51–60 of 151 posts
- The space is littered with fraud. - Wallets have bugs that lose hundreds of millions of dollars - Energy consumption forecasted to hit 0.5% of the world’s electricity consumption by end of 2018 - Promoters yelling “decentralize everything” while exchanges, development teams and mining are all highly centralized - No legal use case found to date Blockchain is a parasite on society.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We receive up to six figures in cryptocurrency payments every week for multiple perfectly legal products. If that’s not a “legal use case”, I don’t know what is. Are we going to argue next that credit cards have no use case because other forms of payment exist? Another example: I just bought a watch off of a guy on a forum using bitcoin, bank transfers or WU would have been a far bigger pain in the ass.
While it has speculative value [0], you can use it to buy stuff, but while doing so you will spend on exchange fees to convert in and out of crypto, you will use as much electricity for your transaction as 33 US households use in a day, you will subject yourself to liquidity risk and volatility risk [1] and you will have to wait for anywhere from ten minutes to a couple hours [2]. Calling this complicated, risky and…
> but there are significantly better ways of achieving the same thing.
There are no ways of accepting payments digitally without a third party. There is no "better way".
> transactions on Visa, Apple Pay, or PayPal all get complete within seconds.
0-conf can be accepted within seconds. Also credit card transactions are reversible after many weeks. Credit card chargeback fraud is a big problem for businesses.
- The space is littered with fraud. - Wallets have bugs that lose hundreds of millions of dollars - Energy consumption forecasted to hit 0.5% of the world’s electricity consumption by end of 2018 - Promoters yelling “decentralize everything” while exchanges, development teams and mining are all highly centralized - No legal use case found to date Blockchain is a parasite on society.
Even if this were true, and it's obviously not, what about the illegal use cases? Aren't they important?
Bitcoin has helped people gain access to a wide variety of medicines that the state has improperly and violently prohibited.
That's not nothing.
And if it can do that - if, in the face of such overwhelming opposition, this technology has aided people in need, then doesn't it stand to reason that it can help other groups of people also?
- The space is littered with fraud. - Wallets have bugs that lose hundreds of millions of dollars - Energy consumption forecasted to hit 0.5% of the world’s electricity consumption by end of 2018 - Promoters yelling “decentralize everything” while exchanges, development teams and mining are all highly centralized - No legal use case found to date Blockchain is a parasite on society.
The energy wastefulness is proportional to the block rewards and fees, the rewards will be exponentially declining to zero and fees should be proportional to the usefulness of the system. Also most probably some other more efficient cryptocurrency - possiblly PoS or DPoS based (https://medium.com/@zby/proof-of-stake-can-be-cheaper-than-p...) - will replace bitcoin.
Having said that - yeah - there is just too much scam in all of this crypto-world, this will end up badly.
- The space is littered with fraud. - Wallets have bugs that lose hundreds of millions of dollars - Energy consumption forecasted to hit 0.5% of the world’s electricity consumption by end of 2018 - Promoters yelling “decentralize everything” while exchanges, development teams and mining are all highly centralized - No legal use case found to date Blockchain is a parasite on society.
OP is proof that intelligent people aren't always creative or future looking.
I got a degree in finance in college (in addition to MIS/Economics) because of all the scandals of my youth. I wanted to see if I could avoid those issues.
Being a software engineer it's actually pretty easy, being a business owner you're certainly riding the tides that are our joke of a financial regulatory system (up to the highest bidder to make the laws/regulations).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We receive up to six figures in cryptocurrency payments every week for multiple perfectly legal products. If that’s not a “legal use case”, I don’t know what is. Are we going to argue next that credit cards have no use case because other forms of payment exist? Another example: I just bought a watch off of a guy on a forum using bitcoin, bank transfers or WU would have been a far bigger pain in the ass.
While it has speculative value [0], you can use it to buy stuff, but while doing so you will spend on exchange fees to convert in and out of crypto, you will use as much electricity for your transaction as 33 US households use in a day, you will subject yourself to liquidity risk and volatility risk [1] and you will have to wait for anywhere from ten minutes to a couple hours [2]. Calling this complicated, risky and…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There was definitely a substantial influx of new (often clueless) investors in the past 12-18 months.
When Bitcoin hit around 14K my mom had heard all about the rise on MSNBC/CNN. So she asked me how to buy bitcoin. She needed to replace her radiator. She had about 500 and needed 1200 so she thought it was a reasonable gamble. So I had her send the money to me and I told her I would invest for her. I did not.. But I did inform her that when it crashed I just stuck her money in my savings account. And nothing was lost…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you have counter examples? Anything using the currencies as stores of wealth or mediums of exchange seem to be better suited by traditional finance which are less volatile and capable of higher volume. Anything using the ledger as a distributed datastore seems like it would be better suited by a datastore that wasn't wrapped up in a currency ledger and uses a consensus algorithm less costly than proof-of-work.
Examples of what cryptocurrencies does better: * Donations to wikileaks. Paypal froze their account and there are tons of examples where they have done this without good cause. * Legal businesses like marijuana sellers, porn, escort services and gambling platforms have had trouble using and keeping payment services. Some have been forced to only accept cash payments as they couldn't accept credit cards. * A way to ac…
It's not a matter of what they've been better than status-quo broken finance systems. The question is "if we replace these broken systems with something, why does it have to be a blockchain using PoW for consensus?"
In many of the cases people use crypto because otherwise they'd have had to been a bank or a money transmitter or file with SEC and uphold their legal obligations as such, and in those cases using blockchain didn't make those obligations disappear.
In other cases, the hype around "blockchain" created solutions that could have been served by any form of digital currency or any form of distributed database -- not just this specific form.
- The space is littered with fraud. - Wallets have bugs that lose hundreds of millions of dollars - Energy consumption forecasted to hit 0.5% of the world’s electricity consumption by end of 2018 - Promoters yelling “decentralize everything” while exchanges, development teams and mining are all highly centralized - No legal use case found to date Blockchain is a parasite on society.
- Wallets have bugs that lose hundreds of millions of dollars >> Software has bugs that cost lives. Losses in the millions are terrible events but they raise awareness to information security and that's priceless.
- Energy consumption forecasted to hit 0.5% of the world’s electricity consumption by end of 2018 >> PoW uses electric power to secure billions of euros in assets. Bitcoin miners were paid ~3.5B USD last year and paid an estimated 1.5B in utilities not to mention the thousands of jobs it creates. In any case right now Bitcoin's PoW spends as much as 3k US households so I don't think it's quite 0.5% of the world's total consumption...
- Promoters yelling “decentralize everything” while exchanges, development teams and mining are all highly centralized >> It's quite evident that realistically it's near impossible to start decentralised, but many teams and projects are adopting loose structures and contemplating moving their governance to a DAO.
- No legal use case found to date >> Among those who disagree with you are all the G-7 governments, almost all major exchanges, many of the major banks, law firms, etc. I'm not saying you're wrong, but you are not even wrong.
Blockchain is a parasite on society. >> FU. This is my job you are talking about.
In the end, the "reputable" ICO-backed companies will mostly (perhaps entirely) turn out to be no better. Enron was a real company that did real things. During the time it operated, hundreds of aspiring future Enrons were born in the penny stocks, took down a few thousand in profits, and died. Skeptics of Enron could have pointed to those overt frauds and said "sure, the space is littered with frauds, but look at Enr…