591–600 of 704 posts
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Which is awesome, but I Algorand is < 0.5% of the crypto-ecosystem
Well, this is how progress happens. Someone complains about a whole industry in broad brushstrokes, someone else invalidates the complaint with a counter example, and we move forward with the better option.
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> Is it impossible to achieve the stated benefit of being able to make quick and easy transactions and being decentralized? Yes. A transaction is a network-scale operation. It needs to be broadcast and confirmed by at least half the network. Otherwise it wouldn't be decentralized. As that network increases in size, the resources required for that operation increase proportionally. "Decentralization" is a bad meme tha…
Why should a transaction need to be a network scale operation in a decentralized scheme? The ultimate decentralized payment mechanism is bartering, in which the transaction only includes the people making the transaction. Now, I don’t know how to translate that to the digital world, but there’s no clear reason why a decentralized network must inform the entire network of everything that happens in it.
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The federal government prints dollars. It is never going to take a loss doing that.
The federal government does all kinds of things it can take a loss on, and it does in fact take losses. The federal reserve prints dollars and buys government bonds.
I like to think of the "losses" which arise from propping up companies (if any, as pointed out it's not necessarily a loss) as subsidies of undesirable behaviour. In other words, they're a very bad thing, just for a different reason.
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The anti-crypto case is not that it's "worse" than some other speculative investment asset (gold, comic books, etc), it's that crypto is a speculative asset, as opposed to the things it's sometimes claimed to be (e.g. currency, a new way to do finance, etc).
All monetized assets like USD or gold are "speculative". I speculate that my dollar probably won't lose more than 10-20% of its value in the next year.
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A stock literally represents a unit of ownership of the underlying company. No, it's not tangible in the "I can touch it" sense - unless you get a LOT of it as you said, but it's backed by hundreds of years of contract law precedent. When I own stock I get quarterly reports on the performance of the company - revenue, profit, etc. - these allow me to evaluate whether I think the company is doing well or poorly and ga…
You can evaluate Bitcoin by how many users it has, how many transactions it facilitates, what kind of new concepts it enables, the usefulness of un-censorability, how many countries are adopting it (or likely to adopt it), etc. If you're going to use athletes past performance for betting, you can always use Bitcoin's past performance of 300% YoY appreciation for forecasting it's price too, but we both know that's use…
By these metrics, isn't fiat currency vastly more valuable? Yet even when a new fiat currency is created, you don't get a rush to "invest" in it.
> what kind of new concepts it enables, the usefulness of un-censorability
These are extremely squishy and any measure of value here is extremely subjective. Plus the latter property is not yet proven. Bitcoin, in particular, makes it very easy to trace the source/destination of a transaction. The same anti-money-laundering KYC practices that allow taking down drug dealers[1] could be used to censor someone from receiving donations/payments.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/27/17509444/dark-web-drug-ma...
I wonder how much of the Crypto hype is because the US banking system still lives in the 1980s or thereabouts. If everybody in the US had access to bank accounts with easy electronic transfers within 5 seconds for no charge, no chargebacks and so on, as people are used to in the EU, would people still be excited about Bitcoin?
Crypto is used as a commodity and for scams, very rarely as a currency. Given that transferring crypto is hard, slower, more expensive, riskier, public, and more wasteful than real banking, I don’t see why these would be related.
Crypto is increasingly being used as a digital payment workaround for areas that Visa and MasterCard try to avoid, like pornography and donations to controversial organizations. It's probably just a sliver of overall crypto transactions, but this is very much the use case that justifies the bitcoin-as-a-currency model.
Pornography is to Bitcoin as "Linux ISOs" are to BitTorrent.
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A stock literally represents a unit of ownership of the underlying company. No, it's not tangible in the "I can touch it" sense - unless you get a LOT of it as you said, but it's backed by hundreds of years of contract law precedent. When I own stock I get quarterly reports on the performance of the company - revenue, profit, etc. - these allow me to evaluate whether I think the company is doing well or poorly and ga…
When you buy bitcoin you are _investing_ in the possibility that the bitcoin will be part of the economic network. The earlier you invest the better the returns. As time passes and bitcoin grabs hold a position the S curve of possible returns will be less. Same as investing in stocks. The value is brought by being early adopter. Historically bitcoin is gaining adoption, but one would argue we're still early. Paradoxi…
I guess I'm too old and curmudgeony to do that.
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> 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".
In that case, I think the point is that some "crime" is ethically justified and worth supporting technologically. The OP's statement implies that all crime is bad.
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One huge difference between Bitcoin and gold is that gold can be possessed purely on one's own. Bitcoin requires the continuous expenditure of energy to maintain the record of ownership.
> energy to maintain the record of ownership. That is entirely incorrect. Energy is expended to allow transfer of ownership, not to maintain the record. If all miners save one dude with a laptop stopped to mine transactions tomorrow, you still wouldn't be able to spend Bitcoins for which you don't own the private key.
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I could replace your use of “cryptocurrency” here with “Pokémon cards” and nothing would change. Yet you don’t seem concerned with the buying, selling, trading, owning of Pokémon cards with regard to their utility. You are not the arbiter of utility. Nobody is. If you have no utility for digital cash, great. That doesn’t mean others don’t. You don’t have to play Pokémon if you don’t want to.
Cryptocurrencies, unlike trading cards, have large negative externalities. They are causing component shortages, driving up GPU prices, enabling new scams and ransomware, wasting electricity, accelerating climate change. It might be justifiable if cryptocurrencies were providing real economic value, but if we're drawing analogies to Pokemon cards, then they are net-negative value to humanity and we should hope for th…
GPU prices is totally fair though.