It's all about 'non-fun-gynable tokens'

December 29, 2021 1:26 PM

A normal person explains cryptocurrency Any questions?
posted by Insert Clever Name Here (36 comments total)

And apparently, there's also an advanced tutorial on those 'fun-gynable token' things
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 1:33 PM on December 29, 2021 [2 favorites]

Have you ever had a dream that that you um you had you'd you would you could you'd do you wi you wants you you could do so you you'd do you could you you want you want
posted by Serene Empress Dork at 1:34 PM on December 29, 2021 [7 favorites]

Well-performed!

I just had the graphics card in my very old gaming rig die. The pc probably had enough life left in it that I could just buy a new card. However, I cannot find any card with an MSRP that I like that is 1) in stock, anywhere 2) new and 3) actually being sold for MSRP. I ended buying an entire new pc, with the card I wanted, for only $300 more than it would have cost me to buy the same card as an individual component. Sort of like when it's cheaper to buy a whole new printer than it would be to buy ink cartridges.

I went through much the same emotional progression as the person in this tweet figuring all this out. Fuck cryptocurrency!
posted by Ipsifendus at 1:34 PM on December 29, 2021 [11 favorites]

@theophile said it best with "imagine if keeping your car idling 24/7 produced solved Sudokus you could trade for heroin"
posted by BrotherCaine at 2:08 PM on December 29, 2021 [76 favorites]

Although technically that's more accurate to explain proof of work instead of proof of stake cryptocurrency.
posted by BrotherCaine at 2:08 PM on December 29, 2021 [2 favorites]

I like the fact that a person who is a success in the world of cryptocurrency, and the owner of art that is non-fun-gynable, such as the Mona Lisa by Leonardo Dicaprio, would consent to dress down as a normal person, and produce their videos in their car, to get closer to the rest of us normal people out there who lack the ability to understand these complex financial concepts. The beauty of the internet, is that it allows anyone, with anything to say, at anytime, and anywhere to just say it. Thanks for all this information. I learned something today. After I get some stuff to furnish a video studio in my car, I will be posting my response to these golden videos.
posted by njohnson23 at 2:10 PM on December 29, 2021 [1 favorite]

(Did you not appreciate the 'Mr. Zog's Sex Wax' car air freshener? I thought that added a particularly nice touch.)
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 2:14 PM on December 29, 2021 [3 favorites]

I'm fond of "non-fun gullible tokens"
posted by one for the books at 2:25 PM on December 29, 2021 [1 favorite]

The transition from “I understand this complicated thing and will gladly explain it to you” to “apparently I don’t understand this thing very well but I hope you do not notice,” and the mounting emotional distress as the possibility of the listener not-noticing diminishes: that’s what the first year of graduate school is like with a teaching assistanceship.
posted by fantabulous timewaster at 2:28 PM on December 29, 2021 [28 favorites]

These are so funny. Obligatory mumbling explanation of Bitcoin. Also, I honestly can't tell if some of the youtube commenters think this isn't a routine
posted by treepour at 2:46 PM on December 29, 2021 [5 favorites]

'Mr. Zog's Sex Wax' suggests Southern California, given the surfing connection. Also, making informative videos in a car.

I must confess, that after watching other explaining videos about crypto and NFTs, this video at least told me the most important thing - stay away.
posted by njohnson23 at 2:48 PM on December 29, 2021 [1 favorite]

more accurate to explain proof of work instead of proof of stake cryptocurrency.

"What if rich people ran the books, and so long as they promise not to run off with the money, they get to pay themselves in proportion to how rich they are"
posted by CrystalDave at 3:15 PM on December 29, 2021 [16 favorites]

[Serene Empress Dork! I did not know that was a thing but just yesterday I heard Ryan George do the thing as an explanation for the plot of The Matrix Resurrections.]
apologies for small derail
posted by Glinn at 3:34 PM on December 29, 2021 [3 favorites]

but just yesterday I heard Ryan George do the thing yt as an explanation for the plot of The Matrix Resurrections

Ha! That is funny. And not entirely inaccurate :D
posted by Serene Empress Dork at 4:02 PM on December 29, 2021 [1 favorite]

CrystalDave: " "What if rich people ran the books, and so long as they promise not to run off with the money, they get to pay themselves in proportion to how rich they are""

What do you mean 'what if'?
posted by signal at 4:11 PM on December 29, 2021 [7 favorites]

What do you mean 'what if'?
Exactly.
"What if it were mostly the same people, but they really wanted to convince you that it's different people, and maybe you could imagine being one of those?"
posted by CrystalDave at 4:26 PM on December 29, 2021 [5 favorites]

By the way, Avalon Penrose is the voice actor who did a lot of work (including Maegara the Fury) in the video game Hades right?
posted by other barry at 4:30 PM on December 29, 2021

I still prefer @dyatlovassincdt's take:

Periodic reminder that Bitcoin mining is not "solving equations". It's thousands of GPUs and specially-built chips burning electricity to yell random 64 digit numbers at each other in the hope one of them is the secret word of the day
posted by Mayor West at 4:57 PM on December 29, 2021 [10 favorites]

By the way, Avalon Penrose is the voice actor who did a lot of work (including Maegara the Fury) in the video game Hades right?

She sure is.

Totally unrelated question: is it possible to have a crush on someone based entirely on their voice acting?
posted by Mayor West at 4:59 PM on December 29, 2021 [2 favorites]

> is it possible to have a crush on someone based entirely on their voice acting?

i am from anime and i assure you it is quite plausible two of my favorite seiyu are Miyuki Sawashiro and Ryōko Shintani and it's always a delight when they end up in the same show like in Galaxy Angel or Sayonara Zetsubō Sensei or Hidamari Sketch
posted by glonous keming at 5:41 PM on December 29, 2021

> is it possible to have a crush on someone based entirely on their voice acting?

Kristen Schaal
posted by zoinks at 5:56 PM on December 29, 2021 [7 favorites]

Is she for real, or mocking it?

I really can't tell The Onion from reality anymore, and this is more evidence of that.
posted by hydra77 at 6:45 PM on December 29, 2021 [2 favorites]

She is most certainly mocking it, and the YouTube commenters who think she's being genuine are *chef's kiss*.
posted by emelenjr at 6:49 PM on December 29, 2021 [3 favorites]

Fungyna-ble. Concept 'o the day.
posted by Oyéah at 7:01 PM on December 29, 2021

If you haven't seen her explain the GameStop mess with equal clarity you should go watch that. She is hilarious!
posted by funkiwan at 8:09 PM on December 29, 2021 [3 favorites]

Although technically that's more accurate to explain proof of work instead of proof of stake cryptocurrency.

It seems certain that increased use and legitimization of any type of cryptocurrency will contribute to ecologically disastrous increases in the use and legitimization of proof-of-work cryptocurrency. I can't imagine a world where lots more people use cryptocurrency but none of it is Bitcoin.
posted by straight at 8:41 PM on December 29, 2021 [2 favorites]

Thanks for this insertclevernamehere! Made my day.
posted by storybored at 9:29 PM on December 29, 2021

I can't imagine a world where lots more people use cryptocurrency but none of it is Bitcoin.

I can, and so can the Stellar Development Foundation.

Stellar is a very-low-energy value transfer protocol that relies on neither proof-of-work nor proof-of-stake, it supports transfers denominated in an unlimited variety of tokens, and its own network-native tokens are used mainly as intermediaries to facilitate automatic currency conversions between sender and recipient. The fact that value spends so little time denominated in network-native tokens means that volatility of their own market value is not a showstopper for the network's use as an actual currency transfer mechanism, as opposed to an insanely complicated tulip hoarding infrastructure. The idea is to have everybody do their transactions in a tokenized form of their own local currency, not in Stellar Lumens; Stellar is about upgrading the payments network, not having people who don't understand tyres reinvent the entire money wheel.

I can see no good reason why existing central banks could not issue State-backed tokens on the Stellar network in much the same way as they already create physical cash; doing so is both very cheap and fully verifiable. I can see plenty of good reasons why central banks holding reserves of Bitcoin is a fundamentally stupid idea. And sure, they could also issue their own ERC20 tokens on the Ethereum blockchain, but why would anybody sane get involved with something as broken and expensive as Ethereum when alternatives that work better and cost less are readily available?

I can also see no good reason why I should need to keep paying rentiers like PayPal and Visa the ridiculous vig they charge in order to e.g. buy stuff from the US at prices listed in US dollars and use Australian dollars to do that. Not when a Stellar transaction settles in five seconds and costs a tiny fraction of a cent. But Bitcoin and its army of externality-blind libertarian fanbois have so thoroughly poisoned the well on cryptocurrency as a concept that I'm sure I'll still have no better choice than paying the rentiers for at least the next decade.
posted by flabdablet at 4:03 AM on December 30, 2021 [3 favorites]

Please stop trying to sell me Star Moomins
posted by oulipian at 4:40 AM on December 30, 2021 [13 favorites]

i am from anime and i assure you it is quite plausible two of my favorite seiyu are Miyuki Sawashiro and Ryōko Shintani and it's always a delight when they end up in the same show like in Galaxy Angel or Sayonara Zetsubō Sensei or Hidamari Sketch
posted by glonous keming

I am a graphic designer and I'm kind of crushing on you a little bit because your username is a graphic design joke and I laugh whenever I see one of your comments.

Is there a way to harness this crush energy? We could power... something.
posted by Fleebnork at 5:39 AM on December 30, 2021 [1 favorite]

CES, the increasingly irrelevant consumer electronics trade show, announced last week that it is covering NFTs with its featured speaker: Paris Hilton. I imagine her speech will make about as much sense as this one...
posted by mmoncur at 6:37 AM on December 30, 2021 [2 favorites]

I just call bitcoin "Dunning Krugerrands"...
posted by DreamerFi at 7:10 AM on December 30, 2021 [6 favorites]

flabdablet: I admit that I haven't really looked into Stellar in any great depth, but on its face, I'm having trouble seeing what the advantage is over a centralized payments clearinghouse.

This is sort of the problem with "blockchain" in general. There's really no particular problem it solves well, except for what we might politely call "regulatory arbitrage", i.e. being able to do illegal shit and dodge banking regulations that exist for various, mostly pretty good, reasons. All the companies involved seem to be betting on a version of the Uber business model: somehow get entrenched quickly enough that it becomes impossible to just shut them down for ignoring all the regulations that they don't comply with.

Except that, unlike with taxi services, where the incumbents were (a) really fucking bad at their goddamn jobs, and (b) not especially politically connected or savvy beyond obtaining municipal-level regulatory capture, the big financial companies are actually pretty good at doing what they do, within a first approximation (they don't typically, like, just lose your money or randomly decide to not work, in a way that's equivalent to the incompetence displayed by incumbent taxi companies), and they are extremely well-connected with national regulators.

There's certainly room to undercut Visa, given that they run something like a ~50% profit margin (although how profitable their actual transactions network is, as opposed to other services, isn't clear), but adding a blockchain into the mix doesn't do much to get you there. Being a nonprofit does, so it's nice Stellar is doing that, but if they're going to be a Delaware-incorporated nonprofit corporation, operating under US law, they might as well just stand up a centralized transaction database in the US and call it a day.
posted by Kadin2048 at 2:26 PM on December 30, 2021 [2 favorites]

Briefly: the SDF doesn't handle transactions, so it isn't necessary for non-US actors to trust either the SDF or the US government not to interfere with the ledger. The protocol works the way its open source code says it does regardless of the jurisdictions that bind its authors.

Happy to discuss further but only off-thread; Bitcoin really has poisoned the discourse to an extent that's made cryptocurrency another topic that MeFi can't maintain healthy, respectful discussion of without undue moderator load, and I have no wish to engage with those offended by it.
posted by flabdablet at 9:04 PM on December 30, 2021

> I am a graphic designer and I'm kind of crushing on you a little bit because your usemame is a graphic design joke and I laugh whenever I see one of your comments. Is there a way to hamess this crush energy? We could power... something.

congrats on your new position as typesetter for my anime fansub group called [Limerence Triangle]

kidding, kidding. 🧡

i ran this comment through the kempressor algorithm and saved 2 characters
posted by glonous keming at 9:56 AM on December 31, 2021 [1 favorite]

I've always enjoyed the way you've embraced it, making glonous that which could so easily have been wntten off as spunous, infenor or imtating.
posted by flabdablet at 10:07 AM on December 31, 2021 [5 favorites]