Live data from Hacker News

Decentralized Woo Hoo

stephendiehl.com

201–210 of 295 posts

Re: Decentralized Woo Hoo

#201

With El Salvadors requirement that businesses accept Bitcoin, I have come to believe that just about every 3rd world nation without significant military will eventually do the same. Why? Because having your countries currency pegged to the bitcoin is better than being pegged to the dollar. Pegged to the dollar allows the US and allies to devalue your currency to nothing almost immediately. Bitcoin is more risilient t…

> having "missed the boat"

The boat is still going, likely to hit $100K in the next few months.

Re: Decentralized Woo Hoo

#202

> Yet if we value these assets in terms of traditional valuation models we find they should be worth absolutely nothing. This is the core tenet that these skeptics get lost with - the premise that there is no real central value to blockchain technology. It is a lost and shallow view made by people who have chosen not to engage or understand what they espouse on. Maybe this person just has too much to lose from change…

I've been a huge skeptic myself until a friend almost forced me into going down the rabbit hole. I have since been wondering why we tech people are so unbelievably critical. "There is no use-case." and "It's a technology looking for a problem" are common phrases. I have no answer. Just a thought: for someone living in the 90s, wouldn't something like Facebook have been also very difficult to conceive? "What's the val…

Smart contracts are really really really cool!

I was able to write a contract to take out a loan, distribute funds to various pools and pull the funds out. Having that sort of atomic control over financial transactions or data is simply amazing. Anyone with the knowledge can do it. Just understand the vulnerabilities and caveats with the languages/apis that interact with the various blockchains.

Re: Decentralized Woo Hoo

#203

> Yet if we value these assets in terms of traditional valuation models we find they should be worth absolutely nothing. This is the core tenet that these skeptics get lost with - the premise that there is no real central value to blockchain technology. It is a lost and shallow view made by people who have chosen not to engage or understand what they espouse on. Maybe this person just has too much to lose from change…

I've been a huge skeptic myself until a friend almost forced me into going down the rabbit hole. I have since been wondering why we tech people are so unbelievably critical. "There is no use-case." and "It's a technology looking for a problem" are common phrases. I have no answer. Just a thought: for someone living in the 90s, wouldn't something like Facebook have been also very difficult to conceive? "What's the val…

Facebook is less a technology than an application. Blockchain and stuff is technology, maybe there are good applications.

Re: Decentralized Woo Hoo

#204
post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fiat currency, in essence, is equally valueless. It only has inherent value because enough people agree that it does. Bitcoin is no different (and in fact has several advantages over fiat, giving it further value).

Well, not quite. It has inherent value since fiat is guaranteed to be backed by the full faith and credit of the backing nation. That is, by holding fiat, you trust that the country issuing that fiat doesn't default (and will hence guarantee that value). I don't see a similar parallel with crypto, though I'd love to be corrected.

> you trust that the country issuing that fiat doesn't default

Doesn't default on what? A dollar isn't a claim on a percentage of the productive output of the USA, it's just a dollar. If dollars aren't worth anything, it's not worth anything.

Re: Decentralized Woo Hoo

#205
post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not everyone got the web, chat, or social networks, but loads of people did and people from all backgrounds. Things like Geocities, AIM, MySpace, early Facebook, early search engines, etc. had millions of users very rapidly. They penetrated beyond the tech-savvy early adopters within years. Cryptocurrency is more than 10 years old and hasn't seen anything like this. The vast majority of what I see in cryptocurrency i…

There are huge regulatory and societal roadblocks for crypto to be used as envisioned not as present during those other cases of wide technological adoption. For crypto to be valuable, merchants need to use it. Transactions need to be cheaper. A stable decentralized financial system needs to emerge. The use case is a world without central banks and central currency manipulation. People who don’t see the use case don’…

> The use case is a world without central banks and central currency manipulation.

> People who don’t see the use case don’t understand the scope of what direct exchange of currency without central management entails.

People who see that as a feature don't understand how credit works nor its importance in modern financial capitalism.

Re: Decentralized Woo Hoo

#206
post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- funded an Afghan refugee friend in Turkey with ETH. they have no bank account. If they have no bank account, how do they convert ETH into something actually useful to them (presumably Turkish Lira)?

Yeah no, the Turkish Lira is no longer useful. "The Turkish lira hit its weakest ever level against the US dollar on August 7, trading at 7.36 at one point, having lost nearly 20% of its value since the beginning of the year....The lira has been on life support for the past two years and the economy has continually struggled." https://theconversation.com/turkeys-collapsing-lira-governme...

[deleted]

Re: Decentralized Woo Hoo

#207
post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not everyone got the web, chat, or social networks, but loads of people did and people from all backgrounds. Things like Geocities, AIM, MySpace, early Facebook, early search engines, etc. had millions of users very rapidly. They penetrated beyond the tech-savvy early adopters within years. Cryptocurrency is more than 10 years old and hasn't seen anything like this. The vast majority of what I see in cryptocurrency i…

I strongly suggest doing a comparison of O(log n)-style adoption curves between Bitcoin, and say- cell phones, computer networking, or really any innovation that became ubiquitous and for which we have the data... I think you'd be surprised at the similarities.

Where we measure adoption by cups of coffee purchase with bitcoin.

[1] https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/1322925/is-there-pr...

Re: Decentralized Woo Hoo

#208

Maybe the title should be updated. It doesn't have anything to do with decentralization per se, but about cryptocurrencies, which is just a technology that happens to use decentralization as a technology. I actually thought the article was gonna be about decentralization (as in P2P technology, like BitTorrent), but instead it's about the authors distaste for cryptocurrencies. Edit: Maybe it's just me, but the article…

Rather than argue semantics, I'm just going to thank you for pointing out this person has other motivations for their position. I'd wondered why they go on such long anti-crypto rants.

Re: Decentralized Woo Hoo

#209
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That centralized exchanges exists doesn't somehow make decentralized cryptocurrencies less decentralized. Just like how centralized social media doesn't make decentralized social media less decentralized.

Crytocurrencies are effectively useless without centralized exchanges. Change my mind. Social media doesn't need to interop between centralized and decentralized, but currencies do if they want to be useable. At the end of the day, someone will want to actually _buy_ something, and unfortunately I can't go to Petco and use my Dogecoin to buy dogfood.

> Crytocurrencies are effectively useless without centralized exchanges. Change my mind.

https://99bitcoins.com/bitcoin/who-accepts/

> use my Dogecoin to buy dogfood.

https://bitcoinist.com/doge-for-dogs-burger-king-brazil-now-...

https://imgur.com/kR1aNcP

...

Maybe not "Change my mind", but definitely a "Prove me wrong"

Re: Decentralized Woo Hoo

#210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, not quite. It has inherent value since fiat is guaranteed to be backed by the full faith and credit of the backing nation. That is, by holding fiat, you trust that the country issuing that fiat doesn't default (and will hence guarantee that value). I don't see a similar parallel with crypto, though I'd love to be corrected.

> you trust that the country issuing that fiat doesn't default Doesn't default on what ? A dollar isn't a claim on a percentage of the productive output of the USA, it's just a dollar. If dollars aren't worth anything, it's not worth anything.

Dollars do have inherent value, because I need them to keep the government from throwing me in prison for tax evasion. That is a very useful property.
Post reply on HN