481–490 of 843 posts
This is why decentralized exchanges that run on top of smart contracts, like Uniswap, were built.
Those exchanges don't have the ability to trade crypto for fiat (to my knowledge) so it's not a real alternative.
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That's right. Not to mention the transaction fees are so high that moving from a wallet you own to an exchange can cost non-insignificant amount of money. Add on top of that the general volatility of crypto, people not wanting to deal with maintaining their own wallet, and you have a recipe for people keeping their funds on exchanges.
>"Not to mention the transaction fees are so high that moving from a wallet you own to an exchange can cost non-insignificant amount of money." I realize that transaction fees are probably a moving target but is there a ballpark figure you or someone else could say? I'm guessing it's percentage-based?
Needless to say, this is much more affordable for a million-dollar transaction than for buying a cup of coffee :)
Why do people leave their money at exchanges? When you go to the airport to exchange foreign currency do you leave your entire bank account there until the next time you need an exchange?
Every new form of money and trade had the people learning important financial concepts and took many, many years to start to iron out their weaknesses through better technology or best practices. For instance, when barter and basic trade was used, people had to figure out new methods to do accounting and record-keeping: whether through sticks, tablets, papyrus, etc. It seems simple now, but these basic methods were i…
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FYI, there is a world of BS around "fire proof" anything. It's all about the time it's around fire. If your house burns to the ground and collapses in on itself, the extreme majority of fire proof safes, aren't. If the fire dept shows up and it's out in an hour and it wasn't buried, your things will probably be alright. I dealt with a guy's gun collection stored in his $10,000 "fire proof" safe stored in his garage.…
Exactly. Given enough time the inside of the safe will be the same temperature as the outside.
So, having been around since the early bitcoin days, core to the salespitch back then was the fact you would have control. You'd have your coins in your wallet, and no need for banks etc. Apparently nobody does this anymore, and gives their wallets to these exchanges (i.e. banks) and balks when the obvious happens in pyramid schemes. People just don't get distributed currency if they promptly undistribute it. Or is i…
Many people will never be capable of self-custody because the lack the interest to do it. They see money to be made and ignore the warnings of those who try to explain what they have on an exchange is a promise of money, not money itself.
When you say "nobody does this anymore," that's kind of true, but also not true. Those who have learned the hard way do, the newbies (which vastly outnumber the first group) don't.
Self custody requires knowledge of some basic math, cryptography, and the ability to understand basic security principles.
User growth explodes with exchange rates. Those diving in understand very little about what they're doing and should stay out. They don't listen to people saying such things and the result is, well, predictable.
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As I've noted before on HN the entire concept of people being able to manage their own wallets flies against everything we know about people. People forget stuff, make mistakes, and lose things. The margin of error for a wallet is tiny. It's not rare for crypto forums, twitter, etc to prescribe completely ridiculous processes and systems for securing wallets, backing up seed phrases, etc. There's an entire cottage in…
There's a market here for a safe way to store crypto. Something like a thing you carry with you, a thing you can keep at home, a thing you have a friend hold, a thing you have in a safety deposit box, and info a service holds for you. Some combination of majority votes, time delays in days or weeks, and warning messages lets you recover from loss and damage. With backup from an insurance company. But nobody has addre…
But a lot of this is too troublesome or adds too many hoops to jump through than is practical for many people.
So, having been around since the early bitcoin days, core to the salespitch back then was the fact you would have control. You'd have your coins in your wallet, and no need for banks etc. Apparently nobody does this anymore, and gives their wallets to these exchanges (i.e. banks) and balks when the obvious happens in pyramid schemes. People just don't get distributed currency if they promptly undistribute it. Or is i…
A lot of crypto investors are day traders or naive hodlers who have no idea what blockchain and DeFi means. But DeFi protocols like Uniswap and Aave are holding up fine and are incapable of pausing user withdrawals.
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2008 doesn't seem like a good argument for "Re-running the entire history of finance scams, up to and including 2008 if we can get that far".
2008 wasn't caused by a finance scam. It was caused by an already heavily-regulated banking industry, supported by governments addicted to growth. Not that different from what is happening now with the crypto "exchanges", by the way.
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That's right. Not to mention the transaction fees are so high that moving from a wallet you own to an exchange can cost non-insignificant amount of money. Add on top of that the general volatility of crypto, people not wanting to deal with maintaining their own wallet, and you have a recipe for people keeping their funds on exchanges.
>"Not to mention the transaction fees are so high that moving from a wallet you own to an exchange can cost non-insignificant amount of money." I realize that transaction fees are probably a moving target but is there a ballpark figure you or someone else could say? I'm guessing it's percentage-based?