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You Can Forget About Crypto Now

theatlantic.com

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Re: You Can Forget About Crypto Now

#101

Post by starkd »

dragonelite wrote: post #70

Crypto will stay but not in the form of wild wild west where everyone can become a coin minter as of right now. It will morph into central bank digital currency, hope it means i can transfer my money away from private sector banks and into a non speculative financial institution like the central bank.

CBDC is an entirely different beast. It is heavily centralized and makes the possibility of third party anonymous transactions impossible. Say hello to a level of state surveillance George Orwell never dreamed of.

Re: You Can Forget About Crypto Now

#102

Post by hericium »

prisoner655321 wrote: post #91
hericium wrote: post #82

> But the problem is more fundamental than losing a bit of money. Crypto was built on the idea that you shouldn’t have to trust banks with your money, that people should be able to hold it themselves, hopefully somewhere a little more secure than a mattress. Yes, and some of these tokens, like BTC, allow this since "crypto was built". You can clone and build https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin and set up your own wall…

This isn’t about where you keep your coins, not really. That’s an implementation detail. This is about the entire system of wealth protection built up around fiat currency. The word of the week is “contagion”: even if you did no business with FTX at all, even if you have your coins on a hard drive locked in the doomsday seed vault, crypto is crashing because investors are learning that the old system that protects we…

In the US, Fed took the "old system" for a ride with no brakes. In the UK central bank went to battle with PM over the "old system" a few weeks back. Old, or new, people in power have their ideas on how to make things interesting.

Re: You Can Forget About Crypto Now

#103

Post by HNDen21 »

x86x87 wrote: post #92
slaw wrote: post #3

> despite the ricketiness of the whole system, despite the constant feeling that everything might fall apart at any moment, there will come a time when crypto really arrives. For me crypto was always Ponzi scheme and nothing more, but it is because I don't laundry money or sell drugs, so I am not the target for crypto.

The narrative that crypto is usefull jusy for buying drugs or laundering money is ridiculous. A couple a weeks ago I did a wire half way across the globe. It took almost 7 days for the money to arrive. With bitcoin? 60 minutes. Remember when OnlyFans was in trouble because of the payments processors wanting to pull the rug? You probably don't and you probably are not aware how many people would have been impacted. Do…

Why did it take 7 days? wire from Netherlands to US (ING to BofA) took 2 minutes

Re: You Can Forget About Crypto Now

#104

Post by deepsun »

jfengel wrote: post #68
deepsun wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As Robert A. Heinlein put it: "When you vote, you are exercising political authority, you're using force. And force, my friends, is violence. The supreme authority from which all other authorities are derived."

Force is a big part of it, but the flip side is that a vote is also consent to abide by the outcome without force. The force is there, invisible, and most people don't even notice it exists because they consent. That's a delicate illusion and does not survive well when largish minorities declare the social contract void.

> consent to abide by the outcome without force

No, if voters don't like the result, they can still use force, anytime they like. Like what Belarusians did in 2020 after obviously rigged circus election (though their force was far from enough vs. their government-in-power backed by Russia).

Re: You Can Forget About Crypto Now

#105

Post by AtlasBarfed »

slaw wrote: post #3

> despite the ricketiness of the whole system, despite the constant feeling that everything might fall apart at any moment, there will come a time when crypto really arrives. For me crypto was always Ponzi scheme and nothing more, but it is because I don't laundry money or sell drugs, so I am not the target for crypto.

1) the article is very good news, because Crypto the hype newsline word is dead. This means we are past the hype phase of the hype cycle and collapsed to the steady climb of actual usefulness.

The US Dollar is a big scam too, if COVID didn't highlight that then... well, it doesn't really matter.

Re: You Can Forget About Crypto Now

#106

Post by fmajid »

slaw wrote: post #3

> despite the ricketiness of the whole system, despite the constant feeling that everything might fall apart at any moment, there will come a time when crypto really arrives. For me crypto was always Ponzi scheme and nothing more, but it is because I don't laundry money or sell drugs, so I am not the target for crypto.

No, it's unfair to belittle all the financial innovation in crypto. There are pump-and-dump schemes, pig-butchering scams, outright embezzlement, and many other schemes, not just pyramid schemes.

Re: You Can Forget About Crypto Now

#107

Post by jqpabc123 »

sho_hn wrote: post #27
albertopv wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where's the value in crypto? What's the purpose? Decentralisation? Democratisation? And then you have to use wallets, exchanges... There's literally no value in crypto currency, but trust. Like plain old money, which is highly regulated, so much more stability to use it in real economy. So why should I use crypto currencies? And which one, given that everyone can create their crypto currency?

Crypto is a decade-long exercise in teaching programmers why the mechanism used to update numbers in databases is the boring part of a money system, and why governance, policy-making and physical territory control are relevant. What it really does is highlight inadequacies in education and discourse, and how intransparent "how things really work" (and by extension, what the tough problems are) can be even to intellig…

Bottom line: Technology is just a tool and an ineffective substitute for the human aspects of "society". Those who tend to think otherwise may be highly trained but still rather naive, under-educated and operating outside their element --- ideal marks for a good con artist.

Re: You Can Forget About Crypto Now

#108

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

wokwokwok wrote: post #35
HebericNewt wrote: post #6

I can't imagine this ageing well. It doesn't feel different. The evangelists will hurt and the whole crypto industry is set back, the cynics gloat and revel in the schadenfreude and claim for the 748th time that crypto is dead... Until 12 months later when we do it all over again. It's not the biggest, it's not the first, it won't be the last, it's nowhere near the most catastrophic. At least let the dust settle befo…

> The fall of Sam Bankman-Fried, and the more-than-likely fall of many more firms in the immediate future, has sapped much of that hope. > Now it’s hard to imagine a near- or even a medium-term future where crypto has a fraction of the influence it did six months ago. Is he really that wrong? The short term future for crypto looks pretty bad, there's no denying it. I'd say the medium term isn't looking that great eit…

And that's the political problem that crypto doesn't solve. In fact it doesn't even address it.

It's an everyone-for-themselves kind of project, in a massively connected and somewhat fragile physical and political ecosystem.

If you're one of the many with narcissistic tendencies who think more imaginary tokens make you a better person, and who resent the very idea of being massively connected - as opposed to a glorious sovereign individual of unlimited power and potential - it's definitely for you.

Which - coincidentally - is why it's surrounded by unsolved trust issues and scams.

But it's a terminal stage of capitalism world view, and on the way out. Not just because it's politically naive, unrealistic, and inherently unstable and untrustworthy, but also because ultimately it's physically unsustainable.

And that ultimately is going to become more and more obvious over the next couple of decades.

Re: You Can Forget About Crypto Now

#109

Post by leidenfrost »

perihelions wrote: post #49
practice9 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tell that to Argentinians, Venezuelans, Iranians where US dollar stablecoins are much more popular among general population. For different reasons: - easier & safer to store - much more stable than their countries own currency - not controlled by the regime And they will likely keep using it, despite major crypto exchanges crashing down, or despite the unclear dangers of USDT.

Are they really though? https://restofworld.org/2022/argentina-nigeria-terra-crash/ ( "From Argentina to Nigeria, people saw Terra as more stable than local currency. They lost everything" )

Terra was sus from the beginning.

20% APY in dollars was too good to be true.

And when it started to crash most of us quickly converted everything away from it. I lost a few bucks though.

But I had a friend who didn't know better back then who tried to apply the "HODL" meme and yes, he lost everything

Re: You Can Forget About Crypto Now

#110

Post by luciusdomitius »

eternalban wrote: post #71
slaw wrote: post #3

> despite the ricketiness of the whole system, despite the constant feeling that everything might fall apart at any moment, there will come a time when crypto really arrives. For me crypto was always Ponzi scheme and nothing more, but it is because I don't laundry money or sell drugs, so I am not the target for crypto.

I favor a conspiracy theory. For me, Bitcoin (and the whole disappearing creator act and hints of NSA involvement) has always been a tinfoil moment. This is the perfect mechanism for total economic awareness not the supposed virtues, such as anonymity, that it does not really have. The Ponzi schemes seem to have been permitted to establish the necessary infrastructure (mining, exchanges, etc.) and normalize the techn…

There is quite some evidence pointing to that. SBF's ma and pa seem to be quite involved in the ban-cash crowd[1][2].

However, S.Nakamoto was always anonymous and Bitcoin never stated to be anonymous, not even in the white paper. I think that the correct term here is pseudonymous.

P.S. To those suggesting regulation, do you realise that regulations are being crafted by people like these (SBF's family)? Is it really going to improve anything or just equalise it all with the absolute worst?

1. https://law.stanford.edu/directory/joseph-bankman/ 2. https://law.stanford.edu/directory/barbara-fried/

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