901–910 of 1001 posts
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That sounds like a burden of proof shift. Why should that be illegal in the first place?
Because it's used to launder money for crime, destroy the environment, and supports the cringiest, most juvenile libertarian derp (thanks Krugman!) about freedom from the tyranny of money banking government taxes or whatever.
“But it’s like the early Internet!” shouted the Emperor’s coinholders. “The Internet wasn’t yet useful a mere, um, thirteen years after its invention either.” I can see how people in their twenties would fall for this argument because they can’t remember. The reality is that the internet was immediately extremely interesting (either useful or fun) for practically everyone who got access. Email and ftp alone were kill…
Personally, I would like to be able to (legally!) program against my money and do stuff with it without being beholden to big banks. I think it would be cool if I could automatically send 1% or whatever of all my transactions to a charity of my choice, or if I could do my own "micro-finance" lending to farmers in developing countries, or other things like that which currently require a bank to implement it and me to use whatever they implement. But it is far from clear whether all this cryptocurrency and DeFi stuff is either necessary or sufficient to do any of this kind of stuff.
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It's become gold. Preferred by criminals, untraceable (gold is a single stable isotope, basically untraceable). A store of wealth. And you can't buy a pizza with gold, either, and there are tons of scammers who love gold (I remember, about Thailand, the scammers would conspire to get people's gold, a few would talk loudly about how jewels were going up, then someone else in your trip would just happen to mention, des…
Companies like Chainalysis have unwound and track the large majority (probably 80%) of Bitcoin transactions. Bitcoin’s lack of fungibility and any semblance of transactional privacy is actually one of the arguments against its suitability as a currency. You can read some of their public reports here: https://blog.chainalysis.com/?tab=articles-tab
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I can't agree with your point hard enough. Really useful nascent technologies all have this pattern—they grow incrementally more interesting and constantly gain applications. Bitcoin followed this pattern for a while. But then at some point it started to regress on that axis. You could no longer buy a pizza with it, you could no longer mine it, and it got too flooded by scammers to use safely. There's nothing to real…
The problem is you’re looking at a technological dead end (Bitcoin). There’s no innovation there, financial or otherwise, just momentum. However all you have to do is to turn your eye adjacent to the dapp space and see where developer and user adoption is definitely happening. There’s no shortage of “stuff to do” in DeFi and over the past few months the pattern is that it maxes out the transactional capacity every si…
Having said all that, I still can't figure out what the hell to do in the DeFi world. It seems like all I can do is lend my assets to people who also have nothing to do besides speculate or themselves lend their assets to other speculators. I can't figure out anything to do that pushes out of the speculative bubble in any way. Maybe you can help me?
I think this actually overstates the value of cryptocurrencies. The value of say, Bitcoin, isn't even connected to its value as a method of money laundering or extortion through ransomware. However morally objectionable these are, they do have economic value - it's just that value is not connected to the price of any cryptocurrency. Rather, the whole thing is an extended, worldwide pump-and-dump; speculation is drivi…
I saw so much potential, and it's just a shame to see what happened to the community and direction of the technology. The Ponzi Casino is a sad outcome for crypto.
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Crypto only solves problems crypto itself created. DeFi is a perfect example of that. The reason is that blockchain can only offer its trustless, decentralized and permissionless guarantees to things that are wholly representable on-chain. As soon as you try and sync it with the real world, the real world is the source of truth and the chain representation is meaningless. Further, by boat anchoring solutions to the f…
I think it's easy to get lost in the weeds on this. What was the fundamental innovation of Bitcoin? It was a blockchain that functioned as a decentralized ledger that allowed un-trusted parties to verifiably exchange value without a trusted intermediary. Game theoretical mechanics were added to try to prevent collusion, resist censorship, and to make the network permissionless, to varying degrees of success. What is…
“But it’s like the early Internet!” shouted the Emperor’s coinholders. “The Internet wasn’t yet useful a mere, um, thirteen years after its invention either.” I can see how people in their twenties would fall for this argument because they can’t remember. The reality is that the internet was immediately extremely interesting (either useful or fun) for practically everyone who got access. Email and ftp alone were kill…
USENET had nothing to do with the Internet. It ran over UUCP.
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Every time a Musk tweet swings the value of BTC by 20% --- in either direction --- Bitcoin loses credibility as a store of value. "Price greater than zero" is not enough to make something a good store of value. BTC as a means of payment is a joke. Most Bitcoin fans I engage with have actually given up on that. In fact, the scaling limitations of Bitcoin transactions are now touted as a good thing because that bounds…
The store of value concept makes no sense because such a thing cannot exist. When you buy Bitcoin you hope the seller does something that maintains the existence of an economy that exchanges their currency for Bitcoin. You can't just pile up gold and then expect to get something for it if everyone else is dead. You need a group of people (aka economy) willing to work for the gold.
All people mean by this is the demand and supply for Gold is very predictable, relatively speaking.
“But it’s like the early Internet!” shouted the Emperor’s coinholders. “The Internet wasn’t yet useful a mere, um, thirteen years after its invention either.” I can see how people in their twenties would fall for this argument because they can’t remember. The reality is that the internet was immediately extremely interesting (either useful or fun) for practically everyone who got access. Email and ftp alone were kill…
I can't agree with your point hard enough. Really useful nascent technologies all have this pattern—they grow incrementally more interesting and constantly gain applications. Bitcoin followed this pattern for a while. But then at some point it started to regress on that axis. You could no longer buy a pizza with it, you could no longer mine it, and it got too flooded by scammers to use safely. There's nothing to real…
One of the most interesting aspects of crypto to me is it's like printing money - having held some bitcoin and having it in an account is rather like the government printing it and giving it to you as a grant. It doesn't directly create goods or services but it does have an effect for better or worse.
“But it’s like the early Internet!” shouted the Emperor’s coinholders. “The Internet wasn’t yet useful a mere, um, thirteen years after its invention either.” I can see how people in their twenties would fall for this argument because they can’t remember. The reality is that the internet was immediately extremely interesting (either useful or fun) for practically everyone who got access. Email and ftp alone were kill…
I can't agree with your point hard enough. Really useful nascent technologies all have this pattern—they grow incrementally more interesting and constantly gain applications. Bitcoin followed this pattern for a while. But then at some point it started to regress on that axis. You could no longer buy a pizza with it, you could no longer mine it, and it got too flooded by scammers to use safely. There's nothing to real…
I’d put that deflationary crash right at the point you mention. I remember it. Bitcoin ran up to crazy levels in 2017 while it was simultaneously abandoned, which is what a deflationary currency collapse looks like.
Bitcoin’s designer(s) were brilliant cryptographers but crank economists. There’s a reason nobody takes that kind of superficial pop Austrianism seriously. It would be possible to design a viable cryptocurrency but it won’t happen until the current crop of cranks and scammers goes away. Right now anything actually workable in the space is tainted by the nonsense.