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Cryptocurrency doesn’t address the hard parts of financial inclusion

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Re: Cryptocurrency doesn’t address the hard parts of financial inclusion

#221

Post by everfree »

Retric wrote: post #220
everfree wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> SPY and VOO have a slightly different mix of stocks and VOO had a larger maximum drawdown at -19.58% vs -19.43%. It’s easy to argue that VOO is obviously better, but I don’t think that’s completely accurate. We're really splitting hairs here. SPY and VOO don't have a "slightly different mix of stocks," they have an effectively identical mix of stocks. They use identical strategies to track an identical index. The d…

> The difference your seeing No, it’s both a different list and slightly different weighting. VOO 510 companies https://stockanalysis.com/etf/voo/holdings/ SPY 507 companies https://stockanalysis.com/etf/spy/holdings/ As to trading volume, 10:1 is comparing every stable coin. There are far more than just 2 mutual funds loosely tracking the S&P 500.

That data is out of date. Go directly to Vanguard's VOO page and you can see that they also hold 507 companies, just like SPY. But it doesn't even matter.

Even if the fund held 510 companies, those last three companies would each represent 0.00% of the fund's holdings. We're literally arguing over a 0.00% difference between two funds.

I also think that the difference between a comparison to total market volume and a comparison to a second competitor is immaterial to this conversation. It doesn't really affect any conclusions about anything.

In conclusion, we're so far off-topic that it may be best to call this thread quits.

Re: Cryptocurrency doesn’t address the hard parts of financial inclusion

#222

Post by Retric »

everfree wrote: post #219
bb88 wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, you're saying I can't make an argument here. It should be as plain as day to everyone. If a stable coin can be shady and still transact 90% of all stable coin market without any apparent consequences, then why should we trust any stable coin?

If a particular stablecoin can be shady and still carry a large amount of volume, why does it logically follow from that that no stablecoin should ever be trusted? The logic behind your assertion of cause and effect doesn't make any sense. That logic is like saying 90% of torrent activity is related to piracy, therefore nobody has ever used the bittorrent protocol for any legitimate purpose. There is no logic in a st…

Trust in stablecoins can be broken by the actions of any one stablecoin.

Trusting a specific stable coin can be independent of all other stable coins.

Re: Cryptocurrency doesn’t address the hard parts of financial inclusion

#223

Post by jimmydorry »

knorker wrote: post #136
jimmydorry wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty regularly [1], depending on the bank. Every year, there will be several hour-long outages or out right data loss incidents (not all get publicized). https://www.wcjb.com/2020/08/05/bank-of-america-glitch-accou... Would you also class going to pay for something and not being able to because the payment network is down as "forgetting your bank balance"? Because those happen even more frequently; the cause being…

Having an outage is not the same as forgetting your bank balance, even if you see a scary $0 when you log in during the outage. But I agree it's definitely a thing that can prevent you accomplishing the thing you want to do with your money, during the outage. But if we're talking "outage" then bitcoin fees going over $25 is probably also fair to classify as an outage as a currency. And that happens too.

And what about the first kind of failure I mentioned, that we see pretty regularly in the news? That the banks are usually pretty good at reconstructing your balance from secondary sources, does not cover for the fact that they can still lose your balance in the first place.

>Having an outage is not the same as forgetting your bank balance

I wouldn't class a high fee as an outage. If your transaction was important enough that it warranted being settled immediately and at a higher priority than every other transaction during peak rush, then a higher fee might be a pretty good trade-off. Keep in mind that the banks do not offer this feature, so in their case your transaction would simply not go through giving you no choice in the matter.

Re: Cryptocurrency doesn’t address the hard parts of financial inclusion

#224

Post by tromp »

dmitriid wrote: post #183
tromp wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This relies on the weak assumption that the consensus algorithm will not finalize invalid data and then continue to build on it for over a year. You don't need to rely on such a weak assumption. You can use Incrementally Verifiable Computation to verify the entire blockchain history in constant time. See e.g. https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/11/05/halo.html

So, hackers remove your money or exploit an error in your smart contract, the history is there, okay. Then the data and transaction history is dropped. Yup, the " " tells you that history is correct. So?

Yes, losing access to the underlying data is a big downside.

I think the ideal blockchain should offer constant time historical verification in addition to rather than as replacement of verifying the tx history. That also makes it robust against possible bugs in the design and implementation of the rather complex IVC technology.

Even if IVC is the only way to verify the full history, then it could still be limited to older history, e.g. up to a week or month ago. That would give you some time to investigate recent hiccups.

Re: Cryptocurrency doesn’t address the hard parts of financial inclusion

#225

Post by knorker »

jimmydorry wrote: post #223
knorker wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having an outage is not the same as forgetting your bank balance, even if you see a scary $0 when you log in during the outage. But I agree it's definitely a thing that can prevent you accomplishing the thing you want to do with your money, during the outage. But if we're talking "outage" then bitcoin fees going over $25 is probably also fair to classify as an outage as a currency. And that happens too.

And what about the first kind of failure I mentioned, that we see pretty regularly in the news? That the banks are usually pretty good at reconstructing your balance from secondary sources, does not cover for the fact that they can still lose your balance in the first place. >Having an outage is not the same as forgetting your bank balance I wouldn't class a high fee as an outage. If your transaction was important en…

For a $10 purchase a $62 fee is in my opinion certainly an outage.

But also there have been hours-long transaction times.

I wouldn't say that banks "lose your balance" at all. It's a failure in availability.

If the bank fails or does the extremely common cryptocurrency thing of "rugpull" then you still have your money because FDIC.

You say "immediately", but i regularly do inter-bank transfers that go through faster than any Bitcoin transaction can go through, no matter what transaction fee offered. And that's not even talking about CC payments, which are done in milliseconds.

Re: Cryptocurrency doesn’t address the hard parts of financial inclusion

#226

Post by jimmydorry »

knorker wrote: post #225
jimmydorry wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And what about the first kind of failure I mentioned, that we see pretty regularly in the news? That the banks are usually pretty good at reconstructing your balance from secondary sources, does not cover for the fact that they can still lose your balance in the first place. >Having an outage is not the same as forgetting your bank balance I wouldn't class a high fee as an outage. If your transaction was important en…

For a $10 purchase a $62 fee is in my opinion certainly an outage. But also there have been hours-long transaction times. I wouldn't say that banks "lose your balance" at all. It's a failure in availability. If the bank fails or does the extremely common cryptocurrency thing of "rugpull" then you still have your money because FDIC. You say "immediately", but i regularly do inter-bank transfers that go through faster…

Those transactions that appear to go through "immediately", are not settled for many days or weeks. That third parties are willing to take on the settlement risk is beside the point as the same could be offered by third parties working on top of the Bitcoin blockchain.

Re: Cryptocurrency doesn’t address the hard parts of financial inclusion

#227

Post by knorker »

jimmydorry wrote: post #226
knorker wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a $10 purchase a $62 fee is in my opinion certainly an outage. But also there have been hours-long transaction times. I wouldn't say that banks "lose your balance" at all. It's a failure in availability. If the bank fails or does the extremely common cryptocurrency thing of "rugpull" then you still have your money because FDIC. You say "immediately", but i regularly do inter-bank transfers that go through faster…

Those transactions that appear to go through "immediately", are not settled for many days or weeks. That third parties are willing to take on the settlement risk is beside the point as the same could be offered by third parties working on top of the Bitcoin blockchain.

> Those transactions that appear to go through "immediately", are not settled for many days or weeks.

The thing about that is that end users don't care, not even a little bit. It's about as interesting as whether the banks runs Linux, BSD, or OS/400.

The service provided is immediate. I don't care if the two banks need to ship physical checks around on the backend.

> the same could be offered by third parties working on top of the Bitcoin blockchain.

But that defeats the whole point of the bitcoin blockchain.

It does not defeat the point of traditional banking.

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