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Is this the end of crypto?

economist.com

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Re: Is this the end of crypto?

#171

Post by mjburgess »

mechanical_bear wrote: post #152
mjburgess wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is the ray of light which exposes the ideological con taking place: trust between machines isnt trust in an economic sense. Centralisation of power has nothing to do with computer network decentralisation. The scam here is, at first, ideological. There's a techbro-libertarian wordplay taking place which must be exposed. The blockchain has nothing to offer "trust", "contracts", "rights", "rewards". Nothing. And muc…

I think you should get a basic understanding of the technology if you are going to comment on it.

Ah! I really don't get the idea of a distributed immutable append-only log which is reproduced on all clients and whose integrity is cryptographically guaranteed by recomputing hashes on each append.

Nor do I understand anything at all about systems of power, accountability, the political intuitions of the state and the economy. I've no idea how central banks regulate the supply of money; i'm totally at a loss as to how trust in the ability for people to keep their promises is the guarantor of the value of money. I'm bamboozled by financial risk, and have no idea how productive economic systems create value by taking bets on economically productive activity.

Rather, I'm a rube. I've been told that when you plug computers together and copy-paste cryptographic ledgers then we can get rid of The Fed. So that's what I choose to believe.

Re: Is this the end of crypto?

#173

Post by cynusx »

stephc_int13 wrote: post #101
1970-01-01 wrote: post #88

Here's how I see it: Crypto as an investment - Not your keys, not your coin. Crypto as a currency - I can't directly buy food, water, shelter, transportation, energy, or anything fundamental with it. I know acceptance is growing, but 10+ years later, crypto still has extremely limited acceptance for daily goods and services. It is almost exclusively held as an investment.

This is not an investment because there is no asset behind it. (no production) It is a speculative vehicle.

It's an abstraction of the stock market imo. People who bought and sold stocks also never understood there was something of value beneath it and just look for "is it going to go up?" and "why is it down?"

Re: Is this the end of crypto?

#174

Post by whatwherewhy »

lupire wrote: post #159
whatwherewhy wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't hold Bitcoin. I use it for cross-continent transactions. I buy it from people in my city using a local FB group or (way in the past) Localbitcoins.com and then send it to the recipient. They usually use Localbitcoins to convert it to their own currency AFAIK. The fees (transfer and exchange) are much lower this way - usually less than 0.5% all things considered. Compared to $100+ fee to just transfer the mone…

To get that rate, how much do you have to send in one batch? Just obtaining Bitcoin is expensive unless you have a high trust off-chain method to prevent double-spending.

I'm usually sending around $500-$1000 once every 2-3 months (per contractor - I work with multiple).

Re: Is this the end of crypto?

#175

Post by kojeovo »

sschueller wrote: post #45
kojeovo wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't basically all of crypto transactions facilitated by centralized exchanges? Why is FTX alone the antithesis?

No, you can trade crypto on a decentralized exchange like a token trading contract on ethereum. You do have the risk of bugs in the code or poorly coded contracts with backdoor but the code is public.

You can but what % are on those? Less than 1?

Re: Is this the end of crypto?

#177

Post by aww_dang »

hellotomyrars wrote: post #157
sokoloff wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What constitutes a "scam" in the that paper? That paper treats all USDT (Tether) transactions as "not scam". I think that remains to be proven and I don't think it's anywhere near certain.

Tether is arguably itself a scam based on their incredibly creative account and likely outright lies about the backing of Tether.

Turtles all the way down. The US central bank backs the US dollar with "The full faith and credit of the US government"

https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/currency_12770.htm

Re: Is this the end of crypto?

#178

Post by kojeovo »

yieldcrv wrote: post #71
kojeovo wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't basically all of crypto transactions facilitated by centralized exchanges? Why is FTX alone the antithesis?

No, decentralized exchanges have had more volume and liquidity than centralized exchanges for 2 years.

Cuz of NFTs?

Re: Is this the end of crypto?

#179

Post by hellotomyrars »

Animats wrote: post #133

China has shut down every crypto asset activity in China that they can find.[1] The hammer came down in 2021. Mining farms had their power cut, and several hundred people were arrested. (There's a "digital yuan", but that's a payment system run by the People's Bank of China.) So a big part of the world has already ended crypto as an asset class. [1] https://coinpedia.org/cryptocurrency-regulation/cryptocurren...

I think this is a major contributing factor in why crypto isn’t going to work.

Re: Is this the end of crypto?

#180

Post by mechanical_bear »

mjburgess wrote: post #171
mechanical_bear wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you should get a basic understanding of the technology if you are going to comment on it.

Ah! I really don't get the idea of a distributed immutable append-only log which is reproduced on all clients and whose integrity is cryptographically guaranteed by recomputing hashes on each append. Nor do I understand anything at all about systems of power, accountability, the political intuitions of the state and the economy. I've no idea how central banks regulate the supply of money; i'm totally at a loss as to…

Well, in the end, at least you admit it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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