I understand that crypto is a scam that will rob millions of people of money they desperately need.
See, this guy gets it
But what you said there is literally the end of my understanding of what crypto is. It has something to do with computers solving math problems, and somehow that’s worth money.
What?
the problem with crypto is that when you try to explain it, it sounds so stupid that someone else thinks you have to be explaining it wrong
but if you want explanation, this one is fine https://ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/bitcoin/2020-12-31-bitcoin-ponzi.html and this https://www.ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/bitcoin/2021-01-16-yes-ponzi.html
When I think of crypto I think of that bloke grubbing through landfill for a lost hard drive. I think of Sam Bankman Fried. I think of Trump’s meme coin. Yes, I’m sure someone must be explaining it wrong to this old lady.
I feel like there’s so much nonsense happening with crypto that people will overlook any of the legal, ethical use cases of it. Like its got lower inflation than gold, I mean that’s actually incredible from an economic standpoint.
So the same as most currency that isn’t backed by actual valuables? Like the US dollar after it stopped being backed by gold like 100 years ago?
Crypto is a world currency that people have assigned value to. Pretty much all other money is a currency that individual countries have assigned a value to. Both types can be just as worthless. Hyper inflation has made money from many countries worth less than a roll of toilet paper to wipe your ass with. For that matter, the US dollar could buy you 30 rolls of toilet paper 75 years ago. Now it can only buy you like 1 roll.
A pretty generous comparison. USD is at least FDIC insured and somewhat tied to our country’s finances. Crypto only stabilizes around the markets that use it, i.e. black markets.
At this point, the US is becoming a black market.
FDIC insures you won’t lose your money if a bank or something goes under. It doesn’t do anything to insure that the money’s value stays good.
You have a good point, the value of any money (even a lot of gold’s value) is a social construct, i.e. only what the population makes of it. For that reason, I don’t think that crypto is inherently bad, but the fact is that most people trading aren’t using it as money (you know, an intermediate good to facilitate trades), they’re attempting to use its wildly fluctuating value to make a quick buck. Those types of trades ironically only make it more volatile, and are what made it volatile in the first place, so there’s now a vicious cycle. Will crypto ever stabilize? Fuck if I know, I’m not qualified to talk about this, but frankly I think you could say the same about most people in the stock market and especially in crypto. Maybe if a critical mass of people start actually using cryptocurrency as a currency it’ll change, but who can say.
Crypto has already started stabilizing. But only proof of work can demand the trust and longevity to make it so. Everything else has the threat of a scam. Do not trust proof of stake. Research those terms and the Birds Eye level of the crypto they represent for more info.
I wouldn’t say PoS is a scam but it 100% increases that existential threat of a 51% attack.
These are great, but they don’t explain what a crypto coin actually is.
technical details vary and honestly matter little. what matters more is what people do with these things, and that’s what’s explained
If your interested in learning more about the math behind Bitcoin and how it functions at a lower level I’d recommend reading the original white paper for it
Its just an entry in a ledger. It says something like, “blandfordforever sends courageousstep 1 coin” along with a cryptographic signature from blandforever that validates the transaction. This means you now have and can transfer that coin to someone else, provided that you have the key to sign the appropriate transaction. That’s all it is.
The miners are all competing to sign a “block” of transactions onto the ledger by figuring out new correct answer to a math problem that’s determined in part by a number from the previous block. They are rewarded for this by being able to send themselves a preset number of coins in this new block they’ve signed. Transactions aren’t final until they’ve been added to the blockchain by this mechanism.
A central part to it is that each coin is defined as a series of transactions, not the other way around like with real world items. For example if a new Bitcoin is mined, that’s described as a transaction from no-one, to someone.
This has been my favorite response so far. It explains nothing, but the mental image is priceless.
It’s a speculative asset that fluctuates based on the whims of billionaire hedge funds and early crypto investors. There is zero value in owning it unless you got in early enough. And even then it’s a situation of the last man holding the bag. Someone will end up losing their asses.
On average the value of any crypto token is less than 0 because of the high cost to produce and transfer them. Ironically it seems people find the most wasteful tokens more valuable. “It’s hard to make so it must be valuable” or some such nonsense.
Not all crypto is hard to mine you know. Stuff like Ethereum and Solana don’t use up that much electricity bc they use a different method called proof of stake, rather than bitcoins proof of work. Basically people who wanna validate transactions stake some money on the network, and if they validate a transaction right, they get paid a bit. If they get it wrong, they lose that money they staked. And the more money they stake, the more they make from validating transactions.
I literally said that there is a difference between tokens in their cost to produce. E.g. bitcoin is more expensive than others and valued higher.
Most crypto is. Proof of work crypto is not and brings actual stability and longevity to the table. Most people don’t understand this. Proof of stake is never anything more than gambling.
Well it really depends. The good thing about PoS is that it lowers volitilatity to some extent, because stakeholder cant take out too much of their money otherwise they’d be losing out on money they couldve been making. PoW is definitely more concrete though, PoS is really abstract for sure
No, that’s basically it.
The reason for all this work is basically the concept of a currency that isn’t backed by and dependent upon governments while also being impossible to counterfeit, hence a lot of encryption because it fundamentally says that you can’t trust the other computers that you’re talking to. Everybody holds a ledger that says that you have $5, so you can’t suddenly say that you actually have $10. And all the math is to prevent inflation by limiting the amount of currency that exists at any time. The more currency there is from solving the math, the harder the math gets to slow down the creation of new money.
It all falls apart, though, because the only value that crypto has is what it’s worth in traditional fiat currency - the very thing that it’s supposed to replace.
So it’s just a bunch of computers doing a lot of math to make funny money that’s supposedly worth something because…of reasons?
You’re close. 1 unless the coin is proof of work you can’t trust it. 2 the value it brings it in the replacement of third party trust for economic transactions and the infrastructure and labor required for that, along with global, instant access to transfer infinite amounts of value as well as store that value logically within your own mind.
Downvotes are coming but if you’re seriously intellectually curious where the value is, read the Bitcoin standard.
it’s also at the same time libertarian political project that aims to, how they put it, “separate money from state”, which is in itself absurd, but not for libertarians, because their only problem with capitalism is that they’re not on the top. crypto is an attempt to “fix” that “problem”. see also doings of peter thiel, curtis yarvin, urbit,
first they build a place with no state interference and then they learn hard way why there’s so many financial regulations. sometimes it’s deliberate and it’s a way to use novelty to repackage old financial crimes to deflect responsibility long enough to fuck off to Dubai. sometimes it’s scams all the way and scammer already lives in North Korea
prevent inflation by limiting the amount of currency that exists
which is a flawed premise itself. the supply of currency needs to expand at the same rate as productivity increases or else you get deflation which has its own set of problems
well…no. Gold goes up because of the same reason and its not ruining everything. And I’m pretty sure actually no currency has THAT much inflation, like that’s a lot more than you might think
It’s decentralized, so how do you prevent people from making up bullshit lies that didn’t happen about where the money is? You do it by incorporating a difficult math problem. Then to incentivize people to actually work on that instead of just using the money, people who solve it get a reward.
I am not pro crypto, just explaining.
Fiat currency is just as silly. As is all money, really.
“I trade numbers for food. The numbers are accessible via a magnetic strip on some plastic in my pocket.” or “I trade paper for clothing but the number of papers isn’t as important as the number printed ON the papers.” Both of these realities are absurd. :)
As a store of value representing labor rendered: neither of those are terrible systems and most people don’t understand either of them anyway. Fiat seems “normal” because we grew up with it. That said: I’m no apologist. Popular crypto currencies offer little novelty for the layperson, no true improvement on the concept of currency generally, and cost orders of magnitude more to maintain their required infrastructure. I fail to see the appeal.
There are some projects which focus on the practical utility of decentralized currency (I remember thinking Nano (wikipedia.com) was cool back in the day) but they don’t get the same kind of attention as meme coins because they can’t be abused as easily. I’ve heard stories of these kinds of tools facilitating commerce in places where the local currency collapsed. Neat as that may be it isn’t revolutionary… Still more convenient than bartering via cigarette though.
Fiat isn’t “silly” insofar as there’s an underlying reason why fiat has value. The US dollar is valuable because the US government only accepts tax payments in USD. As long as the US government demands tax payments and has the ability to make good on those demands, US dollars will have value.
You know what a normal database is.
The Blockchain is a distributed database instead of a centralized one where normally people can verify that each other part of the database is correct.
Generally anything a distributed database can do, a centralized database in good hands can do better. Except for crimes. It’s more difficult to get away with crimes when they can be shut down in one place.
Also it’s harder to undo Blockchain/crypto stuff. They sell this as a benefit while the primary use is scams and rug pulls.
“The government can’t get your money back.” Yeah, gonna be hard to get back thr money you were scammed out of with a court order, isn’t it.
They also try to sell it as anonymous, but it’s very much not. Everything is on the record, so if they link you to an address (and they generally can), they can see every transaction you’ve ever made. There used to be services to obfuscate this, but the government has well and truly broken through those. They can find you of they want to.
Crypto is a an MLM for guys. You can make money, if you’re lucky enough to be the scammer and not the scammee.
There used to be services to obfuscate this, but the government has well and truly broken through those. They can find you of they want to. Not all currencies have this issue, like stuff like Zcash and Monero cant be traced
“it’s somehow worth money” is basically true of all fiat currencies. It’s worth what the consensus agrees it is worth.
(this comment should not be read as a defense of crypto)
Government currencies are backed by taxes - someone did something and gave a portion of the value of their labor to the government, represented by currency. The government then reinvests the labor into the country supposedly for the public good. This is expected to continue indefinitely and it is this cycle that gives the currency value.
Crypto companies have investors. Investors are only attracted by the prospect of growth. They have no natural revenue cycle, no way of creating value without hype and people gambling with their.money.
The exception is the value inherent in being a currency outside of the control and surveillance of the Governments. Hence all the illegal activities. As time goes on cryptocurrencies will be more regulated and controlled by government, and it will diminish that trait.
It’s fucking stupid.
Traditional currencies are backed by governments and the global economy. Boiling down USD/EUR to “it’s worth money because we say so” is many many magnitudes larger of a splicification than saying the same for crypto.
I think it helps to reinforce how silly crypto is, though. Once you establish that fiat currency is basically magic paper we all agree is worth something because it’s backed by things like the government’s reliability and contract to uphold that value, and then you say, “and crypto, designed to replace fiat currency, is backed by fiat currency,” the whole thing falls apart like the house of cards that it is.
How can you justify a funny money that doesn’t do anything new in terms of cyber security, while burning vastly more resources to do it, and is only worth something because of the currency that it’s supposed to replace, and that value rapidly fluctuates from moment to moment.
How can you justify a funny money that doesn’t do anything new in terms of cyber security, while burning vastly more resources to do it, and is only worth something because of the currency that it’s supposed to replace, and that value rapidly fluctuates from moment to moment.[?]
Well its got lower inflation than gold, that’s something.
What is a fiat currency?
Oh, I just looked it up. So it’s the USD.
It’s any currency that is unbacked by a commodity.
I’m gunna try to explain the basics of just Bitcoin here, its probably the easiest to understand out of all of them. It’s all based on a mathematical function called the hash function. Basically the hash function can take in any input and produce a unique number between zero and a bazillion that represents it. Statistically speaking, the outputs of the hash function are random, and if you only have the output its impossible to find the corisponding input - it cant be reversed. When a transaction happens with a cryptocurrency its broadcast to the whole network, and made very public. All the information about it, the sender, the receiver, the amount, the time, and a few other things too, all that is sent around the network. That bundle of information is basically all a transaction is. But the process of validating it is what makes it real. Some people have computer programs that collect all of these transactions broadcast across the network, and they combine them into large chunks, known as blocks. Each block, along with all the financial data inside it, has an extra number attached to it known as a nonce. These people who listen for new transactions and later store them, take the block, and apply the hash function to it. If the output of the hash function is in a very small range - with is unlikely - a new special transaction happens, from no one, to the person who calculated the hash, minting new bitcoins (rn I think this amount is 3.125 Bitcoin but that might be outdated). (This is what Bitcoin mining is). If the output of the hash isn’t in the range, they try again. The network automatically changes the size of this range to make sure that over a given amount of time the same number of bitcoins are minted, making Bitcoin free from spikes in inflation. Additionally, the network halfs the reward from mining a block about every 4 years, causing the inflation rate to drop over time. As this happens the network with settle on a fixed number of usable bitcoins, slightly less than 21 million. And that part of it makes its a viable alternative to gold, because while new gold is always being mined, its not much so overall gold has very low monetary inflation. But a large amount of bitcoins value stems from the fact that eventually Bitcoin wont have any at all.
I’d be more than happy to further explain how this stuff works, I’m no expert but I’m really interested in the math and economics behind it all. I really recommend reading the original Bitcoin paper, https://bitcoin.org/en/bitcoin-paper , its not a light read but it explains it all a lot better than I can. Have a nice day!
I’m not religious, but God bless you.
I still barely understand, but I understand more than I did five minutes ago, and that is worth something.
Why is this math problem worth monetary value to anyone if it’s just a randomly generated number? I don’t care if something generated a number somewhere. Like, good for them I guess? Why is that valuable?
Thank you! Well its really not that useful by itself, just like little green papers aren’t that useful. But its just more practical for the world to imagine that the paper is worth something its not, because this makes trade a lot easier to do. Same thing with Bitcoin
I don’t think there is one legal use case that can only be solved by a blockchain and not cheaper and faster with a classic database.
Except money laundering, crapto is fantastic for that.
I am sure scamming people out of their money with crypto is legal in a few jurisdictions.
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Bitcoins got lower inflation than gold, that’s a use case right there
Public ledger blockchain is genius technology, whether you can imagine a use-case you consider valid is not a condition for it to actually be an amazing construction.
Just a big lottery you’ll never really win https://youtu.be/4DUkS98yw5Y
Then you don’t understand crypto.
The only crypto that makes kinda sense is the idea of a stablecoin (essentially a layer around a stable currency/reserve), but so far there’s not really a good implementation of one.
All the big crypto coins are just more volatile stocks with shittier tax implications (assuming you don’t try to skirt the law with it)
Yall seem to young to to understand crypto. Its original intent was to combat the crazy bad economic stuff from 2007. It’s not inherently a scam as a category. 2007s banking collapse was really scary when it happened if you were paying attention. It made 9/11 seem like NBD. Unfortunately not much has changed and you’ll probably get to see something similar again.
Huh. I’ve never heard that being the reason, especially when crypto was supposedly made outside US but the 2007 crisis was centered around US.
The original reason is in the name.
You should read some of Satoshi’s stuff about bitcoin, its honestly pretty interesting ,he wrote a lot about the economic implications of it. Actually fun fact in the first Bitcoin block, the first transaction has the title from British newspaper about how the government was bailing out more banks.
Yes. Absolutely. But I see where the appeal comes from. A few years ago I bought some Bitcoin for 50 Euro. A year later it doubled in value. That was nice. And that was moderate compared to when I first got Bitcoin and it was as cheap as dirt and suddenly it’s worth 70k. With the world in the grips of the billionaire class people get desperate for even a chance at moderate wealth. It’s a sad symptom of the fucked up world we’re living in.
The relative value of your bitcoin changed, but the amount of bitcoin itself stayed the same.
Same happens with cash I guess, except it tends to be worth less over time.
8th grade teacher got pissed at us on 9/11 because he thought we were laughing at the fact that a plane had hit the WTC. We were laughing because one of the girls didn’t know what the WTC was. We turned on the TVs to see the second one get hit.
6th grade we had napster while some of us were still bringing in cases of floppies to play games that’d run on the computers
9/11 was high school for me, Columbine mass shooting was around the same time. I went from end of cold war get under your desk drills in early grade school to a few years with no drills aside from tornado, to ending high school with active shooter drills.
4th grade for me, so barely old enough to understand the significance, but definitely old enough to remember airports without TSA, and being able to go all the way to the gate with whomever was flying.
At first they just told I think 7th and 8th grade and let us watch CNN. Told us not to talk about it with the younger kids.
That lasted until a bit before lunch when parents picking up kids sped up. It really ramped up once news hit about the one that crashed in PA as it was less than an hour from us.
That was kinda the wildcard at the time. We all knew that area and there’s not a whole lot out there. Definitely was a worry that it was going to be a much wider attack in the moment.
I had a girl in my classroom watch the second plane hit the tower and said out loud to the room, “wow, what a coincidence.” We were so innocent… and she was so dumb.
Cryptocurrency or cryptography?
The former you don’t really need to understand fully to use, but the latter is vital and indeed brain-melting.
Cryptozoology
I’ll give you five chupacabra for a mothman
I feel both cuddled and attacked
Before 1990?.. fuck you… I have kids born before 1990… elder my ass … I probably understand crypto better than you do…
I’m not bitter. Not at all.
…Dad? Haha I’m about to hit 40 and shitcoins are my brainy boomer dad’s hobby.
Oh I wouldn’t necessarily say it’s a hobby. I tend to believe it’s a method of market manipulation by a few big players and somehow used for money laundering (but that’s my own conspiracy theory 🤣). It’s WAY too volatile for me to “invest” in. I pretty much meant from the techy side like I understand how blockchain works. Like the difference between PoW,PoS,PoA,DPoS… and the math (cryptography,hashing, etc) behind the whole process. I mean I’ve used it before to buy things when I wanted more anonymity (well maybe more obfuscation but now but that’s not even really possible).
And I really didn’t take offense at the whole original statement. I just thought the arbitrary “1990” cut off for elder was just comical. I mean someone born around 1990 is 35/36 and that’s an elder?? Really?? I might have put that number at closer to 1965-1970. There is no way, even when I was in my teens and 20s would I have called a 35 yo an “elder”. That’s just ludicrous.
And I’m a computer nerd and have been since I was single digits. So I understand this kinda stuff way better than my kids.
Ok. Before you get mad. Do you think you are a normal representative of your age group?
If you walk into a room of people you don’t know but who are all likely born within +/-5yrs of you, would you expect to be able to talk about crypto with any sophistication and at least half would be able to follow?
If not, then the generalization is true even if it doesn’t apply to you specifically.
Oh I wasn’t mad, it was meant as more an humorous thing more than anything. I should have added “Now get off my lawn!!”. And yeah a lot of people in my age group wouldn’t understand. I’m also surrounded by a bunch of nerds my age so my perception is a little skewed.
But you might be surprised how many IT folks are in my age group. It was a good job to get into in the 1990s. So there are lots of techy mid to late 50s out there.
You think half of any group of zoomers can talk with sophistication about Crypto?
100%. I doubt any of my kids (millennials and gen z) have any clue about any of this. As far as tech is concerned, I run rings around all of them. But that’s just not their thing. We all have things we’re good at. Just like I can’t do the things they’re good at.
But the original thought wasn’t really wrong. I went from basic phones, to cordless phones, to bag phones, to candy bar type cell phones, to palm pilot phones, to iPhones with more computer power than some of the first Cray super computers. My first computer had 64k of memory and now I throw out 4GB dimms because they’re too small to keep. A lot of shit has changed in 50 years.
The median zoomer can probably talk about it far more accurately than the median gen x-er or boomer
To be fair, us elders had grifts and money laundering too, so crypto is nothing functionally new.
No hate, but this is exactly proving the point of the meme. There’s so many new concepts and paradigms, each so complex and constantly evolving, that we need to rely on familiar comparisons that strip away the true identities of the subject. And I think this is true for pretty much every everyone in this information (bombardment) age, myself included.
People tend to forget that cryptocurrencies are based on cryptography, and were founded on the dream of building a decentralized system, built by the people, free from “big player” censorship and influence, in the wake of the 2008 crisis. If you are on the Fediverse, I guess you share that dream. But then the finance “bros” started coming in and badabing badabang now it’s another asset you trade through your bank like stocks or gold. Then came the NFTs and yes, somehow “crypto” evolved into being the prime speculation and scamming vector.
And the same goes on for every news topic. “Trump!” “Gaza!” “AI!” “Climate!”. Our brains try to reduce these mind-melting concepts hitting us all the time to simplified good/bad or us/them categorizations. And we’re left utterly unable to actually tackle and act upon anything at all.
No, no one is forgetting they’re built on cryptography. It just doesn’t matter. The underlying technology of a thing doesn’t have much bearing on the properties of the thing as far as practical usage goes.
You don’t care what your car is made of as long as it has good fuel efficiency and crash rating. Steel ceramic and aluminum are just tools to that end.Research into cryptocurrency started long before 2008. Academics and odd crypto enthusiasts have been working on it since the 80s.
The intent from the beginning has been a mix of curiosity, paranoia, and buying drugs.
Bitcoin was hardly a “for the people” project. It was initially used almost entirely for black market purchases, largely via silk road. “The people” did not give a fuck about perfect anonymous digital cash. It solved a problem that most people didn’t and still don’t have.
The adoption order was: Math nerds > drug lords > finance > small investors. It’s still not actually adopted as currency by people.
When you create a thing for the purpose of making monetary transactions untraceable, and your first major users are all using it to hide where their money came from from the government, it’s really fair to say that you created a money laundering tool.Bitcoin wasn’t taken over by finance people, they’re the reason it didn’t taper out like previous cryptocurrencies, which either fizzled or were shutdown for being nuggets of financial crime.
Sorry, but then by that argument cryptography itself is bad because “pedos use it”? Criminals will always use privacy-preserving technology/techniques/strategies. Should we renounce our right to have secure communication, or a decentralized currency because of that? Hasn’t this argument been done to death already?
The underlying technology of a thing doesn’t have much bearing on the properties of the thing as far as practical usage goes.
Excuse me, what? Of course it does matter if the backup for all your life’s photos is in an hard disk in your living room, or it’s on Google’s server. Of course it matters if the platform we’re talking on is Lemmy, and not Reddit. It does make a difference if the car you’re driving is gas or electric, where it was made, if it shows you ads or not. What are you going on about? It makes all the difference in the world, but that’s on “the backend” and no one remembers that it does matter
You missed the point and heard one that wasn’t being made.
No one said cryptography was bad, or that cryptocurrencies were bad because they were used for drugs and criminals.
I said that the cryptographic underpinnings of things like Bitcoin are irrelevant, and that what matters is the behavior of the system. It’s history as a vessel for laundering drug money speaks to it being a tool for money laundering, as opposed to some populist tool for freedom taken over by fintech bros. The fintech bros where there before any populist usage even started to take root.The underlying technology of the thing doesn’t matter. Pointing out the properties of things you care about doesn’t contradict that. You care about privacy, reliability, security and all that good stuff. You care that your car is electric because it has lower emissions and lower environmental impact than gas, not just “because it’s electric”.
The means are not the ends.You went on a rant about how there’s too much in the world that confuses people, but I think it might be you who’s a bit confused.
It’s really not proving much of anything. These new “concepts” and “paradigms” are nothing more than buzzwords thrown onto old concepts. Every scam is a scam that’s been done before even if there’s a new layer of glittery wrapping paper over it. Who’re you trying to convince more, the potential suckers or yourself?
The internet is a buzzword thrown onto old concepts? Instantaneous transfer of large amounts of data? Democratization and seamless diffusion of anything, from memes to “money”? “no but crypto is indeed a scam” is completely missing my point, and hitting the meme again
Your point is adding fancy words to make something sound smarter, likely screwing someone along the way, if the track record of the use of “paradigms” is any indication. It’s okay to let at least some things stay simple. If someone broke into my home, I wouldn’t call the cops and report a “spry possession-reappropriating malcontent”, I’d report a thief. Same with crypto, I wouldn’t report a “financial savant”, I’d report a money launderer. You see, sometimes adding fancy, unneeded words to something does nothing but make you sound like a pretentious tool.
“Paradigm” is a word I chose to convey a specific meaning, which is “the way you approach/think about something”. It might be more common in my language, I’m not trying to make either crypto or me sound smarter. I’m for precision of language, if you’re more into newspeak you do you. You also seem to think I’m trying to convince you that “crypto is good”, which is not the case. You have either misunderstood my comment, or are just trying to pick a bone. Either way, that’s not very debatable for a racoon :)
My point is that people fall into fallacies by simplifying things too much, and only looking at the surface. See how your doubling down on “crypto actually bad” is beside it? Granted, I really should’ve picked a different case in point than cryptocurrencies ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I keep saying that humanity’s toys do evolve spectacularly while humans are still working on the same basic impulses they’ve been dealing with for millennia.
Trump is a petty conman who does everything in his power to consolidate as much power in himself as he possibly can so that he can funnel as much money to himself and his gang as he can. That’s not new. The environment he’s doing in may be more complex, or differently set up than in previous iterations, but the core is depressingly mundane.
Gaza is just people hating people and other people supporting different sides while all sides give each other more reasons to hate each other perpetually, some more war-crimey, some less so. Tragic, quagmired to hell and back, but not groundbreaking in and of itself.
As for AI, the framework is the usual capitalists trying to convince everybody that their new best revolutionary thing is a word sorting machine that can sort very, very many words now very fast. Trying to cash in on the hype is the eternal constant, the occasion this time is a very sophisticated chatbot/image generator based on all the materials the inventors could get away with stealing.
And climate stuff is just this generation of capitalists stripping the planet for parts while they can get away with it. The scale is bigger, but vulture capitalism is also not even remotely new.
Just like the principle of singular attributability of data via the blockchain is a fancy way of assigning stuff to one recipient. We’ve had approaches to this before. This time the blockchain’s ledger system is the big new anchor for the human element, which will invariably at first be either grifters or people who wanna bash in other people’s heads with it.
So people who 35years old are elder now.
I’m 37, I’m not old!
Right in the feels. YTMND.
Get back in the lounger grandpa
I can’t. I have to work to afford food and shelter until I die.
Better than hunting and gathering without shelter until you die
Yes.
FUCK YOU! I understand crypto and STILL have a VHS tape I never returned. pfft. arrogant youth. now where do i push to send this to reddit?
“before 1990” ffs. I was expecting “before 1960”
But crypto is borderline useless that consumes more electricity than the entire AI industry while enabling alot of illegal activities and money laundering. I was quite susprised when my drug money found their way into normal people’s lives.
Crypto? Yes, I know what a pyrimid scheme is.
I wouldn’t say all crypto is a pirymid scheme but some of it 100% is, like dogecoin or something. Bitcoin didn’t become worth 1.6 TRillion dollars because of scam, like there’s actual institutional investment into it
When I was a kid, Commander Data from Star Trek TNG was the height of technological possibility. TNG was set in the 2300s.
It looks like hard drives are selling for about 20 bucks a terabyte now. Commander Data had a storage capacity of 100 petabytes.
So today, to buy hard drives equivalent to the capacity Commander Data would cost about $2 million. You would have to be very wealthy to afford that as an individual, but the cost will only get lower. It will still be quite awhile before a random laptop will have a Commander Data’s worth of storage space. But you’re talking decades, not centuries.
Though, this calculation is for the Data that appeared in the original TNG run. His more recent appearance in Star Trek Picard may be different, as his specifications there may canonically differ.
This calculation was only meant to detail the capacity of the original Commander Data, not the more recent Big Data.
For what it’s worth, the capacity of Commander data did very a little bit during the show, but I just chalked that up to a few upgrades.
Besides, I think it’s important to mention that data was not built for storage capacity. He only had as much storage capacity as he realistically would need during his lifetime. Until he could get an upgrade, I suppose.
JESUS HAYTCH CHRIST. I’m watching TNG with my daughter at the moment. Did you have to do me that dirty?
Still, given modern video compression algorithms it’s a solid 93,000,000 hours of video recording at 1GB per hour at decent quality and surely that’s only going to get better with time.
Approx 10,000 years
I like to re-read my favorite science fiction classics and giggle at the author’s mistakes.
In “The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress” a self-aware computer struggles over creating a CGI face for him/herself. Also, iirc, the computer uses tape.
William Gibson has done essays about how much he got wrong in 'Neuromancer," but my personal favorite is the spaceship pilot who never heard of a computer virus.
My favorites are in Asimov. In the Foundation series, one product the traders sell is a nuclear powered ash tray. They employ advanced nuclear plasma manipulation to…quickly atomize cigarette butts.
Or the time there’s this couple. They are traveling to another planet, and they get aboard their personal interstellar spaceship. The society is advanced enough, that that is just something you can own.
What happens as soon as they get onboard their personal FTL interstellar ship? The husband commands his wife to get dinner started.
They employ advanced nuclear plasma manipulation to…quickly atomize cigarette butts.
You have a powerful computer you use to look at cat memes.
I hate to be brutal, but you forced me to take extreme measures
jk
Nitpick, I do believe just like the storage for the actual computer in the ship (isolinear optical at first then more complex in TNG), positronic brain storage is not one to one comparable to what we use. Or rather, a bit may be the same (again, maybe not, I don’t think it’s binary) but how it’s used is a lot different than our slow versions.
To me, the storage isn’t the impressive part; it’s the logic, “thinking”, fine motor control, etc.
The elders had to rewind the movies after watching
I still own a VCR and a vast collection of VHS tapes. I mean, I also pay for streaming services, but without the old 90s commercials for Disney World and previews for movies that were released in 1995, the movies just don’t hit the same.
I don’t have a machine, but can’t throw away some classics. Sometime in the future, someone will watch ‘Videodrome’ as God and nature intended.
How are the VHS cassettes holding up? 30+ years I think is past the average lifespan, do they jam/tear/etc more than they used to?
I haven’t had any tears. Hard to say whether it’s my VCR or the tapes doing the jamming. I’m not very tech savvy, and I was a kid when these were all in use so I haven’t learned how to fix these things. When something doesn’t work right, I usually just take the top off the VCR and wiggle a part, and all goes smoothly after that.
I convert them to USB for people as a side line. Quite rare to find one that won’t play. Even the ones where the spools are white with mold still play ok.
Be Kind. Rewind.
Crypto is an EMP away from being worthless
I’m against crypto but this logic seems same as money is one fire away from being worthless.
Which is true. We just give worth to things to make it easy for transactions.
Also, modern money is also susceptible to an emp, arguably more so than crypto.
I don’t expect them to understand crypto. No one expects them to understand crypto.
I expect them to understand FUCKING FASCISM.
Yeah.
We can move on to “complicated” things like crypto after we’ve made sure people understand basic things like FUCKING FASCISM.
Priorities.
