It's entirely possible for nvidia to be sour and also correct. Crypto currencies have done nothing for society but to introduce scam and money laundering vectors.
There are people that still have their accounts frozen because they donated to the truckers in Canada. That’s insane. Other countries had or will have similar cases in the future. We absolutely should have a way to exchange money without the governments involvement. The government already has the monopoly on physical force. That ought to be enough. So yes, there is a use case. But you’re correct in that it hasn’t really been used that way so far.
Oh yeah, and those same people later cry foul when they get robbed of their money because it was not protected in any way.
Suddenly everybody wants crypto but with protections. Fools.
There is a reason why money and banking is regulated -- to protect little guys from getting scammed right and left.
Those protections are not perfect, true, but still orders of magnitude better than crypto free for all.
And as to monopoly on physical force, there is a reason for it, too. Take a look at African countries for what happens when people are allowed to take things into their own hands. Take a look at The Last of Us if you want to know what happens when there is no government that can project physical force.
Our civilisation is far from perfect but it is a civilisation. It lets you live, travel and do business in relative safety. So think about it the next time you start imagining how good it would be without all this pesky civilisation around you. Because it is much better and productive to try to iteratively fix what we already have than decide to erase everything and start a complete rewrite.
> Oh yeah, and those same people later cry foul when they get robbed of their money because it was not protected in any way.
Can you give an example? Do you actually know any of these people?
> Suddenly everybody wants crypto but with protections
Not me, So not everybody.
> There is a reason why money and banking is regulated -- to protect little guys from getting scammed right and left.
The reason is that their protocols are inherently unsafe. Similarly, there is a reason Bitcoin was made to be unregulated -- to protect the little guys from having their share devalued by trillion dollar bail-outs for the super rich.
> orders of magnitude better than crypto free for all
Better for who? Maybe better for you, but certainly not everyone.
> Take a look at The Last of Us if you want to know what happens
The video game??
> It lets you live, travel and do business in relative safety.
Speak for yourself. Not everyone is safe. That's an increasingly rare privilege as the wealth divide grows, and many people attribute this divide to our monetary system.
I can't prove it, but I strongly suspect our pop culture is being intentionally Marvel-ized to keep full-grown adults' mental models of the world at a grade school level. (We have to stop Voldemort!! Captain Gandalf needs our support, and people who question him are traitors!!)
> Speak for yourself. Not everyone is safe. That's an increasingly rare privilege as the wealth divide grows, and many people attribute this divide to our monetary system.
The crux of the issue, I think, and why I doubt decentralized stores of value will be legal for much longer.
"Permit me to issue and control the money of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws!" - Mayer Amschel Rothschild, probably apocryphally
(twawaaay) > > > Take a look at The Last of Us if you want to know what happens
(mike741) > > The video game??
(JPws_Prntr_Fngr) > I can't prove it, but I strongly suspect our pop culture is being intentionally Marvel-ized to keep full-grown adults' mental models of the world at a grade school level. (We have to stop Voldemort!! Captain Gandalf needs our support, and people who question him are traitors!!)
Essentially, what has happened is the application of Disney movie/show narratives taken outside of their intended context: What was meant as the starting point for guiding children on morality has instead been used as the ultimate end-goal & a shining beacon of what is considered to be moral or immoral.
In simpler terms, this is the "Disney-ification" of the political world: We're the good ones, they're the enemy, they must be opposed/defeated/unalived.
From the article:
> In high-rung politics, it’s understood that people aren’t 1s and 0s—they’re all 0.5s, each in their own messy, complicated, unique way. And to people who see people as 0.5s, it’s clear that PDW narratives not only dehumanize their opponents, they dehumanize everybody into fake cartoon people.
The repeating theme of crypto fans postulating "free" cashflow without government involvment is the road to salvation is annoying me so much.
Cashflow without government involvement is the absolute opposite of democratic freedom. Take literally any autocratic government ripe with corruption, look at Russia, China et al. Look at any large criminal organization which tries to avoid democratically elected governmental regulation of their cashflows.
Instead of being free, in a world with no oversight of how money is exchanged, 99.9% of people will wake up in modern servitude to a tiny rich oligarchy which owns all the assets and brutally opresses their slaves.
How this is not apparent to anyone is beyond me.
We already found a solution to the problem of being treated unfairly by a government: the judicial branch.
Think your money is frozen unfairly?
Then sue. Easy as that.
Going the other direction where government controls all aspects of society is what the USSR and China decided was the best system. When the USSR broke up they gave all citizens ownership of previously held state enterprises which was worthless to them and those shares were sold ended up in few players hands.
Crypto is the opposite where miners hold as much power as developers to create a balance.
You can't sue in Canada when the government introduces wartime measures. Like Canada was under attack
> miners hold as much power as developers to create a balance
I have no horse in this conversation about government, but I think it's important to note that neither developers nor miners hold any direct power in creating a balance on a properly decentralized blockchain. Their only power is insofar as they are able to convince users to collectively change their node software to introduce code that creates such a balance. A chain's developers are generally in a much better position to convince users of that than its miners (or stakers) are.
I am not going into the other direction though. I am not in any way saying the USSR or Chinese political system is or was desirable.
I explicitly gave the judicial branch as implemented in Western democratic societies as an example.
I'm no expert in Canadian politics, but to me it seems reasonable to assume that, just like in any other Western democratic society, the gov introducing wartime measures isn't what's day to day due process 99.9% of the time.
So you arguing based on extreme examples, which are at least partially out of context isn't really adding anything substantial to the discussion at hand I think.
How do miners hold as much power as big ass capitalists in a crypto world??
No. The few who had their accounts frozen had them unfrozen within days. The freezing was done by the banks without instruction from the government other than the existing "supporting terrorism" laws on the books (it was done by the banks of their own volition before the Emergencies Act was passed). Yes, efforts were being organized to bypass regulation by taking donations in cryptocoin but that turned out to be a scam and thankfully few of the donors were sophisticated enough to go beyond cheques and credit card donations to Give/Send/Go.
So, end in the end, a terrible example of why trusting the organized crime behind crypto is superior to the usual crowd and whether it has contributed anything useful to society. It's more of an example of how paranoia can blind one to reality.
The reason crypto never took off is because the government effectively backs a lot of the currency transactions indirectly, which makes engaging in such transactions a lot less risky for everyone involved. If such trust in the government wasn't there, everyone would have jumped on crypto ten-fold.
Yes, government has control over aspects of life, and humanity collectively organized governments specifically to have that power, because humanity early on realized that humans are emotion-prone individuals that cannot be trusted. All the anti-state rhetoric that you ever read completely ignores that fact.
Yes, there are going to be some negatives associated with this transfer of power that are going to happen, no complex systems like that are perfect. You probably would want someones account frozen if they were directly donating large sums of money to a terrorist group that was planning attacks on US. There are good cases for use of power, and bad ones. The fact that we aren't living in totalitarian regimes and still have plenty of individual of freedoms means that the system is working pretty well.
Crypto aside, it's difficult to point to a less deserving cause than the trucker convoy that paralyzed Ottawa for no good reason (the reasons are no good outside of delusionland).
^ Exhibit A: commenter fails to recognize that there are sometimes good reason to temporarily limit rights, such as to limit the spread of infectious diseases, because commenter knows very little about public health or epidemiology. Commenter believes that anytime rights are limited, it's for a nefarious purpose, and it can't possibly be for a good reason.
How's the syphillis and HIV treating you? Oh what's that? You live in a society that actively limits the spread of these diseases by carefully limiting rights, so you're free to live your life without these diseases? Nice concept.
They also don’t understand that the “wartime act” is not the act that was invoked. In fact, the War Measures Act has not existed in Canada for nearly 40 years.
It was replaced by the Emergencies Act, which explicitly does not violate the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, unlike its predecessors.
It just goes to show how knowledgeable the previous poster is on the subject.
> which explicitly does not violate the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms
Indeed indeed. However, it does limit the rights and freedoms in the Charter, and it does so in a way that the Charter allows. The Charter provides an escape hatch in exceptional circumstances, and that is not by accident: it is by design. And anyone who would design the Charter without this escape hatch probably has no business being in governance, because it would just be a ticking time bomb to a constitutional crisis.
Same act that imprisoned Japanese citizens that was slightly changed. Legally the government could make you a slave and it wouldn't violate your charter.
You don't have as many rights or protections as you believe. You don't even have property rights in Canada.
Not the best example. We live in a society that intentionally infected 600 African American men with syphilis, without their consent, simply to see what happens despite knowing effective treatment already existed. Nice concept indeed.
Irrelevant to a response regarding both the importance of human rights and the spread of syphilis? I can't imagine an instance where it would be more relevant, I'd be interested to hear why it's not though.
The topic of discussion is the limits on human rights that can reasonably arise to protect the public from real harm.
What you're throwing into the mix is a suspension of human rights for... unethical research? Failing to see the distinction is really not something I can help you with.
What I've thrown into the mix is a suspension of human rights that was claimed to be for the purpose of protection but in reality caused harm. It wasn't simply "unethical research." If HIV and Syphilis are the best examples of reasons to suspend human rights then we are lacking in good examples. Far more often than not, human rights are a form of protection and their suspension is a guise for causing harm.
This is the problem with people who think like you. You see someone say "there can be good reasons to suspend rights in exceptional circumstances" and you just go and find an example of a terrible justification to suspend rights (sometimes with an outright evil or cruel motivation), as if it was the same thing.
When I used the example of STIs, I was alluding to things like how the "duty to report" [1] and the criminalization of very limited and targeted behaviours [2] have the effect of narrowing very specific rights in very specific circumstances. These are policies that are reasonable and that generally are designed to limit rights and freedoms as little as possible in order to achieve a particular goal. We're not talking about suspending rights just because it's "convenient", and I wasn't alluding to using humans as guinea pigs for unethical research programmes... I don't know what you were thinking.
You apparently don't see the difference, but that doesn't mean you have special insight-- if anything, it just means you're confused about the principles at play (or, perhaps more charitably, you're assuming that I'm a fool and are misinterpreting what I'm saying).
^ The provided links are US-centred (because I'm assuming most readers are American) but one can easily find very similar policies in Canada or almost any other developed country.
I recognize that you were not trying to allude to the countless times where the limitation of rights were used to cause harm. I also recognize that good and bad justifications are not the same thing. My thinking is simply that there are better examples than Syphilis and HIV, such as seat belts or speed limits. What I saw you say was "You live in a society that actively limits the spread of these diseases" and I'm saying that is a poor example of justification for such limitations because:
1) The listener might be disease-free regardless of society's efforts (the limitation's benefit might not be relatable)
2) We live in a society that actively spreads diseases in the name of protection and profit (the justification behind limitations might be engineered)
3) These diseases still exist in unknown quantities (the limitations might be ineffective)
A better example would be something like seat belts or speed limits because:
1) The listener is far more likely to have been in or around a vehicle than they are to have contracted syphilis. (the limitation's benefit is relatable)
2) There are no instances of seat belts or speed limits having been used to justify excessive harm. (the limitation's benefit cannot be argued as having been engineered)
3) The impact on safety is far easier to measure and compare. (the limitation's effectiveness can be measured immediately)
But if you don't believe any of this to be relevant, then I must accept that. Thank you for your time.
1) it's exactly the type of infectious disease that public health experts deal with routinely. See the first link I provided for a long list of others.
2) it's not an "extreme" concern in the sense that there's no real danger of syphillis posing an immediate existential threat: it's a very mundane example
3) there are limitations on rights today, in most developed countries, centred around the chosen example. There are tradeoffs in place today which, similarly to seatbelts, are generally well tolerated by society.
4) it is in some sense better than the seatbelt example because it involves population dynamics (exponential growth and all the models we must make use of to make well-informed policy decisions), which are a different beast. Seatbelt behaviour is linear and has an individual blast radius. Infectious diseases are non-linear and have a collective blast radius.
There's a reason there was no trucker convoy protest over seatbelt laws: people were panicking because they didn't know anything about infectious diseases and didn't understand the motivation for taking public health action. It's an almost-classic case of fear of the unknown, and yet there were always similar types of measures in plain sight.
You’re wrong. All accounts have been unfrozen. They were frozen for less than 2 weeks. Stop spreading misinformative nonsense for you political agenda. This is not the platform for it.
> The total crypto market cap collapsed because of interest rate hikes.
It's constantly been peaking and collapsing since 2013, when there were no US interest rate increases. The 2017 peak happened in the middle of a US interest rate increase cycle. The 2021 peak happened 6 months before the most recent US interest rate increase cycle. I'm sure interest rates were varying in other countries on different schedules, but blaming a crypto market collapse on interest rate hikes doesn't seem to square with the data.
Yeah but institutional investors were just starting to hold much larger positions within the last few years. They are much more sensitive to interest rate hikes than individuals.
I would assume that as long as the returns are greater than the interest rates, institutional investors are less sensitive than individuals to interest rate hikes.
> The 2017 peak happened in the middle of a US interest rate increase cycle. The 2021 peak happened 6 months before the most recent US interest rate increase cycle
Denominate the Bitcoin market cap in US M1 money supply. You will then see that it peaked in 2017, 2019, and 2021 (twice). This ratio also bottomed recently.
Effectively, when the central bank that manages the word's reserve currency starts printing money (or there is an anticipation of printing), Bitcoin appreciates. The opposite happens during tightening (ie rate hikes).
In recent years, you can argue that bitcoin has acted as a canary in the coal mine. Bitcoins chart is pretty much the same as stocks (especially tech/growth stocks). It just moves slightly ahead of stocks sometimes.
Money flows out of equities and into bonds which yield a higher more dependable return when interest rates are high enough.
The equities market was already running at artificially inflated values for some sectors (like technology), which means there isn't much growth potential (if everything is deemed to be already overpriced), and so the outflows were quite significant from those sectors, accentuating the inverse relationship between equities and interest rates.
I would argue that cryptos are typically not equities; they're usually either commodities (cryptocurrency) or some sort of non-current intangible asset (NFTs). The exception would be things like shares in the DAO, which, while interesting, is not typically what people have in mind when they say "crypto" these days.
I can't say for sure, but I think cryptos are actually behaving a bit more like precious metals, in that people use them as speculative store of value - so a bit like you say, commodities.
The other thing that surprises me is the sheer number of currencies that currently exist - I had thought there would be a massive shake-out in the market but so far they seem to be multiplying like fungus.
That’s a good model. Gold and diamonds actually have industrial applications, but those price signals are lost in the noise of fashion and speculation. If they were suddenly unpopular, prices would drop, but not to zero.
Crypto is not an equity, but it trades like one (specifically like a tech meme stock) as of late. It peeked in Nov 2021 just like tech stocks, and has come down roughly a similar amount.
Interest rates in Argentina have been on an upward trend for the last decade [1], yet bitcoin is near its all time high relative to the Peso [2]. How do you explain the contradiction here?
The claim is higher interest rates cause things to collapse.
US interest rate go up, bitcoin go down!
Argentina interest rate go up, bitcoin go up!
Contradiction.
What you pointed out tho is important: fiat is a confidence game at the end of the day, and it doesn't matter how much yield a fiat offers if it lacks confidence.
Bitcoin is more or less a measure of how much confidence people have in their respective fiat currencies.
We've seen a lot of growth over the past decades, so it should be easy to retire at 30, but we're being told to work longer, be more productive, and die sooner. So where is that all growth? something doesn't add up.
Is that a rhetorical question? It flows to the 1%. Current levels of wealth inequality are unprecedented in American history. We work hard to support the lavish lifestyles of the rich.
If we could combine today's technology with 1970s levels of wealth equality, we could probably retire in 1970s level comfort by the time we reach age 40.
It's a hedge against currency debasement. And it hedged pretty well against that! From the moment M2 supply increased (Feb 2020) to the moment M2 began decreasing(jan 2022), bitcoin earned you almost 400%.
Take a look at Bitcoin. It's up 80% from the recent bottom.
NVDA is up 140% for similar reasons: the market anticipates the tightening cycle is over.
It's up more than Bitcoin because of the AI narrative. It's also possible money is moving out of bank stocks (compare to KRE or XLF), small/mid-cap stocks (compare to IWM), and other semiconductor stocks (compare to SMH). This trend could mean-revert into the new quarter.
The comment I was originally addressing was about the decline, not the rally.
We could go back and forth for days on whether cryptocurrencies have done anything for society, but it's already been discussed ad infinitum both here on HN and elsewhere.
I only wanted to point out that this article is inane.
Crypto is a technology that offers just one thing: electronic payments without anything unneessary bundled with it. Crypto is a model of what banking should be.
For comparison, to use a bank card you first need to provide all your details to bank which can share them with anyone they want, and then your application can be rejected for arbitrary reasons. And after this again the bank can share information about anything you bought with the card. There is even an official organization for sharing data about consumers loan history and this is totally not a crime in our weird society.
It is quite a very poor use with such "crime" happening all on a public and transparent blockchain, making it very easy to trace all of that (even if they use a tumbler / mixer) with the funds certainly seized and frozen as soon as it hits the exchange.
In fact criminals and scammers still use banks and Zelle to facilitate their criminal enterprise - [0] [1] in the trillions of dollars.
Perhaps they want to get themselves traced on a public ledger and to join the long list of gangs caught and arrested by the authorities each week?
Once again, Bitcoin is worse for scammers, criminals and ransomware than using Zelle and the banks for fraud.
You should be asking why the banks continue to move trillions of dollars of illicit funds for criminals for years without them doing anything. Same with Zelle.
Sadly there are many more simple minded people like this than people who understand nuance and know that legal doesn't always equal right. Even more terrifying, people like this can vote.
You live in a bubble if you think projects working on blockchains as Ethereum or Bitcoin are only used for crime. USD is still the #1 FIAT used for crime.
Bullshit, they existed both before the crypto and before the Internet itself. It's just a bit more convenient, but otherwise it's just the same as it was: give money to one man, take money/goods from other man and how exactly they settle their accounts is none of your business.
"A person often meets his destiny on the road he took to avoid it" --Jean de La Fontaine.
With sufficient tracking of non-cryptocurrencies and physical goods governments could largely kill dark net markets by making it too hard to buy anything physical with your cryptocurrency. Imagine KYC but applied to every transaction instead of just large ones.
Making dark markets too easy isn't a win for personal liberty. Its a step on the road to a dystopia with little personal liberty or privacy because every time something seriously bad happens a few due to dark markets that would not have been possible in the legal markets the general public will demand something be done about it, which will result in government being granted more power.
One of the things I hadn’t considered in the beginning is that it is also a large conversion of resources and power into computation and heat.
Fundamentally, that’s a kind of transfer of wealth in and of itself. My favorite examples were people with subsidized electric bills who kinda scored on that arbitrage until everyone wised up.
Right, but _they_ are also are also firmly planted within the fiat monetary system. Ultimately their will be a socially defined singular cryptographic definition of economic value at some point in the future.
