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The cryptocurrency bubble is strangling innovation?

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Re: The cryptocurrency bubble is strangling innovation?

#71

Post by powvans »

Robotbeat wrote: post #23

Reading the original Satoshi paper, the point of Bitcoin is to be decentralized/trustless and to enable microtransactions by lowering transaction fees. 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 y…

This is a great analysis. The lack of trust as a feature in cryptocurrency is really a bug in society.

Bitcoin rose out of the previous financial collapse by appealing to people who have lost trust in institutions. The problem with building a trustless answer to that problem is that (assertions ahead) life isn't compatible with an absence of trust.

Trying to build a trustless financial system is a quixotic undertaking at best. It really smacks of a utopian dream where fundamental aspects of human nature are blithely ignored.

Of course, as you point out, no one is really trying to do it. Most people will have to trust Coinbase or whichever exchange they choose.

Re: The cryptocurrency bubble is strangling innovation?

#72

Post by AlexCoventry »

SN76477 wrote: post #68

What I have seen is a lot of people in my space have dropped what they are doing to focus on blockchain/crypto. They are chasing novelty, they do not seem dedicated to their craft. I think this is a bit of a problem.

By space, do you mean field? If so, which?

Re: The cryptocurrency bubble is strangling innovation?

#73

Post by rnicoll »

tqkxzugoaupvwqr wrote: post #20
brndnmtthws wrote: post #16

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

Oi, check the PRs before declaring development stopped :P https://github.com/dogecoin/dogecoin/pulls

Re: The cryptocurrency bubble is strangling innovation?

#74

Post by [deleted] »

rlanday wrote: post #65
debaserab2 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a question as a relatively uninformed spectator: where do these transaction fees go and why do they have to be so high?

A miner that successfully mines a block collects all the transaction fees for transactions in the block. They are high right now because many people want to send transactions, but blocks are capped at 1 MB, limiting the number of transactions that can fit into one block. Blocks are produced approximately once every ten minutes, so a transaction that contains a fee that’s too low will constantly get passed over in fav…

[deleted]

Re: The cryptocurrency bubble is strangling innovation?

#75

Post by FLUX-YOU »

Robotbeat wrote: post #60
FLUX-YOU wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>stagnates mainstream adoption Bitcoin/cryptocurrency is stuff for rich and tech-savvy people. - Folks with stressful and demanding jobs probably won't bother with full-time security measures to protect their wallets. - The same group won't have time to watch every piece of crypto news about which service or product is possibly bad/hacked (see electrum wallets). - Extremely high volatility means you need to be prepar…

> Rich people can afford astroturfing services to spread memes and good morale to pump the price. Rich people likely have significant control over hype cycles and may even be pumping other cryptocurrencies to start diversifying. That's super interesting. We assumed that the decentralization of content brought on by the Internet and social media would put a stop to stuff like that, but instead, due to anonymity, simpl…

It's really easy to get into tinfoil haberdashery territory, but IMHO, the two main areas of manipulation that are worth it (these days at least) are finance and politics.

Bitcoin has the advantage that it lacks any significant regulatory oversight or penalties while being useful across borders, which regulatory agencies are usually constrained by.

Re: The cryptocurrency bubble is strangling innovation?

#76

Post by acdha »

viggity wrote: post #33
acdha wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One thing has to be noted, while there is a constant parallel drawn with dot com people forget that there was at least 7-8 years head start for a layman to understand "internet". Bitcoin has been around for 8 years so it's not like there hasn't been enough time. The difference is that the internet was easy to explain to people because it had a number of immediately useful applications: you could almost immediately…

Doesn't solve a problem that average american has right now . The key feature of crypto currency (to me) has always been that it can't be easily manipulated by a government. Specifically with bitcoin, were it not so expensive and have such high fees, it could be of real use in countries with hyperinflation and black markets (Venezuela, Zimbabwe, etc). Hopefully bitcoin and the myriad of alt-coins can fill the gap. On…

What reason do we have to think that will work, however? Governments have a lot of angles for control and it especially seems to me that it would be personally risky to rely on downloading software, making easily identified network activity, and recording your activity in a public ledger to do anything which is officially banned. Besides being more workable without pervasive internet access, hoarding USD / Euros have the very nice property of not risking retroactive deanonymization.

Re: The cryptocurrency bubble is strangling innovation?

#77

Post by pavel_lishin »

bobcostas55 wrote: post #44
pavel_lishin wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Goatse cryptocurrency.

If you visit the original goatse domain, you will find exactly that. "Meme creation on the blockchain", it says.

Right, I wasn't making a joke, I was saying that Dogecoin isn't the most ridiculous example

Re: The cryptocurrency bubble is strangling innovation?

#78

Post by Goladus »

leroy_masochist wrote: post #39

> Look at the dot-com boom. A lot of people lost a whole lot of paper money, but it brought us a cheap worldwide fiber backbone and companies like Amazon and Google. If the point the author is trying to make is that Amazon and Google were made possible by the dotcom boom, and that the collapse of the dotcom bubble was part of the price we as a society had to pay to have the services provided these companies, that's a…

If the point the author is trying to make is that Amazon and Google were made possible by the dotcom boom, and that the collapse of the dotcom bubble was part of the price we as a society had to pay to have the services provided these companies, that's a really really bad argument.

Well, the article actually refers to that argument as a "desperate rationalization," although rather than delving into refuting the analogy he focuses on his primary thesis which is that right now, the speculative bubble is preventing any real determination of whether the blockchain technology has (or does not have) any practical uses.

Re: The cryptocurrency bubble is strangling innovation?

#79

Post by DennisP »

SN76477 wrote: post #68

What I have seen is a lot of people in my space have dropped what they are doing to focus on blockchain/crypto. They are chasing novelty, they do not seem dedicated to their craft. I think this is a bit of a problem.

How can you tell they're not dedicated to their craft in the blockchain space?

Re: The cryptocurrency bubble is strangling innovation?

#80

Post by oh_sigh »

Robotbeat wrote: post #23

Reading the original Satoshi paper, the point of Bitcoin is to be decentralized/trustless and to enable microtransactions by lowering transaction fees. 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 y…

> 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?

That's only if you want to exchange fiatBTC. If you just want to pay people who accept BTC with BTC, you don't need to use any exchanges.

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