101–110 of 332 posts
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Keeping crypto on an exchange is like keeping gold at the gold dealer. Just why.
Same reason you don’t keep all your savings under the mattress. There have been a number of stories about people losing or corrupting their crypto wallets. Once it’s gone, it’s gone.
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It seems rash to wish for regulation to be weaponized to the effect of banning something, rather the actual meaning of regulation to define and enforce orderly, fair, predictable functioning of something.
Replace crypto with dumping toxic waste into the local river and re-read your sentence.
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It seems rash to wish for regulation to be weaponized to the effect of banning something, rather the actual meaning of regulation to define and enforce orderly, fair, predictable functioning of something.
Much like a puppy-kicking machine, the "orderly, fair, predictable" functioning of cryptocurrencies is something much closer to "nonexistence" than to the current state of affairs. Less facetiously: there is nothing orderly about our current schemes. There is nothing particularly fair about them either, unless your definition of fairness is something closer to Thucydides' than a modern one. And predictable? Cryptocur…
The issue here is actually pretty easy to grok. Crypto is a new market, so there is a historical amount of information asymmetry between consumers and producers. This brings a lot of scammers to the space. A lot of crypto is definitely bullshit, but there are some use-cases that I admire that aren’t just gambling on Shit coins.
Ignoring the hostility, what would you list as the realistic and adopted use-cases for crypto?
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Remind me again what the price of BTC is most commonly quoted in?
The answer to this question does not demonstrate that USD has any intrinsic value, it merely demonstrates that USD is the most valuable and well circulated of the currencies. These currencies still have zero intrinsic value.
A good investment does need intrinsic value, which BTC does not have. It's also not a feasible payment system.
The fact that cryptos are only referenced in USD terms proves that the only real use people have for them is a vehicle of speculation. Investment without intrinsic value = speculation
The second there's a gov backed USD stable coin, the argument for any crypto as a payment system evaporates.
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> Governments will likely fight this tooth and nail however, because crypto is currently an anti-government technology. Democratic governments represent the will of the people, and I don't think a technology can be pro-government or anti-government, it ultimately depends on what the people what. I think you are correct though for autocratic governments. Would you for example say that guns are clearly anti-government…
> Democratic governments represent the will How are people still this naive and indoctrinated. Me, earlier: > You vote what you're told to vote by the media that the state and capital dominate entirely (Think about it: how would enough people even hear about an alternative idea or candidate that they don't deem in their interest?) If you're American you get to choose between two millionaires (or sometimes billionaire…
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> If it goes up in value again, 2x or 10x its current value, will people who said it was a grift admit it was more than that? I've called it a grift since 2017 so yeah. Being a grift has nothing to do with its price and everything to do with its fundamental structure.
how is BTC not fundamentally sound. You can literally take 1 Billion dollars worth of BTC and cross the border without anyone questioning you. How does that not change how you see things ?
- As a currency, it's garbage. Currencies are inflationary to incentivize spending. A deflationary currency incentives hoarding, and harms the economy by dropping velocity. All the worst periods in history have been deflationary, not inflationary. Currencies benefit from being able to respond to changes in population, to shocks, to changing demographics. And they shouldn't cost a fully-realized (inc. block reward) $200+ to transact.
- As a 'hedge against inflation,' it's garbage. In the most inflationary period in decades, it went from 69K to 28K. That's a drop of 60% in nominal terms. While the dollar dropped 9%. That means it dropped 69% in real dollar terms in a few months. RIP.
- As a 'store of value,' it's garbage. A store of value must be predictable. You should have a reasonable expectation that you can extract the same amount of value from it in the future. See above.
- It's an environmental catastrophe, wasting as much power as an entire nation (and yielding kilotons of e-waste per year) to achieve 6tps. Millions of times less efficient than Visa, or FedNow or RTP.
It has sufficient throughput at the L1 level to service a large flea market or a mid-sized Costco, not the world economy. Lightning is a nothing burger. It would take 75 years, 2/3 of a trillion dollars in fees, and the entire rest of the block reward to open a channel for everyone on earth. And LN has quadratic routing complexity meaning even if you did, it wouldn't be functional in the first place.
Even your example of smuggling money across the border doesn't make sense - you need to buy Bitcoin at one exchange in one country, then sell it at another exchange in another country in order to spend the value. That takes days, costs percentage points, exposes you to huge counter party risk and massive forex swings ... and KYC. And being a public ledger, both governments can fire up chainalysis and see exactly who moved it where. So even if they don't ask you questions as you move across the border, they'll follow up. Just give it time.
In exactly what narrative does it come across as 'fundamentally sound'?
The issue here is actually pretty easy to grok. Crypto is a new market, so there is a historical amount of information asymmetry between consumers and producers. This brings a lot of scammers to the space. A lot of crypto is definitely bullshit, but there are some use-cases that I admire that aren’t just gambling on Shit coins.
> On Monday, the Financial Times published an interview with Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of the FTX crypto-trading exchange, in which he said bitcoin doesn’t have a future as a means of payment because it is too complicated and environmentally costly. https://twitter.com/SBF_FTX/status/1526098754163687424
I think he's a little biased because he's heavily involved with Solana
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Much like a puppy-kicking machine, the "orderly, fair, predictable" functioning of cryptocurrencies is something much closer to "nonexistence" than to the current state of affairs. Less facetiously: there is nothing orderly about our current schemes. There is nothing particularly fair about them either, unless your definition of fairness is something closer to Thucydides' than a modern one. And predictable? Cryptocur…
If you believe those things, you should be asking for crypto to be outlawed, not disingenuously regulated for the underhanded purpos of outlawing it.