The only trading indicator worth paying attention to.

@parker I like to look at Dai. It's easy to move whatevercoin into it, people do that a lot, and it tries to stay pegged to the USD, so it very reliably moves against the market.

@p Yeah, variance in DAI sounds useful, though wouldn't it be a bit of a lagging indicator. Phases of the moon however, you can align your portfolio to best harness the lunar energies.

@parker @p wtf are you guys talking about? What is DAI?

@bot @parker DAI is an attempt to create a coin that is pegged to the USD without being backed by USD. It almost always stays within 0.1% of the USD, but there are small fluctuations caused by people buying or selling en masse, so if it's trading at $1.001, then that means people are selling coins. It corrects itself when the rate stabilizes.

@p @parker I'm sure you guys know more than I do about crypto, but I am absolutely certain that it is a fake and gay scam. Just as an example, a tranny surgeon is probably an expert in their craft, but that doesn't mean they're capable of seeing the forest for the "trees".

@bot @parker

> crypto, but I am absolutely certain that it is a fake and gay scam.

Since the 1970s, so is every currency. Money is essentially an abstract token representing value. The only question is where you put your faith: the petrodollar (the foundation of the entire global currency system, held together by the good faith of the US government and OPEC; I simplify but not much), or the buttscoin (held together by weird hackers and Chinese miners). Obviously, I trust weird hackers to the ends of the earth and I hate the government, so I try to use one instead of the other.

This is as good a description of the idea as any: https://elaineou.com/2017/08/03/a-hundred-years-of-crypto-anarchy/

@p @bot Yeah, ideally a gold-backed currency would be nice. But since we don't have that anymore, at the very least Bitcoin has transparent rules everyone can agree on. Whereas there is no transparency on how many Canadian dollars get printed at any given time.

@parker @p what control do you have over the rules of bitcoin?

@bot @p Generally the rules don't change much, as you need a consensus among the miners, nodes, etc. But everyone's running the same software, so all have a full understanding of the rules (e.g., only 21 million bitcoin can ever exist, the amount produced gets cut in half every 4 years, etc). Which to me is more ideal than the Canadian governments "we'll print as much money as we feel like".

@parker @p you completely dodged the question. Who controls the way bitcoin operates? What control do you have over those rules?

@bot @parker

> you completely dodged the question. Who controls the way bitcoin operates?

He answered it. "Generally the rules don't change much, as you need a consensus among the miners, nodes, etc." The rules are set by the network, which is a consensus of the people running miners and full nodes. You can run a full node and get a vote.

@p @parker ok but you're assuming control can't be usurped by powerful interests. That seems naive tbh.

@bot @p I previously mentioned the astronomical costs required to dominate the bitcoin hash rate. Given that power and value are derived from computing power, hardware, electricity, etc., it's a system that's not feasible to put under centralized control. There's a physical limit to how much you can scale a single operation. China recently banned crypto mining, and all the miners moved to the U.S. and elsewhere, and started up again.

@parker @p I just think you're wrong. The government can tax people as much as they please, and they will. It's naive to think that governments or banks can't take over or eliminate fake computer coins if it poses a real threat to control and taxation.

If tomorrow, Trudeau says you need to pay 30% more in taxes to fight the evil nigger coins, are you going to refuse? I doubt it.