171–180 of 327 posts
What puzzled me is how comes blockchain startups did not sell their crypto for fiat just after their ICOs. I recommended this to several of my blockchain customers but none of them listened. I dont know if that was motivated by greed or something else. According to Game theory there is no benefit in not selling the crypto for fiat: if you raise lets say 10million during an ico (typical amount raised 6m ago), there is…
At what price will the Bitcoin death spiral occur? (i.e. when it costs more to produce/handle Bitcoin than the revenue generated, so best move is to just exit the crypto industry).
There will always be SOME miners who have access to cheap enough electricity and economies of scale for whom it continues to be profitable to mine.
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If you haven't seen the need for an apolitical currency yet you probably never will. But maybe you're just all viewing this from the perspective of traditional speculators and haven't even considered it?
It's fascinating how strongly we believe that now == how things should be. Humans have been using gold as a currency for thousands of years, and yet nowadays everyone seems to believe that nothing but state-backed paper can work as such - and anyone who wants (as you said) an apolitical currency is just weird.
Gold currency can hardly be described as apolitical. It has been a major political issue in every country that adopted it. Political issues have included debasement and forgery of coins, bimetallism, deflation vs inflation, the legality of citizens owning bullion, the exchange rate between gold-backed paper money and actual gold, ships sinking while carrying loads of gold, countries stockpiling and transferring large amounts of gold back and forth under the Bretton Woods system, etc.
Any "apolitical" system of currency will become political as soon as it is large enough for governments to take notice of it and start trying to regulate it. Any cryptocurrency that has disputes about governance or forking also has politics.
What puzzled me is how comes blockchain startups did not sell their crypto for fiat just after their ICOs. I recommended this to several of my blockchain customers but none of them listened. I dont know if that was motivated by greed or something else. According to Game theory there is no benefit in not selling the crypto for fiat: if you raise lets say 10million during an ico (typical amount raised 6m ago), there is…
What is even involved in finding a buyer for $10mm btc in usd and then getting that usd into a legal/compliant bank account? Sounds non-trivial. It's my understanding from some work I did for a crypto startup that there is approximately zero usd/btc liquidity, the apparent "usd liquidity" and "usd price" last year was actually dominated by tether-btc and tether-eth liquidity. There was not actually a functional usd/b…
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I assert that the diffusion of responsibility is a key feature of decentralized technology precisely because it renders us unable to "nip it in the bud".
Not really. When the MPAA wanted action taken on torrented movies, they didn’t just throw their hands up in the air and go “whelp, it’s decentralized!“, they went after the authors of the protocol, the ISPs, hell even domain name registrars (that listed torrent websites). You can still torrent films, but you could get prosecuted or fined. Furthermore, some content is completely censored from torrent sites. All that t…
lending - https://dharma.io
derivatives - https://dydx.exchange
forecasting/gambling - https://www.augur.net
on-chain "US dollars" - https://mkr.tools
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is even involved in finding a buyer for $10mm btc in usd and then getting that usd into a legal/compliant bank account? Sounds non-trivial. It's my understanding from some work I did for a crypto startup that there is approximately zero usd/btc liquidity, the apparent "usd liquidity" and "usd price" last year was actually dominated by tether-btc and tether-eth liquidity. There was not actually a functional usd/b…
The BTC/USD market on Kraken is pretty liquid. I think trading $10m wouldn't have been a problem if you spread it over a few days. They are trading $34m/day now and it would have been far more 6 months ago. Not sure what paperwork you need - as long as you could document the source was legit it would probably be ok. Also changing BTC/USDT would at least protected against the decline in value.
But how many of these ICO's actually did proper KYC/AML stuff? My guess is very, very few, making getting fiat money into a legitimate bank much more difficult.
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I don't really see the connection. It seems to me that such a move will make decentralized money more valuable and more likely to be used, not less.
Most people don't care about decentralised money. Stop the on/off ramps they currently use for speculation and the vast majority will stop speculating, as they were only in it for the get-rich-quick factor.
The discussion of blockchain tech on HN is puzzling to me. On the matter of value: I suspect that if we find ourselves able to send a message back in time two years (when BTC was less than $1,000 USD) and report that the price is now over $3,700, that we'll find this message to be met with an understanding that this is, at least, a validation of the use of blockchain tech as a store of value. I suspect that if we des…
We did not rally optimism and childlike curiosoty from the general public for HTTP or TCP/IP.
You are shilling based on the popular Bitcoin playbook of Quotes and Comments.
If it's really about the technology then people shouldn't care about the USD value of this crapshitcoins era... But no you folks not only took on the technologically inclined people but dragged the unaware general public into the mud took their money and fueled your drug-induced, darkweb fantasies of lambos and Porsches.
Just stop with this bs already .. I really hope SEC comes after everyone of you greedy technobabble mumbo jumbo Signal pump-dump idiots.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you haven't seen the need for an apolitical currency yet you probably never will. But maybe you're just all viewing this from the perspective of traditional speculators and haven't even considered it?
It's fascinating how strongly we believe that now == how things should be. Humans have been using gold as a currency for thousands of years, and yet nowadays everyone seems to believe that nothing but state-backed paper can work as such - and anyone who wants (as you said) an apolitical currency is just weird.
So grand scheme of things, yeah, there's pros and cons to both. Personally, I'd prefer the vast majority of my currency to be state-backed vs the alternative.
Regardless, I think the whole mining thing is consuming resources for consumption's sake so if the various coins that must be mined falter to the point that that behavior goes away, I'd be fine with this.