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Crypto: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

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Re: Crypto: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

#131

Post by thomasikzelf »

Crypto needs to solve a problem. I think cryptocurrencies should focus on making a cheap currency that people can actually use.

  requirements:
  - low transaction costs
  - low volatility
  - many places where you can pay with it
  - secure
  - privacy
  - no tax problems
  - fast transactions
  - handle fraud
  - scalable
If a crypto currency can solve above points by cutting out the middle man and making transactions virtually free instead of paying 1.29% + 0.25c per transaction that would be huge.

But that is a big if. Bitcoin fails at almost all of the above points. The only coin that comes close is Nano (I've got no investment in it). They solve fast, secure, scalable and cheap transactions, which I think are the main problems right now. Read their whitepaper, it is interesting. Whether they can solve the other problems remains to be seen.

Re: Crypto: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

#132

Post by Geee »

pcthrowaway wrote: post #8
Nursie wrote: post #7

> It seems if you want to do crypto things without burning the planet down, you can. Right, but what if you consider it a bad thing to introduce an economic incentive for other people to burn the planet down? This is beyond a matter of personal choice, until and unless we all get our own personal planets.

I agree, but our problem is with proof of work, not crypto. I don't buy/use bitcoin any more because of this. Ethereum is moving (the sooner the better), and the only other PoW crypto I have a bit of is innovating PoW and (hopefully) becomes more environmentally friendly as a result. To be honest, I'm still unclear on if this is even possible, and if energy usage becomes significant relative to what it does, I would…

Bitcoin and PoW is our only shot at decentralized monetary system. PoS has many problems, and it can't provide the same level of confidence in the system as PoW. There's no way to reach objective consensus in a PoS system.[0] From this angle, I see PoS as an adversarial attack against decentralization. Failing to understand this is dangerous. Bitcoin mining uses increasingly clean or otherwise wasted energy, which solves the actual problem, which is unclean energy production.

Ethereum has many problems, which prevent it ever competing with bitcoin as money. It can do NFTs and games, sure. However, there are many competitors who do these better, like BSC and Solana, and other more centralized blockchains. So, in the end there is really no place for Ethereum to be competitive in.

[0] https://download.wpsoftware.net/bitcoin/old-pos.pdf

Re: Crypto: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

#133

Post by keiferski »

onion2k wrote: post #128
keiferski wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It almost never takes a decade to see the use, If you study the history of technology, its ultimate impact is never manifest within a decade. It took decades for the Gutenberg Printing Press to spread around Europe and centuries for the consequences to see be seen (Protestant Reformation, newspapers, birth of the modern media, on and on.) This is the case for pretty much every other invention. > Crypto doesn't real…

This is the case for pretty much every other invention. It is, but that was because far fewer people were well educated so they didn't really see the need, and innovations tended to be physical objects that can only travel as far and as fast as the transport of the time will take them. Today most people in the developed world are very well educated (relative to the 1600s) and things based on computers travel at prett…

That sounds mostly like modern hubris to me, combined with a lack of patience, itself driven by our on-demand, "I want it now!" economy.

Re: Crypto: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

#134

Post by ethbr0 »

rland wrote: post #107
ethbr0 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The irony is that much of the criticism against the missing physical link / utility of crypto was surely levelled against the idea of money in its earliest days. "Coins? Why would I want those instead of food? I can't eat coins." To which the killer adoption feature was governments saying "Well, you have to pay taxes in coins, so you need some" to bootstrap & put a floor in under the system's value. Crypto doesn't ap…

No, there isn't. Money is useful because it is an abstraction of a physical process somewhere. Cryptocurrency can never be an abstraction of some physical process.† Therefore, I would argue, it can never be useful to us. † Well, technically, it actually is an abstraction of a physical process: a heat engine with 0% efficiency.

Well, commodity-based currency had non-zero value because it was an abstraction of a physical process somewhere. Proof of work. I have to spend time mining gold, so gold has value, so gold coins have value.

But that wasn't sufficient alone to give it utility. And without utility, there is no buyer of last resort, and no floor under value. Hence taxes.

Fiat currency removed the proof of work, and replaced it with proof of stake (-ish?), but retained taxes.

You could probably make the argument that "buy NFTs" or "run dApps" are the beginning of crypto's tax moment, but both seem a pretty small scale to base value on.

IMHO, that's the entire point behind dApps: a crypto-native version of taxes that puts a value floor under the cryptocurrency. If you have a solution that can only be solved by dApps, and you need cryptocurrency to run dApps, then there you go...

Re: Crypto: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

#135

Post by ls15 »

_57jb wrote: post #86
astoor wrote: post #26

The author believes "a Twitter where your popular tweets earn you money" would be a good thing? Twitter is already full of people trying to shout the loudest - how can adding a financial incentive to shout even louder make things better rather than worse?

I am glad we are talking about crypto pro/cons but this article was a huge miss imho. The arguments against are these beaten dead horses that many within crypto know already and frankly not well versed. NFTs were an unenforceable joke, integrating the physical world and the digital world doesn't exist (yet?), there are alternatives to the PoW model in use, legal aspects and oracles in the Ethereum network need to be…

> NFTs were an unenforceable joke

"NFT Art" is a stupid implementation of NFTs that probably mostly exists for money laundering.

I always thought of NFTs as a good backend for things like concert tickets or other kinds of "club memberships". This would not really have the enforceability problem, at least not more than traditional tickets, while some new features are added.

Re: Crypto: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

#137

Post by colordrops »

dagmx wrote: post #111
colordrops wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"no use case" and "no new tech" are just vague opinions that are typical anti-crypto talking points. Whether you personally like the use cases or not, obviously they are there as it's been on fire for more than a decade now, and continuing to grow in popularity. And regarding tech, there is no doubt that the advent nakamoto consensus algorithm is an absolutely breakthrough technology that will be seen as a pivotal mo…

As someone else said, this argument is tautological. You're saying it's useful because it's in use because it's useful.

You are suggesting that there is an alternative. What perchance might that be? Some authority figure or organization that decides whether something is useful?

Re: Crypto: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

#138

Post by dagmx »

int_19h wrote: post #127
dagmx wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your first comment is a very common crypto talking point that isn't really borne in reality IMHO. It takes decades to see the impact. It almost never takes a decade to see the use, and that's what people are deriding. Crypto doesn't really solve a problem that needed solving and it is often the wrong solution for many things it's used for. All at a very high cost. Cryptocurrency hasn't really brought much in the way…

Hawala clearly solves a problem - the very fact of its existence is proof of that. Crypto solves the same problem.

Hawala also existed in a time with poor communication abilities between the financial nodes.

Re: Crypto: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

#139

Post by dagmx »

colordrops wrote: post #137
dagmx wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone else said, this argument is tautological. You're saying it's useful because it's in use because it's useful.

You are suggesting that there is an alternative. What perchance might that be? Some authority figure or organization that decides whether something is useful?

The alternative is to say something of actual substance instead of an empty statement saying it's useful because it's useful.

Re: Crypto: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

#140

Post by sjtindell »

dagmx wrote: post #87
sjtindell wrote: post #48

Easily the best take posted here in a while. These are money games. And if you think this will be a minor sector of the economy, look at Wall Street - there is huge demand for these types of games, and that's when only people with $1+ million in net worth can really play. Now anyone can play, at the same time that traditional paths to wealth are stagnating or closing off completely.

How does this enable new people to play? The rich can still gamble the most and come in early to earn the biggest rewards. The poor still take the highest risk. As the poor buy more into it , the rich get richer as well. Maybe the poor get richer but how much money can they lock away? What stopped them from investing that money in the stock market before crypto was around? I fail to see how this creates a new economy…

You’re right, many of the biggest winners are ironically probably the same players. Probably lots of white, well educated, male, geeks. But the barrier to entry is way lower. Consider rules against “pattern day trading”. Sometimes to make more than 2 equity trades in a day, you need $25,000. To invest in anything besides bare equities, bonds, options, you need $1M+. This is US specific, but it’s common. Average people are literally not allowed to trade “exotic derivatives”. Cryptocurrency opens up the option of putting $100, $500 or $1000 (some tokens sell for fractions of fractions of a penny) into a range of games, derivatives, and other assets that you can trade 24/7, 365. You can create one yourself and make it available to everyone in less than 30 minutes, for free. You need a web browser and some money or credit (not much). Pay your taxes, and you’re good to go. The other options available to people are boring and take decades to pay off on average even if you do it right. But they provide the same thing - no one really cares what stock they own. They are speculating, playing money games. I think there is huge pent up demand for money games because it’s so hard to get into “traditional” finance. Even if you get in, there’s very few games available to you on Wall Street.

And you’re right it is the same economy, just open to all, and with way more fun ideas like flash loans (impossible in traditional finance), no-loss lotteries, decentralized automated market maker exchanges, tokens you can stake for other tokens that represent the interest and the principle which can then be traded again, etc.

Should it be allowed? Up for debate. I’m strongly against any rule that says “you’re too stupid, this is for your own good”.

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