“Tokenized”
Is there a good “crypto for idiots” type resource for those of us struggling to wrap our brains around this? I wouldn’t have a clue where to even start with buying any of these or how to use them. Between a demanding job and family responsibilities, I don’t have time to do a whole lot of studying in an area that I know so little about. I bet I’m not the only one.
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You’re not alone. I think many folks are in the same position, which is definitely a barrier to adoption. If crypto of any kind is to be widely adopted, it has to be made more user friendly.
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The best place to start would be at the beginning - read https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
It’s only 8 pages, not counting the references.
This whole thing strikes me as unbelievably complex and complicated, soon to be well beyond human ability to understand and manage. It amounts to fiat currency implemented by digital means.
To me “they” appear increasingly desperate, ever more seeing control and stability slipping from their grasp. They cannot hold all of the threads in their hands — and never could. That is the lesson here: their dream is impossible and unattainable now and always has been; the limits to their growth are coming nearer. The entire premise upon which their plans and schemes are based is flawed. Failure is guaranteed.
All fiat currencies eventually fail, and I am confident that this labyrinth, this bizarre Byzantine scheme will follow suit. The main question is, as ever, how many little people will be hurt and destroyed by it en route to its failure?
It appears you understand neither the problem nor the solution. This article should help if you manage to read through it: What Is the Byzantine Generals Problem? | River
Public distributed cryptocurrency is not a labyrinth, once you understand the inner workings it’s actually fairly straightforward. As a prerequisite, you do need to understand some math, such as what is a hash function.
And the main truth of the situation is that the elites who are in the drivers seat couldn’t care less how many people are hurt and destroyed. Their overriding goal is the retention of wealth and power … at any cost.
Cambridge dictionary:
byzantine:
complicated and difficult to understand:
rules of byzantine complexity
He called for an overhaul of the byzantine tax system.
The calculations become positively Byzantine in their complexity.
Fewer examples
- The byzantine legal manoeuvring went on for years.
- They are seeking alternatives to the current Byzantine process for channelling money into education schemes.
- Anyone who has managed the complex challenges of a large household can survive the most byzantine office intrigues.
Should have used the lower-case b.
In my further defence, I spent 10 years as a database programmer, building and elaborating upon an increasingly capable but increasingly complex system, and ended in the unenviable position of being the world expert in it. I won’t go into the details. Suffice it to say that I have gained a good insight into what is required to analyse, design, code, debug and maintain a computer-based system.
There are limits to growth everywhere. There is an error rate associated with EVERYTHING we do.
All that said, yes, I will read your linked article, if only to prove that the older I grow, the less I know. 
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The theory and implementation of crypto is an order of magnitude or two more complex than what’s required for the typical person to trade using cash, checks, and credit cards, or barter or physical PMs.
Complexity isn’t always a bad thing but it does impede adoption. And a simpler system is usually more resilient - meaning less prone to breaking and more easily fixed. And it is more transparent.
I assume you disagree with that, which is your prerogative.
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If/when you get into ‘crypto’ IMO you would be wise to stay with just BTC and learn how it works.
A transaction can only occur if/when the token you have has some value to the person you are attempting to conduct business with. The problem with so called ‘privacy coins’ or ‘confidentiality layers’ is that you can have perfectly private transaction with yourself, or wait for others to while your coin is debased by air drops and inflationary monetary problems. If you willing to loose purhasing power due to monetary inflation, your likely better off just using paper US dollars. Small bills or coins are private and at least they are widely accepted.
After long hours attempting to understand ‘alt’ coins, including Monero and Zano, IMO there is good reason why BTC holds value, while others tokens do not. Satoshi made the right trade offs, started the network, then left. What he left is anti-fragile because it depends on a game theory of participants in a network. Based on this game theory, not only is BTC dominant network now, it will always be the dominant network. It will always have a stable and unchangeable monetary policy. Why? Because to change from this requires the majority of USERS to do things that are not in their best interests. Bitcoin can’t be cloned because the value is in the network itself (number of nodes, users, hashpower, etc). Governments can and have attemptted to control it, but they have repeatedly failed. They can’t control this because its USERS are globally distributed. After more than a decade it just seems to have no good attack point. For example the CCP tried to shut it down hashpower - but hashpower was higher within a year. Attacking it seems to make it stronger.
No other crypto is like this. Other cryptos have pre-mines, airdrops and promotions. They are scams with central figures that get rich, but importantly can be bought off or controlled. Other coins claim faster transaction by ignoring settlement security. Others coins claim ‘privacy’ by ignoring inherent risks that are involved by ‘locking up’ coins on insecure or small chains. ETH for example has several attack points that make it insecure: 1) a huge percent runs on Amazon servers so the US govt could just tell amazon to stop hosting this, 2) its monetary policy and chain reversals can change at the whims of Vitalik, and 3) smart contracts can be exploited in ways that steal even coins held in cold storage (as recently shown by the Bybit hack). This is just to name a few problems. Layer 2 solutions will likely always be faster and more private, but faster/private always comes as a tradeoff of settlement security. For large transaction settlement, Bitcoin is far and away the fastest and most secure settlement - by several orders of magnitude. For small transactions, Lightning is faster and more private than any ‘privacy coin’ or ‘light coin’ IMO. There just seems no reason to go for anything else in this space.
Moreover, IMO it is possible to transact bitcoin anonymously and in ways that no government can trace or stop - if you know how it works and run your own node (e.g. you can perform coin joins in ways that make tracing addresses statistically impossible ). You just don’t need a separate coin or layer 1 to do the same kinds of things that a layer 2 can do. However, this statement comes with the same caveats that ANY privacy coin would have: 1) your privacy is only as good as your understanding of how things work, and 2) there is NO SUCH THING AS ABSOLUTE PRIVACY in this space unless the person on the other side of the transaction is yourself.
In every real transaction, there is another party which is how ‘THEY’ (the deep state blob/cabal) will figure this out. ‘THEY’ will catch you not because of the token stored up, but because you need the stuff on the other side of the transaction. Because no transaction occurs unless the other side needs/wants some thing you have - and MOST folks will never care to want your deflating ZENO, so you will almost surely will need to convert that into some other form that the other party will accept. And then you have an on/off ramp becomes non private again. Moreover, you can easily be profiled based on who you do business with, so the size of the anonymity set becomes a limiting factor. As a result, the ‘confidentiality layer’ with a small user base ends up being a scam which offers no more privacy than you had in the first place. To be more confidential, ironically a network needs a larger number of users most of which are not conducting suspicious activity. But to gain that larger number of users the smaller network must compete to hold value over time better and ensure safety against attacks better. And this ends up being why Bitcoin +/- Lightning +/- CoinJoins ends up being more private/faster.
Notably, this is also why USD, Gold, and Silver are good to have also. Bitcoins main advantage here is that it has tighter monetary supply than even Gold, and is more far more convenient to move across juridictions. And, if network effects continue it has a shot at being accepted by enough in the future without a need to exchange into fiat first.
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I don’t disagree with it. The average person doesn’t need to understand it to use it, just like they have no idea how fiat money works, but IMO it’s nice to understand what it is you’re using.
I so agree with the complexity of this field. Like Partial Differential Calculus, most very smart people here at PP could learn this and pass a college course—but only after several intense months or years of study.
We are convinced of the NEED and DESIRABILITY of a privacy focused transaction crypto,
So what do we do??
Please give us a recipe with simple steps, use SMALL WORDS, provide basic pictures. Hold our hands and and walk us noobies into a working system.
There is a tremendous art to conveying a complex topic to a beginner. We need people who want to do this.
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I’ve heard good things about Andreas Antonopoulos (https://www.youtube.com/@aantonop), how he is great at exactly that art - conveying a complex topic to beginners. Now, I haven’t personally watched any of his material as I dove into this before he created his presentations, but supposedly it’s very good. Give that a shot?
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If banks and guberments are pushing the plebs into using some form of crypto or tokenizing their transaction, i would think that cash or its equivalent is still needed. Since these scumbags want total control to “help us”, how will they continue to conduct their corrupted agenda through fraudulent money transactions if cash was no longer available? Will they use private alt coins? How will they send billions in cash to those foreign countries?
How do they pay off folks to perform malicious activities if cash lost its luster? How does the CIA pay off folks to overthrow governments or pay a group to over throw a country?
I think cash will always have its place, I have not experienced anywhere in Ohio that will not accepted cash. My wife has a home business and she see more folks that pay with credit than with cash.
Trump-backed crypto bank joins stablecoin wars with new dollar-pegged token -CNBC
My sense is a slow drag into 3rd world.
Our family has done business in Haiti for 1.5 generations. The winding down is earily familiar.
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