There is real and undeniable innovation happening in the blockchain, aimed at fixing problems created by the blockchain, just like resolving the problems introduced by string theory has become the central research program of theoretical physics.
At some point all technical issues will be fixed, blockchain payments will work, and there will be a simple client you can download that's lightweight enough to run on a phone in the background. And whoever distributes that client will have 100% control of the entire system
At that point we will have rebuilt the Visa network and financial regulation via a 100,000 developer-year detour.
“We shall not cease from blockchain development.
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”
The plague that finally wipes out humanity will probably be some @balajis-funded blockchain-on-RNA CRISPR play
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The Elon Musk crypto cycle consists of an adiabatic hype tweet, an isothermal expansion of his portfolio, a cryptic subtweet, and the return stroke. The tweets do no work but create an irreversible flow of income in the direction of Musk.
Bloomberg's @matt_levine has written beautifully about Musk's cryptocurrency perpetuum mobile, his memetic power to generate limitless profit from such pump-and-dump tweets, and his general position at the center of the financial universe, God help us all.
More support for my "this is the last week of American covid" thesis
The idea is that May 31 is a rare American three-day weekend and the traditional start of summer, and after 15 months of plague there is no way any kind of public health self-restraint is going to make it through that weekend
Huge crunch time this week for covid podcasts, book proposals, and memoirs of what it was like to come of age in Williamsburg during a pandemic
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
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.
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…
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
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.