is at best a gamble and at worst a scam. It would be unethical

Sounds like the definition of Wall Street and banks, not cryptocurrency

At least on Wall Street, for the retail investor / trader - most tradable products such as currency, shares, options and futures mostly have at least some tangible "thing" that underpins them, and that the spot price is derived from - hence "derivatives", and also a certain liquidity and volume that makes the trades somewhat easier to get into and out of.

The problem with Crypto - is there is nothing with any real tangible value that supports the price, other than herd speculation that someone will pay more than someone else paid for it, and that the price will keep going up. There is also no real tradeable volume.

What tangible thing underpins a currency?

Gold mostly, hence why banks shift large pallets of them around occassionally to other banks or reserve stores.

That was long ago, and the decoupling started a number of interesting problems.

The painful truth is that it is at best "trust".

The decoupling was necesary because of the imbalances built up over time. Using gold to back a currency has its own problems: just ask Spain.

Oh, I know.

I'm from the nation that used to rob them at sea on a regular basis in more interesting times. If I recall correctly there are even still children songs about it.

:)

What tangible thing underpins a currency?

Look around yourself - all of that. Fiat currency can be used to pay taxes in a country, so it is underpinned by the government and economy of that country.

Yeah, that's it. And goes down with its government also. All fiat goes to zero in the end. Just depends on the government's abuse how quickly.

"it is underpinned by the government and economy of that country"

-ish

It is underpinned by the trust / belief that everyone else in the country will accept the currency, and it becomes self-fulfilling - everyone accepts it because everyone accepts it.

In theory the value of each dollar (or whatever) should be backed by economic activity in the country, but because of the magic of fractional reserve (banks can lend 10 X as much money as they hold deposits), there is far more money than economic activity backing it up.

Also, central banks can 'print'* as much money as they feel is necessary to prop up the economy (although they can and sometimes do 'retire' some of this money as required). But these generate inflation, and with too much inflation comes loss of trust, which can lead to hyperinflation and money becoming worthless (at least as compared to things). It's not exactly a house of cards that will fall with 1 card missing, but pull out enough cards (eg large enough amount of people try to withdraw their savings at once) and the system might collapse.

With bitcoin (or whatever) it's the opposite. The finite supply means that looked at as a currency they are deflationary. People are reluctant to spend a deflationary currency** since it's perceived value is going up, but that stifles economic activity. In this respect bitcoin is no different to gold. The value of gold as an industrial metal or to make shiny things (ie its inherent value) is much less than its market value - the difference is made up by the belief of people in gold as a value store. As long as enough people believe bitcoin is worth something, it will, even if it doesn't continue to increase in value.

*not really printed, they just create it electronically and pass it on to the banks

**which is why central banks purposely target slight inflation for their currencies

The ability to pay your taxes i guess is not tangible, whereas the ommitance may have tangible consequences

I think I'm going to need to see a bit more citation or evidence for this supposed implied mutual exclusivity between these two. I see no reason at all they couldn't both be, so it's pretty unreasonable to say that one is, therefore the other isn't.

ETA: Yeah, it's really just rhetorical flourish, but this is one (of many) bit of rhetoric I really don't like at all.

In the US there are laws that try to discourage dealing in "securities" backed only by "The wide blue sky of Kansas" Those blue sky laws actually are enforced at times as are laws requiring some amount of truth in public statements. It'll be recalled that Elon Musk ran afoul of those. Heck, the US has even been known to put popular celebrities that do particularly outrageous things in jail for a few years -- e.g. Martha Stewart. So yes, Well Street may be a casino. But it's a regulated casino that tries to keep the actual odds in favor of the house close to the apparent odds.

It's hard to see how cryptocurrency fits into that picture.

I'd be more impressed with block chain if its supporters could demonstrate even one beneficial use. You'd think, for example, that block chain could somehow be used to conveniently authenticate Covid vaccination or for website login. But somehow that hasn't happened. So I think probably crypto's critics are correct. It probably really is a hive of ill considered, resource wasting, scams.

[1]But web3!!

[1] https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html

Regarding signing of vaccination status, check out the smart healthcare card format (SHC). Some areas already use it to issue digital vaccine statements that are cryptographically signed by a known entity (e.g. the state of California). No blockchain required, just ordinary cryptographic public key signatures of an agreed data structure.

Sounds like the definition of Wall Street and banks and cryptocurrency.

FTFY

free vivaldi advertisement. but i dont mind. browser is gud.

I think he has it spot on. Also, what's with this craze of bundling miners in programs all of a sudden? If people want to mine install a dedicated program.

It is the new shareware. After the free-tier expires, starts the mining.

It fairly pointless mining on a "PC" anyway, compared to a dedicated hardware setup its going to be extremely unproductive & use a lot more power per coin mined

than a proper rig (hate to imagine how long it would theoretically take to mine a coin on a bog standard laptop or desktop & how much electricity it would use at a time of high energy costs, not to mention the pointless environmental damage of bitcoin etc)

It only makes sense to the likes of Norton etc. who don't have to pay power costs and benefit from scale (lots of inefficient computers will still produce some coins), but very much a mugs game for the punter

I wasn't aware that it was happening in existing applications in general, but Vivaldi's inherited the (OG) Opera approach of implementing non-web browsing features in the browser (mail client and calendar; torrent client hasn't appeared as yet but was in Opera) so I think he's probably responding to or anticipating a feature request.

And I agree with you — I used to happily use the mail and torrent clients in Opera and might get around to using the mail and calendar in Vivaldi if Thunderbird stops improving, but if I want my browser to chew up my CPU I'll just try to perform basic browsing activities on any modern website.

This.

Moore's law not only kept making* computers more powerful, it also gave rise to a sort-of Anti-Moore's law which kept making software ever shittier and buggier, such that the combined computational effort to do a task has remained somewhat constant.

In the olden days of 56k, you waited a bit for the HTML to load. In the modern days, you have to wait a bit for the shitty surveillance creep-ware to finish spying before letting you read the news or watch kitties on the internets.

* I know, that this is quite a primitive interpretation of Moore's law, and I know that Moore's law isn't a law at all.

"The problem is that to extract actual money from the system you have to find someone willing to buy the tokens you are holding. And this is only likely to happen as long as they believe they will be able to sell them on to someone who'll pay even more for them. And so on, and so on."

"The entire crypto fantasy is designed to lure you into a system that is extremely inefficient, consumes vast amounts of energy, uses large amounts of hardware that could better be spent doing something else and will quite often result in the average person losing any money they might put into it."

Spot on. Those two paragraphs are probably the best and most succinct explanation that I've read of why cryptocurrency is a thing best avoided.

"Spot on. Those two paragraphs are probably the best and most succinct explanation that I've read of why cryptocurrency is a thing best avoided."

Completely agree.

But the issue is, it seems half the population (amongst any given set of people, including high rank bosses" seem to agree on this, while another half seems to believe crypto and NFTs is the future of human kind.

This last half is a complete mystery to me and keeps me wondering "what have I missed ? They all can't be so wrong !".

"This last half is a complete mystery to me and keeps me wondering "what have I missed ? They all can't be so wrong !"

50 billion flies can't be wrong, so why not eat shit?

Fear Of Missing Out. The belief that not participating in something means you won't gain any supposed benefits of having done so.

Once having done so, you're now part of the mindless mob trying to sucker other folks into doing likewise by playing on their own FOMO.

The only way to win is not to play in the first place.

[1]A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. --> Or else.

[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086567/

The B Ark?

In years to come, Crypto will make original Ponzi schemes look like a lemonade stand exercise

Unfortunately, this will take another decade to play out in my opinion.