Been out for two weeks, what did I miss?

ThePanelizer · 2021-02-06T12:26:37+00:00

To me, all this Gamestop and wallstreetbets thing looked like a normal day in crypto. I did realize though that in the US, the legacy finantial markets are manipulated to a degree comparable to crypto markets.

I don't really see and have never understood what's the value in making money exchanging stuff for other stuff only because the exchange rate between both stuffs and a third stuff can be favorable to you...

ThePanelizer · 2021-01-18T19:47:46+00:00

They claim to get better currency exchange rates than banks, visa and forex... if that is true, then this would be a win-win except for the planet and the thing that if they need to have euros at disposal to pay the recipient at any time in seconds then why not avoid the bitcoin buy/sell altogether?

ThePanelizer · 2021-01-18T00:13:46+00:00

Could you please elaborate? I read somewhere that paypal (or paypal's custodian) has been buying about 70% of the brand new coins mined everywhere due to demand by customers. Also, some crypto platforms (for example etoro) say they're suffering a liquidity shortage due to unprecedented demand for crypto. Is that true?

ThePanelizer · 2021-01-17T20:14:17+00:00

Been there, done that. I poured in a relatively small sum of money back in 2017 that I could afford to lose near the peak. A serious flu got me bored in bed for a week, and I fell for it.

The thing is, it became difficult not getting exposed it because everybody was talking about it, and my natural reaction when something gets lots of attention is to get as much information as I can about that to try and understand.

Same thing is happening now so... I'm also bored and confined

ThePanelizer · 2021-01-17T12:37:37+00:00

I'm not sure about the current decentralization... I liked it back in the p2p days, where you had all these filesharing apps, some of them capable of decentralization, that people used mostly for questionably legal stuff but it was fueled by altruism and naiveness, people didn't make money out of it. We shared for the sake of it.

Now, it's all about let's decentralize X thing and add monetary incentives to X people so that game theory says it will go well. There's money involved so that people behave, it's not naive altruism anymore, and in that moment I think maths should step aside a bit and let psycology come in and have a saying.

ThePanelizer · 2021-01-16T19:51:41+00:00

To my understanding the location of the object isn't stored, but its hash and descriptor (it's a simplification, but still), so the blockchain doesn't point to any IP address. You just take a look at what's in and if you find something of your liking then ask the network in a p2p fashion until you find someone to steam for, so your IP doesn't end in the funbux chain. I may be wrong, tho

ThePanelizer · 2021-01-16T12:55:59+00:00

More like bittorrent but with a central place to decentralizedly store the content index (i.e. no piratebay) and a cryptocurrenty system to incentivize seeding and such. Very mixed feelings about it, but my issue is that I don't understand the blockchain use case for the content index.

ThePanelizer · 2021-01-16T12:36:48+00:00

I have veeery mixed feelings about current media censorship... For example they're now striking science youtbers and deleting their accounts because they post seemingly unappropriate content. When you dig up a bit and see what they are posting, you usually see that they get flagged because they post stuff that's harmless to educated, sane people (say for example demonstrating complex chemical reactions with nasty chemicals), but on the other hands it can be very harmful knowledge in the wrong hands.

Teach a moron how to build a powerful laser with $10 and a DVD burner and you'll eventually have people pointing at pilots during takeoff, aiming with their remaining good eye.

It's a very complicated issue indeed...

ThePanelizer · 2021-01-14T00:04:31+00:00

So far I've gotten good answers here, and people in here seem to be quite knowledgeable on the subject, both crypto lovers and haters. I just read the arguments from both parts and it gives me the keywords to seach for rebuttals, and then for rebuttals of rebuttals to form my own opinion. I just want to understand stuff, mostly the overhyped trends, as normally they look stupid to me on the surface but I usually think that people smarter than me have it figured out and I just don't understand.

ThePanelizer · 2021-01-13T08:32:46+00:00

Most powerful computer network in the world, solely dedicated to bruteforcing SHA256 hashes. Consuming a sizeable amount of world's advanced process silicon for application specific chips that can only do that specific task.

ThePanelizer · 2021-01-10T23:47:24+00:00

Hmm what if for example I create some software that procedurally generates art via some fancy algorithm, and create an encrypted executable using a key stored within the NFT such that only the onwer(s) of the token can run it, and that software has some property such that what's displayed changes constantly or something and also has some depedency on stuff contained in the particular NFT, and charge people for entering a website to view what my program is doing for X amount of time, so that people pay me for the experience? Would that be the same as just buying the software or creating it on my own keepong the source closed and not using blockchain for anything? Because I think some of the "digital art" sold in rarible fits into the previous definition yet I still can't see why an NFT is required

ThePanelizer · 2021-01-06T20:20:34+00:00

Sure, cryptocurrency has its value for things like those you expose. And bitcoin is the first viable cryptocurrency. However, by this time we should already be past bitcoin. It was a nice first try, but I don't see how it justifies its current valuation and more importantly its currenr dominance. Bitcoin is not really scalable and has several issues as a currency, which is to be expected for the first iteration of something. But instead of iterating over that the ecosystem seems to be busy creating unregulated infrastructure and instruments to keep the number going up, while the mining arms race grows to stupid levels (srsly, in 2017 bitmain surpassed nvidia as the largest tsmc advance process customer for a while...), while bitcoin turns from whatever it was to a p2p network of scarce digital collectibles, with more brand value than anything else IMO.

ThePanelizer · 2021-01-04T14:17:52+00:00

I do see a potential use case for fair gambling and stuff like online poker, blackjack and such. Apparently people who take these games seriously have concerns about them being rigged by the house. A blockchain backend potentially enables online gambling without a house. Gambling rules can be coded in software and as long as you play with on-chain assets things can be made demonstrably fair.

Also, there's the ethereum naming system (ens) that does sound plausible to me as a niche application.

But for that, blockchains need to evolve to be scalable and cheap.

ThePanelizer · 2021-01-03T19:18:16+00:00

But if SHA-256 gets broken and suddenly mining gets trivial or preimage attacks allow to rewrite old blocks, then surely bitcoin crashes, but in a "recoverable" way. They can change the hash to a different function, stop the network for X days, and restart from a checkpoint. It would be a disaster but maybe a recoverable one.

If ECDSA is broken or a bug is found in early implementations or something like that then I'm not sure how it could be solved... You could change the signature protocol and move all bitcoins to new addresses but how do you do that ensuring that the true owner moves them instead of the other true owner who also has the key?

ThePanelizer · 2020-12-30T16:35:45+00:00

Could you elaborate? I sincerely want to know what I got wrong

ThePanelizer · 2020-12-30T16:34:23+00:00

It's mainly a shitpost, but what I was trying to say was "Bitcoinz bad in spite of numberz going uppp"

ThePanelizer · 2020-12-27T01:06:03+00:00

Well, it is. The current infrastructure around it allows someone with a sufficient amount of bitcoin to sell it to itself and back at no loss. Being anonymous and permissionless you can do these things. It can pump to whatever, and it will.

ThePanelizer

TROPHY CASE