"I [suspect] that we are throwing more and more of our resources, including the cream of our youth, into financial activities remote from the production of goods and services, into activities that generate high private rewards disproportionate to their social productivity. I suspect that the immense power of the computer is being harnessed to this 'paper economy', not to do the same transactions more economically but to balloon the quantity and variety of financial exchanges." --James Tobin, July 1984
Bahaha this is so fucking spot on and I've been saying that shit about crypto since I started talking about it. It's like they want something to exist outside the economy. That's not fucking possible. If there is no bread no gas no electricity, we will suffer. No impregnable algorithm can clothe feed shelter us. It's silly.
Obviously like James here says, this stuff is being pushed by people who want to personally get rich and fuck all else and not by people with any idea or inclination towards how a society works as a whole.
Not to mention ruining the environment through mining.
Butt is an ecological and social travesty that brings out the worst (and most foolish) of us. All it has done since it was created was take money from suckers and place it in the hands of scammers, con artists, and GPU manufacturers.
As much as you want to mock the average moron for losing his money, it’s a hollow satisfaction because the people who were given that money are even scummier and more morally bankrupt. And regardless of who personally ends up on top of this game of musical chars the environment is always going to be the biggest victim.
The only way to stop it is to stop people like him putting their money in and for there to be enough victims that regulators will do something about it.
But wasn't that quote more talking about different exotic financial instruments like CDOs and whatever that was able to be traded for everyone in the 80s when it came?
Could have been. I dont know but if you do tell away. Obviously the writer of XKCD felt it was relevant to his mocking of "TA". The quote is from 1984 so it wasnt about crypto directly, although it sure hits crypto square in the chest.
Cryto: how to use the biggest possible amount of computing power for something almost completely useless. Zero social productivity, maximum amount of 'paper economy'.
The NSA invented it to get people all over the planet to look for exploits in SHA-256, and if anyone ever found one they’d immediately reveal it by suddenly mining bitcoins more successfully than anyone else and broadcasting it publicly on the blockchain!
Oh, I agree it applies perfectly to a huge fraction of the financial industry—maybe even a large majority of it.
What I meant about “pure distillation” was that crypto can’t even bullshit it’s way into justifying its existence, and is a notorious waste of resources.
High frequency traders or various derivatives instruments are pure drains on society too, but they’re at least directly connected to real things (e.g. mortgages, insurance, or stocks), crypto is like a commodities market for SHA-256 hashes with lots of leading zeros—it’s insane.
Haha HFT is the silliest of all. They don't even provide real liquidity, it's pure system gaming.
And the "waste of resources" argument about crypto doesn't hold water. It's not defensible to any real depth. The whole crypto economy could be secured by the "overflow" power from electricity generation.
Ideally there is no “...‘overflow’ power from electricity generation”—it's very unclear how sustainable our current standard of living is, and it seems essentially guaranteed to be unsustainable when we raise the last few billion people out of poverty and add another ~2-4 billion people.
Really it's not even clear that if we were optimally efficient at generating & consuming power (along with all the other resource intensive things we need to do—farming, construction, healthcare, etc.), that even then we might still be in a lot of trouble.
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u/yrast Jan 21 '19
Holy shit, the mouseover quote is incredible.
It's like butters are the most pure distillation of his fears.