Cryptocurrency is an ingenious technique for converting concentrated wealth into widespread shortages, ransomware, and carbon dioxide. Whoever figures out how to run it in reverse will have their statue in every public square
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Updated chart of Chia disk use, which just crossed 6 exabytes. We're one Elon Musk tweet away from no one being able to afford a high-performance SSD ever againpic.twitter.com/566uNjyxnS
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Tom's Hardware has gone into detail on some of the Chia induced price spikes and high-capacity HDD shortages. But the real pain is probably in fast SSDs, since you need those to create the Bram Cohen Bingo™ cards to fill the big hard drives withhttps://www.tomshardware.com/news/analysis-hdd-prices-skyrocket-high-capacity-hdds-sold-out …
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The fact that 1/3 of Cohen's new "decentralized" cryptocurrency is already controlled by a Chinese pool that requires users to install custom software is the cherry on top. Of course, they're working on adding more software to re-decentralize. Code is the solution to all problemspic.twitter.com/CtIUJ4nTNL
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The appeal of cryptocurrency to a certain class of mind is that it purports to be a technical solution to a social problem: How do you pay strangers without trusting anyone? But it shows that you can't escape social problems with technology, you can only dig yourself in deeper
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The attempt reminds me a lot of early attempts to formalize mathematics—that if you could put everything on a basis that you could prove theorems about, and had enough expressive power, you'd eventually get arrive at a "God's eye view" of Truth and Beauty and so on.
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The discovery that this is not possible even in principle was a pivotal moment in human thought. There's a similar (if less lofty) principle at play here. Any interaction between people is irredeemably and ineradicably social, no matter how much code you slather on top of it
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Replying to @Pinboard
The fact that every human interaction is social doesn't mean that technology can't improve upon that interaction. Does a constitution make it impossible for a ruling party to abuse power? No, but it makes it harder.
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Replying to @defisaurus @Pinboard
Can some form of money be better than some other form? In the end, it's just social coordination of human interaction. But would you prefer a US Dollar or an Argentinean Peso?
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Replying to @defisaurus @Pinboard
The fact that you cannot see how social interactions being mediated by inmutable computer code can someday become a useful technology makes me think the absolute worst: lack of imagination.
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As a programmer I can confidently say that immutable and computer code should never go together, and certainly never touch money
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Replying to @Pinboard
As a programmer from a third world country were "social" institutions have failed the people countless times, you are dead wrong.
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