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21 May, 8 tweets, 2 min read
Lol remember Libra?
Man, that had to be a satisfying project to work on. All the late nights, the missed dinners with the kids, but through it all the satisfaction of knowing you worked on something so embarrassing in its futility you can never speak of it again
I guess now they renamed Libra to Diem and it's going to be pegged to the US dollar? The masterminds at Facebook have reinvented the Cuban Convertible Peso cnbc.com/2021/04/20/fac…
"Diem’s technology has “changed dramatically over the past year and a half from a naive blockchain to a very sophisticated blockchain” said Ran Goldi, CEO of First Digital Assets Group." Any more sophistication and it will rival the Chuck-E-Cheese token for financial complexity
How is a centralized cryptocurrency pegged to the dollar differs in any way from a "transactions" table in the Facebook database is a question for larger minds than mine
Facebook's stated aim was to create a currency to rival the dollar, and I guess step 1 of that is to tether it to the dollar, so the dollar can't escape.
A more serious question is why Zuckerberg's grandiose projects continue to get taken so seriously. Curing all disease, replacing the dollar, running-not-running for President, all these received massive amounts of press coverage unaffected by the many previous failures.
The Facebook Oversight Board should be seen through the lens of this serial grandiosity. The company is cosplaying a state—it wants its own currency, its own Supreme Court, its own Maximum Leader. (To their credit Facebook has so far stayed out of the plutocracy space race)

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More from @Pinboard

Pinboard Profile picture
22 May
If you're wondering why so many people are beating up on Bitcoin right now, choose your fighter:

a) We're all in the pocket of Big Fiat

b) The whole thing is a pyramid of fraud and crime, a mighty crash is coming, and I want you to keep your tendies so you can afford Pinboard
My favorite unmasking so far has been the YouTube commenter who implied I was a shill because I embedded the Litecoin symbol in my last name Image
To be fair, the Polish writing system is also a giant fraud. Worst decision ever by some 12th century monk to go with an alphabet missing half the sounds of the language.
Read 4 tweets
Pinboard Profile picture
21 May
Specifically, there's 71% left to go.
A quarter of WeWork's loss came from paying Adam Neumann half a BILLION dollars to stay away from the place for a year. They also paid him $50 million on top of that to not work anywhere else. That's puzzling. You'd think they'd want the guy hired sequentially by every competitor
No word on the fate of WeLive, the subsidiary that will rent you this magnificent New York apartment for $4,178 a month
Read 11 tweets
Pinboard Profile picture
21 May
The whole thread is great. Criminal activity is what keeps the cryptocurrency bubble inflating (with money laundering the principal use case). The basic critique of crypto is that if it doesn't work, there's no point to it, and if it works as advertised, it attracts all the crime
There's parallels here to the E2E debate. If you build unbreakable anonymous messaging, criminals will use that. Conversely, there are sympathetic people who use cryptocurrency to evade oppressive governments. The difference is in the tradeoff.
For E2E, the benefit of thwarting mass surveillance so far outweighs the costs that we accept them. But there's no benefit from cryptocurrency that balances out being able to shut down Atlanta and get anonymously paid, or launder hundreds of millions of dollars across borders.
Read 5 tweets
Pinboard Profile picture
20 May
This is a good thread about trying to think through the implications of the Pentagon UFO disclosures. There's several things about this mystery that make it difficult to reason about.
One is that over the last few centuries, we have gotten a lot of mileage out of always favoring mundane explanations over supernatural (or in this case extraterrestrial) ones. But we also learned it is wrong to dismiss evidence that contradicts your beliefs.
To me, the big question in the forthcoming UFO report will be exactly what the observations have shown. If small objects are accelerating at 20G with no visible means of propulsion, you could imagine that there's a military lab in China or Botswana where people are high-fiving.
Read 13 tweets
Pinboard Profile picture
20 May
Thank you to @cnbctechcheck for having me on! I realize that "cryptocurrency is a gambling token and pyramid scheme" is a simplistic argument, but... pyramid schemes are not that complicated, and I think it's useful to say it on TV for all those intimidated by blockchain woo
Let me tweet a little longer for people who want more than a sound bite. By its own criteria, crypto was supposed to be a decentralized currency that no one person or government could control, a safe store of value compared to fiat money. By all those criteria it has failed.
Instead of having no points of control, cryptocurrency is run like middle school—everything is determined by what the popular kids like or don't like that day. If Elon Musk has a double espresso this morning, the price will go up, if he tweets after bong rips, it will go down.
Read 16 tweets
Pinboard Profile picture
20 May
Good morning! If the Skype gods are willing I'll be appearing this morning on @cnbctechcheck to talk about cryptocurrency. This is probably one of those signs that you should sell, sell, sell. Segment starts a few minutes after 11 EST.
The fun part of a cryptocurrency TV segment is that you have to check prices two minutes before airtime, so you can know whether you're going to be explaining the 20% loss or 30% rise for the day
Cryptocurrency is the only stable store of value; it's the fiat currencies that fluctuate wildly against it as part of a transnational conspiracy
Read 4 tweets

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