231–240 of 241 posts
While the tether story is very interesting and the article does indeed tell it I cant shake the attempt at throwing shade on cryptocurrency broadly. I like patio11 but his takes on this space look to me like a guy who made a bad call years ago throwing shade on bitcoin and has to continue to justify it as the revolution happens around him.
because the hackernewserati are jealous too.
> The dominant use case for cryptocurrency is speculation. Speculators want to put value into the system, somehow have it become greater, and then take more value out of the system than they put in. Don't forget that another relevant use case is anonimized payments. Let's say you deal with weapons. A good crypto could help. Let's say you sell porn videos: in some cases, one wants to pay with crypto because they don't…
The more formal way to say that is that cryptocurrency payments are "payments without the requirement of multilateral fiat recognition." Fiat money works and has value internationally , because governments extend treaty relationships with one-another to offer the same sorts of protections against fraud committed by citizens of treaty partner nations, that they do for fraud committed by domestic citizens. But when thi…
> The dominant use case for cryptocurrency is speculation. Speculators want to put value into the system, somehow have it become greater, and then take more value out of the system than they put in. Don't forget that another relevant use case is anonimized payments. Let's say you deal with weapons. A good crypto could help. Let's say you sell porn videos: in some cases, one wants to pay with crypto because they don't…
That use case is currently comparatively vanishingly small and no where near large enough to explain Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies current values. Speculation isn't just the dominant use case. It's the overwhelmingly dominant use case.
Another use case: there have been a couple of cases where I'd use a fast cryptocurrency over banking. This case is: fast international transfer.
Have you seen the speed that Ripple has, for example? (Yes, yes, I know Ripple not decentralized, I don't care, I care about speed)
What takes me days to with a bank, I can do in seconds with Ripple. Though, this only works if: converting back to fiat is quicker on the other side than the bank transfer or the whole transaction is possible with crypto.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You respond twice downthread that while Bitcoin may not be anonymous, Monero is. Do you then concede that anonymous payments are not a major use case for the non-anonymous Bitcoin protocol? Why then is Bitcoin so valuable?
Bitcoin is valuable because people value it. If you need anonimity you mix your coins - almost every darknet market (likely bitcoin's largest transactional use case) explains how to do this Probably the easiest way is Samourai Wallet https://samouraiwallet.com/
> I have looked, quite a bit. I have not found a good use case yet I'm always surprised that intelligent and knowledgeable people claim this. You haven't even found a single use case? You don't think buying a VPN anonymously is a good use case? Or see the need for uncensorable donations? (Remember how the U.S. shut down Wikileak's PayPal donations when they exposed their war crimes?) Or that cryptocurrencies allow bu…
Cryptocurrencies aren't anonymous. They also don't eliminate payment processor risk: fraudulent exchanges, hackers, and your own mistakes can all lose or lock you out of your money. And generally there's far less legal recourse when that happens with crypto. I'm skeptical how many people in Venezuela saved their fortunes via Bitcoin et al, but if you have some data on that, I'd be curious to hear about it. In particu…
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Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why can't it last? Casionos/betting seem to be doing well.
The thinking probably goes "eventually, enough people will either want their money back or a positive ROI on their investment that they'll pull out of crypto and the price will stabilize around people who actually intend to use it". I personally don't think this is necessarily the case in the current economic environment of ridiculously low interest rates.
What they want is stability in the exchange rate.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Tether has gigantic red flags including not being able to actually exchange it for dollars even though it is pegged to dollars. It's so brazen it's hard to even believe it.
I'm not advocating for tether. But it is not a ponzi scheme. And I think that most of the users understand what tether is - they are not excepting returns, they also understand that it is unregulated vehicle where the backing can disappear any time if the issuers get into trouble. I would guess biggest use-case is moving fiat between exchanges without having compliance issues, which you would have with banks.
The scheme to create a token that is supposedly worth $1 to buy BTC and other coins off exchanges and then selling those coins for real USD.
For anyone interested in the origins of Tether, look up Bitfinex hack.
Three things make the bubbly/scammy nature of current generation cryptocurrency very obvious to me: (1) The fact that nearly all cryptocurrencies move in unison even though they differ widely in adoption and real-world use cases. Many totally useless cryptocurrencies move perfectly in unison with the supposedly useful ones. (2) The fact that complete jokes that barely work like IOTA still have large market caps. (Thi…
Usually only the most popular cryptocurrencies are directly priced in dollars.
Tether problems are known. It's surprising that crypto sphere continues using it. I guess it's a good way to connect digital native Bitcoin to the rest of the world, aka, fiat. I've been advocating for Bitflate. It's a cryptocurrency with constant inflation. The idea is to create a digital native and decentralized stablecoin. We won't get perfectly stable price. But it will not be controlled by a single entity. I thi…