21–30 of 109 posts
Alternative perspective: maybe cryptocurrencies are valuable and represent real innovation?
Counterpoint: “Dogecoin, a parody cryptocurrency, just broke $2B for its market cap” although development stopped two years ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16096119
Dapps can be awesome when you want to avoid counter-party risk. Ether Delta is a great example; however, it's super expensive to use ED (every interaction costs $0.80-$1.60) and unless you're playing with a lot of money it's cost prohibitive to use. Even though they had the dns hijacking a while ago, you can still access the market via direct calls to the contract. When it's time to liquidate a large alt holding back…
You may want to have a look on Etherdelta Guard Chrome Extension (FYI: I built it). I open sourced it https://github.com/paxpelus/etherdelta-guard and you can download the plugin here https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/etherdelta/beeeoaa... When etherdelta deploys - they call a script of mine that calculates the md5 of their files in github and creates automatically a new version in Chrome Web Store. I use my…
Both these goals seem to have failed in practice, the latter spectacularly (although other cryptocurrencies have done better in this regard).
To truly be trustless, you can't generate keys/addresses on some website like bitaddress or use some other online wallet, as you're clearly trusting bitaddress to not be copying your key (and/or have the ability to fully and carefully audit their code... few people have this capability and even fewer have the patience to do so). You have to do something like this: generate them offline using a computer which can never communicate with the Internet after you use it. And you need to do it at least twice with two completely different implementations to ensure your public and private key truly match.
In practicality, I have to send a picture of my ID to some third party exchange in order to use it. REALLY? Why don't I just use PayPal?
In practicality, Bitcoin is only /ritually/ trustless and decentralized. And it's worthless for microtransactions. (Etherium is better, but not perfect.)
I really do think the whole industry has become too enamored with the cloud and with centralization, but these steps toward decentralization seem self-defeating as they rely on (centralized!) apps from a centralized appstore in practice. Might as well trust PayPal or Apple or whoever. Or even just a regular bank. Or even better, a credit union that you, as an account holder, have voting power over.
If I'm using Windows, I trust Microsoft. If I'm using Ubuntu, I trust Canonical. If I use Android or Chrome, I trust Google. If I use iOS, I trust Apple. On some level, I also trust Intel and/or AMD and/or NVidia and my chipset provider, too. Trustlessness only exists in theory (and even then, only with certain assumptions--like a distributed mining pool or stake that hasn't become centralized), and you can make a good case that in practicality cryptocurrencies actually INCREASE your trust attack surface area.
It all starts looking like a lot of overhead for transactions.
There's another issue that I don't see mentioned much here. I was contemplating writing a blog post about it. Over the past year I've seen a serious decline in early stage angel investment. I've talked to a lot of people who have said similar things. What I've heard and in some cases observed is that it's all going to crypto. All the people who would be making speculative angel investments are now buying into cryptoc…
The dotcom bubble only lasted 2.5-3 years. Most of the housing bubble's value inflation happened in 3-4 years.
There's another issue that I don't see mentioned much here. I was contemplating writing a blog post about it. Over the past year I've seen a serious decline in early stage angel investment. I've talked to a lot of people who have said similar things. What I've heard and in some cases observed is that it's all going to crypto. All the people who would be making speculative angel investments are now buying into cryptoc…
More than anything, the cost to transact with Bitcoin or Etherium (which this article weirdly focuses on), stagnates mainstream adoption. Sure, I could create my own coin to use as an in-app currency for my project, but why ? A coin is only worth what you can buy with it, and nobody is going to sell anything worthwhile with some random, in-app coin. Even Bitcoin was just abandoned by Microsoft, because it's so overpr…
Microsoft didn't abandon Bitcoin because it was overpriced, they abandoned it because it was volatile.
One could argue that a blockchain's only real world purpose is as a shared database, just as http's only real world purpose is the transfer of data between computers.
There's another issue that I don't see mentioned much here. I was contemplating writing a blog post about it. Over the past year I've seen a serious decline in early stage angel investment. I've talked to a lot of people who have said similar things. What I've heard and in some cases observed is that it's all going to crypto. All the people who would be making speculative angel investments are now buying into cryptoc…
Awful? Yes, the bubble will probably pop at some point.. however, from a risk reward PoV, over the last few years it seemed more likely to be able to 10x your money in crypto than it was to make a successful angel investment. Getting into the good deals is hard without a proper network in place and most angel investments fail. I think it's normal people reallocate to the more interesting opportunity available at a certain point in time. No point in throwing money at bad ideas if you can't get into the interesting deals.
Once most of the crypto gains have been made, this will shift again. If the fed sets up another QE programme, more money will flow into the stock market, etc.
Alternative perspective: maybe cryptocurrencies are valuable and represent real innovation?
> It remains an open question whether even much, much lower fees would be viable in the long run. The problem is not fees rather usability. If today I speak to a layman about bitcoin he is confused. It doesn't help that people start talking about hardware wallets, multisigs, Segwit etc. Most of those guys find that using cryptocurrency is a pain and want to stick to real money. Yes, it doesn't stop them from speculat…
I fully agree re usability. It only took about five years, from early 1996 to 2000, for most lay persons in the US to grasp the value of the Internet and begin routinely using it at home or work. Internet usage in the US went from ~10% of adults to over 50% of adults in that time. The browser largely extracted away the need for a person to understand much of anything about how it worked. Today most people do not unde…