just_test

fiat currencies at least have the value of being a generally accepted item with an exchange value that is easy to use to trade for things, and its backing is usually the existence of the states that made them and the institutions and laws they use to back things. bitcoin/ethereum/etc are mostly useful as a speculative commodity. in the terms of capital, they are much more M-C-M (exchanging money for a commodity, at the hope of selling it later for more money) than C-M-C (producing something to get something else that you need).

if tether, for example, was operating by minting regular currency rather than cryptocurrency, it would be so obviously a giant scam. creating fake dollars to buy other fake dollars to bump up their price to back the fake dollars they made and repeat.

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

its backed by other coins, like other stablecoins including tether, which is notorious and involved in pumping up the price of other coins

that's just a problem with capitalism. math and software isn't gonna fix it

this is true

it doesn't impact the value of cryptocurrency

i am still not convinced it has any real value, rather than just a bubble backed by the hopes and dreams of software devs and desires of grifters.

i feel like we've had substantial discussion to agree that cryptocurrency isn't a "grift".

it definitely is built upon grifts

yes

the reason for choosing cryptographic currencies is that you have a choice between paper currencies (and so you enter an arms race of counterfeiting) or a digital currency (which you'd probably want to secure, using cryptography).

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. 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. all of this time and energy spent on cryptocurrency is, from that perspective, a complete and utter waste of time, at best.

The block reward would be small, but each party would be making some amount of interest on their stake. So, each party might earn 5% of their stake (rather than 5/6900 %.)

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

one thing to note is that the 51% means they break a threshhold of probability assumptions, but won't have total control over the cryptocurrency. and when other validators see their bad behavior, their stake gets "slashed", so their coins just disappear.

how many validators are needed? what if they can't be? what if they could maliciously do so?

the common thing is that, in addition to a 51% attack being costly, everyone will see it and either (1) fork the currency, or (2) stop using it.

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.

also, who's saying it doesn't work as a currency?

i was referring to this, where you differentiated between making coins and making money:

in proof-of-stake, extra coins are made by sitting on coins. money is made by buying those coins with money, and then sitting on the coins hoping others will buy them for more money later.

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. 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.

DAI, built as an ethereum token, will retain a value pegged to $1 USD

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

i disagree with communism as being definitionally moneyless (unless we mean strictly marxist communism, i guess)

that would be the correct definition, yes.

so: how would you go about implementing that labour voucher? i mean this. i really can't see anything better than a cryptographically secured system for doing this

not an expert but i imagine you could do that just fine and not need a blockchain or anything. especially considering how slow they are at doing transactions and you would expect people to be creating and then destroying one like, once a day or so? billions of changes in state every day when cryptocurrencies seem to top out around a million or so currently, even if they continue improving that's off by a factor of 1000 or so. the cost per transaction seems really steep too.

or, 6,900 people get together and put together $10 each worth of ethereum. it's called pooling and it's been around forever

so everyone gets 1/6900 or 0.014492753% of what ever percent chance of a reward whenever more ethereum is made? seems like a raw deal to me, honestly. why wouldn't rich people have, say, 51%+ of the value of ETH in rich stakeholders split their holdings into 32 ETH chunks, become a ton of validators, then only validate themselves getting anything? the ethereum docs seem to just suggest this wouldn't happen because it would lose value, but what if they just work secretly? why assume that a bunch of people with tons of money are gonna act rationally? i mean... have you seen markets?

in proof-of-stake, extra coins are made by sitting on coins. money is made by buying those coins with money, and then sitting on the coins hoping others will buy them for more money later.

so cryptocurrency is not a currency, it is a commodity you trade money for to sit on in hopes it gains more value? what gives it value that say, beanie babies didn't have?

this isn't a problem with proof-of-stake. this isn't tied to choice of consensus mechanism, and this problem isn't unique to cryptocurrencies.

except it is a problem with it because the value of it is a bubble, and it apparently doesn't even work as a currency? doesn't have to be unique to cryptocurrencies to be a huge problem with them.

currencies will still be a part of communist economies

this is not true, categorically so. communism being the stateless, classless, moneyless society with common ownership of the means of production. the lower stage would use labour vouchers, which are non-transferable and not currency, then later wouldn't need them any more.

and looking up ethereum's proof of stake model

Proof-of-stake is the underlying mechanism that activates validators upon receipt of enough stake. For Ethereum, users will need to stake 32 ETH to become a validator. Validators are chosen at random to create blocks and are responsible for checking and confirming blocks they don't create.

32 ETH is currently $68,818.56. i will never see that much money in my entire life. money is made by being really rich and sitting on it?

bees are good because they make hexagons

6 is a good number

tbh i kind of assumed that, given this is a predominately leftist forum, that there would like cryptocurrencies and see them as good

i'm a communist so i'm not really into trying to make new currencies inside of capitalism, or managing current ones either

it'd be silly to dismiss proof-of-stake coins

why? all of my reading on it makes it seem like a sort of defense of ethereum et al, "oh some time in the future we'll invent the way to do the thing that makes it okay".

it's free to make a new cryptocurrency, so if rich fuckers are redistributing wealth a little bit because they won't even pay someone to understand things for them, then that's actually cool and good.

based on my knowledge of marx and cryptocurrency it seems to me like its basically petite bourgeois peeps pushing money around.

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.

the planet's dyin, cloud

motorcycle is mike and bicycle is bike

the moon is a fucking normie?!? 😡

will they bring henry cavill's mustache back?

thats rough buddy

i love my girlfriend hours

big solar creates them to trick us

this would mean the speed of light is also slightly off because they used mirrors and lasers to measure this

my moon could beat up ur moon

more like getting the banned back together am i right

it's kinda interesting in the sense that when you look at the two big companies making closed source operating systems, they are completely opposite on that. can you imagine if microsoft were to cut 32-bit application support like apple did?

that's the policy. people don't care why it doesn't work, they just want their software to work and not break. and microsoft has their employees make sure that happens.

read this pdf for some fun examples of the problems they have had to deal with, here's one of my favorites:

"One card game tried to make changes to the system.ini file but ended up destroying it. The game read the system.ini file a line at a time into an 80-character buffer, made any necessary changes, and wrote the result to a temporary file. If any line contained more than 80 characters, the buffer overflowed and corrupted the next variable on the stack, which happened to be the name of the temporary file! Once the changes were made, the program deleted the system.ini file and renamed the temporary file to system.ini. But the rename operation failed because the name of the temporary file was corrupted by the extra-long line.The result: a system with no system configuration file.In other words, installing this program rendered your system unbootable.The fix from the operating system side was to go through all the components of the system that used the system.ini file and make sure none of them ever wrote lines longer than 80 characters."

i believe windows using the backslash to this day is the result of an absurd level of backwards compatibility. ms-dos didn't have directories originally, and they used / for switches instead of -. so for file directories, they used \.