antiscam

7 ms·

1.
A DAO of DAOs(papers.ssrn.com)
2 points by antiscam 5y ago|0 comments
2.
Legal personhood for software and autonomous companies are already possible(cambridge.org)
3 points by antiscam 5y ago|0 comments
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by antiscam 13y ago
Thanks. Good perspective. (I also get the reference in your username, btw. I don't know if it's obscure or not, but I don't see it often.)
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by antiscam 13y ago
I'm making no such assumptions; I don't think I'm making the argument you think I'm making. As for "money has already exchanged hands," that can be true of any Ponzi scheme as well. When we talk of "old" and "new" money in a Ponzi investmen
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by antiscam 13y ago
It's a kind of distributed Ponzi scheme that lacks the ordinary intent and centralized accounting associated with them. It's different from startup in that a startup's shares increase in value, at least theoretically, on the likelihood of f
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by antiscam 13y ago
I'm not "bitter" at Satoshi Nakamoto, or really at anyone. I'm trying to do what I can, as I have from the beginning, to prevent people from falling for a scam. I'm not alone in doing this, and many other good analysts are doing the same th
7.
by antiscam 13y ago
I honestly don't see why. Most of the people involved in the major Bitcoin businesses, or in promoting Bitcoin publicly, are reprobates. Have you spent any time reading bitcointalk.org? Hal is very different from them.
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by antiscam 13y ago
As you'll see from my comment history, I was playing with significant money in Bitcoin early on. I have at least paper gains that are quite satisfying. Nothing I'm saying is personal or is based on any kind of jealousy. It's weird of you to
9.
by antiscam 13y ago
Hal is one of the only class acts publicly associated with Bitcoin.
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by antiscam 13y ago
True, if by "break" you mean "break by brute force" (and of course with current, non-quantum computing technologies).
11.
by antiscam 13y ago
On "little practical use," I mean today. Why does anyone buy a bitcoin today? The only reasons that I can see are (1) ideology, (2) illegal activities (including the circumvention of gambling restrictions), or (3) speculation, hoping to sel
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by antiscam 13y ago
Or the seventeen others founded on the same technology. It's important to distinguish the Bitcoin software from the particular block chain in whose private keys naive people are now speculating.
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by antiscam 13y ago
Well, rather than armchair psychology, you could consider the points I made themselves. Do you think there is a good reason for the world to transfer massive wealth to those who currently own bitcoins, rather than setting up an alternative
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by antiscam 13y ago
I'll give it a go. The early distribution of bitcoins seems to have been enough to motivate lots of relatively early adopters to promote it aggressively, maybe out of ideology or maybe just out of greed. Their claims, which fueled the recen
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by antiscam 15y ago
Oh, I don't mean to suggest that at all. I'm just trying to suggest that an offer from Google doesn't, to me, at present imply that the offeree has any special merit. Google is cash-rich and can use cash strategically.
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by antiscam 15y ago
It wouldn't be right to assume that because Google has many smart people, everything they do as a result is smart. Google is hardly an innovative company anymore. In fact, they seem mostly to be coasting on existing models and paying lots o
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by antiscam 15y ago
It's a huge myth that Bitcoin is beyond the reach of governments. There are three reasons for this. First, Bitcoin isn't actually decentralized. It's not a true open-source community of developers; the core group is tiny, and few others are
18.
by antiscam 15y ago
Bitcoin's not at all resilient in the face of an attack by a government. You're right about limiting damage from a 50% attack, however. Of course, you could agree in advance on an amount of time the majority of hashing power would have to a
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by antiscam 15y ago
I think you've misunderstood his focus. He's describing the network protocol, not the overall "Bitcoin system" that's sometimes called the "Bitcoin protocol." He explicitly points out that the economic details are beyond the scope of his a
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by antiscam 15y ago
Those are the most superficial points of the post; everything else he says is spot on, particularly the disconnect between the claim the the protocol is easy to update and the nearly impassable practical obstacles to doing so for a contenti
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by antiscam 15y ago
I haven't seen a good argument for why the blocks need to be prevented from being found in advance or why the proof-of-work has to depend on the contents of a particular new block (rather than simply authenticating that block). If that requ
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by antiscam 15y ago
I think you may have missed the point of the comment to which you were replying. What's the humor of the comic, in your view? I can't discern it myself. It does seem to need a punchline. Perhaps a zoom out to a larger group of people saying
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by antiscam 15y ago
This is a bit of a digression, but it's something important that needs to be said. Most of the Bitcoin fanatics are drawn to Bitcoin in part because of a bizarrely deep anger at the notion that units of their functional currency -- usually
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by antiscam 15y ago
The statistics here seem more important than the individual cases. Not everyone who talks up penny stocks is long them either, but most of the people sending spam promoting various penny-stock pump-and-dump schemes have a selfish financial
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by antiscam 15y ago
And with a check or an American-style ACH payment (or British-style BACS payment), nothing at all. And both ACH and BACS provide many more services and essentially no practical downsides compared to Bitcoin. (Most people go through life nev
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by antiscam 15y ago
Yes, exactly. The Bitcoin marketers do something that's increasingly transparent: they (intentionally?) confuse the hypothetical with the real. A system based on the Bitcoin technology could theoretically be something more than a scam. But
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by antiscam 15y ago
Bitcoin marketers invariably use formal analogies to suggest that Bitcoin isn't a scam. "The early adopters benefit just like in Google, so there can't be anything wrong with that" or "If Bitcoin is a pyramid scheme, then US dollars are as
28.
by antiscam 15y ago
The difference is that people who complain about these upvotes don't have a vested selfish financial interest and aren't marketing anything to us. Unlike the Bitcoin pump-and-dumpers, they are exercising judgment rather than trying to manip
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by antiscam 15y ago
The entire value now is backed by speculation rather than "real stuff." The widely repeated "market capitalization" figure vastly overestimates the actual value given and obtainable for Bitcoins, and the price does not even closely reflect
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by antiscam 15y ago
Unfortunately, Mt. Gox faces no regulation, so their data should be treated like the data from an offshore online poker company (many of which scammed users in underhanded ways even when they stood to gain significantly from their legitimat

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