451–460 of 577 posts
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That’s not even close to the main flaw. The main flaw is that it incentivizes crime, human trafficking and accelerates environmental destruction. None of these are huge problems if you can afford a private bunker in New Zealand. It’s a major problem for ordinary citizens, especially those of poorer countries. Everything involving code has bugs. Bugs aren’t a reason not to use code. Bitcoin isn’t a problem for the ver…
From a humanitarian and economical point of view, Bitcoin doesn't hurt the poor. It allows the unbanked to finally store wealth, as a counter to a local strongly inflationary currency. Besides storing wealth, also growing wealth, as pretty much the only option they have. Unless you don't believe the narrative that Bitcoin stores/grows wealth very well, in that case...poor people can simply not use it. Perhaps you mea…
Fiat money doesn't give your free money either. You have to invest in something - and there's plenty of fee-limited options in the cryptocurrency world as well.
> And this isn't a vague promise, some 60/70% of the hashrate from China, which include most coal-based mining, is being wiped out in just a few weeks.
Because the price is so low, not because they want to help the environment. At the next peak everyone will be happy to burn whatever fuel is cheaper than the payout again.
The fact that this is trending on HN shows how little hacker news knows about the cryptocurrency space. A relatively unknown, recently launched stablecoin collapsing is not big news in crypto. Now if dai, usdc or usdt had failed, that would be a big deal.
The “Dai” peg did break — both in early 2020 [1], and a few days after launching. DAI’s now 60% backed by Tether like instruments. It’s basically a strictly worse version of Facebook’s Libra, assuming Libra weren’t crippled by state regulators (Libra is now Diem).
Every major algorithmic stablecoin has imploded at least once in times of market volatility. Preston Byrne has written a wonderful article explaining why the concept is clearly unsound and theoretically flawed [2]:
When you make a “coin” which is in form and substance a repackaged
exposure to another underlying cryptocurrency, as Dai is simply
repackaged Ether, and Basecoin is simply an abstraction of demand
for “Base bonds,” and peg that exposure to some meatspace asset
like an ounce of gold or a U.S. dollar, a sudden move against the
underlying collateral – in this case, 12% – can trigger a sell-off
that breaks that peg, and breaks it hard.
Unfortunately, when stablecoins break, they get propped up by biased investors in closely linked pseudo equities who limp the imploded stablecoin along by injecting more capital and then powering on the hype machine.
[1]: https://blog.makerdao.com/the-market-collapse-of-march-12-20...
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A VC publicly saying "I don't spend money on coke" as a marketing tactic and then getting busted doing just that would make the news. Much like a coin that claims "this coin is stable and its value is tied to USD" getting looted and crashing to $0 also makes the news.
Me shouting "I'm a VC and I don't spend money on coke" and then getting busted doing just that would not make news, as I'm nobody. Same here.
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Let's see: - Google: monopolistic tendencies, decline of their search engine, copyright troubles for youtubers, overall bad execution with their projects recently. - iot: really bad security and privacy, otherwise it would be neat. - modern websites: gauntlet of cookie banners and modals, ads and surveillance are criticized, page weight often silly, but the capabilities of modern websites are generally appreciated he…
Yes, I could. You just did it, as did the 3 other replies. You double down and confirm my point. Like I said, I see the humor in it. It's culture. Every forum has a culture. That's why you came to the defense, even in absence of an attack. I know I won't change that, but I do want to explain my counter point by means of an example. You have absolutely no idea how deeply I hate Google. I could write books full of it.…
The onus is on crypto boosters (who are usually invested and would benefit from more hype) to present better arguments and demonstrate the general benefit/feasability of crypto.
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I couldn't disagree more. All of the projects I listed have radically different mechanisms, failure conditions, capital efficiencies, and value capture abilities. It's a fascinating space that is in its infancy. And you're missing projects that aren't pegged to the dollar, but instead have dampened volatility floating price targets — like Reflexer and OlympusDAO. It's a rich, beautiful corner of a rapidly growing spa…
It's a rapidly inflating bubble like NFTs and subprime mortgages.
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The flip side of that is any smart contract that stood the test of time should be rock solid. For example, there are huge incentives to go ahead and hack a big contract like maker, compound, uniswap or aave, so you can bet that there's highly qualified people out there trying to hack them as we speak, yet after all this time, they are still working as intended. I have a lot more trust in that kind of product than in…
I'm not sure this follows. It's a fair point that any easy-to-find bugs in large, time-tested contracts will have been found. Any medium- or hard-to-find bugs also will probably have been found. But there might still be a very-hard-to-find bug lurking; and given the value of finding such a bug, people might look hard enough to find it. In other words, the same scale that ensures there is no low-hanging fruit, also pr…
There are countless instances of rouge traders, high level financial crime and corruption.
Wirecard is one recent example costing billions. The Libor scandal another that comes to mind.
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No kidding - each of the these crypto folks go "trust us" - and then even the simplest things (1:1 US Dollar backed coin - seriously - how hard is this!) turn out to be a full of crap and lies. And if you believe USDT has been 1:1 backed by us dollars for its full history - dream on. If you believed they would actually get audited when they said they would - hahah.
Your statement "how hard is this" shows your complete incompetence regarding the backing of anything. Nothing of value is backed in our world. If a mere 7% of bank account holders go to the bank to collect their money, the bank collapses. They don't have your money, it's not there. If all owners of gold (gold value papers) today claim their physical gold, it can't be done. There's 400% more value paper compared to th…
Considering negative interest rates in the Eurozone you would be doing the banks a favor. They don't want your deposits.
There are more than $100b of stablecoins — 285x year-over-year growth — with a variety of very interesting and high-quality stablecoins proliferating. And of course, Hacker News focuses on some garbage project nobody in the space even followed. How is there no discussion about FRAX, Maker's DAI, USDC, CRV's 3pool token, Liquity's LUSD, and so many other interesting projects?
Why is everyone talking about the condo that collapsed recently in Miami? There are so many condos still standing, but nobody cares!
There are more than $100b of stablecoins — 285x year-over-year growth — with a variety of very interesting and high-quality stablecoins proliferating. And of course, Hacker News focuses on some garbage project nobody in the space even followed. How is there no discussion about FRAX, Maker's DAI, USDC, CRV's 3pool token, Liquity's LUSD, and so many other interesting projects?
Because there's nothing interesting about them. They're just another variation on the same ol' "we peg our value to the dollar(*)!" pitch. The interesting stuff happens when they fail.
What else can you suggest in order not to prompt this response?