The most obvious stupid scam ever conceived and they actually managed to hook a bunch of actual corporations

Square Enix, Nickelodeon, Coke, KFC, and more fell for this shit while regular people were laughing about how obvious a con it was.

Really puts into question the capitalist myth of the genius entrepreneur and the idea that these corporate types are rich because they are smart or deserving in some way.

13 points
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The real kicker is that there are plenty of good theoretical applications for blockchain technology and all we get are shitty investment commodities and grifts

The technology never gets employed to a productive end because the entrepreneurs are in charge of deploying it

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there are plenty of good theoretical applications for blockchain technology

This is not true. Distributed ledgers allow for consensus without trust. That is it. Every other application of them is just a slower database. So pretty much all they are good for is digital money, but digital money with a hard throughput limit and no backing from any government. The rush to use them for anything and everything violates the most basic principles of good computer engineering, and there’s a very good reason no one has created anything worthwhile with them besides money that can be used for crime.

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13 points

I🖤crime. The Revolution will be funded by and implemented by criminals.

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oh worm?

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Ay Tone, we’re seizin the means of production ova here.

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7 points
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Distributed ledgers allow for consensus without trust. That is it.

That’s like saying asymmetric cryptography only allows for trust irrespective of medium. We still deployed it everywhere because it turns out that’s useful in countless ways. Blockchains are also not necessarily public, and generally most of the shit they get from leftists has more to do with stupid wasteful consensus mechanisms than anything to do with the principle of a fancy networked Merkle tree itself.

In the end it’s just another mathematical guarantee and we can do better than “concept is related to bad people and is therefore bad”

edit : Also worth noting that PKI was a huge gold rush when it started and still to this day lots of companies make utter bank on the sole basis that their certificate chains are trusted by default in your browser

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No, I think crime money is good. But every time someone tries to come up with another use for them it’s like, demonstrably worse than what already exists. It just sets off my bullshit sensors.

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7 points

git is a blockchain without a consensus model. Once you remove the artificial scarcity component of blockchains the are extremely useful.

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a blockchain without a consensus model is just a linked list

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3 points

Eh. Blockchains and git both use merckle trees, but boats and cars both have engines.

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6 points
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Even this is overselling blockchains, to be honest. There are a variety of far cheaper ways to do distributed trustless consensus, for example CRDTs. You can even run a CRDT-based ledger if you’re willing for people to have negative balance. The only thing a blockchain adds is an incredibly expensive clock mechanism to slow the transactions down enough that they can prevent double-spend and enforce positive balances.

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13 points
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Most supposed use cases besides crime money involve needlessly spreading out a calculation (of a picture of a monkey or whatever) so many more computers have to verify the same calculation as a stupidly unnecessary waste of electricity that also dumps more carbon in the air. And the crime money also does that but dae le drugs amirite

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3 points
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Man what the fuck am I doing on hexbear. Even the most inconsequential disagreements turn into this sort of bullshit, without fail

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9 points

The sort of bullshit like pointing out that blockchain technology has a massive carbon footprint and drastically increases the electricity costs of whatever it ostensibly replaced?

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1 point
Removed by mod
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name a single application of “blockchain technology” that cannot be done the same or better by other tech

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7 points

If you want to burn the planet down faster, doing computations on a blockchain multiples the electricity costs and the carbon dumping!

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39 points

Everything is like this.

Sucking up, lying, putting on a show, and being merciless is the biggest part of how anyone attains a managerial position.

It’s not a bug, it’s a feature.

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SBF convinced venture capitalists at sequoia to invest in FTX while playing WoW.

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28 points

:theory-gary: it was League of Legends

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and he wasn’t even winning at the game

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6 points

The only qualified economics experts are Challenger tier

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This is one of those moments where you realize these companies aren’t jumping on these trends things for us, but they’re doing it to placate an investor class that doesn’t know any better and wants them to be into the new, hot thing among these twitter brained friends.

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23 points

yeah I think the execs in these companies saw that people in their rich social circles were messing around with crypto and thought that meant everyone else is doing it and it’s the next big thing, for an industry that markets itself as innovative there’s a lot of herd mentality in tech

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It’s funny “ha-ha” but also funny “damn this sucks dude”.

Square Enix, Nickelodeon, Coke, KFC, and more fell for this shit while regular people were laughing about how obvious a con it was.

That’s one of the big things I think the NFT craze highlighted. When the suits at MEGACORPS saw a potential way to make money off intellectual property they jumped at it. IP law is really bad, and IP financialization is even worse. They thought they saw a whole new way to create new sort of “premium” product and they all went feral like they were consumed Spirit of Greed from Weird West. They really believe they could make a gazillion dollar from nothing, they either truly thought that or convinced themselves that they did.

Really puts into question the capitalist myth of the genius entrepreneur and the idea that these corporate types are rich because they are smart or deserving in some way.

Big time! It also really highlighted how everyone is despite to get out of the capitalist trap. I really felt kinda bad for regular people who got duped into NFTs and crypto as a whole. I’m not trying to say they are dumb people or have no agency, just saying lots of regular people lost their hard earned cash cause they bet on NFTs and crypto being “the future”. Lots of regular people lost cash on the Robinhoods, the Coinbases, and the crypto dotcoms of the world. All of the “smart” “business people” were telling you NFTs and crypto was the future. Just yet another vampire scheme to siphon the lifeforce from working people =,

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