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Dogecoin's inventor looks to the past for insight into the future

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Re: Dogecoin's inventor looks to the past for insight into the future

#61

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.

As others are saying, Satoshi made some political-sounding statements about financial systems around the time of release, but the paper only refers to facets of traditional financial institutions in measured, objective terms.

Then again, given that Satoshi's true identity is unknown, a lot of this is necessarily speculation by interpreting a small set of clues.

Re: Dogecoin's inventor looks to the past for insight into the future

#62

DOGE is a pretty good currency to use for moving money between exchanges. That is why its used. If BTC had low/no transaction fees and was fast, people would have less incentive to use DOGE. Overvalued? Its possible but I think the entire crypto market is actually insanely undervalued. I was talking to my financial advisor the other day and he said pretty much 100% of people now are asking him about crypto and are co…

>Overvalued? Its possible but I think the entire crypto market is actually insanely undervalued. I was talking to my financial advisor the other day and he said pretty much 100% of people now are asking him about crypto and are considering putting money in. This seems like it is just the start.

Ask him how many of those same people consider using it as a currency.

I suspect they will remain interested in it so long as they hear about incredible gains and Bitcoin millionaires. I suspect that when the hype dies off (say if cryptocurrency prices were to stabilize) they would not be holders of any cryptocurrency the same way they are not holders of Yen, Euros, CAD, USD etc. for the purpose of investment.

Re: Dogecoin's inventor looks to the past for insight into the future

#63

>"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…

I disagree, I think that the federal reserve's artificially low interest rates and essentially unlimited supply of money for the banks to loan out at these interest rates were at the heart of the most recent financial crisis in the US. A decentralized currency would certainly mitigate that.

No. The heart of the crisis is people believing they can easily make money by investing in a product they don't understand. I can sell a CDO on CDS in Bitcoin, and make a lot of money while the buyers are all getting screwed. And they will be even more screwed as nobody will print cash to cover or limit their losses.

Re: Dogecoin's inventor looks to the past for insight into the future

#64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The sort of activity which led to the financial crisis would not be mitigated by the establishment of a decentralized currency. I can't speak for every ideological bitcoin supporter, but you and I may differ on what constituted the "crisis". I agree that it would not deal with the activity which led to the financial crisis. But to many, the crisis was not that the banks all failed, but that they were not allowed to…

I'm not sure what your point is. If all banks switched from dollars to Bitcoin, they could still be bailed out.

Yes, but it could remove the need to bail out the banks, which is really the crux of the issue when you get down to it. As it stands today, _not_ bailing out the banks would have crippled or destroyed the world economy (at least, that's my understanding). The banks are, literally, too big to [be allowed to] fail.

Cryptocurrencies could eventually remove enough power from banks to render their failure absorbable by the global economy.

Granted, I find it very unlikely that any cryptocurrency could remove the need for banks in general - they fill too many roles in the financial system - but it could reduce the market's reliance on them in general.

There's a lot of "could"s in all of this and I'm not an economist myself, so, grain of salt and all that. I will say that this is all based on things I've read from people that are, to the best of my knowledge, actual economists, but you should do your own research if such a thing interests you.

Re: Dogecoin's inventor looks to the past for insight into the future

#65
post #58
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're invested I wish you the best. But here is why I think all cryptocurrency is worthless: It is backed by nothing. The USD is backed by the courts of the USA, which in turned are backed by people with guns (law enforcement and the military). The YEN is backed by guns. The GPB is backed by guns. What is BTC backed by? If someone literally steals your BTC, what recourse do you have? There is no court to go to, n…

What precisely do you mean by "The USD is backed by the courts of the USA"? Do you literally mean "if someone takes my USD by force I can sue them"?

Exactly. There are laws and rules about moving USD from one person to another, and if someone violates those rules, you have recourse in the courts. And if they don't follow the court order, someone with guns will come and force them to follow it.

Re: Dogecoin's inventor looks to the past for insight into the future

#66
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The USD is pretty decentralized already People are insane. Fiat currency is the definition of centralized currency

Please define what you mean by Centralized and Decentralized. I believe you and the OP are talking at cross purposes. the USD is decentralized in that P2P transactions are accepted with almost anyone in the world without needing a centralized intermediary.

Is it centralized in the sense that a single organism can exert more control than anyone else on the real value of the USD by printing more?

Re: Dogecoin's inventor looks to the past for insight into the future

#67
A copy/paste from /u/palmerstoned on reddit on 2018 Jan 7. What do you guys think?

/u/palmerstoned: There is no fucking limit on how high this can go (compared to traditional stocks where there actually is a limit due to economic indicators like P/E ratio's). When someone says it's overvalued or undervalued, they are automatically wrong because we have not found any method yet to actually value crypto's, unless you compare the value between crypto's. The nominal value of derivatives in the world is estimated at 1.2 quadrillion (probably a gross overstatement and a bad comparison but a man can dream). Let that sink in for a moment.

/u/palmerstoned: We are still far away from large investment bank ETF's where they actually buy Bitcoins or Ethereum. But it will come, they will never let all this money lying around. The problem right now is that exchanges aren't safe enough yet to be buying Bitcoins by the millions. UI interfaces for wallets are way tooo complex for the average Wall Street trading desk. But this will change, eventually. (definitely keep an eye out for investment opportunities in this niche market). Goldman Sachs has already announced they will put up a trading desk by the summer. Things are about to get a lot more crazy!

Re: Dogecoin's inventor looks to the past for insight into the future

#68

>"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 sort of activity which led to the financial crisis would not be mitigated by the establishment of a decentralized currency. I can't speak for every ideological bitcoin supporter, but you and I may differ on what constituted the "crisis". I agree that it would not deal with the activity which led to the financial crisis. But to many, the crisis was not that the banks all failed, but that they were not allowed to…

To take the biggest example, AIG's owners did bear the consequences. Their equity was wiped out in the bailout. Do you believe individuals who did business with AIG are the ones who should have born the consequences for bad decisions made by the owners of AIG?

Re: Dogecoin's inventor looks to the past for insight into the future

#69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, money supply is a pure count. Money supply is not quoted in terms of trade, it exists purely outside of market behavior. Market cap requires a trade market in order for it to be calculated. It is money supply x last trade price . That's why you quote a cryptocurrency's market cap in some other currency, whereas a market cap is quoted in terms of itself.

> Money supply is not quoted in terms of trade, it exists purely outside of market behavior FX traders absolutely look at money supply, amongst other things, re-priced into hard currency when considering e.g. foreign-currency debt burdens; local rates, inflation and borrowing conditions; and the monetary policy relative to the internal and export-oriented economy. It's a specialist metric, though.

The money supply isn't the currency's value. Of course it is a factor in what traders are willing to pay to acquire it...but weather can be as well. Do you conflate the trade balance with the value of a currency too?

Market cap is money supply * last trade price. It mathematically can't be analog to money supply, any more than density can be analog to mass.

Re: Dogecoin's inventor looks to the past for insight into the future

#70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what your point is. If all banks switched from dollars to Bitcoin, they could still be bailed out.

Well look at it from this perspective: If a tbtf bank algo went haywire when trading with the intent to maintain some position in cryptocurrencies because of some market spike/error/or w/e over an exchange and lost alot of money, yet others who were on the other side of the trade safely moved their gains to private wallets, the exchange wouldnt be able to negate those trades and claw back funds (like they did during…

Yes, I get that blockchain transactions are not reversible (excluding threat of force/imprisonment).

But I think you may not have fully investigated your assumptions about what makes a bank TBTF and what it means to be "bailed out."

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