Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Edited Latecomer’s Guide to Crypto

mollywhite.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 331 posts

Re: The Edited Latecomer’s Guide to Crypto

#191

Post by jklm »

FabHK wrote: post #85
twox2 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is it negative sum, and not just zero sum?

Miners are paid some $40m/day, through 1) creating more BTC (called "coinbase" here, "Seigniorage" more generally, leading to inflation) and 2) fees. For now, the $100 miners siphon off per transaction are predominantly from 1), so those costs are not very visible. And then of course the exchanges charging 20 to 120 bp (or more) for a roundtrip against money you can actually use. Coinbase (the exchange) alone takes a…

If that seems crazy, wait until you hear about these companies called Stripe and Visa.

Re: The Edited Latecomer’s Guide to Crypto

#192

Post by rvz »

flaque wrote: post #120

The issue with crypto is that reasonable use cases are early, and don’t attract attention except for niche communities. There’s a few big ones, for example, filecoin right now has created a commodity market for storage that is currently 10,000 cheaper than S3 in some instances. (See file.app for stats) But realistically, the interesting projects are very small and hard to find. However, scams and ponzi schemes, by th…

The only 'NFT' that has a use-case so far is ENS [0] and domain names on the blockchain. The JPEG NFTs (which don't have a use-case) have captured the hype of the critics and that will likely collapse in the long term and those NFTs are what the critics will just keep talking about.

There is a product that is using it for identities already: [1][2] I can see businesses using ENS or similar solutions as a way to replace those long hexadecimal names into something readable, so that say; merchants can use it for users to donate / pay towards verified names e.g: (myshopname.eth) and not accidentally pay to a random address like 0x123..cdef.

I won't be surprised to see even reputable payment services like Stripe, BitPay and Coinbase Commerce use something like ENS for the verification part and do the same thing in the future.

[0] https://ens.domains/

[1] https://www.skiff.org/

[2] https://www.skiff.org/updates/skiff-ens

Re: The Edited Latecomer’s Guide to Crypto

#193

Post by davenaff »

Aunche wrote: post #156
flaque wrote: post #120

The issue with crypto is that reasonable use cases are early, and don’t attract attention except for niche communities. There’s a few big ones, for example, filecoin right now has created a commodity market for storage that is currently 10,000 cheaper than S3 in some instances. (See file.app for stats) But realistically, the interesting projects are very small and hard to find. However, scams and ponzi schemes, by th…

>There’s a few big ones, for example, filecoin right now has created a commodity market for storage that is currently 10,000 cheaper than S3 in some instances. (See file.app for stats) First of all, 63 PB is nothing in terms of cloud storage, so I wouldn't exactly call it a commodity market. Also, I doubt that Amazon is making 99.9% profit margins, so it's more likely that miners are just subsidizing the cost of stor…

This. The comparisons to S3 are specious. Filecoin is doing some interesting things such as their proof of storage and collateralized contracts, but there are significant differences between S3 and Filecoin: - Filecoin is 'cold storage' similar to AWS Glacier. Retrieval times can be really long and certainly aren't web time. - Redundancy is left up to the user (or the user's client). Sure, you can store your files with multiple providers, but good luck determining the reliability of your hand-rolled storage logic. - Retrieval prices are known up front with S3 and other cloud providers. Given that retrieval prices aren't part of storage contracts, costs of retrieval can vary widely (and change). A user's only defense against usurious retrieval pricing is to store with multiple providers. - Bandwidth available to users is largely unknown and likely pretty variable - Miners serve a 'dumb box interface' that will serve anyone any data that they are holding.

In the end, users are still writing contracts with individual storage providers, each of which has their own degree of experience, expertise and proven service history.

Obviously, the Filecoin community is working on improving many of these, but costs will certainly change as Filecoin evolves closer in functionality to s3 and other cloud providers.

Re: The Edited Latecomer’s Guide to Crypto

#194

Post by davenaff »

chockchocschoir wrote: post #189
Aunche wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There’s a few big ones, for example, filecoin right now has created a commodity market for storage that is currently 10,000 cheaper than S3 in some instances. (See file.app for stats) First of all, 63 PB is nothing in terms of cloud storage, so I wouldn't exactly call it a commodity market. Also, I doubt that Amazon is making 99.9% profit margins, so it's more likely that miners are just subsidizing the cost of stor…

> First of all, 63 PB is nothing in terms of cloud storage Not sure why you would compare it to cloud storage, because it's not. Storing files in Filecoin is more like making deals with people who offer space on their hard drives (which as far as I know, doesn't exists besides Filecoin). It also doesn't make sense to compare it to something like S3 as again, it is not cloud storage.

I do think Filecoin is closer to cloud storage than 'free hard drive space'. The hardware requirements for miners (storage providers) are pretty significant and pretty much guarantee that miners are running dedicated hardware. While I'm sure some storage providers operate out of data centers, I don't think a server needs to be located in a data center to be called cloud storage.

Re: The Edited Latecomer’s Guide to Crypto

#195

Post by cdiddy2 »

germanjoey wrote: post #44

The article (or, rather, the commentary in the link above on the article) talks about the fallacious notion of "market cap" in regards to cryptocurrencies. That is to say, e.g., multiplying the number of bitcoins in existence times the current market price is a silly metric because the entire market would never be able to cash-out at that maximum price. What I was wondering was: is there a better number? e.g., is the…

I am late to this question but there is actually a method that really only works for cryptos. Its called realized cap. Multiply the each coin by the price at which it last moved and sum it all together. This gives a closer estimation of how much money is really in the system. It is not perfect but neither is mcap and this gets a bit closer.

https://messari.io/charts/bitcoin/mcap-realized

Re: The Edited Latecomer’s Guide to Crypto

#196

Post by jron »

acdha wrote: post #170
randomhodler84 wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh please do explain why it is failed? The only thing that has evolved over time, that is peoples time preference. There will always be demand for BTC. The software works as it was designed, and grows stronger every year. Gresham’s law might be the key to understanding this.

The original goal was to be a currency but over a decade later, statistically nobody uses it for normal transactions. If it shut down tomorrow, the few businesses which accept it would remove that option from the others they accept and that'd be it. Nobody other than speculators would care because it's never given them a reason to use it. I realize you need to say there will be demand for it but your desire to sell y…

A little more than a decade to bootstrap an idea worth nothing to almost a trillion USD... Did you expect it to be valued at two-trillion USD instead? I can reach out to you when it gets there if you like.

Re: The Edited Latecomer’s Guide to Crypto

#197

Post by anchpop »

vasco wrote: post #5

This format is interesting at first but when it starts getting to 5 paragraphs of dissecting each phrase, it gets too much. Reminds me of the someone-is-wrong-on-the-internet, point-by-point-repliers in internet forums circa 2006.

True. It made me feel like microanalyzing one of their comments. Here goes:

On:

> What I couldn’t find was a sober, dispassionate explanation of what crypto actually is — how it works, who it’s for, what’s at stake, where the battle lines are drawn — along with answers to some of the most common questions it raises.

They left this comment:

> No technology is "sober" or "dispassionate" in its creation, nor is it neutral or apolitical, and thus anyone who is claiming to view it from that perspective is DEFINITELY selling you something.

First of all, no one said anything was sober or dispassionate in its creation. And it's trivial to come up with a sober and dispassionate explanation of many technologies, even political ones. I'm certain I can find a sober and dispassionate explanation of how Israel's Iron Dome functions if I really wanted to. And second, if you have a definition of "political" that's so broad that it includes literally every technology, it's not really a very interesting statement to say that some technology is political, right?

Re: The Edited Latecomer’s Guide to Crypto

#198

Post by [deleted] »

germanjoey wrote: post #44

The article (or, rather, the commentary in the link above on the article) talks about the fallacious notion of "market cap" in regards to cryptocurrencies. That is to say, e.g., multiplying the number of bitcoins in existence times the current market price is a silly metric because the entire market would never be able to cash-out at that maximum price. What I was wondering was: is there a better number? e.g., is the…

[deleted]

Re: The Edited Latecomer’s Guide to Crypto

#199

Post by [deleted] »

cdiddy2 wrote: post #195
germanjoey wrote: post #44

The article (or, rather, the commentary in the link above on the article) talks about the fallacious notion of "market cap" in regards to cryptocurrencies. That is to say, e.g., multiplying the number of bitcoins in existence times the current market price is a silly metric because the entire market would never be able to cash-out at that maximum price. What I was wondering was: is there a better number? e.g., is the…

I am late to this question but there is actually a method that really only works for cryptos. Its called realized cap. Multiply the each coin by the price at which it last moved and sum it all together. This gives a closer estimation of how much money is really in the system. It is not perfect but neither is mcap and this gets a bit closer. https://messari.io/charts/bitcoin/mcap-realized

[deleted]

Re: The Edited Latecomer’s Guide to Crypto

#200

Post by acdha »

jron wrote: post #196
acdha wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The original goal was to be a currency but over a decade later, statistically nobody uses it for normal transactions. If it shut down tomorrow, the few businesses which accept it would remove that option from the others they accept and that'd be it. Nobody other than speculators would care because it's never given them a reason to use it. I realize you need to say there will be demand for it but your desire to sell y…

A little more than a decade to bootstrap an idea worth nothing to almost a trillion USD... Did you expect it to be valued at two-trillion USD instead? I can reach out to you when it gets there if you like.

How about you let me know when ordinary people use it for anything other than speculation? When a business would care about it shutting down because their customers can’t trivially switch to an alternative?

That’s the problem with multiplying the number of coins by the last sale price: it assumes a larger pool of buyers than we’ve ever seen. The number of people treating it as anything other than a lotto ticket isn’t anywhere near enough to support a valuation in the range of trillions of USD.

Post reply on HN