uncomfortable AWS noises

Yeah, but there’s a solution for that.

Nobody comes here for the tuna.

Yikes. I would get my own modem and router then.

Can one not participate in another’s parody?

What an absolutely fucking braindead take

Nah. At least not as a replacement for USD any time in the near future.

It’s in a weird position where it’s best as very anti-consumer or very pro-consumer implementations.

For example, digital concert or sports tickets sell out to scalpers almost immediately. If they were issued via blockchain and invalidated if resold again it would be extremely difficult for scalpers to continue (like, having to sell a whole physical device or spoof private keys or something). This would eventually make the practice die out, and people could just buy tickets to things without an artificially inflated market.

Conversely, an audio and/or video codec could prevent “unauthorized” devices from playing digital media they aren’t “authorized” to play. This would have quite the impact on the complexity of media piracy. Similar to Steam some time ago, this makes paying money for things easier than pirating again, but is extremely prone to said corporations misbehaving.

There’s also more complex possibilities, like digitizing municipal voting or permanent record keeping on private chains. Most people get confused about these and without a technology and cryptography background, and realistically at least some background in social services or macro logistics, the average person only has scammers and finance bro wannabees to learn from. That goes exactly as well as you’d expect.

Money is just made up in the first place. If instead you mean using it as an efficient way to represent allocating specific physical resources, perhaps. In the upcoming dystopian apocalypse where people still have to go work meaningless jobs to survive while the search burns around them, perhaps using a blockchain for ‘fuel points’ and ‘drinkable water points’ or something makes sense.

But as a general purpose currency it seems needlessly complex, and we already have a needlessly complex financial system. Changing the complexity doesn’t solve enough problems to be worth it.

As a currency? Yes please. Kill it all.

As a niche technology that very few people would otherwise know exists and even fewer would know how to use, but can be surprisingly effective if implemented properly? It’s ok.

Exactly. Paying is the point

Unfortunately, the people that need this reminder the most are also generally staunchly anti-intellectualism.

Tomato Tomato

I think warp capability just means they’re guaranteed to find other life on their own now, so there’s no point in hiding.

The frighteningly low number of XCOM memes and references to come out of this debacle has me seriously concerned for the future of humanity.