This thread about how the SEC is being mean to the company trying to hook cryptocurrency scams into the real economy creates an acute crisis for nanoluthiers, who are still decades away from being able to build an atomic scale violin and thought they had more time https://t.co/OCso4xvkxX
— Pinboard (@Pinboard) September 8, 2021
I wrote about one of my favorite trends in Rich Person Things. https://t.co/QrFPAadR7Y
— David Roth (@david_j_roth) September 22, 2021
There are the many liberative and exciting things that cryptocurrency might someday be and be used for, and then there is what cryptocurrency currently is, and how it actually gets used. Neither, strictly speaking, is anything that a normal person would really need to know or care about unless that normal person is the victim of a ransomware scam, or wants to buy drugs on the internet, or needs to discreetly send $250,000 to Roger Stone. For now, this is what it is: something that’s absolutely real, but also abstracted and howlingly sketchy even relative to other speculative investment vehicles and obscure even when compared to the other memetic fads that our moment’s reigning cretins tend to favor. The discourse around it is absolutely catastrophic, just disastrously obnoxious and dishonest and stilted at every turn, but that is generally true when it comes to conversations about money.
It is not unreasonable to be suspicious of this, both because of who is making the argument and how they are making it. Cryptocurrency, at least as it is sold by its most fervent adherents—the most prominent of those are men already famous for being rich, with a greasy substrate of rise-and-grind influencer types pumping and dumping and posting and posting and posting away just beneath—is rhetorically much more ambitious than the previous innovations that promised to Change The World for the better. Another reason for skepticism is that those previous innovations, when pitched by this type of person, all quickly wound up resolving to abetting ever bleaker new frontiers of serf labor, or expediting and optimizing the process through which aspiring genocidaires around the world get their social media posts in front of the most receptive possible audiences.
But also there is just the reality of how and what cryptocurrency actually is, which is, as SEC chair Gary Gensler said last week, “a highly speculative asset class.” When the Biden Administration tentatively moved to tax and regulate cryptocurrency transactions, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen explained the decision by saying, “To the extent [cryptocurrency] is used, I fear it’s often for illicit finance. It’s an extremely inefficient way of conducting transactions, and the amount of energy that’s consumed in processing those transactions is staggering.” Advocates’ response to this series of basically true observations is less a rebuttal than a blithe counterproposal to the effect that 1) none of that matters and also is all being fixed, and 2) the new money will bring about world peace so honestly how dare you…
It is very easy to believe that the apostles of cryptocurrency do not really aspire to the liberation they so deliriously tout. Sure, it may be that they sincerely would like to replace the money they already have with a new type of currency, which they will also have, that is truly global and fluid and free in the way that national currencies inherently are not, and whose value might—when the current janky, carbon-chugging methods of production run their course—be legible and stable in a way that national currencies are not. But it is clear that the energy and the juice is more thoroughly in the speculative moment. The high temperature of the conversation gives away what’s behind it; the insistence that cryptocurrency is a boon for all of humanity quickly collapses into the assertion that it will become one; the ostensible market science of it reveals itself pretty quickly first as libertarian scientism, and then just as plain sweaty magical thinking…
…[T]his is all very much a Rich People Thing. It is a status symbol and, as a Rich Person Thing, it is necessarily something that non-rich people are most likely to engage with as a scam being perpetrated against them by people who do not think very much of or about them. Whatever cryptocurrency might someday be For All Mankind, it is most urgently and avidly in this moment something that people tell weird lies about in hopes of getting richer…
It is generally worrying news when rich people start talking loudly about revolution. But anyone can recognize the two tiers of the grift. There is the invitation to join an expert elite and get the same incredible deal they’re getting, which is a familiar selling point, and then above that there is that elite itself, the whales and whale-aspirants who either believe that they’re in charge or suspect that they’re knowledgeable enough to bail before the bottom falls out. There are the people who will know to dump when the pumping stops, and those who won’t. The most obvious aspirational aspect of all this is the chance to get rich, but there is also a strong associational benefit to pulling yourself up out of the broader starving chaos of hopeless marks and into this ever-feasting community of People Who Know…
Kind of hoping the Taliban realize they could implode the western legal system by making Bitcoin legal tender.
— Pinboard (@Pinboard) September 8, 2021
Baud
Elizabeth Warren criticized cryptocurrencies and the some glibertarian dweebs on the crypto subreddit on Reddit were like “why doesn’t she go after banks!” :-\
SpaceUnit
I don’t pretend to understand cyber currency, but in my experience the people who are hyped about it are the same people who used to whine about getting back to the gold standard. It’s all got the same hipster / contrarian / libertarian / Joe Rogan / dipshit vibe. I wouldn’t touch it with a stick.
Major Major Major Major
I actually bought some the other day when it was down like 10%. I’ve no conceptual problem with it at all, it’s actually pretty neat, but then again I guess I feel the same way about guns, and both should be tightly regulated.
In general I recommend looking to Ron Wyden for sensible takes on government and crypto, though I don’t think I’ve seen him say anything the last few weeks.
Poe Larity
You laugh, but just you wait for the dystopian post-apocolyptic revolution Carrington Event where you’ll wish you had bitcoins to barter on your non-working digital wallets and cellular networks for food and fuel.
Let them eat bitcake.
Another Scott
Uncle Sam auctions the stuff off.:
A ways to go to pay off the national debt, but it’s a start.
Cheers,
Scott.
catothedog
Crypto-currency has no lender of last resort. The only way it can survive is by leeching on to the real economy and forcing the Central Bank (the Fed in US) to bail out the bag holders when crypto crashes. The Central Bank would be forced to save the economy.
Think of mortgage notes and the housing crash. The pump-and-dump crash bled into the economy and the Central bank had to step in to back the notes. At least there was some value to the collateral backing the note, even though the values were way inflated. Crypto-currency has no asset nor power backing it.
It’s a gigantic pump-and-dump. The all out marketing now is to make the economy take the crypto bag. Then the Central bank will have no choice but to save the ‘Too-big-to-fail’ crypto-issuers, when the p(d)umpers take the loot and run.
Anyone can create currency, but there are very few entities with the power that can backstop the currency. That’s why Central Banks exist. (And even Central Banks don’t get it right all the time, leave alone these crooks)
The SEC should denote cryptos as penny stocks and be done with it.
cope
Thank you AL for further evidence that I neither need to nor should learn more about cryptocurrency.
Carry on.
lollipopguild
Regular currency is not “free” because it has to be tied to a country that will give its currency some value. Bitcoin is the mother of all Ponzi schemes and it needs to die a quick death, it won’t .
azlib
The distrbuted ledger underlying cryptocurrency is interesting as a piece of technology. But the heavy computing horsepower required to verify each transaction is a huge hurdle for making the system practical. Also, the transaction rate in such a system is pretty low and currency is not a stable store of value and has wild fluctuations. Bitcoin is a deflationary currency by design for example. Not a good vehicle for any kind of rational economy. Bitcoin should be taxed just like gambling winnings are taxed.
Ihop
A possible issue about the trajectory of bitcoin is porn. I know. But after pornhub and onlyfans made it difficult for the producers of legal material to get paid for their labor, it may be that bitcurrency works best for them to be paid.
Betamax anyone?
evodevo
@Poe Larity:
that’s what I never could figure out about the apocalyptic side of it…if everything is going to hell, why do you think you would have endless cell service or electricity to access your supposed stash?
bbleh
See, what it’s missing is some biological aspect, preferably something allegedly involving DNA. That would give it soooo much unknowable-except-by-the-elites cachet …
Did I mention that I’m the exclusive east coast seller for DNAbiocoin? Check out my website! And get your bids in early! The IPO-round auction closes in one week!
Seanly
@catothedog:
That’s my very limited understanding too. I can’t find the article, but it was a good one about how most of the cryptocurrencies have almost nothing backing up the value. So if you’re seeing Bitcoin at $30,000 it’s really only got about $300 to $1000 of actual backing. I’m doing alright financially after making it through 7 months unemployed 10 years ago and my wife’s almost deadly leukemia treatment 6 years ago. Not going to trash my financial security putting it in vapormoney
Also, since the banks aren’t dabbling in crypto too much, if it does crash I don’t think we’ll see Congress bailing out a bunch of former paper billionaires.
Baud
@bbleh:
We need to find a way to combine it with the vaccine.
Geminid
@Major Major Major Major: I think Wyden came out on the losing side of a fight over strengthening regulation of crypto-currencies. The fight was over language that was included in the “bipartisan” infrastructure bill. It would treat cryptocurrency transaction reporting like that for securities transactions. Wyden advocated a less stringent regulatory regime.
Danielx
I really prefer at least something tangible. Even the flakes burying gold in the backyard….
trollhattan
O/T this is very cool.
“Zogg, you’ve been playing in mud all day, wipe feet before coming to dinner.”
Xavier
@cope: The only thing anyone needs to know about Bitcoin is when to get out.
Baud
@Seanly:
Based on what?
Major Major Major Major
@Geminid: That was the last I saw from him too. He was right, of course, the Johnson amendment went way too far–typical for corrupt lawmakers who don’t understand what they’re doing. He did not win that fight, though.
Basically the version they ended up with casts too wide a net, but is better than nothing.
Will wait for the people I respect to chime in on this… god bless Roth and Pinboard, but the former isn’t a techie, and the latter is somehow even more down on crypto than me.
Roger Moore
@SpaceUnit:
This is absolutely 100% correct. The best way to understand cryptocurrency- or at least the cryptocurrencies that people are most excited about- is that they’re basically an attempt to replicate the worst features of gold and the worst features of electronic commerce in one product. It’s just that those worst features actually benefit certain kinds of speculators and criminals, who coincidentally happen to be the people most interested in cryptocurrency.
SpaceUnit
Environmentally, large-scale bitcoin mining operations are the last thing this planet needs right now.
misterpuff
Nobody has explained (at least to my satisfaction) what happens after the algorithm stops making new Bitcoin and who will pay for the energy to keep the system working.
My sense is that once the miners leave (to switch over to some new coin), Bitcoin will implode.
Roger Moore
@lollipopguild:
And while it waits to die a much deserved death, it’s used by extortionists for their ransom demands, other kinds of criminals to launder money, and billionaires in China to exfiltrate their money through their country’s capital controls.
Roger Moore
@Seanly:
It actually has absolutely nothing backing up the value. It’s a pure pyramid scheme. You can say the thing about any fiat money, but at least US dollars have a powerful government saying they’re willing to accept them for payment of taxes, so there’s a guaranteed market for them. Bitcoin doesn’t even have that.
Math Guy
My sense is the the “real” value of cryptocurrency is proportional to the value of dollars (or Euros or Pesos or whatever) actually spent to buy the cryptocurrency discounted by the cost of keeping it going. I’m not buying it.
SpaceUnit
@Roger Moore: The gold standard actually made sense when the US was a young startup nation.
ETA: Bitcoin not so much. Cybercurrency is built to crash.
WaterGirl
Cryptocurrency needs to be stabbed in the heart and left to die.
It’s good for porn, human trafficking, ransomware, and other crimes.
Ruckus
@Xavier:
Isn’t the time to get out come before you get in?
Roger Moore
@misterpuff:
There is an answer to “who pays when you can’t mint any new Bitcoin”. The system allows you to add what is effectively a tip to any transaction that is collected by the miner who validates the transaction. This deals with the problem that Bitcoin can only add one fixed size block to the block chain every 10 minutes, so when things get busy it can take a long time to validate a transaction. The idea is that miners will prioritize the transactions with the biggest tips. When it’s no longer possible to mine new Bitcoin, the miners are supposed to keep working to collect the tips. Of course that undermines the idea that the transactions are free, but that’s set far enough in the future for people to ignore it.
Starfish
@azlib: Every time anyone tries to tell me about a ledger, I am always saying “So you just invented a database?”
catothedog
@Seanly:
I would really love to see this, if you find it. AFAIK, there is zilch.
When the value of Bitcoin goes up and down, on one talks about inflation or deflation. No one talks about investing in a currency, but bitcoin is all about investing.
It’s nuts if you think about it…Bitcoin is an asset whose value derives solely from its utility as a currency. But Bitcoin is a good investment because it does not behave like a currency. (It appreciates instead of acting like a currency which holds stable value)
So it’s a good currency because it is not a currency.
Roger Moore
@SpaceUnit:
I did say that it’s supposed to replicate the worst features of the gold standard, which is that there’s a relatively fixed supply that can’t keep up with a rapidly growing economy. But that isn’t really true. The gold standard had the disadvantage that it was usually deflationary, but once in a while someone would discover a massive new gold deposit and there would suddenly be a surge in inflation as the new gold came into the system. The absolute worst example of this happened with silver after the Spanish conquest of the new world. There was so much silver in the Americas that you could literally trace a burst of inflation spreading across Europe every time a big treasure fleet arrived in Spain. Bitcoin does avoid this particular drawback by having a fixed rate of new coins being mined.
dnfree
Sometimes I tell people that I’ve done better with the lottery than almost everyone who’s ever bought a ticket. Sure, a few people have done much better than I have, but most are in the hole. I feel the same way about Bitcoin and cryptocurrency. Many are doing better than I am now, but I think in the long run I’ll come out better.
Splitting Image
The “aha” moment for me came when Ron Paul released his tax returns when during one of his Presidential runs a few years back. Looking over his investment portfolio showed that he had invested heavily in gold, which was not surprising since he was always saying that the country is bankrupt, the financial system is failing, and everybody should buy gold bullion.
The problem was that Paul wasn’t investing in gold bullion. He was investing in gold mining. He was investing in the companies which were mining gold to sell to the suckers that he was telling to buy gold. Mining companies are notable for requiring a stable financial sector to exist, since a mine or an oil well needs an extraordinary amount of startup capital to get up and running before a single dollar can be extracted. Investing in them requires believing that the entire financial sector is not, in fact, on the verge of collapse.
All of this made Ron Paul very clear to me, and as has been noted above, bitcoin is the Ron Paul Revolution redux.
bbleh
@Baud: Well maybe, as long as we also hand out coupons with every tube of ivermectin and bottle of hydrogen peroxide. I mean, remember whom we’re marketing to …
SpaceUnit
@Roger Moore: I used to argue with a gold-standard bro at work. Finally I asked him what we’re supposed to do when the Chinese figure out how to synthesize gold or Russia (or some other cash strapped country) discovers the biggest deposits of gold ever found and immediately floods the market. Just stand around in the street with our pockets inside out?
Geminid
@Major Major Major Major: I wonder what other Senators were on Johnson’s side. He could not have been alone. I have the impression that Senators thought a more extensive reporting regime would result in more taxes paid. But I haven’t dug too deeply into the matter, because this digital stuff just makes me go cross eyed.
Redshift
@bbleh:
There have been demonstrations of using DNA to do (very slow) computing, so… It could solve the environmental problem, too, just get your DNA modified to mine DNAcoin instead of using computers!
Xavier
@catothedog: The word you’re looking for is not investing, it’s speculating. Not being snarky, it’s what I do in the stock market with index funds, since I have no expectation of real knowledge.
Another Scott
@trollhattan: Good, good.
The idea that there were no humans here 15,000-10,000 years ago, and then the whole of North and South America had people in the relative blink of an eye never made any sense to me. It always made more sense to me that people were here, but didn’t leave much evidence that would survive tens of thousand of years (humidity, varmits, etc.). Scientists needed to look harder!!
But good data is always needed and this sounds like good data. (Though unlikely to be the last word.)
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
Ksmiami
@catothedog: Nah – penny stocks at least have some intrinsic value…
Ken
@misterpuff: Bitcoin’s plan is to reduce the number of bitcoins rewarded to the successful miner, halving it as necessary so that their finite supply never runs out. This does require that the exchange rate (bitcoin to dollars) increase exponentially to match, since no miner is going to use $1000 of electricity to get 1/65536 of a bitcoin that’s worth less than 66 million dollars.
On the off chance that unlimited exponential growth proves infeasible, I think the backup plan is for the miners to get a small percentage of all the transactions in the blocks that they verify. In other words, they’ll be like Visa or Mastercard, except much less efficient.
LongHairedWeirdo
I saw an interesting discussion among economists that said taxes are needed to create a market for a currency. For example, if the nations of the world all decided “what the hell; one full bitcoin will be accepted for n units of currency in tax revenue,” then bitcoin would always have value. The market value might be far higher, but you’d always know, worst case, it was worth however-many units of whichever-currency, for payment of taxes. Find someone who wants to pay that much in taxes, sell them the bitcoin.
Of course, that would lead to a ridiculous situation. If the market value for bitcoin fell below the highest possible tax-paid-by-bitcoin price, everyone would buy bitcoin, but only to pay the taxes of that nation.
E.g., if the US marked a bitcoin to $10k in US taxes, and China’s equivalent was $9k, people in China would sell their bitcoin to US tax payers to make a profit and pay their taxes – and the US would take an additional loss, since the US doesn’t need to pay $10k in US taxes – they’d have to sell to someone else for less. (And if they sold it to a Chinese taxpayer, the Chinese government would immediately sell it to a US taxpayer at a profit….)
I don’t know if there’s any other sort of “natural market” but this sort of scenario is why I think bitcoin won’t ever be a real thing (though it is, was, and will be, “a thing”).
Geminid
@WaterGirl: I would like to see an electricity pricing regime that penalized cryptocurrency mining operations. This would take some careful legal drafting, and of course the industry would scream bloody murder. But I think that courts would uphold utilties legislation that furthered a demonstrable public purpose.
Roger Moore
@SpaceUnit:
It works both ways. The key is that you would like the money supply to grow at a pace that’s good for the economy. If you use something like gold, you lose control over the money supply. Most of the time, it grows to slowly to keep up with the economy, which winds up choking it off. Then you can get a big surge of inflation when a new deposit is discovered.
The biggest argument against the gold standard is history. Supporters of the gold standard talk about how it tamed inflation and helped stabilize the economy, but that’s not what history shows. The 19th Century US was wracked by a crazy series of boom and bust cycles that were only tamed when we created a functioning central bank. The most stable time in monetary history wasn’t when we were on the gold standard; it was when the Fed was doing a good job.
Redshift
@evodevo:
The targets for this are the same people who bought into Glenn Beck et al. pitching gold as a survivalist thing, except they things they were pitching didn’t actually send you gold, you got an account of gold you owned that was… somewhere. (Real ownership, but completely useless without modern civilization.)
Ksmiami
@WaterGirl: completely- it’s only use is currency in the underworld… but tbh it’s not even as good as cash because the ledger history exists for feds to track. Come on man
Major Major Major Major
@Geminid: I forget all the details, but I remember thinking that the bad Ron was carrying water for Wall Street, and the good Ron was actually looking to create some sensible regulations.
Geminid
@Roger Moore: I wonder if nations will start cracking down on cryptocurrency. China seems to have started. Treasury Secretary Yellen may have a Deputy Secretary quietly talking to counterparts about a regulatory solution. A monopoly on currency seems like an essential element of sovereignty. Maybe nation states will band together like so many wolves and suppress the cryptocurrency coyotes.
David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch
@Geminid:
Ain’t that something. Wyden gets apoplectic over penny ante telephone metadata but goes limp against ponzi schemes.
SpaceUnit
The strength of the dollar is based on the US having the world’s most productive and innovative economy.
The value of bitcoin is supported by the baseless hope that the Ponzi scheme doesn’t collapse until after we’ve shucked our mortal coils.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
I don’t trust cryptocurrencies. Had a customer try to upsell me on crypto. I was like um no thanks, I’ll just stick to mutual and index funds…
Geminid
@Major Major Major Major: I think Wyden is more or less a good guy. But he is a politician. I would expect him to stand up for some industries, just like I would expect my Senators Warner and Kaine to stand up for the Navy’s shipbuilding budget. But I don’t know who or what Wyden is standing up for when it comes to cryptocurrency regulation.
prostratedragon
Good thinking music:
WaterGirl
@Geminid: Possibly not as gratifying as driving a stake through its heart, but I would take it. :-)
JWR
O/T, (this one completly), but Ooo! Looky here!
Is it really beginning? I mean the good stuff, like indictments for every one of these criminal bastids.
Roger Moore
@LongHairedWeirdo:
There is precedent for the kind of situation you’re describing in the gold/silver exchange rate. Back in the day, countries would mint coins in both gold and silver. Originally this caused no problem because there wasn’t any kind of peg between the two values. People could buy with gold or with silver, and they would tend to spend the different coins on different kinds of goods. But as they tried to regularize things, they tried to fix the relative values of gold and silver coins.
It didn’t work very well. Different countries had different exchange rates, and it drove exactly the kind of thing you’re talking about. In particular, the UK overvalued gold relative to silver compared to the rest of Europe, so people could profitably exchange gold for silver coins in England and sell them for bullion on the Continent. This caused a starvation of common coin denominations in the UK. IIRC, China systematically overvalued silver relative to Europe, so a lot of European silver wound up in China.
Also, FWIW, this is the origin of Gresham’s Law that bad money drives out good money. This was specifically about cases where a country had two different currencies. It could be gold and silver, it could be nice new coins with the proper amount of metal in them and old debased coins, or it could be paper money and hard currency. But in any case, people would tend to hoard the one that was perceived as more valuable and spend the one that was less valuable.
MagdaInBlack
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): This is just another bs argument against raising minimum wage. That last bit is your big red flag because it is not true. Refuse the job, you lose your benefits.
schrodingers_cat
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): Inflation is the new deficit. i.e. an imaginary problem like the deficit was supposed to be in Obama’s first term. I don’t think inflation is a problem right now. Interest rates are at historic lows.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@MagdaInBlack:
Thanks for the feedback. The guy was an economist from Bloomberg, I assumed he was on the up and up. I edited my comment because it was a little off-topic
laura
schrodingers_cat
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): He was an asst professor of finance, macroeconomics is not his area of expertise.
Redshift
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
Yeah, that makes no sense. Would people have been better off with inflation and no raise? It’s only a “setback” if the wages somehow caused the inflation, which would be an even more dishonest argument.
The bit about relief benefits causing the worker shortage was also pretty conclusively disproven when the states that stopped benefits didn’t have any better rate of employment recovery.
Roger Moore
@Geminid:
China is specifically cracking down on cryptocurrency because people are using it to evade capital controls. China wants its ultra-rich to have to plow their money back into Chinese investments rather than spending it overseas, and they have rules to keep them from doing so. Mining Bitcoin is a way to evade that. A Chinese billionaire can buy a bunch of Bitcoin mining rigs made in China, put them in a data center in China, power them with Chinese electricity, and then spend the Bitcoin they mine anywhere else in the world. That capital control evasion- and consuming too much electricity that the rest of the economy needs- is driving the Chinese crackdown on Bitcoin mining.
MagdaInBlack
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): He’s just on a different side of the argument than I am.
Yes, I’m seeing my paycheck isn’t going as far as it did 2 years ago. I don’t think this inflation is permanent. We’re still in a worldwide pandemic. Supply chains are fucked up. A ship this big doesnt turn around on a dime. It’s going to take some time and these guys know it. He just found an excuse to argue against raising wages. As they always do
Also too: What Redshift said ?
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@schrodingers_cat:
Ah. That’s pretty fucking dishonest of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Bloomberg, and Smith then. All they said was he was an “economist”
Another Scott
Speaking of hinky “banking”, …
KrebsOnSecurity.com:
Who to believe?? It’s a puzzle.
This relates to the Sussman indictment that Durham just dropped. But it’s much deeper than that. Lots of details at the link.
Closing paragraphs:
This case is something to watch – for an indication of how far the investigation ability of the FBI (and Congress) was corrupted by TFG and the GQP.
Cheers,
Scott.
NotMax
Highly related:
“Freedom Phone,” the Fyre Festival of phones. Doesn’t take The Amazing Kreskin to see the kid behind its so-called revolutionary tech has a colorful jumpsuit in his future.
Ksmiami
@Geminid: yes yes yes
NotMax
@trollhattan
Wrong Way
CorriganKronk.:)
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Redshift:
You’re right about that “setback” thing. It’s a stupid framing. A “setback” implies that raising wages is responsible for inflation
Mike E
My favorite description of crypto: Image keeping your car idling 24/7 produced solved Sudokus you could trade for heroin
schrodingers_cat
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): I did some more digging around, his PhD is in economics, his focus was on financial markets. (not labor markets or macroeconomics, the subject of this opinion piece)
NotMax
Once all the cold fusion plants come online, the arguments about power consumption will become a footnote to history.
//
schrodingers_cat
@NotMax: Free electricity along with free beer tomorrow
Booger
@NotMax: ISWYDT.
MagdaInBlack
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): As it’s meant to. ?
Another Scott
+ eleventy billion
Cheers,
Scott.
SpaceUnit
Maybe I’m the chump but I’ll be damned if I’m buying a digital token of ones and zeros from some random dude on the computer who’s wearing a Guy Fawkes mask for 30k.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@schrodingers_cat:
Great detective work, SC! He’s not an expert on the subject he’s writing about. Surprise, surprise
@NotMax:
LOL.
A question for the jacktariat: if there was a technology that was capable of inducing a post-scarcity utopia, do you think the Powers That Be/rich fascists would do everything in their power to destroy it? Such a thing would take away their power under the current system. Everyone could live the life of a billionaire if they so wished.
Or perhaps they might try to keep it for themselves ala Elysium and segregate themselves from the rest of the rabble?
Kent
We will know that bitcoin is a *real* currency when you can get a 30-year mortgage denominated in bitcoin. Or even buy a 10-year bond denominated in bitcoin.
Until then it smells more like a giant ponzi scheme.
Omnes Omnibus
@SpaceUnit: It’s a very nice mask though.
Omnes Omnibus
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
Not playing.
Kent
Rest assured there won’t be. Such theoretical technology would violate both the Law of Conservation of Mass and the Law of Conservation of Energy that you should have learned about in your HS physics class.
piratedan
@JWR: yay for the subpoenas, will the ones subpoenaed show up? If not, who will enforce it?
I am happy someone has issued them, ecstatic, will they be enforced or will we continue to play this game where the GOP continues to deny agency to DEM governance.
Villago Delenda Est
Anything touched by glibertarian stooges, who know very little about actual economics, only the cant of the Chicago School, is going to be tainted, at best. The whole reason for Bitcoin was to conduct illicit transactions. That’s it. Criminal intent all the way.
Tony Gerace
@SpaceUnit: The mother of a friend had been a young woman in Holland during the German occupation. By 1945, when food was really scarce, people survived by eating tulip bulbs, among other things. At least tulip bulbs have some intrinsic value. Cryptocurrency has none.
@SpaceUnit:
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
Feathers
For some reason this thread is reminding me that so much of what is keeping this country afloat is that we are the world’s fiat currency, and that the Republicans keep threatening to blow that up to win a nickel’s worth of nothing.
It’s the global warming moving the jetsteam level of ignoring the real dangers.
Villago Delenda Est
@Roger Moore:
Typical idiocy of a confusion of cause and effect.
different-church-lady
Crypto currency is nothing more than the latest in an endless series of things techno-utopians do in the hopes of making money off your confusion.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Kent:
I don’t think the replicators in Star Trek, for example, create matter or energy IIRC. They just convert energy into matter
ETA: I suppose I thought it could theoretically be possible. Warp drive (aka the Alcubierre Drive) is plausible under our current understanding of physics
different-church-lady
@WaterGirl:
NotMax
@different-church-lady
Still working bugs out of bitbooze.
Soon, soon….
:)
JWR
@piratedan:
Dunno. I just hope they use ALL the tools at their disposal. Maybe farm the enforcement out to a few disgruntled capitol police? Cops really like OT, don’t they? ;)
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@piratedan: Adam Schiff coming up on the O’Donnell program, and I can’t imagine these questions won’t come up.
SpaceUnit
@Tony Gerace: But I think it might still leave a bitter taste.
NotMax
@different-church-lady
Cryptocurrency is the Scientology of finance.
;)
Gin & Tonic
Just collected three large grifola fondosa, aka hen of the woods, aka maitake. Each well over a pound. Will be cleaning and sautéing tomorrow.
NotMax
@Gin & Tonic
Putting the fun into fungus?
:)
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Gin & Tonic:
That sounds yummy ?
Thinking about stuffing one
ETA: Although looking them up, they don’t look like the kind of mushrooms you can stuff
James E Powell
@Another Scott:
The FBI was corrupt long before TFG & the GQP. Another haven for right-wingers.
Gin & Tonic
@NotMax: I’m a fun guy.
Gin & Tonic
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): Probably more trouble than it’s worth. Fair amount of dirt on the underside, if I just separate the lobes it’ll be easier.
matt the somewhat reasonable
My favorite thing about Bitcoin is that whoever designed it is still anonymous.
CaseyL
I think the main reason bitcoiners want to be considered a legitimate currency is they want the Feds to bail them out when things go south. From the FDIC insurance on bank deposits to enormous bailouts passed by Congress, they want to be able to steal from taxpayers.
Isn’t that what the MOTU are really all about?
NotMax
Presumably no mask too.
There’s been multiple sightings of naked men walking, jogging on the streets of NYC
Kent
Ahhh….but unlimited resources requires BOTH unlimited energy and matter.
If you can create a kg of gold out of thin air, but it takes 1000 gigawatts of electricity, what have you actually achieved? We live in a world of both scare energy and scarce matter. Converting one into the other doesn’t solve scarcity.
dnfree
@James E Powell: exactly. The fact that the FBI building is still named for J Edgar Hoover should tell us something.
bbleh
@Redshift: no no, you see, we’ve modified the DNA of bacteria to do the mining. It’s billions of processors in one refrigerator. Once the colony is mature, the value just comes spilling out.
Only six days left on the auction! Get in before it’s too late!
Ken
@bbleh: I think that’s the basic setup for Greg Bear’s Blood Music. Spoiler: Things go badly.
MisterForkbeard
Since we don’t have a new thread yet, I suppose I should note that the Arizona Fraudit report leaked early and it was a complete flop.
Two report volumes of whining, blaming county authorities, pushing completely unproven conspiracy theories and the the admission that in their recount Biden actually GAINED 300 net new votes. And the recommending that Arizona do things Dems have recommended forever, with the insinuation that they’re doing this against Democratic wishes.
Total shit show.
Major Major Major Major
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
Except for the part where you still can’t use it to move through space faster than light.
Suzanne
@MisterForkbeard: Not surprising at all. When I heard about the last delay, I knew it would be a nothingburger, because if there was anything even remotely good for Trump in it, they would be shouting about it nonstop.
LAWL.
Ken
Sorry, just wanted to see that again.
Urza
Well then. The nations second largest mortgage broker is talking about doing just this. I don’t think its actually happened yet but I saw an article a couple weeks ago.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/08/19/united-wholesale-mortgage-will-accept-bitcoin-other-cryptocurrency.html
Urza
I guess not denominated in bitcoin, but at least accepting it as payment, which would be a first step. Personally I hate the concept for the gold buggery. I mined it for a very short time when it initially came out and realized it was worthless compared to the electricity cost. Would have been worth something if I saved it but that would have taken most of a decade.
Raven Onthill
This 2018 interview with Prof. David Golumbia of Virginia Commonwealth University talks about the history, politics, and prospects of cryptocurrency; it’s worth a read.
Personally, I knew Tim May back when. Man had very little empathy. He died alone, at home, and it took days before anyone even noticed.
cminus
@Urza: Accepting interest payments in cryptocurrency, as in the linked story, is very different from issuing loans denominated in the stuff.
It is unclear is whether UWM will hold the cryptocurrency it accepts or convert it to fiat at the point of transaction.
Nobody thinks to ask whether UWM will convert payments made in dollars into cryptocurrency. That’s because dollars are currency, and cryptocurrencies are highly speculative investments at best and waiting-for-a-greater-idiot scams at worst.
Kent
Those are two separate things entirely. The article you cited is a bank that is willing to accept bitcoin as payment on a mortgage that is denominated in dollars. In other words, you take out a $500,000 mortgage in dollars and the bank lets you make payments using bitcoin at whatever is the current exchange rate that day.
The current price of bitcoin is $44,000 so $500,000 is 11.36 bitcoin. No bank on the planet is going to write a 30 year mortgage on a house for 11.36 bitcoin at say 3% interest and take 360 monthly mortgage payments equal to 0.015 bitcoin for the next 30 years. Because they don’t have the slightest fucking idea what the value of bitcoin is going to be in 1 year, 5, years, 10 years, much less 30 years.
VeniceRiley
Tardigrade violins
NotMax
Well, that was different.
Stepped outdoors to quickly take care of something. Big menacing SUV parked in the driveway, two guys (uniformed but not police attire) with flashlights exiting it.
Politely asked me, “Do you mind if we park this here for a few minutes? We’re going next door to arrest your neighbors.”
Guessing they’re from the sheriff’s office.
JR
@SpaceUnit: like the gold standard, BTC is essentially fixed and thus counter inflationary. It’s inherently conservative and probably a big reason why (some) rich people idealize it.
It’s also a pyramid scheme, too.