BitCoin: "The Most Dangerous Project We've Ever Seen"

I'll have what he's having.

Globalization might pressure for a single worldwide currency, but as long as there are countries that enjoy favorable conversion rates, it probably isn't happening.

eMusic is desperate enough to try doing, er, something? with blockchains.

Wild guess: you buy the music ( of which they have barely any now ) and you get both the download and the right to stream the song unlimitedly, authenticated with blockchain.

Some Bitcoin operations use so much energy "mining" the bullshit currency that at least one city is threatening to shut them down.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/hut8-medicine-hat-bitcoin-mining-1.4834027

A little late to the party, but I found this brilliant definition of what Bitcoin is.

And the price has fallen to the point where you can't make a profit mining the stuff. https://nypost.com/2018/12/16/price-of-bitcoin-falls-below-cost-to-mine/

Hackers have found some unexpected ways to steal Bitcoins. https://www.technologyreview.com/s/...getting-hacked/amp/?__twitter_impression=true

What man can encrypt, another man can decrypt. Sometimes it just takes a while.

You can now rent time on IBM's quantum computers, which can crack a lot of encryption. I don't know what the time costs, or what levels of encryption they can crack, but if someone can find a way to use it to hack into things like BitCoin wallets, they will. Sooner or later.

Not if bitcoins are worthless which seems to be their present strategy to keep people from stealing them.

I note that the tiny island of Bermuda, which tried to position itself as a cryptocurrency and fintech hub, was just added to the European Union tax haven blacklist.

I started mining bitcoin last week.

I now own Bermuda.

Haters gonna hate....

Oh they just made that up!

Right? Is that smaller or larger than 10 Brazillion?

Part of me is kind of happy that classic Macs are still being used in clip art like this.

Bitcoin creator to reveal himself. https://www.globenewswire.com/news-...ator-Satoshi-Nakamoto-to-Reveal-Identity.html

CAN WRE BLAIM DAYTON?

The technology has gotten even dumber.

Yeah, so just shit tied to one cryptocurrency/blockchain system now puts out as much pollution as Ireland, and there are hundreds of other systems out there. An artist created a website to track the amount of pollution produced by NFT transactions and had to pull it down after a week or so because he was getting death threats.

And they don't (yet) even work as advertised -- websites that are supposed to host the NFTs in perpetuity are evidently already vanishing.

*Furthermore*, people are passing others' artwork off as their own to sell off. So it's supposed to prevent art theft . . . but encourages it.

I've made all of my posts NFTs, so I'm gonna start charging for the privilege of reading my carefully written thoughts.

Here's a unique QR code:

Hey, I created that unique QR code. You can pay me for its use using this one:

This post from @Tuckerfan, from over two years ago, is still the best description of cryptocurrencies I've ever seen.

NFTs are like the autistic stepchild of crypto.

Jesus wept.

Yes.

According to a podcast I happened to be listening to tonight, they can never work as advertised because there's simply no way to ensure that you'll have an unchanging website address, which every system eventually has to tie back into.

Theoretically you could put the actual data on the blockchain, but that would be quite bad for the network unless it’s like a 1 kB png. But yeah, buying an NFT for off-chain items is basically completely, utterly retarded. Like makes a genuine 50-IQ child look like if Albert Einstein had a love child with Brainiac who was raised in the fortress of solitude by Jor-El and Stephen Hawking and had daily access to a working version of the Flowers for Algernon drug. NFT buyers make Venus fly traps look smart.

Now NFT sellers, I understand them. It’s a cash-minting machine, and they can structure the contract such that they can take a percentage of all downstream resales.

NFTs are not Beanie Babies. They are Certificates of Authenticity for Beanie Babies potentially with self-enforcing restrictions on resale of itself. Only the Beanie Baby is infinitely, perfectly duplicable, by anyone, and enjoyable as if it was the original. Oh, and anyone can create a duplicate Certificate of Authenticity for a copy (possibly with some services, even the “original”) because the data is not on the chain. And because the chain is pseudonymous, there’s no identification of who the actual creator of the Beanie Baby was in the first place, at least for anything that was ever posted to the web before being tokenized.

There is a single legitimate use for them: redeemable NFTs for event ticketing so as to not have to deal with a payment processor, and to prevent scalping*. Blackballed by Visa and MC because you want to host a conference about drug paraphernalia? NFTs are perfect. Want to offer international tickets to people who can’t pay in a currency your payment processor will accept, or to allow citizens of countries experiencing institutional breakdown or international sanctions? NFTs to the rescue.

*for some values of prevent. They can prevent on-chain scalping (either by setting a fixed price, or writing the contract such that the issuer receives all profits), but that doesn’t prevent a scalper from taking off-chain cash or other government currency (or even Bitcoin - it’s a different network) in exchange for the right to buy a ticket from them.

IPFS aims to solve this, and in theory, the seller can use some of the proceeds to pay for hosting on many nodes indefinitely. Some of the intermediaries (like Nifty, I think) basically use their commissions in part to store it. But yeah, it’s just web hosting with extra, incredibly stupid steps. Oh and if the last IPFS node hosting a particular piece goes offline, it’s lost forever. Putting another copy of it up generates a new hash, if I understand correctly.

And bear in mind, I *like* Bitcoin, quite a bit. I even like the idea behind Ethereum, even if I think Solidity (the programming language for Ethereum smart contracts and applications) can probably never be made safe enough to use by anyone for anything remotely serious. So when I say that off-chain NFTs are the hottest of hot garbage, please understand where I’m coming from, and where I’m not.

This makes me think that Elon was running a "pump and dump" scam.

Just want to point out that some folks have noted that Bitcoin was an ecological disaster for a while now.

I like the concept of Bitcoin, in this age of non-existent privacy, but it's such a disaster at this point.