> I've been using Bitcoin to get paid for a couple of years at this point
How do you turn your Bitcoin into food, housing, utilities, and other necessities?
> And, yeah, 13 years after the internet's invention was 01982
The Internet was not available to virtually anyone in 1982 much less 1969. Nor was the ARPANET of 1969 even remotely similar to the Internet. TCP came about in 1974. IPv4 in 1982.
> So why does Bitcoin have tens of millions of users
It doesn't. It has a lot of speculators, and a handful of users. And no one knows or could possibly know how many there are.
> How do you turn your Bitcoin into food, housing, utilities, and other necessities?
I sell it for dollars to people in person; some of the dollars I have to change into Argentine pesos before I can spend them. Isn't that how everybody does it?
> The Internet was not available to virtually anyone in 1982 much less 1969
It was available to almost anyone who knew someone who had access, which is the same situation as Bitcoin. Precisely what Maciej is complaining about is that so little of the economy is hooked up to Bitcoin is that most of us can't buy a pizza with it without going through intermediaries.
> Nor was the ARPANET of 1969 even remotely similar to the Internet
It was remotely similar; it provided telnet over a packet-switched network, with routing. You could argue that substantial technical changes happened in Bitcoin over the last 13 years, too. Maciej did, in fact, make that argument: he pointed out in particular the dramatic shift to centralized intermediaries like Coinbase (the ANS.NET of Bitcoin?) and from CPU mining to GPU, FPGA, and then ASIC mining, as well as the proliferation of alternative cryptocurrencies. We could also mention segwit, the BCH schism, Lightning, BIP39 and Electrum seed phrases, and lightweight clients like Electrum. Those changes are not over yet. So the situations are in fact quite closely parallel.
> I sell it for dollars to people in person; some of the dollars I have to change into Argentine pesos before I can spend them. Isn't that how everybody does it?
No, most people just spend their currency directly on the things they need to purchase, actually.
> It was available to almost anyone who knew someone who had access
That's not even remotely true, and is also a tiny number of people.
> It was remotely similar
But... it wasn't. As I already have shown.
The ARPANET, then the Internet, have all gone through steady evolution. It has not spent 13 years stagnant or regressing in terms of either design or use.
Just because you read somewhere that "ARPANET was the predecessor of the Internet" does not mean that ARPANET was the Internet.
This is willfully ignorant and motivated reasoning. Crypto has more uses than I care to even list, in fact it’s quite easy to come up with many of them, but it’s weird that people who’ve set in their ideology against it won’t ever budge. In another thread I listed out a handful, and it was so interesting to see people do what always happens in political fights: they take a small subset of the idea or just one of the things that they feel they can best counter, and counter that, conveniently ignoring that they aren’t really engaging with the point at all but rather very small branches of the argument.
If you care to see, it’s in my comment history not long ago. And the thread is fascinating because at best the replies just cherry pick and do semantic tricks like this.
Crypto has a wealth of interesting uses. Tech company co-ops, incentivizing content curation, new and organic stock distribution mechanisms for open source projects, and of course the giant one of providing a far better investment and transfer vehicle to the non-first world countries.
I mean, I can totally see the arguments that it is wasteful, or a bubble, overhyped, and not reaching its potential. But the ones who say it has no or next to no uses are in my opinion on the same plane as Krugmans “the internet will be less useful than the fax machine” or the classic Slashdot iPod “less space than a nomad” comment. It may take even 20 years to prove it, IMO that’s not unreasonable, but it will be claim chowder I’ll be happy to revisit.
If proof of stake works out, there’s no doubt the next Google will be a crypto company that gives revenue back to the user base to incentive good contribution. Content sites absolutely will be totally disrupted. Well look back at writing reviews for the Yelps and Googles as being anachronistic, “why did we used to give all this content to the largest company in the world for free”. Instead, a crypto-based Yelp or Reddit that used a coin and distributed it fairly in relation to contribution would absolutely blow up.
I think VC is also better done with coins in general. Take any traditional tech company that has nothing to do with crypto and just change one thing: instead of paying early adopters who help the platform grow $150 bucks, which is nothing, pay them in what is essentially a micro-dose of stock. That’s a 10x more incentivized early adopter because they actually could make something more than lunch money.
The reason crypto is blowing up isn’t because it’s a ponzo scheme. It’s because laws around accredited investing are truly the most egregiously disgusting instantiation of class warfare ever to exist, and finally small guys have a chance to do what the wealthy have been doing since forever: take their extra money and invest it. All the “pure” crypto companies are total bullshit, minus many BTC and ETH, because they have no product. That I agree with. But in time you’ll see a huge growth in companies that are simply normal tech companies with novel tech/uses, but who build in community ownership, rewards and incentives that actually share profit with their user base.
Again: why do people not get paid for contributions to Pinterest, Yelp, Reddit? These are companies paying millions of dollars to employees, and 100% of their content is given to them by users. In a better world they are actually run by the community, owned by the community, and developed in the open.
> If proof of stake works out, there’s no doubt the next Google will be a crypto company that gives revenue back to the user base to incentive good contribution.
Any company could do this with fiat currency today. "Crypto" has nothing to do with it.
> Take any traditional tech company that has nothing to do with crypto and just change one thing: instead of paying early adopters who help the platform grow $150 bucks, which is nothing, pay them in what is essentially a micro-dose of stock.
Likewise, there is nothing stopping a company doing this today without "crypto".
> finally small guys have a chance to do what the wealthy have been doing since forever: take their extra money and invest it
You're ignoring the existence of the stock market, index funds, exchange-traded funds, fractional share purchasing, Robinhood no-fee trading, etc.
Crypto gives the ability for the community to actually control and be confident they won’t get slowly squeezed out, because you can actually codify control. So no, you can’t do that with a traditional company. And I’m somewhat sure it’s not legal to pay users in micro shares of common stock, but even if it was, you have the same issue of the stock having almost no value as it could at anytime be devalued as the company has total control. Again, it may be possible, but crypto makes it obvious and easy and strongly enforced, whereas some sort of legal paperwork setup will never achieve the same confidence.
And your final response is an absolutely perfect example of cherry picking. I said VC, you reply with index funds. Laughable.
> Crypto gives the ability for the community to actually control and be confident they won’t get slowly squeezed out, because you can actually codify control.
This is nonsense. Sure, on a technical level, you can ensure that Google2 will only have 10,000 crypto-shares, and will never issue any more. Regular Google can issue new stock and there's not much that can be done.
But the volume at which public companies or even private companies trade stock is so huge that there's no use case you can imagine that would tank the stock. You're talking about micro-payments -- Google2 is not going to pay people $30 an hour (crypto or USD) to upvote comments or submit useful content. I know this because Google1 barely pays YouTubers (outside of the top x% who make real money, and even they have ad dollars siphoned off by Google). Google1 could issue a million new shares of the stock to pay its moderators, and all they'd do is tank the stock price. But all their most valuable employees are paid heavily in stock. They wouldn't be happy and would quit or riot. It's a soft-regulation on that kind of silly behavior.
Despite 20+ years of "pay users to use the site" being an obvious conclusion, almost no site has done this in a meaningful way. There are hardly any even paying people in funny money / company scrip. All I can think of are Eve Online and Steam. You can't convert money OUT (regulations) but you can use their chuck-e-cheese tokens to buy stuff within their business. On Steam, the money you get per value the user puts in is a pittance. Valve takes a 30ish % cut on almost everything you do, even "secondhand" trading card transactions.
You can speculate that financial regulations are preventing it, but I think it's more likely that the owners of Google2 would much prefer to keep as much capital for themselves and not let its users/"staffers" get a slice. Similarly, Google1 pays its low-level moderator staff very little (compared to an engineer or upper level manager). Most corporations turn a profit. That's a very clear indicator of 'money on the table' - money that the owners chose not to return to the people performing labor for the company, whether volunteer or employee.
You imply a kind of 51% governance of an open source or community driven project. History shows that community projects fork all the time over personal differences, and majority does not always rule. Google2 coin won't matter if people get mad at Google2's governance and fork it for Google2.5 coin. If you can't fork the coin, then it sounds like regular stock or company scrip.
The argument of traditional stock being worthless isn’t just that they could dilute, which they could in any number of ways, but they could end sharing anytime, change the % share, or do any number of the squeezes for-profit VC companies end up doing like ”introducing” prioritized white-labeled content. Again, the trust is what matters.
> Google2 is not going to pay people $30 an hour (crypto or USD) to upvote comments or submit useful content. I know this because Google1 barely pays YouTubers (outside of the top x% who make real money, and even they have ad dollars siphoned off by Google)
Google pays tons of content people, they also have 130 billion in cash.
Google2 may make the mistake of being greedy, but GoogleN may not because they have a team that realizes less greed = users paid more = more incentive. Forking is a feature not a bug.
Success being correlated with fairness in equity distribution, users having stake and say in the platforms they use, creators having contracts with how they earn their living that can’t be changed on a whim, and if they ever do change, it’s by a democratic process, and creators then being able to vote with their feet to fork.
Seems like a good thing.
> even they have ad dollars siphoned off by Google
> That's a very clear indicator of 'money on the table' - money that the owners chose not to return to the people performing labor for the company, whether volunteer or employee.
To be clear, I think these companies need to be non-profit but still pay their team well (a fixed rate to some sort of inflation basket that tracks competitive engineer salaries, for example).
How do you turn your Bitcoin into food, housing, utilities, and other necessities?
> And, yeah, 13 years after the internet's invention was 01982
The Internet was not available to virtually anyone in 1982 much less 1969. Nor was the ARPANET of 1969 even remotely similar to the Internet. TCP came about in 1974. IPv4 in 1982.
> So why does Bitcoin have tens of millions of users
It doesn't. It has a lot of speculators, and a handful of users. And no one knows or could possibly know how many there are.
etc.