This is an award-winning documentary that pulls no punches and goes into detail on what blockchain is, how it works, and all the other crypto schemes and how they inter-relate. The second half of the documentary goes into examining specific claims made by crypto proponents. A must watch for anybody who wants to fully understand crypto technology.

BOSTON—Stressing that the move would help keep digital currencies liquid through the coming year, crypto leaders called for an infusion of 20 million dopes Thursday to stabilize the market. “We’re calling for millions of bozos to be infused into the crypto market to stave off collapse and assure investors their money…

A crypto ATM maker and a Texas sheriff’s department are locked in a fierce legal battle after police seized cash from one of the company’s machines and handed it back to an 82-year-old woman who had been scammed into converting $15,000 into bitcoin.

This is great. More of this please.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/703141

I am very excited about the possibility of the Fediverse, and the potential for many experiments in instance governance. A problem that all instances must content with is trolling and spam. It seems very difficult to impose a cost on these bad actors without harming honest users as well. Either instances have minimal signup friction and are vulnerable to being overwhelmed with bad actors & defederated (see the recent defederation decision from Beehaw), or they present frustrating barriers such as manual approval or waitlists for folks who just want to have fun

A possible solution comes from the blockchain space, which has been dealing with anonymous bad actors since its inception. Many blockchains and blockchain apps require users to stake some asset in order to gain certain privileges (basically a deposit). If the user is determined to be a bad actor, they lose some or all of their stake.

An instance could be integrated with a smart contract to manage membership could be very effective at dissuading trolls and spammers. A user could stake a small amount of money (say $10) in order to create an account on the instance. This could be done very quickly and would require no manual approval from admins. If the admins determine they are acting poorly, they could ban the user and slash their funds. If an honest user decides they don't want to stay on the instance, they could delete their account and recover their deposit.

I've got a prototype smart contract for this. Would be interested in working with someone on this if there's anyone with experience with the instance management

Now, dear The Node reader, what does all this have to do with crypto? Or how can it help you earn money? Well, depending on how the situation shakes out it could have a few implications for crypto as a social movement. Obviously, the ability for a company to make unilateral decisions that severely affect users is a Big Plus for a movement that is advocating for transparency, open access and user control. Perhaps an enterprising lad, laddess or ladx could build the next Reddit, only decentralized.

We need the comedy GODL to migrate here. This is a much more capable platform than the others I have been trying since last year.

Also hello again, Buttcoiners.

#Buttcoin

In this episode we talk about some surprise restrictions that Reddit top level admins have placed on /r/buttcoin, the most popular crypto-critical subreddit....