35 crypto companies got together to make a change dot org petition called “Bitcoin Deserves an Emoji”.
F that
💩
fighting for bitcoin to get an emoji is stupid, but fighting against it might be even stupider. surely there are more important things to spend your time and energy on. it’s a fucking emoji. who cares?
normalizing scams, by laundering their image via standards organizations, pollutes our communications environment. Both an emoji and a petition are symbolic - and our symbols are in fact important.
Bitcoin isn’t a scam. All non-bitcoin cryptocurrencies are scams.
People often hear about stuff like coins that are pre-mined, or proof-of-stake and the schemes and scans that come out of those, and immediately associate Bitcoin with the same thing.
Of course bitcoin is a scam. It’s a “currency” you can’t spend anywhere. It’s only purpose is a pump and dump scheme for early adopters.
It’s a “currency” you can’t spend anywhere
Lol
It’s only purpose is a pump and dump scheme for early adopters.
This is exactly what many alt-coins are but Bitcoin is decidedly not.
You’re confusing “easy to mine” with “early adopter scam”.
It’s a “currency” you can’t spend anywhere.
You could’ve at least pretended to have done some basic research…
That is also not 100% true. There are several altcoins with fantastic utility. Monero and Ethereum come to mind.
Ethereum has scam characteristics though. The creator Vitalik gave himself time to mine it alone before giving public access. He secured for himself quite a nice stash
That’s true. I suspect the application programming is the only reason that it actually took off.
Exactly. Most cryptocurrencies are scams, but a handful are fantastic. Ethereum is cool for being proof-of-stake (so no high-energy mining), and Monero is cool for being super privacy-oriented. There are a handful more, but honestly, if you stick with Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Monero, you’ll be fine.
That’s pretty much exactly my thought. I hold a very very small amount in Polygon, but only in order to pay the gas fees for the Polygon network. So I never have more than a few US dollars worth in it at a time.
Yeah, I basically just do Monero, and I use it as a spend account and use it anywhere it’s accepted. I don’t invest in any cryptocurrencies because I don’t think cryptocurrencies have positive expected return (it’s all hype), so I keep the amount of crypto I have small.
I wouldn’t argue with that. I was mostly generalizing.
It would create legitimation and that could further increase its popularity
millions of people who use emojis would constantly see it. It would slowly start to feel more familiar to them and increase its acceptance. If that works, others would try to do the same and we would have every and any company put their logos in. If it doesnt then it doesnt matter that much, but i dont want to risk yet another avenue for corporations to worm into peoples minds.
Personally i dont care about emojis at all but i do care about general mentalspace.
Stupid indeed.
Proprietary money is a scam.
I agree but I’m not sure BTC fit the definition of proprietary money I’m finding online. How does BTC qualify in your opinion?
Maybe we don’t need a Bitcoin emoji, but we absolutely need a Doge emoji.
Lol, doge
🐶 there’s already one
Does anyone remember when one of Maine’s US Senators lobbied Unicode to create a lobster emoji?
I think I should post a 1000 word essay about why I dislike the merman emoji.
I don’t mind there being an emoji for cryptocurrency. It’s a relevant thing in modern society whether we like it or not, so there’s no reason it should be excluded. But just not Bitcoin, specifically. Even though Bitcoin is the one that kicked off crypto, it’s still a brand name, which would result in auto-rejection according to the Unicode Consortium’s guidelines.
If there was a more general-purpose icon/symbol that could represent cryptocurrency in general, that’d be more appropriate. But it can’t be Bitcoin.
It makes a lot more sense to implement this the way country flags are implemented in Unicode.
The problem with having cryptocurrency as emoji is agreeing on the specification how it should be drawn, and also make it different enough from already existing emojis such as coin 🪙. It is not exactly a tangible thing.
Just make it the B symbol they use in the coin? None of the others would exist in their current fashion, without Bitcoin anyway.
Bitcoin is a brand name there which means they can’t do that. Also if bitcoin deserves its own symbol (and I don’t think it necessarily does) then all the cryptocurrencies such as ethereum also deserve one.
Windows wouldn’t have existed without DOS so it’s logo should be the DOS logo. Likewise the USD emoji should be a pile of gold. \s
I don’t think it should have an emoji either, but how does this rule apply to real currencies being emojis? I mean there is dollar banknote 💵 and yen banknote 💴 and euro banknote 💶 as separate emojis, not just a general money one. And honestly, even most of the emojis referencing anything that has to do with money uses dollar signs, i.e. $. Were these rules made after these emojis were already added?
It probably falls under faulty comparison:
https://unicode.org/emoji/proposals.html#Faulty_Comparison
Their guidelines change, and it’s possible these emoji were added with old guidelines. They can’t remove old emoji, which means specific buildings like Tokyo Tower🗼is an emoji, even if they prohibit the addition of specific buildings nowadays.
I saw this get brought up a lot. I think the difference is that currency symbols generally don’t refer to a specific currency. USD and AUS both use the $ symbol, for example. “Dollar” and “American Dollar” aren’t the same thing since other types of dollars exist, and the symbols are still technically multi-purpose, whereas the ₿ symbol technically refers only to Bitcoin.
That’s my theory on the reasoning, at least.
They already have that, 💩
💩🪙
lol shitcoin
Poopmoon?
Its a coin emoji, but its one of those emoji that get rendered wildly different depending on which device (and software version) you’re viewing it on
Hah, poop coin! For me it’s like realistic moon without face, just like Samsung quality moon photo.
Wait it is a coin! What the what!
an emoji for cryptocurrency
💩🪙
I mean it has its issues but a non regulated currency not controlled by a government is cool imo
The main issue is that it tries to fix government trust issues with private actors trust issues. It’s still trust issues
Its supposed benefits are vastly overshadowed by their only practical application: allowing online crime to flourish.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ drug users gotta get their drugs
Criminals use what works. So therefore that means that crypto actually does its job as a real currency that cannot be controlled. Criminals also have a habit of using auto mobiles, guns, computers, shoes, etc.
If criminals only used cars from brand X and nobody else used brand X, it would be viewed the same.
There are plenty of currencies out there, which normal people use. Cryptocurrencies are mainly used by criminals though.
Chain analysis companies whose whole reason for existing is selling exchanges and governments software to track illicit cryptocurrency transactions show that less than 1% of transactions are illicit in nature. So I don’t know how that means the majority of crypto is used for illicit finance.
Had to go out and find a source myself.
Private companies say less than 1%. Academia says around 20%. That’s a huge difference to only cite one side of the story.
I suppose you don’t use cash then. Come on, there is almost no online crime anyway
I can buy almost everything with cash but with shitcoins I can only pay ransom. And the FBI probably won’t agree there’s virtually no online crime.
Semi-legal activities such as donating to wanted individuals, purchasing non regulated non illegal to ship medicine, purchasing digital goods (such as commissioned art) from countries that were banned by SWIFT (Russia).
I wouldn’t think Bitcoin has, or can, be trademarked or copyrighted, as it is an open-source protocol/technology where even the creator is unknown?
Either way there isn’t a generic symbol for cryptocurrency. This emoji will go the way of the save icon, where in a couple generations most people will have no idea what it relates to, but know that it’s a symbol for cryptos.
Satoshi Nakamoto.
The creator of bitcoin is as unknown as batman’s identity. The folks at the center of the main blockchain companies and stuff like that all know pretty well who created it, they just play along with the story.
Satoshi Nakamoto is some kind of consipracy…?
if this is true, there would be some evidence
Oh, there is. But while they keep this game up, there’s still plausible deniability for everything.
if you can’t present evidence, then you’re just spreading uncertainty and doubt.
If whoever invented Bitcoin is still on this earth, they have a bit of a conundrum. Since we can track all transactions, and we know roughly how long Satoshi was mining the first bitcoins before other people got involved, those early accounts are sitting on over 1 million BTC. Even after today’s dump, that’s still over $50 billion. And for reference, the Koch family is 25th on Forbe’s infamous list, estimated to be worth about $56B. So that person is one of the richest people on the planet.
However, those coins continue to remain unspent. And once they are moved in any transaction, the entire world will know. That leads to an inherent assumption that those 1M coins (out of 21M that can ever exist) must be irretrievably lost (due to their private keys being deleted), so most have taken that out of the active supply when estimating BTC value. Once they are moved, the price will probably crash – at least 5%, but more likely much more than that. He is among the richest people in the world on paper, but if he moves any of it his wealth will collapse.
However, one doesn’t have to move coins to prove they own them. Anyone with the private keys could cryptographically sign a message saying “I am Satoshi” with one of the early keys and immediately have 100% credibility. The fact that this hasn’t happened means that those keys likely not longer exist. (I, personally, think Hal Finney took those keys to the grave with him, and Craig Wright is a big fat liar.)
No single wallet has even close to 1 million Bitcoins. It’s a public block chain and you can find a list of the largest wallets in a website like this: https://bitinfocharts.com/top-100-richest-bitcoin-addresses.html
Also, regarding the unfair advantage of the genesis block, Bitcoin’s code was actually written in a way that prevents this balance from being transfered. It’s forever locked in the wallet at this address: 1A1zP1eP5QGefi2DMPTfTL5SLmv7DivfNa.
I wouldn’t think Bitcoin has, or can, be trademarked or copyrighted, as it is an open-source protocol/technology where even the creator is unknown?
It’s still the name of a specific product/service. The issue is partly trademark/copyright, but also partly a matter of neutrality. The Unicode Consortium want to ensure that they’re not directly or indirectly endorsing any specific products. If they added a Bitcoin logo, then you’d see every other crypto lining up to get their logos permanently installed on every person’s devices, too. Free advertising for life on 99.99% of phones would be hard to pass up.
I mean, we have a symbol for effectively any currency that anyone can or wants to fill out the paperwork for and can demonstrate the basics of “this is a meaningful symbol with more than transient relevance”.
They added ₿ in 2016.
So, if there’s already a symbol in Unicode, the petition doesn’t make any sense. They should ask Google and Apple to display the symbol in the emoji list, with a control character to force it as emoji.
Totally. It’s double weird, because it’s not a petitionable issue, it’s a form where you make your case and a committee decides, and they already have the symbol and they just seem to want it to be usable like 💲, which isn’t a thing.
Surely the Tokyo tower is a specific product then? 🗼It costs money to visit, aren’t the other towers jealous?
https://unicode.org/emoji/proposals.html#Faulty_Comparison
The Tokyo Tower🗼(a specific building) does not justify adding the Eiffel Tower.
Many historical emoji violate current factors for inclusion. Once an emoji is encoded it cannot be removed from the Unicode Standard.
It was added when Unicode Consortium had different guidelines. They don’t accept specific buildings anymore.
Under automatically declined:
Specific buildings, structures, landmarks, or other locations, whether fictional, historic, or modern.
Thanks for the explanation
It’s a specific type of thing, but it’s not a brand. Nobody owns the trademark for Bitcoin. Anyone can buy, sell, or mine Bitcoin. It’s no more a specific product than dollars are a specific product.
If they added a Bitcoin logo, then you’d see every other crypto lining up to get their logos permanently installed on every person’s devices, too.
Is there a problem with that? This isn’t “advertising”, these are unicode symbols. There are unicode symbols for all kinds of things. Every currency has unicode symbols, why not cryptocurrencies?
Why in the world would you have “emojis” as part of Unicode anyway?
We already have a way to have endless “emojis” without administrative stupidity, it’s called JPEG.
If you need to show text as that, we’ve had smileys since 90s.
Hmm, why do we need a corporation to be arbitter of the written language anyway ? If they want to use it, they should just use it.If they can’t because of some central authority then Unicode is is to be abolished and replace with a system where you can usev wherever squiggle that you want and nobody gets a second opinion. You just do it.
Would you rather send an entire JPEG over text message for an emoji? Or just 4 bytes of unicode right inline where you want it? Unicode having a standard set of emoji is actually incredibly useful and reduces complexity. I guess it would disincentivize 👏 emoji 👏 spam 👏 to use JPEGs tho.
Just send the file hash and only download a copy if you don’t have it.
I’d send :-} and :-\ and =P and D= instead of an emoji. As the founding fathers intended.
There’s even more use cases that come up, like being able to use emoji and other fancy symbols anywhere unicode is supported. So you can even program with them. People have taken that idea to the extreme just for fun: https://www.emojicode.org/
Other special symbols are a different thing. For APL language or others.
They are useful, provided you have them on your keyboard or you have configurable extra keys.
Symbols specifically for emoji - I mean, people can do what they want with code space, even if I’d rather see another obscure alphabet standardized there. Medieval Armenian or Russian musical notation, for example. Something real .
How aren’t emoji “real”?
You do that. 👍
Suggestion: We do with the Bitcoin emoji what people did with the eggplant emoji. The B stands for butthole. So now we can do [eggplant emoji] [bitcoin emoji].
I’m sure the TOTALLY NOT HOMOPHOBIC tech bros will love it.
We must do this if it happens.
Have you checked your =B=?
Cryptocurrency is speedrunning ruining everything. We might as well have a laugh at the cryptobros’ expense in the meantime.
I would rather point my finger at wall street or financial institutions not at the tools that offers a viable option to avoid these
I loved the concept at first, the idea of a decentralized currency all handled by encryption, and transactions permamently stored in a public ledger for all to see.
Then the cryptobros and the scammers caught wind of it and it’s all downhill from there.
Did they or did a bunch of media get pushed that told us all what these crypto bros were doing like shitting on beaches and taking our jobs.
Seriously though I’m picking up on a trend that a lot media has a greater influence on opinion then I’ve ever seen before
If you want the name of a payment techology that isn’t snake oil, isn’t blockchain-based, isn’t a cult, doesn’t claim to be a currency, doesn’t work on proof-of-work or proof-of-stake, but actually does provide certain privacy guarantees for your basic purchasing needs, is cryptographically secure, and can be used with only FOSS, I recommend looking into GNU Taler.
The only downside is that it’s not really supported anywhere at all yet. But I do hope it becomes a real thing some day.
The only downside is that it’s not really supported anywhere at all yet. But I do hope it becomes a real thing some day.
AFAIK there are a lot of talk about making GNU Taler the basis for the ‘digital Euro’ which is curently being debated at the EU Parliment.
Thanks, I’ll read on it :)
Yea, that is interesting! I don’t really understand a lot of it though. Wonder how censorship-resistant it can be, and whether the receiver would be able to cash it out anonymously.
I’m not an expert on it, but I’ve done a certain amount of study on it.
I’m pretty sure there are no privacy guarantees for money receivers. Merchants/sellers would still be identifiable by banks and governments and such. So Taler isn’t what anyone selling heroin or doing murder for hire would want to be using as an accepted payment method. (At least not any more so than credit/debit card transactions will help the seller with keeping their doings secret.)
But Taler can keep the buyers’ identity secret. Unless you’re doing things in ways that reveal information about yourself, your bank and your government wouldn’t know you were buying fursuits even if they knew the merchant was selling fursuits.
So all that to say that no, the merchant couldn’t cash out anonymously.
What I don’t understand is whether it is like “Taler is obtained and cashed out only in a bank, but the link between two events is unknown” or if Taler can change hands during said “link”.
If the former - I really hope it gets implemented as a card replacement, but it would need to coexist with something like Monero (which is what I use now) that is more akin to cash. But I really hope that somehow non-blockchain full-on “digital cash” could one day be invented, so wonder if this could be it :)
How I understand it is:
- You go to your bank (or use a webapp or whatever) who knows who you are and get them to initiate a withdrawl from your bank account to your Taler wallet in the amount of, say $100.
- The balance in your Taler wallet goes up by $100. The bank also decrements your bank account by $100 and puts that $100 in an escrow holding intending to pay it to whatever recipient(s) can provide cryptographic proof that you gave them Taler.
- You go to a merchant and pay out of that $100 Taler balance $9 for a cheeseburger and fries.
- The merchant receives $9 in Taler from you and checks with your bank that that $9 hasn’t already been spent previously before concluding the payment process and giving you your receipt and burger.
- You now have a burger and fries and your Taler balance is $91.
- But the merchant doesn’t learn anything about your identity in the process. But they do have proof that your bank has $9 in escrow earmarked for them (the merchant) specifically.
- And your bank doesn’t know which of their customers to which they’ve ever given Taler is the one buying from the merchant in question. They just know that of the total sum of Taler they’ve issued that hasn’t been collected yet, $9 is earmarked for such-and-such merchant/burger joint.
- The merchant can settle up any time, but theoretically the bank can charge per-transaction fees. In order to minimize fees, it behooves the merchant to batch up settlements. The merchant can claim actual USD for every dollar that was used at that establishment by customers via Taler over, say, the last week or whatever in one big settlement batched transaction.
I’m leaving out some details, but that should give you a decent idea of how things work with Taler.
Now, as for this bit:
if Taler can change hands during said “link”.
That, I’m not sure of. It might be that you can transfer Taler from your wallet to someone else’s wallet (that they could then spend) without any identities being revealed, though they wouldn’t be able to get real USD or whatever without working with your bank which would generally insist on confirming their identity. But I’d think in order for the recipient in that situation to know that they actually had real Taler and not Taler that you had already spent and that wouldn’t actually work if they tried to spend it or cash it in, they’d have to make basically an API call to your bank, though unless the bank blocked all traffic from every VPN and traffic anonymizer (like Tor or I2p) in existence, I see no reason why it couldn’t be done in a way that preserved the recipient’s anonymity.
So yeah. Not sure. But even if that bit isn’t a thing, I still want Taler to take off.
Ah, so probably would not work to evade censorship/sanctions. I would REALLY love to use such a thing instead of my card though.
isn’t blockchain-based, doesn’t work on proof-of-work or proof-of-stake
These things weren’t introduced as a gimmick they are used to solve specific problems.
Please describe how I can send the money to my mom in Russia (disconnected from SWIFT) with GNU Taler today. I’ll wait.
Exactly. With Monero, she gets it in seconds and no one can stop it.
lol the downvotes. your mom is clearly evil and doesn’t deserve any money
I don’t know how I could possibly have been more explicit about it not yet being ready for any real-world use cases than I was.
It will never be ready. It doesn’t even make sense. To transact with real fiat like the US dollar, you’ll have to go through an official on-ramp and an off-ramp of the respective government. And to do an international transaction you’ll have to use one of the widely accepted systems like SWIFT. GNU Taler doesn’t appear to address anything like that. Anyhow, my comment was made with the premise of this whole thread in mind, i.e. “Bitcoin is stupid” or “snake oil”. Yet there’s no alternatives to what crypto provides. So is it that stupid after all?
How wasteful!
Anyhow, today I’m going to resume using a currency backed by oil and nukes, which encourages consumption on purpose. I will then either exploit workers by investing in a for-profit business, or get poorer.
But someday, in the future, economics will work the way I expect them to. That’s when I’ll switch to something better!
Russia has had oil and nukes and it didn’t stop the ruble from collapsing in the 90s
Maybe reexamine your assumptions
GNU Taller is pretty fragile, though. One bank issues unbacked tokens and the credibility of the whole system goes down the drain. It’s the current financial system, just rebranded. Also, it promotes taxation which automatically makes it a cult & scam.
One bank issues unbacked tokens
- The Taler protocol has bank auditors built-in.
- Your hypothetical would just as much apply to existing debit cards.
- Unbacked tokens. You mean like Tether? (Let alone Terra.)
Also, it promotes taxation which automatically makes it a cult & scam?
The fuck? How does Taler “promote taxation?”
Fuckin’ Libertarians.
Unbacked tokens. You mean like Tether?
Exactly like Tether. USDT was never backed 1:1 by USD. They don’t even try to deny it anymore. They admit it’s backed by “various assets, including BTC”, which smells like a market manipulation.
How does Taler promote taxation?
“Customers can stay anonymous, but merchants can not hide their income through payments with GNU Taler. This helps to avoid tax evasion and money laundering.”
Thank you for being honest about being pro-tax-evasion and pro-money-laundering.
I liked the idea for awhile as well. But for me, learning about the “proof of work” underpinning is what changed my mind. That - and the fact that cryptocurrency does not actually have any of the strengths that it claims to have. It’s definitely and interesting idea… but in practice it’s all just scams and incentivised waste.
That’s interesting. I’ve initially written it off as a scam. Until I’ve learned about the proof-of-work.
Scammers use the technology because it actually works and does what it says it does. And criminals and scammers and such are generally the first ones to adopt a new technology. Such as bank robbers adopting the automobile in order to get away faster.
Bitcoin is over 15 years old now, that’s not a particularly fast speedrun.
Is the government spreading anti-cryptocurrency propaganda or did lemmy got invaded by idiots recently?
Lots of people on the left don’t seem to like crypto on a fundamental level. A lot of the time they seem like they have a tenuous grasp on the concept, at best, and are just parroting what they heard someone else say. Most of the time they’re projecting their criticisms of Bitcoin onto the entire concept of digital currency.
I consider myself a progressive, and I got some ETH at a good time a few years ago, but I’ve been desperate for an exit point in the market for over a year (fomo feels bad man) because the sentiment for crypto among everyone who isn’t an an-cap or tech-bro hobbyist has been atrocious for some time now.
To be clear, I don’t really care for Bitcoin. It was first, and I appreciate how clever it was, mathematically and such, when it was anonymously put out there. But other than that it’s kind of shit. It’s like saying that wax cylinders are better than vinyl records, or even CDs, because they came first.
I hate that people seem to only have room in their brains for one word for “digital currency,” and it happens to be the one with no real useful functionality, while being an absolute disaster for the environment.
It’s not some kind of panacea, but writing off incredible tech. with actual use-cases like Ethereum or Monero (the former of which reduced it’s power consumption by over 99% after switching to Proof-of-Stake, and the latter does not use ASIC miners and is significantly less resource intensive than BTC), because they didn’t get it perfect on the first try. That said, Monero will never be a good long-term investment because it’s too secure and that scares governments. Monero is like what people (at least used to) think Bitcoin is… That is, anonymous, untraceable, etc. No way that succeeds as an investment, and good luck actually using it as a currency with all that volatility.
I think the concept of a digital currency is here to stay whether people like it or not. I think it makes more sense to push for ones that can potentially solve actual issues and aren’t a disaster for the environment, so people don’t call them all “Bitcoin,” like people do for “Q-Tips”. Probably too late.
If I had to guess, long term, nations will see the writing on the wall and start using their own tailor-made CBDCs (Central-Bank Digital Currency) and it’ll probably suck. They will 100% use it for control and oppression. So that’s some fun stuff to look forward to.
the former of which reduced it’s power consumption by over 99% after switching to Proof-of-Stake
This isn’t necessarily a good thing, there are many arguments against POS. You shouldn’t use non-green energy resources to begin with, if people use these to mine that’s not bitcoin fault.
No, people just don’t like crypto because it’s a huge waste of energy that has no use for the average person at the moment and is only used by rich people to get richer without much regulation. Don’t get me wrong, it might definitely be useful when used correctly in the future. Not wasting as much energy by ditching proof of work, becoming actually useful for normal transactions, etc. But right now it’s just an overhyped technology for obnoxious cryptobros.
no use for the average person at the moment
No, people just don’t like crypto because it’s a huge waste of energy that has no use for the average person
This is actually part of government propaganda to discredit cryptocurrencies.
Lemmy servers consume energy too and half of the content is memes, i don’t see anyone complaining about it.
You can’t begin to imagine just how much energy cryptocurrencies use. A web server can never come close.
A web server can never come close
but AI model training can.
Pretty sure people have been shitting on AI pretty heavily as well, partly for those reasons (but also for several others).
I’m sure meta or google energy usage is up there but i’ve yet to see someone complaining about mr.beast or cristiano ronaldo wasting energy with their videos.
Maybe because people value entertainment more than invisible money that won’t help them anyway.
or more like because the government doesn’t have problems with people keeping themself busy on entertainment vs them using a decentralized and open currency that can bypass financial institutions
I’m pretty sure the government isn’t forcing people to watch YouTube and neither of the people you mentioned are government employees, unless you’re concocting some elaborate Alex Jones-level conspiracy theory.
Yeah because they have a lot of servers. The problem is each individual web server does not use a lot of energy whereas each individual server running a crypto currency blockchain uses a lot of energy for that one server.
I mean…I’ll go one further. I know there have been many historical “aged like milk” quotes, like about how much RAM computers need, but I’m still saying this in confidence: I don’t think that cryptocurrency or blockchains will ever have a useful purpose. Their design is built to solve societal problems, but introduces worse problems in implementing them. This goes well beyond just taking too much electricity.
They already have a useful purpose. Sending crypto is much easier than sending different currencies into different countries. The services exist, but they are prohibitively expensive if you’re sending like $50
Send Monero or something and it’s far easier and faster. You can exchange it for your own currency locally or just sit on it.
Just gonna copy/paste this from someone else’s comment in this thread: https://www.reuters.com/technology/california-dmv-puts-42-million-car-titles-blockchain-fight-fraud-2024-07-30/
So… whoops. That didn’t take long, huh?
Every time one of these articles is posted, I predict a very very short investigation into the technical workings of the project will find that the same could’ve been done with a much simpler central database. Or, that they were actually using a database at the backend and wasting their whole crypto approach.
And we all know technology never changes or improves over time. Good catch.
Technology absolutely improves.
But blockchain is worse. And it’s not close.
Bitcoin ≠ cryptocurrency.
Ethereum lowered it’s power consumption by over 99% after switching to Proof-of-Stake.
Bitcoin was the first cryptocurrency and we don’t even fucking know who came up with it.
How about we don’t throw away the possibility of 5.1 Surround Sound Blu-Ray Audio, because wax cylinders sound like shit?
“Computers are cool and all, but they take up entire rooms and only do simple calculations! It’s a complete waste of time and money to invest in such a technology!”
^That’s you
This is what the overwhelming majority of people believe. No offense, but were you spending a lot of time on r/Bitcoin?
The majority of people believes what the government makes them believe, so it make sense.
Nah, idiots bring shitty crypto propaganda and pretend it isn’t just an unregulated security pretending to be an alternative currency (that isn’t usable as a currency for regular people) while using more energy than entire nations, all for a giggle with a shit coin.
Are you sure you are not confusing propaganda with ads?
Cryptocurrencies are quite easy to use, the process to create a cryptocurrency wallet is much easier than the procedure required to create a bank account or a credit card and these days cryptos are widely accepted even as a currency.
Are you sure you are not confusing propaganda with what crypto is actually used for?
I don’t care how easy it is to set up a wallet. I cannot take my crypto and go down to the bodega and buy a sandwich. I can’t pay my rent with crypto. I can’t pay my utilities with.
Crypto is not a usable currency for the vast majority of people.
I cannot take my crypto and go down to the bodega and buy a sandwich.
^(but I admit that 95% of the time there is a payment middleman needed to convert crypto to fiat, just like Visa is a middleman)
So what you are literally stating is you cannot use cryptocurrency to pay you need to convert into some other actually accepted currency…
Also, have you ever been somewhere that is card only?
There are ways. Visa has crypto-linked cards for example.
https://cointelegraph.com/news/visa-crypto-withdrawals-cards-145-countries
Before the government enforced credit cards and made them mandatory it would have been really hard to buy a sandwich in bodega with a credit card too. Not sure where you live but these days in most places if you want you can literally pay with all sort of service, they have these big cash registers with the screen that accepts all soft of payment youtubers advertise for.
Crypto is not a usable currency for the vast majority of people.
There aren’t any limits that prevents the majority of people from creating a crypto wallet and using cryptocurrencies
I don’t care how easy it is to set up a wallet. I cannot take my crypto and go down to the bodega and buy a sandwich. I can’t pay my rent with crypto. I can’t pay my utilities with crypto.
There aren’t any limits that prevents the majority of people from creating a crypto wallet and using cryptocurrencies
This is why people laugh at you cryptobros. I literally tell you why it’s not a usable currency and you tell me it totes is.
Go back to speeding up climate change with your fake currency and stop trying to pretend normal people are using it to for anything other than unregulated securities trading.
Go back to speeding up climate change with your fake currency
cryptocurrencies provides an open alternative to a centralized and rotten financial system that is at the core of consumerism and the speedrun of mankind into oblivion.
Yet it still isn’t a usable currency for normal people, and the usage of it is a (gross as well as net) negative to society is directly contributing to, to quote you, the “speedrun of mankind into oblivion.”
You practically use the energy output of a nuclear reactor to process transactions. So I think you’re the ones pushing the expediation of the human races extinction. What’s worse is your been obnoxious while doing it.
It already has a codepoint. ₿
Bitcoin has the right idea, but did not execute it properly, primarily because it was the first and technology has improved and it has not. Monero is actually doing what bitcoin was meant to do and acting as a transactional currency, medium of exchange, and store of value.
Look at my totally stable store of currency bro, trust me bro, this is totally useful as a means of exchange and you can trust in its future value bro, just believe me.
How are those Intel stocks going?
Creeping my posts form days ago? That isn’t weird or anything. I’m guessing you’re trying to make a point in there somewhere, but you’ll have to point it out to me.
I didn’t check out any of your posts. I was making a point about the “safe and stable” stockmarket vs the “volatile and dangerous” cryptomarket.
Cryptocurrency is just like the stockmarket, so there are safe, dangerous, and stupid options.
No one has argued that bitcoin is stable. It maybe will be in 10-20 years, but for stability today, you obviously go with a stablecoin like USDC or whatever stablecoin that is backed by your local currency and assets.
I didn’t check out any of your posts. I was making a point about the “safe and stable” stockmarket vs the “volatile and dangerous” cryptomarket.
We’re talking about currencies, not stocks, but I’m not surprised that crypto bros think their imaginary coins an somehow both appreciate in value like an investment while also being stable enough to use as a currency.
Now, overlay that price chart with a transaction count chart averaged out over say 90 days and what you will notice is that big spike up to 400 and above was at basically no transaction volume which makes it seem more like that was hype. Looking at the price chart over shorter timeframes such as a year will show you that the transaction count is actually increasing now and the price is staying quite stable.
“Ignore the glaring flaws and look only at the parts I tell you to” is great fiscal policy and inspires a lot of trust. You nerds are basically sending PGP emails to each other and pretending it’s money. It isn’t — it’s literally nothing.
Well, we will just have to agree to disagree.
No, because the rest of us have to deal with the environmental destruction wrought by your virtual paperclip maximizer. it affects everyone.
Fine, go after the industries that are doing more, such as industrial processing for making glass and other things that require high temperatures, the global transportation industry, etc.
Why would I “go after” an industry producing something useful, rather than grifters powering GPUs to do absolutely nothing of value? We can get to the glass industry once we’ve culled the useless garbage first.
Monero is mining-resistant, which means mining farms are going to be unprofitable. The people mining Monero are regular enthusiasts, so that should mean there’s less wasted energy from a ton of people competing over the same number of coins. Oh, and Monero has no maximum block-size, which keeps transaction costs low (which means even less competition over mining).
I don’t know of a good way to estimate Monero electricity usage, but I’m guessing it’s way less than Bitcoin has per transaction, or at least it would be if they had a similar number of transactions. Monero is a lot more complex currency (so one transaction will actually spawn a bunch of “fake” transactions), but that mining-resistance is doing some work.
Here’s Monero’s webpage, which has some discussion on energy usage, which I think I’ve summarized well above.
Your comment costs data-center energy, please help save the environment by not commenting.
I don’t know if this argument is the winner you thought it was. A currency where people aren’t using it as a means of exchange because of price fluctuations is a failure.
No, no, hear them out. It’s actually super great that when you walk into the grocery store the loaf of bread is $1.50, and by the time you walk to the bread aisle it’s $0.72, and by the time you walk to the cashier it’s $2.10. This is actually super great, because there’s also a medium country’s worth of electricity being consumed to enable that.
When i pick up a loaf of bread its 0.012, and when i check out its 0.012. Currentsies are going to shift against each other. The exact same thing would occur if you walked into a store in, say, Germany and handed them dollars. Also, do you mind telling me how much energy the banking system uses to run their equipment, build their buildings, have their employees come to their branches, move armored trucks full of cash, etc. Like, I can understand the power use thing being an issue. But if you want to go after something that would make more of a difference, how about figuring out thermal bricks or something for industries making glass? Which produces a hell of a lot more greenhouse gases than crypto mining does. Industrial processes are a huge polluter. Or how about the global transportation system?
This is the poster child for whataboutisn. You literally just argued that it’s okay for cryptocurrencies to pollute and waste energy because it takes energy to make glass too.
It fluctuates with an I narrow range, and as it gets more adoption, that range is continuing to narrow. As a matter of fact, I sell items for Monero and I keep my prices completely stable and people do come to buy things. https://xmrbazaar.com/user/shortwavesurfer2009/. I have my prices set in such a way that they will stay stable until at least December 1st of 2024 at which time I will update them if need be.
Monero will not scale. All attempts at “improved” altcoins have just sacrificed scalability in exchange for features that look good in the short term to investors that don’t know any better.
There are people dedicated specifically to Monero scaling and they are a hell of a lot smarter than me and do not see any reason why it cannot be scaled properly. Look at some talks by Articmine
I’m not interested in spending a ton of time on this, but I did go and watch this short interview with him about scaling misconceptions.
Wasn’t convincing at all. For one, the guy comes across as kind of dishonest. Not scammer-level dishonest, but more like a politician. The main thing though is that he’s just a big-blocker, which is just a total dead end. Having everyone store every single transaction that was ever made until the end of time is just not realistic.
In order to scale to any globally significant number of users, a cryptocurrency needs a second layer to aggregate transactions, such as Lightning. Monero seems to have nothing in this regard beyond “However, academic and industry research is ongoing and promising in this area.”
they are a hell of a lot smarter than me
You should not be investing money in something based on this level of understanding, and you *definitely* should not be advocating it to others. Scaling is an existential problem for cryptocurrencies. Their utility is based on their monetary value, and their monetary value is based on investor assessment of their future utility. Without the ability to scale, there will be no growth in utility, which means no investment other than temporary dumb money, which becomes a vicious cycle.
You should not be investing money in something based on this level of understanding
IMO, you shouldn’t be investing in cryptocurrencies or any currencies for that matter. Currencies should be used, not hoarded with the expectation of gain. If you’re buying cryptocurrencies as an investment, you’ve already lost.
Where cryptocurrencies have value is as a medium of exchange. In many parts of the world, the central bank isn’t trustworthy and end up causing runaway inflation, such as in Venezuela, Argentina, and Turkey. This is because there is a lot of political gains to be had by manipulating the currency to make things appear better than they are. The US hasn’t had this issue largely because the Federal Reserve is largely immune to politics (they’re appointed by the executive and confirmed by the Senate, but that’s about it). But that’s not guaranteed to always be the case. Board members can be removed, and the President and Senate can theoretically pack the Federal Reserve board in the same way as packing the Supreme Court.
The great thing about cryptocurrencies is that you don’t need to trust anyone to use it. Here are the parties involved in a transaction:
- you
- the other party
- miners verifying blocks
- source code maintainers
Each of those has checks in place. You and the other party don’t need to exchange secrets, only information that is totally acceptable to be shared (pub keys, not private keys). With something like Monero, you can even make a separate key for each transaction if you’d like. Miners compete against each other to validate transactions accurately, and if a miner tries to cheat, their results are excluded. Source code maintainers work in the open, so researchers (or you!) can and do look at the code.
With fiat, you have to trust the central bank and banking regulators. If you don’t trust your central bank, you’re SOL.
The cost of using a cryptocurrency vs a central bank is that lack of central oversight, meaning you’ll see more variation in valuations. However, this should smooth out as more people use it as a currency (so more even inflows vs outflows). There isn’t something like the US dollar or Euro’s target 2% inflation rate, so we could see deflation instead of inflation if cryptocurrencies catch on or if people flee to it from investments in a bear market or something.
The value of a cryptocurrency is the demand for that currency. Just like fiat, it has value if we believe it has value. Fiat currencies aren’t based on anything more than supply and demand for that currency, just like crytocurrencies, with the big distinction that valuations also take into account trust in the backing back (whereas cryptocurrencies include trust in the network and code).
IMO, you shouldn’t be investing in cryptocurrencies or any currencies for that matter. Currencies should be
used, not hoarded with the expectation of gain. If you’re buying cryptocurrencies as an investment, you’ve already lost.Cryptocurrencies literally cannot function without speculative investment. Even in the absence of formal investors, *someone* has to be the first person to accept the tokens in exchange for something of value, in hopes that they will have value of their own in the future. Until then, the tokens are unusable.
Further, the market cap and liquidity of a cryptocurrency impose practical limits on what it can be used for. You can’t very well conduct a billion dollar transaction through a cryptocurrency that has a market cap in the millions. Investment raises the market cap, “unlocking” these higher-value use cases. Conversely, loss of investor confidence will reduce the market cap, and effectively reduce the utility of the coin.
This is why ability to scale is so important. The current market values of Bitcoin and the various alts are based far more on speculative investment than they are on usage. Those investors believe that the coins will see far more usage (and have far more natural demand) in the future than they do today. If that turns out not to be the case due to an inability to scale, investors will start to flee, and the vicious cycle will start.
I don’t think anyone needs to exchange cryptocurrencies for “something of value” for the investment to work, they just have to believe the currency itself holds value, where value is defined by supply vs demand. If enough people think others will believe it has value, then demand will increase. It’s basically how MLMs work, but it can sustain itself once it reaches a sufficient number of investors.
Adding transactions for real goods and services in the mix expands the reach of the currency and can stabilize demand a bit once the initial speculators have lost interest. So yeah, there’s absolutely a motivation for speculators to try to get others on-board. But it’s not necessarily a requirement, as we can see with other collector fads like Beanie Babies or Baseball Cards (the only value is in trading with other collectors), but just changed to be digital (NFTs are the strongest analogue).
However, just because speculators are rewarded if you use a cryptocurrency for transactions doesn’t mean you should avoid it. Use it if it provides value to you. The value proposition is:
- lower transaction fees, especially for international transactions - Bitcoin fails for small local transactions, but works well for large and international transactions; the lightning network helps for small transactions, and other currencies exist for small transactions as well
- privacy - banks can and do sell your data, and governments may be interested in your transactions as well; you can’t use cash for online transactions, so there aren’t many good options
- security - breaches and scams happen, and if you don’t notice the issue soon enough, you could end up paying for fraudulent transactions; with cryptocurrencies, you never share your private key, so you’re as safe as wherever you store that key; you can also move money between keys, so you can keep the bulk of your money safe
Even without any kind of physical backing, cryptocurrencies offer an attractive value proposition. We could probably solve the above with fiat, but that currently is not a thing. I don’t recommend using cryptocurrencies for everything, nor do I recommend using it as an investment, but I do recommend using it for a few transactions here and there until you feel comfortable with it because of that value proposition.
It seems like you’re arguing against a position that I don’t hold? I’ve been invested in Bitcoin for a long time, and I’m quite familiar with its technical and socioeconomic dynamics. I’m skeptical of altcoins specifically, not of cryptocurrency as a concept.
While I personally agree that we should not store all transactions for all time, our storage capability is going to get exponentially better. We are able to store data in 3D discs with lasers now and can store petabytes in a single disc the size of your typical old CD-ROM and even store data in DNA if we wish. These obviously aren’t going to be included in your desktop computer anytime in the near future, but they do currently exist and show that storage will not be a problem for a very very long time.
Scalability isn’t quite as simple as “how much data can a well-off enthusiast from a developed country store”. You need to consider the behavior of your lowest common denominator users.
You want as many users as possible to run fully-verifying nodes, rather than SPV (“simplified payment verification”) nodes that can be tricked by a malicious miner. The more transactions are being done through SPV nodes, the more potential payoff there is for an attacker, and the more resources they can dedicate to an attack.
Further, if your number of full nodes gets low enough, it becomes feasible for state actors to track down and compromise the remaining node operators. At that point, you may as well just be using a centralized, government approved payment system instead.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again:
True bitcoiners 🤝 no-coiners “Bitcoin should be illegal”
This is 100% wrong
Fuck Emojis
Emoji are stupid and deserve Bitcoin. We don’t deserve either of these unintelligible pictograph shorthands. Alphabets exist for multiple reasons.
