221–230 of 636 posts
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> I also would way rather make large purchases with crypto (e.g. down payment on a house) For a purchase that large, I would rather make it in person. With a check. Which is way more secure than crypto or a wire transfer.
Checks are converted to ACH payments.
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The thing I think driving Bitcoin is that all the other assets that can absorb billions of dollars in liquidity are throughly manipulated. A trillion dollars goes into Sovereign Debt. The government can issue endless sovereign debt to dilute that. A trillion dollars goes into the stock market. The companies on the stock market can issue tons and tons of new shares to dilute that. A trillion dollars goes into paper go…
> The thing I think driving Bitcoin is that all the other assets that can absorb billions of dollars in liquidity are throughly manipulated. Bitcoin can be just as much manipulated, if not more, because there's barely any regulatory oversight. Remember the two bots that traded Bitcoins with each other on Mt Gox to drive the price up ( https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/may/29/bitcoin-b... )? What makes you t…
indeed. decentralization of mechanical infrastructure =/= decentralization of human control over said infrastructure.
if anything, the former serves mainly to obfuscate the latter, rather than eliminate it.
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> I also would way rather make large purchases with crypto (e.g. down payment on a house) For a purchase that large, I would rather make it in person. With a check. Which is way more secure than crypto or a wire transfer.
Not trying to be facetious — who lets you make a down payment with a check? I’ve worked with title companies (though only in 2 US states) and never seen a closing that wasn’t wire based.
But everybody is happy with a _cashier's check_. Admittedly you have to go physically get those, which kinda sucks. Or wire the money to the title company instead, which I personally prefer over carrying around a piece of paper worth $75k (or whatever).
I completely agree with the author. I've been reading a lot about the EVM, and while there's some interesting technology involved, it feels unlikely to be able to support any worthwhile applications outside of blockchain finance or moving $ around the world[0] (since the code can really only directly reference the blockchain itself). It's a bit like playing with a programming language in a sandbox that has (1) has no…
There are non-EVM solutions as well like Solana, which has substantially higher throughput while transactions cost a fraction of a cent.
Try out other chains than ETH before ruling out web3 imo. There's a lot of engineering and incredible products outside of the main ethereum ecosystem which is being masked due to ETH's scalability problems.
There are also standalone computation solutions that are under development such as Truebit, which if successful, could allow for smart contracts to execute complex calculations off-chain, avoiding both the increased gas fees due to complexity, and bypassing the gas limit altogether.
It's disingenuous for the author to present instances where some level of trusted actors is required in the near-term to make a service operational as voiding any claim of decentralization; obviously, the centralization of a network exists on a spectrum and where it's present in Web3 tech it's almost invariably more limited in scope than the centralization of their Web2.0 counterparts. Likewise his claim that APIs re…
Arguments about blockchain here on HN are frustrating. There are plenty of good examples of where it works very well but the mental gymnastic people go through to deny the obvious are incredible. The most basic to me is the Automatic Market Maker system. For example Uniswap is a system with only a few (relatively speaking) lines of a code at its core and a team of a couple of dozen. The system does billions of dollar…
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NFT's don't grant you any rights of ownership of JPEGs
They don't but that’s how people interpret NFTs. They think of NFTs as buying an asset that demonstrates authentic ownership of media. NFTs conceptual value doesn’t map to anything that seems remotely valuable at present moment. There’s no mental model for owning this inmaterial thing that is pegged to a digital file that can be duplicated infinitely without your approval.
We have been dealing with this since the dawn of Napster. I'm pretty sure people understand ownership of digital creations and the ease with which they can be duplicated/pirated.
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Unless there is a typo, in which case it’s the easiest way to lose large amounts of money in existence.
Echoing GP, I also do not find sending crypto to be all that nerve wracking. I frankly find sending a wire to be a lot more stressful (since I understand it a lot less well).
OK. The reason all this happening is that Bitcoin really did go to the moon. That's what powers all this speculation. If the price of Bitcoin had been stable for a decade, and it worked reliably, it would be a useful medium of exchange, but nobody would care. This is all about MAKE MONEY FAST. Bitcoin found some early use cases. Drugs first. Then getting money out of China. Money laundering. Tax evasion. Scams. Bitco…
Which area of modern tech is not about "make money fast" ? Lol You're ngmi amigo
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What's the recovery if your private Ethereum key gets deleted, or worse, stolen? If you're signing in via some other 3rd party, you can change your password. I'm just trying to think of how "Sign in with Ethereum" would work if you're trying to get your technophobic grandma that clicks on phishing links and responds to the County Password Inspectors [0] when they call to use it. [0] https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/…
I think smart wallets will help with that. You’ll be able to create a set of recovery tokens such that you only need a subset of the tokens to recover your wallet. For example, you can generate 7 tokens and only need 5 to reset your wallet keys. You can give 3 to your relatives, 1 in a safe-deposit box, etc. Grandma’s kids can help her set it up. Edit: Or, for people who really prefer centralization, you can give all…