The world is changing in a big way, the creation and use of crypto and nft’s is historical and have the potential to change poor people lives, it has certainly changed my life and it’s got to be worth an off topic thread or two.
CCP and the ISD’s understand this which might be why they are leaving this thread alone.
The ISD’s primary job is to keep the peace. If people generally behave it is easier to let a thread be than to go out of their way to put the kibosh on it. Also sometimes its easier to let one thread act as the lightning rod for a topic that might otherwise infect a wider swath of the forum.
So long as it’s within the guidelines and everyone behaves, I certainly see no issue - I have however, moved this to the OoOP section.
I have temporarly closed to try and perform a cleanup and will reopen soon.
Some of you remind me of this guy Warren Buffett, perspective is a funny thing I don’t think he has much to say about poorer countries and inflation and privacy. Can we all say with a certainty that he cares about the whole world and it’s people or is he just interested in the USA and it’s people being in a good position.
Trying to get someone like him to understand the concept of mining would be impossible, he simply wouldn’t understand there is no head office computer or server processing all of the transactions
I have watched a lot of what Mr. Buffett has had to say, and this is consistent with his philosophy in general, even if he agrees with your assessment of what bitcoin is.
Buffett does not like to hold commodities. He likes to buy businesses that produce things or provide services people consume directly. He greatly prefers businesses he can understand. He would have no interest in crypto because A) It is not a consumable good or service, and B) Crypto as a business model is not as intuitively familiar as businesses that produce goods and services making it hard for him to select ones that are trading below what they’re worth.
Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway are buyers of businesses. He does not run them, and he makes a point of not getting involved with trying to manage the companies he acquires. They were good when he bought them and he wants to leave them that way. He’s an investor and he sticks to investing.
Buffett is like, the last guy on earth who’d be interested in crypto, but neither does he deal in gold or real estate, either because he doesn’t know much about them or because they don’t align with his overall long term strategy. I would not be surprised if Youtube has exaggerated what Mr. Buffett has had to say on the subject. He’s not shy about saying what he believes or what he thinks, but he’s usually pretty careful not to say that a thing can’t work for someone else who has a different skill set. It’s Charlie Munger you have to watch out for. If he were as famous I bet they’d be all over what he says sometimes because he does not pull punches and occasionally leaves Buffett a bit mortified.
IRS is not the tax collector of the world.
I guess this would suit him because he lives in a country where the currency is stable. Someone in a developing country where the currency is not stable might want to use bitcoin simply because it may stop them from losing everything not because they want to become rich off of investments.
Also the cash in his bank is a commodity and can be traded on forex against other currencies in a similar way to how bitcoin is traded, does he have anything to say about this?
One can still have a business doing whatever they do, as long as they are being paid with legal tender which is what bitcoin is there shouldn’t be a problem.
It is actually a money transfer network/service as much as it is a currency, the fees for sending the currency are reasonable. The fact that it is not a consumable good is not a reason why you shouldn’t buy it, It is a currency so it can also be used to buy consumer goods
Does physical cash on it’s own have a business model? He seems to be trying hard to ignore that it is a currency and should be viewed as one. I can start a business tomorrow and produce goods for sale and request bitcoin only payments. this is just the same as requesting cash because they are easily exchanged for each other.
This feels like manipulation.
And they speak of criminals using crypto, in 2016 Natwest Bank in the UK laundered around 365m from criminals. The UK believes around £30 to £90 Billion is laundered through banks in the UK each year. Should everyone in the UK stop using physical cash because of this? No, that isn’t how it works. It would be silly to stop using banks because criminals are able to trick the system into laundering physical cash.
Why should we stop using crypto just because criminals also use it it? No one wants to help criminals and I really hope a lot is being done to stop them using crypto networks.
I guess what I’m saying is that Buffett has always felt this way about literally any asset class that you just buy and hold so his stance is not something born purely of a dislike for cryptocurrencies.
Buffett didn’t go to Gilette to buy all their razors and shaving cream, he bought the ability to produce razors and shaving cream.
Buffett didn’t go to See’s Candy to buy all their lollypops, he wanted to be able to make lollypops.
Buffett isn’t going to buy cryptocoins, and he can’t buy the ‘crypto business’. You can not ‘consume’ a cryptocoin, only pass it around. It’s not something Buffett would see as an investment of the sort he prefers.
Cash is a necessary intermediary, but Buffett does not like cash as an investment because it also does not produce anything. Re-watch the video and replace ‘bitcoin’ with ‘gold’ and most of it would still be something Buffett would likely say.
“When you buy gold, you’re just hoping you can sell it to someone else for more than you paid for it. It does not produce anything of value.”, yet he would probably still concede that gold has a pretty stable value. He just does not care. He wants to produce something of value, not just hold it.
Buffett having some money really just boils down to this: What can I trade to get the businesses I want?
Razor Blades? No.
Lollypops? No.
Gold? No.
Crypto? No.
Cash? Yes.
It just looks like he holds a lot of money to us because businesses are very expensive, but Buffett doesn’t love the money. He loves his business.
Buffett is definitely critical of Cryptocurrencies, and I’ll grant that things could shake out differently from what he expects, but he’s critical of not just crypto but of every asset class that one can own that exists only to be traded, including cash in excess of the amount he intends to use. Make crypto a necessary or convenient option for buying and selling businesses and I bet he’d be using it. (Though never holding it as an investment in itself, just to have in preparation for the acquisition of an asset he actually wants.)
Yeah, you seem to be taking a lot of the supposed benefits of crypto and NFT’s at face value -which probably goes a long way towards explaining why we feel so differently about it. I mean, I agree with what you said. And, if NFT’s actually benefited artists, that would indeed be a good thing.
In reality, however, many, many artists have found their work already stolen and minted, and those who were actually able to mint their work, ended up losing money in the deal. The former occurred because there were absolutely zero protections put in place to protect against art theft, and the latter occurred because NFT collectors weren’t buying NFT’s for their artistic value, but for their speculative value. Thus, many of the NFT’s bought were not bought from artists, but from those capable of generating hype and perceived speculative value (i.e. by wash trading -or selling NFT’s to sock puppet accounts at inflated prices in order to make them appear like they are going up in value).
In fact, the entire NFT market has apparently shifted away from buying “art,” and towards buying “tokens” that act like shares in business ventures.
Anyway, I know the video is over two hours long, but I highly recommend that you watch it. Because you appear to know less about what’s actually going on in the crypto sphere than you think you do.
I have experienced the benefits of crypto first hand due to being a miner and so far I have found that it does everything it says on the tin.
I am learning about NFT’s at the moment and so far it looks good. I’m not going to pretend there isn’t copyright and ownership problems in the world today with regard to digital art, I understand the Ethereum blockchain and how it records NFT’s so I would say this is an excellent method of securing content.
Which video do you speak of? please link it thanks.
This pair was scamming people out of their personal data and then selling it for crypto currency, they seemed to think by selling the ill-gotten data using crypto currency they would be protected and remain anonymous.
They were mistaken.
Based on the evidence I can’t think that law enforcement is sitting back relaxing while criminals use crypto to do their business, this is not the case.
Justice is catching up with new technology. So yes, they won’t be able to get rich quick and get away with it. And the simple crooks, on par with ‘the wet bandids’ got caught.
It takes more than copy pasting a crime to get away with it. They probably heard on some forum some guy telling them he got rich with it but he left out a lot of details like wage or more importantly how to launder it in a less obvious way.
As I mentioned earlier lots of jobs have been created. I’m sure governments around the world employ crypto specialists to assist their police force.
yes, criminals need police to catch them. So now you are saying criminality is a good thing.
I knew you were dishonest, I did not know you were a criminal apologist.
Indeed, those are new jobs that are required. Below is the (constantly updated) IMF post about the crypto boom and it’s volatility and lack of central oversight.
And central oversight I think is the future. I have my own Mumble server, our ingame alliance also has one. But most people including us are moving to Discord mostly as a means to attract young new players who are pro-centralisation; Discord (replacing the majority of private and rented Teamspeak/Ventrillo/Mumble/… servers, Facebook (replacing Geocities, MySpace [swallowed by Facebook and repurposed for artists],… ). And I think although there is competition, it’s like Microsoft vs Linux. Linux isn’t really replacing any windows stations. Linux somehow is not taking on tablets/phones (in a seriuous way), which I can undertsand . I hope I didn’t get to far off topic, it was just to explain how popular centralisation (and the giving up on personal freedom, unknowingly albeit voulontary) is.
There is yet another criticism of Bitcoin, blockchain, and Proof-of-X consensus protocols that I’d like to share: DSHR's Blog: EE380 Talk
It is a long read, as it is a transcription of a presentation made at Stanford. It does require a technical background to fully understand the criticisms.
Well the IMF are one of this organizations which will lose a lot of power when Bitcoin or crypto gets a foothold. They basically try to make sure that the US dollar stays the world reserve currency and that everyone has to buy dollar to trade on the global markets. The US would lose a lot if the dollar was losing this position, as it allowed them to print value out of nowhere just because there is global demand for the dollar.
Obviously a lot of other countries don’t like the US being in that privileged position very much, but none of them are big enough to challenge it on their own, and no other country will support them becoming the next benefactor of a global money printer. The alternative to that is pretty obvious, an open source monetary network and asset that is not controlled by anyone that favors no one, like Bitcoin. This way they can at least take the power away from the US.
Another important point to think about is that the biggest global monetary network, SWIFT is completely controlled by the US as well. In the case of sanctions against countries, the regularly use that power to shut them off from the international payment rails. Bitcoin and Lightning can be used as an alternative and even superior version of a payment rails that can not be stopped this way.
This is a completely wrong perception of the proliferation of this operating systems. Linux has behind the curtain basically replaced everything. Yes, you still have your windows or mac workstations, but that is like almost the only place where Linux isn’t dominating today (except if you have a chromebook, that’s Linux again). You mentioned phones or tablets not being Linux, Android is Linux and it’s the dominant OS on phones or tablets. Top 500 super computer, 100% Linux since a couple years. Servers on the internet, the absolut big majority of them runs Linux. OS on your TV or toaster, probably Linux.
It’s just that the regular consumer doesn’t even notice and doesn’t watch behind the curtain. The reason why Linux is so popular is the network effect. Companies adopting Linux are maybe competing on a product level, but on a technological level they are additive because of the open source nature of Linux. If two companies use Linux, they both benefit each other by improving Linux. Companies that use their own in-house OS on the other hand don’t benefit from the works of others. So in the end as a company, you can either join the Linux train where thousands of companies world wide benefit from each others work or be on your own and fight solo against the rest of the world.
Now I believe Bitcoin is in a similar position because it shows a similar network effect. The more people, companies and even countries join the network and build on it, the stronger it will become relative to the proprietary network that are run and controlled by just a few. It is also like Linux the case that you can just take the technology and plugin to the system. There are no barriers that stand between you and the realization of your business idea, no Banks that closely guard the infrastructure to kill competition. It’s a truly free market again built on a free and open source monetary network where no one has an advantage.
And also like Linux you will probably not notice it as a customer. Because this will all be done behind the curtain. You will still have apple pay or cash app or revolut, but they will all be able to seamlessly exchange value instantly utilizing the Bitcoin and Lightning network. And if your app doesn’t join, it will be similar to that company not being on the internet.
This is all speculation obviously. But this is essentially why I’m betting on Bitcoin, but because I think it has a valid use-case and is already in the process of taking over.
Not really.
Most companies don’t bring anything to Linux.
It’s using open protocol /common formats that would help both, not using linux. You can use Windows and open protocols.
Open formats is a long term benefit, not a short term one, though.
Nope, it won’t be instant with BTC.
Instant payment is already available, anonymously, so BTC would not ad anything . What’s more it’s more costly since it requires “miners” to make the accounting work using a lot of Watt.