151–160 of 539 posts
Everything is a bubble. Crypto is no different, but its not more a bubble than web2, web1, telnet and we could go on. Its interesting why people are so interested in trying to argue against crypto. Its here, its adding value, get over it.
No.
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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)…
This is typical crypto-hype. Notice that although many points are raised, it doesn’t address the direct objections of the previous post. Obfuscate, misdirect, and confuse the marks.
as far as web3, i suspect that will be a few things. a move away from centralized platform economics and/or a rise in applied cryptography made accessible to ordinary business software developers.
so maybe a disruption of the venture capital buying out industries and replacing them big singleton companies with web/mobile interfaces business model and hopefully bigger advances in things like end to end encryption for all areas where modern technology has revamped how we conduct business. if we're lucky, we'll see actually secure operating systems as well.
to play my own devil's advocate: it could end up replacing a lot of finance, if only for the reason that it seems to attract a lot of the brightest minds in that space, and sometimes that's all you need.
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)…
I think this will forever be the sticking point for crypto for a lot of potential users. It boils down to trust. And the relevant question is: for an average person, do they trust FDIC insurance more than they trust their own ability to understand the crypto infrastructure and protect themselves from rogue or compromised transaction facilitators (because for Bitcoin at least, it's fundamentally impractical to transact for most things without a facilitator; the time it takes for the transaction to get buried into the chain alone is enough to take most day-to-day uses off the table).
And personally, I think for most people the risk model is that trusting FDIC insurance is a superior option.
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This hinges on the contracts actually working as intended, which is something they often do not. Code in general rarely does poorly in that regard. It's really hard to consider every contingency beforehand. Unknown unknowns and all that.
In fairness, they picked JavaScript as the language to write the transactions in. People keep losing money making coding mistakes that even "gcc -Wall -Werror" would refuse to compile. Examples: type errors like L1 vs L2 (whatever that even means, not a crypto person), wrong number of function parameters causing some sort of currying, allowing that massive ETH heist a few weeks back. I'm sure there are hundreds of ot…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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)…
This is typical crypto-hype. Notice that although many points are raised, it doesn’t address the direct objections of the previous post. Obfuscate, misdirect, and confuse the marks.
You can choose to ignore the nuance, but it exists anyway.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is typical crypto-hype. Notice that although many points are raised, it doesn’t address the direct objections of the previous post. Obfuscate, misdirect, and confuse the marks.
Thats because nobody refutes those points. Yes, transactions in crypto are irreversible. It might be bad for those number of factors. But even given those cons we see benefits in things mentioned above. E.g. my colleague can send bitcoin to his brother in russia. Tell me what other options to transfer value there are at the moment between west and russia. Very similar for ukraine.
This is half-true. A wire transfer can't be reversed due to end-user error, which can be abused by fraudsters. However, Incorrect input on the bank's behalf does warrant a reversal.
I'd compare my bank screwing up vs a crypto exchange screwing up (Like getting hacked). I'm still not protected if the exchange gets hacked and my coin is exfiltrated. I am protected if my bank fatfingers a wire transfer.
Also, banks are insured by the FDIC against financial catastrophes. Savings accounts held in FDIC-regulated banks are insured up to $250k if the bank fails for some reason. I get no such protection holding crypto with an exchange. The FDIC turns around an audits banks to make sure they're compliant with liquidity requirements, loan quality measures, etc. Nobody in crypto is watching anyone else in crypto to make sure everything is kosher because that is fundamentally impossible in a system that is meant to be decentralized.
Scammers are everywhere and not nearly enough is being done to address it. It's not even clear whether it's possible or not to even address crypto scams.
Cryptocurrencies have a valid but very specific use-case: being able to transact in a hostile environment. It does so by making certain trade-offs such as an energy-intensive verification process. This is a very valid use-case when you need to transact against the will of a powerful adversary such as governments. It needs to be there and needs to be protected just like free speech needs to be protected. However, day-…
It’s 2022 - nobody cares about free speech or freedom.
Lightning is an engineering marvel.