[ExI] lotta splainin to do

[sjatkins]

I recommend the video below among others on the strange coincidences (or were there) and connections of FTX. I am deeply suspicious it was set up and fired off by government to effectively bring crypto under the control of the same folks that produced the rapacious and easy for government to control people with legacy financial system. That and killing off relatively free market crypto to usher in CBDC which will spell the death of any real financial freedom.

https://odysee.com/@MarkMoss:7/evidence-ftx-was-a-deep-state-plan-to:0

Decentralization is great to some degree but it is complete fantasy that you can do all interesting and important computing in the world on some blockchain or with the sorts of "smart contracts" we have today. Some types of computational task don't lend themselves to fragmented byte-sized execution repeated endless times. I have some hope for zero knowledge proofs and their kin to prove compactly and efficiently that some computation was done and done with no shenanigans. That could improve parts of the situation. In the meantime I am happy enough with federated open source as being better and less prone to single points of failure or censorship and other controls. I also take hope in the tide turning to more localized and private computation and applications backed up in highly encrypted cloud storage with access strictly controlled. The situation in commercial computing is getting so messed up that development crews act as if they can do nothing unless AWS or Google Cloud or Azure tells them exactly how they are allowed to do it and at what cost.
------- Original Message -------
On Sunday, November 20th, 2022 at 8:51 PM, spike jones via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> From: extropy-chat <extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org> On Behalf Of Giovanni Santostasi via extropy-chat
> …
> Subject: Re: [ExI] lotta splainin to do
>
> Spike,
>>…No exchanges are not needed, they are just convenient.
>
>>…1) If we just …
>
> {…did something that we haven’t done…}
>
>>…2) In the meanwhile …
>
> {…do this other thing we also haven’t done…}
>
>>…Giovanni
>
> OK thx Giovanni. I agree completely with your observations on decentralization and I agree. We are not there yet, but that is where we need to be.
>
> As is often the case (well, OK always the case) I am late to the party as I have not followed cryptocurrency, other than cheering for friends who made it big in BtC, such as Jeff Davis.
>
> It occurred to me that the perspective of an outsider or tyro (me) is of value too, because I ask the obvious questions that the proletariat will ask the day after I do, and may come to similar conclusions that I did. So… reading my naïve commentary enables you to know what the proletariat will likely do, which enables hipsters to make money investing shrewdly. Shrewd investment is really about correctly predicting the future movement of the masses, or more specifically the mass of money. Get ahead of that wave, surf on it, and some of that money splashes into your pockets.
>
> The obvious observation regarding that cryptocurrency exchange FTX: it demonstrated that the usual rules don’t apply if one follows the simple expediency of buying the loyalty of the politicians in power. That is what happened here, ja? If so, if my cynical outlook is correct (always bet on human greed (you seldom lose that way)) then the other cryptocurrency exchanges most likely did and are doing the same thing this Sam Bankan-Fried character perpetrated, for all the same reasons. This will lead eventually to the same outcome FTX demonstrated last week, for all the same reasons.
>
> Hey cool, we can make money short-selling all the remaining cryptocurrency exchanges. It’s all good, just so long as I personally make a buttload of money on it. Otherwise not. If I personally lose money then it’s unacceptable! It’s unethical, immoral, I tells ya! Aughta be illegal! I’ll call my congressman. Oh wait, retract, she’s on the payroll.
>
> Giovanni, I hope there is a flaw in my reasoning, and the FTX effect doesn’t apply to all existing cryptocurrency exchanges, for if it does, they will go down in a chain reaction like a row of dominoes, and we will be back to where cryptocurrency has no convenient safe secure way to trade back and forth between fiat and digital currency. I get the feeling those two currency systems really just need to find a way to work together, to coexist peacefully, in parallel. One big bridge between the two just collapsed and now we are questioning the structural soundness of the rest of them.
>
> spike
>
>>
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