131–140 of 578 posts
> 60% of mining energy consumption still comes from fossil sources. Even if it would be 0% then it is still wasting energy and removing that consumption would reduce overall waste. And “green” energy still have massive environmental and economical costs.
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It does not sound plausible that all of this engineering, required to make these systems even viable in the real world (and, we hope, preventing it from eventually demanding approximately as much energy as Eastern Europe, despite the weak incentives to actually accomplish that) is the best, fastest way to lower transaction fees for the working class.
But does comparative advantage apply? Perhaps the best way to solve problems isn't for everyone to work directly on what the single most important problem in the world is. What if it's actually often better for people to work on tasks they find the most suited to their interests and abilities?
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There are huge crypto.com ads plastered over every F1 track, I don't think this is extremely obscure stuff. I've encountered a lot of non tech people who own crypto. I saw some number somewhere that estimated that around 17% of Ukrainians own crypto, with similar numbers for other countries. The idea that it is an extremely obscure thing also seems like a function of being in a HN tech bubble. There are crypto ads an…
Owning crypto != actually using it. Exchanges run private order books like any other investment org. People trading (gambling?) one ticker symbol (crypto or not) vs another (crypto or not) has absolutely nothing to do with real world use or utility. I can watch the Euro move up and down on forex and buy/sell to make money in my currency of choice while never touching a Euro, using it for anything, or having any real…
How do you use bonds?
in January, 10 trillion of debt wolrdwide was negative yield in nominal terms. in real terms - a whole lot more.
Holding assets IS use. that's the root of your misunderstanding. For some reason everyone here is fixated on cheap payments. That's not what it's about.
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This solves inter-bank transfers in EU but does not mean payments going out of, or into, the EU are solved. Crypto takes a different approach: a single protocol that is shared across all countries.
How is crypto any better at doing this than say, Western Union? Ultimately, as someone who finds blockchain technology really cool, what I struggle with is, in which scenarios is blockchain better than Postgres?
> it argues that the entire technology field is worthless and cannot be used for any practical purpose Which I concur with. Cryptocoins are worthless, the idea Bitcoin has a market cap of $5-6 hundred billion is absurd, and maybe the increasing fed funds rate etc. will pop this speculative bubble more than it already has (Bitcoin had the even more absurd market cap of $1 trillion toward the end of last year). Why is…
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Yeah, and if you lose your private key apparently you deserve to lose everything.
In the same way as someone keeping their savings in cash under their mattress deserves to lose everything or in a different way?
> In other words, transaction reversibility is not about the ledger, but rather about the transaction rules that a currency uses. A reversible currency requires that someone anoint this trusted party (or trusted parties) and that they use their powers to freeze/burn/transact currency in ways that are at odds with the recorded owners’ intentions. once you have a trusted third party, though, you no longer need permissi…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This solves inter-bank transfers in EU but does not mean payments going out of, or into, the EU are solved. Crypto takes a different approach: a single protocol that is shared across all countries.
How is crypto any better at doing this than say, Western Union? Ultimately, as someone who finds blockchain technology really cool, what I struggle with is, in which scenarios is blockchain better than Postgres?
Different developers are comfortable building inside a shared execution environment. If Western Union built a smart contract execution system, you'd have a much, much harder time convincing developers to build inside of it than you would on Ethereum. It would be much less likely that Ethereum would shut off, change the rules, ban you from the platform, etc.
The advantage that gives blockchains is composability. Thousands of different applications can instantly talk to one another using standardized calls inside atomic transactions. Databases by contrast are siloed. So they work really well if you stay within the application that database was built for. But really poorly once you try to cross applications, and hence databases. Imagine how hard it would be and how many hoops you would have to jump through to be able to use Venmo to buy Nasdaq listed stocks. In contrast USDC and Uniswap work together seamlessly because they're both built on the same common credibly neutral layer, Ethereum.
This article is a rebuttal to a letter, that in his interpretation, claims: >[...] that the entire technology field is worthless and cannot be used for any practical purpose. However, instead of addressing the core issue of whether cryptocurrency or DLT serves any practical purpose, the article instead cherry-picks specific issues that he thinks are resolvable: * Energy waste * Transaction speed * Privacy The author…
Crypto is antiprivacy. All of the transactions are public, it just offers psuedo-anonymity. If we used crypto for all transactions you could see when I go to my local watering hole and wait for me to close out my tab.
"transaction reversibility is not about the ledger, but rather about the transaction rules that a currency uses. A reversible currency requires that someone anoint this trusted party (or trusted parties) and that they use their powers to freeze/burn/transact currency in ways that are at odds with the recorded owners’ intentions. And indeed, this is a capability that many tokens now possess" I think this is arguing th…
Many real world systems are "nearly trustless". Of course you still need some sort of court system if someone decides to break bad. But in the 99%+ of times you're in the happy path, economic transactions occur based on autonomous rules encoded in software. The analogy I like to use is what's harder to buy a $1 million house or $1 million of Microsoft stock? The former process takes weeks, and dozens of man hours fro…
Replace NFT with deed, and what you think we can’t execute the transfer quick enough? No we can but we don’t because, we want to title search, violation search, inspect, appraise, survey the freaking thing you are about to blow your life’s savings on.
There is a reason why people continue to lose millions and billions on NFTs and crypto and why systems to slow and prevent rampant fraud exist.
There is no real technical problem with a real estate transaction that has not been solved. I closed on my house remotely, in 6 weeks, never having met anyone except my broker. 6 weeks were spent doing due diligence inspections.
I have an NFT of the Brooklyn bridge to sell you, cheap, 200 million dollars.