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You Can Forget About Crypto Now

theatlantic.com

181–190 of 238 posts

Re: You Can Forget About Crypto Now

#181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>UK central bank went to battle with PM

I thought it went like this: >PM announces tax cuts >no way those cuts can meet budget >panic in market for long maturity gilts >sudden spikes in benchmark rates are bad for everyone so BoE announces YCC

Did I miss something? Did Truss somehow take a swipe at the BoE? I'll be honest, I didn't pay super close attention.

Re: You Can Forget About Crypto Now

#182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think it’s hilarious that you think your wire was slow because of the geographical distance the message had to travel (“halfway across the world”) as opposed to the fact that it had to travel across jurisdictions with different laws Condescending straw man here. Being able to use BTC to do this, routing around the various jurisdictional settlement layers, is a huge practical improvement. Those 7 days don't make s…

You think preventing fraud, money laundering or terrorism funding (the specific examples cited above) doesn't make society better?

The question you're posing assumes an argument the comment you're responding to doesn't make. It's not whether "preventing fraud, money laundering or terrorism funding" makes things better, it's whether the processes put in place are effective towards combating those things. It would be upsetting to know a $2b pipeline for catching these things were only able to detect $2m worth of illicit funds for example.

Your comment is also assuming funds would only be seized for a shared definition of "fraud, money laundering or terrorism" when that is not always the case. Preventing "terrorism" by placing embargoes on all individuals of disagreeable governments would seem like an overreach for many individuals with family overseas.

Re: You Can Forget About Crypto Now

#183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> doesn't it still hold the promise of a parallel peer-to-peer non-inflationary currency, suitable for self-custody, which is totally orthogonal to the meltdown of a cryptoexchange? In my experience whenever some poses a convoluted leading question like this, it's because they have already decided the answer. But let me try a simpler version: > doesn't it still hold the promise of a... currency Did it ever? Has any c…

> In my experience whenever some poses a convoluted leading question like this, it's because they have already decided the answer. No; I am genuinely undecided. On the one hand, I hear the arguments of bitcoin advocates from 5-10 years ago (Andreas Antonopoulos; authors of college-level courses on cryptocurrencies and bitcoin; as well as random podcasters); and they still make sense to me — which I tried to inject in…

>why is the use on a black or a grey market a put-down for a currency?

The lack of accountability in black market transactions is a feature. In regular transactions this is a hindrance.

The basic examples I can think of would be preventing funding terrorism or human trafficking - which I personally think is a net good. Or even more basically the ability to contest and reverse charges.

Re: You Can Forget About Crypto Now

#184
post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since day one, honestly. Otherwise most people here would have stuck $100 in to BTC at $10.

I put $1000 in at $100. Good thing I didn't know it was a bubble! Best return on an investment-related activity I've made so far in my life.

The market doesn't care whether you understand it. So long as you pull your money out before the bubble deflates back to or below the level at which you initially invested, you will make money. There is a risk that the bubble could just pop when the public gets cold feet, but "the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent" cuts both ways.

The primary problem with bubble economics is ethical, not utilitarian. Just like in a casino, every dollar you make in a bubble is a dollar someone else has lost (or will lose when they cash out too late).

Re: You Can Forget About Crypto Now

#185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And doesn't it still hold the promise of a parallel peer-to-peer non-inflationary currency, suitable for self-custody, which is totally orthogonal to the meltdown of a cryptoexchange? The meltdown of FTX is not orthogonal to bitcoin, it's an outright vulnerability of the system. You can't have a crypto exchange crash without underlying crypto tokens, period. If you're going to argue the merits of the design of cryp…

Bitcoin was not created to run with CEX, blockchains as Bitcoin, Monero or Ethereum are built to run decentralized.

And there's no mechanism in place to prevent corporate centralization from being built atop those blockchains. It doesn't matter what they we or were not created to do, it's that the flexibility permitted within them exposes them to this kind of problem.

Re: You Can Forget About Crypto Now

#186
post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since day one, honestly. Otherwise most people here would have stuck $100 in to BTC at $10.

I put $1000 in at $100. Good thing I didn't know it was a bubble! Best return on an investment-related activity I've made so far in my life.

Did you sell it?

Re: You Can Forget About Crypto Now

#187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, if I use some altcoin as a savings account, how is keeping custody over it going to save me when the altcoin owner decides to pull the rug? And 2022 has shown that when it comes to Ponzi-schemes, raising interest rates means harvest-time.

Don’t use altcoins.

[deleted]

Re: You Can Forget About Crypto Now

#188

> 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…

> But having all your money in bunch of wallets kept by a single entity that is not you, is just plain stupidity.

I do exactly this with my dollars and it's worked out just fine. Modern society is based on trust. I don't want to have to inspect source code to ensure my wallet is secure.

Re: You Can Forget About Crypto Now

#189
post #68
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.

Your idea that voting is consent is very flawed, no where in society is the ability to choose not to vote where by they absolves you from rule by the authority. If voting was actual consent then if I were to choose not to vote that would be withdrawing my consent thus I should not be under the rule / jurisdiction of the government.... Try that and you get Sovereign Citizens

So that alone invalidates the idea that voting is "consent to be governed", saying that is like saying when a mugger that comes upon you with a demand of "your money or your life" means you "consented" to give the mugger you money when you hand it over.

Second people feel the force of government every day, most have assimilated this consent threat into their lives as just a part of living but even in the most "free" nations consent threat is there, did you fill out your tax return correctly... is that cop going to pull me over.... etc etc etc etc

The delicate illusion is that this consent overriding threat of violence by the state is somehow legitimate, ethical and moral

Re: You Can Forget About Crypto Now

#190

> 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…

Geographically distributed multisig is not an implementation detail, it’s a clear improvement over legacy methods of value storage.

What is the equivalent for storing dollars? How about gold?

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