What does /leftpol/ think of cryptocurrency?

Its good to fuck with porky and that it does. Revolutionary activity may come to rely on it or a derivative of it in the future and probably does to an extent now

Like gold, it has value from being fetishized, and that's about it. Bear markets in gold last MUCH longer than stock market bear markets, and I suspect the same to happen to cryptocurrencies. Although, unlike gold, Bitcoin is very easily replaced by something that has the same qualities but better (altcoins), so if they can't keep up the hype, Bitcoin could easily fall back to it's fair value of 0 (practically near 0).

This. Cryptocurrency is one of the best solutions to labour vouchers I've ever heard

Can we stop having these threads? This question is so fucking stupid.

I'll add gold does have some intrinsic value, but the added value is basically just fetishization

You couldn't have made it any more obvious that you have no idea what bitcoin is or how it works.>>1870531

It's kind of funny what Bitcoiners consider decentralization. Instead of a central group that could manipulate transactions and crash the value of the currency, there's 2 or three mining pools that could manipulate transactions and crash the value of the currency.

So traditional currency has the Fed and banks. Bitcoin has

To stop that manipulation would require -gasp- a central body of -gasp- Bitcoin core devs - and aren't they -gasp- centralized?

DAG consensus (Byteball, Iota) seems to have an actual decentralized consensus method, because the proof of work blockchain is fucking stupid waste of energy and doesn't live up to it's promises. Just gold rush LARPing.

The idea is that it's cryptography applied to economic exchange. So with cryptography, there are public and private keys etc. which ensure an idea of identity, i.e. I know who you are because its exceptionally unlikely you were able to forge a private key. Taking this and applying it to currency was nothing that hadn't been tried before, but bitcoin did it with the idea of a public ledger secured with the cost of energy through computing power. In other words, the way everyone agrees on transactions is to go with whoever has spent the most energy to validate a given set of transactions. This is similar to the labour theory of value, in at least superficial sense, since its reliant on the sunk cost of the production of the transactions to give value to the chain. Anyway, this removes the need for trust, to an extent, and that's why its primary use is in dark net markets

It's some crazy shit
wolfstreet.com/2017/07/11/what-is-going-on-with-crypto-currencies-collapse/

that's what i thought. i'm just sorry for some of the people who believed the meme.

Yeah, the network has problems with gigantic pools that have too much hashpower, but that's a bit of a hyperbole, no?

Also, to say that the core dev team is in any way "centralized" is a fucking joke. There's a variety of conflicting interests and opinions, and if the users and mining nodes don't like something the devs do, they can just not to update and still use the old software (which someone else can pick up and start developing because its open source). This is the whole idea behind the Aug 1 hardfork hysteria.

Classy

This, there's no impetus to go with the core devs decision on a project like this if you don't want to. It's not like they have the keys to bitcoin and they can just change it whenever they want to, if they hard fork you can just tell them to fuck themselves and run with the old chain. See ethereum

I'll word it another way, Bitcoin claims decentralization by moving the consensus method away from a tradititional governing body and over to 2-3 people that managed to harness the power of the most amount of transistors, as well as the core developers.

It's just a change in governing methods, not real decentralization.

Bitcoin just achieved what libertarians strive for subconsiously or not: bloat, waste and speculation.

The good thing (if you are big into technological progress) is that the attention paid to Bitcoin is causing the digital currency space to develop faster.

Seems like the argument of "people vote with their dollars in ancapistan". People aren't going to be paying day to day attention on whether or not to update their virtual speculation "currency" wallet every day if for some crazy reason it reached mass adoption.

Plus whenever there's a hard fork the price crashes.

This is the whole idea behind the Aug 1 hardfork hysteria.

Could someone explain this and Bitcoin for people that only know that it's a cryptocurrency.

i'm so sorry user, bitcoin a good boy who dindu nuffin.

All I know is That Guy T shills Bitcoin so it's more than likely evil.

It's not the concept that I have a problem with in your statement, it's the degree. To say that it's literally 2 to 3 people is hilariously delusional. I agree with you in that there's lots of better alts that do decentralize better (like LTC with its special snowflake hashing system that's ASIC unfriendly and ETH that needs miners to be Turing complete) but you're basically on the edge of going on an Alex Jones tier rant about the crypto Illuminati.
The average joe using this might not, but the miners that carry the network definitely will. The failure of the ancapistan argument is that it fails when considering inelastic goods, and cryptocurrencies are anything but.

And then normally immediately recovers as people realize how fucking retarded worry about it is. t. Ethereum

You're not wrong, Bitcoin never will reach mainstream adoption because its a slow, bloated and costly system that has no real advantage over centralized systems. The purpose of bitcoin is its use in applications where people don't trust a central authority, as in drug deals and the like. Having 2 or 3 mining pools is still decentralized enough for this purpose, really unless there's collusion, but the likelihood is that this isn't in their economic interest (but I acknowledge it could be, hypothetically, if they short a shit ton of it, for example). A hard fork, again, isn't in their interest because of the crash, but its not likely that people will avoid a hard fork if it jeopardizes the system's decentralisation because the crashes are usually non-permanent, as points out.

Bitcoin is going to be implementing several changes that are going to make previous versions of the bitcoin software incompatible with with newer versions. Traditionally, large scale changes have preserved backwards compatibility with various roundabout implementations (a "soft fork") but it's getting to the point where the changes that need to be made for the network to scale properly need to come in the form of a hardfork. This would be a huge issue if the changes being proposed are very contentious and divisive in the community, but the current changes being pushed for have like a 90%+ approval rating (from the mining network, core dev team and various affiliates). There's been various rumors of backroom drama, but then again there always are when shit like this happens. The recent crash in bitcoin has been mostly blamed on people pulling their money out into traditional currency in case shit goes south and the network implodes.

So they're not doing segwit? Damn, I'm confused now

Segwit is still happening, the hardfork is the Nov 5 blocksize increase from 1MB to 2 MB

So the bitcoin equivalent of the Great Depression. just replace the gold standard and gold to the bitcoin. At least that's how I understand it.

And from what I understand while segwit may not be an outright hard fork anyone running a non-segwit node post Aug 1 is going to be playing a very dangerous game

There's a lot of people that hold that opinion, but there's also a reason I referred to it as "hysteria". The rule of thumb for markets is that if EVERYONE sees a crisis coming, it probably wont come (t. Y2K)

So if a lot of people opt out from it do to fears of the market crashing it will crash and if people don't buy into hysteria there will be little to no problems besides the people who stay on the soon to be obsolete software. If I understand correctly.

What I don't get is how bitcoins can be mined out of nothingness and still they somehow have value. How does that work?

No. It's not due to fears of the market crashing, it's due to fears of the entire currency splitting (hence the term fork) and all the associated problems that come with it. Having this sort of thing be a self fulfilling prophecy where people rush out en masse and permanently damage the price would have been a danger a few years ago, but now there's a lot more cool heads and steady hands involved in the whole thing that aren't going to be so easily shaken. Bitcoin has survived far worse things (look into the Mt. Gox debacle).
Also not necessarily true. The reason this particular upgrade is contentious is because it has some serious technical implications for the mining nodes. Even if the pre upgrade hysteria sumply weren't a thing, if the upgrade some how has unintended consequences for the network it may still destroy the price due to actual technical factors (i.e. fundamentals). This is simply a possibility, and in this case i don't think it's a likely one.

The hard thing about crypto is that it's a clusterfuck of both balls-to-the-wall speculation and very new software concepts with many unknown social, economic and technical implications.

it's currency

It's not just currency; the blockchain technology can be used for lots of stuff that require secure transactions. Its going to be a huge thing with smart contracts if they can solve the scaling issues.

The currencies might bring about a huge change in capitalism as we know it, so its still something important to understand. I hate how some people here are so anti-technology muh musty garl margs books circlejerk. Megaporkies have taken interest because it could mean a destruction of their present banking system that they manipulate. If it takes off it means yet another stake in the heart of nation-states; global instant currency free of state monetary/fiscal policy, taxation and the associated privacy loss. Of course they can manipulate some crypto currency with big orders or taking over the exchanges or the mining, but then nothing stops people from using another crypto…

I am thinking about put some more of my few spare porkybux into ETH with the latest downturn; it's likely to rise after the whole August debacle.

Could you provide a short tl;dr about this, at least to know what the gist of it is before diving in? Already have tons of shit to read fam.

"Mine out of nothingness" is a bit of a misconception. A bitcoin (or a certain amount of bitcoin) represents a certain amount of computational power that was put in to validating a transaction ledger. The whole point of the bitcoin network is that it's a method to essentially crowdsource financial recordkeeping, which is what "mining" is (cryptographically validating a ledger with computational power). People get bitcoin in return for doing the computational heavy lifting

I think you've fallen for the smart contracts meme a bit too hard, friend. Companies don't need to have trustless computing, really, and if they did, the most cost-efficient way to do it would not be to do it on the ETH blockchain or anything else. They have some limited application in multisig, gambling and some other ideas, but smart contracts aren't going to take over the world

There's potential in the related technology for economic planning especially regarding privacy. Too bad it's basically just a get rich quick scheme right now. I mean, the idea of mining is incredibly wasteful. Because bitcoin et al are currencies, they need to be artificially scarce to be useful, so they have a system where people "mine" (brute-force an encryption puzzle) to add new coins to the market. This means there are big server farms constantly burning electricity to try every possible password to get the rupees. Those computers could be doing basically the same thing but with, say, software that simulates protein folding and helps build a research database that will help us understand prion diseases (google [email protected]/* */).

ETH smart contracts are Turing complete my man. With the right framework support, you could do shit like host websites, run FEA and CFD simulations and provide various other IT related services. Conventional smart contracts are just the tip of the iceberg.

See

Cryptocurrency is not going to make a huge difference to capitalism. It's still fundamentally money.

It's good.

why would I want this?

sonm.io/

I still don't get it. Can't you just let a computer run and mine Bitcoins ad infinitum?

Don't be idiotic. Obviously the fundamentals of capital ownership and wage slavery remain unaltered, but their expressions and the extent to which capitalism fucks the world over change dramatically, and we need to understand how it is so if we hope to ever defeat it.

But Bitcoin isn't decentralized. The pools could hypothetically get together and manipulate the transactions. The dev teams can blacklist whoever they want from using their "free" software, forcing users to fork/upgrade.

Sure it's improbable for the miners to do something like that, but it's also improbable for the Fed to credit randomly people's bank accounts illegally without any bank realizing something is off, telling the press, and causing the largest financial shitstorm in the history of man.

I like the idea of a decentralized payment system. But the only virtual currencies I see that don't simply shift consensus to some different group of people is DAG consensus. If I understand correnctly, DAG is a completely decentralized consensus model, payments are verified by the nodes on the fly. No mining, no blockchains, no weird and laughably wasteful competition for computational power access like in BTC or LTC

It is, at its heart, a Ponzi scheme. It's a scam for marks, by marks. However I've come to the conclusion that its relentless mockers were wrong. Instead of creating Buttcoin, they should have just bought a hundred. At any point in time you would be richer to have bought done coins, stuffed them in a drive and forgotten about it. Not follow the the scams, the humiliations, the bubbles, the quixotic dramas. Somehow, despite being ridiculous and stupid, it was a mistake to not buy in back then.

Yes. But the way it works means that doing this isn't viable anymore. In 2008, it was.

You don't get some certain amount of bitcoins per CPU cycle. You basically have to randomly solve a hard problem. You might never solve one now.

scratch that, I like the idea of a decentralized ledger system. I still need to make up my mind if there's any possible way for a "currency" to be both stable and decentralized, my gut reaction is : definitely not.

It was started by a group made up entirely of Ron Paul libertarians. If you were Online during the 2008 election you know who that is. They loved the idea because it was a currency that fundamentally out of control of monetary policy. America Libertarians are skeptical of the federal reserve and "fiat" money. Bitcoin represents (actually, is) a currency that is virtually cannot be regulated.

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Go read "Towards A New Socialism" right now.

Hey, I had this idea in the Soviet Cybernetics thread as a way to connect people to perform the linear optimizations and then store the plan updates from it, and people were shooting me down for it! What would you know?!

Post-Cybersyn economic cybernetics of ours will be a good response to it. As they stand, cryptocurrencies are dysfunctional accelerationist cancer. They prove the potential viability of bringing together cybernetic planning and communization theory IMO, but also in practice have proven Nick Land's predictions correct so far.
it's Holla Forums, newfag

The dev teams can't blacklist anyone. How would a blacklist against a particular user or miner by the devs even work? Would it be an IP ban that's trivial to circumvent? Would you have some big, overtly complicated heuristic that tries to ID blacklisted users? Would you put in hard coded blocks on transactions from one particular wallet so that the blacklisted user can just make another wallet in a few milliseconds or 50,000 wallets in a few minutes to obfuscate their identity?

Which chapter does he cover digital labor vouchers?

He discusses labor vouchers starting in Ch2 and runs with the theme for most of the first 2/3rds of the book where he discusses labor time calculation. There's already an algorithm posted online using his part-labor-time, part-in-kind method. We can then tack on a system of accounts using an automated system of PGP encryption where (via an app interface connecting with the core system of databases and supercomputers by means of a low-level protocol like TCP) firms send daily values (commented-out text which contains a function with an ID and number of hours worked and which job) for how much an account-owner in question has worked to a database to manage attaching labor values to these. Then, run those values through the algorithm (supercomputer scrolls through database columns and inputs values into the calculation accordingly) and distribute vouchers as determined by the answer to the problem with the given inputs. He doesn't discuss them outright because the internet did not exist at the time, but the possibility is definitely there because of his work. We actually don't even need Blockchain, although a complete reimagining of the proposed system on a pure in-kind explicitly communist basis and using something like SONM's solution alongside lexicographic tiers for products and the solving of an optimization problem called a "mixture problem" is something which I'm considering as a project.
I've derailed this thread, haven't I?

Literally the biggest spook that has ever existed. Even paper money and coins have some value.

A cancer to humanity.

We burn coal to generate electricity, force slaves to mine for minerals, polute the planet by making lots of graphics cards, produce lots of electronic waste which gets dumped in the third world to be burned and picked through by children for scraps, all to solve meaningless math problems to get fake digital points with the sole purpose of exchanging them for money.

Because bitcoin is in freefall right now, and they need more people to buy into the scam.

Reasonably fond of the idea of anonymous money despite caveats about empowering the bourgeoisie to dodge taxes.
Loathe a bunch of other stuff that basically come down to "If this was ever used as the primary currency it would be a fucking nightmare. We have monetary policy authorities for a reason."
(I'm open to the idea of decentralizing monetary policy somehow, but without it - just letting the thing go freely without any kind of policy direction, as bitcoin seems to do - it's really more a fun way to gamble than a cash replacement.)

At the moment my understanding is that they're really more assets like gold than actual currencies (which iirc is also the legal status.) for a whole bunch of reasons. (Money is fucking weird.)

the only people who like bitcoin are ancaps or people who want to buy drugs on the internet anonymously

really makes you think, you know.

Cryptocurrency's for niggers

MUH BLOCK CHAIN

...

I could in ironically program this. Where's the algorithm? Maybe I'll start a thread about it in /gnussr/

*unironically

pastebin.com/gM9yrNP3
There's already a thread there on it, but the board's dead. Stay here.

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Andreas antanopolous disagrees with you
He insists you could work the protocol around bad actors with a blacklist.
youtube.com/watch?v=ncPyMUfNyVM

If the solution to the centralization of github commits is to fork every time you don't like a dev decision (which has happened… hundreds times now), how is that not inflation of the money supply that the Libertarians claim they are fighting against?

...

I'd use C like any sane person tbh.

Are you dumb?

It's mainly numerical computations so maybe fortran?

What's wrong with C?
Actually it just occurred to me, don't a lot of banks use Haskell? That might be the optimal choice just to go with the industry standard.

People make mistakes and write unsafe code. It happens every time.

Its a language meant to be a close to the metal, yet high level language.
It is purposefully designed to let you do unsafe things to increase performance. But this freedom allows you to fuck up.

I don't know why a mutual credit system hasn't been made yet. It would be easy to do with a type of crypto currency.

I feel like there's potential to do some kind of collectivism-friendly currency (or maybe some other, novel use) with crypto/blockchain stuff, but I can't articulate it.

Wait, seriously? I can understand CFD and FEA because it's just math-heavy processes being calculated by the miners (did I get it right?), but how does website hosting work? The actual site data is encrypted into the blockchain or what?

O to go back to these halcyon days, when we played gaily on the rolling green hills of the innocence we took for granted, and "alt-right" and "social justice" were but meaningless terms rather than meaningless ideologies.

See, now you gotta explain that too. If I understand correctly, all that electricity goes towards calculating something that ensures transactions are done correctly, and these transactions are Bitcoin's own money transfers. Is that right?

I remember playing counter strike source on cs_office, and when the election results were in the server admin spammed "OMG A NIGG IS PREZ". Those where the comfiest of days fam.

There is literally nothing wrong with Python.

good because it eliminates the need for banks but bad bc it is a currency

I hate proof-of-work as a concept in crypto currencies. It's extremely wasteful. It's like this: When two people have a contract with each other, do you think the promise in the contract is something reliable if the contract is made of platinum? I just find that reasoning bizarre. Any sort of trade system should rather follow a web-of-trust principle. So a person I might want to trade with is graded as high trust not because he blew processing power on bullshit, nor because the result of majority voting of some population made of people I don't trust for the most part, but because the people I trust in turn trust him. Other people with different priorities and different friends get different recommendations by the system. I guess that's what DAG consensus also refers to (never heard the term before, but I know what a directed acyclic graph is, so I guess it's that sort of trust network).

I remember when people hyped that site up as the go-to place for serious uptodate information about Bitcoin value and immediately lost respect for anybody who pronounced that Mount Gocks. Proper pronunciation: Magic the Gathering Online Exchange.

everything changed when social media really hit mainstream. remember when people werent eager to give away personal information on the internet?

it only serves two main purposes:

1. giving a high return to early adopters who invested a lot

2. black market stuff drugs, human trafficking, prostitution, etc.

Funny that you mention that…