MLM and Ponzi are is still going strong, so crypto has nothing to worry about.
Is this the end of crypto?
141–150 of 448 posts
Re: Is this the end of crypto?
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
When bitcoin first came onto the scene I personally knew a guy who was running a website to act as an exchange. It was small because bitcoin itself at that time was very small. Then bitcoin had its very first dip and it became unprofitable to mine bitcoins. When that happened he shuttered the website and kept everyone's bitcoins. I knew of bitcoin early on due to this guy, but even then I had no interest and consider…
Get ready for CBDC, surveillance of every transaction and economic unpersoning then.
The government doesn't need a cryptocoin to monitor transactions, or to make using paper currency illegal. It can already do what you think it needs a cryptocoin to do, and it doesn't do it because it supports wealthy people being able to launder money and avoid taxes. US politics runs entirely on laundered money and misdirected/avoided taxes. You're lobbying for the swamp.
Re: Is this the end of crypto?
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why do you need to send money across continents?
I pay for software engineering work done in Africa and sometimes South-East Asia.
You do realise this is nothing new and you can use TransferWise, MPesa or PayTM for this right?
Bitcoin is slower than all this and violently fluctuates which loses people's money quickly. People also need to pay their bills in fiat anyway so whoever is receiving the Bitcoin needs to cash out to fiat anyway.
At that point you might as well just use fiat instead.
Re: Is this the end of crypto?
#144The mainstream response to this debacle is a bit incomprehensible. FTX was the antithesis of cryptocurrency; it was a centralised exchange, that was also trying to become a bank, and was AFAICT trying to kill DeFi [0]. The failure/success of FTX has no relation to the soundness of cryptocurrency. I do however hope that this crash means fewer people will speculate on the prices such that it can finally stabilise a bit…
> FTX was the antithesis of cryptocurrency
Not really.
The narrative around crypto sells the idea of decentralization but doesn't deliver.
(1) Put money into anything and people will show up to try to get as much as they can. That is: money is a centralizing force.
(2) Crypto, the technology, doesn't have a mechanism in place to resist centralization -- one person or entity can own as much as they can get their hands on.
Just (1) and (2) means centralization is built-in to crypto.
There are some accelerants too, though:
(3) Crypto resists regulation. What people think of as the decentralized nature of crypto is actually about resisting intervention by external parties. Obviously, that can be good, but also lets people buy, sell, trade, borrow, accumulate crypto without limits.
(4) Crypto is confusing. I think this lets people believe the things about crypto they want to believe, leading the the wildly optimistic narratives around it.
As long as there is money in crypto, you will see the same thing keep happening: money goes in, crypto moves around, for a while everything seems to be following the narrative, then, suddenly, the money is gone, the crypto is gone or worthless and we have some more threads about it on HN.
Re: Is this the end of crypto?
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm sorry but no one in their right mind will come away from this article thinking that this is a "pro-crypto-scam" article. The article is actually very critical. > The problems blockchains solves are highly academic csci issues around "trust" and "programming" in absurdly distributed systems. They have nothing to do with trust, risk, contracts, ownership or rights in anything like an economic, political or moral se…
> The whole innovation behind Bitcoin is to eliminate the need for trust in a centralized entity Err, nope. That's the scam. A blockchain is a kind of database which requires no single machine to be nominated as the single-source-of-truth. that's it . This has nothing to do with centralisation, power, trust, or anything of that kind. The sense of "centralisation" in blockchain means computer network centralisation, a…
If "eliminating the need for trust in centralised entities" is an absurd claim and a lie, then it follows that there exists a centralized entity you need to trust to use Bitcoin. What is that centralized entity?
PS: When people say that Bitcoin is decentralized, they also mean it in the colloquial sense, not only in the CS academic jargon. Entities like PayPal or the Federal Reserve Bank are centralized and require trust. They have to be run by trusted people. In contrast, Bitcoin isn't run by anyone. It is governed by a protocol which is mostly set in stone. No centralized party can suddenly decide to "print" more Bitcoin or freeze accounts. This is what people mean.
Re: Is this the end of crypto?
#146https://archive.ph/coBBz
Piggybacking on this link, since many seem not to have read the article.
But this is one of the most pro-crypto articles I've ever read. It may as well be a submarine, in the PG sense.
Re: Is this the end of crypto?
#147> The disappointment is that, 14 years after the Bitcoin blockchain was invented, little of this promise has been realised. Crypto’s frenzy drew in talent from bright graduates to Wall Street professionals, and capital from vc firms, sovereign-wealth and pension funds. Vast quantities of money, time, talent and energy have been used to build what amount to virtual casinos. Efficient, decentralised versions of mainstr…
Here's the thing: the public doesn't need Bitcoin. The public needs quite a few of the services and functions that the existing financial system provides. Bitcoin on its own is unable to provide many / most of these.
The last handful of True Believers can shuffle Bitcoin among themselves indefinitely, this is true. But does that have any more significance to the world than a multiplayer game someone creates for only them and their friends to play, handing game items back and forth among themselves?
Re: Is this the end of crypto?
#148Bitcoin survived MtGox. I'm sure crypto will survive to tulip another day.
i see what you did there
Re: Is this the end of crypto?
#149We are making steady and inexorable progress through the technology hype cycle. From earlier this year: https://emtemp.gcom.cloud/ngw/globalassets/en/articles/image... Now we enter the Trough of Disillusionment. Given the general accuracy of this model/metaphor in the past, should we consider it to be any different this time around?
The hype cycle is not applicable to every technology. Some, probably even most , technologies are eventually found to not be useful or valuable, and never recover once the hype bust happens and the technology is forced to compete in the marketplace based wholly on its merits.
Are you saying that crypto (or blockchain) cannot compete based wholly on its merits?
Re: Is this the end of crypto?
#150This again...every single time we get the death of Bitcoin articles.
And every single time the honey badger of financial networks just doesn't give a shit.
The tech is solid, people are not, this is not a new information