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The Edited Latecomer’s Guide to Crypto

mollywhite.net

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Re: The Edited Latecomer’s Guide to Crypto

#211

Post by Animats »

twox2 wrote: post #94
pavlov wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's an important nuance to this: enough unsophisticated people think it's money, so there's lots of opportunity for finance people to make money. Traditional finance is well-trodden, every arbitrage opportunity has been tried decades ago. But crypto is full of doe-eyed innocents who think they're reinventing finance. Of course experienced traders want to take advantage of them. It must be more fun than ye olde eu…

There are financial mechanics that exist only in the scope of DeFi and not in traditional finance. It actually IS new in a lot of ways and skilled folks are teaming up to make a killing, not just experienced traders. Take a look at what's happening in the "MEV" space. None of this existed in traditional finance.

Sure it does. Front-running is not new. Payment for order flow is not new. Altering the recent transaction history (the thing blockchains are supposed to prevent) is a criminal offense in other markets.

Re: The Edited Latecomer’s Guide to Crypto

#212

Post by [deleted] »

NovemberWhiskey wrote: post #102
trophycase wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The activity on Ethereum is economically meaningful, whether you believe it is or not. And let's be honest, Netflix or Facebook could disappear off the face of the earth tomorrow and productivity would arguably increase, so is that a negative sum game?

OK but I'm responding to a claim about BTC.

[deleted]

Re: The Edited Latecomer’s Guide to Crypto

#213

Post by acjohnson55 »

rvz wrote: post #192
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 repla…

I think of NFTs as tradable roles, in the sense of auth. But it's a concept that just doesn't have many proven use cases.

Re: The Edited Latecomer’s Guide to Crypto

#214

Post by lhorie »

librish wrote: post #201
lhorie wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My impression has been similar to the comment sibling to yours, that a lot of attempts at crypto-related applications were somewhat hype based. However, despite the huge amount of noise, some do seem - at least in principle - valuable. I certainly share a certain level of cynicism towards many crypto applications, but even the likes of OpenSea currently employ people and presumably pay them actual money that they can…

If I'm not misunderstanding you you're saying there could be value, which I've never argued against. I'm asking if you have any evidence that there's currently any significant value created.

I mean, if by value, we mean a "good or a service [someone] would be willing to spend USD on", then yes, all the things I mentioned are things that people have spent money on in one way or another, presumably because they felt that they were getting something in return by parting with their money. From an economic perspective, the crypto product incentivized labor of some sort, so it would arguably qualify as "creating value".

My reservation for whether to call those products "value" is more along the lines of the argument about whether cigarettes are "creating value" (i.e. if one buys a "feeling" from literal puffs of smoke and punts the costs of externalities onto others, is that a net positive?)

Re: The Edited Latecomer’s Guide to Crypto

#215

Post by louloulou »

quickthrowman wrote: post #143
anonporridge wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why's that?

A rational actor would never spend a deflationary currency since it would gain value as deflation happens. If everyone was rational, no money would ever change hands. You can’t have a functional monetary system without liquidity or exchanging of currency. Bitcoin is a deflationary currency (for now)

A rational actor will exchange money for food rather than starve to death, regardless of whether the currency they are using is deflationary or not. Your argument is nonsense.

Re: The Edited Latecomer’s Guide to Crypto

#216

Post by modeless »

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…

The really important metric isn't how much money has gone in, but how much money you can get out. You can actually calculate something related to this: take the order books of the large exchanges and add up the USD values of all the buy orders. Of course there's spoofing and dark pools and all sorts of other reasons why this is not exact, but as a first approximation it's better than market cap.

Re: The Edited Latecomer’s Guide to Crypto

#217

Post by bawolff »

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…

People always say the same thing when someone is critical of crypto.

Its too early!

I mean after all, we are only 13 years in.

Or: there is a lot of bullshit but the interesting things are outside of your echo chamber.

But then never link to such counter examples. At best people talk about filecoin, which does pass the bar of not being a literal scam, but still makes no sense from a product-market fit (storage has 3 metrics to judge by: price, retrieval latency, reliability. Filecoin is order of magnitudes worse than competitiors on all metrics).

I don't think i am irrationally biased against bitcoin & friends, i actually think the original paper was quite ingenious. However its been over a decade - we're well past the "benefit of the doubt" stage and into the "put up or shut up" stage when it comes to cryptocurrency.

Re: The Edited Latecomer’s Guide to Crypto

#218

Post by generalizations »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #122
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…

Yeah, it sucks. Monero for example is an actual privacy coin that's usable as currency but nobody seems to care. Very demoralizing. Bitcoin is obsolete technology at this point. It's continued existence does more harm than good to the cryptocurrency space because everyone gravitates towards it instead of better projects.

I imagine that by its nature, the people who do care about monero are the ones who won't talk about it.

Re: The Edited Latecomer’s Guide to Crypto

#219

Post by thinkmassive »

tromp wrote: post #168
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…

> What I was wondering was: is there a better number? e.g., is there a way to calculate the amount of USD put into a cryptocurrency across a timeframe? For PoW coins there is. For every day in the coin's price history, multiply said price by the number of newly mined coins that day, and sum over all days. Sadly, I don't know of any site that publishes such a metric, although the column "PoW Produced (24h)" of [1] sho…

CoinMetrics has done research in this area, for example Realized Capitalization: https://coinmetrics.io/realized-capitalization/

Re: The Edited Latecomer’s Guide to Crypto

#220

Post by bawolff »

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.

What do you think cloud storage is? Its not literally storing things in a "cloud"; a cloud is just someone elses computer.

I suppose its the difference between going to a garage sale vs corporate dept store, but at the end of the day what is the difference in the product you are getting?

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