RMT, Metaverses, Crypto, Blockchain And Now NFT

The whole POINT of cryptocurrency is to remove the centralized bank.

Why do you think a Centralized bank is needed?
There is nothing in the constitution or government charter that says government should control currency.

In the United States, our founders understood government to be a necessary evil. Thus they organized the constitution to LIMIT government and do the best they could to restrict government power.

The more power is decentralized, the more insulated against corruption it becomes.

The decentralized nature of Bitcoin is one of the most attractive features to it. (The other being that it is the most inflation-proof currency in the history of the world).

If you look at the history of currency, its amazing how quickly Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have propagated. The biggest worry is that only bitcoin seems to be truly unmanaged.

Even Ethereum is centrally managed. (They were able to freeze the date and roll back transactions)

Bitcoin is no more 'monopoly money' than the dollar or any other currency out there. Currency is just a measuring tool for value, but the currency value itself is nowhere near stable. It falls down to who you trust more. the Blockchain technology or the US Government (or any other government).

Politically there are plenty of reasons Bitcoin is a good thing.

Regarding Frod's points....

1. Environmental waste is a joke reason. Anyone looking at data instead of media hype can see this is a non-issue. Crypto currencies didn't create the current energy market, nor will they exacerbate them. Crypto currencies reward people for finding cheaper ways to generate energy anyway. If anything, they motivate to find better energy technologies and even allow clean independent energy generation in remote locations to be monetized.

2. Not sure what you trying to say here, but I'm not offended by fees or exchanges... so its unclear but if even if it argues either way of what I'm guessing, it doesn't seem significant to a decision either way.

3. A legitimate concern for security, but its not like you cannot still use credit cards for online transactions and still have waiting times between your crypto wallet and final transaction. Receipts are a thing man. Crypto doesn't overturn that. You have a record of the transaction and can dispute it as well as now. So I think you are overblowing this alot.

4. You don't turn the titanic on a dime, let alone an economy. I rather disagree that economy should be based off consumption, credit and the government printing more money. Its has been an unstable model for a long time and the way the government treats debt makes that painfully obvious. How long until the bubble pops? we've been in that situation so long no one cares anymore, but that doesn't mean the bubble isn't going to pop.

I agree, internet at it's purest purpose, but was merely trying to convey raw "data" to the "masses" in the most "efficient" manner as possible.

Humanity ruined that, Don't blame the internet, it was just a tool.

Well put Xilkk.

I really would like to get more input from all of the people reading this topic going, I feel like this is the next paradigm, and who better to hear from about these topics, than the very beta testers in this -verse? Because, that's essentially what we are as the 2.0 MMO citizens rolling into the 3.0 METAworld.

So.. I'm sitting in a bar right now, about 7 people at the table, asked, what you guys think about, this topic "the meterse, cripto..?"

No clue, granted... Blah, etcetera, circumstances.

Guessing 95% of total population haven't an idea this is supposed to be important.

1. ahahaha ***. they do exacerbate. we have a *** here in new england trying to buy a coal power plant just to *** mine butts, china and india are/were having electrical grid issues because of this ***. There was talk of moving mining to texas of all places, and we know how stable that shitshow is... free market *** isn't always the best, stop huffing rand's libertarian taint.

2. no fees is a common argument of coiners, except that it's completely untrue, and often worse than alternatives.

3. i was saying that you can't overturn transactions in crypto. the large number of recent exchanges losing millions and having their only option be to beg the thief to return their monkey jaypegs is the hilarious result.

4. the *** you huffing about turning the economy on a dime? yours is the 'currency' that can have 30% swings from a musk shitpost on twitter. i was stating the obvious fact that a supposedly deflationary currency is terrible from an economic standpoint. When the best option is to stuff your money under the mattress instead of spend or invest it, it leads to horrific stagnation.

bamp, lots of new developments, market is crumbling, NFT speculators are getting hosed, haha.

Market correction, I think.

It's bear market this year due to FED QT( https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/what-the-feds-quantitative-tightening-plans-mean/2022/04/07/4774f172-b627-11ec-8358-20aa16355fb4_story.html)

So it's not just crypto market "crumbling". But also stock market, and stock market in Asia. Because hot money from the 2020/2021 bubble is leaving those market. It's more like stock/crypo market is going back to pre-2020 era.

If "stablecoins" have dipped below their promised 1:1 USD ratio by nearly 100%, your market isn't worth the chains they're minted on~

I truly hope that I live long enough for humanity to remember that one cannot bestow value upon that valueless simply by saying it has value.

Unfortunately this is literally how it works. Nothing has value. Value literally does not exist. ALL money is fake.

You can say "but its paired to gold" gold has no value either. It's just a rock that's pretty.

Its capital flight. And the most tenuous investments get fled from the fastest. So crypto and NFTs fall more than tech stocks which fall faster than the rest of the market and blue chips hardly fall at all.

Behold! The powers of advertising and hype!

Ahh see, that's where you show a lack of understanding of value.

The reason Gold has value comes from its properties that were used for plenty long before jewelry. Non-corrisive and malleable made it desired for protective coverings. Its highly reflective of many forms of radiation. Its ductile. And its quantity upon this planet is limited.

Also, cash doesn't have value, either, even when it was based upon a gold standard. The gold gave it representative value, not innate value.

That crypto? Its a representative of a representative. Its no different than art....wait- no art has more value in the concrete materials used to make it. At least its worth a few bucks of canvas and paint even if its crap. And I'm not seeking an explanation- we simply view value in very different ways.

You describe useful, not valuable

Crypto (can) also be useful, (in theory), the concept

Apples to apples, a verification tool is as (more) useful than gold.

Every measure is a standard. Its not written anywhere but a common agreement decided, for example, the 0 and 100C as a temperature measure, the foot of someone as the distance measure, and something random to be the "work" measure.

In the most basic form of trading, how do you trade man's work, something imaterial? You define that X amount of man's work to be equivalent to Y grams of salt, or T grams of rice, or Z amount of cigar, or W amount of gold, or K amount of criptocoin.

Civilizated population just agreed to use papel and coin to replace those primitive forms of man's work representation. Cyber community decided on that thing called criptocoins.

Now is actually a really good time to invest, assuming someone has an available supply of liquidity. When the market turns down significantly, folks panic and sell off stuff to convert wealth into cash and put it in "safe" places like gold / etc, they will sell it cheap out of the fear it won't have value in the future. These things do have value, regardless of what prophets and fanatics on soapboxes preach. Once the market recovers, their value recovers with it and then they can be sold for a very nice profit. Many people got very wealthy doing this from 2008 to 2012.

As for the whole Federal Reserve thing, the government doesn't control our money supply nor does the Fed. They have very limited influence, mostly in the form of overnight rates. Most currency is actually printed by regular run-of-the-mill banks via business loans or mortgages by leveraging their holdings. I believe the rules are that banks must maintain 3% of their outstanding debt as capital, there was discussion of raising it to 5% back in 2013, not sure if that happened or not. This type of monetary growth is organic to an economy and represents natural growth of GDP, QoL and the inflation that goes with that. All the new money being generated is the result of economic activity and participation from the population in that activity, either as consumers or providers.

Then we have the big evil, when government really does decide to just print money, they do it in the form of long term secured debt. Now as long as the amount printed is within the increase of GDP, then it really doesn't matter since the future money used to pay it has been watered down sufficiently. But if the government borrows against future money when the economy is shrinking or staying the same, well then we get a situation were money is being introduced that not only wasn't generated from economic activity, but has a higher cost then regular borrowing. That in turn causes a sharp devaluation of all existing liquidity, which in turn causes folks to start freaking out.

Crypto was folks, wrongly so, thinking that some big evil group of wealthy white men sitting in dimly lit rooms smoking cigars, was controlling the economy. That by creating a currency those evil white european men couldn't control they would "free" the economies of the world. Of course that's all nonsense, the economy is controlled by the collective decisions of millions of individuals, billions if we look at the whole world. Crypto just turned into another traded asset that is then subject to the exact same market pressures as every other traded asset. Trading crypto is no different then trading futures contracts on oranges.

But there is a point to be made, actual cash is garanteed by governments.

If I have an official paper of one dolar, the government garanteed everyone will recognize that papel as worth to be traded.

While its not generally clear for many (like me) who will garantee that my criptocoin will be traded by some equivalent amount of something else I could want.

A blockchain is useful for recording data, and would be an excellent tool for things like medical records or property deeds. It's not practical for currency, by it's own nature any fraudulent transactions or mistakes are all-but impossible to reverse. This makes crypto very impractical for day-to-day transactions, before you even get into scalability.

It might be ok for large scale monetary transactions handled by banks, but it's not inherently any safer from attack than SWIFT or any new system would be. The primary value in crypto is as a speculative asset, most 'practical' applications for crypto are just a sales pitch counting on the user being unable to discern the limitations of the system.

Not going to take a hard stance on whether the big ones are here to stay or not, though I lean toward them losing all value as a response to government regulation of some sort. But, if you think a shitcoin is going to revolutionize anything to justify it's own multi-billion dollar market cap, you're just the sort of patsy they want 'investing'.

The value of that one dollar isn't guaranteed by anyone, only the number printed on it. Currency is just a numerical representation of someone else's time / knowledge / resource. When you work a "9-5" you are exchanging your time for currency from your employer, who is then exchanging a service/product/resource to someone else for more currency.

Most payrolls are funded by short term debt as employers don't keep a huge stack of cash sitting somewhere waiting for payday. Instead they take out short term loans right as payday happens, use that money to pay their employees, then pay the loans back over a period of a year or more. In this way a part of the economic activity of the company gets transferred to a bank, who then use's that activity to leverage more loans to generate even more activity.

I just want folks to get away from the notion that there is some evil group of men sitting somewhere smoking cigars controlling the world. It's more like a frantic group of accountants trying to guide the course of a massive river by putting rocks around the edges.

I beg for an example of when any currency has gained value over time, because as far as my limited knowledge, every currency meets its end when it no longer is backed by a concrete commodity and instead is backed by "the full faith and credit" of some entity.

That example of how paper money is guaranteed by a government, therefore it has value....again, the only value it truly holds is as kindling for a fire. I think people are so used to bestowed value and accepting that as legitimate they fail to see its flaw. Take away those who bestow or guarantee something's value, and that value is lost. That's why any currency- paper, digital, or coin- is doomed to only ever be the representative.

If currency had intrinsic value, the concept of inflation would only be tied to supply of goods or services purchased with it. Since currency itself has zero value, increasing the volume of any currency breaks that fallacy and reveals it for what it is- just a paper promise, only good for as long as its accepted.

Currency is a monetary representation of someone else's time/knowledge/resources, it has no more "value" then that. People have been using your argument for centuries, since the first government used paper bills instead of weighted coins. In actuality, paper currency existed long before that, the hebrew merchants used a form of "credit notes" for trading, redeemable for currency at various locations, because they didn't want to expose their wealth to confiscation by governments.

Paper currency works just fine, representative value works fine, the only thing that doesn't work is when a governmentm any government, dumps huge loads of fungible currency into a market without economic activity to support it. Right now something like 40% of all cash in circulation was created by the various stimulus bills during the pandemic. Thankfully the US Government can't just fabricate cash out of thin air, it must be done through loans that are repaid over time. The interest on the national debt is what is paying those off and is preventing a Venezuela situation.

Well, any framing is valid up till a certain point.

You can interpret the people who has more power than you and has an influence over you as an "evil" if what they are doing impacts you in a harmful way, as well you can interpret them as "good" if their deeds impact you in a benefitial way.

But this is not different than anything in the world. The more power some people can gather, more impact they can influence over others, and while those actions can harm the majority, maybe it is comprehensible from some PoV.

But surely those evil group men arent smoking cigar.

More likely they are smoking some cuban cigar.

oh I agree Saevel. I just think two major misunderstandings of government currency are happening here with others:

1. The current arrangement between government, a centralized bank, and currency backed by that government is how its always been in the States. Currency wasn't always this flexible and fallible when it had a backing in a concrete commodity and you couldn't simply "print more money". Gold Eagles weren't gold plated to just look pretty for example, and for over a century in this country's history it was quite acceptable and normal to ask for large debts to be paid in a hard commodity like those Gold Eagles vs Paper Currency. But the truth is that some form of representative for what truly holds value is needed for simplicity in daily life. No one wants to drag a cart of bouillon to go to Trader Joe's.

2. Because of a lack of framing, most people I engage with under age 60 view currency not as that representative, but as the source of value. Which blows my mind how people can view it that way, yet in the same breath *** about inflation. Clearly that currency doesn't have any worth directly attached to it. That's why the crypto discussion shocks me- mentions of "its an inflation-proof currency" when its value is still talked about in terms of the currency they bash. It just shows a complete destruction of the concept of what value is- you're not enlightened just because its a good soundbite to say "nothing has value until its assigned". You're just proving a lack of understanding that those selling those crypto currencies are taking advantage of. (the general "you", not Saevel hehe)

Quantatative Easing, Debt buybacks, and other manipulation should not be accepted traits of a government currency, and are not legitimate reasons to abandon a system for something that is just one more level separated from value. These, as you mentioned, are what is truly at fault. Not the concept of a government-backed currency.

Crypto currencies are being used as a storage for wealth, and not in the way most folks think. Wealthy folks don't keep a Scrooge McDuck money bin full of gold, that's dumb. Instead the vast majority of their wealth is stored in business's, real estate or other appreciable assets. Thing is, those assets are vulnerable to the government, who can confiscate them at will. Even in a country like the US, government entities invent various ways to steal from the population.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_forfeiture_in_the_United_States

Those that started and grew business's or real estate portfolio's and now are sitting very nice want to store some of that wealth in a way a government actor can not seize for redistribution. Before this was done with anonymous European bank accounts, or various overseas locations, but lately the big governments of the world have been ransacking those. So now they use that wealth to buy crypto currencies, which while volatile, can not be confiscated by someone else, especially if the keys are stored in an encrypted offline wallet with backups.

The most powerful men in the world have very little direct influence on the economy, and only marginal indirect influence.

The economy in free market democracies is controlled by the day to day decisions of millions of people all participating in it.

Yeah, thats where i beg to disagree.

Traditional/classical economics textbook says about free market and invisible hands.

But I believe globalization have been steadly changing this relationship. The 'invisible hand' have been progressively weakened over time (IMO). And at this pace, even if right now it still has the major influence, it tends to be continuously weaker if great groups/corporations grow stronger by the day.

Its clear to see how hard is nowaday for anyone to even start a new business. How its so easy for big companies to simply buy the smaller ones. How it is easy to manipulate population opinion to make them believe something is right/worth/good while other things are wrong/not worth/bad.

If all small companies are bought by the big ones, where is the "free" market? If I cant even start my business, if cant even decide what I want but just buy what a propaganda tells me to buy.

"Freedom" is a complex term, that definitively doesnt apply to our current world.

Of example for those to understand how the vast majority of money is actually created.

Lets say I own a small business and I employ give people, we have customers and are doing well. Market analysis has me believing I can do even better over the next 24 months, but I would need to expand and hire another five people. Now I do not have the funds on hand to pay five people for two years, nobody keeps that kind of cash sitting around. Instead I go to my bank and request a business line of credit to fund my proposed expansion, we negotiate the interest rate and the loan is secured by the value of my business. The bank gives me the one Million USD, which is actually leveraged at a 20:1 ratio (using 5% cause easy). I hire five people and spend some on advertising, this generates more economic activity and I use the profit to pay off the $1 million USD and it's associated interest (it's more complicated).

That small and extremely common scenario just created money. The bank funding the loan acts as a catalyst in facilitating capital for economic growth, think of it as economic grease. Most currency is created this way, it's why inflation is tied so tightly to the increase in GDP. This process wouldn't be possible with a fixed currency, the supply restrictions of whatever is used as a "backing" would act as an artificial limiter. The bank either couldn't give me the loan, or would have to charge astronomical rates as there simply wasn't enough to go around.

If folks want to know why the 2009 debt bubble caused some catastrophic problems, it wasn't the bad loans or the banks crashing. Instead it was the banks asset debt being of unknown value causing the banks to be unable to make loans that caused the economy to implode. Without the grease of liquid debt economies seize up and are unable to function.

Business's are even easier to start now then four, five, ten or twenty years ago. The internet has made it easy for anyone to do a service startup on the cheap. You don't even need some expensive business school now, just some youtube videos on the basics of putting together a business plan then filing for the LLC.

https://howtostartanllc.com/cost-to-form-an-llc

The hardest part IMHO is having the idea in the first place, and the willingness to take the risk and grind to build it.

Again there is no invisible group of people silently controlling the world. We seem fixed on that idea because it's easy to blame a fictional object (devil / bankers / jews / <insert group here>) then understand that things are simply out of your control. Every decision any one of us makes has an impact on the economy. Strongest impact is locally and grows weaker the father away we go. Local elections have dramatic consequences, yet are often ignored in favor of reality TV style national ones.