401–410 of 539 posts
Nothing in here that hasn't been said in the last 10 year. It's tempting to dismiss it as a bubble. But; most bubbles don't get 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th... etc. chances. Every time bitcoin crashes people say "this one is different, this time it's dead for real", then it bounces back. It's proving to be far more cockroach like than anyone anticipated. In the more distant future, if bitcoin survives, its utility will just be…
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I agree with everything you said except a couple of things. >Unless crypto becomes actually useful for real world transactions, it has to be converted to fiat currency for use, and all the exchanges or technologies that do that conversion are subject to the will of governments. This is true, except that in some places governments are too inefficient to even control those things. The IT people works for them for penni…
Crypto should never be an investment. That is one of its primary flaws. Currency is not an investment. Yes, people trade currency, but for very small margins and as a hedge. When a currency swings 10,000x as crypto has done, it typically only happens in countries whose economies are going belly-up, see: Zibabwe. If crypto is an investment, that means it is fluctuating dramatically, and if it is fluctuating dramatical…
Yes, that's unintentional, but it is an investment anyway. Yes, it's also a gamble, like any other kind of investment. Every investment has its risks. This is a very, very risky one.
>Don't believe me? Then I would expect you to be investing in stablecoins. If you only invest in Bitcoin and Ether and not stablecoins, then you are playing the stock market, because stablecoins are kept stable the same way countries can float their currenct to avoid wild swings in valuation.
Of course I believe you, I'm an argentine. In my country people is forbidden to buy other currencies. They "can", but they are limited to 200 USD every month (minus the consumption they spend by paying Netflix and Spotify with credit cards) and it's taxed. And I'm not taking into account a lot more rules. So it's mostly obligatory to use our local currency that loses 50% of its value every year.
We even have a black market for the dollar. It's sold for twice more from what the government says it's worth. When you Google for our currency, that's just the official value. valordolarblue.com.ar shows you the real value for a dollar in pesos, that's how much it's sold for in the streets. The official value only exists for paying us programmers and other exporters half of what we earn when we work for foreign companies (and that's before the 50% of taxes), as we are obligated to convert all our money to argentine pesos. The situation is even worse for farmers, they pay them like 60 pesos per dollar. So yes, people in my country use crypto mostly for the USD stablecoins. It made the life of a lot of people better too, as the best "investment" here is saving dollars.
>I believe crypto will have a use in the future, but only with stablecoins, similar to commercial paper. As it is today, it is a scam for gambling and illegal activity, and a few people who want penalize their impoverished foreign relatives by sending them tokens that might be worth much less the day after they are sent (the cost of sending >US$10,000 is peanuts compared to the loss of value due to BTC/ETH fluctuations).
I do so too, but I don't think that the investing / gambling side will disappear. Like it or not.
But I also think that tying the value to the US Dollar or any other currency is disappointing and a bad idea, as it's keeping itself to being marketed as such and, as I said, causes a competition against the Fed. And the disappointing part is that crypto shouldn't strive to be just a dollar or an euro.
Having an stablecoin without pegging it to another specific currency would be ideal.
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Crypto transactions are no less reversible than ACH or wire transfers. The warm fuzzy feeling you have about ACH is you have a trusted third party intermediary that contractually or legally guarantees they will give you the same amount of currency back under certain conditions. If something goes wrong with that ACH/wire transfer and you don't get your money back, you'll have to sue, just like you would crypto.
The destination of a wire is an account at a bank, who’s owner can be tracked down to recover the money from. Crypto wallet owners can be entirely hidden and impossible to sue.
Have you ever worked a retail/food chain job and gotten to see how many CC transactions are invalid/fraudulent resulting in the business losing money? I worked at a pizza place where 5-10% of CC transactions were bogus (college town). Checks were more like 20%.
All financial transactions are trust relationships. Some are higher trust than others. If you could buy groceries at Wal-Mart or a new iPhone from apple.com with bitcoin you would have no concern about that. If you send money to a rando on the internet, well it doesn't matter all that much whether it's crypto or dollars.
Sometimes you will have third party intermediaries, like VISA, who will offer certain guarantees/insurance for a fee. It's as simple as that.
It's silly to compare transactions with known/trusted entities like a physical business or trusted insurance provider/intermediary like VISA with sending your money to a random anonymous bitcoin address. You would not generally be wiring money to a random anonymous bank account either.
Crypto people love to say “it’s the early days.” But it’s not. Bitcoin is 13 years old. At that age, Windows was on >90% of the world’s computers. Java at age 13 had taken over enterprise software and was about to conquer mobile via Android. Cryptos are used by maybe 0.1% of computer users (if we’re very generous about what exactly constitutes usage). Considering the amount of investment they are an expensive failure…
You're comparing apples to oranges. Decentralized systems by nature suffer for slow adoption (just look at decentralized networks like Mastodon which are objectively better than alternatives yet lag behind in adoption). Finally, bitcoin is a financial product, I really don't know any other financial systems that we're adopted quickly other than maybe payment processors. We still struggle to adopt centralized systems…
No, we couldn't be. i mean, every time in these crypto threads cyptobros compare crypto to the Internet, and to cars, and to the wheel, and to..., and it's fine.
But when we compare it to something, it's apples to oranges? You don't say.
> Crypto is just too big to be adopted quickly
It's not big.
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Any contract must be backed up by force, or else it’s meaningless. As an example, if you enter into a legal contract, that contract is backed up by the threat of litigation (and by extension, force). If it weren’t, there wouldn’t be any incentive to obey it. And yes, I do believe that the consensus is that activities with an outsized climate impact are harmful.
IF you enter. There is the choice that is lacking is this case. Without the choice there is no contract, just the force. And if it were consensus you wouldnt have to force it. Both "contract" and "consensus" are nice frames for forcing people to do what you think is right. At least be honest about it.
If you instead hold the view that _every single individual_ should be able to opt out of the contract (i.e. should be able to choose not to be subject to the rule of law), then you go back to ‘anarchism is the only form of free government’, which is where we started this discussion 6 comments ago. QED.
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> 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!
If you're going to indiscriminately start beheading technology which uses energy why not start with vehicles, video games, machine learning, or anything at all? Its because in order to ask whether something should use energy you must first ask whether its worth it, and your sophistication when it comes to crypto-currencies, finance, and economics is too weak to have that conversation: ergo, you resort to zero value,…
I’d be shocked if video games as an industry outranked crypto for energy use. Even if we assume all gamers run their GPU’s at 100% the entire time they play games, miners will quickly dwarf the energy usage because games don’t play 24/7.
Machine Learning is computationally expensive, but unlike crypto, is basically constantly trying to make their systems faster and more efficient all the time. Again-computation isn’t used as a gatekeeper here. There’s no “hash this pointlessly until enough work as been done so you can do x”, it’s just “do this work as quickly and efficiently as possible”. Things like TPU’s in ML aren’t a threat or arms race, they’re a net improvement.
Crypto gets targeted for its energy use because it uses an insane amount of energy for even the most rudimentary functions. Even if current payment processors use the same amount of energy right now as crypto does, you have to consider the relative scales: those payment processors handle the vast, vast majority of payments with that energy; scaling current crypto up to that levels would bring its energy use to astronomical levels.
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> One of the biggest drawbacks for blockchain is that transactions can't be revoked after the fact You can transfer money to an escrow smart contract that reverts the transaction if a third party confirms malicious activity. > They can block transactions if they think it's stolen, and if I report it as stolen I can claw back money from fraudulent purchases. Certain DLTs allow you to secure your account with SSI/DPKI…
I think what a lot of people miss is that cryptocurrencies are different than blockchains. But also that cryptocurrencies can both work exactly like modern money (opposed to cash) but that this system is still new (e.g. DeFi: Decentralized Finance). Not only can you do smart contract escrows, but there's nothing stopping anyone from doing DeFi and having the exact same functionality as a credit card. You can also tak…
Did you even look at why they are unbanked?
--- start quote [1] [2] ---
According to the Federal Reserve data, 14% of households making less than $40,000 are unbanked, compared to only 3% of households making more than that amount.
...
“Don’t have enough money to meet minimum balance requirements” was cited by 29.0 percent of unbanked households as the main reason for not having an account—the most cited main reason
--- end quote ---
But sure. Do tell me how magical crypto that expects you to pay wildly fluctuating fees for every single transaction is going to save the unbanked.
Cue in "not all cryptocurrencies in 3... 2... 1..."
[1] https://www.forbes.com/advisor/banking/costs-of-being-unbank...
One of my big issues with (legit) Crypto it's UX VS Decentralization. The easiest way for the regular Joe to use crypto it's with an exchange... that it's basically, just a centralized institution making changes in a private database for when transactions are made inside the exchange. Only if the user wants to send money to a wallet the transaction enters into the blockchain, outside of that it's like a bank... witho…
It's the exact same problem with Email. Email is "decentralized" but most people would rather use a central website and give up their info.
We're almost forced to get Google Workspace / Microsoft equivalente Service for your own email.
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I think we're debating two different points. My point is about the perception of the trustworthiness of crypto by your average person. Your point seems to be that crypto is a better financial instrument.
It boils down to the same thing. Inflation is nothing more then inflation expectation, as people change their behavior as a result. The fact that fiat is moving towards 10% inflation is a direct result of a reduction in trust in it as a store of value. People expect it to be worth less, and as a result it is. If you look back over any period of time you have a constant erosion of trust in its ability to store value s…
Crypto had value swings far greater than that in the past 6 months alone.
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> "I was there at the start but I still don’t really get why…” Where do you get that? I understand the reasoning entirely. I disagree that it is important or that the security trade off is appropriate for almost anyone.
It’s the entire point. This is basically the entire purpose and meaning behind satoshis invention. It’s the first sentence on the first page of the white paper: “A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution“ Nah, who needs it???
I'm saying (again!) that I don't think the trade-offs involved with self-custody are worth it.
So far all you've done is (a) attacked me personally, and (b) made some kind of circular argument that either I don't understand what Bitcoin is or restated your argument that it is important.
Ok, I get you think that. Just saying the same thing over and over again isn't actually a convincing argument.
I don't think that trade off is worthwhile because the risks associated with it outweigh the risk associated with it for almost anyone.