Climate change: Page 3 - The Arsenal discussion community: One More in the Tolly

Climate change

jones

Burnwinter wrote:
I personally know, as in physically know and am watching start businesses and buy houses, several people who've cashed out hundreds of thousands with significantly more still in play, so the FOMO can get pretty real.

I'm sure you're technically right about currency backing, but I think the differences are unimportant absent a crisis. I've lived through changes in the face value of things like real estate that are unanchored to reality. Exchange value is a moron spinning an abacus, and crypto trading brings us slightly closer to realising it.

Several people out of how many? Is it that different to someone investing in Amazon shares or any other booming commodity?

I have to disagree with your second point, it's in a completely different league of divorced from reality. Real estate can rise and fall in value but it is in the end a piece of land or property that can be used for whatever you want it to. Bitcoins are literally pointless concatenations of bytes that will never have any intrinsic value. Even in the 80s in Japan real estate wasn't as violently volatile as Bitcoin is today.

Burnwinter

I'll give you the details. I know a group of people in Fremantle who started investing in crypto in around 2015.

One of them has just cashed out enough to buy a commercial premises in a prime location large enough to sublet to four small businesses.

Another has drawn up plans for a warehouse for a hydroponic mushroom farm, and cashed out the initial capital.

And a third has nearly paid off a suburban home on the income of a sociology PhD student.

All three are worth well over a million on paper.

goon

Surely they will all eventually crash though and crash permanently without a real tangible use?

Irishgunner

There is a tangible use though.

Fees and transaction times have gone to shit recently, but when lightning network rolls out that should solve the current issues. Being able to securely send large sums of money for low fees and with a publicly verifiable ledger will be particularly useful for commerce and trade.

Lightning network also allows for objectively verifiable off-chain transactions too.

speedy

Irish gunner wrote:
speedy wrote:
Its a Pyramid scheme. You buy in to something with no actual value hoping other people buy in after you. The guy that invented it is dead but a group of guys involved in it control the sales market so when it crashes which every pyramid scheme has to eventually they can sell first while they freeze the market. Because its not traded on a normal stock exchange.

What? Nobody even knows who Satoshi is.

I know one top guy in tech. And he said people know and he died years ago.

goon

Irish gunner wrote:
There is a tangible use though.

Fees and transaction times have gone to shit recently, but when lightning network rolls out that should solve the current issues. Being able to securely send large sums of money for low fees and with a publicly verifiable ledger will be particularly useful for commerce and trade.

Lightning network also allows for objectively verifiable off-chain transactions too.

How is it significantly different from conventional currency transactions? Genuine question.

I pay hundreds of thousands to suppliers in the US and they receive it almost instantly, and as far as fees go, we're talking about a virtually inconsequential $25.00.

I also don't buy that anyone is going to pour money into a hugely volatile 'currency' so that you can make international payments slightly easier.

Irishgunner

speedy wrote:
Irish gunner wrote:
What? Nobody even knows who Satoshi is.

I know one top guy in tech. And he said people know and he died years ago.

If you believe Satoshi is Hal Finney.

jones

goon wrote:
Irish gunner wrote:
There is a tangible use though.

Fees and transaction times have gone to shit recently, but when lightning network rolls out that should solve the current issues. Being able to securely send large sums of money for low fees and with a publicly verifiable ledger will be particularly useful for commerce and trade.

Lightning network also allows for objectively verifiable off-chain transactions too.

How is it significantly different from conventional currency transactions? Genuine question.

I pay hundreds of thousands to suppliers in the US and they receive it almost instantly

Alright Pablo now calm down.

speedy

Irish gunner wrote:
speedy wrote:
I know one top guy in tech. And he said people know and he died years ago.

If you believe Satoshi is Hal Finney.

To be honest I didn't ask. Appearently theres a new crypto thing coming out soon that's actually going to do stuff and has some of the smartest people in the industry behind it. It's probably worth investent but i can't remember the name of it. An hour of bitcoin conversation and I was ready to end it all.

Irishgunner

goon wrote:
Irish gunner wrote:
There is a tangible use though.

Fees and transaction times have gone to shit recently, but when lightning network rolls out that should solve the current issues. Being able to securely send large sums of money for low fees and with a publicly verifiable ledger will be particularly useful for commerce and trade.

Lightning network also allows for objectively verifiable off-chain transactions too.

How is it significantly different from conventional currency transactions? Genuine question.

I pay hundreds of thousands to suppliers in the US and they receive it almost instantly, and as far as fees go, we're talking about a virtually inconsequential $25.00.

I also don't buy that anyone is going to pour money into a hugely volatile 'currency' so that you can make international payments slightly easier.

It's only different in that you don't have to go via a bank to make transfers really, and you have a publicly verifiable ledger that shows proof of receipt of payment.

Fees should be even lower with lightning network too, you'd be looking at sub 5$ fees for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Definitely doesn't currently work as a currency though. Far too volatile, isn't a reliable store of value, isn't practical for transactions etc.

Irishgunner

speedy wrote:
Irish gunner wrote:
If you believe Satoshi is Hal Finney.

To be honest I didn't ask. Appearently theres a new crypto thing coming out soon that's actually going to do stuff and has some of the smartest people in the industry behind it. It's probably worth investent but i can't remember the name of it. An hour of bitcoin conversation and I was ready to end it all.

Oh yeah definitely, there are already cryptos that are "technically" better than bitcoin. It's unlikely that they'll ever gain the necessary market share though. Bitcoin just dwarfs every other alt.

Mirth

Burnwinter wrote:
I personally know, as in physically know and am watching start businesses and buy houses, several people who've cashed out hundreds of thousands with significantly more still in play, so the FOMO can get pretty real.

Oh yeah, the FOMO is real but it's probably better for my sanity that I don't put money in something I don't understand.

Claudius

It’s all mad. All the engineers at my telco client just sit around talking about cryptos all day long, hoping that they can retire of them.
The one thing that I have not figured out is as a currency / store of value, what value have they replaced in the world? Have we seen a weakening of the dollar or the pound as a result of the surge of these cryptos? That would make sense. That has not been reported. No. Bankers and speculators have successfully like magicians made value appear out of nothing, enriching themselves and whoever else has been smart or curious enough to follow along with them. The question is how long will the illusion of value hold in the absence of a substitution elsewhere? It’s all rather baffling to me. All I know is financiers have been finding new ways to conjure money since the Miissippi bubble and before in the 18th century

Klaus

This thread is well worth reading:

I love the people who are all: "Can't we just make the panels over here??" They've missed the last 20 years of world development where China have invested heavily in renewable energy and now hold the majority of the patents.

Mirth

Questions must be asked as to how the US completed missed the boat on renewable energy as a whole - it is true that they have to compete with state subsidies in China which doesn't help their domestic manufacturing but when you look at the raw numbers, they (14%) are well behind Germany (33%), China (24%), Japan (15%), UK (22%), France (17%) and Italy (44%) when it comes to % of energy generated from renewable sources.

It's like they've taken their eye of the ball, realised they won't be able to catch up and now pretending they never wanted to play this game anyway.

Mirth

I thought this was quite interesting: https://epi.envirocenter.yale.edu/2018-epi-report/results (Environmental Performance Index 2018.)

jones

It's especially ridiculous given the US' expanse and how much (moneymaking, as that's the only thing which counts there) potential there is for photovoltaic parks.

I'm relatively critical of solar energy around these parts, in Germany there really isn't that much potential and they're using up a disproportionate chunk of renewable energy subsidies, funds that could and should be used for wind energy. But that's literally a first world problem compared to the US who're stuck in the stone age

Klaus

"The cryptocurrency uses as much CO2 a year as 1m transatlantic flights. We need to take it seriously as a climate threat" - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jan/17/bitcoin-electricity-usage-huge-climate-cryptocurrency

The most striking thing about cryptocurrency is how fucking stupid it is when you look at the mechanism of it. It's just about stupid enough to attract the kind of clueless tech-wannabe arseholes that constitute the larger crypto community. These are the kind of people who show up on Reddit or Twitter and throw a bunch of buzzwords at you and mumble something about "solving equations". Show me any university in the world where an accepted solution to "solve for x" is to just guess the value of x! You can't! Because that's not calculation. It's brute-force guesswork; and in the context of bitcoin it's brute-force guesswork that literally burns a country's worth of energy in order to get the computing power of a cheap smartphone.

Blockchain is technology that is going to be absolutely vilified by history. I was reading an old article on Reuters the other day by Dan and Alex Tapscott, who helped create a lot of the bitcoin protocols. It's written as a debunking of five popular bitcoin myths in that popular Buzzfeed fashion where a fictional audience makes a confounded statement and then the rational author of the article steps in and pats them on the head and explains what's really going on: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-blockchains-technology-commentary/commentary-five-myths-about-the-blockchain-revolution-idUSKCN0Y22GC

Their only response to their own bulletpoint, called "Blockchains have too many problems for them to be feasible", is LITERALLY this:

“Our research suggests such concerns should not go into a category called 'Reasons why this is a bad idea' but rather into a category called 'Implementation challenges.'”

That is just fucking extraordinary. 😆 It's the exact equivalent of inventors of a pyramid scheme standing up during a meeting and saying: "Now remember, this is not a pyramid scheme..." while pointing directly towards a pyramid-shaped organisation on the whiteboard behind them.

Coombs

That's just a fundamental misunderstanding of what block chain is. It doesn't actually require any equation solving or guesswork. It could be riding a stationary bike or generating renewable energy or completing online courses, it could be anything, but greedy fuckers slow down the pace of real technological advancement as ever. Bitcoin is flawed, but was never meant to be what it is now. It's basically garbage compared to what crypto has shown it could be. It absolutely is an implementation issue. Nothing has intrinsic value but the human body. The phrase I like the best when describing bitcoin is that it was always a social platform first, a means of communication, and storage of value second. Cryptos can truly do something, be for something productive. Whether or not they will pan out the way we might hope is down to how we use it, not what it is.

Klaus

They can't be for shit, Coombs. We don't have the kind of energy to waste on "secure" transactions that are so insignificant, and are only secure anyway as long as the chain and the userbase keeps growing. It's a constant pile-on of more miners, more electricity, rising costs and expenditures. More, more, more. Blockchain is either distributed data in a log file that can be manipulated, or it uses exponentially rising power out of necessity to prevent that from happening through cryptographical protection. It's useless and shameful, and like every scam in history it's been sold and marketed under the cloak of being for someone other than the early adopters and the mega rich investors, to people who don't have a bloody clue what's going on. It's the perfect hook for conspiracy nuts who confuse a healthy distrust of banks with crackpot dreams of a completely decentralised system. It has no practical human benefits, and that's why it will eventually die in the wake of government regulation. The damage it will do before then, though...

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