I feel like I have a pretty good idea of Stephen Diehl's opinions on cryptocurrency markets, after reading a lot of his articles posted on HN. I'll read this one too, if there's a new argument in it. Is this one worth reading for someone who is beginning to find them a little samey?
The Handwavy Technobabble Nothingburger of Crypto
231–240 of 704 posts
Re: The Handwavy Technobabble Nothingburger of Crypto
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Leaving aside the dubious idea that the Federal Reserve can give their friends the ability to print money You didn't read my comment correctly.
What is the mechanism that ensures bitcoin inflates proportionally to the dollar?
Perhaps inflation in the price of electricity, denominated in USD?
But when people say inflation in the context of cryptocurrency they usually mean "deflation".
Re: The Handwavy Technobabble Nothingburger of Crypto
#233Earlier quoted context omitted.
Propaganda? Does it matter where they learned it as long as it's true and factual?
Can we start by talking about how modern money works in a more factually accurate way. In particular, can we stop talking about "printing money"? Printing money has no impact on the value of money. I think most people in a forum like this understand that but when we talk that way I worry that someone, somewhere doesn't understand. Money is created when it is borrowed from a bank or banking institution. Even that is a…
Sure, but central banks do influence how much banks can borrow, and hence how fast the currency supply grows. Even someone whose understanding of monetary policy is limited to "The Fed has a big meeting each year to decide what the inflation rate will be" can understand why a deflating currency would be really bad.
Re: The Handwavy Technobabble Nothingburger of Crypto
#234"Cryptocurrency", not "Crypto". Title should be updated to correct this.
Unfortunately that battle is lost :/
Re: The Handwavy Technobabble Nothingburger of Crypto
#235Not being pegged to a centralized, state-controlled currency is a dealbreaker for me. It's still in infancy and it's true that 99% of the projects are get-rich-quick schemes with no intrinsic value. Though, I think the author lives in a country with a trustworthy government because that's not the case for many people including me. In the last two days my country's currency has shaken much more than crypto and I don't…
If you're going to use a different currency, why not just use USD or EUR?
"If they don't have bread, let them eat cake."
Edit: I think in the kind of countries that GP mentions, access to stable foreign currencies will be very restricted, especially during times where the country's native currency is in crisis.
Re: The Handwavy Technobabble Nothingburger of Crypto
#236What about gaming? A huge problem in gaming now is that once games are no longer profitable, the servers go offline and they become unplayable. In-game assets simply disappear, and DRM servers go offline on the whim of the publisher. With the right architecture, crypto could solve both of these problems.
Disclaimer: I don't like DRM or microtransactions, I think both of them make the gaming experience in 2021 pretty terrible.
Re: The Handwavy Technobabble Nothingburger of Crypto
#237Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, this is what I don't understand from the naysayers. Anyone who says blockchain-driven assets don't have intrinsic value seems to ignore the value of trust - the ability to trust that the ledger is accurate seems extremely valuable. The author of the article skips over the question entirely, maybe he's addressed it elsewhere, but if the crypto skeptics continue to ignore one of its primary value propositions, I…
But that ledger isn't accurate. It's just distributed and difficult to change. I technically am the owner of (quite a few) bitcoin that were being processed by MtGox when they imploded. The wallet they were in at the time was emptied and no longer exists. I still receive the relevant court documents as the case continues still. As far as the ledger is concerned - they are no longer mine. --- So question to you: How d…
Not your private keys, not your coins. You CHOSE to gamble with your property when you gave it to someone else. Whether you understood this before you lost your property or not, is irrelevant. I've not lost any of my coin UTXOs associated with my own private keys. Unregulated, foreign Magic The Gathering trading card exchange use was never a wise choice from the day Jed McCaleb started that garbage database.
Re: The Handwavy Technobabble Nothingburger of Crypto
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is why I always have thought that election voting would be a perfect use case for a blockchain. Imagine a way that you could look up the blockchain with your key (SSN?) that is somehow one-way-hashed to show you the result of your vote. The value param would be plain-text. Someone else wouldn't be able to see your vote without your key, but you could confirm yours was recorded properly. Anyone could tally the va…
Of all the things you could do with a blockchain, it's probably the worst. The legitimacy of voting outcomes depends critically on everyone understanding and in principle being able to verify how it works, and it being resistant to tampering at scale . Very few people would understand a blockchain based voting mechanism well enough to really verify, and any implementation error could give an attacker complete and unt…
You telling me everyone understands computerized voting machines? Because I don't think there's that much of a gap between people who know about those vs people who know about block chains
Re: The Handwavy Technobabble Nothingburger of Crypto
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
> You don't see how people are unhappy with getting their savings diluted by unlimited money printing? Money printing dilutes wealth if you hold it in cash, but every other asset appreciates. Moreover if you have more debt than wealth, money printing reduces that burden. How many people actually have more wealth than debt but keep it largely in cash? I never understood who exactly has this problem.
The vast majority of humanity has no access to credit besides borrowing cash from Uncle Pedro, no access to any other financial instruments besides cash and keeps their savings under their mattress or in a shoe box. You don't understand who has this problem because you don't know anyone who has this problem, but outside of our comfy western countries most people have this problem.
> outside of our comfy western countries most people have this problem.
Can you cite some evidence that there are people keeping long-term savings* in cash and has adequate internet access and computing resources to participate in cryptocurrencies? I'm still not buying this.
* (I believe people do hold short-term savings in cash, but those are not the type of savings that money-printing erodes significantly.)
Re: The Handwavy Technobabble Nothingburger of Crypto
#240The Oracle problem renders the trust component of the blockchain untrustworthy. The storage expense of using a blockchain (because of the validation required) imposes the requirement of using off chain DB for storage. So you end up with the most economically viable use for Blockchain being the validation of high value digital transactions..e.g
Crypto. Perhaps this is why crypto prices will continue to rise, since the validation component requires energy ($) to function and the more transactions that take place, the more validation is required - I believe it does not scale linearly even though it happens in parallel.
Since validation fees are paid in crypto, crypto prices must rise as more validation takes place. It is sort of circular.
I could be 100% wrong though.