The blockchain is going to destroy everything

[Pocket]

Dan Olson did a video yesterday.

It's long as hell, so I'll sum up the most important part: If you thought the environmental threat was the worst thing about crypto and NFTs... well, you're probably still right, but it turns out there are a ton of runners-up that are each making the world a little worse. The big one, though, is that it's increasingly attracting the attention of people who have the power to rework our entire economic system so that everything runs on it. While it no doubt continues to devour rainforests whole.

 

[Ironbite4]

Well that video's a little out of date now. Crypto took a massive tumble in the last 48 hours.

Ironbite-as in it ain't worth the blockchain it's embeded in.

 

[Pocket]

See, that's a fallacy I think we need to get over—treating every drop as the bottom falling out of it. Like, almost as long as the public has been aware of Bitcoin, every single time its value seemingly tanked, everyone was like "Well so much for that lol"... and then the line goes back to gradually crawling upward. It's unstable as hell from day to day, sure, which is one of two reasons it's terrible as a currency, but as an investment its upward trend has been more reliable than the stock market. That's why, over ten years later, we're still having this conversation. (And ironically, for people who have been suckered into buying in and aren't rich enough that they deserve to lose their shirts, the last thing we want is for them to think the first slump spells doom and frantically dump what they have left at a huge loss.)

Will it collapse eventually? Maybe. Compared to the other possibility Dan presented, it's certainly the more preferable one—but it's not one we should count on. Personally I'm rooting for it to be outlawed outright, with reparations for any non-wealthy people who were left holding the bag.

 

[wonko the sane?]

Everything I've seen has basically said that NFT's are just ******* stupid. And the folks screaming about it alternate somewhere between a pyramid scheme and a brainwashed cult. No, I didn't watch this video, but a bunch of shorter ones from other sources (mostly upper echelon gaming on youtube.).

The basic core of the technology isn't bad, and could be used for security purposes attached to other things but on it's own? It's DRM without content.

 

[Pocket]

That's actually one of the things he touches on, the myth that the blockchain is in any way suitable for sensitive information. It may be nearly immune to man-in-the-middle attacks, but the old standby of finding someone who has write permissions and tricking them into giving you access through a phishing link still works like a charm. And due to its append-only nature, nothing you do can ever be erased, only rectified with the equivalent of "disregard the above".

He also mentions the complete lack of privacy: anything that's been incorporated into the blockchain can be read by anyone, so forget about using it to store anything you don't want the whole world to know. And because anyone who even knows the address can just put stuff into it, people have figured out how to write viruses that, once clicked on, steal the contents. That's what happened to the "all my apes gone" guy. I don't know if that's inherent to the technology or just how it works for crypto wallets in particular, but it's something to keep in mind. At the very least, there's nothing about blockchain that's inherently more secure than what we have now.

 

[wonko the sane?]

Seems like the whole thing would actually work well when linked to actual physical property, like real estate, if only as a record of ownership to refer to.

 

[CoffeeHorse]

It won't collapse. Florida's government is seriously looking into the idea of recognizing some crypto or another as a valid form of payment. This will definitely include Bitcoin, because we found out that the inventor lives here and DeSantis thinks that's kinda cool. We also already have MiamiCoin.

 

[NovaSaber]

Saw this today and it makes another good point:

 

[Pocket]

That was another thing the video covered. All the claims that because the blockchain is decentralized, you're not reliant on a central authority to keep the records alive, are also bullshit. Because there's not enough room in a block for a whole image file, they just contain the URL of some copy that's hosted somewhere and can disappear at any time for any reason.

So it's not just that there are downsides that they don't want you to know about; it's that every positive thing anyone has ever claimed about them is also a baldfaced lie.

 

[wonko the sane?]

The blockchain of security is no more secure than any game that requires a server check to run. The second the company hosting it decides they don' wanna any more: it ends. Congrats, your entire "fortune" just got EA'ed.

 

[Cybersnark]

Peripherally relevant, but we all need a little levity:

 

[Monique]

Its a good video and very informative. I already knew most of this stuff but one thing I didn't know about was people being able to just... drop a virus into your wallet and then you literally can't interact with it in anyway you just have to hope you never click on it. Sure you could transfer everything into a new wallet but because thats all public info they can just drop a new virus in. You end up paying for all those transfers and get nowhere.

I mean its FAR from the worst thing about Crypto. But if anything will stop it from becoming mainstream it has to be that surely? That and just the general nature of it being unreliable and easy to lose your shirt on. Like a dude just lost half a million in coin the other day because he had transfer ETH to WETH and wanted to transfer it back. He assumed you just did the same steps to transfer it back. The money just poofed instead. half a million gone by a simple, irreversible, mistake.

 

[wonko the sane?]

Part of the responsibility of government is the oversight and maintenance of the economic system. Someone is responsible for ensuring the money works. With crypto, there is no security.

It's no less imaginary than the rest of the economy, but unlike cold hard cash: you can see the wavy edges where it's nosing into the imaginary.

 

[Kup]

I had a client who was a strong proponent of the decentralized web and blockchain. I had a hard time writing the content as I was literally learning as I went.

The thing no one has explained to me is why you’d invest in crypto in the first place. You buy it with money, and when you sell if you get…money. USD or whatever your local currency happens to be.

To me it feels more like stocks: an intangible asset that can’t be used to pay your monthly bills, and only has value in established currencies. Like…who is gonna buy your 100 shares? That guy? Ok. What’s he paying in? US dollars. Okay then…

 

[Nevermore]

I had a client who was a strong proponent of the decentralized web and blockchain. I had a hard time writing the content as I was literally learning as I went.

The thing no one has explained to me is why you’d invest in crypto in the first place. You buy it with money, and when you sell if you get…money. USD or whatever your local currency happens to be.

To me it feels more like stocks: an intangible asset that can’t be used to pay your monthly bills, and only has value in established currencies. Like…who is gonna buy your 100 shares? That guy? Ok. What’s he paying in? US dollars. Okay then…

That was my first instinct back when I first learned about Bitcoin. Nobody was ever able to explain it to me.

 

[Dekafox]

The idea is that crypto removes the need to trust anyone or anything with the money transactions so Big Finance can't muck about with it behind your back. Transactions are non-reversable, because any sort of dispute resolution requires trust in whomever is resolving the dispute, and the idea is to remove all things that require trust so it can run on its own with no human input. That's the entire idea behind Decentralized Finance. Remove humans form the equation(which coincidentally also removes the ability to deal with abuse).

Of course, the thing it neglects to mention is that if certain wealthy coinowners are hit by a major loss through a bad transaction or hack, they can roll back EVERYONE'S transactions via a hard fork of the blockchain.... which has already been done a few times to my knowledge.

"The law is the code" sounds wonderful until you realize how buggy software code is in the best of hands, and then run that against all the people who now have a financial incentive to break it...

(Which puts aside the fancyland ideas some people have to replace all IP law with NFTs and smart contracts.... that's where things like the "own a color and get a split of any payments when NFTs using that color are sold" come from. )

 

[wonko the sane?]

Basically: you have to trust people with the thing that people can be the least trusted with.

 

[Monique]

I had a client who was a strong proponent of the decentralized web and blockchain. I had a hard time writing the content as I was literally learning as I went.

The thing no one has explained to me is why you’d invest in crypto in the first place. You buy it with money, and when you sell if you get…money. USD or whatever your local currency happens to be.

To me it feels more like stocks: an intangible asset that can’t be used to pay your monthly bills, and only has value in established currencies. Like…who is gonna buy your 100 shares? That guy? Ok. What’s he paying in? US dollars. Okay then…

I mean I would guess part of the reason you don't get an answer is because the original point of Crypto wasn't to become an investment. It was supposed to be an alternative type of currency I gather and you weren't meant to invest in it anymore than you would spend time converting USD into CAD and then waiting for the exchange rate to be favorable to change it back. Bitcoin being so volatile wasn't really a feature its just kind of... and exploited bug? Which just plays into why Cryptobros trying to get you invest in it is a scam. They want your money to go in so the value goes up for when they pull the money out and put it back into the very currency they claim their coin is trying to replace.

And that kinda ties back into NFT's too. Its too hard to gauge when the next massive coin tumble will be and when it will rally again. It's not as easy for them to be right there and ready when it happens to get in on buying the dip. Especially when the only really super unstable coin you can do it with seems to be bitcoin. But with NFTs you got a brand new world of crypto to exploit. Its much easier to manipulate people, its much easier to pump and dump, rugpull, its much easier to make something worth nothing look like its worth something. It's a volatile playground built off the back of a mostly stable coin and so the cryptobros LOVE it. No buying hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of hard to get equipment to get started, you just need some ugly ass jpegs and a sucker. You can find those you can turn 70 bucks into some crazy number if you get lucky.

And because its less tracked, less people find out about it when it goes wrong. Everyone can see when Bitcoin sheds half its worth in a couple of days. Less people see that limited run of 10000 wolf cybercops NFTs vanishing in to the night with all the purchasers ETH.

 

[abates]

"In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes" -- Benjamin Franklin

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1488359022612865025

 

[Dekafox]