then its not really a cryptocurrency in any way brought about by bitcoin and all its successors, its just centralized servers with info on it.

to specify, by centralized i mean centralized disbursement

the majority of money is done via changing numbers on private ledgers anyways already, and this was true before bitcoin. banks and nations aren't mailing pallets of $100 to each other.

they are, when it's necessary. the difference is that every $1 a bank has matches $1 worth of a bill (or treasury note) somewhere.

if i sign a message saying that there are now 2000 jstpst Coins, and that i'll give you a jstpst Coin for $1, and you pay me that and then i sign that message to your public key... then we just made a new crypto currency 8) and everyone can see our account balances

this is different than if, say, you gave me $1 and i stored that in a special vault and i stored that information in an SQL database and i double-pinky-promised the government to keep it safe.

tangential: just as banks "build on top" of paper dollars with this system of accounting and balancing (so they don't need to mail paper bills to one another), something called the "lightning network" builds on top of bitcoin. it's meant to make payments fast, tiny, and cheap. it actually works, but not everyone uses it.

why not just have money in a bank account at that point, and then its regulated and insured by the FDC

yeah you can do that. nobody is forced to stake. staking is entirely optional.

this is taking for granted that everyone would see it and immediately take countermeasures. there is none built in, its just expected that people will see it and stop.

there are plenty of countermeasures built in, like slashing. that's automatic. human eyes and hands correcting for bad behavior is the worst-case scenario that none of the countermeasures work.

that sounds less like a currency to me and more like a speculative commodity, where people buy into it in the hopes of making money. that seems to be the primary use of any cryptocurrency.

yeah, it is right now, except in some places where it's commonly used as a currency. as noted, you can use a stablecoin if you want something that doesn't vary greatly in value.

ethereum is one good example because it allows you to do computation using the blockchain as a computer. this is because ethereum's scripting language is stronger than bitcoin's. this is basically how DAI and other ethereum tokens (specifically, "ERC20" tokens) exist.

in addition there is a tiny list of places where you can use it to exchange for goods. i could trade a magic card for my friend to buy me lunch, but that doesn't make it a currency.

it does if a lot of people are using magic cards as a standard. if there were a tiny but noteworthy list of places using magic cards as a standard for trade, then yeah, it'd be a currency.

tangential, but one of the big reasons to use cryptocurrencies is that you can kind of see how the money is spent. if i give UNICEF 0.1 ETH, i can see how they're spending their cryptocurrencies. if i give UNICEF $200, then i just have to trust them on their reputation.

and, as awful as this sounds, item-duplication glitches in MMOs would basically disappear if transactions existed on a blockchain. there's a lot of reasons that kind of datastructure makes sense in the design of an MMORPG. there is so much blockchain/cryptocoin snakeoil bullshit but this is like... one of the three legitimate usages of NFTs.

why not just use the USD instead of a stablecoin? and what is backing it? other coins, or USD?

one would buy DAI if they want a coin that has a stable value while also being able to be converted (for free) to other ethereum tokens.

i don't really know how all the technical details of how DAI works so i can't answer that for you any better than their whitepaper can: https://makerdao.com/en/whitepaper/

Apparently it's "collateral backed", so it seems USD.

Anyways, this conversation has really diverged from the original discussion. to circle back, i was responding to this criticism of proof-of-stake:

so whoever has the most for the longest is determining who gets more? what is even the point of cryptocurrency then? it all just seems like grifts upon grifts, reinventing the current state of things but even worse this time.

which (1) proof-of-stake is better than proof-of-work in terms of "trickle up", but that's just a problem with capitalism. math and software isn't gonna fix it. (2) it doesn't impact the value of cryptocurrency. (3) i feel like we've had substantial discussion to agree that cryptocurrency isn't a "grift".