Excellent. Bitcoin is now officially a meme investment that has nothing to do with its original ideals .

Everybody is worried about those things. Obviously.

But without evidence, there's nothing anybody can do. In other words, what is that "something" that you want done? Should somebody be brought up on charges? If so, who? On what charges? With what evidence?

You see, this is why you can't only go by conspiracy theory sites. In the real world, you can't send somebody to prison based on what somebody said on a podcast.

I don't doubt there are a small number of people in the world using cryptos to pay for things "on a daily basis" but the keyword here is small. There are something like 30 billion transactions a day worldwide using credit cards alone, and there's simply no chance, architecturally, that cryptocurrency could even achieve one thousandth of that.

And as I've said many, many (many!  ) times here, I think it's great that people view Bitcoin as an investment opportunity. You have my viewpoint here exactly backwards. I think cryptos are a perfectly fine investment instrument and they've shown their popularity in being so in the last 10 years.

But as a worldwide payment system, crypto has failed. And you know what? Given the price of Bitcoin right now, nobody cares. How hard is it to believe that a technology that was created for one purpose was instead used for another purpose, the original one being a bust? That's happened a zillion times in the history of tech...




Sorry that I think what? I said I agree that Google has privacy issues, and they are well-documented. And my company doesn't even use cookies because we see them as evil.

I was only making a narrow point about the text and meaning of the emails themselves, for which there has never been any evidence that Google has every breached that without a specifically targeted court order, nor would there be any reason for them to. That doesn't mean I deny they have many privacy issues, many of which I've seen first hand in my IT career.

That's a better approach than most NFTs for sure, but the buyer of the NFT still has to trust the game maker themselves.

In other words, imagine I pay $500 for a super-duper magic sword, and then... the game makes 50,000 more of these swords just like mine and my investment is worthless.

Any NFT is basically a contract, and contracts always have "fine print" which end-users never read and companies exploit. That's why NFTs have such a bad reputation.

When you are buying an NFT, you are basically buying a legal battle, and those aren't very popular  .

Take a look at what we did with the Haypenny Promise to try to mitigate this problem with digital currency. The key here is that every single asset is treated exactly the same. And Haypenny's contract is very simple, very hard to game, and has a company (Haypenny) with a vested interest in making sure nobody screws over users.

Using raw NFTs means it's still the "wild west" and people can get ripped off really easily.

The police "violently impose" when they enforce the law. I vote for their being the police to enforce laws, so indirectly I am "violently imposing" my viewpoint here.

I would also go to war to violently to impose my country's commitment to democracy, for instance, so we can all vote whether to have Obamacare or make abortion illegal or whatever.

My point is simply that "violently imposing your viewpoint" is something everybody does, so it's not very useful to call that "extremism"...

What is mean for a currency to be "censorship resistant"? In what way are, say, US Dollars not "censorship resistant" for instance? What does "permissionless" mean? Again, in what way are US Dollars not "permissionless"?

I certainly get that it's denationalized. That's not a very strong benefit to the consumer though per se. Most credit cards these days allow you to pay in whatever currency that is required at the point of purchase and the bank does the forex for you behind the scenes.

It is definitely not subject to currency manipulation by governments, but on the other hand the price of Bitcoin has been extremely volatile, so there's certainly no materialized benefit there.

And all of these benefits, I assume, are only realized in the context of somebody transacting with Bitcoin without the assistance of any financial institution which is, I suspect, not the way most consumers use Bitcoin these days, e.g. with some kind of app and a company like Coinbase...

Well, in actual reality, crypto has failed to achieve anything besides being another financial instrument to invest in. I don't think there's anything wrong with that, but that's the reality.


Yes, absolutely Google itself lives off of your data in lots of ways, but they don't do anything with your actual emails. They work off of aggregated data. I don't discount the privacy concerns with them for a second (my company doesn't even use cookies at all for instance), but your actual emails aren't getting breached unless there's a court order.

Bitcoin has a public ledger, so I really don't see how it could have ever really been conceived as a "currency of privacy". Physical cash is still way, way more private than Bitcoin etc.

Privacy? Bitcoin puts every transaction on a public ledger. That's about as [n]un[/b]private as you can get, IMHO.

For me, there are two ways people use the word, "private". One is "private" from companies, marketers, criminals, and maybe your own family .

The other definition is "private" from your government, e.g. for criminal activity.

GMail is the first kind of "private", because it's absolutely private unless there is a court order. In practical terms, most people probably consider their GMail messages as private as they need it to be.

Peer-to-peer networks attempt to accomplish the second kind of "private", but again I'm not sure Bitcoin in particular really does.

***

As for "decentralized", that's a technical implementation detail, not a feature...

But that definition of "extreme" doesn't tell you what you need to do.

And as far as that definition goes, I'll plug in one of my "extreme" beliefs: that we should punish stealing.

a) I'm not open to discuss this. If we let thieves go unpunished, we'll have rampant crime, and I don't want that.

b) If the majority of Americans suddenly thought stealing was okay, then I would do everything I could to stop that, so..

c) Yes, I call people who think stealing is okay... all kinds of mean things  .

Obviously I'm inventing a simplified example here, but I think you get the idea.

So for me, "extreme" doesn't actually tell you anything useful, except to point out where somebody sits in the current political spectrum within their political party.

You can also try to point at "extreme" policies, which wouldn't be defined on any kind of spectrum, but rather as a measurement of the aggregate change to all Americans (in our case). For instance, Obamacare was "extreme" because it changed pretty much everybody's health care insurance in the US, and just about all Americans have heath care--and the change to people's lives was significant in many cases. On the other side are the Republican crackdowns on abortion, which is a very big change to people's lifestyles and health. You can call both of these policies "extreme" in that sense.

With that definition you can grade the two political parties, overall, by the amount of change they each will make to the country, and you can call the one that will pass bigger changes for more people a more "extreme" party. But obviously that gets into a deep partisan discussion...

These terms have lost their meaning. So has "liberal" and "conservative". Don't use them unless you want to be confused.

In the US at least, just stick with "Democrat" and "Republican". Both of those groupings are a hodgepodge of ideological leanings that change almost hourly sometimes, but at least that means something in the real world in terms of the laws we're all going to have to follow.

And be careful when people use the term, "extreme". Trump is not an "extreme Republican", he's the consummate mainstream Republican since he is the leader of the party and almost his entire party supports him. Liz Cheney and Mitt Romney are the "extreme Republicans" today.

You can Ilhan Omar an "extreme Democrat" in some of her stances because she actually is way out of tune with the rest of her party, who have proven this with their votes. Biden, on the other hand, is a mainstream Democrat, and so on.

In other words, disregard the partisan name-calling and just look at the actual outcomes.

Governments don't need to control the assets themselves, they will (and often do already) control all the points of entry and exit.

Personally I think cryptos (and all digital assets) are going to be regulated just like stock shares if they aren't already. That won't effect your ability to buy or sell it, or transact with it. It will, however, effect your ability to conduct crime with it, or to evade taxes with it. The US clamped down on physical cash starting in the 1970s, and they will do the same thing for digital stuff.

I've been trying to say the same thing throughout this thread as well.

The good news is that investors don't care about this, and invest in cryptos anyhow as a pure speculation instrument. It's not about "freedom", it's about buying low and selling high.

The problem with NFTs is that every one of them has a different contract, so investors never know what they are getting. If I buy an NFT of some digital asset, how do I know the game won't make one million more just like it and make my investment worthless? Even if the contract says you can't do that, there are loopholes in contracts that can be exploited, or maybe the game company will cheat in some other way.

The solution is a system where every single token is treated the same way. That way people can compare the currency in one game to the currency in another game directly.

On Haypenny you can create your own meme coin. How's that for early .

Seriously, check out the directory under Public Currencies. The service is brand new, which means a lot of the good names aren't taken yet. It's got a long way to go (still in beta, yadda yadda), but it surely wants to be the "king of memecoins" someday.

I'm not sure that's the best way to convince people of your viewpoint...

Now you see why even Fox News isn't covering the Epstein story....

I don't care. He's not president. He's not an elected official. He's not part of our government. There is no sign he ever will be any of those things.

I also don't care what Barron Trump is doing either...

Well, as a US citizen, I'm a lot more concerned about what the current frontrunner to be our country's next president is mixed up in rather than a non-political actor like "Hunter Biden" is doing.

Seems like anybody concerned about all of those things would be very, very concerned that Trump would win the presidency this year...


Trump has paid millions in settlements and his lawyer and his accountant have both been convicted....


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I guess it would depend on how they did it. If they (say) switched their game's currency to be (say) a Haypenny currency, which was publicly tradable, users wouldn't even notice unless they actually wanted to trade their game currency. For their existing gamers, it would be completely transparent, and Haypenny is fast/cheap enough that you could swap out the code that adds/subtracts/checks your character's coin supply seamlessly with the API.

In fact, you are pointing out to me just how perfect the Haypenny platform is for online games  .