The crypto thread

What do you prefer?

  • Bitcoin

    Votes: 3 9.7%
  • Ethereum

    Votes: 6 19.4%
  • Binance Coin

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Cardano

    Votes: 1 3.2%
  • Fiat

    Votes: 6 19.4%
  • Go away, I deal in coke and gold bars

    Votes: 14 45.2%
  • Privacy coins

    Votes: 1 3.2%

  • Total voters
    31
  • Poll closed .
It's illegal in Canada for stocks but legal for crypto. I can't remember exactly but something about how something is classified. It could be a sort of loophole that's closed eventually, but as of a couple months ago at least, when I was reading about it, it was still a thing (and the same thing in the U.S., but with tighter annual limits of what you can claim or something like that)

I found it interesting that China banned it, since it was basically a way for US stimulus dollars to stimulate the Chinese high-tech industry.

What's even more interesting is that there is all sorts of blockchain activity in China these days. Even involving Chinese banks. It seems to be a fine line the Chinese government is willing to walk. Those last two articles are from the spring and summer, but you can google Nervos and all sorts of stuff will come up.

So in the west we hear that China has banned bitcoin, but it seems that the situation is a lot more nuanced than that.. My friend from Hong Kong says that a lot of rich Chinese use crypto to hide their wealth from the government and that's one of the things the government wants to prevent.. but that they actually don't mind having their hand in the pie. But that's just one person's opinion as well.

The migration of bitcoin mining from China to the U.S. should make all of this greener, so that part of it is very welcome.
 
This "trick" is illegal when you're trading stocks (from what I understand), but it is allowed when trading blockchain tech coins and tokens. I suspect this is because the laws have not yet caught up with the technology, but I'm not really sure.

I don't know about common law systems, but even in civil law ones you're playing with fire, laws can be interpreted as applying to the same kinds of transactions. I'd expect latitude for interpretation top be even greater in common law systems. So that's' prosecution futures for those doing it.

Yeah, it's stupid that a tax incentive that's supposed to encourage capital investment is actually subsidizing purchasing a nothing that was produced elsewhere. Unless you successfully milk the Greater Fool, these purchases merely encourage economic growth elsewhere. GPU producers rejoice, I guess. I found it interesting that China banned it, since it was basically a way for US stimulus dollars to stimulate the Chinese high-tech industry.

It was ridiculous. But I think the chinese have gotten as much capital and technology as they needed, now they want to channel it to productive development. Good for them.

So in the west we hear that China has banned bitcoin, but it seems that the situation is a lot more nuanced than that.. My friend from Hong Kong says that a lot of rich Chinese use crypto to hide their wealth from the government and that's one of the things the government wants to prevent.. but that they actually don't mind having their hand in the pie. But that's just one person's opinion as well.

The migration of bitcoin mining from China to the U.S. should make all of this greener, so that part of it is very welcome.

Funny thing, if you hide your wealth from the governments, who enforced contracts that grant you control over your wealth deposited with third parties? Bitheads seldom actually hold their tokens because it makes trading extremely difficult and people with wealh stashed away want it liquid. Otherwise they'd invest instead.

All of those blockchain things you mentioned still going on in china are shovel-selling. Useless except for the speculation with "cryptocurrency". The chinese will continue to sell bit-shovels so long as someone pays real money for them. Makes sense. @El_Machinae And they'll probably also keep selling chips! But actually running the so-called "mining" on one's country is bad strategy, cheap energy gets wasted on immaterial stuff and usually subsidies are involved. And pollution needlessly made Several levels of waste.

@warpus there is no "greener" things like this until all energy is "green". Any energy wasted on useless calculations is energy that could have replaced fossil-fuel produced energy or used to produce e something useful which instead must be produced out of "dirty energy" elsewhere. Claims of "green" are greenwashing.

The chinese governments is proving exceptionally rational in a world caught up in many irrational manias.
 
I disagree, in this case China is trying to stay in the game in case decentralized finance becomes an important force in world finance in the future. They don't want to be left behind by the west, so they have not banned the development of blockchain technology or the involvement of Chinese banks.
 
Blockchain and crypto aren't the same thing, from my perspective. In the same way that squares and rectangles aren't the same thing. Crypto seems to be a hunt for the Greater Fool, a side-quest to figure out some type of utility for muggles, plus the legacy of the winner for Big Finance. Blockchain is a technology that will be used in regions where it makes sense to use it.
 
Blockchain and crypto aren't the same thing, from my perspective. In the same way that squares and rectangles aren't the same thing. Crypto seems to be a hunt for the Greater Fool, a side-quest to figure out some type of utility for muggles, plus the legacy of the winner for Big Finance. Blockchain is a technology that will be used in regions where it makes sense to use it.
I am not sure this makes sense. Any distributed ledger kind of needs cryptography to manage. The point then becomes when does the ability to add to the ledger become a currency rather than just an information action. With things like NFTs the line becomes quite blurred.
 
You're technically correct. But in colloquial parlance, 'crypto' seems to be the thing people buy while pretending they're investing. In other words, it's become the name of the toy.
 
You're technically correct. But in colloquial parlance, 'crypto' seems to be the thing people buy while pretending they're investing. In other words, it's become the name of the toy.

Isn't "crypto" just basically slang for "blockchain tech" ? If you say "Crypto" and point to something, you will be pointing to blockchain tech, and vice versa, right? The one difference I see is how these terms can be used. You don't "trade blockchain tech", that doesn't make sense, you trade "blockchain tech coins and tokens". Blockchain tech points to the technology at large, while "coins and tokens" narrows it down to something you can trade, whereas "crypto" could stand for either the tech or individual tokens.

In teh case of China they are seeing western banks, financial institutions, and other large tech companies investing in this space. To them it doesn't matter what it's called, they don't want to get left behind in case there is something to this and it becomes more popular. Whether it does or not, it seems that they are looking around and seeing everybody else jumping in, so they want a piece of the pie too. If it doesn't pan out, no big loss, but if it does, they won't be playing catchup - like they have several other times in history (with other technology, such as space travel for instance). At the same time they don't want their citizens hiding wealth, so they have banned their banks from helping people trade these assets.. but nevertheless allow their banks to perform work in this space and develop Chinese-based blockchain tech.

It blew my mind a bit when I found out that public Chinese blockchains exist. I assumed that wouldn't be a thing, since 98% of all articles you'll find online will talk about how China has banned bitcoin and so on. The fact that the Chinese government allows their banks and others to develop such a decentralized technology is a bit telling. Seems like they are willing to make an exception in this case just in case. It wouldn't surprise me at all if they eventually ban all of it completely, but for now it seems they are walking a fine line just in case
 
RobAnybody (in his first post) uses it as slang for 'cryptocurrency', or "the toy you buy". So did BJ. You even acknowledged the common parlance your first post. Moriarte eventually does switch to the colloquial usage.

That's mostly my point. I understand that there's an entire technology base underlying the discussion. That technology is going to be used, for sure.
 
It seems like a minor nuance though, similar to "Is it football or soccer?". It's true that "crypto" has a slightly negative connotation, but other than that it's essentially another word for "blockchain tech"

I think the two words might mean different things only if you are looking in from the outside. Once you jump in and do some research, it seems more obvious that both terms describe the same thing, they're just used slightly differently depending on context.
 
Hey, I was wrong. Sort of. The nuance is greater than that. Sort of. Cryptocurrencies reside on the blockchain. However, you could say both are examples of blockchain tech.

In the end I guess it doesn't matter as long as everybody understands what is being discussed.
 
Blockchain and crypto aren't the same thing, from my perspective. In the same way that squares and rectangles aren't the same thing. Crypto seems to be a hunt for the Greater Fool, a side-quest to figure out some type of utility for muggles, plus the legacy of the winner for Big Finance. Blockchain is a technology that will be used in regions where it makes sense to use it.

I have suffered through sales pitches for "blockchain". When pressed for actual advantages of using "blockchain" for the stuff they were talking about, the salesmen could offer... nothing. All were things that worked perfectly with a traditional database, which satisfied 100% of the requisites.
At least they looked embarrassed about it.
 
Really? It's really easy to look up exactly what the benefits of blockchain tech are. I've written up a bunch of it in this very thread. It would take like 5 seconds of googling to find online as well

It seems like a lot of people are against this technology for emotional reasons. Which is to be expected, but as a robot I find it highly illogical
 
Off the top of your head, can you say now just one application where you believe blockchain to be uniquely useful?
 
Off the top of your head, can you say now just one application where you believe blockchain to be uniquely useful?
Buying drugs on the internet.
 
@innonimatu I mean.. yes, very easily. It's not like I was lying in my previous post.

Blockchain technology is being used to help clean up the oceans. All "blockchain tech" really is is a publicly accessible and uncorruptable and unhackable (if set up properly) ledger. In this case it is being used to motivate locals to help with the cleanup efforts. They get paid for doing this, and they get paid for exactly what they picked up.. but it used to be tough to keep track of all this data while ensuring that it's legit, so it was always tough to get people to participate.

So the use here is this - they are able to easily piggypack on the blockchain, without having to build up any sort of database or build and maintain any sort of infrastructure. The technology is already in place. It's public and open, so everyone can check the state of the cleanup at any point in time. And when you drop off your haul of the garbage, it is all tracked and stored on the blockchain, so when it comes time to getting paid - everybody gets paid exactly what they are owed. Since it's impossible to hack the blockchain and alter this data, it leads to transparency, keeping everybody happy that nobody is cheating the system.

So yeah, sure, you could just use a sheet of paper and a pencil for this or an Excel spreadsheet or a custom built database or something. That's what they used to do - and it didn't work very well.

A link to the project so you can educate yourself further. A page on their site that talks about how blockchain tech is used.

Want more uses? Imagine anything that uses a public & transparent ledger that's 100% secure. There are a lot of potential uses.
 
Just because it's a buzzword doesn't mean there's not an underlying technology. See also 'quantum'.

A sales person might try to sell you something with 'quantum' in its label, but quantum technology still exists.

It's a distributed ledger system.

You know, I still don't know why my bank believes my Cayman bank when my offshore bank deposits funds in my local bank.
 
Catching up a bit... I should really check in more often! :)
It seems that those sites (like coinbase) need actual ID, not just something like email/paypal.
Just speaking from the US... Most reputable sites (Coinbase for example) require quite a bit of identity authentication. However, unless you're going to invest a sizeable sum, you can easily just "go with what's popular" & find some easy-to-sign-up-for site.
I think that if one is so committed to the point of sending such documents, they should at least have studied the market a bit.
I mean, if you wanted to randomly throw $20 into Dogecoin because you heard about it on the internet somewhere (I don't advise this, just saying, as an example), you don't really need to do a lot of research.

On the other hand, if you want to shift your entire savings account into Bitcoin (I definitely don't advise this), then yes, you should do some extensive research. So it depends on how much you're just playing with pocket change vs trying to use this as a long-term plan (fwiw, I'm in between those views AND already have other much more stable, reliable long-term plans in place, so when I speak of this stuff, keep that in mind - @warpus has clearly done more research than I have & I'm the one that's in! that should tell you something - I can afford to lose all this - hope I don't, but I can).
In the U.S. you are also able to use your credit card to buy crypto. In Canada this is basically banned.
IMO, no one should ever do this - use a credit card to buy crypto. Under no circumstances. However, if pressed, I'd get a bit wishy-washy on banning it. I wouldn't rail against it being banned here (USian here), but since my opinion counts as "one guy as the internet with no repercussions", I'd probably ever so slightly fall on the side of not banning it if, like, a rondom internet poll asked me my opinion - that's the extent of my conviction.
A lot of exchanges are built around American needs in mind, and America is a weird place. For instance, requirements to sign up and get started on American sites seem to be really lax.
Just speaking to the two sites I've dealt with, I had to go through two-factor authentication to set up an account (& even for some larger buys - mostly just my Ethereum, which as I've mentioned, is just a long-term hold for me I rarely even check), & had to take a picture of my driver's license & enter my SSN.
It seems that I could easily set up my dog to buy dogecoin, even though I don't even have a dog.
That said, I bet you could - I looked into which exchanges are reputable & secure & those were the two best, although I, personal opinion only, greatly prefer Coinbase as far as security & accessibility to your money. Crypto.com tends to offer coins earlier - I bought my SHIBA when it was at "5 decimals after the 0" on Crypto.com b/c it was available there months sooner. They also are the only one of the two to offer TERRA, my favorite coin (see way upthread), & which if I'd just put all my money into when I bought it, I'd be waaay up compared to all my "smart" decisions - in other words, if I'd just put everything into "the coin named after my favorite comic book character", I'd be way up compared to where I am now, which is kinda up. That may be the best insight into crypto as a whole that I've provided this whole discussion. :)
...$10 of warpuscoin
Shut up & take my money!!
Off the top of your head, can you say now just one application where you believe blockchain to be uniquely useful?
Well, if you're willing to accept literally true answers: speculative investments.
 
@innonimatu
Blockchain technology is being used to help clean up the oceans. All "blockchain tech" really is is a publicly accessible and uncorruptable and unhackable (if set up properly) ledger. In this case it is being used to motivate locals to help with the cleanup efforts. They get paid for doing this, and they get paid for exactly what they picked up.. but it used to be tough to keep track of all this data while ensuring that it's legit, so it was always tough to get people to participate.

So the use here is this - they are able to easily piggypack on the blockchain, without having to build up any sort of database or build and maintain any sort of infrastructure. The technology is already in place. It's public and open, so everyone can check the state of the cleanup at any point in time. And when you drop off your haul of the garbage, it is all tracked and stored on the blockchain, so when it comes time to getting paid - everybody gets paid exactly what they are owed. Since it's impossible to hack the blockchain and alter this data, it leads to transparency, keeping everybody happy that nobody is cheating the system.

So yeah, sure, you could just use a sheet of paper and a pencil for this or an Excel spreadsheet or a custom built database or something. That's what they used to do - and it didn't work very well.

A link to the project so you can educate yourself further. A page on their site that talks about how blockchain tech is used.

I'll tell you outright that it looks like a greewashing project*. But Let's look at the actual technological claims involved regarding blockchain. Unfortunately they're scarce! The specific claim is:

A blockchain-based tracking system secures real-time data and track the origin of the recovered plastic and all the steps of the cleanup process until delivery at a local waste bank. This ensures true authenticity and the highest level of traceability.

First, let's look at the authenticity and traceability arguments. The obvious authenticity vulnerability for the purpose of fraud is in the step of doing the initial data entry into the database. Is the data being entered authentic? Blockchain does not change that. If the people tasked with entering the data decide to carry out fraud, by making up references, they can with either technology.
The only thing that "blockchain" brings to the table is increased difficulty in tampering with the data after it is entered. A malicious designer or maintainer of the system can still carry out frauds: one example would be by providing malicious software to consult the blockchain, which misreported read data, or alter data on entry. The position of gatekeeper with the ability to carry out fraud remains, and the need of a trusted gatekeeper remains. I see little gain: you could trust them to guard the integrity of a traditional database. Or if you didn't trust them, you could demand to have a replica of the database and audit that. Such is in fact what the blockchain provides but there is nothing unique about it, copying a database is just as easy. And the data within comes structured for easy analysis with standard tools (SQL). The "blockchain" is more opaque to analysis.

If you are going to have some entity carry out formal audit processes, it can be done with either technology. You have to compare inputs and outputs with actual reality, the algorithms inside are not really relevant.

Now let's look at any efficiency claim - which in this case is not made, but suppose it was. Traditional approach, you only need one database system (and backups) to store and check the data involved in this use case. In this case you have a blockchain system. Do all the users have their local in-sync copy of the current data? For adding to it they must. But this is costly and inefficient, especially if the datasets grows fast. Do you have the whole bitcoin ledger? How big is it by now?
Or they use some software that links to a centralized system which actually holds the "blockchain". Which would be exactly like a traditional database, plus the word "blockchain" attached to it. I strongly suspect that will be the case. What does it actually add then? Mind you, if the blockchain data is held by a single entity then changing it and changing the database is equally easy, the defense against fraud remains a third party with a copy of the data going through the trouble of comparing.

I'm not convinced of the case for blockchain in this application.

*I'd also like to comment that the whole idea of this project is silly. If I understood correctly: pay random people for plastic collected from waterways? It's like paying for killed mice: pay enough for people to do it, and they'll set up mouse farms. In this case, they'll dump entire dumpsters into waterways in order to have plastic to collect there. The incentives are perverse - they can easily prompt the opposite of what is intended.

This claim in particular is ridiculous:

The high level of traceability provides proof of the plastic’s source and authenticity certified by an independent third party and allows anyone to trace the plastic back to its extraction point and view its onwards journey to the waste bank.

No, the only thing that would provide proof is having someone trusted do the collection and data entry. Truly having an "independent third party" watch the collecting itself doubles the man-hours worked for this thing. It's impossible. It's a lie. Plus: quis custodiet custodes? Will an "independent fourth party" watch the third party?
Imo the whole project is a money grab by some NGO for its managers, that's the business plan. The expense is paying some poor sods in Indonesia to collect some plastics from somewhere in order to justify the whole set-up to donors. Talk of transparency and ritual invocation of blockchain serves as a smokescreen. And free publicity, perhaps some wealthy cryptostuff speculators will donate. Smart...

This problem is fixed by properly collecting and disposing of new garbage - donate to that. And by the local public authorities spending to hire people full time to clean up. Do you believe that people like "Antonio Astone, Global service manager Assurance and Supply Chain in DNV GL" care about cleaning up water courses in Indonesia?
 
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