed significantly from the value.

In normal times, the value of a ticket is usually its price, although trying to get a seat at a sold out concert again shows the difference between the value of a ticket, and its price. But for trains, normally they would be equivalent.

NFTs are a *terrible* example of price and value being the same, because their value is almost wholly subjective. The true cost of an NFT is that of creating it, while the price can be literally orders of magnitude larger (and can fluctuate wildly). I'd say that things like coins, while they don't cost exactly their value, are reasonably good examples of stable price to value ratios. But that could be argued against.

Value and price are different but related. A price is a snapshot of value in time, a way of capturing a measurement of value at the moment of exchange. Price information is incredibly useful, because it strips away all the pretense: someone did, in fact, pay this price at this time, and thus at that moment valued that product or service at that price.

Chumpy_McChump wrote:

Any claim to digital uniqueness is silly, especially when the unique part is something that almost nobody cares about.

The uniqueness part of an NFT isn't about value. Uniqueness itself has no intrinsic value. I can pick up a piece of gravel from my driveway and note that it is statistically unique in shape, but that doesn't make it more valuable. The digital uniqueness of an NFT is about ownership. If I control the matching private key, I own that particular NFT, and I'm able to transfer that ownership to another person in a secure way. No one is able to own more NFTs than were created, and I can prove that I own an original. That is the only fundamental difference between NFTs and other collectibles.

Uniqueness can be a component of value, however. Value is not based on one element (except for things like currency).

The big difference between art or other physical collectibles that may lose value is at least to the owner they still have something they may still personally enjoy. The scam with most NFT’s is once the company that controls the assets decides they no longer want to do that you end up with nothing.

That’s the biggest scam with video game NFT’s. You won’t ever be using your unique Call of Duty gun playing The Last last truly last of us 7 because neither company will partner in that kind of way.

I believe that with NFTs, the originator of the digital object - I hesitate to call them "artists" - can decide to destroy the object at any time, leaving you with a digital link to nothing. (Remember, Bored Apes run $100K+ per NFT!). Your rights are limited to what's in the contract. They could even pull the image back, if that's written in the contract. And most contracts seem to leave the IP rights with the originator, not the NFT purchaser.

Imagine an art market where the artist maintains the right to enter your house and burn the art piece, with no recourse and no refund. Or even just walk off with it and resell it. Or make multiple copies and sell them to others.

Crypto, and NFTs, are a serious step backwards in creating reliable, safe and stable currencies.