In defense of cryptocurrency

> That's just, like, your opinion, man.

Mine and everyone else's who holds important information in databases. The whole financial system for one.

> NFTs can store arbitrary data.

Up to some size.

> Which is many orders of magnitude easier than the current system.

It is not. The current system scales with the number of home transactions. Your proposal scales with the number of homes - a much bigger number.

> Besides, it doesn't have to be all or nothing; a gradual opt-in transition would be perfectly doable.

Sure, but then it's just a whole bunch of extra work for no benefits for 10-20 years. Not just for the county clerk, but also for home owners and buyers: not only will they still need to process the existing requirements, they would also have new requirements to obtain and prove ownership of their ETH/other crypto wallet. And they wouldn't see any advantage at all until the next time they sell their home (hopefully they will still remember their wallet address and private key by then!).

> On just about anything noteworthy that's not Ethereum, the cost is on the scale of cents. Wow, such unaffordable, many expensive.

Well, there are exactly two block chains that are somewhat noteworthy outside the crypto bubble: Bitcoin and Ethereum. And Bitocin doesn't support NFTs.

And any other block gain that becomes even mildly popular quickly explodes in values and transaction fees just like the other two. Turns out that storing hundreds of thousands of copies of the same data, and writing every single transaction to hundreds of thousands of systems before it is considered settled, without any kind of permission system, is actually very costly.

Note: you're right on the cash transaction statement, to some extent. There are still some important differences I feel, mainly related to the fact that today's systems enforce knowing the legal identity of parties to a transaction for something like a house, even if the sale is done in cash - which wouldn't be guaranteed if the house could be traded by selling an NFT on a chain.

In reality, a crypto wallet is better compared to a bank account, though. Most people don't carry their life savings (or comparable amounts) in cash.

One of my property purchases was in the UK for me as well. The system is horrid. Blind bidding and behind-closed-doors conversations is common in the UK, and often buyers will end up over-bidding since it favours the selling agent’s commission fee. Depending on how well you know your agent and how much they are willing to hint at, you may be in a better position than another bidder. To make things worse, the UK has long periods after accepting a bid but before exchanging contracts, so “gazumping” is a regular fear in UK real estate market

Yes these are mostly policy and regulatory hurdles but there are also some technical solutions that could be applied here.. The fact that a screenshot of a bank website or PDF passes as proof of funds for a 6 or 7 figure cash bid is laughable.. the idea that a concluded auction won’t fully settle for days, weeks or months is wild after being accustomed to bidding and auctions based on smart contracts. if a listing agent accepted USDC and a zk-proof as a proof of funds for the bid, the actual transfer into a solicitor’s holding account could be settled in minutes and with zero privacy invasion.

This is all purely hypothetical, and not likely to work across the board.. but it does present some areas that cryptographic tech could improve upon our traditional financial system

As GP mentions I talk about them separately.

The reason I don't think there's anything genius about cryptocurrency as a technology is because it's not impressive. It's been more than 13 years or so now and wow, PoW managed to do exactly what we said it would: burn a ton of energy on useless work in order to prevent Sybil attacks.

PoS is also really stupid.

Cryptocurrency was cute and easy to ignore when it was a bunch of libertarian crypto hackers messing around in their bedrooms and writing long, naive forum posts about how they were going to replace banking and form a new world order. They made themselves sound like conspiracy crack pots without any help from critics.

But the technology was built and designed by people with dangerous political beliefs and poor understanding of economics. And whether they were naive and had good intentions in the beginning matters little now that it has been completely co-opted by conspiracy theorists and fascists.

They're trying to convince senators to pass bills that would regulate cryptocurrency by the CFTC and not the SEC. They are undermining every possible avenue to regulating cryptocurrencies, exchanges, DAOs and all of the systems built on this technology.

They're doing it because they're making too much money ripping off regular people, retail investors, etc and right now there are few consequences to doing so. The people making money off of cryptocurrencies are suckering people into departing with their life savings, leaving piles of e-waste and new coal plants in the global south, and are generally not interested in helping anyone but themselves. They literally do not give one single ounce for any Joe-Bitcoin user out there. As long as there are enough new people coming in so they can cash out they're happy to say anything.

This is the world that cryptocurrency people want. Small government, no regulation, no sanctions, gold-standard deflationary "money", untraceability, etc.

Regular people don't benefit from this. They benefit from the existing banking and legal system that put limits on what is acceptable to protect them and their businesses from fraud and crime.

There's nothing to defend. Cryptocurrency has spoken for itself. It's not genius magical technology that's going to usher in a new age of peace and prosperity. It's a community run like a conspiracy convention where any crack pot can come in and share their theories about the evils of governments and the global banking system coming for you. It's garbage technolgy promoted by terrible people who want to extract wealth from poor people, commit crimes, and not be subject to regulation by governments.

That analysis has a major flaw. One of the main advantages of a centralized exchange is that they don't have to process all transactions on chain. As such, this is measuring very different statistics for centralized and decentralized exchanges.