[ExI] lotta splainin to do

Gadersd gadersd at gmail.com
Tue Nov 22 01:20:54 UTC 2022


Do you think the technology behind cryptocurrencies could be used for broader goals than currency? Can blockchain technology or future technologies inspired by blockchain be used to run entire decentralized governments? I dream of a decentralized government system that is fairer and less corrupt than contemporary governments.

> On Nov 21, 2022, at 8:05 PM, Giovanni Santostasi via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
> 
> Spike,
> Yes crypto and fiat do not work well together because in general fiat belongs to the government and crypto is supposed to take away the power of control from the government. Powerful governments like the US would make illegal BTC (as China tried many times) if they really could but they do realize they cannot at the global level so they are trying to regulate it with actually negative results. For example, some of the most liquid crypto markets do not want to do business in the US, making the US a third world country in terms of financial innovation. Binance has a special US exchange (that is not really owned by Binance but it works with some kind of license agreement with Binance). People use VPN to go around these restrictions anyway so the entire thing to regulate something that cannot be regulate is stupid. Regulation is not the answer. 
> When crypto came out was it supposed to be a revolution. 
> When you have revolution heads roll and people that had power lose it. It was exciting to be part of that revolutionary thinking when the concept of crypto came out. I lost 34 BTC to be part of that excitement. A lot of money even now. 
> I'm not sure if we lost the opportunity or if the revolution we expected will come in the future but playing nice with the government is not for sure part of the revolution, at least not this form of government. 
> BTC in particular is here to stay in my opinion. Over time because of these problems of not being the best as a form of daily tender it has become a store of value as gold instead. In the long term the fluctuations you mentioned do not matter because actually the value of BTC went up many fold as a general trend and it will continue to do so until BTC has reached about a million dollars. 
> Then the price will stabilize and it will not be a good short term investment but it should keep its value at least above inflation. It remains a fact that if you wanted to quickly transfer 1 M dollars for BTC to another country in particular it would be one of the fastest, cheapest and secure ways  to do it with BTC. Just this potential gives BTC an enormous fungibility that is superior to cash (even digital cash given it takes several days to move even a few k via wire). 
> It is not something you would want to do every day (as in buying goods and so on) but for large financial transfers it is ideal. This alone should give BTC a value that is much higher than the current one. 
> There are so many interests that are put in danger by this potential that this power of BTC is not discussed often in the media and what is mentioned often is the potential for being used for money laundering. 
> But this is because what people use for money laundry is mostly cash (like 99.999 % of the time). Money laundry using cash is 1000s of times more than any money laundry where crypto in general was used. Banks themselves are the biggest actors in terms of money laundering. This is because in particular for BTC you can actually track what is going on in terms of transactions much better with BTC than cash. This is again something that is never emphasized or described in the media. It is a misconception that crypto hides transactions, quite the contrary. Now there are anonymous (or they claim to be) cryptos like Monero but that is another topic. BTC value in fact could be all in the fact that you can track easily and forever the chain of ownership. This why one should separate also the idea of crypto currencies and block chain technology in general. Block chain has so many interesting uses besides currencies. 
> 
> https://news.sky.com/story/worlds-biggest-banks-allowed-criminals-to-launder-dirty-money-leaked-documents-allege-12077604 <https://news.sky.com/story/worlds-biggest-banks-allowed-criminals-to-launder-dirty-money-leaked-documents-allege-12077604>
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> It is a really fucked up system and crypto is just used as a culprit many times when it is complete bs given it is happening mostly by the conventional channels we already have. 
> 
> Giovanni 
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> On Mon, Nov 21, 2022 at 4:08 PM spike jones via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org <mailto:extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>> wrote:
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> …> On Behalf Of Giovanni Santostasi via extropy-chat
> Subject: Re: [ExI] lotta splainin to do
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> Spike,
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> >…Money is a really fascinating subject…
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> >…Sorry if it is a long one but I think this is the type of medium where we can have this interesting convo without being restricted to a certain number of words. 
> If some people in the list are not interested they don't have to read but I do enjoy this convo with you, Spike.
> It is thought provoking.
> Giovanni 
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> Likewise Giovanni!  Ja, that’s the magic of the written word.  We do not demand anyone’s attention.  This is the comment that made me think of a post I saw somewhere at some point, and I don’t remember where:
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> >…Money is a really fascinating subject…
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> At one point I didn’t know what to do with my life.  I had an engineering degree and an engineering job at the time, but wasn’t sure I was going to make it a career.  I went to a movie, which was Ferris Beuller’s Day Off.  You might remember that as a funny movie, everything except the truly tragic part, the death of that 61 Ferrari GT.  Oh how we car geeks wept.
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> In that movie, a memorable scene solidified forever the words I often use to this day:  Anyone?  Anyone?  Beullllerrrr…
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> But note that the phrase is never actually said in the movie at all.  Here’s the scene:
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> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhiCFdWeQfA <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhiCFdWeQfA>
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> This is remarkable because the actor, Ben Stein, is an actual real-life JD with a Yale education.  The boring lecture is anatomically correct, perfectly correct, and really interesting, even if it is supposed to be the classic super boring lecture by an ultra-geek professor.  He wasn’t using a script.  That was an ad-lib.  I wasn’t a business guy, I was an engineer.  After I saw that goofy movie, I studied up on the Laffer curve and came damn close to going to graduate school to study economics.  Right about that time, my workplace gave me something interesting to do.
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> Turns out… my own childhood friend Barry Goodwin did get his PhD in economics and became a professor of economics at North Carolina State University.  I didn’t know what Barry was doing in those years, but it blows my mind that both of us became interested in that topic.  We never discussed it as kids.  Neither of us had any of it.  Economics really is cool.  Money is cool.
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> My current theory: it will prove inherently difficult to get fiat money and digital currency to play well together.  That will be harder than it looks.
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> spike
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