Bitcoin and Digital Currencies

Sure, Whatever you say, Coinbase...

The other thing about these exchanges that makes them so risky is that because they control their "depositors'" wallets, someone who compromises their security can loot the funds. It's happened several times, and again there is no insurance or other guarantee for the assets. Heck, the owners could just take everything and run, or quietly siphon off the funds for themselves. That too has happened before.

The theoretical gain in privacy from "government intrusion" comes with a heavy, heavy cost in security risk.

Edited by Fighteer on May 11th 2022 at 1:45:49 PM

This reminds me a bit of why, in the Middle Ages, Jewish banks were generally a lot more reliable than Christian banks (at least until the ruler du jour decided to seize the bank directly and impoverish a ton of their own citizens).

Jewish banks could charge interest on loans, Christian banks couldn't. So with Jewish banks, the owners were incentivized to run them fairly and properly because the more loans you get, the more money you make, and you never really need to dip into the vault more than necessary and they'd get more back than they started with. With Christian banks, they had constant and chronic problems with the owners skimming from the reserves all the time, just making sure to not touch the money from the powerful people.

There's a reason banks have so many regulations and rules and are expected to operate in certain ways, and places like coinbase are just proving why that is.

El Salvador faces potential default after president invests huge amounts of national treasury in Bitcoins.

Someone smarter than me can probably exclusion this better, but I think El Salvador's president bought a lot of Bitcoins with the country's money and now the country's finances are in jeopardy because of Bitcoins plummeting value?

That and the country had some large debts even before. Having a typical wannabe dictator strongman president did the rest.

Those poor people in El Salvador having to suffer under an idiot of a leader.

But as for the leader thinking about investing in Bitcon, my reaction:

So I was watching this Upper Echelon Gamers video about the Terra crash and apparently it's more serious than I had realized. Either a market trend started a run on TerraUSD, like a conventional bank run, or someone with a lot of money deliberately targeted it for manipulation. Its collapse has pushed bitcoin down by 25% as well.

The lack of any oversight or governance over these crypto projects is really biting them in the ass right now.

Edited by Fighteer on May 12th 2022 at 7:29:50 AM

I imagine Nayib Bukele thought that investing in Bitcoin with El Salvador's money would somehow stabilise Bitcoin since it would be covered "de facto" by real world currency.

Reality however keeps showing that plans like that are as plausible as Cryptoland actually becoming a thing.

It's funny though, the more crypto bullshit keeps happening, the more I'm convinced that libertarianism and its derivatives are a mistake in practice.

Seoul Police say that they recieved a report that an unknown person attempted to break into Terra founder Kwon Do's house

According to the police, Seoul Seongdong police station received a report that an unknown person pressed the doorbell to Kwon's house and asked Kwon's wife if her husband was home. The intruder then ran away. Kwon's wife immediately called the police and filed a request for personal protection. According to the police, the intruder followed another resident through the main entrance of Kwon's apartment building, which is locked with a password. The police do not know whether the intruder is a crypto investor.

Edited by minseok42 on May 13th 2022 at 12:32:07 AM

That vid also mentioned that they even froze trading to keep things from getting worse.

Ya know, like a bank does.

Crypto is like someone thinking they should reinvent the wheel and coming up with ones shaped like right triangles because they don't understand why wheels are round.

Update: The man who broke into the apartment building of Do Kwon turned out to be a cryptocurrency streamer

Seoul police said that the wife of Do Kwon, founder of the cryptocurrency Luna and Terra USD asked the police for protection after a man broke into Kwon's apartment building and pressed their doorbell, asking if Mr.Kwon was there. It turned out that he was a streamer who streams videos about cryptocurrency. He said that he bought 2 billion KRW (~1.6 million USD) worth of Luna, which lost almost all of its value today.

Edited by minseok42 on May 13th 2022 at 9:59:09 PM

That reminds me of the accounts who spam replies on Twitter saying that they lost all their money on crypto investments and can't feed their three hundred children or whatever. Obvious scam, but there are a lot of idiots out there.

Edited by Fighteer on May 13th 2022 at 8:53:54 AM

The vid also pointed out that this isn't even the first time Do Kwon ran a "stable" crypto into the ground.

Even worse, he literally dared rich assholes to attempt a market run against Terra on Twitter. It seems they took him up on the dare.

Yeah, a lot of this boils down to Do Kwon being a fucking arrogant idiot.

The Venn diagrams of "fucking arrogant idiot" and "person who operates a cryptocurrency" are very nearly unity.

Ironic how the lolbertarian crypto kingpin's wife called the cops for protection, when they spew shit about how decentralization is supposed to save the world.

Almost as ironic as said crypto having to enact their own financial controls to keep it from crashing even worse like actual banks do.

Rare sentence moment: Madonna defends NFTs made of her giving birth to trees and insects as art.

Another thing that's ironic was cryptobros insulting the poor and then turning around and want sympathy because they don't have money anymore

On Twitter, the crypto bros kept saying things like 'people who work for a living are stupid' and 'if you're poor it's your fault'. Hell, Do Kwon, the guy behind Terra, even said "I don't debate the poor on Twitter" when an economist pointed out the flaws in Terra. I can't help but taste the sweet schadenfreude

Edited by minseok42 on May 13th 2022 at 11:04:46 PM

Okay, so Madonna is not entirely wrong, but she's missing the point. Images, videos, graphics, etc., are definitely art... even randomly generated monkey pictures. They satisfy the literal definition of the term. They may not be good art, but that's irrelevant. If someone makes an animation of trees growing from her digital vagina, that's art too.

However, an NFT is just a token that points to a URL. It is not, in and of itself, art. It's only when taken as a whole with the thing it purports to represent that it could be considered art, but this is at best a bad take and at worst a deliberately misleading one.

This isn't a perfect analogy, but it's sort of like buying a painting at a store, tacking the receipt to your wall, and saying, "Look at my art."

Edited by Fighteer on May 14th 2022 at 8:24:35 AM

Frankly, that's being generous — I'd sooner consider the tacking of the receipt on the wall to be art.

Crypto Company Turns Games It Doesn’t Own into NFTs, Quickly Deletes Them

Some of the included games were owned by huge companies like Epic and Blizzard. Tim Sweeny also mentioned looking into legal action.

This stuff makes me wonder in how many more ways can Crypto guys look like clowns.

See, I keep going back and forth on this. There are a lot of really ignorant and arrogant people out there in the crypto space, but do they really understand copyright and IP law so poorly that they think they can resell someone else's product just because it's "free", or do they know exactly what they're doing and are hoping to squeeze some cash out before anyone notices?

After all, the losers aren't these folks; the losers are the people who bought their "NFT games" and now have nothing to show for it because the games were taken down. The worst part about it is that the use of NFTs actually makes it worse for buyers. If they had bought a downloadable emulator and ROM, it would keep working on their computers even if the seller shut down. But as an NFT, everything goes away. The buyer has fewer rights than they would have in a direct sale.

Edited by Fighteer on May 16th 2022 at 11:51:27 AM

Considering that reselling a game as your own product without permission is a copyright violation on its own regardless of being an NFT, then yeah they know what theyre doing with one final gambit to squeeze before the NFT industry derails.

Edited by M1gamiTensei on May 16th 2022 at 8:50:39 AM