In November of 2008, an unknown Satoshi Nakamoto invents a “new world order” system that trivializes big banks’ fiat system and their effect on the effective transfer of wealth and value around the world. It sounds so great on the surface. Thousands of programmers set out on the project, “Anarchy for everyone!!!” Everyone is making money as long as there are new buyers to pay the past bills, sounds like a Ponzi scheme right?...Exactly. Even the staff here at Steemit pay their bills with what?...You guessed it US dollars. Their lunch is paid for in…USD and so on. Are you starting to see the picture? There is no underground and anarchistic currency. It’s just a sock puppet.
Imagine going to a bank today and getting change for a $100 USD note. It takes about 30 seconds. Tomorrow it takes 45 seconds and a year from now you’ll spend hours at the bank trying to break a “hundred.” Miners use a lot of juice and each network needs hundreds of nodes, multiply that by 3700 different coins and that’s a lot of power. Meanwhile, the cost of electricity rises and the costs become increasingly unbearable. Can you say “Carbon Footprint?” Thirty-seven hundred coins and about 1000 merchants worldwide! Today, if I owe you $10.00 USD, I simply pullet out my wallet, slap a ten in your palm and walk away. Transaction is successful, with complete consensus and anonymity. No electricity was necessary for this exchange. I didn’t even NEED a bank or network.
Now… let’s follow the same path of buying a $10 lunch with Ethereum. I’m not picking on Ethereum, it could be any altcoin. First of all, value is created by work. You can’t work for Ethereum, you have to buy it or mine it! Mining requires a lot of technical knowledge, high equipment costs and yes, electricity that has to be “always on.” To buy it you have to go to an exchange, and they add fees to pay miners and developers, continuously, so the fees aren’t cheap but they are never-ending. But, it can be done. Now, the exchange had to go to your bank, and pay fees, to issue you…(wait for it…)………… bitcoin? Why couldn’t I just have gotten Ethereum straight away? Once you have your bitcoin, you can then buy them on the exchange for another fee. But 2 seconds after you buy your Ethereum, it goes down in price. Now your $10 USD is worth only about $8 plus all the fees, and now $7. So you have your Ethereum. It took 24 hours to get your bitcoin, another hour to get your Ethereum and you are ready to buy lunch! That hamburger and fries is going to be great since it took me so long to get the funds to pay for it. You place your order and the cashier asks you for what?... Dollars! Then you say “For chrisaakes! I had more than enough to pay for lunch yesterday!!!” I no longer have dollars, I used them to buy bitcoin, so I could buy Ethereum. But you’re in San Francisco, so the cashier says that they are “one of the handful” of 200,000 small businesses in the bay area that accept…bitcoin. They’re not an exchange, so you have to go back to the exchange and get bitcoin for a fee and add it to your wallet. Now you have $6 bucks. A 40% reduction in your buying power, in a day! But you’re still hungry; you do it and order something off of the menu. After all, it is “Frisco”, so all you can afford is bottled water. Of course, now it takes 90 minutes to process the transaction before the cashier can hand over the bottle of water. You’re dead of starvation and dehydration and now you’re broke too! Now the Ponzi gang has stolen most of your wealth and killed you. Does this sound like reasonable finance?
What is an exchange? It is a marketplace, where goods are exchanged. But not just goods, in some cases, currencies, and contracts of guarantee between interested parties. The stock market makes use of these exchanges by bringing together the pool of buyers and sellers. It allows for an almost immediate exchange of value from one participant to another. Market makers join here to provide liquidity assuring that there’s always a place to buy or sell your particular stock. Bitcoin exchanges are not like this example. You can pull up one exchange in one window and another exchange in another window. Why are the prices different? Why can’ I buy these coins on that exchange where the holder will accept a lower price? This is akin to the kid who owns the “xbox” deciding who plays and who sits out. It is not a true exchange for the simple matter of greed. (Now doesn’t this sound a little bit weird coming from “advocates of a free and independent economy”, an economy without big banks and bureaucracy”)
Some “techies” might shower you with the “praise of crypto” speech, but they all do the same thing. Send their coin back through the exchange to get dollars out and pay bills. Why then does anyone refer to anything crypto as “money?” Simply put, it’s not. Again… It’s not money. Until I can pay for a hamburger at a major food chain, or pay for my fuel with it, it’s simply not money. To test this just go up to anyone who uses money on a daily basis and offer to sell them your bitcoin for 1 dollar each. Even at such an outrageous discount, cryptocurrency is not widely accepted as a means of transferring value. Most people would say “No”.
The bitcoin community, in the effort to eliminate fraud and corruption, have begun to assign users with a value based on “Trust” or “Popularity” which has no bearing on the fact that even good people will betray a given trust without consideration of others, like Bernard Madoff, Ken Lay, Jeff Skilling and the list goes on. Another popular though highly flawed model is “consensus.” Software companies do this all of the time to install invasive procedures on your computer, steal your personal information, browsing habits, friend’s lists and any email addresses that may be on your machine. Well, you allowed them like others in a process called “consensus”, because they enticed you to do so in order to download their wares. You failed to read the contents of the EULA (End User License Agreement) and because of that the consensus has allowed them to do whatever, because we were too lazy to read. Miners agreed to the DAO code and look where that got them. Sites with financial benefit going to others based on consensus are doomed to failure. I hope whales like @berniesanders is going to give that back. Do you know how many people in California alone are out of work? The last thing we should be doing is giving millions of dollars to millionaires, just cuz they read the posts!
If you’ve never heard of the “Turing Test”, don’t be ashamed. I had never heard of it until a few years ago either and it still has to be “spelled out” in movies as well. So allow me to provide an excerpt from the “world famous” book of knowledge, Wikipedia. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test)
“Turing test is a test, developed by Alan Turing in 1950, of a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behavior equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human. Turing proposed that a human evaluator would judge natural language conversations between a human and a machine that is designed to generate human-like responses. The evaluator would be aware that one of the two partners in conversation is a machine, and all participants would be separated from one another. The conversation would be limited to a text-only channel such as a computer keyboard and screen so that the result would not be dependent on the machine's ability to render words as speech.[2] If the evaluator cannot reliably tell the machine from the human (Turing originally suggested that the machine would convince a human 70% of the time after five minutes of conversation), the machine is said to have passed the test.”
That said, I am declaring a new test, an inverse of what has been provided. I propose the “Tobor Test”, whose outcome reveals the nature of humans to behave as robots. Meaning they have to think but without emotion, without experience and reasoning. It means that the human accepts all instructions as truth. Actions have no real or meaningful consequences. It also has to mean that their behavior is subject to influence from what peers think, the consensus vote. The result of this test is important because it literally tells the researcher if the subject will accept or buy into any idea and put their own money or family fortune at risk. “Now my work is done, I’ll take a selfie showing my work in the back ground, name drop a couple of “whales” and wait for consensus recognition.”
Message:
“Good one, you got me…You win.”
Signed,
Everyone (You, Me and the rest of the world)