DarkRange55
I am Skynet
- Oct 15, 2023
- 1,944
It may be a bit melodramatic to say that all cryptocurrencies are a scam but even if they have millions of dollars in their market cap - they are probably garbage. Not fully thought through a basic level. I have crypto. I don't diversify hugely with it because most of it is crap. A lot of people focus on the digital scarcity aspect of Bitcoin. Because thats the point. You have this blockchain and it allows you to have scarcity in a digital domain. You can't just copy and paste Bitcoins. So you can actually build a monetary system on top of it. You can critique what it does right and wrong. The nice thing about it is, it's a self propelling system. The miners have incentive to mine and secure the network and increase the hash power. People who have the coin, since there is guaranteed scarcity, they can use it for different things. On the one hand it's a well designed system to keep itself going. You don't need some agency monitoring Bitcoin. Because you don't have a single agency that monitors it, it's pretty hard to regulate it. You can't crack down on mining, you can say it's illegal, you can say it's illegal for a company to accept Bitcoin. But the protocol itself is not censor-able. And are you going to go to the individual developers houses? There's not like Bitcoin code or Bitcoin ink that you can come for and prosecute. It's decentralized, there is not a single company controlling it all. You can say has Blockstream taken over too much? Thats another thing. Thats not necessarily part of Bitcoin.
Most of the time with alt coins - it's not about the coin, it's not even about the technology. It often is just about the company. Instead of being decentralized like Bitcoin, a company says we need to fund ourselves. So we'll use a blockchain and we'll shoehorn in our project for some reason. But the reason we want that, its a solution looking for a problem. They want this solution because it allows them to have a cryptocurrency. And that is a great way for crowd funding. While Bitcoin is this decentralized network that doesn't have a single ruler and is self propelling and doesn't require incentivizing to use it. Basically most alt coins are managed by a company and they are incomplete in a way. The innovation of Bitcoin is this system that you don't have to incentivize people. It has the incentives built into it. The game theoretics of it are totally thought out. Miners are gonna do this and get this reward and transaction fees incentive them to mine. Everything works and you don't need a company managing everything. But when you look at a lot of these other projects in the cryptocurrency sphere, they're not like that. They have a token that sort of does something in some system that they're really just using so they can have the token and basically crowd fund because a lot of people want to get rich. But when it comes down to it the company ends up making all the decisions. They have a massive pre-mine and ICO that they're give out to people when they do stuff they want. They want to propel things, they want to be in control. They have dev taxes and get money from every transaction. It's so ridiculous and self serving. A lot of these projects are not fully thought out like Bitcoin or they're unfinished. They're like well we still don't really know how this works so we're gonna have to spell it out later so we're gonna need some professional developers that work on this and that. Bitcoin has many flaws that I have talked about. There are many tweaks that you could make to it. It's hard to make changes to Bitcoin because you have to do hard forks and stuff like that. Thats not the case in these other cryptocurrencies because they are basically just unfinished projects managed by a company. They're throughout words all the time like "decentralized." Yeah, sure a blockchain can be decentralized but it doesn't mean what they're selling, its doesn't the product itself is actually decentralized. Cash grab tokens on some sort of network that isn't even necessary.
If you are developing a cryptocurrency project — I should say, you just want to a blockchain genuinely and you want to establish a protocol for the internet to use: the thing to remember is that you are not gonna be a permanent fixture of the internet. You can't be too greedy.
The BAT project for the Brave browser they can give you their little fake BAT internet money. It's still basically a centralized project. They want to become this internet standard but they're really saying in that is that we want to be able to control this aspect of the internet and get like 30% of the income from this or something like that. And thats just absurd. When another project comes up that does the same thing in a decentralized way that is done genuinely — they're gonna win out. Like proprietary and free software. For decades people thought that proprietary software was the way to go. How will you pay your developers? Well now even companies that write proprietary software are open sourcing things. They're having random people able to commit to them and make changes to their repositories and stuff like that. And that's just because thats the better way of developing in the first place. You will probably make less money, but open source software projects like decentralized cryptos are much more likely to become the layer that people are going to base things off of in the internet. Thats just how it is. Why would you take some crappy proprietary centralized crypto project and permanently stake your own project on it?
The Library Project has this site odysee.com its supposed to be a video site and the metadata is stored on the blockchain and its all done through torrents. It's supposed to be uncensorable even though the frontend is like odysee.com which is actually censorable but thats another story. You'll have to look into it. But again the problem I have with these projects are they are centrally managed by one company. And you can say, someone else can use our blockchain. Okay, but your organization the library organization (I forget who exactly does it) but they have this massive coin that is supposed to be used on the network. All these projects need to have annoying incentives. Like they need to host videos. Mining isn't difficult, everyone knows it because Bitcoin figured it out. And every other project is doing it like how you can incentivize people to secure the network. But in the case of library, is there really an incentive for people to host their own video site? Monetary incentive? Thats not really clear. No one else has done it. So if you want a protocol this going to work you have to have something totally decentralized. No CEO, no company. Library was attacked by the SEC for having an ICO. Thats a security so we're gonna regulate you like that. I'm not victim blaming Library because I think it's total nonsense however if they had made a truly decentralized network there would be no company to wage law fair to.
Let's say maybe mining is too centralized or all these extreme transaction fees. If you want to send someone $5 on the Bitcoin network it has at time cost $10 or $15 in fees. Its obscene. So there's no such thing as using Bitcoin for an actual medium of exchange. Thats why you have maximalists out there. They just say Bitcoin is a store of value. You put money into it and forget about it. You can add layer on to the Bitcoin network. You can have the Lightning network. People like Michael Saylor will even say things like Coinbase or Kraken. These are layered too on top of Bitcoin and thats a good thing. If you look at human history and look at gold, Bitcoin is digital gold, right? Well could follow the same thing that happened to gold in that gold was originally used as a store of value but its a terrible currency for similar reasons as Bitcoin. Gold is hard to transact with, gold is hard to divide, hard to transport. So what people did is they invented a layer 2 for gold and thats paper currency. Its layer 2 eventually took over. Thats a problem for me with Bitcoin. The layer 2 phenomena overtakes the core of it. Bitcoin is not useable, it's not fungible, it's not private, transaction fees are totally unworkable. People have all these misconceptions about it like that it's private. Monero has ring addresses and stealth signatures and Bitcoin doesn't. So the layer 2 takes over what Bitcoin is supposed to do. But it's so unusable. People are buying money on Coinbase and not using Bitcoin at all. If you have money on exchanges, you don't. That is just you paying a company to pretend you own this address that don't really have and they promise that you'll be able to cash them out. But you're not really in control of it. If Bitcoin were to become widely used and all the big exchanges regulated by the government, its very possible that the government says we need to stimulate the Bitcoin economy. So you need to not let people cash out and we're gonna print 2 million Bitcoin. And if its not on layer 1, if its on layer 2 you can do that very easily if you're using centralized exchanges that none of its real anyway. You want a simple base layer but you want it to do everything that you really need. The thing with email is that everyone uses it, it's part of the internet. But SMTP protocol is actually terrible because none of it by default is encrypted. So that should be a core functionality of email. Of course you can encrypt an email with GPG but thats hard to use and the metadata isn't encrypted. All these problems because we didn't build that into the base layer.
I think a lot of people will say they don't care if people see their transactions. They aren't doing anything illegal. Its an easy to thing to say because no one has lived in a world where anyone can see your transactions. Thats a totally novel thing.
Satoshi might be the world's richest trillionaire if he's not dead. But Bitcoin was ultimately a hobbyist's project. It wasn't a cash grab. Cryptocurrency is this great opportunity to have a truly decentralized internet and protocols to build all this stuff on. And it's like people aren't really getting the benefits from it. They aren't exploiting it the way that they should.
Most of the time with alt coins - it's not about the coin, it's not even about the technology. It often is just about the company. Instead of being decentralized like Bitcoin, a company says we need to fund ourselves. So we'll use a blockchain and we'll shoehorn in our project for some reason. But the reason we want that, its a solution looking for a problem. They want this solution because it allows them to have a cryptocurrency. And that is a great way for crowd funding. While Bitcoin is this decentralized network that doesn't have a single ruler and is self propelling and doesn't require incentivizing to use it. Basically most alt coins are managed by a company and they are incomplete in a way. The innovation of Bitcoin is this system that you don't have to incentivize people. It has the incentives built into it. The game theoretics of it are totally thought out. Miners are gonna do this and get this reward and transaction fees incentive them to mine. Everything works and you don't need a company managing everything. But when you look at a lot of these other projects in the cryptocurrency sphere, they're not like that. They have a token that sort of does something in some system that they're really just using so they can have the token and basically crowd fund because a lot of people want to get rich. But when it comes down to it the company ends up making all the decisions. They have a massive pre-mine and ICO that they're give out to people when they do stuff they want. They want to propel things, they want to be in control. They have dev taxes and get money from every transaction. It's so ridiculous and self serving. A lot of these projects are not fully thought out like Bitcoin or they're unfinished. They're like well we still don't really know how this works so we're gonna have to spell it out later so we're gonna need some professional developers that work on this and that. Bitcoin has many flaws that I have talked about. There are many tweaks that you could make to it. It's hard to make changes to Bitcoin because you have to do hard forks and stuff like that. Thats not the case in these other cryptocurrencies because they are basically just unfinished projects managed by a company. They're throughout words all the time like "decentralized." Yeah, sure a blockchain can be decentralized but it doesn't mean what they're selling, its doesn't the product itself is actually decentralized. Cash grab tokens on some sort of network that isn't even necessary.
If you are developing a cryptocurrency project — I should say, you just want to a blockchain genuinely and you want to establish a protocol for the internet to use: the thing to remember is that you are not gonna be a permanent fixture of the internet. You can't be too greedy.
The BAT project for the Brave browser they can give you their little fake BAT internet money. It's still basically a centralized project. They want to become this internet standard but they're really saying in that is that we want to be able to control this aspect of the internet and get like 30% of the income from this or something like that. And thats just absurd. When another project comes up that does the same thing in a decentralized way that is done genuinely — they're gonna win out. Like proprietary and free software. For decades people thought that proprietary software was the way to go. How will you pay your developers? Well now even companies that write proprietary software are open sourcing things. They're having random people able to commit to them and make changes to their repositories and stuff like that. And that's just because thats the better way of developing in the first place. You will probably make less money, but open source software projects like decentralized cryptos are much more likely to become the layer that people are going to base things off of in the internet. Thats just how it is. Why would you take some crappy proprietary centralized crypto project and permanently stake your own project on it?
The Library Project has this site odysee.com its supposed to be a video site and the metadata is stored on the blockchain and its all done through torrents. It's supposed to be uncensorable even though the frontend is like odysee.com which is actually censorable but thats another story. You'll have to look into it. But again the problem I have with these projects are they are centrally managed by one company. And you can say, someone else can use our blockchain. Okay, but your organization the library organization (I forget who exactly does it) but they have this massive coin that is supposed to be used on the network. All these projects need to have annoying incentives. Like they need to host videos. Mining isn't difficult, everyone knows it because Bitcoin figured it out. And every other project is doing it like how you can incentivize people to secure the network. But in the case of library, is there really an incentive for people to host their own video site? Monetary incentive? Thats not really clear. No one else has done it. So if you want a protocol this going to work you have to have something totally decentralized. No CEO, no company. Library was attacked by the SEC for having an ICO. Thats a security so we're gonna regulate you like that. I'm not victim blaming Library because I think it's total nonsense however if they had made a truly decentralized network there would be no company to wage law fair to.
Let's say maybe mining is too centralized or all these extreme transaction fees. If you want to send someone $5 on the Bitcoin network it has at time cost $10 or $15 in fees. Its obscene. So there's no such thing as using Bitcoin for an actual medium of exchange. Thats why you have maximalists out there. They just say Bitcoin is a store of value. You put money into it and forget about it. You can add layer on to the Bitcoin network. You can have the Lightning network. People like Michael Saylor will even say things like Coinbase or Kraken. These are layered too on top of Bitcoin and thats a good thing. If you look at human history and look at gold, Bitcoin is digital gold, right? Well could follow the same thing that happened to gold in that gold was originally used as a store of value but its a terrible currency for similar reasons as Bitcoin. Gold is hard to transact with, gold is hard to divide, hard to transport. So what people did is they invented a layer 2 for gold and thats paper currency. Its layer 2 eventually took over. Thats a problem for me with Bitcoin. The layer 2 phenomena overtakes the core of it. Bitcoin is not useable, it's not fungible, it's not private, transaction fees are totally unworkable. People have all these misconceptions about it like that it's private. Monero has ring addresses and stealth signatures and Bitcoin doesn't. So the layer 2 takes over what Bitcoin is supposed to do. But it's so unusable. People are buying money on Coinbase and not using Bitcoin at all. If you have money on exchanges, you don't. That is just you paying a company to pretend you own this address that don't really have and they promise that you'll be able to cash them out. But you're not really in control of it. If Bitcoin were to become widely used and all the big exchanges regulated by the government, its very possible that the government says we need to stimulate the Bitcoin economy. So you need to not let people cash out and we're gonna print 2 million Bitcoin. And if its not on layer 1, if its on layer 2 you can do that very easily if you're using centralized exchanges that none of its real anyway. You want a simple base layer but you want it to do everything that you really need. The thing with email is that everyone uses it, it's part of the internet. But SMTP protocol is actually terrible because none of it by default is encrypted. So that should be a core functionality of email. Of course you can encrypt an email with GPG but thats hard to use and the metadata isn't encrypted. All these problems because we didn't build that into the base layer.
I think a lot of people will say they don't care if people see their transactions. They aren't doing anything illegal. Its an easy to thing to say because no one has lived in a world where anyone can see your transactions. Thats a totally novel thing.
Satoshi might be the world's richest trillionaire if he's not dead. But Bitcoin was ultimately a hobbyist's project. It wasn't a cash grab. Cryptocurrency is this great opportunity to have a truly decentralized internet and protocols to build all this stuff on. And it's like people aren't really getting the benefits from it. They aren't exploiting it the way that they should.
