I also can't help but note that this blog post itself seems (first to my own intuition and heuristics, but also to both Pangram and GPTZero) to be clearly LLM-generated text.
I think your pitch would be significantly stronger if the resources you linked didn't largely revolve around "What if Snoop Dogg had his own currency?"
I'm not ... completely unable to be persuaded that there are use cases for cryptocurrency. But "Ashton Kutcher should have Aston Kutchercoin, and develop some sort of referral-based pyramid-shaped scheme with it for his fans" is... what is that?
1) A way to fill unsold seats at venues, and always have sold-out events
2) A way to reward his members for spreading his message and bringing more people
3) A way to turn his audience into an army of promoters
4) A way to be independent of banks, and accept global payments
5) A way to have a global online movement that becomes bigger than Ashton Kutcher himself... having subcommunities be empowered to get together and form their own meetups, see it happen around the world, if they get large then Ashton and his crew can come and do a rock concert there
It's great for political campaigns and many movements as well. We did it for Yang's 2020 campaign for example, with "Yang Gangs", that was very early days in 2020
This is extremely vague and seems to be so on purpose in order to just have some nebulous "attack". Do you really think Web2 platforms aren't the epitome of rentseeking, by taking advantage of their role as middlemen?
This is like asking why people should switch from telephone switchboard operators, to automatic switchboards. Or why should anyone switch from livery cab services to Uber.
Technology may be "less proven" initially, but it's far more reliable in the end. It also removes a whole class of inefficiencies and conflicts that won't be possible with smart contracts, the same way that you could remove them if you switched from anything custom to anything standardized.
If you just stopped repeating the same tropes "web3 bad" for the sake of saying them, and engage with the substance, you'll see that this is a case of standardization, automation and programming what was previously ad-hoc and requires costly arbitration after the fact.
Okay but 1) arbitration is often desirable, which is why these systems allow it, and 2) traditional software can automate just about anything web3 can if you have the same degree of coordination among counterparties
No one said that arbitration isn't desirable, when there is a problem.
It's like saying doctors and medicine are desirable once a medical condition arises. But sometimes, preventative medicine and eating right in the first place is better.
An once of prevention is better than a pound of cure.
Web3 can prevent a whole class of problems that normally would require after-the-fact arbitration to fix. It's better to just have existing systems. Like for example having red lights at intersections, where everyone knows when it's their turn to move.
You understand that software can automate things. That's good. Now you have to understand that web3 is nothing but software which is decentralized and byzantine fault tolerant, so you can trust that the code is being executed correctly. This is the massive improvement over code that runs inside some server farm and can be switched up anytime.
It's weird arguing that no, we would rather have databases where certain people have the key to subtly corrupt the entire database, and then we can catch them and try to recover from this corruption using litigation. That's what MtGox was.
But you can implement transactions without any recourse trivially using existing technology today...
> Web3 can prevent a whole class of problems that normally would require after-the-fact arbitration to fix.
Such as?
> This is the massive improvement over code that runs inside some server farm and can be switched up anytime.
Massive theoretical improvement. No debate there. The question is about applicability, which I notice you've still not made concrete.
> It's weird arguing that no, we would rather have databases where certain people have the key to subtly corrupt the entire database
I don't know, it basically seems to work and as far as I can tell, you're about a billion times more likely to have your shit stolen from you in the web3/cryptoverse than using the traditional financial system... except of course if you're a criminal and/or a more grey-area "unsavory character" to some of the main stakeholders. Which that is a good usecase for this tech, of course.
Are you serious? There are so many problems it can prevent, because they are nearly impossible to occur now:
1) People can only act as themselves, they can't log into the database and corrupt all the data in a table, so there is no need to recover from massive systemic corruption (this is the big one)
2) Business rules of smart contracts are enforced, and you know that the state transitions happen exactly as they should (this is the reason that databases use stored procedures, for example)
I can list a few, but there are literally thousands:
1) In an auction, the highest bidder is the one who actually wins, it can't be hacked. You can have N winners, and once the N+1st arrives, it returns the money to the lowest bidder who can bid again. Bids increase at a predictable rate, everyone knows the deal upfront, etc.
> People can only act as themselves, they can't log into the database and corrupt all the data in a table, so there is no need to recover from massive systemic corruption
I don't understand why you think this is so critical? This is a solved problem - just have backups and basic security. If it's really critical, there's a lot of ways to log changes. It's not a big deal.
> Business rules of smart contracts are enforced, and you know that the state transitions happen exactly as they should
Ok, but we have that already. They're called regular contracts. If they have bugs or unexpected problems or someone doesn't follow through, you can get the state to make them.
> In an auction, the highest bidder is the one who actually wins, it can't be hacked
And how often is this a problem, exactly? The article says it happens maybe once every five or six years.
> 2-5
We have all of this already. Banks, HR software, escrow, reserves. It works fine.
You want the ability to unwind a contract or a transaction if something goes wrong. In fact, the contracts are only really used if things go wrong. Most of the time, the parties just follow the contact voluntarily.
To add on: if someone's "irreversible" crypto transaction goes awry, do people really think they're not going to go to court and/or that courts won't do exactly what courts do in every other case of fraud?
"Your honor, the smart contract was clear as day: this fraud was totally above board" is not going to work. I promise.
1. Well, you want to have your coin usable to pay for something in your own community. The first thing you can offer are unsold seats and other things that literally cost you nothing. People who earned your coin can buy seats at your events, or sell them to other people (e.g. who live locally) to attend the event.
2. With your own coin, obviously. If the coin has value aboard a cruise ship, or events, etc. then everyone wins. There are many businesses that can benefit from selling unused inventory, and they may as well sell it for coins earned for things like bring other paying customers, contributing great testimonials, content, etc. Imagine being able to go on stage if you earned enough "loyalty points" or whatever.
3. Loyalty points have been around forever. And no, fans are not already promoters. I know in my own personal experience that even INVESTORS who invested in your company often sit back and hope that you'll make them a profit somehow, instead of bringing others in behind them. Let alone people who just come to a show. The easier you make it for them, e.g. having your own site with custom links that they can share and earn "affiliate revenue" in your own coin, the more traffic you'll get.
4. You get more traffic. More audience. More capital. More money. More loyalty. Independence from having your speech restricted or demonetized. Look at all the youtube personalities openly saying that they can't say this or that. Many comedians and performers are sensitive to being censored.
5) Also you can easily collect money from a global audience, and pay out to a global audience, without being a central bottleneck (FinTech) and without being required to post surety bonds as a "money-transmitter", instead letting people transact directly and you don't have the liability, and they don't have to trust you like they trust Binance or FTX or Celsius with custody of their funds etc. etc. You just provide the Web interface, they do the transaction, facilitated by IMMUTABLE smart contracts.
Yes, exactly. It will be paid for in a coin that was issued by the community or the celebrity themselves.
The celebrity gets to have their own web server, their own coin, etc. making them independent of Big Tech and Big Banks. They can't get deplatformed. Their community can organize however they deem fit. The smart contracts allow everyone to trust the system.
Just saying someone will "pay you" like they did for millennia doesn't really discuss "in what medium". We have long moved past commodity money, gold blocks, then gold coins, then paper banknotes, to electronic money inside regulated banks, this is just the latest form that money can take.
Opposing it for the sake of opposing it, is like opposing the Web and HTTP and open protocols, because you think AOL and MSN walled gardens ought to be good enough for anybody, and no one really needs any custom servers or self-sovereign websites.
I had the exact same thoughts.
But, also, why is it a good thing that risk is passed down to the users of the currency?
In the regular system risk is passed upward to regular bank you deal with, then upward to the government bank. The frustrating part here is that the regular bank makes all, or very nearly all, the profit, yet passes on the risk. This gives them enormous amounts of power, through wealth, which is far from ideal.
But, much, much worse is the concept of removing the regular bank, and government bank, replacing them with a random person online. And passing the risk downward to the users of the currency.
You don't replace the bank with a random person, but with a smart contract trusted by the community. The whole point is to eliminate trust in the middleman completely from many transactions, and prevent a growing class of conflicts from even starting. That is why you don't need to post surety bonds, for instance!
Pyramid schemes are illegal, but Multi-Level-Marketing schemes are legal.
And you don't need multiple levels. You can have one level. That's called affiliate marketing.
Loyalty points are a thing. You can earn them as an affiliate, for instance. It doesn't have to be a pyramid. But if you are going that route, almost all startups are "pyramid schemes" that end up with an IPO where the public continues to demand rents be extracted perpetually to boost stock price endlesssly, resulting in increased "enshittification". I'd rather people earn utility tokens they can spend once into the economy, than shares where they have the right to demand rent extraction and enshittification for everyone else.
>Pyramid schemes are illegal, but Multi-Level-Marketing schemes are legal.
In this case, this wouldn't even fit the mold for a multilevel marketing scheme, or even affiliate marketing. There are real cash flows detached from a buy-in both of those schemes.
>people earn utility tokens they can spend once into the economy, than shares where they have the right to demand rent extraction
Again, there's cash flows underlying shares of a company. There's not in the case of a digital asset that people refer to as a coin or token.
Not sure I understand what you're trying to say. There are "real cash flows" in every case, just what you consider as the unit of account is different.
As far as shares, no. It's completely different. Shares are equity securities, that entitle people to dividends or they want the shares to go up in price. Regardless, it sets up a never-ending demand for enshittification and rent extraction that you see across Big Tech. Utility tokens are fundamentally different and don't have those perverse incentives, and remove the shareholder class. It's like comparing shares in Disney Corp, to Disney Dollars.
MLM schemes and affiliate marketing businesses will have, or be related to, underlying businesses of selling products which generate revenue, and they'll have some level of expenses related to producing these products. These are components of an operating cash flow. Businesses, whether private or public, are expected to either have healthy cash flows, or would be expected to grow their cash flows in the future in the case of a startup, to support the share price. Also, shares don't necessarily "entitle people to dividends" as shares often have no dividends. In the case of cryptocurrencies, there is no underlying physical product, nor underlying debt, nor a cash flow generating business.
You are correct about businesses, but very confused about Web3.
I am saying that Web3 should be used by existing celebrities to monetize their existing fame and social capital, sell unsold seats, etc.
I am saying that existing organizations, communities, including entire cities, can benefit from having a decentralized system powered by smart contracts, rather than a random FinTech that posts a surety bond, powering their commerce at scale.
Yes, shares don't necessarily entitle people to dividends, but the point is that the shareholders want to extract rents from the ecosystem, forever. And this is a problem, that doesn't exist when you have utility tokens and cut out the parasitic shareholder class completely.
Which one of those five have actually happened in reality, and to what extent?
"The American Conservative further stated that a contingent of Yang's digital followers were only backing him for "a fresh platform for surreal and cynical humor" and that Yang had to denounce part of and distance himself from the movement, which largely stemmed from digital supporters of the Trump 2016 campaign.[85]"
> IGN has accused the game developer for being sexist (based on some poorly translated social media posts) and gave it a low score before properly playing/testing it.
What score did they give it? Because I just checked and they seem to have awarded it an 8 out of 10. I don't follow game reviews, but surely review inflation hasn't gotten so bad that people are on some sort of anti-"woke" bent over an 8 out of 10?
I figured "well maybe they changed it after publication, those sneaky skags", so looked at the ol' Wayback Machine capture for Aug 16th, four days before launch, when the review embargo lifted: https://web.archive.org/web/20240816141422/https://www.ign.c...
8/10 there too- "Despite some frustrating technical issues, Black Myth: Wukong is a great action game with fantastic combat, exciting bosses, tantalizing secrets, and a beautiful world.". Really a horrible thing these journalists have done, ripping into the game like that.
Now, I did also find a report from IGN about 6 months ago that some people claim used "mistranslated quotes". But I don't speak Chinese, and the people online who I've found yelling at IGN about this appear to have used ChatGPT or Google Translate to translate things themselves! So- do you speak Chinese? If not, how do you know the claims of "mistranslation" are correct (again, for a thing that is not a review)?
" by the same people that believe whatever they're told by anyone in authority, and then feel the urge to pass it on to others without critical thought."
respectfully, what the hell is this bit doing in your post?
Dishwasher detergent is probably the harshest chemical cocktails in most homes. Small consumer appliances are built to the cheapest minimum standard. Creating a risk of a fire and peacocking about how smart one is great material.
It could be emotional, but sometimes emotions are necessary to get the meta-point across. Without critical thought, the same people also pass on various other lies. For example:
1. Fluoride is safe in drinking water and is a good thing. It may be safe up to a point, a very conservative point, beyond which it definitely harms the brain development of kids, perhaps of adolescents too. Certain branches of the government are finally coming around to acknowledge it.
2. Chlorine is safe in drinking water. Chlorine is of course necessary to kill germs, but there can exist certain byproducts of excessive chlorination that are harmful to the stomach and the digestive system. These could form when chlorine reacts with organic matter in tap water. I'd like to see the government acknowledge it, resulting in a tighter range regulation of chlorination, its byproducts, and organic matter in water.
3. Handwashing prevents flu and colds. This lie was repeated over and over for at least a decade before Covid. Handwashing is no doubt important, but there is no way that it will block respiratory inputs like a good mask will. Both practices complement each other.
4. Combining vaccines is totally okay. Both children and seniors get affected by this lie. Logically, if each vaccine has certain temporary side effects, there is no way in which it's better to take two or more vaccines together, e.g. RSV + Covid (Moderna) or flu-shot + Covid (Moderna). Logic dictates that spreading out the risk over time will be easier for the body to handle, and it is so in practice.
5. Water ultimately heats to 100C (212F) in the microwave. In truth it's very easy for drinking water to superheat in the microwave to greater than its boiling point. The purer the drinking water, the more likely it is. This is a common occurrence with RO (reverse osmosis) water, even after it has been pH adjusted. Understanding this helps avoid burns to the hand and face from an explosion of the water.
6. It is safe to stand very close to a microwave while it is in use. In truth, if you measure with a microwave radiation meter, you will see that nearly all microwaves leak substantial radiation measurable in the first one-foot closest to the front of the microwave.
In fact, humans will be running at relativistic speeds within this century, risking the total destruction of the Earth if they should ever trip over something and fall down.
Scary stuff. And it's not science fiction- it's based on real, observed trends and scaling laws. Seems impossible? Well, they said the four-minute mile was impossible, too.
