101–110 of 704 posts
I wish I could have discussions about cryptocurrency as a technology rather than a "get rich quick" scheme. Back in 2017 I was really excited about Ethereum and the promises of scalability not just from Vitalik B. but from other developers too. I still think that cryptocurrency could do good for the world if the issues can be resolved but for now everybody's got their eyes on the price, not the technology's horizon.
> Any application that could be done on a blockchain could be better done on a centralized database. Except crime. After all as we all know: If you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear. And look at how inefficient all these permissionless, trustless protocols are! What a waste! Let's just all trust a central authority and think of the savings and the children.
That argument doesn't work with currency, because money requires trust by definition (as opposed to immediate barter), and, as a backup -- enforcement. In the end, it's just a question of whether you trust a centralised authority that's ultimate accountable, however imperfectly, or decentralised authorities that are accountable only to themselves and have no enforcement power. If you give me bitcoin and I don't give…
There's many other ways than inserting a monopoly on violence dispensing political authority into the loop and still ensuring that transactions are suitably reliable.
Big sticks just aren't a very efficient solution.
People talk about things like Bitcoin as a threat to sovereign currencies, and they are, as competitors, of sorts. But stablecoins are another matter entirely. One huge aspect of the value of sovereign currencies is that they are instruments of law -- courts will settle in them as a lowest common denominator, and it is safe to use them in all sorts of settings as a result.
When dollar-denominated assets appear, they always run the risk of being considered a dollar-equivalent. For example, bank deposits are dollar-denominated, and are considered dollar-equivalent (even dollar-superior, in the sense that there are transactions that you can't legally do with specie, only with bank deposits, like buy stocks). That means that if banks (which are businesses) are not good at doing business, the government is essentially forced to treat them as dollar-equivalents by making them whole. See Savings & Loan Crisis, the GFC, LTCG, etc., etc.
Stablecoins piggyback on the legal aspects of dollars, and as long as you treat them as dollar-denominated assets, you're fine. The second you treat them as dollar-equivalents, you run the risk of a change in the value of that asset being something that the government is forced into supporting.
Funny how he fails to mention that Tether regardless of how dodgy it is provides a lifeline to people in countries undergoing massive inflation like Lebanon. Legal or not a back up option to a failed currency has real utility. This is why I suspect countries will push ahead with CBDCs and seek to export their use for financial and intelligence reasons.
I wish I could have discussions about cryptocurrency as a technology rather than a "get rich quick" scheme. Back in 2017 I was really excited about Ethereum and the promises of scalability not just from Vitalik B. but from other developers too. I still think that cryptocurrency could do good for the world if the issues can be resolved but for now everybody's got their eyes on the price, not the technology's horizon.
It has no use case. Zero
That's not a particularly valuable contribution to the discussion, nor is it even true.
A use case for crypto is to be independent of the establishment financial system. This isn't important to that many people, but it is a use case, and there are valid reasons for it.
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> the ability to trust that the ledger is accurate seems extremely valuable Maybe it "seems" valuable, but why exactly is it valuable? For what use case and which situation (besides crime)? I think the issue is that many don't see value in its "primary value proposition" because the features they want from banks are already there (stability, FDIC insurance). The only thing I personally see missing is no/low-fee insta…
One IMO realistic use-case is providing a wealth preservation mechanism for people living in a country with a corrupt government that's experiencing hyperinflation, for example Lebanon.
Sure, but (like it or not) that's covered under the umbrella of "crime".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then you would expect people in the EU to not be interested in crypto, yet it's the opposite. You can pull up search volume for "Bitcoin" across the world (using Google Trends), many European nations are at the top. As a matter of fact, their search volume is higher than US.
The difference is that those people can honestly see and use crypto as speculative assets, which is fine (if we ignore externalities for a second), not making up use cases.
For the longest time, real estate was assumed to be 100% safe until 2008, etc.
This particular source is extremely low quality and is motivated by the author's undisclosed competing product. I would like to see higher quality sources on the front page of hacker news one day.
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Imagine when ransoms had to be paid in suitcases full of dollar bills with non-sequential serial numbers. Bitcoin has made it all so much easier.
If all transaction can be tracked, what prevents the [FBI\et al] from simply following the bitcoin trail until someone cashes out?
[2] Why and How zk-SNARK Works: https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.07221
We get it, Steve. You don't like crypto. And it upsets you that other people like things you don't like, so you feel compelled to write the same useless whine over and over to cope. Get a life
There are significant negative externalities created by your toys.