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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   27783 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 13, 2025

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This is somewhat tangential but is now a good time to buy Sol then? If the president himself is shilling it, it seems like a good buy

no, too risky and missed the train. Crypto has very high beta with the stock market, no alpha anymore.

Bummer. I miss all the trains!

Consider any other altcoin, however- bitcoin, litecoin, ethereum, monero.

By the time you've heard of a memecoin, when you buy, you've probably already lost.

The price of the Trump shitcoin has doubled since you said this.

I already have FOMO

The minute, or hour, after he posted it was definitely a good time to buy SOL. Now ... probably still is a good time, but not necessarily because of Trump, more because the momentum in the crypto ecosystem seems to be behind it.

But this entire exercise illustrates how, IMO, speculative cryptocurrency trading is a negative sum, socially useless activity that should be at least shameful, if not illegal. Your profit on SOL or BTC isn't coming from 'transforming the financial system', it's coming from the kind of people who are buying Trumpcoin. That's not to say that cryptocurrency overall is bad, blockchains are cool and the current crypto financial system has a lot of advantages over tradfi by virtue of being native to modern tech, but that doesn't justify the speculation.

A good 2% of world GDP goes into negative sum, 'socially useless' military spending. Just because something is socially useless it doesn't follow that it's wise or practical to do away with it.

Military spending acts as a deterrent and to enforce American interests abroad, so it's worthwhile even if unused .

"Russian and Chinese military spending does the opposite" says the hippy "and all we get are these retarded wars and megadeaths that grind on for years where almost nobody gets what they want and everyone pays a shockingly high price. Why can't we all just get along?"

There are a bunch of complex reasons why we can't get along probably rooted in the human condition and likewise there are complex reasons why people want to speculate or do things that aren't strictly rational or productive. I feel no desire towards Bulgari handbags but I don't think 'these should be banned because they're socially useless moneysinks that unworthy organizations use to make money they shouldn't really have because they make these things high-status'. Let people enjoy things.

I don't understand your argument - military spending isn't socially useless because you'd get invaded if you didn't do it, it's directly useful for the security of the world. There's no action we could take to get to a 'better' world without military spending. (Also, power and the ability to use force are good.) Whereas you could just ban crypto.

Yes but in 'theory' everyone could cut military spending to zero and not have to worry about being invaded. But that's obviously not practical.

Likewise banning crypto would be impractical for the same reason that banning stocks in the 18th century was also impractical. Speculation occurred. There were dangerous bubbles that caused serious economic problems. But there were advantages in having liquidity and a developed financial system. Crypto also performs various important functions that aren't fully understood by anyone right now, like stocks back then. Fast global transactions, cheap and secure storage of wealth, recordkeeping, smart contracts...

Crypto as a currency? Cool. (But most are impractically slow and expensive for that).

Crypto as a tool? Cool. (Whatever Polymarket does)

Crypto as gambling/speculation? Very much a bad thing.

Of course, the whole space will fall apart when quantum computing is achieved, and the cryptograpy is broken. Who knows how long that will be, though.

At least investments, even shitty crypto ones, can go up. Better than 'all or nothing' things like sports betting.

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