141–150 of 209 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I too can madlibs any noun in front of "blockchain" and try to start a pyramid scheme off of it, but the question is why?
I don’t see what is the point of this comment other than “hurr durr blockchain bad”. Providing a marketplace tokenised assets/digital assets is useful.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yea I mean, if we're going to go down the hole of "cryptokitties" and other asset exchange, let's be honest, we're reliant on a third party to create the value in the first place already.
judging a cryptocurrency projects usefulness on cryptokitties is like judging a front end frameworks usefulness on “TODO MVP”: it’s just the example of a tradable asset that everyone uses BECAUSE it has no value and anyone can just set it up to test. substitute crypto kitties with something more real, like say a government starts to issue ownership information for cars (pink slips in the US i think? idk exactly) on t…
If you sold one of your TODO notes for $170,000 [1] frankly I think that'd be a fair judgement to make.
> substitute crypto kitties with something more real, like say a government starts to issue ownership information for cars (pink slips in the US i think? idk exactly) on the blockchain... there’s live, traceable ownership information, duties can be calculated and applied automatically, and traded on a platform like this. this is an asset that has real value because it exists in the real world; it’s not the bit of paper that has value, it’s the significance that it constitutes ownership of an asset
You know you can do that with a database right? Literally, a database. Like we have today. That's how it works today. You're trying to introduce complexity and inefficiency into the US government. It's like trying to sell ice blocks in the arctic, but somehow dramatically less efficient.
I already trust the government to allow me to drive my car. Why on earth does this need to be decentralized? It's the definition of centralized. A vehicle registration reflects the governments acknowledgement that you own that vehicle and are allowed to drive it at the governments discretion. If they revoke it your blockchain entry will be totally worthless and just out of sync with reality. The value is created by the government.
[1] https://ethereumworldnews.com/worlds-expensive-cryptokitty-6...
Tom from 0x here. Happy to answer any questions about Launch Kit or 0x more broadly!
I think i see what you are doing here while others are missing the point. If there is an open source ui, there is an open source api as well. My do-something-usefull-for-users app isn't going to launch a full exchange - but what I would implement is the api library allowing a user to exchange utility and $$ tokens from one to another while staying in my app. ergo, the user benefit here is that the user only needs a C…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Think more broadly about what an "exchange" could be. You're thinking crypto forex, but consider a crypto-kitty bidding platform or a virtual game item marketplace.
Or market for insurance policies. Or bonds. Or stocks. Regulation is clearing up and there are many biting at the bit for this. The disruption of financial markets may not happen tomorrow, but once it does it will go fast in each market. If there are more efficient venues, competitive market participants will start moving once they realize that they will be at a competitive disadvantage if they don't. When I say effi…
Oh just large legal and healthcare companies[1].
Earlier quoted context omitted.
95% of blockchain projects are a garbage heap, crypto currency is WAY overvalued, but the 5% of projects that are actually useful, and have a real need for a blockchain may just fundamentally change parts of how we live life when micro transactions as a concept came to games, it changed the way people wrote games. when crowd funding became mainstream, it allowed more innovation from people with just a need and an ide…
> don’t dismiss the 5% useful for the 95% useless (and no, i’m not going to enumerate the useful cases because it’s been done to death) It sounds like you can't point to any, like everyone else who insists there's a 'there' there. Nobody has been able to point to a single, legal, use case where crypto is better than a fiat based technology. Zip. None. But they're all sure it's there. Don't you think with all the inte…
It’s also useful for transmitting money long distances when banks won’t do business and you want to avoid a paper trail (drugs). Fiat is perfectly fine for in person transactions, but not when distance is involved. You may or may not morally agree with it, but this is a proven use case.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t see what is the point of this comment other than “hurr durr blockchain bad”. Providing a marketplace tokenised assets/digital assets is useful.
In what way is it useful? You say that like it's obvious, but it's not. It's on the challenger to explain why it's better than the status quo, not the other way around.
Secondly, I find this viewpoint highly regressive, the asking of why is X useful question. We can go to the moon but why is it useful? These type of questions are ultimately backwards and short sighted. Why do we spend X to research Y and why is Y useful is not clear until $many_years. It may not be obvious to you if it is useful or not but it is not up to you to decide (the invisible hand of the market decides).
From your other comments, it is clear that you have already decided that “all cryptocurrency are scams” so I don’t think you are arguing this point in good faith.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> don’t dismiss the 5% useful for the 95% useless (and no, i’m not going to enumerate the useful cases because it’s been done to death) It sounds like you can't point to any, like everyone else who insists there's a 'there' there. Nobody has been able to point to a single, legal, use case where crypto is better than a fiat based technology. Zip. None. But they're all sure it's there. Don't you think with all the inte…
How about real time cross border remittance and settlement? Current fiat approaches require large illiquid reserves, are slow, and not very scalable. It’s also useful for transmitting money long distances when banks won’t do business and you want to avoid a paper trail (drugs). Fiat is perfectly fine for in person transactions, but not when distance is involved. You may or may not morally agree with it, but this is a…
It's bad for that, we've been through this. To send money you have to pay ~1% to an exchange in your home country, wait a few days for it to clear exposing yourself to huge forex risk, pay a $1 transaction fee give or take, then pay ~1% to an exchange in your destination country netting you 3-5 days latency, 2% fee plus $1 plus 10 minutes and incalculable forex risk. And the risk your exchange will literally just steal your money a la Quadriga. Or getting it confiscated en route like the $825M taken from Bitfinex by various government entities for laundering money.
There are a lot of solutions to this problem ranging from a credit card to buy things, TransferWise (0.85% fee give or take) to Interactive Brokers ($20 per million fee, or 0.002%) to Norbert's Gambit (free) to a wire transfer if you have to settle instantly. Or even just opening an HSBC account in both countries and moving the money instantly online via web banking.
Then there's Square Cash and Venmo for free domestic transfers, the free/instant domestic RTP network in the US, the free/instant SEPA network in Europe and the often free/instant Interac e-Transfer network in Canada.
> ...and not very scalable.
According to the Bank for International Settlements triennial report of 2016, the foreign exchange market cap averaged $5.1 trillion per day.
That's $1,861.5 trillion dollars per year. Forgive me for thinking that means the scaling issue is pretty much solved. It's probably the single most liquid market in the history of the world.
> It’s also useful for transmitting money long distances when banks won’t do business and you want to avoid a paper trail (drugs).
I did say a legal use case. One that neither violates laws nor sanctions. Worse, Bitcoin leaves you with a paper trail. You'd have to use Zcash or Monero.
> Fiat is perfectly fine for in person transactions, but not when distance is involved. You may or may not morally agree with it, but this is a proven use case.
It is, though, because you can use your Visa card to send money instantly to anywhere in the world that isn't sanctioned.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In what way is it useful? You say that like it's obvious, but it's not. It's on the challenger to explain why it's better than the status quo, not the other way around.
Because there is no status quo? (And solutions that aren’t better than status quo should be automatically thrown in the trash?). Now if your question is why are markets useful, then that is obvious is it not? Secondly, I find this viewpoint highly regressive, the asking of why is X useful question. We can go to the moon but why is it useful? These type of questions are ultimately backwards and short sighted. Why do w…
I think in general, people are excited by technology that's innovative and promising. It doesn't have to solve problems better or more efficiently today but it should have some clear path to doing so, yeah.
> Now if your question is why are markets useful, then that is obvious is it not?
I guess what I'm asking is why are markets for crypto tokens useful? If I built great tech around markets but it only let you exchange week old chicken nuggets would that be valuable?
> From your other comments, it is clear that you have already decided that “all cryptocurrency are scams” so I don’t think you are arguing this point in good faith.
Substitute 'cryptocurrency' for 'entries in a MySQL store' and re-read everything that's been posted here.
Going to the moon yielded amazing technological advances, in engineering, in materials science, in physics, chemistry, national identity, etc and promises to do so again as we iterate. Capital and research expenditure isn't negative sum. Then who knows what we might find out there?
Crypto is not new technology in any way. It's a 10-year-old recombination of 20-year-old tooling. Merkle trees and hashcash. That's it. All the money being spent on it is paying miners in China to repeatedly hash numbers and pay their electric bills. There's no research, no innovation. Just people selling each other spreadsheet cells they're sure are going to be worth something one day because 'blockchain'. It's religious, not scientific. Combine that with the world of finance, zero regulation and irreversibility, there's no way to make it anything other than a scammer's paradise. Scamming people is a feature, not a bug. All based on what, the idea that 'inflation is theft' and 'the gubmint shouldn't tell me who to send money to'? Any ECON-101 class will set you straight.
It's actively anti-efficient, regressive in terms of user experience and negative-sum: the more the price goes up the more you have to pay miners, the more cash needs to come into the system to keep the price stable. PoW isn't decentralized (>51% of BTC hashpower is concentrated in a few mining pools in the PRC), it's not trustless (PRC), it's not fast (7tx/sec), it's not cheap, it's not a good store of value and it fails to solve human problems (deflationary in the face of an expanding population and economy).
It's abjectly failed at every one of it's stated goals, all that's left is 'number go up.' What's to like?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Only 0x can steal them
That's not true. Nostrademons [0] explains it better, but in short, trades occur atomically, so the assets never leave your possession. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20044091
The stealing occurs in the relays not in the contract.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do you overcome the inevitable "I don't trust an exchange that was launched within minutes by an amateur" stigma?
You don't have to trust! 0x Exchanges are non-custodial -- you hold onto your funds and atomically execute trades through the 0x smart contracts, which are open source and audited. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSxphhWcLxk