President Trump announced his intention to ensure that all future bitcoin production would take place within the United States, should he be re-elected.
That’s pretty easy tbh, most of the core bitcoin devs all work for a single company that can absolutely be bought out, and even have gone on record on how much they dislike bitcoin.
It was the main reason I got out, I bought into it because I was excited by the tech behind it, but no single company should have that much control over the direction it goes in.
Now you could argue that if they did so the chain would just split and the rest of the world would just stay off the USA owned chain, but imo they have already done so much against the interest of bitcoin and everyone has just gone along with it so far (minus the bch split) so what do I know.
The whole point of cryptocurrency is that it’s decentralized. Trying to geographically limit it goes counter to the entire point. If the core devs tried to restrict it to a location like the US, it would be split pretty much immediately.
Bitcoin and other crypto currency like it rely on there being enough to circulate. China has several times over the amount of mining potential the US does. It’s seems prohibitive to investment to make it a US only mined currency.
excellent algo - but not sure it properly weights botnets over CPU/GPU specialization.
heavy chain - monero utxos are some of the biggest out there and therefore probably bad for protection against node centralization (other chains are heavy, but compared to ecnomic activity, monero is lead)
lack of verifiable inflation rate - by its nature, monero make it almost impossible to do this.
those are the ones off the top of my head. would love to have any mistakes.corrected.
the algo is CPU weighted and botnets actually help secure the network. (Though they may be ethically wrong)
yes the chain is heavy, however, to do mixing correctly means you use more txs and end up weighing just about the same
have you counted every bitcoin tx to verify they add up or do you rely on the software to do so? I would say most people rely on the software and the Monero software can count up the Monero that exist as well. So as long as there is no inflation bug in the software, we should be fine. And there’s no indication in the Monero price of such a bug.
Edit: To add to point 3, either an inflation bug has not been found, or if one has been found, the person has done a very fantastic job of going against human nature and not selling a ton of Monero that do not exist for profit.
algo - agree on the importance of general-ish purpose silicon to do the hashing, but CPU algos are still vunerable to massive parallel, (potentially) free, undetected hash. as much as 51% attacks seem to draw a collective “meh” from the crowds, I bothers me.
heavy chain - not sure about the final tx product being roughly as dense as a similar bitcoin tx. regardless, for the economic activity on the monero chain and, please correct me… an an increase of transaction frequency of average sized transactions would cause, at least, a linear increase in chain storage, correct? if so, I think my node centralization issue still applies.
inflation - its a real issue. the ability to audit the chain is pretty important to build trust. thats one of the reasons bitcoin has resisted private transactions, sending those to other layers. good, bad? who knows, but I get nervous around chains who’s very base layer is singularly opaque to an inflation bug and many others will outright reject it. not sure how devs fix this, considering monero’s (vital) core mission.
monero is a fantastic bit of dev implementation and community interaction and one of the most important chains out there, I am just suggesting that its own (unavoidable?) issues could come back and bite… hard.
this one statement should send any bitcoin activist with a crypto/cyberpunk ethos running for the hills as fast as possible. this joker is pure poison to everything
I think that the really notable insight that Trump has had is that the typical voter has little or no idea what is actually happening in the policy areas being discussed, and that making false or self-contradictory statements isn’t – at least in the existing environment of commentators and media and such – as politically-damaging as is conventionally held to be the case.
He also worked to get people listening directly to him. Like, instead of his statements being mediated by the media – who might call him out – he works to get people following a social media account that he runs directly, on Twitter. When even that media cut him off, he established his own social media outlet. Cut out middlemen, avoid situations where other people might call out your statements as false and have those calling-outs reach your target audience.
I’d add that the problem really doesn’t go away when Trump loses the election or wins and then four years down the road, leaves office. That is, it’s not that Trump has some unique ability to exploit it…he’s just the one who found the hole. If you’ve found a mechanism that is effective and works, other people will also make use of it, unless you restructure the environment so that it isn’t effective any longer. That is, this is going to be an issue into the future, unless it’s possible to redesign things so that it’s not practical to exploit.
The good news, I think, is that we live in an era with a lot of change going on in the media environment. That is, it’s not that the present environment is one that’s been around for a long time and it’s very difficult to come up with anything else. Newspapers and TV are in decline, various social media sources are on their way up, and there isn’t much by way of entrenched and impervious entities. Hell, I’m writing this and you’re reading this on a platform that didn’t even exist a bit back and was put together on a shoestring budget. So there’s a lot of potential for change, including in ways that would make it a lot harder to make outright false claims.
Trump polls better among low-education voters, but I don’t think that is as interesting as it might seem. That is, I don’t think that an effective counter is “just teach everyone enough about everything to identify holes in what’s being said”. Even if it were possible to bring everyone up to speed on a broad range of policy areas – and it just isn’t – you could always just find less-egregious, more-subtle false statements, adapt to a different audience.
Like, I know a few things pretty darn well, would have expert knowledge on them. There are a lot of areas that I know a little bit about, maybe enough to pick up on things that are false, but I can’t pick up on subtle errors in those. And there are areas that I just know nothing about. I can call people out pretty well in areas that I have expert knowledge in, but I’m inevitably going to be less-able to do so the less I know about a given area. And every person out there is going to have some mix of those levels of knowledge for various areas. Humanity long-ago specialized knowledge via division of labor. That lets society do more than any one human could – can “know” more – but as we specialize, though it lets society do more, it also means that each individual person has a narrower and narrower sliver of knowledge sufficient to understand everything that goes on in an area in society. We don’t have the kind of fairly-complete understanding of what’s going on in society that someone in, say, a small band of hunter-gatherers might.
If I had to give an off-the-cuff guess as to what a counter would be, I’m pretty sure that whatever has to happen has to involve some level of delegating evaluating statements to people in an area who do have expert knowledge and getting a reasonably-objective take from them. Gotta make sure that someone can’t insert their own experts or the like to get through a statement that they want. And that’s not an easy problem. Newspapers and such might have regularly consulted experts – and that process may itself be imperfect, might have media sources happy to let through flawed information if they think that it benefits them – but in today’s environment, where direct mass communication between people is a lot easier, that kind of filter often doesn’t exist.
I mean, people have taken stabs at it. I’ve seen some sort of fact-checking thing that Google News has in the sidebar, and I’ve seen various media sources aiming to do explicit fact-checking projects. But I don’t think that, as things stand in July 2024, it’s sufficiently effective, if major-party candidates can just regularly make outright outrageously wrong claims and have them go through.
facepalm
What? Our ancient grid says lol. But also. We don’t own bitcoin. It’s not some random American product that the US owns the rights to. What even.
President Trump will never let anything stop America. Especially not something so unimportant as the truth.
That’s pretty easy tbh, most of the core bitcoin devs all work for a single company that can absolutely be bought out, and even have gone on record on how much they dislike bitcoin.
It was the main reason I got out, I bought into it because I was excited by the tech behind it, but no single company should have that much control over the direction it goes in.
Now you could argue that if they did so the chain would just split and the rest of the world would just stay off the USA owned chain, but imo they have already done so much against the interest of bitcoin and everyone has just gone along with it so far (minus the bch split) so what do I know.
To take over Bitcoin it would take not only devs but also miners and major exchanges to cooperate. No single government on this planet has this power.
as another comment indicated, bitcoin (and other hard crypto chains) are resistant, not immune. please don’t make that part of your armour.
For response; see last paragraph in my comment
The whole point of cryptocurrency is that it’s decentralized. Trying to geographically limit it goes counter to the entire point. If the core devs tried to restrict it to a location like the US, it would be split pretty much immediately.
Not happening.
Bitcoin and other crypto currency like it rely on there being enough to circulate. China has several times over the amount of mining potential the US does. It’s seems prohibitive to investment to make it a US only mined currency.
May I introduce you to the Monero community, where it seems like you would very seriously belong.
no knock on monero but, like every chain out there, it has ts own problems. I wish it were the perfect panacea, but right now, nothing is.
Fair enough, I am curious. What do you see as its problems? I may or may not be able to help.
hey there.
those are the ones off the top of my head. would love to have any mistakes.corrected.
edit: hit send too early :-/
Edit: To add to point 3, either an inflation bug has not been found, or if one has been found, the person has done a very fantastic job of going against human nature and not selling a ton of Monero that do not exist for profit.
algo - agree on the importance of general-ish purpose silicon to do the hashing, but CPU algos are still vunerable to massive parallel, (potentially) free, undetected hash. as much as 51% attacks seem to draw a collective “meh” from the crowds, I bothers me.
heavy chain - not sure about the final tx product being roughly as dense as a similar bitcoin tx. regardless, for the economic activity on the monero chain and, please correct me… an an increase of transaction frequency of average sized transactions would cause, at least, a linear increase in chain storage, correct? if so, I think my node centralization issue still applies.
inflation - its a real issue. the ability to audit the chain is pretty important to build trust. thats one of the reasons bitcoin has resisted private transactions, sending those to other layers. good, bad? who knows, but I get nervous around chains who’s very base layer is singularly opaque to an inflation bug and many others will outright reject it. not sure how devs fix this, considering monero’s (vital) core mission.
monero is a fantastic bit of dev implementation and community interaction and one of the most important chains out there, I am just suggesting that its own (unavoidable?) issues could come back and bite… hard.
edit: clarification and typo.
It’s simple really. Trump will just have to charge a tariff on foreign bitcoins.
He will take the WW2 approach to leading an industry. Have the competition be bombed out husks.
beat me to it by 1 minute!
this one statement should send any bitcoin activist with a crypto/cyberpunk ethos running for the hills as fast as possible. this joker is pure poison to everything
I think that the really notable insight that Trump has had is that the typical voter has little or no idea what is actually happening in the policy areas being discussed, and that making false or self-contradictory statements isn’t – at least in the existing environment of commentators and media and such – as politically-damaging as is conventionally held to be the case.
He also worked to get people listening directly to him. Like, instead of his statements being mediated by the media – who might call him out – he works to get people following a social media account that he runs directly, on Twitter. When even that media cut him off, he established his own social media outlet. Cut out middlemen, avoid situations where other people might call out your statements as false and have those calling-outs reach your target audience.
I’d add that the problem really doesn’t go away when Trump loses the election or wins and then four years down the road, leaves office. That is, it’s not that Trump has some unique ability to exploit it…he’s just the one who found the hole. If you’ve found a mechanism that is effective and works, other people will also make use of it, unless you restructure the environment so that it isn’t effective any longer. That is, this is going to be an issue into the future, unless it’s possible to redesign things so that it’s not practical to exploit.
The good news, I think, is that we live in an era with a lot of change going on in the media environment. That is, it’s not that the present environment is one that’s been around for a long time and it’s very difficult to come up with anything else. Newspapers and TV are in decline, various social media sources are on their way up, and there isn’t much by way of entrenched and impervious entities. Hell, I’m writing this and you’re reading this on a platform that didn’t even exist a bit back and was put together on a shoestring budget. So there’s a lot of potential for change, including in ways that would make it a lot harder to make outright false claims.
he does “love” the uneducated, after all.
considers
Trump polls better among low-education voters, but I don’t think that is as interesting as it might seem. That is, I don’t think that an effective counter is “just teach everyone enough about everything to identify holes in what’s being said”. Even if it were possible to bring everyone up to speed on a broad range of policy areas – and it just isn’t – you could always just find less-egregious, more-subtle false statements, adapt to a different audience.
Like, I know a few things pretty darn well, would have expert knowledge on them. There are a lot of areas that I know a little bit about, maybe enough to pick up on things that are false, but I can’t pick up on subtle errors in those. And there are areas that I just know nothing about. I can call people out pretty well in areas that I have expert knowledge in, but I’m inevitably going to be less-able to do so the less I know about a given area. And every person out there is going to have some mix of those levels of knowledge for various areas. Humanity long-ago specialized knowledge via division of labor. That lets society do more than any one human could – can “know” more – but as we specialize, though it lets society do more, it also means that each individual person has a narrower and narrower sliver of knowledge sufficient to understand everything that goes on in an area in society. We don’t have the kind of fairly-complete understanding of what’s going on in society that someone in, say, a small band of hunter-gatherers might.
If I had to give an off-the-cuff guess as to what a counter would be, I’m pretty sure that whatever has to happen has to involve some level of delegating evaluating statements to people in an area who do have expert knowledge and getting a reasonably-objective take from them. Gotta make sure that someone can’t insert their own experts or the like to get through a statement that they want. And that’s not an easy problem. Newspapers and such might have regularly consulted experts – and that process may itself be imperfect, might have media sources happy to let through flawed information if they think that it benefits them – but in today’s environment, where direct mass communication between people is a lot easier, that kind of filter often doesn’t exist.
I mean, people have taken stabs at it. I’ve seen some sort of fact-checking thing that Google News has in the sidebar, and I’ve seen various media sources aiming to do explicit fact-checking projects. But I don’t think that, as things stand in July 2024, it’s sufficiently effective, if major-party candidates can just regularly make outright outrageously wrong claims and have them go through.
great reply! I think his actual phrase was… “I love the poorly educated.”, so I didnt nail my punchline.
agreed with pretty much everything you said, with the caveats that…
To be fair, I’m not sure Trump knows what’s actually happening in the policy areas either. He just says stuff that he thinks will get him notoriety.