I am goddamn well pissed-off because yet another one of these bloody spam blackmail emails hit a work account this morning, and thus the question posed above.
Why don't ordinary people accept that crypto is THE CURRENCY OF THE FUTURE? Why does it have a bad reputation? Don't they know something something blockchain contracts Satoshi Nakamoto computers something something means it's beans on toast all round?
Well, this is why. This is just another iteration of the kind of thing I see too frequently for my liking, and I'm quoting it in full because it'll be pertinent:
Hello there!
Unfortunately, there are some bad news for you.
Around several months ago I have obtained access to your devices that you were using to browse internet.
Subsequently, I have proceeded with tracking down internet activities of yours.
Below, is the sequence of past events:
In the past, I have bought access from hackers to numerous email accounts (today, that is a very straightforward task that can be done online).
Clearly, I have effortlessly logged in to email account of yours [deleted].
A week after that, I have managed to install Trojan virus to Operating Systems of all your devices that are used for email access.
Actually, that was quite simple (because you were clicking the links in inbox emails).
All smart things are quite straightforward. (>_<)
The software of mine allows me to access to all controllers in your devices, such as video camera, microphone and keyboard.
I have managed to download all your personal data, as well as web browsing history and photos to my servers.
I can access all messengers of yours, as well as emails, social networks, contacts list and even chat history.
My virus unceasingly refreshes its signatures (since it is driver-based), and hereby stays invisible for your antivirus.
So, by now you should already understand the reason why I remained unnoticed until this very moment...
While collecting your information, I have found out that you are also a huge fan of websites for adults.
You truly enjoy checking out porn websites and watching dirty videos, while having a lot of kinky fun.
I have recorded several kinky scenes of yours and montaged some videos, where you reach orgasms while passionately masturbating.
If you still doubt my serious intentions, it only takes couple mouse clicks to share your videos with your friends, relatives and even colleagues.
It is also not a problem for me to allow those vids for access of public as well.
I truly believe, you would not want this to occur, understanding how special are the videos you love watching, (you are clearly aware of that) all that stuff can result in a real disaster for you.
Let's resolve it like this:
All you need is $1450 USD transfer to my account (bitcoin equivalent based on exchange rate during your transfer), and after the transaction is successful, I will proceed to delete all that kinky stuff without delay.
Afterwards, we can pretend that we have never met before. In addition, I assure you that all the harmful software will be deleted from all your devices. Be sure, I keep my promises.
That is quite a fair deal with a low price, bearing in mind that I have spent a lot of effort to go through your profile and traffic for a long period.
If you are unaware how to buy and send bitcoins - it can be easily fixed by searching all related information online.
Below is bitcoin wallet of mine: 1Nx353jT8zZYaqmoMdMr2PRtdixStrDoZE
You are given not more than 48 hours after you have opened this email (2 days to be precise).
Below is the list of actions that you should not attempt doing:
Do not attempt to reply my email (the email in your inbox was created by me together with return address).
Do not attempt to call police or any other security services. Moreover, don't even think to share this with friends of yours. Once I find that out (make no doubt about it, I can do that effortlessly, bearing in mind that I have full control over all your systems) - the video of yours will become available to public immediately.
Do not attempt to search for me - there is completely no point in that. All cryptocurrency transactions remain anonymous at all times.
Do not attempt reinstalling the OS on devices of yours or get rid of them. It is meaningless too, because all your videos are already available at remote servers.
Below is the list of things you don't need to be concerned about:
That I will not receive the money you transferred.
- Don't you worry, I can still track it, after the transaction is successfully completed, because I still monitor all your activities (trojan virus of mine includes a remote-control option, just like TeamViewer).
That I still will make your videos available to public after your money transfer is complete.
- Believe me, it is meaningless for me to keep on making your life complicated. If I indeed wanted to make it happen, it would happen long time ago!
Everything will be carried out based on fairness!
Before I forget...moving forward try not to get involved in this kind of situations anymore!
An advice from me - regularly change all the passwords to your accounts.
Forget all the guff about "I saw you jerking off to kinky porn", this is an old work account that we only keep around because a few sites won't let us change to the new email address. There isn't any camera, mike, etc. set up and do I really need to say nobody here is jerking off to kinky porn during work hours?
Yes, they're trying to reel in people who are panicked and ignorant of what goes on with computers and just have vague ideas they've picked up from news headlines about large corporations getting hacked (such as happened in my own country to the national health service). I know it's trash and I regularly delete these and the more sophisticated invoice scam ones.
But.
This is the experience most ordinary people will have about bitcoin/cryptocurrency, and mostly what it says is true: I haven't the faintest idea how to start tracking these bozos down if I wanted to. They do have secure and untraceable anonymous transactions. Hackers do steal and sell on information.
So long as cryptocurrency is associated with criminals and fraud, nobody is going to trust it or touch it with a ten-foot barge pole. You don't want goverment interference and regulation? Then do something about these guys who are scamming and making money off scams.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
The bigger problem for regular people is that when someone takes over your computer then you lose your funds without any recourse whatsoever.
In many places this is bigger overall danger than inflation and Argentine-style currency controls.
To say nothing about fact that typical bank in civilized countries is far less likely to steal/lose all your funds than Bitcoin exchange.
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They don’t like it because it’s an inferior product. Why would normie Americans want to give up state seigniorage? Why would you want a currency that is very expensive to create versus a currency that is virtually free to create (some printing costs plus policing for counterfeits).
Plus cryptos have a fixed supply. Which is a problem because a fixed supply means a more volatile value of crypto. The federal reserve can manage the growth of dollars to for the most part give its a constant or predictable value in terms of what it can buy. This is very important for borrowing and lending. If I buy a house I want to know it will be worth approximately 25k hours of human labor (like a $500k house at $20 per hour). How would I take a crypto loan on that? One day the house is worth 25k hours of human labor when I buy it and later due to changing bitcoin prices is worth 10k hours of labor or if bitcoin goes up in price it’s worth 100k hours of human labor. A currency that can be controlled by the government Can control its value which is incredibly important for trade.
Plus if you looked around the last 20 years centralization is winning a lot because it’s more efficient.
In short crypto is just an inferior product.
Well fiat currency constantly and predictably decreases in value over the medium/long term. Bitcoin is unpredictable but tends to rise in value. Unlike with fiat, there is no federal reserve ready to prop up bubbles or bail out governments that 'need' to print/borrow $200 billion per month, as the US does:
https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/government-budget-value
In an environment where Bitcoin was more used for transactions as opposed to trading, prices would be much less volatile too. If the fixed supply was an issue, miners could vote on forking the chain (a vaguely democratic process as opposed to the closed-door meetings of elites that determine current monetary policy).
The decline in value of currency is usually small year-over-year, with a target of around 2%. If people want a safe way to simply hold value, TIPS have existed for a long time now.
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Don't use the term normies. It is slightly offensive. Besides most rationalists don't trust cryptocurrencies either.
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The weird thing about cryptocurrency is regular currency could have the same functionality (basically) if it and the banking system were unregulated. Those regulations are what slow down transactions. It's requirements like know your customer and others like that which require banks to actually verify and have a more involved role that introduces the friction points that crypto ostensibly solves. If you take out all of the safeguards that make the current system relatively safe, it starts looking a lot like crypto - for good and bad.
This is nonsense. Lets take SORBNET2 operating in Poland - transfers are executed within minutes. Transfers within the same bank are executed within seconds in general. There are some companies with bank accounts in all major banks allowing cheap transfer of funds executed within 60 seconds.
(https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/SORBNET2 is in Polish only as it is some Poland-specific system, but in principle the same thing may exist in USA or EU wide)
This is done at time of registration, not for every transfer. Maybe when you make bank transfer to Iran or North Korea it would be extra-verified.
At most USA has some regulations dumber than what UE managed to set up.
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Nobody has ever convinced me that “slightly slow transactions on the backend” has any meaningful welfare consequences.
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The proper question is not "Why Don't Normies Trust Crypto?" but "why should they?"
If you in your latter paragraphs have correctly identified "the experience most ordinary people will have about bitcoin/cryptocurrency" who are you to claim that these experiences are atypical or otherwise non-representative?
Contra Scott Alexander, I would argue that it is trust that must be kept strictly bounded rather than distrust. The grand irony of LessWrong and the associated "skeptic movement" has always been its profound lack of skepticism. Hence the 0 HP Lovecraft line about how "The quokka can not imagine you might eat it, and the rationalist can not imagine you might deceive him."
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Cryptocurrencies marry the reliability and predictability of modern computing with your hard-earned cash. For normies especially, that means machines which mysteriously do different things from day to day, sometimes turn on with totally different user interfaces, sometimes disappear your work, fail with inscrutable error messages, and generally annoy the crap out of you at all times. It is no surprise to me that crypto is not adopted by normies unless they've lost total trust in fiat.
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People into crypto because the tech allows for new types of transactions are not confused about why adoption isn't higher. But it's also not because scammers use it as the most convenient way to do irreversible transactions, there are plenty of other options for this and it's probably not even the most common method losing out to things like gift cards because the kyc process on buying crypto with fiat is usually too onerous for the standard scam. And most scams in fraud not through these cold call approaches is still done with good old greenbacks and people trust those quite a bit.
No, crypto's limits to adoption as a day to day currency have to do mostly with friction, complexity and uncertainty.
What are the new types of transactions that anybody actually cares about in a quantitatively significant way?
Swarm learning is a neat use. In practice any transaction that would traditionally need escrow or a middle man can make use of the trustlessness.
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As someone familiar with cryptography, I can appreciate that at a purely mathematical level, cryptocurrency works (assuming secure algorithms, and acknowledging huge computational inefficiencies). But whenever someone asks me about it, I generally point to the economic and sociological side of things. "Does it work?" and "should I exchange it for goods and services?" are two very different questions.
In general, the crypto community seems to have speed-run rediscovering why our financial and legal systems are as complicated as they are: chains forking, bank runs, bugs in smart contracts, and all sorts of scams. It'd be pretty funny if it was only wealthy tech bros losing money, but it isn't exclusively. And any poorly-regulated financial service is likely to be used for crime like OPs letter.
You're totally right, but in my experience even the extremely regulated financial services get used for crimes as well. Based on some of the current lawsuits over Epstein it looks like the extremely regulated financial companies in the west like JP Morgan were openly financing and working with someone who was sexually abusing kids on a commercial scale while (based on some of the lawsuits at least) being fully aware of what he was doing.
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I work in banking software so I've seen a lot of different angles of both. Speed running through the difficulties that have lead to the legacy financial system doesn't necessarily mean that the crypto version is not an improvement even though it feels good to bash the naive libertarians in our imaginations. We have papered over a lot of stuff with how things work today and many of the insane things we put up with would seem insane if we took a couple different forks.
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And the quite frankly inherently contradictory goals and actions expressed by the crypto community.
Yes HODL is a good strategy for the layperson investor, but if EVERYBODY holds and accumulates, there is no real increase in 'adoption' because all you can do with the damn thing is hold it. Maybe the rallying cry should become SPND!
Yes you want your chosen coin to increase in 'value,' but if you denominate that value in USD you're actually confirming that the Dollar is the single best unit of value against which all others are measured. So maybe stop focusing on USD price if you're hoping to replace USD?
Yes you want to encourage people to use your blockchain as much as possible, but if your blockchain gets overloaded with low-value activity then it's harder to use it for high value activity! And anything else. The scaling problem is real.
I literally saw a meme on the /r/cryptocurrency subreddit to the effect of "I won't be spending any of my BTC until I'm spending it as a globally accepted currency." And I just want to shout "you dense motherfucker, if you aren't willing to spend your BTC right now then what possible reason does anyone have for accepting it? How do you get to universal acceptance if you're shouting your refusal to spend it?
You are confusing best personal strategy with a universally optimal strategy. These are completely different things. It is very unlikely that all participants of the market would be able to coordinate and follow the same trading strategy (in fact, I'm not sure whether it'd even be legal for some). There are people that are long-term HODL investors. There are daytraders. There are market timers. There are arbitrage seekers. It takes all sorts. Looking at one HODLer and screaming "but what if everybody!" and making the conclusion until impossible assumption that everybody on the market will clone this behavior is pointless. They won't and what is good for one kind of investor may be not good at all for another kind. It is fine and good for the market as a whole.
In a weird moment where my moral intuitions and those of a universalist utilitarian might align, I think you are mistaken in believing that there is a meaningful difference.
This is exactly the sort of thing I'm talking about when I accuse rationalists of trying to use inductive logic to model fundamentally anti-inductive phenomenon. Long story short, @faceh has struck at the heart of the matter. How do you expect crypto to gain acceptance as tender if crypto's own advocates refuse to spend it?
That assumes there's such thing as "crypto's own advocates" which think as a single mind and act in concert. This is very much not the case. Moreover, crypto is not a scarce resource, at least not for the purposes of this question, so there's no contradiction between HODLing it and using it for day-to-day transactions. If I wanted to buy my pizza for BTC, there's no fixed stash of BTC I must use for it - I could buy BTC on open market at any instant, and use it to buy pizza, if that were my intent. So if people do not buy pizza for BTC, it's not because they have a choice what to do with fixed amount of BTC, whether HODL it or use it to buy pizza - there's no such dilemma at all, you could do both. The reason people only doing HODL, mostly, is because there are alternative ways of buying pizza, which are currently much easier and low friction. Making transaction in BTC has its advantages - e.g. irreversibility and unability to block it from the regulatory powers - but when you buy pizza, at least as a normie, these advantages in most cases are irrelevant.
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My point is that there is no organized movement to drive adoption because almost everyone falls into the long-term HODL, daytrader, or market timer categories.
There's just no segment of the community that is truly dedicated to using the cryptocurrency as a currency and exchanging goods or services.
People want there to be greater adoption, but everyone is hedging their own bets and generally don't spend their cryptos just in case it pops off and they can get rich.
And the current state of the tech supports that. There are virtually zero projects available which encourage spending crypto on useful things, vs. just paying scam bounties or buying drugs.
EVERYONE is operating on the hope that they'll be able to sell to some guy in the future at a higher price than they themselves paid.
The fact that the Bitcoin pizza guy is generally mocked (if in good-natured way) for spending his bitcoin when he could have saved it and been independently wealthy is a sign of this.
I'm all for buying drugs online, and likely would if I wasn't afraid of getting caught, even though the odds seem low at a cursory glance.
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The "communities" built around investing in crypto should be taken as seriously as the "communities" built around investing in stocks. The existence of /r/superstonk does not discredit the entire financial industry because it is inhabited by lunatics with no understanding of finance or business. I promise you I have more contempt for HODL meme spammers than you can muster.
Yes, there are a variety of people who are involved in crypto and those people have various goals that often contradict eachother. This should not be mistaken for inherent contradiction in the tech.
The problem is that tech is jammed up on these issues. The community is what dictates where most of the hype and money ends up, and what gets mainstream attention.
It's INCREDIBLY EASY to spin up an altcoin out of nothing and try and scam a few thousand people into a rugpull. Not so with regards to the existing financial industry, although of course scams exist.
So there's currently many more ways to use Crypto to outright scam than there is to do something useful for an average person, aside from transferring funds.
I'm about as much of an enthusiast for crypto as you can get without actively contributing to development of crypto projects. I bought my first BTC when it was $64/coin.
And now I'm just watching a continual cycle, since circa 2016, of rising investment and enthusiasm, lots of random people losing money, the investment withdrawing, over and over again. And unlike, say the DotCom boom and bust after all the scams fold up and the hype recedes, there HAVE NOT been any successful, winning projects left behind in the wake!!!
Most recently we're seeing the exchanges themselves take a beating, some of which has unveiled the shadiness and weakness of said exchanges. If Coinbase somehow folds that's probably the endgame for individual adoption, everything will be done through existing institutional players.
The one project I ever saw that managed to leverage the benefits of blockchain in a way that made actual sense, AND produced 'real world' value, Augur, is pretty much DOA now. Trading of Monkey jpegs, though, THAT got people going!
So my cynicism is, in fact, grounded in my appreciation for the technology but the harsh recognition of the mismatch between the promises and the actual results.
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Crypto as a transaction medium is not a scam. But the network effects of fiat are strong enough that by selection it tends to get used for things that the financial system doing ordinary fiat wire-transfers would object to you trading in.
Crypto as an investment is effectively a Ponzi/Greater Fool.
I don't use crypto because I'm not a speculator (so I don't hold it) and I don't currently engage in illegal or legal-but-cancelled commerce (so I don't need to use it day-to-day).
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I don't make claims to my normieness, but in my case, I just plain haven't found out a personal use case for crypto (seeing as I don't need to buy drugs, or anything else illegal, at the moment), and there's nothing in particular to indicate that the age when you could with any reliability make a lot of bank on crypto speculation (compared to potential risks) is returning.
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Same way you'd track any other bozos - as a normie, you go to the police. It's not like a normie can track regular thieves and robbers any other way. If somebody stole your fiat currency credit card or a checkbook, who do you call? Your bank, first, then maybe the police, if you care enough. At no point you actually do anything to "track" those people or know how would you approach it.
Just FYI: Bitcoin is very traceable, and not as anonymous as you would think ("pseudonymous" is much better definitions). Especially if you don't own any on- and off-ramps for it, i.e. you need to interact with some third parties to convert it to sweet fiat currency that allows you to buy booze and fancy cars. True, there are enhanced-privacy coins, which average normie probably wouldn't even know how to handle, and which would be even harder to off-ramp.
The added value for the criminal is not non-traceability, actually. It's non-intermediation - if somebody pays you in BTC, nobody can stop or reverse this payment. And this is why it's so good for the criminals - if the victims paid by credit card or bank transfer, it is very easy to reverse the payment, and to take it back or stop it. Even cash transfer like WU requires an intermediary (WU itself) which could intervene and prevent you from getting your money. It's not possible to prevent a crypto transaction.
The problem, again, is not the existence of fraud. There's tons of fraud going on with credit cards. The normies don't care. because the current system ensures they are, largely, not the ones suffering from it (at least not directly, in an obvious way). With crypto, it's currently not the case - and that's why most normies can't properly use it. Because they (we) are gullible, lazy and inattentive, and for that reason need mechanisms that allow intervention in the transactions. However, the reverse side of it is, of course, that whoever has this capabilities also has the control over your money, and if you, for example, make a stupid mistake of voicing any dissent to the benevolent rule of your government, the access to your own money may be cut off. So you have to choose, which part you want - freedom or safety, at least until cryptos develop more safety mechanisms.
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No.
This is an experience «ordinary people» have with email and in general with the internet outside of their silos where they're corporate-farmed for data and ad exposure. Your inability to track the sender has everything to do with how internet identities work. Certainly Bitcoin would not be my choice of an extortion channel.
Now, a debate can be had on this topic. Ordinary people certainly don't tend to buy the libertarian ethos of anonymity, and sure would prefer to live in a global village, a Panopticon where special respectable representatives of the Community are tracking down offenders at all times. Basically the «ordinary people» imagine Britain or China as the perfect state when they think about these matters.
In this respect, ordinary American people are quite blessed that they aren't listened to more.
For ordinary Argentinian people, meanwhile, it's the government that's associated with fraud, so they're forced to touch crypto on a nearly daily basis.
The value proposition of crypto isn't that it's «untraceable»: it's «trustless». It's the absence of an arbiter able to make arbitrary exceptions from the rules. Code is law, which is immensely attractive wherever law has failed the people.
I tend to agree, given the lack of migration off of Twitter and Reddit to decentralized alternatives despite recent events.
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My personal take is that this is a result of consent manufacturing. Crypto and bitcoin are a direct assault on several major power-centres in western societies - widespread embrace and adoption of crypto would wipe out vast swathes of the banking and commercial payment industry. The modern western financial system effectively functions to a large degree as a wealth pump, transferring goods and services from the outer territories of the empire to the elites within it. In recent years as the number of territories to plunder and amount of wealth that can be extracted from them decreases, the nature of the system (which requires perpetual expansion and the constant creation of new debt) forces it to extract more and more wealth from the internal proletariat (i.e. people in western nations who are not members of the elite). As life for the internal proletariat who do much of the work that makes the Empire actually run gets worse and worse, opposition to the imperial wealth pump starts to build in the imperial heartland. Bitcoin and cryptocurrency are thus threats to the mechanisms by which the western elite receive their imperial largesse and tribute - but those mechanisms are not simply gears or cogs in a machine, but people and corporations who can identify what is obviously a dangerous threat to their power and have the ability to influence both high-ranking members of government (what US politician running for election wants to turn down a big Goldman Sachs contribution to their campaign warchest?) and the broader public through their influence over media and the culture. They then went on to use their influence over the press and consequentially public opinion to attack what they saw as a threat to their position, and the result is the anti-crypto messaging that has become so pervasive.
Of course, what actually ended up happening is a bit more complex than that. The same mechanisms of public opinion shaping were used and abused to such an immense degree in the attempt to take down Trump that vast swathes of society no longer trust or uncritically adopt the views broadcast to them from the media, and as a result crypto support or hostility has, in my experience at least, tended to split along the populist/elitist axis rather than the old left/right view. I haven't done a study to confirm this, but I think that one's position on cryptocurrency is more tightly correlated to one's position on the war in Ukraine than their location on the political compass.
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There's a big problem with crypto for regular use when you hear the creator of Ethereum, in a podcast, talk about the paranoid rampage he suffered for three days to make a transaction (albeit probably the biggest ever).
He inspected and coded his own library/script because he was so unsure of the inherent safety of the running environment for that virtual money.
This is the biggest problem with the "code is law" paradigm - we as humans are extremely shitty at making code. With law, we have thousands of years of experience how to deal with it, with code, we barely have 50 years, and we're not getting any better at it - arguably, worse.
As soon as we get withing sight of being good at one narrow section, they invent some new contrivance we all have to learn; despite the fact that all languages are just C or lisp. NO, I will not be taking any questions
All languages are actually just dynamic circuit mappings.
Please elaborate, I'd actually want to know more.
In short from someone who barely knows shit about fuckall bellow the assembly layer: computer languages are some level n of abstraction (eg, int x = 1; translates to mov r(n) #1 in ARM assembly; which is iteself an abstraction to some binary) away from machine code which is itself an abstraction of some sort of voltage difference (or some other difference in other media ) that actually physically exists in the logic gates and what have you in your pixie box.
So a given bit of code running on a given piece of hardware could actually be written out as a circuit diagram, because that's what it is.
Unless this is wrong because fuck learning about volts and shit. It's all just magic to me once you get smaller than .5mm.
Hmmm... I have some issues with this reductivism. To me code is a bit more platonic than that. Yes- code running on a specific architecture is reducible to logic gates, but if you run on a different architecture it may be reduced to a different set of logic gates. The standards for the abstraction level drive the architecture to meet those standards in order to permit the abstraction to hold a consistent meaning in the absence of consistent architecture.
Ultimately, a given language has a sort of categorical realism that emerges from the human choice to standardize the capabilities of different underlying structures to a single shared identity, a shared emergent structure. ie ECMAScript.
I still agree that its a series of abstractions- but it doesn't bottom out in a single circuit diagram, it bottoms out in the set of all physical systems capable of implementing the standard. And they will all share an isomorphism with one another, including the circuit diagrams. That isomorphism 'is' the standard.
That's why I qualified the statement so hard; but it is mainly a joke.
I'd argue circuit diagram is the bottom; but the graph looks more like a tree than a pyramid: Everything narrows down before spreading back out. Especial since all architectures share so much commonality. x86 and ARM have different assembly languages; but an ALU is an ALU and a register is a register.
Although I guess computers existed before ALUs, so I have just found another rabbit hole to fling myself down lol.
More seriously: IMO the important thing for people to remember if they want to write really good in any language is that silicone exists and all your shit is going through these little micro components on a chip somewhere, while also remembering that unless you are willing to put in a couple dozen extra hours; the compiler is better than you are.
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A blatant lie from our scammer. You can search up any bitcoin address and see its transactions. That's what the blockchain is! Now, there are mixing services and (formerly) Tornado Cash along with Monero. Yet it's not easy to do fraud with Bitcoin specifically, anyone with a browser can see what's going on.
It took me 10 seconds to find this particular wallet: https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/addresses/btc/1Nx353jT8zZYaqmoMdMr2PRtdixStrDoZE
Serious fraud is done by banks, brokers and governments, not ESL scammers. How much money is being siphoned off privately, where it can't be seen on publicly accessible databases? How many hundreds of billions in COVID stimulus was stolen thanks to reckless governance negligence? https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/justice-department/biggest-fraud-generation-looting-covid-relief-program-known-ppp-n1279664
They're so incompetent that nobody even did any verification for the free money spigot!
Bitcoin is fair. The rules are the same regardless of whether you're a billionaire or a little fish. No 'trading halts', no closed hours where the brokers get to make transactions but the hoi polloi can't, no reversible transactions, transparency for commoner and billionaire, no authority that can freeze wallets.
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My personal issue with crypto is that it's almost always a speculative asset rather than hard currency.
Part of this is cryptobros reaching for the sun and then getting flamed by regulators. The other is regulators themselves being terrified of becoming helpless.
There are more staid options like stable coins, but I have had no real reason to put my money in the as opposed to the usual fiat.
I am fond of the existence of Darknet markets, I dislike governments meddling in the affairs of private citizens, especially when it comes to drugs. If that comes at the cost of enabling other crime, I don't really care. The typical gangbanger who is any threat to me isn't holding me up for my Monero.
Ransomware was already a thing well before crypto, and while it's made it a bit easier, I don't particularly care if I have to pay them with BTC or USD.
Isn't this, and countries with rampant inflation, the main non-speculative use cases for crypto right now? After all, what's the point in conducting transactions over a decentralized network when you can do so faster and cheaper on centralized ones, unless there's a reason you're unable or unwilling to use centralized ones?
I presume this is a brand new account, because it took me like 5 min ago to get a notification.
Sure, it definitely has a use case in places going through hyperinflation like Venezuela and Argentina, they're just not a concern for me personally. And even then, it's more that they can be converted into USD rather than a real medium of trade themselves.
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Do you have a problem with Cheques, cash, wire transfers, and Credit Cards? Because fraud equally happens just as much if not more often in those mediums.
Fraud is a function of ease of use, the easier a medium of exchange is to use, the easier it is to talk idiots into hurting themselves with it.
Crypto actually has far less fraud than most other mediums of exchange... because its a pain in the ass.
THe only exceptions are blanket mass mailers like this where you try to get some fool to blind yolo money into an account without even pretending there's another side of the bargain, outside a vague threat of "technology scary" so the added element of crypto ads to their normie techno-thriller fears...
Or, there's crypto pump and dumps and other market frauds, which aren't even frauds in the classic sense since its all people trying to outwit and out-lie each other in the speculative market.
None of these things actually effect the use... maybe it gives it a shady perception... but who cares, that's not the thing that makes crypto precarious.
The thing that makes crypto precarious is if you misplace or forget a password you can lose thousands or millions of dollars...
To be fair, wire transfers are so fraught that, in the United States, attempting to initiate any significant one will immediately have you filling out a form that lists some of the most common forms of fraud. Large transfers will usually have the bank (or other vendor) . As a result, most Americans will only use them in extremely rare circumstances.
((Though ACH, by comparison, have far too few protections. And similar sorts of fraud focused on gift cards are not well-enough known yet in normie world.))
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I've lost a good amount of money from an Ethereum smart contract that got hacked. I mean, fair enough you know, that's the price you pay for trusting buggy code on a trustless network.
But my point is, when is the last time a US bank failed because somebody hacked the bank and the US legal apparatus could not undo the transactions? With crypto, you have to not only trust the devs to be honest, but also that they were competent and the code they wrote watertight. Even if you manually check the code yourself, like I do on rare occasions, you have to trust yourself not to have missed an exploit somewhere.
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I’ll be honest that this isn’t why I personally don’t like crypto. My issue is that, at least at present, it’s just speculation. You call it currency, but it’s not actually a currency, it cannot be directly exchanged for real objects in the real world without first converting to real currency— dollars, euros, pesos, whatever. My cryptocurrency is shares in a company or a technology (bitcoins, etherium, or whatever else) which other than the coins themselves has no actual value. And since they’re not actually backed by a government or an object, if bitcoin goes under, or even drops fairly precipitously, I lose the value I had in those coins. That makes the entire thing fairly speculative. Bitcoins have value only as long as people believe they do, and the minute they don’t, the value drops.
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Most normies haven't received an email like this.
The biggest reasons are that it's hard to setup a wallet (considering most people have difficulty hooking up a monitor to a computer or opening a checking account), followed secondarily by crypto assets being highly volatile and normies' exposure to them being mostly by shady influencers on TikTok and Instagram.
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What do you propose bitcoin enthusiasts are going to do about the commons-tramplers? By design, there’s no enforcement mechanism. Not that it’s a trivial problem—online commerce has been fighting chargeback scammers and the like for ages. No, the only way this gets suppressed is by the good ol’ monopoly on force.
The pessimist in me says any crypto which actually protects against fraud and abuse will be vehemently denied by cryptobros.
Does there exist trustless enforcement mechanisms? There are already escrow contracts where 2 out of 3 parties (including an arbiter) have to agree for a transaction to take place, but that still involves choosing and trusting (and paying) an arbiter.
I know gwern wrote about a couple options. Really out of my comfort zone.
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I'm not even a true normie and the idea of typing up a significant amount of my money into bitcoin is a bit disquieting.
Too much like having money in a mattress.
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This one is wordier than the versions I usually get. But nothing new here.
I do always wonder how they figure someone dumb enough to fall for this will be able to figure out how to set up Bitcoin transfers.
A Nigerian scam artist my grandpa(RIP) used to tell me about said, in response to ‘do you really think people will believe you to be the prince of Nigeria?’, ‘well it only takes one’.
I would imagine a similar principle applies here.
I once got a handwritten and snail-mail posted Nigerian scam letter. In all other respects it was exactly like every other Nigerian scam email you've ever seen.
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