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Crypto Winter, or Crypto Ice Age?

technollama.co.uk

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Re: Crypto Winter, or Crypto Ice Age?

#91

Post by gota »

throwoutway wrote: post #27
SkyMarshal wrote: post #25

Bitcoin has lost more than 80% of its value at least four times in its short 10yr existence. It, and all other crypto, are highly volatile. Every time they go through one of these stages, people publish articles like these, asking if this time is the end. But the builders just keep building, advancing the tech and extending its capabilities. Largely because cryptocurrencies are a fascinating engineering problem, whic…

Well there has always been a supply of victims (err investors*, but after the last two crashes , what if the well has ran dry?

Right. The real measure is not % of loss from top-value, rather it should be # of people that both don't understand the technology & have lost money speculating on it (i.e. how many people bought into hype and got burned)

There's a finite amount of people to buy-in next cycle

Re: Crypto Winter, or Crypto Ice Age?

#92

Post by UncleMeat »

jimgo84 wrote: post #79
UncleMeat wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But I don't know how entering a .eth/.sol/etc address or scanning a QR code to send USDC over is harder than typing in the sort code, account number, IBAN number, etc to do a wire transfer. Because I don't possess any USDC and acquiring some requires me to open an account with Coinbase or FTX or whatever, send them dollars, and then purchase USDC. And even though sending the USDC has a low fee, the exchange fee for…

The fee part is incorrect. Coinbase offers 1:1 exchanges of USD USDC with zero fee. On FTX it's the same, USDC and USD are treated 1:1 with no fee to convert. Deposit dollars, withdraw USDC or vice versa. Aside from these zero fee exchanges, many others have significantly lower fees for stablecoin fiat than they do for crypto fiat.

Fair enough. Still a nontrivial process for me to get any USDC.

Re: Crypto Winter, or Crypto Ice Age?

#93

Post by ayngg »

SkyMarshal wrote: post #25

Bitcoin has lost more than 80% of its value at least four times in its short 10yr existence. It, and all other crypto, are highly volatile. Every time they go through one of these stages, people publish articles like these, asking if this time is the end. But the builders just keep building, advancing the tech and extending its capabilities. Largely because cryptocurrencies are a fascinating engineering problem, whic…

Articles like this all read the same way. Sure he can frame his student as some kind of expert, but clearly if she is referencing youtube videos about price action in crypto she doesn't really have an understanding worth framing your criticism around. For all of these articles, it feels everyone's idea of crypto does not extend beyond dunking on stuff dumb retail meme traders (who have no idea what is going on) say on twitter instead of the people actually building the technology. I'm not even an expert but even I can see the way everyone approaches it in such poor faith is like building a caricature of what they think crypto is to justify their feelings towards it.

Re: Crypto Winter, or Crypto Ice Age?

#94

Post by blueflow »

deepu256 wrote: post #82
p4bl0 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> show me a credible 3rd Party where I can store my ownership data apart from Government Your "ownership data" does not have any intrinsic value. It only has value because an external authority (your Government's justice institutions) is able to enforce it. Writing something on a blockchain has no magical effect. You cannot remove necessary third-parties like that. > Most corporations which currently store my data pr…

"My ownership data" has value. perhaps not to you. But for people i interact with. Example :- My education degree is something that I own. It can be very useful if I can quickly prove to the world that I indeed really have that degree. (like Twitter allows to prove you own an avatar NFT) . It would be super helpful if this was on a blockchain instead of some university database with a cumbersome process to avail tran…

Good example of a signature! The institution who awarded you the degree should sign it. They are the authoritative source of this information. Everyone who trusts the institution will be able to verify your copy of the signed document. No communication to the institution necessary.

Re: Crypto Winter, or Crypto Ice Age?

#96

Post by Commodore63 »

axg11 wrote: post #13

I live in Canada and recently invested a small amount in a startup via AngelList RUV. There were two funding options: (1) wire transfer, (2) transfer USDC via Ethereum network. One of these options is cheaper, faster, and more flexible than the other. Crypto has long been criticized for being gambling and lacking utility. I think utility is finally trickling in, although currently in limited settings. If you look at…

It's the latter, right? I can wire USD hundreds of thousands from my bank for $25, and the transaction takes place within an hour or two.

Re: Crypto Winter, or Crypto Ice Age?

#97

Post by Commodore63 »

dghlsakjg wrote: post #86
pavlov wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wire transfers in North America are literally 40 years behind the evolution of bank transfers in EU and UK. Sending money in Europe is free and increasingly often instantaneous 24/7. It will be very difficult for crypto to reach the level of convenience available on unified infrastructure created through sensible regulation. Lacking that, maybe Americans will have to keep settling for all these clunky, incompatible i…

He lives in Canada. Canadians don't live in the same country as Americans. Canadians don't have the same banks as Americans. Canadians can do money transfers instantly between any bank using e-transfer. He was talking about transferring money out of the Canadian network of banks to a foreign entity (guessing based on it being denominated in USD). As a European can you transfer money to, say, Vietnam without using clu…

The settlement delay isn't there for technological reasons. People think they want instant! fast! until they lose their life savings because libertarian tech has no buffers.

Re: Crypto Winter, or Crypto Ice Age?

#98

Post by matthewdgreen »

masswerk wrote: post #15
lucideer wrote: post #5

Bitcoin is absolute garbage and in theory any critique is good, but it bothers me that half of the points in this article aren't even internally logically consistent: > “Blockchain is just like the early internet”. No, it isn’t. Satoshi Nakamoto’s paper was published in October 2008 ... . Nothing about the original statement is predicated on the age of the tech. Even if it did, I don't see what modern tech corps have…

Regarding (1), the real statement here is, "many of us were there at the start of the Web, it was evident that it was going to change the world, and it was usable from the start." And it's mostly about the the Web (but you may include things like The Well, which were promising from the start.) The point is really about immediately apparent use. And, if you're going to date the Web back to the humble beginnings of ARP…

This is all pretty arbitrary. In the context of pure engineering timelines, you don’t get to just pick arbitrary starting points.

The Internet took decades to reach “I can buy cat food from my home PC” because that’s how long it took the underlying computing and networking technologies to go from the first recognizable proto-technologies to the point where they enabled mass-market usage. If you start your clock in 1994 (or 2007) you can make that time look shorter, but it doesn’t change anything.

Similarly Uber was able to launch a GPS-based smartphone app only a few years after the first smartphone, because the technologies of 3G cellular, OS, portable computing, GUI, GPS, distributed systems etc. were all extremely mature by the time the smartphone launched. But if you measure from earlier points in the “portable computing” timeline you can make Uber look like a multi-decade pipe dream.

There’s no reason to believe that the technical barriers facing cryptocurrency (scaling, UI, key management) will follow dramatically slower or faster tech development curves than those previous technologies. There are still plenty of reasons to question whether there’s a “killer app” once the tech issues are sorted out, but they clearly aren’t yet.

Re: Crypto Winter, or Crypto Ice Age?

#99

Post by anony23 »

Commodore63 wrote: post #97
dghlsakjg wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He lives in Canada. Canadians don't live in the same country as Americans. Canadians don't have the same banks as Americans. Canadians can do money transfers instantly between any bank using e-transfer. He was talking about transferring money out of the Canadian network of banks to a foreign entity (guessing based on it being denominated in USD). As a European can you transfer money to, say, Vietnam without using clu…

The settlement delay isn't there for technological reasons. People think they want instant! fast! until they lose their life savings because libertarian tech has no buffers.

I thought the settlement delay was so that the banks can squeeze out 72 more hours of interest.

Re: Crypto Winter, or Crypto Ice Age?

#100

Post by aeternum »

FabHK wrote: post #55
dcolkitt wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that's the point, crypto is a coordination mechanism that in most cases serves as an alternative when you don't have effective and trustworthy centralized institutions. It's pretty clear that (in this case) European financial regulators did a good job coordinating an effective and efficient electronic money transmission system. But the whole world is not Sweden. Even in America, which is relatively first world wi…

Good analysis, and you are right. I think purely technical attempts to solve current political/social problems are doomed, while better institutions can and have been built. Now, what makes you think that the regulators in well-run countries will continue to accept this inefficient and unregulated money alternative full of scams? Crypto currencies could be banned to quite an extent (mining, on/off ramps, maybe even t…

Those countries that ban it will miss out on the economic value. Just as those countries that banned or did not invest in early internet infrastructure (for similar reasons) are now significantly behind.
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