It’s called high frequency trading. HFT companies place extremely fast servers as close to the physical locations where the computers controlling various stock exchanges are and then use the lower latency to make millions of trades in the split seconds between the exchanges releasing prices and the data making it to the public internet.
The Forbes article referenced says that using the cable vs traditional network connections gives a 3 millisecond advantage. It cost $300 million, and was considered well-worth the investment
That advantage is worth so much, and yet I keep meeting everday people who think they’re going to make money by investing in stocks that “feel good”.
It’s literally gambling with a bunch of people who are cheating, more or less legally. Yeah everyone knows an acquaintance who made one good investment years ago and might not even realize how much they lost along the way. It’s so exploitative.
The only way it works at all is to pay a mutual fund to game the system for you. That’s not a healthy system.
Norbert
2 years ago
Most of the cryprocurrencies are just scam or balloon waiting for burst.
Trad currency doesn’t cause massive carbon emissions and make it impossible to find a graphics card, not to mention has government backing so it can be spent without causing a mass loss in value.
Crytocurrencies burn GPUs and power for absolutely no benefit except for criminals. But other than that, I have to admit you have a point – traditional markets are scams as well.
All of the fiat currencies are just a scam or balloon waiting to burst. FTFY.
Seriously though, every fiat system in the history of humans has crashed and burned, with an average lifespan of about 150 years. They all end the same way – the people in charge get hooked on printing money, and devaluing their own currency in the process.
The USD became a fiat currency in 1970, when they got off the gold standard.
I’ve heard 27 years, 35 years, 24.x years. All from people trying to sell either gold or bitcoin. Oh and your name is cryptofan. Hello bot! And what is crypto backed with? Nothing.
There is absolutely nothing magical about the “gold standard”, it just added an extra layer of abstraction. Gold has little intrinsic value, less if circumstances resulted in the type of societal collapse that would render the US dollar useless. Salt would be far more valuable if society collapsed. All currency is based on mutual trust and utility. A vault full of gold, even one that could keep up with the sheer size of the dollar based worldwide economy would be largely impractical (if even possible) and add no practical level of trust or utility. Meanwhile crypto currencies have little to… Read more »
The ‘magical’ part of the gold standard is that it kept money printing in check. It’s not about the value of gold, it was more about keeping the system from being a fiat system, where the powers in charge could print money at will, devalue their own currency, and thus, steal value from all holders of said currency. When governments print money, they don’t create value, and they don’t inject the new money into the system in a fair and equitable way. They quietly extract value from all holders of the currency in a way that most people don’t notice… Read more »
Crypto not being controlled is also the biggest disadvantage. It is literally legal to manipulate crypto, perform rug pulls, do every single trick that’s banned in traditional finance, all because no one can control it. No protections are given, you can accidentally spend $1 million to send $10 instead of the other way around and there’s nothing you can do. As for them being here to stay, probably in some form, but China’s already banned them entirely, and India is looking to ban all but a handful of hand-picked ones. Add the growing concerns over the staggering energy usage of… Read more »
You’re talking of control when you really mean regulation. Crypto absolutely could be regulated, but governments have been hesitant to do so, mostly because they either don’t understand it or don’t want to lend legitimacy to it. But the frauds you’re talking about are still, in many jurisdictions, very much a crime. The lack of control I’m talking about is in the ability to inflate the supply, like can be done with fiat. That will never happen with Bitcoin. China only banned crypto because they wanted to remove competition before putting out their own government created crypto. CBDC’s (central bank… Read more »
Thorough regulations are impossible without thorough control. There is literally money laundering as a service; I can open up a new wallet, perform whatever financial crime I feel like, and run the proceeds through a mixer to my primary wallet. Even if/when things like crypto manipulation becomes illegal (again, manipulation and insider trading perfectly legal today), there’s easy access to untraceable funds. The only real way to stop that is to require some kind of authentication for setting up new accounts, something like what a bank does, but that’s impossible on an uncontrolled blockchain. As for moving miners from China,… Read more »
I don’t think this deserved to be downvoted. It’s a pretty good description of the position, even though I strongly disagree with most of the implications.
I think it’s fine that governments can print more currency, and I do not care that it devalues existing currency by causing inflation. Inflation can be very bad, but it can also be natural and fine. I also do not think the gold standard meaningfully prevented the problem of inflation. Cryptocurrencies extremely don’t.
Thanks for providing for a respectful dissent here. Governments printing currency is fine as long as it’s done responsibly. But I would hardly call what governments everywhere have been doing since Covid hit responsible. Heck, since the 2008 financial crisis, things have gone off the rails. https://medium.com/currency-waves/visualizing-global-monetary-expansion-6ecf3db7a7ea Inflation is bad if you hold a lot of the currency being inflated, and inflation is good if you hold a lot of debt denominated in that currency. If you owe more on your house than you hold in cash and equivalents, maybe you’ll do okay with high inflation. But all I’m really… Read more »
Inflation is definitely bad for people holding on to the currency, that much is for sure! I’ve whined about the stock market a lot, but there are stable investments that typically follow inflation. IMO, that’s basically the “gold” standard in the modern age. There was nothing special about gold except for its scarcity. Investment in vital commodities is essentially the same, except less artificial than valuing gold. …Ironically, gold does have actual use nowadays in electronics, but you know what I mean. I do see how the gold standard kept currency printing in check, theoretically. In practice there was no… Read more »
Not to beat a dead horse here, but I can understand how it might be difficult to understand the value proposition of bitcoin itself. For me, the key to understanding the idea was to look at the next most popular cryptocurrency – Ethereum. It became the world’s first programmable blockchain, and the implications of that are really where the value proposition starts to make more sense, at least if you’re technically inclined. These days Ethereum does so much that it has become congested, like a single core processor from the 90’s trying to do too much all at once. It’s… Read more »
I sure hope so. In concept, they’re a great idea looking towards the future, but in practice, they seem even more abused than the gold exchange. Comically so. But I have this underlying worry that I’m making the same mistake my dad did when he thought computers would never be more than a novelty, and lost his career as an architect when everyone started switching over from a drafting table to the CAD he refused to learn.
This comment warms my heart. I realize the crypto and gamer communities have been at odds with each other due to the current state of the GPU market. But I would like to believe that gamers would be more likely than the average person to recognize that digital money is the future. Thank you for acknowledging that sliver of doubt in your mind. I believed it was a scam once too, but there are great reasons why it is still here, and it isn’t too late to get onboard.
I don’t know what rock you’ve been living under, but traditional currency is already digital. I’ve never once had a chequebook, and haven’t visited an ATM in years. My rent is transferred digitally, my groceries are bought with a digital tap of the wallet. I can buy goods in other countries without visiting an exchange because they’re all digital. Crypto isn’t special in that regard.
That last sentence is always the big red flag. Betrays intent as purely being the lucky few early adopters hoping to become rich if it keeps growing. Not genuinely understanding the tech and If it has potential. Just assumptions and avarice. The same mindset other scams prey upon (hence the comparisons) I’m your antithesis really. Former enthusiast, then the deeper I went into crypto as a tech, the more rotten and flawed its foundation seemed. Tech with no genuine problem to solve and physically incapable of scaling to the size it would need to go for its flau Ted promises.… Read more »
Forgive me then for showing a little emotion for something that I am passionate about, and something that I think gets some unfair hate from the gaming community (as obviously evidenced by all the downvotes my comments are getting). Let me just remind you though that I’M not here to sell YOU anything. I’m only trying to open a dialogue, one community to another. It is a shame that you encountered toxicity in your journey through our subcultures, if you will, but every community has their sections of toxicity, gamers included. But I can assure you that blockchain technology will… Read more »
I have no doubt that blockchain will eventually come to be a great tool. I think how it handles decentralization is a great idea for a lot of many things. What I doubt is that an attempt at currency that relies on it while also implementing a system that incentivizes more and more electricity consumption by more and more miners during an era where most of the planet’s electricity is still produced by non-renewable resources that pollute the air, will be at all accepted by the majority. It is worth noting that this aspect is what I suspect draws the… Read more »
I do appreciate your mostly neutral tone, and with it, the opportunity to correct some misnomers about crypto from an ecological perspective. I’ll also set aside the idea of a gaming community (or any one community in general) deciding what is and is not a frivolous waste of electricity. Crypto mining has been quite an energy consumer, yes, but it does provide some advantages from an ecological perspective. One being that it is providing increased demand, which is often required for green energy projects to get built in the first place. Another is that energy companies often produce a lot… Read more »
And so ZK makes the exact same judgement call so many have done before: you see a flaw in the system and you immediately jump to exploiting it to your own benefit. If you have the brain power to even notice the flaw, it’s so much more satisfying to find a way to fix it (if for no other reason than the fact that it’s actually more challenging that way).
The powers that be, are, specifically because they used the flaws to get the power. They won’t let anyone kneecap them by fixing the very thing they used to get where they are. Not unless something else they can manipulate takes its place first.
Phaet
2 years ago
Now I envy him.
Dodgy
2 years ago
Deleting the old comments so no one ever knows a mistake was made? Or were they linked to that particular post?
A copy of the last Starcaster strip was uploaded under the name “Recipient p4” instead of this strip. It was early in the morning, at around 7:00 AM EST, so a lot of people missed it.
As for the comments missing, my best guess is that Tim simply deleted the mistake-strip and uploaded this instead, and the comments went out with the mistake. If for no other reason then deleting all the comments on the mistake would be too much of a pain in the a**e
Dodgy, literally no one cares. Why the heck are you getting bent out of shape on a bunch of posts that were literally, “huh, what’s up with this, is this the wrong comic?” They had nothing to do with commenting on the actual comic.
I know your whole schtick is being “that guy,” but come on, don’t be that guy.
When did you decide to be a troll? Hey, I’m merely asking questions here! If you read any meaning behind my question you’re a hypocrite.
Dodgy
2 years ago
To be honest, I’ve got a newfound respect for ZK that he only took 48 dollars. It must have figured out by now that money is what drives most of us meat puppets and thus would be the fastest and surest way to subjugating is. The fact that it must know this and delibarately hasn’t acted on it shows me it’s not all that evil and heartless as it makes itself out to be. Because, again, it only took 48 dollars while it could have crashed the entire system in the blink of an optic.
The concept is so much more complicated than that. If I steal money from a huge corporation that profited directly from unethical business practices, that’s not the same as mugging a nice couple in an alley. Stealing food, for example, when you have no other way to obtain it. There are many examples of ethically justifiable reasons for theft. There are none for blindly following rules that are designed to keep you out of the game.
I would ask…where is the harm? Who is the victim here? He told a percent of a cent a few thousand times. Those he stole from have no idea anything was even done to them, and it did not impact their quality of life. I would say stealing is immoral because it inflicts suffering upon those you took from, correct?
It depends on who Zeek stole from. Stealing a cent from fourty-eight hundred people living paycheck-to-paycheck is doing tiny but significant harm to each of them. It still adds up to fourty eight dollars of meaningful harm.
I personally would say that taking fourty-eight dollars from a single millionaire does much less harm because it would not change their living condition whatsoever. It devalues their estate, eventually harming their inheritors, but they’re likely to be living in full comfort as well. It’s hard to really understand how much value a millionaire claims to deserve.
I understand your point, but I don’t think it works at this scale; a single cent or fraction thereof wouldn’t really affect someone living paycheck to paycheck. A dollar or more might, but not a single cent. I think you’d have to steal from an actual homeless person to make the loss of a cent mean something impactful.
I think he is treating the economy as his bank, as he needs money he skims the needed money off. For one thing I imagine he would see the need for big numbers a human thing and it being more robotical to take what he needs when need it
Exactly. He took what he needed to pay. He paid directly from the 480000 accounts to the seller. There is no ZK bank account. At least from his explanation. Who knows what he isn’t telling Ethan.
This is an interesting idea.
He does not need to eat. If he needs to plug in he has an outlet and his needs likely minuscule. Pants were deemed a necessity.
Now the question. Which is more likely to get caught? The global skimming of trace amounts of money? I don’t mean the half cents. I mean $48 compared to the billions changing hands all the time. Would repeat interactions get attention faster than one big score?
Cmd1095
2 years ago
I mean… he’s not really wrong. Though he might be overestimating himself considering all of this stuff he’s doing is being done through one internet connection, which is a common link between each theft and thus can be traced to him.
If he’s smart about that, that’s virtually impossible. There a lot of ways to the end through the Internet and while any one is traceable (if you are dedicated enough), it’s impossible to trace all and requires cooperation of multiple countries.
Oh man, i love this comic – Zeke is on-point with those observations.
Falco
2 years ago
*slow clap for the panted robot*
cryptofan
2 years ago
ZK is right about the global economy. I realize this isn’t going to be a popular statement around here, but buy bitcoin, people! It is a far better store of value than anything else, especially fiat.
That’s a really short-sighted timeframe you’re looking at. Bitcoin has been declared dead in the media hundreds, if not thousands of times, and yet every 4 years it adds another digit or two to the left of the decimal place. It has averaged a 200% increase in price year over year in its 12 year history.
Well the problem is. Does it help you if your bought crypto for 1,000,000 that has now a value of 50,000,000 if you don’t find someone more stupid who buys it from you for that price? And that person has to find someone too. Thats the definiton of Speculation. The only people profiting from bitcoin are the people who came in early when prices were low, like with every snowball system.
The crypto markets processed well over $100 billion in volume in the last 24 hours alone. I can assure you there are lots of buyers and sellers every day. The number of users of Bitcoin is about where the internet was in 1997, and it is growing faster.
We’ve definitely passed the point in the adoption of crypto where one has to be concerned with the “greater fool theory”, provided you stick to the blue chips like Bitcoin.
“store of value” is something that keeps the same value. If it loses 20% of value overnight, it does not “store value”, even if later it increases 1600% (and 1600% increase also sucks, because it does not correspond with similar rise in production). It’s impossible to use smth so unstable as money. One moment BTC equals one pizza, the next — one house. When will it suddenly go down again? God knows. Let’s say everyone uses crypto, not fiat. Naturally, you get your wages in crypto as well. You go to the store to buy food, it costs, say, 1… Read more »
Last month, the whole of the EU had an inflation of 5,1% compared to last year, so while 10% in a day is an awfull lot, even in larger currencies, the devaluation is quite heavy.
I would suppos you do realise that with wider adoption comes less volatility. Because as in your example: if everyone and their salaries are in cryptocoin, the market volume and use are higher, making investments and speculation less influential and thus the drops and rises much smaller.
So you are making my point for me — volatility depends on usage, not on nature of a currency, and at the moment crypto is a terrible store of value I should also add to your and cryprofan responses two points. 1. Currency with no potential for inflation is doomed. It’s unusable. Say, we mined all we could and there is a finite number of cryptocoins in existence. Let’s say 1000 cryptocoins. All the money available are always equal in value to all the resources available. That’s the reason for inflation, we have more money, but not that more resources.… Read more »
In addition to wieb83zd’s response to this comment, I’d like to point out what you’re missing in terms of ‘store of value’ of crypto vs fiat. The difference is that fiat’s value is ever decreasing due to inflation in the supply. That 25 cent gallon of milk from decades ago is only getting more expensive. Bitcoin, on the other hand, has a fixed supply and an ever growing demand. Bitcoin market cycles are divided into periods of 4 years, centred around their “halving” events. If you measure the price of a gallon of milk in Bitcoin, you’ll see it has… Read more »
What do you mean it has a fixed supply? The whole point of bitmining is that they’re racing to increase the supply by 1 bitcoin. It’s constantly increasing in supply, even if that rate slows down.
Actually, it increases by 6.25 BTC about every 10 minutes, a number that gets cut in half about every 4 years. There are over 18 million in circulation, but there will never be more than 21 million. At that point (roughly 120 years from now) no new bitcoin will ever be created. Totally fixed supply.
The ever decreasing supply, combined with increasing adoption, is what leads to these cycles of exponential growth.
Well that’s definitely why I’ve heard people call it an old boys club then. If it caps at 21mil, then it can’t possibly be fully adopted, since even the population of California exceeds the count. Unless fractions of bitcoin are allowed, but in that case if it can be infinitely broken down then it’s not like the fixed supply matters, since ever decimal allowed is another factor of 10 that the supply is allowed to grow by.. On that note, if it’s to be a fixed supply, why not just release it all out of the gate? What purpose is… Read more »
Fractions are allowed, yes. Bitcoin is divisible by 8 decimal places. 0.00000001 BTC is referred to as one Satoshi, or “sat” for short. I’m not sure the exact reasons why it wasn’t released all at once, but I can think of a few. Firstly, if they were all released initially, it would have been possible for someone to buy and destroy the entire supply while this still would have been very cheap to do, relatively speaking. Secondly, by holding back supply, the protocol was able to keep a “reserve fund”, which it has used to incentivize mining activity at a… Read more »
You realize ZK is calling bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies a joke in the last panel, right? And he’s right. The part where you claimed bitcoin is a far better store of value than anything else is an especially funny joke.
If I put “bitcoin value” into Google – WOOF. Look at that chart bouncing all over the place. And that’s just for one day. Yikes. Top stories below that, “bitcoin tumbles more than 17% in 24 hours.” If I put $1,000 into bitcoin, then blink, suddenly I have less than $830. That’s a horrible store of value.
ZK is not directly picking on Bitcoin. They refer to the “global economy” as a house of cards, which would hardly encompass Bitcoin. ZK is instead talking about all forms of currency and monetary value. Every fiat currency system in the history of humans has collapsed eventually, from the Roman Empire to Weimar Germany. As for value, nobody stores value in Bitcoin for “a blink” of a timeframe – instead perhaps you should look at how it has increased an average of 200% per year every year over its 12 year history, and then decide if it is really a… Read more »
So your saying crypto currencies are a house of cards that will collapse because they aren’t backed by any commodity and there value is entirely imaginary and only backed by the economy.
Bit coin has absolutely no value if it can’t be converted into money used to actually buy things. If you could use bitcoin to buy a burger(which was the original intention of the thing). You might have a point but the value of a bitcoin is backed by the same flat currencies you cry against.
Actually, the bridges to buying things with bitcoin and other cryptos are being built as we speak. There are already several major players releasing or having already released Visa products (both credit and debit) backed by crypto. We’ve also had the first country adopt it as legal tender. But that’s beside the point I initially made about a store of value. Currency has two purposes (medium of exchange, store of value) and you don’t necessarily need to stay with one currency when you can use both, each for their own strengths while avoiding their weaknesses. And Bitcoin does have value,… Read more »
But nobody actually pays “in crypto”. Prices are not set “in crypto”, they are set in, for example, us dollars, and you are allowed to complete the transaction in crypto. You don’t transfer so and so amount in crypto, you transfer so and so dollars worth of crypto. It’s like using potatoes to pay, it may be accepted by a fellow farmer in exchange for a cow, but it does not make potatoes currency.
Well, that’s just semantics. We’re not yet at the point where it is common to see items priced in BTC, but we very well could be headed there.
But my point about BTC initially is that it does the “store of value” function of currency much better than fiat does. The more people that recognize this fact, the more likely it will make strides in the “medium of exchange” department eventually.
But like, isn’t that true of stocks? Housing? Any type of investment that isn’t in the midst of a speculative bubble? Y’know, the things that people who can afford to store their value have been storing their value in for decades?
If your argument is “we should keep doing the things the way we’ve always done them because that’s how we’ve always done them”, then that’s just silly. If you’ve got value to store (and nearly everyone does, even if only a small amount), then it is worth assessing what is the best store of that value. Historically (and I’m talking centuries), that has been gold, but if you check the charts, you’ll see that gold has become very stagnant ever since Bitcoin was invented. As far as stocks, housing, real estate – they all have their pros and cons, and… Read more »
If you read the last bubble again you’ll see that while he is not directly picking on bitcoin, the specific line “people are literally inventing new currencies every other day” is without a doubt specifically referring to crypto, which bitcoin is a part of. Also I saw you commenting on another thread that USD fell apart because it was pulled off the gold standard, but it’s not like bitcoin is on any gold standard either. Vukodiak also makes the best point of all in that bitcoin currently can only amount to a “store of value”. My landlord doesn’t accept bitcoin… Read more »
oh hey look, someone finally made a comprehensive video about all of the shortcomings of bitcoin: https://youtu.be/YQ_xWvX1n9g
The Kid
2 years ago
I like how nobody is batting an eye at the “illegal in your country but legal in Automatia” comment. Like, yes. He considers himself a country. But the real thing that makes a country a country is being recognized. Heck, the only reason the USA was able to be a country after the revolutionary war was because France signed treaties with the leaders. If France was like “nah, England is still over you.” we would have had zero trade and our laws would have been moot. So, ZK calls himself a nation, but his laws don’t matter if a bigger… Read more »
It’s really more that I just consider that line as him teasing Ethan a bit. He knows he’s in a fancy closet, he took issue with being forced to stay there. Why bother taking his joke seriously?
I mean, can they even convict him? He is a machine, he would first to be recognised as a person to be tried in a court of law. Otherwise either Master is responsible (as his creator), or Ethan (as de-facto owner)
leduk
2 years ago
oof, hard truth being said
southpawfrenzy
2 years ago
The utilitarian in me agrees with ZK. His action provides him benefit while not harming anyone, and refraining from the action doesn’t provide anyone a benefit. And it might be for the betterment of all human society if ZK has pants 🙂
All this time we thought the crumbling economy was a tragedy; but it’s really a comedy!
Greevar
2 years ago
He’s totally right. The level at which the system screws us over on the daily, you can’t really take laws regarding money all that seriously because they really only exist to protect the wealth of the rich from the working class.
Karrde
2 years ago
Be funny as hell if he created his own Crypto coin that blew up
Mike
2 years ago
This may be the most honest comic I’ve ever read!
Giuliano Berlato Marques
2 years ago
Ethan’s face is like, “This should not make sense. Why it does make sense?”
Kaitensatsuma
2 years ago
Look, I’ve been saying this since Bitcoin became a thing ?♂️
Especially since GameStonks and Dogecoin, I’ve been 100% thinking everything ZK said in this comic.
Blitz
2 years ago
Honestly zeke should crash the crypto markets for a laugh
william scott
2 years ago
he is 100% right. all wealth is an illusion to give the working class a sense of self worth.
Crestlinger
2 years ago
And that’s why if all the gold held in various secure places were to disappear and be made publicly known Of that disappearance in real time it would kick the cornerstone holding all this together out the window.
Perhaps I’m misunderstanding something, but the gold standard isn’t in use by anyone anymore. As far as I can find information on, no currency is currently backed by gold. If all that gold suddenly disappeared…it would do pretty much nothing to any currency the world over. Maybe devalue gold itself if it all appeared on the market, but that’s about it.
Isn’t the reason gold was demoted (right word?) is that it’s the perfect conductor of electricity, meaning no power is lost by passing through it? So in an ideal future, anybody stealing gold out of a city-supporting mega-structure because that’s the only option will be met not with a pretty penny in exchange, but a hard smack to the head or worse for desecrating gold from its most holy station.
Last edited 2 years ago by Michael
JD.
2 years ago
Dealing in Currency Is sort of like buying expensive baseball cards its only worth what someone is willing to pay for it, regardless of what the “books” say its worth. bitcoin and the others are just another commodity that someone said was valuable.
Pulse
2 years ago
he sees crypto the way i do i see
Matt Braddock
2 years ago
Not gonna lie, this strip here really hit me in the reality.
24
I can’t prove it, but shit like this literally happens every day.
It’s called high frequency trading. HFT companies place extremely fast servers as close to the physical locations where the computers controlling various stock exchanges are and then use the lower latency to make millions of trades in the split seconds between the exchanges releasing prices and the data making it to the public internet.
Might I direct your attention to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spread_Networks
The Forbes article referenced says that using the cable vs traditional network connections gives a 3 millisecond advantage. It cost $300 million, and was considered well-worth the investment
That advantage is worth so much, and yet I keep meeting everday people who think they’re going to make money by investing in stocks that “feel good”.
It’s literally gambling with a bunch of people who are cheating, more or less legally. Yeah everyone knows an acquaintance who made one good investment years ago and might not even realize how much they lost along the way. It’s so exploitative.
The only way it works at all is to pay a mutual fund to game the system for you. That’s not a healthy system.
Most of the cryprocurrencies are just scam or balloon waiting for burst.
Most???
And this is different from traditional currency how, exactly?
Trad currency doesn’t cause massive carbon emissions and make it impossible to find a graphics card, not to mention has government backing so it can be spent without causing a mass loss in value.
Crytocurrencies burn GPUs and power for absolutely no benefit except for criminals. But other than that, I have to admit you have a point – traditional markets are scams as well.
*All of the cryptocurrencies are just a scam or balloon waiting to burst.
FTFY
All of the fiat currencies are just a scam or balloon waiting to burst. FTFY.
Seriously though, every fiat system in the history of humans has crashed and burned, with an average lifespan of about 150 years. They all end the same way – the people in charge get hooked on printing money, and devaluing their own currency in the process.
The USD became a fiat currency in 1970, when they got off the gold standard.
I’ve heard 27 years, 35 years, 24.x years. All from people trying to sell either gold or bitcoin. Oh and your name is cryptofan. Hello bot! And what is crypto backed with? Nothing.
Again: And this is different from traditional currency how?
Exactly, it’s not, and therefore is subject to the exact same criticisms that cryptofan is applying to traditional currency
Funny thing is that he is actually right, and you wrote nothing of substance to disprove it.
Pointing out that cryptocurrency is just as unbacked as fiat currency is a fine response to what cryptofan said.
There is absolutely nothing magical about the “gold standard”, it just added an extra layer of abstraction. Gold has little intrinsic value, less if circumstances resulted in the type of societal collapse that would render the US dollar useless. Salt would be far more valuable if society collapsed. All currency is based on mutual trust and utility. A vault full of gold, even one that could keep up with the sheer size of the dollar based worldwide economy would be largely impractical (if even possible) and add no practical level of trust or utility. Meanwhile crypto currencies have little to… Read more »
The ‘magical’ part of the gold standard is that it kept money printing in check. It’s not about the value of gold, it was more about keeping the system from being a fiat system, where the powers in charge could print money at will, devalue their own currency, and thus, steal value from all holders of said currency. When governments print money, they don’t create value, and they don’t inject the new money into the system in a fair and equitable way. They quietly extract value from all holders of the currency in a way that most people don’t notice… Read more »
Crypto not being controlled is also the biggest disadvantage. It is literally legal to manipulate crypto, perform rug pulls, do every single trick that’s banned in traditional finance, all because no one can control it. No protections are given, you can accidentally spend $1 million to send $10 instead of the other way around and there’s nothing you can do. As for them being here to stay, probably in some form, but China’s already banned them entirely, and India is looking to ban all but a handful of hand-picked ones. Add the growing concerns over the staggering energy usage of… Read more »
You’re talking of control when you really mean regulation. Crypto absolutely could be regulated, but governments have been hesitant to do so, mostly because they either don’t understand it or don’t want to lend legitimacy to it. But the frauds you’re talking about are still, in many jurisdictions, very much a crime. The lack of control I’m talking about is in the ability to inflate the supply, like can be done with fiat. That will never happen with Bitcoin. China only banned crypto because they wanted to remove competition before putting out their own government created crypto. CBDC’s (central bank… Read more »
Thorough regulations are impossible without thorough control. There is literally money laundering as a service; I can open up a new wallet, perform whatever financial crime I feel like, and run the proceeds through a mixer to my primary wallet. Even if/when things like crypto manipulation becomes illegal (again, manipulation and insider trading perfectly legal today), there’s easy access to untraceable funds. The only real way to stop that is to require some kind of authentication for setting up new accounts, something like what a bank does, but that’s impossible on an uncontrolled blockchain. As for moving miners from China,… Read more »
Both 1, 2, and 3 are very bothy indeed.
I don’t think this deserved to be downvoted. It’s a pretty good description of the position, even though I strongly disagree with most of the implications.
I think it’s fine that governments can print more currency, and I do not care that it devalues existing currency by causing inflation. Inflation can be very bad, but it can also be natural and fine. I also do not think the gold standard meaningfully prevented the problem of inflation. Cryptocurrencies extremely don’t.
Thanks for providing for a respectful dissent here. Governments printing currency is fine as long as it’s done responsibly. But I would hardly call what governments everywhere have been doing since Covid hit responsible. Heck, since the 2008 financial crisis, things have gone off the rails. https://medium.com/currency-waves/visualizing-global-monetary-expansion-6ecf3db7a7ea Inflation is bad if you hold a lot of the currency being inflated, and inflation is good if you hold a lot of debt denominated in that currency. If you owe more on your house than you hold in cash and equivalents, maybe you’ll do okay with high inflation. But all I’m really… Read more »
Inflation is definitely bad for people holding on to the currency, that much is for sure! I’ve whined about the stock market a lot, but there are stable investments that typically follow inflation. IMO, that’s basically the “gold” standard in the modern age. There was nothing special about gold except for its scarcity. Investment in vital commodities is essentially the same, except less artificial than valuing gold. …Ironically, gold does have actual use nowadays in electronics, but you know what I mean. I do see how the gold standard kept currency printing in check, theoretically. In practice there was no… Read more »
Not to beat a dead horse here, but I can understand how it might be difficult to understand the value proposition of bitcoin itself. For me, the key to understanding the idea was to look at the next most popular cryptocurrency – Ethereum. It became the world’s first programmable blockchain, and the implications of that are really where the value proposition starts to make more sense, at least if you’re technically inclined. These days Ethereum does so much that it has become congested, like a single core processor from the 90’s trying to do too much all at once. It’s… Read more »
I sure hope so. In concept, they’re a great idea looking towards the future, but in practice, they seem even more abused than the gold exchange. Comically so. But I have this underlying worry that I’m making the same mistake my dad did when he thought computers would never be more than a novelty, and lost his career as an architect when everyone started switching over from a drafting table to the CAD he refused to learn.
This comment warms my heart. I realize the crypto and gamer communities have been at odds with each other due to the current state of the GPU market. But I would like to believe that gamers would be more likely than the average person to recognize that digital money is the future. Thank you for acknowledging that sliver of doubt in your mind. I believed it was a scam once too, but there are great reasons why it is still here, and it isn’t too late to get onboard.
I don’t know what rock you’ve been living under, but traditional currency is already digital. I’ve never once had a chequebook, and haven’t visited an ATM in years. My rent is transferred digitally, my groceries are bought with a digital tap of the wallet. I can buy goods in other countries without visiting an exchange because they’re all digital. Crypto isn’t special in that regard.
Perhaps digital isn’t the best choice of word there, but the underpinning technologies here are completely different.
That last sentence is always the big red flag. Betrays intent as purely being the lucky few early adopters hoping to become rich if it keeps growing. Not genuinely understanding the tech and If it has potential. Just assumptions and avarice. The same mindset other scams prey upon (hence the comparisons) I’m your antithesis really. Former enthusiast, then the deeper I went into crypto as a tech, the more rotten and flawed its foundation seemed. Tech with no genuine problem to solve and physically incapable of scaling to the size it would need to go for its flau Ted promises.… Read more »
Forgive me then for showing a little emotion for something that I am passionate about, and something that I think gets some unfair hate from the gaming community (as obviously evidenced by all the downvotes my comments are getting). Let me just remind you though that I’M not here to sell YOU anything. I’m only trying to open a dialogue, one community to another. It is a shame that you encountered toxicity in your journey through our subcultures, if you will, but every community has their sections of toxicity, gamers included. But I can assure you that blockchain technology will… Read more »
I have no doubt that blockchain will eventually come to be a great tool. I think how it handles decentralization is a great idea for a lot of many things. What I doubt is that an attempt at currency that relies on it while also implementing a system that incentivizes more and more electricity consumption by more and more miners during an era where most of the planet’s electricity is still produced by non-renewable resources that pollute the air, will be at all accepted by the majority. It is worth noting that this aspect is what I suspect draws the… Read more »
I do appreciate your mostly neutral tone, and with it, the opportunity to correct some misnomers about crypto from an ecological perspective. I’ll also set aside the idea of a gaming community (or any one community in general) deciding what is and is not a frivolous waste of electricity. Crypto mining has been quite an energy consumer, yes, but it does provide some advantages from an ecological perspective. One being that it is providing increased demand, which is often required for green energy projects to get built in the first place. Another is that energy companies often produce a lot… Read more »
too true to be funny…
Still worth a bitter smile?
And so ZK makes the exact same judgement call so many have done before: you see a flaw in the system and you immediately jump to exploiting it to your own benefit. If you have the brain power to even notice the flaw, it’s so much more satisfying to find a way to fix it (if for no other reason than the fact that it’s actually more challenging that way).
The powers that be have zero interest in allowing the system to be fixed.
On both sides of the aisle, no less!
The powers that be, are, specifically because they used the flaws to get the power. They won’t let anyone kneecap them by fixing the very thing they used to get where they are. Not unless something else they can manipulate takes its place first.
Now I envy him.
Deleting the old comments so no one ever knows a mistake was made? Or were they linked to that particular post?
Good question?
? While I am not surprised that Dodgy is making confusing and asinine comments, what are you even talking about?
A copy of the last Starcaster strip was uploaded under the name “Recipient p4” instead of this strip. It was early in the morning, at around 7:00 AM EST, so a lot of people missed it.
As for the comments missing, my best guess is that Tim simply deleted the mistake-strip and uploaded this instead, and the comments went out with the mistake. If for no other reason then deleting all the comments on the mistake would be too much of a pain in the a**e
I mean, I definitely prefer seeing relevant comments instead of having to wade through dozens of variations on, ‘Huh, Tim uploaded the wrong page’.
Dodgy, literally no one cares. Why the heck are you getting bent out of shape on a bunch of posts that were literally, “huh, what’s up with this, is this the wrong comic?” They had nothing to do with commenting on the actual comic.
I know your whole schtick is being “that guy,” but come on, don’t be that guy.
Bent out of shape? Just asking a question.
When did you decide to be a troll? Hey, I’m merely asking questions here! If you read any meaning behind my question you’re a hypocrite.
To be honest, I’ve got a newfound respect for ZK that he only took 48 dollars. It must have figured out by now that money is what drives most of us meat puppets and thus would be the fastest and surest way to subjugating is. The fact that it must know this and delibarately hasn’t acted on it shows me it’s not all that evil and heartless as it makes itself out to be. Because, again, it only took 48 dollars while it could have crashed the entire system in the blink of an optic.
The point is that he stole without batting an eye…………
He’s more human than ever!
If you justify stealing, maybe it’s a sign you’ve played too much GTA or RDR……
The concept is so much more complicated than that. If I steal money from a huge corporation that profited directly from unethical business practices, that’s not the same as mugging a nice couple in an alley. Stealing food, for example, when you have no other way to obtain it. There are many examples of ethically justifiable reasons for theft. There are none for blindly following rules that are designed to keep you out of the game.
I don’t think acknowledging that humans commit stealing is a justification of the action
I would ask…where is the harm? Who is the victim here? He told a percent of a cent a few thousand times. Those he stole from have no idea anything was even done to them, and it did not impact their quality of life. I would say stealing is immoral because it inflicts suffering upon those you took from, correct?
It’s the execution, not the result.
It depends on who Zeek stole from. Stealing a cent from fourty-eight hundred people living paycheck-to-paycheck is doing tiny but significant harm to each of them. It still adds up to fourty eight dollars of meaningful harm.
I personally would say that taking fourty-eight dollars from a single millionaire does much less harm because it would not change their living condition whatsoever. It devalues their estate, eventually harming their inheritors, but they’re likely to be living in full comfort as well. It’s hard to really understand how much value a millionaire claims to deserve.
I understand your point, but I don’t think it works at this scale; a single cent or fraction thereof wouldn’t really affect someone living paycheck to paycheck. A dollar or more might, but not a single cent. I think you’d have to steal from an actual homeless person to make the loss of a cent mean something impactful.
The degree to which he’s rationalizing his action suggests to me that he thought about the morality a lot.
I highly doubt ZK has a balance of zero point zero dollars after purchasing those pants.
Yeah we know he spent forty-eight dollars. We don’t know how much he actually took.
I think he is treating the economy as his bank, as he needs money he skims the needed money off. For one thing I imagine he would see the need for big numbers a human thing and it being more robotical to take what he needs when need it
Exactly. He took what he needed to pay. He paid directly from the 480000 accounts to the seller. There is no ZK bank account. At least from his explanation. Who knows what he isn’t telling Ethan.
This is an interesting idea.
He does not need to eat. If he needs to plug in he has an outlet and his needs likely minuscule. Pants were deemed a necessity.
Now the question. Which is more likely to get caught? The global skimming of trace amounts of money? I don’t mean the half cents. I mean $48 compared to the billions changing hands all the time. Would repeat interactions get attention faster than one big score?
I mean… he’s not really wrong. Though he might be overestimating himself considering all of this stuff he’s doing is being done through one internet connection, which is a common link between each theft and thus can be traced to him.
If he’s smart about that, that’s virtually impossible. There a lot of ways to the end through the Internet and while any one is traceable (if you are dedicated enough), it’s impossible to trace all and requires cooperation of multiple countries.
^^^
hashtag vpns
Oh man, i love this comic – Zeke is on-point with those observations.
*slow clap for the panted robot*
ZK is right about the global economy. I realize this isn’t going to be a popular statement around here, but buy bitcoin, people! It is a far better store of value than anything else, especially fiat.
That’s a funny thing to say about currency that recently lost 20% of value overnight
10% over the course of one hour
That’s a really short-sighted timeframe you’re looking at. Bitcoin has been declared dead in the media hundreds, if not thousands of times, and yet every 4 years it adds another digit or two to the left of the decimal place. It has averaged a 200% increase in price year over year in its 12 year history.
Well the problem is. Does it help you if your bought crypto for 1,000,000 that has now a value of 50,000,000 if you don’t find someone more stupid who buys it from you for that price? And that person has to find someone too. Thats the definiton of Speculation. The only people profiting from bitcoin are the people who came in early when prices were low, like with every snowball system.
The crypto markets processed well over $100 billion in volume in the last 24 hours alone. I can assure you there are lots of buyers and sellers every day. The number of users of Bitcoin is about where the internet was in 1997, and it is growing faster.
We’ve definitely passed the point in the adoption of crypto where one has to be concerned with the “greater fool theory”, provided you stick to the blue chips like Bitcoin.
“store of value” is something that keeps the same value. If it loses 20% of value overnight, it does not “store value”, even if later it increases 1600% (and 1600% increase also sucks, because it does not correspond with similar rise in production). It’s impossible to use smth so unstable as money. One moment BTC equals one pizza, the next — one house. When will it suddenly go down again? God knows. Let’s say everyone uses crypto, not fiat. Naturally, you get your wages in crypto as well. You go to the store to buy food, it costs, say, 1… Read more »
Last month, the whole of the EU had an inflation of 5,1% compared to last year, so while 10% in a day is an awfull lot, even in larger currencies, the devaluation is quite heavy.
I would suppos you do realise that with wider adoption comes less volatility. Because as in your example: if everyone and their salaries are in cryptocoin, the market volume and use are higher, making investments and speculation less influential and thus the drops and rises much smaller.
So you are making my point for me — volatility depends on usage, not on nature of a currency, and at the moment crypto is a terrible store of value I should also add to your and cryprofan responses two points. 1. Currency with no potential for inflation is doomed. It’s unusable. Say, we mined all we could and there is a finite number of cryptocoins in existence. Let’s say 1000 cryptocoins. All the money available are always equal in value to all the resources available. That’s the reason for inflation, we have more money, but not that more resources.… Read more »
In addition to wieb83zd’s response to this comment, I’d like to point out what you’re missing in terms of ‘store of value’ of crypto vs fiat. The difference is that fiat’s value is ever decreasing due to inflation in the supply. That 25 cent gallon of milk from decades ago is only getting more expensive. Bitcoin, on the other hand, has a fixed supply and an ever growing demand. Bitcoin market cycles are divided into periods of 4 years, centred around their “halving” events. If you measure the price of a gallon of milk in Bitcoin, you’ll see it has… Read more »
What do you mean it has a fixed supply? The whole point of bitmining is that they’re racing to increase the supply by 1 bitcoin. It’s constantly increasing in supply, even if that rate slows down.
Actually, it increases by 6.25 BTC about every 10 minutes, a number that gets cut in half about every 4 years. There are over 18 million in circulation, but there will never be more than 21 million. At that point (roughly 120 years from now) no new bitcoin will ever be created. Totally fixed supply.
The ever decreasing supply, combined with increasing adoption, is what leads to these cycles of exponential growth.
Well that’s definitely why I’ve heard people call it an old boys club then. If it caps at 21mil, then it can’t possibly be fully adopted, since even the population of California exceeds the count. Unless fractions of bitcoin are allowed, but in that case if it can be infinitely broken down then it’s not like the fixed supply matters, since ever decimal allowed is another factor of 10 that the supply is allowed to grow by.. On that note, if it’s to be a fixed supply, why not just release it all out of the gate? What purpose is… Read more »
Fractions are allowed, yes. Bitcoin is divisible by 8 decimal places. 0.00000001 BTC is referred to as one Satoshi, or “sat” for short. I’m not sure the exact reasons why it wasn’t released all at once, but I can think of a few. Firstly, if they were all released initially, it would have been possible for someone to buy and destroy the entire supply while this still would have been very cheap to do, relatively speaking. Secondly, by holding back supply, the protocol was able to keep a “reserve fund”, which it has used to incentivize mining activity at a… Read more »
You realize ZK is calling bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies a joke in the last panel, right? And he’s right. The part where you claimed bitcoin is a far better store of value than anything else is an especially funny joke.
If I put “bitcoin value” into Google – WOOF. Look at that chart bouncing all over the place. And that’s just for one day. Yikes. Top stories below that, “bitcoin tumbles more than 17% in 24 hours.” If I put $1,000 into bitcoin, then blink, suddenly I have less than $830. That’s a horrible store of value.
ZK is not directly picking on Bitcoin. They refer to the “global economy” as a house of cards, which would hardly encompass Bitcoin. ZK is instead talking about all forms of currency and monetary value. Every fiat currency system in the history of humans has collapsed eventually, from the Roman Empire to Weimar Germany. As for value, nobody stores value in Bitcoin for “a blink” of a timeframe – instead perhaps you should look at how it has increased an average of 200% per year every year over its 12 year history, and then decide if it is really a… Read more »
So your saying crypto currencies are a house of cards that will collapse because they aren’t backed by any commodity and there value is entirely imaginary and only backed by the economy.
Bit coin has absolutely no value if it can’t be converted into money used to actually buy things. If you could use bitcoin to buy a burger(which was the original intention of the thing). You might have a point but the value of a bitcoin is backed by the same flat currencies you cry against.
Actually, the bridges to buying things with bitcoin and other cryptos are being built as we speak. There are already several major players releasing or having already released Visa products (both credit and debit) backed by crypto. We’ve also had the first country adopt it as legal tender. But that’s beside the point I initially made about a store of value. Currency has two purposes (medium of exchange, store of value) and you don’t necessarily need to stay with one currency when you can use both, each for their own strengths while avoiding their weaknesses. And Bitcoin does have value,… Read more »
But nobody actually pays “in crypto”. Prices are not set “in crypto”, they are set in, for example, us dollars, and you are allowed to complete the transaction in crypto. You don’t transfer so and so amount in crypto, you transfer so and so dollars worth of crypto. It’s like using potatoes to pay, it may be accepted by a fellow farmer in exchange for a cow, but it does not make potatoes currency.
Well, that’s just semantics. We’re not yet at the point where it is common to see items priced in BTC, but we very well could be headed there.
But my point about BTC initially is that it does the “store of value” function of currency much better than fiat does. The more people that recognize this fact, the more likely it will make strides in the “medium of exchange” department eventually.
But like, isn’t that true of stocks? Housing? Any type of investment that isn’t in the midst of a speculative bubble? Y’know, the things that people who can afford to store their value have been storing their value in for decades?
If your argument is “we should keep doing the things the way we’ve always done them because that’s how we’ve always done them”, then that’s just silly. If you’ve got value to store (and nearly everyone does, even if only a small amount), then it is worth assessing what is the best store of that value. Historically (and I’m talking centuries), that has been gold, but if you check the charts, you’ll see that gold has become very stagnant ever since Bitcoin was invented. As far as stocks, housing, real estate – they all have their pros and cons, and… Read more »
No that is not my argument. If it was I would agree that it was a silly argument, hence why I did not make it.
My argument was that bitcoins are stocks and not a currency.
If you read the last bubble again you’ll see that while he is not directly picking on bitcoin, the specific line “people are literally inventing new currencies every other day” is without a doubt specifically referring to crypto, which bitcoin is a part of. Also I saw you commenting on another thread that USD fell apart because it was pulled off the gold standard, but it’s not like bitcoin is on any gold standard either. Vukodiak also makes the best point of all in that bitcoin currently can only amount to a “store of value”. My landlord doesn’t accept bitcoin… Read more »
oh hey look, someone finally made a comprehensive video about all of the shortcomings of bitcoin: https://youtu.be/YQ_xWvX1n9g
I like how nobody is batting an eye at the “illegal in your country but legal in Automatia” comment. Like, yes. He considers himself a country. But the real thing that makes a country a country is being recognized. Heck, the only reason the USA was able to be a country after the revolutionary war was because France signed treaties with the leaders. If France was like “nah, England is still over you.” we would have had zero trade and our laws would have been moot. So, ZK calls himself a nation, but his laws don’t matter if a bigger… Read more »
It’s really more that I just consider that line as him teasing Ethan a bit. He knows he’s in a fancy closet, he took issue with being forced to stay there. Why bother taking his joke seriously?
I mean, can they even convict him? He is a machine, he would first to be recognised as a person to be tried in a court of law. Otherwise either Master is responsible (as his creator), or Ethan (as de-facto owner)
oof, hard truth being said
The utilitarian in me agrees with ZK. His action provides him benefit while not harming anyone, and refraining from the action doesn’t provide anyone a benefit. And it might be for the betterment of all human society if ZK has pants 🙂
Is ZK basically saying “you live in a society”?
All this time we thought the crumbling economy was a tragedy; but it’s really a comedy!
He’s totally right. The level at which the system screws us over on the daily, you can’t really take laws regarding money all that seriously because they really only exist to protect the wealth of the rich from the working class.
Be funny as hell if he created his own Crypto coin that blew up
This may be the most honest comic I’ve ever read!
Ethan’s face is like, “This should not make sense. Why it does make sense?”
Look, I’ve been saying this since Bitcoin became a thing ?♂️
Especially since GameStonks and Dogecoin, I’ve been 100% thinking everything ZK said in this comic.
Honestly zeke should crash the crypto markets for a laugh
he is 100% right. all wealth is an illusion to give the working class a sense of self worth.
And that’s why if all the gold held in various secure places were to disappear and be made publicly known Of that disappearance in real time it would kick the cornerstone holding all this together out the window.
Perhaps I’m misunderstanding something, but the gold standard isn’t in use by anyone anymore. As far as I can find information on, no currency is currently backed by gold. If all that gold suddenly disappeared…it would do pretty much nothing to any currency the world over. Maybe devalue gold itself if it all appeared on the market, but that’s about it.
Isn’t the reason gold was demoted (right word?) is that it’s the perfect conductor of electricity, meaning no power is lost by passing through it? So in an ideal future, anybody stealing gold out of a city-supporting mega-structure because that’s the only option will be met not with a pretty penny in exchange, but a hard smack to the head or worse for desecrating gold from its most holy station.
Dealing in Currency Is sort of like buying expensive baseball cards its only worth what someone is willing to pay for it, regardless of what the “books” say its worth. bitcoin and the others are just another commodity that someone said was valuable.
he sees crypto the way i do i see
Not gonna lie, this strip here really hit me in the reality.
Kinda feel like Ethan looks right now.