CryptoCurrency Mining with GPUs *spawn*

Lets be honest, energy is a pretexte. Banks just don't want to compete against most cryptos. They're scared of Defi. And they should be.

 

Selective quotes for the win, from various articles, just because I can

 

Tbf we all should be. Crypto can actually create huge issues in monetary policies control for most markets. There are reasons why "free market" is a thing from XIX century.

 

Huge issues already exist. In "free" markets, governments monetary policies, banks, central banks, etc... Imo, some cryptos/aspect of crypto can help, if not already for in some countries. But it's a little OT.

 

Its true that it should be addressed, but its always funny seeing this info coming from central banks, the market from which DeFi (crypto) is stealing customers from. The energy is not their real concern if you know what I mean.

They can push governments to ban mining but once Eth goes PoS and the energy factor becomes a non arguable issue, i wonder what they will argue against.

So far, that Russian central bank news is causing a 10% drop on the crypto markets. Another day another trick.

 

Crypto creates issues in the banks bottom line.


Where do you believe the typical bank "300 million~1billion" quarterly profit comes from?


They use the liquidity you the client provides to the bank so they can bet it in the market or lend it for double digit % returns, of which they give you 0.05% APR which in reality becomes negative for most people due to all the fees. They will battle crypto's typical 4~11% APR to their death beds.

 

I don't believe it's the russian stuff. Everything tech tanked at the same time, including crypto. It's not decupled yet....

 

"Citations needed" for all, but “Although digital tokens are a highly speculative and volatile asset class, they also represent the promise of a more open, more widely shared internet,” is particularly hilarious

 

What did you understand by reading that quote?

 

I posted to demonstrate how out-of-touch most people in this thread are. Providing links for people who have their heads in the sand just isn't worth the effort.

Your argument, "hilarious", is precisely why it's not worth posting the link, because you literally are clueless and intend to remain clueless.

 

Personally I struggle to think of other group of people who were ever as misinformed and clueless as the so called "Web3 fanatics" are right now.

 

The whole crypto market seems to be evolving to convince the ever less informed people to join in, degree by degree. So you can make fun of the NFT folks if you want, but this has been an ongoing endeavor since the start for the most part. It's just kind of accelerated capitalism at this point.

 

From the conversations on the NFT topic in this forum, the group that comes to mind as the most misinformed and clueless towards Crypto is the crowd beyond3D represents. To confidently offer a verdict without knowing the basics, is what I mean.


Not an exclusive mentality to this forum either. It is 100% transversal to other tech forums and tech subreddits. The amount of misconceptions and wrong facts about the tech is mind boggling.


Weird phenomenon too, because the new crowd surrounding computer technologies in the 90's and 2000's used to be very analytical and process oriented. Including the press. I grew up with them. And now that crowd got old, cranky and impatient, and the new crowd joining in since 2010 have the attention span towards things they dont know equivalent to the time it takes to swipe a Tinder profile and get their information on facts from twitter...


Oh well.

 

For the evangelists, being 'informed' is just another way of saying people who accept and agree that crypto and NFT's are awesome and the future of everything(you'll never seen an evangelist attack another cryptobro for not understanding something, for instance). Because there is no ability to have an acceptable disagreement, as it will always, always devolve into a handwaving of 'you just dont get it' at some point. It's not that others have valid issues, it's that they if they just understood things better, they'd see these aren't actually valid issues in reality or actually have nothing to do with the tech at all! The same problem comes with something like arguing with flat earthers - over time, they've basically developed an answer for basically everything. The end claim is still not correct, but individual arguments are usually based on some solid enough reasoning that it sounds like a perfectly plausible explanation on the surface. They are the informed ones, and other people only think the Earth is round because they are uninformed or misinformed about the details and science involved, even other scientists.

The second problem with having constructive discourse is that evangelists are inherently arguing from a position of self-interest. It's bad enough simply dealing with human ego and stubbornness, but now imagine on top of that, trying to have an honest discussion about a company where the 'pro' side is exclusively people with actual stock in the company. It is basically impossible to not thus have a base level of skepticism or outright cynicism in such a situation, even if somebody is not actually highly informed. Of course this doesn't mean the evangelists are inherently wrong about anything they say, but I dont think you can complain about people being cynical in these situations when even loosely unbiased discussion is outright impossible. Being highly wary of people with a financial motivation for selling you on something is basically always the correct response. And even worse, many people will not be forthright about their personal financial motivations involved and will hide that they are invested themselves, only acting like some reasonable, unbiased commenter.

Lastly, I dont need to know the ins and outs of how a gun works to know it's a dangerous weapon. This whole idea of needing to be super informed about all the small details in order for any concern of theirs to be valid is a useful tool to bludgeon the less informed with and dismiss away their comments as FUD.

 

DeFi is not lending, it's pawning. It's only useful for arbitrage plays against exchanges and other cryptocurrency gamblers.

 

The analogy is bad here. Both the benefits and the drawbacks are plain to see for a gun.
While for crypto only (some of) the drawbacks are easy to understand. The UI and experience these days is still so bad that you need technical expertise even to do obvious and useful stuff like sending currency cross-country (though tbf, banks almost provide an equaly bad experience here)

 

Any counter-criticism depends on what is being criticized and on what foundations. You cannot raise a 20 story building on cardboard foundations.


The equivalent of the NFT discussion on this forum (that requires knowledge on blockchain at the very least) was pushing popular ideas with barely any basis on reality. It was akin to having people who barely know how Windows works, demanding c++ to be abolished from the earth because some bad actors used it to program something they dont like.


Computer sciences are exact. Blockchain and NFTs are not dogma, idiology, or subject to interpretation. Its math. So you better know how a gun works before claiming bullets are grown in trees.

 

True enough - crypto's most basic failings are pretty surface level to understand, and its more sinister problems take a slightly deeper understanding to have a grasp of.

Yea, there's that thing again, where all the issues with crypto are handwaved away cuz 'maybe it could be used for bad', except that its decentralized and unregulated nature means you cannot really clamp down on the all the super obvious ways for it to be exploited very easily at all.

It's like letting a poisonous snake free in the room and then saying, "Well sure, it might kill some or all of us, but maybe it will actually free us from the mice in the house instead. Not right of us to want to get rid of the snake just cuz it's doing what's in its own nature."

You cant pretend these are just some necessary, minor problems that are just natural growing pains. Many of these problems only stand to get worse and worse til they are effectively normalized and are part of our daily lives. Having blind faith that they'll get solved is just beyond naive, and we should not and really cannot afford to not push back on them NOW before it gets far too carried away.

 

That's definitely not what I said, but even this distasteful distorsion of my words invalidates the analogy so..

 

Ooh yes, most definitely.

MIT 15.S12 Blockchain and Money, Fall 2018 - YouTube

Gary Gensler as the chair of the SEC really hates shysters in the blockchain/crypto space and he's got some power against them now. The course is excellent.