271–280 of 532 posts
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If you cannot trust a single third party to hold your money, it's no better than cash under the mattress. We have guard rails in banking for a reason.
banking is for fiat currencies whose value halves ever dozens of years. you dont have to worry about bank robbers. inflation does the same thing.
This seems demonstrably better than halving over 6 months...
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> As usual crypto in practice is the opposite of decentralized because people. Will. Not. Run. Their. Servers. Nope, you just don't own any crypto assets if they are not stored on your own means. That's not hard to understand.
Conceptually it is very simple to understand. The point that Moxie was making at the time was that, pragmatically, most users would end up not doing this. Just as most people share their thoughts on Facebook or Twitter and not on their own blogs, and if they do have their own blogs they don't run their own server, and if they do it's a virtual machine on Amazon's hardware. So something can be theoretically capable of…
Centralization vs Decentralization is a similar concept to closed source vs open source. Just because the code is open source doesn't mean that people are going to download the source code and compile it themselves. The option to fork the codebase is also there. Neither of those options are possible for a closed source project. And to your point, the fact that a project is open source might not "actually have any effect at all". Doesn't mean the concept is inherently bad.
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I visited Brazil recently (3-4 months ago), I got into cryptocurrency-talk or some shitcoin peddled by cashiers, Uber drivers, waiters in some restaurants, acquaintances that aren't tech-savvy at all, etc. That's when it downed on me how big this whole thing got outside of internet chatter, it downed how many vulnerable people are exposed to the fallout of a crypto implosion.
It's so ironic how all those libertarian crypto-bros think they've got the inside track and they're so much smarter than everyone else, when actually they're just as gullible and common and deluded as random cashiers, Uber drivers, waiters, bartenders, used car salesmen, chiropractors, cosmeticians, shoeshine boys, and ordinary hoi polloi on the street, all being influenced by the exact same mass market ads and hype…
“Families in despair over IM Academy: ‘The crypto-sect has kidnapped our children’”[1]
https://english.elpais.com/international/2022-04-18/families...
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Sure. many of those speculators will be forced to wait for Binance to resume BTC orders, or use another centralized exchange, or use a bridge to swap BTC to another crypto asset.. Edit: swapping BTC needs a centralized bridge as child commenter notes
Unfortunately there is no decentralized exchange for BTC. There is no smart contracts on BTC so you have to somehow bridge it to something like Ethereum before you can swap it. And to bridge it you have to rely on some centralized party, such as WBTC. (I know renBTC but it's unclear who their validators are so I'd just assume it's centralized)
Localbitcoins, localmonero... Two of many.
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I wonder if that's even a majority of bitcoin owners. I use the term owners loosely.
Does it even matter? What is interesting and actually-important is that it is even possible. Just because most people do something dumb doesn't mean we should throw up our hands in defeat and build systems where it isn't even possible to do something smart.
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Crypto is user hostile then? Got it
Speaking of Bitcoin; Satoshi was an excellent C++ programmer but s/he wasn't quite good at creating GUI and "Crypto" consumer apps that's why s/he open sourced it and left it to the community to build upon it and expand the Bitcoin ecosystem. Btw at the time Bitcoin was in the experimental phase and Satoshi left the Bitcoin community pretty early that's why "Crypto" was user hostile and maybe still is.
IMO it was initially written by someone deep in government (but I have no proof, just my opinion from looking at the code).
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"real crypto has never been tried"
real crypto works just fine for millions. it is not problem of crypto that there are people falling for ponzis (not refering to Binance now). also, even quality of cefi exchanges like binance, coinbase, kraken, bitfinex has been outstanding in recent years so really, not sure what are we even talking about here. you get much more often blocked by credit card company or bank because of suspicious nonsense they dont ex…
You really cannot make this up. As usual crypto in practice is the opposite of decentralized because people. Will. Not. Run. Their. Servers. Moxie nailed it
> You really cannot make this up. Not only you can make this up but it's literally happened hundreds of times in the history of cryptocurrency. So much that there is even a catchphrase for it: "Not your keys, not your Bitcoin". MtGox being the most infamous example. > As usual crypto in practice is the opposite of decentralized because people. Will. Not. Run. Their. Servers. 1) Only a small percentage of the total Bi…
I was there for it. I mined my first coins in late 2011.
Few people want to run their local node (server), few people want to point their wallet at their own node, and fewer people want to run code they've compiled themselves. If you aren't running your own node you are relying on someone else's.
As a mass adoption decentralized trust-less technology for transacting, bitcoin has failed.
That people are still getting burned by trusting major exchanges is hard to believe, and why you really can't make this up. It's stranger than fiction.
>(but I have my suspicions).
Yes, it is me. Jamie Dimon. Warren Buffett and George Soros are here next to me too. Bill Gates is on the way, and he's bringing chips and guac. We're all out to get those pesky crypto entrepreneurs.
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I'm wondering if it's just going to be 25%. How many investors actually understand the technology? Who (even here at HN) has read a whitepaper? I've read some, and have to say it became a personal running gag of how many pages it would take until the authors completely descend into fogging the reader with a mumbo-jumbo of made up words ("The Tangle"). But more specifically Tether stands at half the marketcap of Ether…
I love how cocksure people are of Tether's decline. Do you believe reading a bitcoin (or IOTA) whitepaper is sufficient to understanding market structure because I get the sense that you do not understand it. If you are so sure, feel free to short Tether.
In short, I’m confident it will fail and fairly spectacularly but I don’t know when and I’m also not sure how to go about shorting it.
You really cannot make this up. As usual crypto in practice is the opposite of decentralized because people. Will. Not. Run. Their. Servers. Moxie nailed it
Case in point: was an early adopter of Eth, mined many of the very early blocks. Sold it all back in February. One of the reasons? The whole Eth 2.0 upgrade requires both a base level node (Ethererum sanctioned) and a "2.0 validator node" where one is supposed to trust a 3rd party implementation with minimally 10s of thousands of dollars per stake. At least with a 1st party node the Ethereum Foundation stood behind i…
"2.0 validator" is not a node, it's more like a client that talks to the PoS chain nodes (Beacon).