doom's comments

> why wouldn't you do it on a (performant) blockchain

I don't see value here over JP Morgan Chase operating the market as a neutral third party. Maybe Chase won't really be neutral because they want to steer you to USD and not tokens. But there's gotta be some neutral party that can govern it, something like Coinbase.

Boring old databases and the tech of 10-30 years ago are more efficient than blockchain in all cases, afaik. No matter how efficient, the design of blockchain requires distributed workers verifying each other's transactions. On Chase's server farm, server A can trust server B. All I need is a ledger of how many tokens I have, and a way to convert to USD, the tether of the real world. I can use USD to get into Ether and those 1000 tokens any time I want.

> a 1000 such tokens can interact.

It's basically an API / standard for tokens right? Today I can make an app that uses the IMDB api, but if nobody cares, the app is useless. You can make an app that uses the latest hot tech (raytracing in GPUs) but if nobody likes what you made, it's useless. Same with ERC20, if I understand correctly. I can stand outside Chuck E Cheese and try to make a secondary market in tokens. Nothing illegal about that. Tokens are traded using the hand-to-hand protocol. Yet the number of such businesses is close to zero.

Gift cards for places like Walmart and Amazon are nearly as good as cash on eBay. Nobody buying them is worried about those companies issuing too many cards and crashing the currency.

You propose a world where cyberchuck tokens are useless, but cyberchuck crypto tokens are readily traded on the open market. Cashing out requires people to value the token underneath, and that's a function of who governs the token (and what they let you do with it), not crypto vs. not crypto. Although currently "crypto anything" seems to boost the price of your asset, even if it's just Blockchain Iced Tea.

Fraud reduction by looking at the open market ("nobody's selling these $1 tokens for anything above a nickel!") isn't plausible either - you can do the same thing today by looking at YouTuber payout rates. Those aren't public but it would take the collusion of 10,000+ top tier YouTubers, many of whom don't like YouTube very much, to lie. If YouTube were ever threatened by a more open model (ex. on Patreon, you can see actual income for some creators), they might switch to stay competitive.

> utilize your newly acquired cyber-chucks to generate yield by providing liquidity, collateralizing it, etc).

I can do this with USD so we're really talking about that X day period where my tokens haven't become USD yet. Maybe there is or will be a crypto coin or five that do what Bitcoin was supposed to do - low fees, high volume, easier and cheaper than ACH or Paypal. But if those fees are low enough, I don't necessarily need to keep by cyber chucks as cyber chucks. I could convert to USD and then back into cyber chucks, if cyber chucks is the token of choice. But I think it's far more likely that out of the hundreds-thousands of current coins, the one you pick is going to be a loser in terms of long term utility. Safer to convert to USD and then into whatever today's hot coin is.

Even today, some stock options have surprisingly little price discovery (low volume, big difference between bid and ask price). And those are real, regulated financial instruments with a direct objective relationship to present and future value. I think they can be traded across the whole market too (buy at broker A, sell to someone at broker B). I don't get how, outside of speculation, Company X's coin is going to be worth more than that. Nor will it have better price discovery - there are multiple billion dollar companies who trade stocks and options.

In current "company scrip" modes (ex. casino chips) people generally don't hold onto the not-cash. They exchange it for USD within days. If MGM decides to screw over their customers and cut the conversion rate by 10x, (1) that might be illegal, (2) the % of total customers in history that will be affected are small.

We're also generally proposing micro- or mini-payments - if it's high dollar like a salary, you'll just get USD from working at a company. How many people would take a job at 1-to-1 equivalence in a crypto token instead of a USD salary? Today, I can buy stock in my company using the USD they give me. It's much safer to me because I can choose how much to put in. If I got paid in CompanyCoin that would be a return to the company scrip days. I'd be tied up in risk for minimal gain. If the coin is stable it doesn't matter if I can only invest my USDs every payday.

I admit I don't know much about ERC20 specifically. I still don't see why you can't make a useless token on ERC20. Analogous to making an app that works with all bank accounts that nobody wants to use.

> Note that in Gitcoin's case, GTC serves as a governance token which gives voting rights for their DAO.

People talk about using crypto for democratic community governance. I said this in another comment chain:

> You imply a kind of 51% governance of an open source or community driven project. History shows that community projects fork all the time over personal differences, and majority does not always rule. Google2 coin won't matter if people get mad at Google2's governance and fork it for Google2.5 coin.

Open source is generally driven by a small core of contributors. I don't see crypto voting being anything but a rubber stamp on the current pool of high activity users. I don't hate the idea here but I also don't see much point.

They suppose both parties have equal power (money, ability to analyze the smart contract). I doubt most contract negotiations are like that. Signing a smart contract with Google, written by Google engineers, is like signing your own death warrant. You'd have to hire your own E&Y consultants to verify the contract doesn't screw you, and then we're back to the problems of regular contracts.

Perhaps useful in 1% of contracts, useless otherwise.

Would the government mandate an inane proof of work scheme so that the energy usage goes up YoY every year?

Can you explain why I need a crypto(tm) Gitcoin and not just a cyber chuck e cheese token? I give cyber-chuck $1 and he gives me 1 cyber token. I can subdivide it 10,000 times and micro-tip any site I want. Why do I need cryptocurrency?

If your argument is that crypto would decentralize it, and guarantee a cap on coin totals, I don't buy it. That's not the reason a site owner wouldn't join a coin plan. "I would love to get paid, but I hate inflation too much to consider your proposal". Fantasy land.

There is no reason whatsoever for Activision to join forces with Epic and let your Call of Duty gun skins cross over to Fortnite. Even if they do, both titans will never in a million years allow an indie shooter to be cross-compatible. It'd be free advertising for the smaller game.

From a competitive standpoint, why would I want Activision's digital locks (you can only import NFT'd content) instead of something like Second Life which is more open?

If Activision really wanted purchases to carry over, they could've made it happen. No NFT needed. An open standard does not imply NFT, and vice versa. The 360 era was probably the peak of the 'gaming interoperability' trend, and it went almost nowhere. Your Xbox gamer picture would show up in some games. Everyone knew it was authentic because MS uses cryptography and doesn't let you sideload third party images. No NFT needed.

Same reason my company doesn't like me displaying awards from my last company. The obstacle is entirely social rather than technical.

I've evaluated Bitcoin probably 10 separate times. I regret not getting in at time #1 when it was $30, but I know I would've sold at $35 or $50 or $100 or $1000 based on where I was economically then.

I have no regrets investing in broad market index funds, because I know what they represent, how they work, and how even if Amazon drops to 1/10th of its value I still own a small slice of the company. If bitcoin drops I own a bitcoin, which no adherent can explain the purpose of.

There's no "there" there. It doesn't do what it's supposed to do, most of the adherents don't know what they're buying, the "store of value" argument just makes it a worse version of fine art, gold, or real estate. The economic case for bitcoin is anti-fiat. Fine, but that's a minority opinion. Hundreds of millions of Americans buzz along in a fiat system and don't seem much worse for the wear. The massive COVID bailout kept millions out of poverty, kept food on the table, kept businesses open, etc.

"Failed states print money and crash the economy so they need bitcoin". Why Bitcoin and not another crypto? I can never answer that. Hardly anything in tech is forever. BASIC was once cool, now it's Python. Would I bet $30,000 that Python is the language of choice 50 years from now? No. Bitcoin is a cool proof of concept that is eclipsed tech wise by dozens of other coins. I'm still skeptical of other coins, and hardcore skeptical of PoW when the W is useless (hashing). Bitcoin is the top of the skepticism pyramid. There's no point.

Patently false. Bitcoin put a dollar value on under-utlized energy. That can be coal, hydro, whatever. If you believe that Bitcoin is just a more wasteful version of Paypal or ACH, then it matters a lot that this subsidized energy is being converted into waste heat by a bunch of special-purpose ASICs that have no use outside of *coins, and take a lot of metals and energy to create and ship, on limited-capacity fabs.

I ctrl-F "subsid" in your link and don't see any source for your claim. Bitcoin puts a dollar value on (subsidizes) -ALL- energy. If there's a dirty coal plant you can run in your backyard without the government shutting you down, Bitcoin wants to know about it.

Your claim is (1) bitcoin takes energy (2) renewable is cheaper than nonrenewable (3) bitcoin is causing tons of new renewable capacity.

If that were true, why isn't every power plant in the US renewable? How on earth did Bitcoin manage to get this capacity that nobody else has? Money talks, right? Why aren't the mayors of San Francisco, New York, Chicago etc. trumpeting their new 100% renewable grids?

Then you might say that Bitcoin is tech-enabled and decentralized, you can run a mining rig near any energy+internet source. But that's equally true of a cloud compute farm. The fact that bitcoin is pointless hashes and not cloud compute is a historical quirk. Any Bitcoin node/farm could be replaced with an identical-power-usage server farm and do more good for society.

I'd like a source on your Bitcoin only uses renewable claim. I think if I run a miner on my home PC, which I believe has some natural gas in the energy mix, that argument fails.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/05/private-equity-f...

> But right now the only places that Bitcoin is causing environmental damage are places where some government has unwisely subsidized fossil-fuel consumption, and Bitcoin itself is what puts an end to those subsidies.

I wrote this whole comment without getting to the end of your inane post. We agree that implicit subsidies are bad (burning fossil fuels creates externalities, failing to tax them is a subsidy). But your wordsmithing here is bad faith. Your argument is basically "governments thought people wouldn't be complete jerks, and Bitcoin sure proved them wrong!" Yeah it's human nature and perhaps inevitable, but 50+ years for some of these hydro dams without a problem until Bitcoin came in and ruined everything.

Bitcoin is an ongoing real time climate catastrophe. Get back to me when China and the US ban all forms of carbon-emitting energy production. Until then, those "subsidies" continue, and it matters quite a lot what use for the subsidized energy we find. I suggest cloud computing as a baseline. "environmental destruction right now" is exactly the current state of things.

> Crypto gives the ability for the community to actually control and be confident they won’t get slowly squeezed out, because you can actually codify control.

This is nonsense. Sure, on a technical level, you can ensure that Google2 will only have 10,000 crypto-shares, and will never issue any more. Regular Google can issue new stock and there's not much that can be done.

But the volume at which public companies or even private companies trade stock is so huge that there's no use case you can imagine that would tank the stock. You're talking about micro-payments -- Google2 is not going to pay people $30 an hour (crypto or USD) to upvote comments or submit useful content. I know this because Google1 barely pays YouTubers (outside of the top x% who make real money, and even they have ad dollars siphoned off by Google). Google1 could issue a million new shares of the stock to pay its moderators, and all they'd do is tank the stock price. But all their most valuable employees are paid heavily in stock. They wouldn't be happy and would quit or riot. It's a soft-regulation on that kind of silly behavior.

Despite 20+ years of "pay users to use the site" being an obvious conclusion, almost no site has done this in a meaningful way. There are hardly any even paying people in funny money / company scrip. All I can think of are Eve Online and Steam. You can't convert money OUT (regulations) but you can use their chuck-e-cheese tokens to buy stuff within their business. On Steam, the money you get per value the user puts in is a pittance. Valve takes a 30ish % cut on almost everything you do, even "secondhand" trading card transactions.

You can speculate that financial regulations are preventing it, but I think it's more likely that the owners of Google2 would much prefer to keep as much capital for themselves and not let its users/"staffers" get a slice. Similarly, Google1 pays its low-level moderator staff very little (compared to an engineer or upper level manager). Most corporations turn a profit. That's a very clear indicator of 'money on the table' - money that the owners chose not to return to the people performing labor for the company, whether volunteer or employee.

You imply a kind of 51% governance of an open source or community driven project. History shows that community projects fork all the time over personal differences, and majority does not always rule. Google2 coin won't matter if people get mad at Google2's governance and fork it for Google2.5 coin. If you can't fork the coin, then it sounds like regular stock or company scrip.

https://money.stackexchange.com/questions/18843/how-does-a-p...

I totally disagree on the "link aggregator" assessment. I've been a redditor since late 2007 / early 2008. It originally appealed to me because it was a link aggregator. The links I am interested in seeing are, for example, thoughtful articles or important news stories. I liked having links and a place to talk about the links.

I think what you're trying to say is that Reddit has become a link aggregator of low-effort content: advice animals and reposted pictures, for example. I'd say those aren't links, they are original content and pictures. "Look what my girlfriend made" is a common submission. There is a subreddit, /r/nosobstory, that removes the redditor-added context. It's amazing how it's not the links that get upvoted, but the titles. Uninteresting content soars to the top of /r/pics if it's attached to a story about someone getting cancer.

I wish the Reddit I knew and loved could come back, the one where I was sure I was talking with people smarter than me just based on what they knew and how they presented what they knew.

Regarding /r/iama: It has definitely become full of the vapid celebrity interviews you'd find anywhere else. There's nothing wrong with being a celebrity, but it seems most of them are strictly controlled by their managers, prohibited from addressing any tough questions because they have a movie to sell.

I don't care for most conspiracies but I liked the first part of this post.

http://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/1she85/how_reddi...

>The first thing they did was take away r/reddit.com.

>This took away the only tool for communicating with reddit about reddit. If you had any concerns about the website as a whole, you could address them through r/reddit.com. Taking that away was the first step.

Several times over these years I have been frustrated that there is no place to talk with reddit about reddit. Only employees of reddit now have the privilege to talk to every redditor in /r/blog.

Moderators have far too much power. /r/gaming or /r/undelete could enact a wide-scale censorship campaign and you might not ever notice. There must be a default subreddit for talking about reddit.com. The old /r/reddit.com subreddit was for anything. The new one can be more focused, if needed. There is one mod for all of /r/outside and I tried to start an alternative subreddit. My post was caught in the spam filter and the moderator, intentionally or not, opted to not remove it or respond to any PMs.

I am a moderator on a subreddit with over 10,000 users. I hope I and the mod team never loses our heads. Currently we have a policy that I always encourage other mods to enact on their own subreddits. The policy is to allow respectful criticism. On larger subreddits I think it would be best accomplished in one large self-post linked from the sidebar. To me, not having a safe space for criticism means the subreddit is afraid of the truth. For example, although I don't agree with Gamergate, /r/Games's policy for dealing with it was to set up robots to automatically scrub any mention of the topic from their subreddit, and not tell anyone that such discussion was banned. They once removed 500 comments in one submission, because some of them were about Gamergate. They once removed a totally normal comment of mine, because it was in response to a comment that they deleted. (Subtext: they don't like anything that draws attention to their moderation.)

Sorry for the meandering comment, to anyone who made it this far. To me it looks like all of Reddit's flaws have never been laid out all at once. This is just a disorganized piece. If it were organized, and cited evidence rather than me just remembering things, maybe it could change some minds.