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Why I’m Cryptophobic

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Re: Why I’m Cryptophobic

#221

Post by deadbunny »

upupandup wrote: post #93
IncRnd wrote: post #87

> The world has never seen an economic phenomenon like crypto. There is no historical analogous technology trend or investment craze that comes close to capturing the sustained and frenzied momentum of crypto that has engulfed so many and that will continue to do. Never say never. Greed and speculation have a long and robust history. This crypto speculation and greed reminds of of the price of tulips. [1] During that…

You don't even need to go back that far: e-gold, liberty reserve. Fun fact, bitcoin client had a poker lobby in it, and it was announced mere weeks after Liberty Reserve court ruling jailing its founder for 20 to life for money laundering. Individual or groups behind bitcoin were watching that Liberty Reserve trial very very closely and e-gold/liberty reserve was very popular amongst the online poker industry ;) Ther…

[citation needed]

Re: Why I’m Cryptophobic

#222

Post by benreesman »

px43 wrote: post #218
benreesman wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone can invent quasi-financial terms to make grandiose claims. The beauty of the market is that loudmouths don’t participate in the market for long. I’ll sell an American-style options contract to someone who thinks BTC is going anywhere near there at Black-Scholes -75. And I’ll have no trouble financing it. You want the other side?

Shh.. you're scaring all the people who think their computer science degree gives them exceptional insight into how money works.

In fairness, I was one of those people until I landed at a satellite office of my SV company in New York and started hanging out with real finance players.

Re: Why I’m Cryptophobic

#224

Post by smoldesu »

dont__panic wrote: post #210
ben_w wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just using BTC to replace all of McDonald's daily transactions in the Berlin metropolitan area alone would be enough to destroy the system. (Of course this is where people come along and talk about layers on top of BTC, but all those seem to me to just be extra ways to replace trivial transaction-level auditing with Turing-hard code auditing).

It also seems like those "layers on top of BTC" erode one of the only aspects of blockchain that has appeal for me -- the full transparency of the system, such that you can see every exchange of BTC on the network. The minute you offload any of that to other systems, you're essentially creating dark pools and money laundering opportunities because of differential oversight.

If there's one thing that people should correctly point out as scams in the world of crypto, it should be L2 chains. Every single one of them is a ploy to enrich their creator, full-stop. I don't even know what kind of pipe dream they sell to their investors to get capital.

It's particularly funny, because I remember Justin Sun trying to scam people like this years before cryptocurrency had really taken off. Back then, though, everyone who had skin in the game actually cared about the health of the community, and the guy lost millions of dollars trying some really insane hostile takeover tactics. Nowadays though, nobody cares. The hucksters of this world make their money hand over fist now.

Re: Why I’m Cryptophobic

#225

Post by jazzyjackson »

syzygyhack wrote: post #172
nemetroid wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The outcomes of malfunctioning "smart contracts" are irrevocable.

Wrong. Smart contracts can be updated. If they are deployed with the ability to update, any outcome can be revoked. It is as simple as adding a new function.

?? Updating a smart contract does not rollback the history of transactions, a wallet drained due to a buggy contract is drained for good, that’s what “irrevocable outcome” refers to.

Re: Why I’m Cryptophobic

#226

Post by stingraycharles »

smoldesu wrote: post #224
dont__panic wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also seems like those "layers on top of BTC" erode one of the only aspects of blockchain that has appeal for me -- the full transparency of the system, such that you can see every exchange of BTC on the network. The minute you offload any of that to other systems, you're essentially creating dark pools and money laundering opportunities because of differential oversight.

If there's one thing that people should correctly point out as scams in the world of crypto, it should be L2 chains. Every single one of them is a ploy to enrich their creator, full-stop. I don't even know what kind of pipe dream they sell to their investors to get capital. It's particularly funny, because I remember Justin Sun trying to scam people like this years before cryptocurrency had really taken off. Back the…

I’m a relative crypto noob, but I did see certain “lightspeed” transactions which would allow for high-volume and “instant” transactions. Is this also considered an L2 chain, or not? If not, how does it circumvent the limitations of the bitcoin blockchain without sacrificing transparency?

Re: Why I’m Cryptophobic

#228

Post by nradov »

cowtools wrote: post #62
hans1729 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scenario: a country-wide blackout occurs. You're haggling with local farmers for food. Which has value to them, bits on a hard drive or solid gold?

I agree with your point, but consider the following: 1: Cryptocurrencies can still operate over distributed mesh networks or sneaker-nets in a semi-doomsday scenario. 2: With gold, it is difficult to verify its authenticity vs some impostor alloy without the necessary tech/knowledge. Edit: the bottom line is that in a doomsday scenario, people have little use for bitcoins or shiny yellow rocks.

We have never seen a distributed mesh network that worked correctly in the real world at scale. The OLPC project tried doing that but ran into severe technical problems. So it's not necessarily impossible, but I simply don't believe we will have an operating mesh network in that scenario.

https://wiki.laptop.org/go/Mesh_Network_Details

Re: Why I’m Cryptophobic

#229

Post by mattnewton »

benreesman wrote: post #205
dmoy wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You completely ignored what GP said. The floor is different from what people will sell it to you for right now. AMZN may have a floor of $ASSETS / #SHARES (or something, I just made that up), but that doesn't mean anyone will sell it to you for that right now.

Anyone can invent quasi-financial terms to make grandiose claims. The beauty of the market is that loudmouths don’t participate in the market for long. I’ll sell an American-style options contract to someone who thinks BTC is going anywhere near there at Black-Scholes -75. And I’ll have no trouble financing it. You want the other side?

Not the person you are responding to, but is there somewhere reputable offering these kinds of contracts to no-name retail investors like myself? I would absolutely load up on something like 12,000 - 15,000 USD bitcoin puts depending on the time decay people are offering and how certain I could be that they would actually let me exercise them, and not freeze trading or even go belly up during the crash. I am somewhat.. skeptical I will be able to exercise them on an primarily crypto exchange like Binance that has blocked trading during freefalls before that is structurally dependent on the price of crypto to some extent.

Re: Why I’m Cryptophobic

#230

Post by cypress66 »

mjburgess wrote: post #4

There needs to be some basic economics here.. Money has value because of the value of the economic transactions in which its conducted. Government-backed currencies are forced to have value in the sense they force people to use it for their taxes. The US, additionally, forces the world to use it for oil trades. Value is in those economic transactions. A currency is just a "liquifying" of that value, to make it easier…

As much as I enjoy (and actually use) crypto, you touch a very important point.

No current cryptocurrency that is even remotely decentralized, offers good throughput / scalability / tps.

Bitcoin has Lightning and it's in my opinion fundamentally flawed in its UX. It hasn't picked up much adoption after many years for what it's worth.

Ethereum has many L2 solutions in development but they are many years away from being finished (actually scalable, safe, decentralized)

I don't know much about other cryptocurrencies but from what I've seen they all are either very centralized or not scalable either (see the Blockchain Trillema)

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