The Handwavy Technobabble Nothingburger of Crypto • Hacker News Board

Re: The Handwavy Technobabble Nothingburger of Crypto

#691

Post by yung_steezy » Sat, Nov 27, 2021, 1:17 PM UTC

llimos wrote: post #301

Most people on HN are rational people who look at the world in a rational way. Bitcoin and friends are not operating in a rational market, therefore we don't understand them, and most of us would probably be pretty lousy investors since we would try to make decisions rationally instead of memeing and YOLOing. But, and this is a key point, that doesn't make us right and them wrong . It's just a different kind of marke…

It is perfectly possible to be right for the wrong reasons. Unfortunately that can eventually catch up with you.

Re: The Handwavy Technobabble Nothingburger of Crypto

#692

Post by horsawlarway » Sat, Nov 27, 2021, 4:11 PM UTC

betwixthewires wrote: post #690

horsawlarway wrote: post #675

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Move what to the private key? How do I get those coins in the first place?

Move the bitcoin to your brigade key. However you can. Any time you make a purchase, of anything, you're trusting the seller. Leaving it in their custody is where you screw up. Imagine you bought bitcoin from me, but then asked me to hang on to it for you for free. Or a car. Or anything. It's absurd.

Ok, so we're in a spot where trust is literally required - but the ledger cannot be updated to reflect when that trust was broken or misplaced (at least not without falling back to an external power - namely: government).

So again - the entire value of the medium is predicated on having a legal system you can use to resolve these disputes.

Following - that legal system requires all sorts of control to actually resolve those disputes: Many of the things bitcoin advocates actively rail against are just methods of reconciliation (Funds freezing, reversed transactions, 3rd party control of assets, etc).

So either

1. The legal system will stop supporting exchanges of that medium (see: China)

or

2. The legal system will add back all those controls (see: Legislation in the US)

Basically - My entire point is that bitcoin only has value if current governments support its exchange, and they WONT do that if it's a negative to them (and it is, unless they can tax and control it).

Re: The Handwavy Technobabble Nothingburger of Crypto

#693

Post by tim333 » Sat, Nov 27, 2021, 5:51 PM UTC

germinalphrase wrote: post #47

Scarblac wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

They cash out in Russia is one thing that happens.

Re: The Handwavy Technobabble Nothingburger of Crypto

#694

Post by worik » Sat, Nov 27, 2021, 9:07 PM UTC

SuoDuanDao wrote: post #673

worik wrote: post #669

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you think we can do without trust? Can it be replaced by technology? The pertinent question is still: Can you be trusted? Your answer to those first two questions answers the third

Trust in my family? of course I need that. Trust in my civil service? Depends on incentives. I'm lucky to live in a country where they're mostly aligned with the needs of the public, but even so there's a 'drift' in incentives that requires constant correction. Trust in central banks and elected politicians? Absolutely not, what an absurd proposition. How have groups like that ever earned my trust? Why should I give…

I mean trust strangers

Without being able to rust the people around you life is untenable. Levels of trust in a society are highly correlated with all sorts of measures of well being (which way causality runs I do not know)

Getting back on topic to crypto currencies: Money builds on this. Money is a web of trust. That is the point, and that is why backed currencies (gold, silver, whatever) are pointless. The point is trust. So it is running against the grain to try to replace trust with technology. With money we are trusting each other and the system. If you are in Zimbabwe, say, or Venezuela, perhaps, where the system is devoid of trust money has little value.

Re: The Handwavy Technobabble Nothingburger of Crypto

#695

Post by danielmarkbruce » Sun, Nov 28, 2021, 1:15 AM UTC

tim333 wrote: post #687

danielmarkbruce wrote: post #548

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You want it to fail or you want to be right? Nothing wrong with wanting to be right. If Tesla stays at a crazy high valuation for the long term, then several mental models I use and find valuable fall to pieces. That would be very annoying for me on several dimensions because it's likely they wouldn't be replaced with useful mental models. They'd be replaced with "ITS ALL JUST CHAOS".

Markets look to the future. The Tesla valuation makes sense if they are going to do a trillion of business at some future point.

Everyone thinking about the Tesla valuation is aware markets look to the future :)

Even then - your statement is simplistic - the future cashflows are discounted back to today. As an example, if their revenue is $1 trillion (assume no inflation for simplicity) in 50 years, and we assume 10% net income margin (probably in the ballpark of reasonable) they make $100 bill which is discounted 50 years to today at maybe 8% (?), that year's earnings is worth around $2 billion today.

You may reasonably counter that they will grow much faster than that - and this is where people (like me) question it. The total industry is ~$3 trillion or so, globally. 85 million units. Telsa will hit maybe 900k units this year. So its a tough sell that they'll get to 25-30 mill units anytime soon (from a demand or supply side).

Don't get me wrong - Tesla is brilliant, Elon is brilliant. It doesn't mean the company is worth infinity. There is some concrete number which makes sense... and to many folks, 1 trillion is an order of magnitude too high.

Re: The Handwavy Technobabble Nothingburger of Crypto

#696

Post by tim333 » Sun, Nov 28, 2021, 4:54 PM UTC

danielmarkbruce wrote: post #695

tim333 wrote: post #687

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Markets look to the future. The Tesla valuation makes sense if they are going to do a trillion of business at some future point.

Everyone thinking about the Tesla valuation is aware markets look to the future :) Even then - your statement is simplistic - the future cashflows are discounted back to today. As an example, if their revenue is $1 trillion (assume no inflation for simplicity) in 50 years, and we assume 10% net income margin (probably in the ballpark of reasonable) they make $100 bill which is discounted 50 years to today at maybe 8%…

Yeah but re mental models you combine that with "...Mr. Market’s quotations will be anything but. For, sad to say, the poor fellow has incurable emotional problems. At times he feels euphoric and can see only the favorable factors affecting the business..."

Re: The Handwavy Technobabble Nothingburger of Crypto

#697

Post by danielmarkbruce » Sun, Nov 28, 2021, 5:47 PM UTC

tim333 wrote: post #696

danielmarkbruce wrote: post #695

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone thinking about the Tesla valuation is aware markets look to the future :) Even then - your statement is simplistic - the future cashflows are discounted back to today. As an example, if their revenue is $1 trillion (assume no inflation for simplicity) in 50 years, and we assume 10% net income margin (probably in the ballpark of reasonable) they make $100 bill which is discounted 50 years to today at maybe 8%…

Yeah but re mental models you combine that with "...Mr. Market’s quotations will be anything but. For, sad to say, the poor fellow has incurable emotional problems. At times he feels euphoric and can see only the favorable factors affecting the business..."

Sure. But old Ben Graham also said that in the long-run the market is a weighing machine. Note above I said "long term". If Tesla stays long term at current prices or above, I've completely misunderstood several things in a pretty fundamental way. As an example - gold has stayed at prices which don't make much sense to me for a very long time. So my mental model for that market is "it's crazy town, stay away". That's not a very useful model. I hope I don't arrive at the same place on what is a pretty simple company - they sell cars.

Re: The Handwavy Technobabble Nothingburger of Crypto

#698

Post by mvkel » Sun, Nov 28, 2021, 7:24 PM UTC

I think this fundamentally ignores what’s guaranteed to happen in the future: corporate ownership of… everything.

The only thing we own these days is our identity. That said, our digital identities are largely owned by user data companies like VISA, Google, et al.

If applications can run on the blockchain, and users have the ability to immediately and irrevocably “nuke” the personal information stored on the block chain, that massively improves on the centralized database model.

Re: The Handwavy Technobabble Nothingburger of Crypto

#699

Post by chx » Mon, Nov 29, 2021, 12:31 AM UTC

Robotbeat wrote: post #128

JackFr wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the US has an antiquated payments system vis-a-vis Europe, but crypto solves none of those problems. I don't see it. I see FOMO, groupthink and greed.

Cryptocurrency actually does solve that if you kinda ignore the scalability limitations of blockchain. Of course, the minute you add another transaction layer or exchanges or other third parties, then that wipes out most of that advantage and generally the more it facilitates cheap and fast transactions the more power is given to the third party and/or more fee is taken. I’m still a fan of first layer transactions an…

> you kinda ignore the scalability limitations of blockchain.

ROTFLMAO

The article is titled handwavy

Re: The Handwavy Technobabble Nothingburger of Crypto

#700

Post by ycombobreaker » Mon, Nov 29, 2021, 6:00 AM UTC

sjtindell wrote: post #463

ycombobreaker wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> automated market makers Are you claiming that this is an innovation associated with crypto? Can you elaborate or clarify, as the case may be?

The decentralized exchanges are essentially just automated market makers, but in a different sense than existing automated market makers like Citadel. The contract deals more with balancing pools than a traditional market maker who just forwards orders to an exchange or matches it themselves.

Apologies for the delayed response. What you're describing is not novel to crypto. Citadel is a wholesaler, but plenty of other participants quote firm bid/offer prices on real exchanges (where the wholesaler sends their exhaust). In the US equity space there is RegNMS that seeks to model the marketplace as a single entity, so it's a bad example; but there are plenty of other examples of non-fungible products that trade more similarly to the crypto markets. For example, there are gold markets across the world with slightly different quality standards, units of measurement, delivery standards (or cash settlement rules), expiration dates, etc.