111–120 of 359 posts
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El Salvador uses it as a government enforced national currency. I struggle to understand how people still make the claim that it's useless or that it's niche - it's a recognized and enforced national currency now, not some neat project.
What a convenient source of liquidity for the various drug cartels in El Salvador who need to launder their money.
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I hear this a lot. I want details: - Which countries? - What portion of the population are benefiting from crypto? Is it a tiny portion of nerds or has it become more mainstream now? - With the crash in cryptocurrency over the last few months are these people in those countries still glad that they used this, or are they regretting it? I don't doubt that there exist individuals in countries with high inflation who ha…
El Salvador uses it as a government enforced national currency. I struggle to understand how people still make the claim that it's useless or that it's niche - it's a recognized and enforced national currency now, not some neat project.
I have an extremely low opinion of blockchain/crypto, but in the interest of fairness, I did read an FT piece a few months ago about how banks are apparently actually using the blockchain for currency trading: "HSBC and Wells Fargo are cutting out a key part of the currency market’s infrastructure from some trades after the two banks agreed to settle transactions directly on blockchain technology. From Monday, they w…
They’re banks. They have lots of agreements and lawyers. They already trust eachother. And there’s no 3rd party involved.
I’d be surprised if there was an actual blockchain involved instead of spinning a simple log as a blockchain for hype.
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There are a lot of successful blockchain projects that respond to various use cases. On top of my head: - Uncensorable money: og bitcoin and pretty much everything else - Uncensorable money + privacy: monero, tornado.cash, etc. - Decentralized exchanges/automated market makers: curve.fi, uniswap, etc. - Prediction markets: polymarket etc. EDIT: looks like omen and augur are dead
Both Omen and Augur appear to be dead. Omen isn't online, Augur isn't available on the US but their email signup is broken and they haven't posted on social media in a year. "Company is a fucking joke. I invested upon launch and there's still nothing usable after half a decade. Been seeing the same "roadmaps" for 5+ years. Company raises hundreds of millions and can't manage to launch a simple UX for prediction marke…
I keep saying this, but: Bitcoin is well over 10 years old by now. In 10 years, the internet was already clearly adding a ton of value all over the place. Bitcoin is not really a 'young technology' anymore, and the only thing it has enabled so far is risky, unregulated investment strategies, and an staggering amount of crime.
I'm as skeptical of Bitcoin as anyone, but this is not a very good argument. You'd come to the same conclusion if you evaluated the state of aviation in 1900 or photography in 1820. Even the Internet was useless to the average person in 1982 (13 years in).
https://web3isgoinggreat.com/ has tracked $10B in losses due to grift. And that doesn't include the losses used to pay off ransomware.
Money laundering for good is still money laundering.
AMMs work pretty ok on chains. The list is subjective.
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When the Internet was 10 years old the year was 1987.
Having heard this argument a nauseating number of times, it's fairly clear that people on both sides who say this use "the internet" when they mean "the web." So 1999 is a better "after 10 years'" benchmark here.
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When the Internet was 10 years old the year was 1987.
Having heard this argument a nauseating number of times, it's fairly clear that people on both sides who say this use "the internet" when they mean "the web." So 1999 is a better "after 10 years'" benchmark here.
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I'm as skeptical of Bitcoin as anyone, but this is not a very good argument. You'd come to the same conclusion if you evaluated the state of aviation in 1900 or photography in 1820. Even the Internet was useless to the average person in 1982 (13 years in).
None of those cases, however, had anywhere near as much money put into them that early. It may be that, if blockchain technologies had grown in size much, much slower, that good uses would have been found. Regardless, once this much real money (and the resources of electricity, labor, technical expertise, etc. that they represent) have been invested into something, something impressive should have resulted by now.