@“Gaagaagiins”#p40557 dang, I didn’t know about that one! Actually I was referring to El Salvador, which actually did make Bitcoin national currency! BBC Article
@“Gaagaagiins”#p40559 yes they did do it. They just haven’t made it through the 90 day period before it becomes active yet.
Also to put in my………………………… 2 cents…………
Well, you know, yeah, I think it's impossible to separate it from how cryptocurrency is backed by, forgive me for oversimplifying, its capacity to waste the production of energy to no practical purpose whatsoever, quite literally designed to do so at a pace that will exponentially increase, all to grant illusory wealth to what is primarily no more than a few thousands or tens of thousands of people at, which, unfortunately, spends like real material wealth, until the moment either people finally does something about it, or the entire system collapses in what has a terrifyingly high chance to be an explosion of unimaginable violence, terror, and death, the natural conclusion of this manmade global extinction event.
...all that being said, of course, I don't automatically judge people personally for having a little bit of a stake in crypto, 'cause yes, we all got to get paid and we all commit crimes in the court of lifestylism, and there's often little productive purpose in meting out judgement to others based on your own interpretation of the laws of lifestyle. It just makes people feel like shit and less likely to ask other people's opinion unless they can feel confident they're not going to have people jump down their throat over it. Which, hey, you know, maybe that is a factor in all of this radicalization going around these days!
I mean, which is not to say that I wouldn't avoid an opportunity to say I think you should get out as soon as you can. But, take that with the knowledge I say it more out of concern than my own moralizing. I mean, I _am_ moralizing too, but it's not my intent to make you feel like crap about it either. It's what *I'd* do, but like, I'm just a guy. At the very least, it's always good to be aware of one's own hypocrisies.
Anyway, I mean, yeah, it's pretty bad, but there are more urgent ways in which your average person can gain, amplify, or hoard wealth, through what I would consider something that is morally abominable. Like being a cop, or being a landlord.
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@“Danimal”#p40552 At the same time we could all use a few bucks, and “investments” like crypto are much more reliable than actual gambling.
With all due respect, this is simply false unless one has insider-trading-adjacent insight into what is actually happening in the crypto market, which involves the full gamut of criminal activity from white-collar investment scams through to straight up organised crime. It might be true that it's not difficult for a savvy civilian to make a few bucks but that's very far from reliable.
@“goonbag”#p40574 To add to this, the reason you see services like Paypal catering to cryptocurrency has less to do with a lot of people using it and more to do with there being enough money in cryptocurrency that places like Paypal have decided it's worth catering to that crowd.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ckjr9x214c
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvHN0MEBoZo
ethical crypto exists. blaming the the ends for the means of energy production is silly.
@“Gaagaagiins”#p40559 it seems that the adoption in Latin American countries has to do not with its utility as a currency, but as a transaction medium for remittances that (for now) avoids US-imposed capital controls and the traditional money-changers (and secondarily, avoiding hyperinflation in the local economy‘s currency, but they could use USD for this if it were not for capital controls so it’s mostly the first thing).
@“tanuki”#p47721 I won‘t pretend to understand but I’ll take the broad meaning that it's not as bad as it sounds to heart
I'll never use that feature or play that game. The same way I don‘t care about asset marketplaces in games. I’ll never give money to someone who‘s interested in creating a “free market” within their game. These companies don’t respect you. They don‘t respect your time. They think you’re a sucker. It's artificial scarcity.
**Companies are just looking for investment.** The only reason any of these companies are talking about NFT is because they know it's a quick way to get a bunch of (sucker) investors to pump money into their company and push the stock prices up. Ultimately none of these games company care about NFT or even know what it does. NFT/Cyrpto is just the latest scam to convince people to part with their money. What's the difference between NFT/Crypto games and how Second Life sold products (or skins in CS:GO)? From a user perspective nothing. Its just buzz words for investors.
**It worse at doing every task.** For me this is the biggest point of why you'll probably see all this go away in games once/if the big investment dry up. There's nothing NFT/Cyrpto can do that you can't do quicker and simpler with a centralized authority. NFT/Etherum transitions can take a few minutes at best and a few hours at worst. Games will try and get around these delays with a centralized authority (which undermines the entire thing).
**It has no use.** I've only ever met people who use NFT/Crypto to gamble or "invest" (if you want to invest just put money into S&P 500). No one uses it like a currency because it's not. It's not a currency if you can go to sleep, wake up, and suddenly can't afford basic produce to live. (Countries in south america are using it because their own currency has serious issues, not because they love crypto.) Same with NFT in games. It's not an investment. if the game goes down as happens all the time, then well there goes your NFT. It's no longer accessible. But don't worry it was decentralized while it was accessible!
**Sign of a desperate society.** To me no one would give a shit about NFT/Cyrpto if we didn't live in such a terrible time period at the moment. Regular people are only interested because they think they can get rich. It's their ticket out of participating in a capitalist society.
**Proof of Stake is not magic.** Ethereum 2.0 (and many crypto) are moving to Proof of Stake. It consumes way less power but the exact savings are still not exactly know. That 99.9% number if from The Ethereum Foundation, because well of course they would say that. However much saving it is it's still gonna be more energy than necessary all because they want a sense of decentralization. (It also rewards those with more coin who are willing to "stake" it. So the more of the network you control the more coin you will get rewarded with.)
So far I have yet to see anything crypto can do for games outside of enabling real money gambling and creating a whole new layer of grotesque monetization. In fact I haven't seen anything crypto is actually good for aside from speculative investments. Is it useful? Not really. Does it provide a compelling alternative to any existing computer infrastructure? Nope. Can you make money off of it? Yeah.
I'm not going to fault anyone for wanting to make a quick buck, but I'm also not going to pretend that this "Web 3" shit doesn't make my skin crawl. Even if we assume we can somehow solve the energy problems with crypto, the way crypto developers focus on commodifying every little thing and turning it into a purchasable, ownable, tradeable asset is repulsive. Frankly I think it's much, much worse than microtransactions or advertising or whatever other repugnant monetization scheme is out there.
@"Gaagaagiins"#p47776
Basically the US dollar is used internationally as a store of value and the US uses a combination of its control over the currency itself and its control over the international banking that's done in that currency as a way to exert power over other countries. For example Vietnam was a communist nation after the war, but was unable to do business with the rest of the world. The World Bank offers them a substantial loan but requires them to make "economic reforms" before agreeing to anything. These usually look like abolishing price controls on certain goods, privatizing certain industries, and so on.
All this because you can't do international banking without the US approving of it. Bitcoin makes sense as a replacement for USD for countries the US doesn't like, but even then there are moves being made by countries like China to get international business to depend less on the dollar. The end goal here is of course to make everyone less reliant on the US. The Chinese RMB internationalization scheme is more likely to work out imo, just because there's a central body actually providing the infrastructure to get this thing done. The belt and road initiative is probably going to be more successful than a bunch of random startups, I mean.
@“donrumata”#p47788 Even the Euro has been making moves to not have the dollar be used as the pegged currency for every other currency.
One interesting thing I forgot to mention is how much of the current nft/crypto trends directly mirror the aspirations of every company talking about the metaverse. Which has basically nothing to do with improving anything or providing any service of any kind. But is to do with free market ideology looking for more ways to commodity every day life.
You can listen to Tim Sweeney talk about Epic and the metaverse. These people are free market fundamentalists. The perfect people for all these investors who can see what's really happening and are happy to make the world a worse place so they can make more money.
https://soundcloud.com/siggraph-spotlight/30-tim-sweeney-and-the-metaverse
I read this good article yesterday about how NFTs don‘t have any use in games. It was on twitter so I’m sure many of you have read it too.
https://docseuss.medium.com/look-what-you-made-me-do-a-lot-of-people-have-asked-me-to-make-nft-games-and-i-wont-because-i-m-29c7cfdbbb79
The topic of NFT/crypto came up in a discord group of my uni friends. A few of them have made quite a bit of _'money'_ out of trading cryptocurrencies but barely supported NFTs at all. The only use in games they saw could work was the play to earn model. However, a friend was asking "would you enjoy playing a game if the majority was only there to grind money?" ||no||.
@“donrumata”#p47788 Ah, okay! Yes, I do understand that, I guess it just didn't occur to me that crypto would even really offer a means to address it.
In the SIGGRAPH talk, Tim Sweeney seems to suggest we just need better standards for 3D-renderable virtual objects, persona/identity authentication, and social graphs…and then a federated metaverse will emerge. Ok. Then around 15:50 he adds “standards for ownership of digital objects” as something else we need. Ummm. Finally at 19:20 he claims that the blockchain accomplishes that as one of its functions. Noooooo. It does not. At best it is a way to publicly post a claim of ownership of a digital asset that hashes to a particular value. Any of us is free to ignore that claim of ownership, and can store or resell a perfect copy of the digital asset however we want. Unless that is, we are trapped in a walled garden where a platform-owner restricts our actions.
Epic (and Sweeney) have clearly spent a lot of time thinking about how much more money they could be making if only they didn't have to sell their digital assets in someone else's (Apple's) walled garden. They don't seem to realize that the walled garden is the only place where DRM works and where nearly every customer can be made to pay to store a copy of the same 1s and 0s that everyone else paid for.
Sweeney claims to want open standards -- but only because he resents the platform owner that takes a cut from his pie. But there's no enforcement of scarcity without a walled garden. So his notional free-market federated metaverse would also require interoperable standards-based DRM, which is an oxymoron.
Now HERE'S a Crypto Game for ya
https://twitter.com/SolidusJJ/status/1444007355763593241
@“Danimal”#p40498 all things crypto can go burn in hell
NFTs whole pitch is antithetical to what i like about art.
i want the things i make to be shared. most of the art or entertainment that has spoken to me in my life has been art that is replicated. film, books, music, games, videos,
the internet is great for this! i love when i discover some thirty year old out of print album on youtube. i love nicely curated torrents where super fans have given you thirteen different language audio dubs and five different commentary tracks. i love finding a fan translation of a japanese video game that never came out over here. scrolling through a rom site that is nicely built and organized.
the idea that "the future" for the internet is "owning digital goods" feels out of touch. the best part of the internet is how much we share. how much of it is free and accessible to anyone. doing a lot of work proving that you own THIS file feels silly. how can you own a file? why would you want to own a file?
have you ever used a file before ? that is not how they work.
@“Gaagaagiins”#p47776 it‘s bad but maybe less bad than being under the thumb of a USD global reserve currency. It’s still capital and financialized economics. The posters here aren't ofc making any overly-credulous claims, but the crypto advocates talking these currencies up as being beneficial to developing nations are definitely reverse engineering/rationalizing to cover scamgreed
@“Gaagaagiins”#p47795
I mean I really don‘t think it offers a good means to address that problem, but it’s hard for me to fault countries that have been kept out of international trade for trying to find a solution that doesn't leave them beholden to a much, much more powerful country like the US or China. Now whether being beholden to silicon valley tech libertarians is much better is debatable.
@"pizzascrub"#p47819
I'm very much at a point with copyright (or maybe more accurately "ownership") where I don't think it makes much sense for digital anything. I would argue that taking these ideas about physical ownership to the digital world is a step in the wrong direction. If anything I'd say the current post-scarcity sharing economy of things like private torrent trackers is a much more interesting model than replicating old forms of ownership in the new world of the internet. But I'm a communist so ownership in general is something I struggle to find justifications for.
I won‘t pretend to really understand this stuff but it’s interesting that at some level cryptocurrency is undermining US hegemony over international trade. Based on its fundamentals, crypto should be a good modern representative for decades of US-exported free market rhetorical nonsense. But it's now apparently increasingly an option for Latin American countries with active leftist movements that the US has traditionally crushed with sanctions (and death/torture squads)
In this view it's a good example of how much the interests of the individual factions in the capitalist class have diverged. There's the traditional, globalized industrial capital ruling class group, basically running your classic resource exploitation scheme in developing countries for decades, and who rely on the hegemony of the dollar to accomplish this. There's the ultra-right ideologue freaks, people who believe lead paint should be legal, who were actually created by the industrial capital class as part of a broader propaganda strategy, but are now beyond industrial capital's control. Then there's crypto, in my reading grouped with West Coast venture capital, who to me are the purest manifestation of capitalism: an algorithm that seeks only immediate value, no ability to plan long-term, even for purposes of class interest
I feel like historically the result of this type of deep fracturing of the ruling class is civil war but everything is so insane and weird now that not sure any historical lessons can apply