Posted by ibobev 17 hours ago
I can’t help but think Bitcoin carries a floor for criminal activity. It will always be valuable.
Yes, and not just in crypto. People have started to view a high-trust society like a rainforest: a natural resource that has lots of life-sustaining positive externalities, but you can just burn it down to make a quick buck instead. This has been bad since the GFC, and accelerated by the modern rightwing influence sphere.
There's a very real tendency to people to go "I don't trust mainstream source <X> for <slightly valid reason in one case>", and then immediately jump to totally trusting some random youtube or tiktok conspiracy theorist.
I've never read this analogy before but it really works for me. Thanks!
It also doesn't solve a problem we haven already solved; If i buy something, companies are quite aware how this default contract works and what are up and downside of doing business with someone.
In smart contracts you remove the trust these people build and now come up with another mechanism. The latest i'm aware of is blocking capital from both sides until transaction is done. This binds a lot more capital on both sides which might be a huge problem for a small company vs. a big one, it could alos kill one party if the other party never accepts any resolution.
A current LLM with a credit card an already just buy something and everything in the background works as it has for a long time.
Thankfully, the rampant fraud and scams have made it obvious to most people, with LLM hype now drowning out the siren song that captivates people vulnerable to FOMO of the week.
Gibson isn't really that kind of dystopian. And the Good Place reference makes no sense. The article reads like those old Time Magazine pieces by some baby boomer breathlessly trying to scare other old people.