ellynu

ellynu wrote

Israel is white, Palestine is brown/Israel is white, Palestine is muslim

this is definitely a way that people are gonna defend them but there is also a large collection of jewish israeli people who have a long family history in the middle east and definitely would not be considered white in any sense, and i feel like that's important to understand too.

the mizrahi/sephardi haredim (super orthodox) conservative religious party in the knesst holds more seats than the ashkenazi equivalent, for example.

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ellynu wrote

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.

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ellynu wrote

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

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ellynu wrote

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?

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