111–120 of 539 posts
A genuine question from someone with very little financial education. Is there a market to short crypto?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Crypto has no intrinsic value, it pays no dividend and doesn’t give you proxy rights, just like all the tech equities. Tech companies return money to their investors via buybacks. Most investors prefer this as they get to choose when they get taxed.
A better comparison would have been national currency. A piece of paper has no intrinsic value, pays no dividend, and gets diluted over time.
One of the biggest drawbacks for blockchain is that transactions can't be revoked after the fact (with the only exception being costly forks of the entire ledger), and there's no additional human oversight (like I'd get when sending a large amount of money through a bank) to protect me. If someone steals my credit card, I have my credit card company to give me some level of protection. They can block transactions if…
For example, in the smart contract introduce some authorities that are allowed to block and revoke transactions for some time (if the block chain has no support for certified timestamps, use "number of new blocks mined and appended to the blockchain" as substitute).
Let the market decide what kind of protection stakeholders prefer.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Banks won’t protect you from wire fraud. They will if you didn't initiate the wire. If you typed the wrong account number then you are SOL, but that's true of BTC too.
I am a person who wired ~15K to wrong bank account outside US, I only realized after got notification that money was not received it was days later, reversing wire was straight forward and took if not mistaken a week to process, while requesting to reverse transaction branch manager warned me that on another end bank might refuse to reverse transaction and then this money would be lost forever.
Oh dear.
One of the biggest drawbacks for blockchain is that transactions can't be revoked after the fact (with the only exception being costly forks of the entire ledger), and there's no additional human oversight (like I'd get when sending a large amount of money through a bank) to protect me. If someone steals my credit card, I have my credit card company to give me some level of protection. They can block transactions if…
Banks won’t protect you from wire fraud either. I’ve written this elsewhere when this topic routinely comes up and crypto is dismissed, but the capability of self-custody is the thing to pay attention to. Nothing else has this capability to the same extent. Today we store most of our wealth in assets (market index funds, stocks, real estate, etc.) and some (typically very little, and rarely outside of a bank account)…
Governments can trivially prevent this if they wanted to. Bringing your wallet along will be of no use if nobody dares to transact with you because they themselves will then need to explain the source of their newfound wealth.
The current ability of crypto to (sometimes) escape government oversight is temporary and only exists because it's currently a rounding error in the grand scheme of things, but I can guarantee you it will be cracked down on.
One of the biggest drawbacks for blockchain is that transactions can't be revoked after the fact (with the only exception being costly forks of the entire ledger), and there's no additional human oversight (like I'd get when sending a large amount of money through a bank) to protect me. If someone steals my credit card, I have my credit card company to give me some level of protection. They can block transactions if…
This is a problem (if you consider it as such) that smart contracts intend to solve. For example, in the smart contract introduce some authorities that are allowed to block and revoke transactions for some time (if the block chain has no support for certified timestamps, use "number of new blocks mined and appended to the blockchain" as substitute). Let the market decide what kind of protection stakeholders prefer.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The beauty of crypto is that those tools are exposed and not required, and that the underlying rules are universal. Banks and custodial services built off of shared liability, insurance, reversions, any useful thing a bank does are still possible with crypto - in fact they aren't even that complicated. The difference is that while allowing a (properly set up) crypto bank to transfer funds you may also at any point an…
> Crypto is FOSS finance, it works for the people as stated and expected. A laughable statement in the face of crypto’s negative externalities. We’ll wreck the planet we all share, but at least we’ll have FOSS finance!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Banks won’t protect you from wire fraud. They will if you didn't initiate the wire. If you typed the wrong account number then you are SOL, but that's true of BTC too.
I am a person who wired ~15K to wrong bank account outside US, I only realized after got notification that money was not received it was days later, reversing wire was straight forward and took if not mistaken a week to process, while requesting to reverse transaction branch manager warned me that on another end bank might refuse to reverse transaction and then this money would be lost forever.
I've found that when I wire a large amount of money to a new account, humans sanity check the transaction at both banks.
Also, I once did something weird (wire to same escrow firm a few days apart), and got a call of the form "What's going on? Did you buy two houses or something?"
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But bitcoin isn't being billed as a value-store like gold, it's being sold more as a replacement for payment systems like credit cards, ACH transfers, or PayPal. There is a reason nobody goes around trading tiny bits of gold for goods and services. It is useful to have an abstraction that makes transactions easier and helps mitigate risk.
I don't think that's true. Credit cards, paypal and all the rest existed before bitcoin. I mean it's nifty that I can do it without a single intermediary authority, but it's not that special. I think the lack of revocation available to bitcoin is a (and I had myself for saying this) 'a feature'. If somebody sends me payment in bitcoin, I definitely know it can't be charged-back for example. It's like sending cash in…