181–190 of 429 posts
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It will remain a very useful medium of exchange? Are you saying that today it is a very useful medium of exchange? Are you using it that way?
I use it to money launder - I lose 10-20% in the value swings - but that means I get 80% of the money for free out the other end of the NFT Ape I sold.
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I'm not a huge fan of the the current cryptocurrency scene, but I think it will remain very useful as a medium of exchange and store of value in unstable parts of the globe for years to come.
> it will remain very useful as a medium of exchange The only current usecase I'm aware of for crypto as a medium of exchange is for criminals, i.e. ransomware / extortion / etc.
Front page severely lacking "good news" cryptocurrency stories etc.
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And they do it without NFTs. So what does the blockchain add here?
composability, security, persistence, liquidity
NFTs are not secure or persistent. The asset at the URL could change at any time.
Liquidity is a function of people, not of the underlying technical structure of the marketplace. This is tautological reasoning. "more people will use the NFT marketplace, creating more liquidity, because of the greater liquidity of the NFT marketplace."
We keep expecting crypto to die but then again, we still have antivirus software that is spyware (avast), a scammy vpn industry, and a thriving anti vax movement. No matter how absurd it is, it might stick around for a long time now
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I'm not a huge fan of the the current cryptocurrency scene, but I think it will remain very useful as a medium of exchange and store of value in unstable parts of the globe for years to come.
Stablecoins will turn into CBDCs and CBDCs will serve that purpose. Bitcoin is down from 68K to 48K in the last what 3 weeks? Stores of value don't flail wildly and incoherently at the whims of a few whales, and given it supports 2-3 tx/sec using the energy of an entire country, it's a crap medium of exchange too. The future of crypto for anyone other than an anacap libertarian is CBDCs.
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That is only true at a superficial level. In terms of high-quality art, the Picasso is artificially scarce in the sense that there are reproductions so high-quality that only experts can tell the original apart from the reproduction. Clearly it's no longer the quality of the art that matters, because the reproduction visually looks just as appealing as the originally, but the provenance. There are only so many "origi…
If you're buying a $100M painting like Guernica - you should probably be an expert...
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I see this point rehashed on HN over and over. I'd love if there was a more productive discussion of cryptocurrencies. I don't think they are going away anytime soon. Too many technologists and others are thinking about them now. I personally think store of value is a strong use case, at least for those of us who consider them to have value. Just wondering, what would it take for you (and others who share similar vie…
I don't think crypto in general is nonsense. I do think a lot of the hype is. Some of my concerns with it * Is it a currency or an investment? None of the major coins seem usable as a currency to me, the values are too volatile. * What does it offer me over using USD? For me at least I see very little value, I often cannot use it for purchases and most of the places that I have seen it offered do it for secrecy, VPN…
More of an investment, for the time being.
* What does it offer me over using USD? For me at least I see very little value, I often cannot use it for purchases and most of the places that I have seen it offered do it for secrecy, VPN or counterfeit goods. I am not trying to perpetuate the idea that cryto is only used for illegal activities but for myself I have little to no benefit of using it for purchases.
Yes, I've purchased like one thing with crypto and that was back when you couldn't buy hardware wallets with USD, so crypto was the only option.
* Would you compare your "store of value" use case the same as owning gold? It is interesting to hear coins having a store of value since for me at least the volatility kills it and without a huge use in the economy I don't have confidence in it holding up.
Yes, I do compare the store of value use case similar to owning gold. Gold is just much harder to transport, send across the world, store, etc. Gold has also been trading sideways for about a year, so I don't think it really protects from inflation (someone correct me if I'm mistaken about that). I actually do own both gold and crypto, so I've been able to compare them first hand.
Also, crypto is super volatile, for sure, but if you think about it over a multi-year horizon, similar to how someone would invest in an S&P 500 index fund, then I think crypto will in general appreciate and the volatility should go down as more people hold it and consider it valuable. The idea is that it stabilizes as its market cap goes up. Also just want to call out that I consider Bitcoin its own thing, apart from the rest of crypto, since Bitcoin actually has a max supply cap. Many cryptocurrencies do not (they can essentially print money), or their max supply is so ridiculously high as to barely matter at all.
Thanks for responding! I like to hear about how people are thinking about this, beyond the point that it's only used for illicit activities.
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The Picasso is truly scarce. The NFT is artificially scarce.
But Picasso made his paintings artificially scarce too :) He even made two versions with the same title: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Musicians
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That's the takeaway from "Betting on Zero". I kept watching to see the moment when the Ponzi scheme falls apart and Bill Ackman comes out vindicated, and it never came. It really is the case that "The market can stay irrational longer then you can stay solvent". There might be an escape velocity of irrationality where a Ponzi schemes can become legitimate.
The funny thing is that you assume crypto enthusiasts are the irrational ones.
Crypto and NFT is one big ponzi scheme. Who on earth is spending $000,000s on a virtual ship? I sense it is a case of somebody close to the NFT or virtual world buying the asset and making out it is a great thing and then selling it on quickly. Many a scam involves somebody from the group buying something so the unwilling feel like it safe. As always, don't be left holding the baby.
Art is a really weird market in general. The problem with NFT is that people are buying it as an investment rather than a work of art with its own merit of which appreciation might be one benefit. There's likely no museum backstop for most NFTs. (By which I mean that rich people buy art, sell it amongst themselves/have inflated art appraisals to raise the price, and donate to museums and claim as a tax writeoff.) See…
I think we just need to wait until the first NFTs start disappearing because of the servers hosting the images shutting down. The actual images aren't stored in the blockchain, it's just a URL.