Things cryptocurrency enthusiasts probably won't tell you • Hacker News Board

Re: Things cryptocurrency enthusiasts probably won't tell you

#161

Post by STRML » Sat, Sep 23, 2017, 5:45 PM UTC

Phenomenally detailed article and interesting subject matter. Thanks for sharing. Of particular concern to the community should be the issuance and solvency of Tether. An audit is long overdue.

As mentioned, our CEO, Arthur Hayes, wrote on Chinese exchanges running their customers' deposits in local bonds & stocks back in 2015 [1]. It's worth a read. We at BitMEX have brought a full-time writer into our employ just to bring more of these stories to the fore and help create the facts-first, inquisitive atmosphere crypto desperately needs. [2]

1. https://blog.bitmex.com/crypto-trader-digest-nov-30/#shadow-...

2. https://research.bitmex.com

Re: Things cryptocurrency enthusiasts probably won't tell you

#162

Post by ringaroundthetx » Sat, Sep 23, 2017, 5:48 PM UTC

> In other words, the ICO rackets have recreated many aspects of the financial services industry (underwriters, broker/dealers)

This is all you need to know, end of article.

Of course, the tone of this article is "racket", "boiler room" etc. I call it price discovery, efficient, economic growth.

The article's only objectiveness is by saying that they don't have transparency and financial controls that the securities industry does. But makes no mistake in calling it controversial that one fund or one ICO is investing their proceeds in other ICOs, news flash this is how all economies work. But here it is controversial because "shareholders" don't know, except there are no shareholders, BUT WAIT THEY SHOULD BE SHAREHOLDERS as if these are equity securities!

It is hard to debate this article because each aspect has to be taken individually.

But this author consistently describes an aspect of cryptocurrency as controversial, while inadvertently describing how all capital markets work, but holding bitcoin at a different non-existent standard.

Re: Things cryptocurrency enthusiasts probably won't tell you

#163

Post by throwaway5752 » Sat, Sep 23, 2017, 5:50 PM UTC

sebastos wrote: post #155

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> why do I need to make $1M/year in order to prove to the US government that I'm worthy of investing into a startup Bernie Madoff lost tens of billions of dollars of investors’ money [1] in a clear fraud. This is terrible, but nobody ended up destitute [2]. The systemic risk was contained. Contrast that with the savings and loan crisis [3]. This lost retail investors’ money. People ended up destitute. That, and lots…

Boy, is it me, or is the writing absolutely awful in that 'Savings and Loan Crisis' wikipedia article? I can barely make it through a sentence without getting confused and re-reading.

If a person with a wikipedia account can revert the last change (from 9/20/17) on the Savings & Load Crisis page, it's immature vandalism.

Re: Things cryptocurrency enthusiasts probably won't tell you

#164

Post by earlz » Sat, Sep 23, 2017, 6:01 PM UTC

patryn20 wrote: post #33

earlz wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm involved, in this space and agree. Though to play devil's advocate, smart contracts (especially since Ethereum is soon adding zk-snarks) also allow for more sophisticated ways to commit crimes. But yes, I definitely think that smart contracts are the next move forward for this space. Dumb money transfer is a really awesome thing, but it's also quite small. Bitcoin does have some smart contract-ish functionality,…

As I said, Ethereum is fundamentally flawed. And the implementation was...naive. It is a giant liability to all those who use it. I'm very excited for the space. Just not for the current currencies.

Heh, you don't need to tell me about it. If you like reading rants, I wrote one a while back over why the Ethereum Virtual Machine's core design is flawed to the very core http://earlz.net/view/2017/08/13/0451/the-faults-and-shortco...

Re: Things cryptocurrency enthusiasts probably won't tell you

#165

Post by debacle » Sat, Sep 23, 2017, 6:39 PM UTC

But why is NO ONE talking about the fact that these vehicles aren't even pretending to be currencies anymore?

Re: Things cryptocurrency enthusiasts probably won't tell you

#166

Post by CyberDildonics » Sat, Sep 23, 2017, 8:33 PM UTC

joosters wrote: post #156

dreit1 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

exchange fees, and a general dedication to cryptocurrency

So the exchange fees magically vanished?

Maybe the people paying him are being payed in crypto currency.

Re: Things cryptocurrency enthusiasts probably won't tell you

#167

Post by CyberDildonics » Sat, Sep 23, 2017, 8:35 PM UTC

joosters wrote: post #158

bjelkeman-again wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That isn't a a very popular opinion to hold on HN, as you may have noticed. I think that there is a strong faith in decentralisation and removing rules by many who frequent HN, that have yet to be proven to work well, if the goal is a higher living standard for as many people as possible as well as limiting damaging externalities.

I think there's many outright lies about decentralisation told in crypto circles. So many ethereum contracts turn out to have a central override that one party can control. 'Decentralised' systems often turn out to have a company in charge so that they can make money off of an app. Even blockchains are allegedly decentralised, and yet all it takes is a couple of mining pool owners to collaborate to gain overall contr…

You are mistaking a goal with claims that the goal has been 100% achieved.

> Are there any real decentralised systems out there that couldn't be controlled or overruled by a few well-placed individuals working together?

The internet is probably a good example.

Re: Things cryptocurrency enthusiasts probably won't tell you

#168

Post by joosters » Sat, Sep 23, 2017, 9:07 PM UTC

CyberDildonics wrote: post #167

joosters wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there's many outright lies about decentralisation told in crypto circles. So many ethereum contracts turn out to have a central override that one party can control. 'Decentralised' systems often turn out to have a company in charge so that they can make money off of an app. Even blockchains are allegedly decentralised, and yet all it takes is a couple of mining pool owners to collaborate to gain overall contr…

You are mistaking a goal with claims that the goal has been 100% achieved. > Are there any real decentralised systems out there that couldn't be controlled or overruled by a few well-placed individuals working together? The internet is probably a good example.

The internet is a great example. I look forward to any cryptocurrency project getting anywhere close to such a thing. (And calling yourself 'web 3.0', like ethereum, does not count :)

As for decentralisation 'goals', the difference is not clear. Decentralisation is the buzzword that the sector loves, but I haven't seen much in the way of progress towards it.

Re: Things cryptocurrency enthusiasts probably won't tell you

#169

Post by Dylan16807 » Sat, Sep 23, 2017, 9:37 PM UTC

omarchowdhury wrote: post #40

AgentME wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Focus your time and energy on BTC, ETH and an anonymous coin like XMR. Any other offering should be met with skepticism. To elaborate/explain on this point for those less familiar: those three cryptocurrencies actually are based on real technical innovation, and have developer communities producing more technical innovation. There are many other cryptocurrencies that have zero technical innovation (or completely non…

Technical innovation is not the only type of innovation happening in the crypto space. There are tokens being developed whose innovations are financial, social, political, and economic. Don't assume technical innovation is the end all be all, Ethereum's technical innovation allows for the other types of innovation to occur, for example. To strengthen my argument, you wouldn't expect every startup on the Internet to d…

> To strengthen my argument, you wouldn't expect every startup on the Internet to develop their own Apache server, HTTP protocol, and all the other technical innovations that allow for their business to exist, would you?

I don't want them making their own Apache server in the exact same way I don't want them making their own coin. They should use an existing standardized setup. A smart contract can be useful. A "coin in support of X charitable effort, come mine today" is pretty much nonsense.

Re: Things cryptocurrency enthusiasts probably won't tell you

#170

Post by RustyRussell » Sun, Sep 24, 2017, 4:58 AM UTC

kemonocode wrote: post #52

johndevor wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the main argument for ltc?

Development moves faster and with far less bureaucratic hurdles than with Bitcoin. No contentious forks (thus far), they had SegWit first and chances are they will have working, beyond proof-of-concept Lightning first.

Err... Development is actually just rebasing from bitcoin. I've not seen anything go the other way.

In particular, as coauthor of the lightning spec, I assure you that we're all working on bitcoin. Litecoin happened because it was trivial; interestingly, we've deferred Bitcoin mainnet because it's likely to attract real users, who'll risk real money.