11–20 of 256 posts
Key take-away: > Once the cryptocurrency price bubble pops and takes all the hype with it, will the community be able to recover the energy it needs to build real, innovative technology once again?
>"To deliver a peer-to-peer alternative to cash that, through decentralization, did away with the need for trust in financial institutions, which the 2008 crisis showed to be unscrupulous, and often corrupt." The sort of activity which led to the financial crisis would not be mitigated by the establishment of a decentralized currency. Decentralization would not do away with the need for financial institutions (or the…
>"To deliver a peer-to-peer alternative to cash that, through decentralization, did away with the need for trust in financial institutions, which the 2008 crisis showed to be unscrupulous, and often corrupt." The sort of activity which led to the financial crisis would not be mitigated by the establishment of a decentralized currency. Decentralization would not do away with the need for financial institutions (or the…
>The USD is pretty decentralized already People are insane. Fiat currency is the definition of centralized currency
It may have been meant as a joke but it has a purpose. but it's become a base market in several exchanges.
Uh? What exchanges? I've never seen a DOGE to anything. Right now, BTC is the most popular. ETH is second most popular. I know some exchanges support monero, but those are very limited in what can be converted.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
(author here) I agree! I was calling out Bitcoin's initial goals in the article but don't 100% align with them myself. Financial institutions came to exist for a reason and I'm really not on board with everyone "being their own bank" as I feel it'd be a step backwards from what we have today. What I do agree with is the need for more audit-able, accountable systems so the institutions we trust are less susceptible to…
Are you sure that was Bitcoin's initial goal? Or just speculation from early adopters? In the actual white paper, Satoshi does not mention any of this, although like you, I do remember these motivations being used very early on. I don't know their origin, but Satoshi simply talks about non reversible transactions, in the context of payments over the Internet.
>The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that's required to make it work. The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust. Banks must be trusted to hold our money and transfer it electronically, but they lend it out in waves of credit bubbles with barely a fraction in reserve. We have to trust them with our privacy, trust them not to let identity thieves drain our accounts. Their massive overhead costs make micropayments impossible.
http://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/posts/p2pfoundation/1/#...
Even the whitepaper has a bit about the weaknesses in financial institutions in the intro: https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
>"To deliver a peer-to-peer alternative to cash that, through decentralization, did away with the need for trust in financial institutions, which the 2008 crisis showed to be unscrupulous, and often corrupt." The sort of activity which led to the financial crisis would not be mitigated by the establishment of a decentralized currency. Decentralization would not do away with the need for financial institutions (or the…
(author here) I agree! I was calling out Bitcoin's initial goals in the article but don't 100% align with them myself. Financial institutions came to exist for a reason and I'm really not on board with everyone "being their own bank" as I feel it'd be a step backwards from what we have today. What I do agree with is the need for more audit-able, accountable systems so the institutions we trust are less susceptible to…
From what I know about the financial crisis, it wasn't the nature of fiat currencies that led to the crisis, but rather the complexity of financial instruments obscuring the weakness of underlying mortgage assets combined with incentives driving industry players that turned out to be toxic in the long term.
It doesn't seem to me that a distributed currency will eliminate financial complexity or perverse incentives.
But as an aside, I remember laughing about Dogecoin with friends back in 2014 when we first discovered it. It must feel awesome to have created something people around the world know about.
>"To deliver a peer-to-peer alternative to cash that, through decentralization, did away with the need for trust in financial institutions, which the 2008 crisis showed to be unscrupulous, and often corrupt." The sort of activity which led to the financial crisis would not be mitigated by the establishment of a decentralized currency. Decentralization would not do away with the need for financial institutions (or the…
>"To deliver a peer-to-peer alternative to cash that, through decentralization, did away with the need for trust in financial institutions, which the 2008 crisis showed to be unscrupulous, and often corrupt." The sort of activity which led to the financial crisis would not be mitigated by the establishment of a decentralized currency. Decentralization would not do away with the need for financial institutions (or the…
That isn't to say the mortgage industry wasn't propped up on fraud, etc. But it wasn't irrelevant.
>"To deliver a peer-to-peer alternative to cash that, through decentralization, did away with the need for trust in financial institutions, which the 2008 crisis showed to be unscrupulous, and often corrupt." The sort of activity which led to the financial crisis would not be mitigated by the establishment of a decentralized currency. Decentralization would not do away with the need for financial institutions (or the…
The point of cryptocurrencies is to rediscover everything we already know about money, the hard way
It is kind of funny, actually. Engineers rediscovering by doing, and wall street having these existential self-doubts about whether there is some hidden sophistication which is entirely absent.
Key take-away: > Once the cryptocurrency price bubble pops and takes all the hype with it, will the community be able to recover the energy it needs to build real, innovative technology once again?
I wonder how many young, talented, technology-minded people will be set back if this "bubble" does pop.