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Why I’m Cryptophobic

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Re: Why I’m Cryptophobic

#371

Post by aaroninsf »

engmgrmgr wrote: post #236
smoldesu wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there's one thing that people should correctly point out as scams in the world of crypto, it should be L2 chains. Every single one of them is a ploy to enrich their creator, full-stop. I don't even know what kind of pipe dream they sell to their investors to get capital. It's particularly funny, because I remember Justin Sun trying to scam people like this years before cryptocurrency had really taken off. Back the…

That’s a rather myopic view. You could look at L2s as a sort of credit card system, and from a systems and technology POV there’s nothing inherently “scammy” about it. For web3 applications of any meaningful large scale, L2 solutions are necessary. For better or worse, the L2 developer platforms that I assume you’re referring to are essentially low-code solutions to abstract away the actual systems software engineeri…

This is as clear and succinct a statement as to why "web3" has nothing to offer as I have read.

Translation: we will rebuild existing financial institutions with a bunch of move-fast break-things poorly-regulated "difi" companies which will both intentionally and through ignorance recapitulate every flaw of the existing financial industry.

Purpose: as in the Celsius case, to intentionally exploit regulatory response time so as to extract money through opaque extra-legal and unethical exploits, intended to allow ourselves and chosen insiders to run off it, leaving deluded last-fools holding the bag.

There is literally no benefit to anyone except the VC backing the scam, who are using chaff and FOMO to farm rubes.

Re: Why I’m Cryptophobic

#372

Post by jrm4 »

2muchcoffeeman wrote: post #357
ben_w wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What size transaction do you think it helps with? My transaction fees are usually zero, even internationally, with the only exception being trivial costs when I visited the USA. Conversely, when I bought a flat I was legally required to add the much larger in-all-but-name transaction fee of having a lawyer sign off that I and my money and my payment of it and the flat itself and the seller I was buying it from were a…

I think the argument for this would be that things like smart contracts could do away with lawyers and such. Except who vets the smart contracts? How does the customer execute the transaction in a fool proof way?

You've perfectly hit why "Smart Contracts" are perhaps literally the worst named thing in tech. They're not smart, and they're not contracts.

In real life, the things we "Contracts" are not the the execution of the transaction itself, they are the written statement that attempts to describe the intent of the parties and most importantly -- what you do if things go wrong.

Despite what I've said above, I will definitely go full Luddite and say we are not remotely close to a world in which the lawyers are not needed.

Re: Why I’m Cryptophobic

#373

Post by pcthrowaway »

engmgrmgr wrote: post #236
smoldesu wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there's one thing that people should correctly point out as scams in the world of crypto, it should be L2 chains. Every single one of them is a ploy to enrich their creator, full-stop. I don't even know what kind of pipe dream they sell to their investors to get capital. It's particularly funny, because I remember Justin Sun trying to scam people like this years before cryptocurrency had really taken off. Back the…

That’s a rather myopic view. You could look at L2s as a sort of credit card system, and from a systems and technology POV there’s nothing inherently “scammy” about it. For web3 applications of any meaningful large scale, L2 solutions are necessary. For better or worse, the L2 developer platforms that I assume you’re referring to are essentially low-code solutions to abstract away the actual systems software engineeri…

I think the person you're responding to was talking about Bitcoin L2 chains, probably more specifically the lightning network.

I actually agree with that about Bitcoin.

Web3 is generally done on EVM or cosmos chains, some of which are L2s (and some of which are loosely considered L2s). But most of them are still separate chains, so not L2s in the sense that the Lightning network is an L2. If you're looking at EVM chains, then L2s are certainly required to handle significant throughput, but the "lack of transparency" mentioned by GP isn't an issue with them.

Re: Why I’m Cryptophobic

#374

Post by pcthrowaway »

benreesman wrote: post #205
dmoy wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You completely ignored what GP said. The floor is different from what people will sell it to you for right now. AMZN may have a floor of $ASSETS / #SHARES (or something, I just made that up), but that doesn't mean anyone will sell it to you for that right now.

Anyone can invent quasi-financial terms to make grandiose claims. The beauty of the market is that loudmouths don’t participate in the market for long. I’ll sell an American-style options contract to someone who thinks BTC is going anywhere near there at Black-Scholes -75. And I’ll have no trouble financing it. You want the other side?

I'm pretty bullish crypto but I think there's a chance Bitcoin hits $1000 again in the next 10 years or so.. mainly because I think the case for Ethereum is much better.

I don't understand what Black-Scholes means, but if you're willing to take 10 to 1 odds in my favour I'll draw up a smart contract: we both deposit USDC and receive tokens for our position which can be resold if desired; if bitcoin hits $1000 or less according to the Chainlink BTC_USD oracle at any point between now and 10 years from now, I get 10 USDC for every one of mine wagered

Re: Why I’m Cryptophobic

#375

Post by babypuncher »

dont__panic wrote: post #210
ben_w wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just using BTC to replace all of McDonald's daily transactions in the Berlin metropolitan area alone would be enough to destroy the system. (Of course this is where people come along and talk about layers on top of BTC, but all those seem to me to just be extra ways to replace trivial transaction-level auditing with Turing-hard code auditing).

It also seems like those "layers on top of BTC" erode one of the only aspects of blockchain that has appeal for me -- the full transparency of the system, such that you can see every exchange of BTC on the network. The minute you offload any of that to other systems, you're essentially creating dark pools and money laundering opportunities because of differential oversight.

And you're trusting some central authority to manage your money along with that of countless others. You're right back in the same situation you presumably wanted to avoid with fiat and banks, only with exponentially greater environmental impact and no regulations in place to protect your money when things go FUBAR.

Re: Why I’m Cryptophobic

#376

Post by BTCOG »

lrvick wrote: post #349
mjburgess wrote: post #4

There needs to be some basic economics here.. Money has value because of the value of the economic transactions in which its conducted. Government-backed currencies are forced to have value in the sense they force people to use it for their taxes. The US, additionally, forces the world to use it for oil trades. Value is in those economic transactions. A currency is just a "liquifying" of that value, to make it easier…

Big companies are not using actual printed paper money directly. Cash, like Bitcoin, is great for peer to peer transactions, but too slow and impractical for the population to all use end to end for all daily transactions. Companies like McDonalds operate on credit via privately owned payment rails because ACH and cash are way too slow. Even when it takes cash that cash is not physically shipped to a bank vault at Mc…

Exactly! If Walmart/McD's wish to successfully use Bitcoin, they will easily batch millions of transactions from numerous locations into just a handful of on chain network transactions. The point is finality in Bitcoin for those who wish to hold hard money at the end of it rather than a credit system or fiat currency.

I see a lot of clearly incorrect information being displayed here about l2 such as Lightning Network, and at odds with reality. I'm not addressing the posts but it seems lately HN comments have nearly become a pile-on of misinformation bike-shedding about Bitcoin and in the face of reality, these folks want to spread outright lies and falsities. You may not own Bitcoin and you may not like it, but it's going far when hundreds of comments are so boldly misleading. For folks who are into science and technology, and some who are hackers, the ethos doesn't check out spreading misinformation about energy usage, centralization, and fairness of the system. When I was growing up, hacking was all about freedom to explore, libertarian bent, and/or anarchy.

The cypherpunk movement from which Bitcoin sprang was very libertarian or even one could say classical liberal. This article attempts numerous times to, for some reason, compare libertarianism to communism which is quite absurd. Libertarianism is for as little system of government as necessary, for staunch individual liberty and property rights, and hands-off free market economies. Clearly, communism is for state controlled property and no individual rights, one-world state, and no individual rights at all. Communism seeks to replace free-market economies with everyone equal and no individual rights. It's absurd on it's face to even compare libertarianism to communism when they're at opposite poles. At any rate, I would hope people don't take all these fear-mongering anti-crypto articles just at face value and do some research into what crap they're reading.

Re: Why I’m Cryptophobic

#377

Post by throwaway413 »

ETH_start wrote: post #369
tsimionescu wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But assuming for a moment that crypto can act as a substitute for traditional centralized payment systems, then it has significant advantages in some contexts over those systems. Except that, fundamentally, distributed permission-less systems can't come close to the computational efficiency of centralized systems. So this is like "assuming perpetual motion machines existed, we could build a post-scarcity society" l…

I don't think that is established. Distributed and permissionless systems don't need to handle the overhead of access control. They do have the computational overhead of massive redundancy, but that can be significantly reduced with zk-(SNARK/STARK) cryptography that provides succinct zero-knowledge proofs of validity. With zk-proofs, the redundancy of a blockchain can be significantly reduced without comprimising se…

Do you have any recommended readings on zk-proofs? Familiar with crypto, familiar with zcash, but haven’t looked into this enough and sounds promising. I am going to look into it.

It’s been around for a bit already, why is it not more widely adopted compared to BTC/ETH, any thoughts?

Re: Why I’m Cryptophobic

#378

Post by uoaei »

yellowapple wrote: post #146
mikeyouse wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not true for PHub -- Just went to confirm and the first option is bank transfer, the second is crypto. What percentage of people who pay for PHub do you think even own crypto? My guess would be <1%.

There's no way in any number of Hells that I'd trust PornHub with my banking info.

They're a massive company with a strong and empowered engineering department.

Re: Why I’m Cryptophobic

#379

Post by uoaei »

dmoy wrote: post #187
benreesman wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ll sell you that contract up to what I can finance it at.

You completely ignored what GP said. The floor is different from what people will sell it to you for right now. AMZN may have a floor of $ASSETS / #SHARES (or something, I just made that up), but that doesn't mean anyone will sell it to you for that right now.

It's like any other investment option, in that it's basically a legalized bet with contract language enforcing it.

Re: Why I’m Cryptophobic

#380

Post by rafaelero »

leijurv wrote: post #341
rafaelero wrote: post #200

So much drama. It all comes down to: do you want to use a currency whose rules are immutable and its value is decided by the market or do you want a government backed currency that can change its monetary policy according to its discretion? Everything else is just words.

Why do you think it all comes down to that? Clearly there's much more to it. For example, cryptocurrencies with those two properties you mentioned are a dime a dozen. I could make one right now by git cloning bitcoin, changing some properties, then running it. And in practice there are thousands with high volume exchange-value. Digital currencies, when combined with ubiquitous exchanges, have such substitutability th…

> Why do you think it all comes down to that?

What do you think Bitcoin is about?

> For example, cryptocurrencies with those two properties you mentioned are a dime a dozen.

I don't think so. Only one project have remained unchanged since its inception.

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