nightpool said: Wait how does money being a social construct invalidate ethereum? I don’t get the connection
It depends what you want to use it for. The typical example is buying a house: if you flip a bit in the cloud somewhere that says “I own this house” you may run into difficulties if someone else is occupying the premises and refuses to vacate. At this point you would normally call in mediators in the form of the State, which has a land titles office and legal system with experience going back a thousand years of negotiating property disputes. But then if you’re relying on a trusted middleman, what value is cryptocurrency providing in this scenario?
As with Bitcoin, management of the currency is an inherently political process where various stakeholders campaign for the changes they think are necessary and try to convince people to their point of view. The end result is distributed in the same sense that the rest of the financial system is distributed across multiple banks and government bodies, it’s just more fragile and even less efficient.
So far the killer app for Bitcoin is converting cheap Chinese electricity into US dollars while evading capital controls, which is neat I guess, although not something I get particularly excited about.
Isn’t the killer app buying drugs?
This is the only thing anyone I know has used bitcoin for (myself included!)
The killer app is also speculating and getting rich or at least a bit less poor. I turned a friend from “very poor” to “has a surprising amount of savings for a person of their class background and economic situation, even when accounting for the fact that they spent half of it on something important” just by telling them bitcoin exists. It doesn’t take that much of market savvy to transfer the average investor’s money into more deserving hands.
And then there’s anything else where money needs to change hands easily, fast, and at a low price across the world. Remittances, international trade, etc.
But yeah, buying drugs is a big part of it.
1 week ago · 15 notes · source: argumate · .permalink
argumate liked this
mugasofer reblogged this from argumate and added:Couldn’t you use that money to hire goons to kick them out? Although now you have no money and also the concept of...
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socialjusticemunchkin said: if you get enough people to believe it you can use it to pump the price up higher than otherwise and generate attention and market liquidity for your medium of exchange; it might not be the thing it’s actually _for_ but it has been pretty vital for getting bitcoin anywhere- argumate said: speculating is not a killer app for something that is supposed to be a medium of exchange
- socialjusticemunchkin reblogged this from princess-stargirl and added:
The killer app is also speculating and getting rich or at least a bit less poor. I turned a friend from “very poor” to...
princess-stargirl reblogged this from argumate and added:Isn’t the killer app buying drugs?This is the only thing anyone I know has used bitcoin for (myself included!)
collapsedsquid said: The drama that this decentralization leads to like the block size issue is crazy- collapsedsquid liked this
nightpool said: Hmm. I think I disagree. Cryptocurrencies provide a marked improvement in the state of the art in the technological recording of accounts, in that they’re independent of any given authority (although not ALL authority, but you can almost always swap one out for another one and maintain the same underlying technology, and most of the time even the same blockchain) and their full transparency in transaction processing.
neoliberalism-nightly said: I mean I agree with the first part with the squatters, but cryptocurrrency does provide an robust way to record the transfer of the currency in question. But it does change the logistics in a way that will probably change the political economy provided it doesn’t get crushed by state control.
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