Tehhund

We fixed the glitch.

Thank you for this! I thought Firefox for Android was slow - nope, uBlock was just doing too much.

Where I'm coming from: I'm just a random person on the internet, my opinion doesn't really matter. So I'm willing to apply heuristics here that I would not apply if I were directly involved in the situation. If I were directly involved I would want to know more before rendering a judgment.

The heuristic I applied here was: this whole thing about "furries in schools" has come up repeatedly as a right-wing talking point and to my knowledge it has been a lie 100% of the time. So I was comfortable applying the heuristic of "if this has been a lie every other time it has come up, this time it is probably a lie." As they say extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, so I would need something extraordinary to convince me that furries assaulting students with impunity is a thing that actually happened. Not impossible, there are enough humans on the earth that absolutely bonkers things happen all the time, but extraordinarily unlikely to be true.

A cursory search revealed a much more believable story: some students wore headbands possibly with ears on them to school, and other kids were assholes to them. Honestly the only surprising thing to me is how reasonable the administration was: they sent a letter reminding students that those headbands are not allowed by dress code but also reminding the other students that being terrible to your fellow students is not ok. I remember high school, this all sounds believable to me (except for the part where administration admonished the food-throwing bullies, that's a little bit of a surprise to me).

I'll take "things that never happened" for $1,000, Alex. Fortunately some actual journalists looked into it and this is all a lie: https://www.ksl.com/article/50985141/no-evidence-of-furries-in-nebo-school-district-despite-allegations-social-media-firestorm

After the administration had conversations with the students wearing the headbands — noting that they were a "little bit of a disruption" — the students stopped wearing them, Sorenson said.

The letter also addressed the food throwing targeted at the headband-wearing students, saying that a "written, verbal or a physical act that creates a hostile, threatening, humiliating, or abusive environment is not permitted."

Instant ramen. Or if I'm feeling fancy, ramen that takes 6 whole minutes to cook

I read that as "the tool to report websites is broken."

I don't understand the disadvantages yet except environmental concerns.

As you point out, PoS basically solves the environmental concerns. (Some people might say it still consumes too much power but I disagree, I think power consumption under PoS is acceptable).

This is just my opinion, but I think the big disadvantage is cryptocurrencies are a pain in the ass to use. Lengthy story about what a pain it's been to use them in Spoiler tag. I think this story is a bit of an outlier since I hit all of these issues, but the fact that a technically inclined person who is just getting back into cryptocurrency after a long hiatus can have this much trouble with it does not speak well use ability or safety.

::: I have a few coins I mined back in the day (before switching all my computing power to BOINC), and I saved off my wallet.dat from those wallets. I wanted to use them recently, so I reinstalled the wallet software. That worked, but then I had to download the entire chain again, so I had to wait more than a day to actually use the coins. Putting cash in a bank is faster if I'm already a customer of the bank. If I'm a new customer I might have to wait, but the point is cryptocurrency doesn't have a clear advantage here.

The coins I had weren't Bitcoin, but the shop I wanted to buy from only accepts Bitcoin. So then I had to exchange mine for Bitcoin and pay transaction fees. I guess you could say it's my own fault for holding a less-popular coin but I'm not sure cryptocurrency is living up to its own hype if there's exactly one or two coins that you have to use, just like how in the US there's no real alternative to USD.

I found a no-account exchange, and I had to carefully enter keys and figure out amounts of coin > BTC. And I had to trust the exchange to give me what I wanted. If the no-account exchange didn't exist, I would have to create a whole new account on a website I don't entirely trust just to exchange one coin for Bitcoin. That's a layer of trust in a "trustless" system. I also don't like creating yet another account with my info in it — yet another way that cryptocurrency is not better than traditional finance.

Then not only did it cost transaction fees, it took hours for the transaction to go through. I could pay more for it to go faster, but now we're talking about fees that far exceed those of credit cards or regular money transfers. Then I had to send the Bitcoin to the online store and wait for that transaction to clear. More time and more transaction fees. The purchase worked without a hitch, but it wasn't any better than using a credit card.

I had to buy extra BTC because it's really difficult to know exactly how much you're going to pay including transaction fees, so after the transaction went through I tried to turn my remaining Bitcoins (I think it was worth ~$13?) back into the kind of coins I keep, but I set my transaction fee too low and the trade I set up expired before my coins went through. Luckily I had given the exchange a refund account, but that meant I had to wait over 24 hours before my transaction actually happened, and then the exchange had to send back my Bitcoin, incurring fees at each step.

While waiting I tried to cancel this Bitcoin transaction, but the software I used didn't support that. So then I tried to extract my private key to enter into another piece of software, and that was surprisingly difficult. I thought cryptocurrency was supposed to put me in control, but without a LOT of technical knowledge I was just as powerless as I'd be with a bank that froze a transfer. I asked for help on a few forums and some people tried to help but the whole thing was confusing and eventually I had to give up and just wait for the transaction to go through.

Then I had to do the BTC > mycoin transaction again, and this time I think the fees were 5-10% of the amount I was transferring. That's way more than Venmo's immediate transfer fee or even credit card fees (I think those are around 3%?).

I will say that during this process I discovered the Electrum wallet, which is very good and works on a lot of platforms. Some of the issues I had would not have happened if I had used that all along. But there are so many wallets out there it's hard to know which one is best and obviously when I started this process no one told me it was the best. And maybe it's not and that just my opinion.

In summary, I'm interested in cryptocurrency and kind of enjoyed using it in the way learning new things can be fun. But it was slower, less convenient, and more expensive than regular currency. Cryptocurrency boosters are going to have to improve all of these problems before it's competitive with regular currency, and I don't see a lot of discussion about how much these pain points suck and how to improve.

:::

This is true, but it's hard to see why we would ever move from fiat currency to cryptocurrency as the primary means of exchange. Currently cryptocurrency's advantages are modest and its disadvantages are substantial, and I haven't seen a lot of movement toward fixing that balance. I'd like to give traditional finance channels some competition to reduce fees, lock-in, and inconvenience, but cryptocurrency is going to have to get a lot better for average people if it's going to be a real alternative.

I agree there's something to be said for this — If you have a above-board business that credit card companies don't want to service because they think it makes them look bad, that should not shut you out of electronic payments yet that's basically where we are at least in the US.

This is a little hard to balance with the fact that the same things that let you circumvent gatekeepers like credit card companies also make it attractive for genuinely immoral things, but that's a trade-off. Every currency can be used for immoral things and just because cryptocurrency might make it a little easier doesn't mean it's inherently immoral.

I didn't say cryptocurrency was any better or worse for fraud and abuse than regular currencies. Honestly I have no idea which one is better or worse for fraud and abuse. I'm just saying it's not clear that the particular way that cryptocurrency is more secure than regular banking is actually beneficial.

That's really the thing, isn't it? In my experience cryptocurrency fees are quite high. I bet there's a way to find a lower fee but then I'd have to do a ton of research and hope it's accurate. I'd rather just pay a bank that requires me to do no research.

Thanks for your input, dingdong.