The Great Crypto Grift May Be Unwinding • Hacker News Board

Re: The Great Crypto Grift May Be Unwinding

#191

Post by vishnugupta » Thu, May 19, 2022, 4:26 AM UTC

_vdpp wrote: post #150

vishnugupta wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IANAL. When an entity takes customer deposits it gets hyper regulated, a notch or two below commercial bank. These apps circumvent those regulations by accepting deposits in crypto. Regulators are are also in bit of a spot because it's an entirely new beast. For most of the current use case crypto acts like unregistered security but in in some minor way it's also a currency. So regulators are biding their time becaus…

It almost sounds like a carnival or arcade where you can buy tokens and gamble them to try and win tickets. I wonder if that’s a potential defense.

The thing with crypto is it's getting rapidly enmeshed with main-street finance. For instance one can take loans against crypto, retirement accounts are offering crypto exposure and so on.

It's relatively easy to deal with money-like substances that are precisely confined (closed-loop as they are called sometimes) such as carnival tokens, or Starbuck reward points. Problem starts when they start leaking into day-to-day finances.

Re: The Great Crypto Grift May Be Unwinding

#192

Post by kelseyfrog » Thu, May 19, 2022, 4:26 AM UTC

WFHRenaissance wrote: post #182

alexb_ wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Crypto will succeed because the rich...corrupt...liberarians want it to Just because you want something to happen doesn't mean it will. Especially when you have to assume that we live in some fantasy world where nobody can be trusted and everything has to be done outside the influence of government (i.e. illegally) so we have to use a decentralized append-only database where nothing can be reversed because while you…

All of my stated use-cases are already in use. Society will evolve towards being trustless as the moneyed-class pursue sovereign citizenship and shop for preferential territory on a global scale. They will need a secure way to trustlessly store and exchange funds. Cryptocurrency literally exists nearly entirely for this reason. Ignore the stupid coins.

Have you considered writing in the horror genre? You have a knack for it.

Re: The Great Crypto Grift May Be Unwinding

#193

Post by not_kurt_godel » Thu, May 19, 2022, 4:26 AM UTC

notch656a wrote: post #73

dpweb wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Money is a creation of government, and frankly, the dollar ain’t so bad. If my bank goes under I’m protected by the FDIC. If Coinbase goes under they have the right to use my money to pay their creditors.

Keeping crypto on an exchange is like keeping gold at the gold dealer. Just why.

Because the only practical way to spend the magical decentralized internet money is to trust a centralized intermediary to not only mediate transactions but hold your entire account with no accountability, regulation, or oversight.

Re: The Great Crypto Grift May Be Unwinding

#194

Post by onionisafruit » Thu, May 19, 2022, 4:26 AM UTC

woodruffw wrote: post #168

onionisafruit wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PKI is cryptography.

Where was it implied that it wasn't? Of course it's cryptography.

Nevermind me. I was being an idiot thinking crypto was cryptography.

Re: The Great Crypto Grift May Be Unwinding

#195

Post by vlovich123 » Thu, May 19, 2022, 4:27 AM UTC

razemio wrote: post #153

woodruffw wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've been able to do this for decades. It's a core part of our PKI ecosystem.

Not without a middlemen that we trust (cert authority in this case).

That's certainly not true. P2P file transfer systems have long provided cryptographic guarantees that the file you receive hasn't been modified by anyone, even though you're fetching it from multiple untrusted sources simultaneously.

Merkle trees have made this more efficient and offered maybe more guarantees, but being able to have files be transferred in a distributed fashion but impervious to corruption is not a new invention.

The one thing cryptocurrencies have not figured out how to solve is the root problem of all PKI systems, which is establishing trust of identity.

Re: The Great Crypto Grift May Be Unwinding

#196

Post by woodruffw » Thu, May 19, 2022, 4:27 AM UTC

WFHRenaissance wrote: post #187

woodruffw wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I’m aware of a use case where person/asset location is being determined using a distributively owned set of radio transmitters so that proof-of-location can be established without use of GPS. ...why?

GPS is spoofable… you’re a security guy, you should know this :p

Yes, I am. I'm not aware of a threat model in which you can't trust the frequencies GPS is on but you can trust the frequencies that the FCC allows personal radio transmissions to be on. Seems like a lot of added complexity (and, notably, no legal recourse) for essentially the same failure mode.

Re: The Great Crypto Grift May Be Unwinding

#197

Post by WaxedChewbacca » Thu, May 19, 2022, 4:27 AM UTC

dpweb wrote: post #68

etaioinshrdlu wrote: post #23

Crypto cannot create wealth, only move it around. If too many people become crypto-rich and try to spend it on real-world assets, the assets will just inflate in price. What can happen is that crypto could replace other forms of money. Governments will likely fight this tooth and nail however, because crypto is currently an anti-government technology.

Money is a creation of government, and frankly, the dollar ain’t so bad. If my bank goes under I’m protected by the FDIC. If Coinbase goes under they have the right to use my money to pay their creditors.

No post body was provided.

Re: The Great Crypto Grift May Be Unwinding

#198

Post by tluyben2 » Thu, May 19, 2022, 4:29 AM UTC

patmcc wrote: post #111

sk0g wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you’d be an idiot to ignore the realistic and adopted use-cases Ignoring the hostility, what would you list as the realistic and adopted use-cases for crypto?

Buying drugs, laundering money, ransomware, there are literally dozens. Oh, did you want legal ones?

People buy illegal prescription drugs with their credit cards. Almost no one uses crypto.

Re: The Great Crypto Grift May Be Unwinding

#199

Post by WFHRenaissance » Thu, May 19, 2022, 4:29 AM UTC

kelseyfrog wrote: post #192

WFHRenaissance wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of my stated use-cases are already in use. Society will evolve towards being trustless as the moneyed-class pursue sovereign citizenship and shop for preferential territory on a global scale. They will need a secure way to trustlessly store and exchange funds. Cryptocurrency literally exists nearly entirely for this reason. Ignore the stupid coins.

Have you considered writing in the horror genre? You have a knack for it.

I’m actually a well-known author and this is a pseudonym.

This really isn’t that crazy of an idea though.

Read “The Sovereign Individual” by Davidson & Mogg. Written in 1999/2000.

Re: The Great Crypto Grift May Be Unwinding

#200

Post by nradov » Thu, May 19, 2022, 4:30 AM UTC

tluyben2 wrote: post #189

I think cryptocurrencies/nfts are crap and have no value, but to play devil’s advocate here; for all the people saying this is all doomed, the top cryptocurrency assets seem to more or less look like the tech market and BTC is doing better than, say Netflix. Netflix actually makes things and is 76% down from ath, while btc only 66%. So why is it so resilient? When will it die if it indeed has no value? Are we just gr…

Bitcoin will (mostly) die when wealthy Chinese no longer need a way to evade capital control laws.