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31 May, 4 tweets, 1 min read
This is my favorite kind of zinger from cryptopeople, the idea that I'm bitter for missing out. They forget that back in (say) 2013, we still treated bitcoin like a currency! It wasn't a magic token to hoard forever. If I had allowed BTC payments, one of two things would be true:
1. (Best case) I might have been able to convert it to USD and deposit it in my bank account.

2. (Likely case) I would have lost all my bitcoin when my exchange got hacked.

It was not wanting to give my bank account number to the Mt. Gox people that saved me from cryptoruin
My other favorite zinger is that 2012 called and wants my critique of bitcoin back. Well, yeah—the critique in 2012 was "this Bitcoin thing doesn't work except for all the crime" and the fact that it's now old and repetitive is not a very effective argument against it.
If your wingless failplane can't fly, then that's what people are going to keep harping on for years, no matter how valuable it gets.

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1 Jun
Ransomware could still exist without cryptocurrency. But what couldn't exist is the semi-legal support industry that has grown up around this form of extortion, including software vendors, intermediaries, even customer support hotlines for victims. Crypto makes extortion scalable
I rag on it a lot, but holding larger companies' data for ransom is one area where Bitcoin and its many offspring have created genuine innovation.
We need to find a way to repurpose ransomware as an antimonopoly tool. One reason the meat market is so vulnerable is that it's incredibly concentrated, as @JDScholten has talked about pretty eloquently. There's more ag concentration now than we the original antitrust laws passed
Read 4 tweets
Pinboard Profile picture
1 Jun
I'm glad @smdiehl has been talking about the massive pyramid scheme in post-communist Albania, because it has useful parallels to the present. You had a population distrustful of government, a total regulatory failure, and a sense that "this is too big to be a scam" all at once
The Albanian experience was shocking, but it happened in a context of wildcat privatization across Eastern Europe that accomplished its goal (reanimating a dead economy) but at great human cost, particularly among those on fixed income, and created a class of criminal oligarchs
In Albania, you also had people who were simply completely unfamiliar with the mechanics of investment, or what a naked fraud looked like. In cryptocurrency, the same obfuscatory purpose is served by the real but useless technology running the Rube Goldberg apparatus
Read 4 tweets
Pinboard Profile picture
31 May
The thing I really enjoy about non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and "smart contracts" more broadly is that there's no way to get them to point to information or objects outside the blockchain without introducing a trusted third party, the whole thing you set up a blockchain to avoid.
You might worry, for example, that smart contracts and programmable currency would legalize all gambling in a way governments couldn't regulate. But the only thing you could gamble on is other transactions on the blockchain. There's no way to find out the score of a soccer game
This mixture of solipsism, pointlessness, and being hermetically sealed off from information about the real world while also ruining it nicely mirrors the cryptocurrency culture itself. It's like those people who start to resemble their pets.
Read 8 tweets
Pinboard Profile picture
31 May
That's right, crypto people. Only my anonymity allows me to speak the truth, and I have guarded my secrets well. I defy you to try and unmask my real identity— prepare to enter a devious, twisting hall of mirrors that makes Satoshi Nakamoto looks like a toddler playing dress-up.
Already feeling sorry for Ebenezer Pinboard, whom Newsweek reporters will find and harass next week
Good luck to crypto twitter working hard tonight to peel back the layers of the onion on my Twitter identity
Read 5 tweets
Pinboard Profile picture
30 May
Because Bitcoin especially (through the Tether fraud) and cryptocurrency more generally is a pyramid scheme, of course Wall Street and venture capital need it to go mass market. It's the only road to getting out of their current investment at a profit politico.com/news/2021/05/3…
I think it's time for us in the tech world to speak out and make it clear the emperor has no clothes here. Cryptocurrency is sustained by a mix of money laundering, vaporware, fraud, ransomware, gambling, and delusion. It has no social benefit except helping end first dates fast
What we especially need to stress to regulators is that there's no relationship between the technical claims of cryptocurrency and our now over 13 years of experience. It's not decentralized, it's not a currency, it's not a store of value, and it's not a promising technology
Read 16 tweets
Pinboard Profile picture
29 May
People's thinking on this topic is tied in pretzels. The origins of covid matter because they will help us prevent the next pandemic. Lab escape and direct zoonotic transfer have radically different implications for how we do that. This is a public health issue, not geopolitics
China is an authoritarian surveillance state. They have ample relevant data to help determine the origins of covid, and can choose to share it or not. But our search for the answer should not be conditioned on their willingness to cooperate, or the consequences of making them mad
Chinese citizens, because they live under authoritarian rule, are unable to pressure their government from within for a candid investigation into the origins of covid. The only possible source of pressure comes from abroad, and we can't abrogate our duty to seek answers.
Read 5 tweets

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