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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • This is victim blaming. He isn’t at fault for trusting a company to have the bare minimum of respect for his property and autonomy, the company is at fault for not actually having that respect. Whether the company is actually trustworthy is as immaterial as saying someone “deserved” to have their car stolen because they forgot to lock it.

    You can criticize him for not being cautious in this low-trust environment, but don’t let it get to the point where the party actually at fault gets off without criticism.




  • Hm, yeah I think you’re right. I was wondering why it wasn’t sitting right in my head. Deflation encourages hoarding because the value of each unit keeps increasing so if you spend now instead of later you lose some amount of potential value. I don’t think it was meant to be a scam though. In this case I’d consider it ignorance of the knock-on effects later exploited rather than an explicit conspiracy from the get-go.


  • Bitcoin at least is inherently deflationary because there’s a fixed market cap of 21 million bitcoins. Once all of those are mined, all value from then on is some fraction of a fraction of one of those, thus they decrease in value over time. I should also note, I like Bitcoin as a proof of concept but don’t think it’s viable as a currency, and PoW isn’t viable as a consensus protocol (although it demonstrated that such consensus protocols are possible).


  • “Squandering” is a great description of what they’ve been used for. The only implementations I’ve seen thus far that seem genuinely useful are FileCoin and a few decentralized computing attempts like ICP (not Ethereum). I could see a potential niche use-case for NFTs to decentrally coordinate ownership of abstract properties like domain names, but speculative monkey jpegs ain’t it chief.


  • It’s fiat, I won’t argue it was ever going to be a good currency with built-in deflation, but that’s what it was originally meant to be. It’s long since become too volatile to be anything but a speculative asset, though. It does seem curious to me what that says about the actual distinction between legitimate currencies, stock options, and pyramid scheme buy-ins.