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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
twovests wrote
i am still not convinced it has any real value
i agree here, in the same sense that existing paper currencies have no real value. they're practically useless. but i can buy things with both of them.
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.
twovests wrote
to specify, by centralized i mean centralized disbursement
they are, when it's necessary. the difference is that every $1 a bank has matches $1 worth of a bill (or treasury note) somewhere.
if i sign a message saying that there are now 2000 jstpst Coins, and that i'll give you a jstpst Coin for $1, and you pay me that and then i sign that message to your public key... then we just made a new crypto currency 8) and everyone can see our account balances
this is different than if, say, you gave me $1 and i stored that in a special vault and i stored that information in an SQL database and i double-pinky-promised the government to keep it safe.
tangential: just as banks "build on top" of paper dollars with this system of accounting and balancing (so they don't need to mail paper bills to one another), something called the "lightning network" builds on top of bitcoin. it's meant to make payments fast, tiny, and cheap. it actually works, but not everyone uses it.
yeah you can do that. nobody is forced to stake. staking is entirely optional.
there are plenty of countermeasures built in, like slashing. that's automatic. human eyes and hands correcting for bad behavior is the worst-case scenario that none of the countermeasures work.
yeah, it is right now, except in some places where it's commonly used as a currency. as noted, you can use a stablecoin if you want something that doesn't vary greatly in value.
ethereum is one good example because it allows you to do computation using the blockchain as a computer. this is because ethereum's scripting language is stronger than bitcoin's. this is basically how DAI and other ethereum tokens (specifically, "ERC20" tokens) exist.
it does if a lot of people are using magic cards as a standard. if there were a tiny but noteworthy list of places using magic cards as a standard for trade, then yeah, it'd be a currency.
tangential, but one of the big reasons to use cryptocurrencies is that you can kind of see how the money is spent. if i give UNICEF 0.1 ETH, i can see how they're spending their cryptocurrencies. if i give UNICEF $200, then i just have to trust them on their reputation.
and, as awful as this sounds, item-duplication glitches in MMOs would basically disappear if transactions existed on a blockchain. there's a lot of reasons that kind of datastructure makes sense in the design of an MMORPG. there is so much blockchain/cryptocoin snakeoil bullshit but this is like... one of the three legitimate usages of NFTs.
one would buy DAI if they want a coin that has a stable value while also being able to be converted (for free) to other ethereum tokens.
i don't really know how all the technical details of how DAI works so i can't answer that for you any better than their whitepaper can: https://makerdao.com/en/whitepaper/
Apparently it's "collateral backed", so it seems USD.
Anyways, this conversation has really diverged from the original discussion. to circle back, i was responding to this criticism of proof-of-stake:
which (1) proof-of-stake is better than proof-of-work in terms of "trickle up", but that's just a problem with capitalism. math and software isn't gonna fix it. (2) it doesn't impact the value of cryptocurrency. (3) i feel like we've had substantial discussion to agree that cryptocurrency isn't a "grift".