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The Great Crypto Grift May Be Unwinding

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Re: The Great Crypto Grift May Be Unwinding

#311

Post by mattwilsonn888 »

HFguy wrote: post #122
gfodor wrote: post #62

Crypto crashes every couple years and of course it has grown immensely since the last crash so the scale and scope of these kinds of “analyses” grow with it. I’d imagine in 5 years in the next big crash it will be the top news around the global for many weeks.

You seem to assume an increase in the future. It boomed and busted in 2017. Then wasn't going anywhere for years until central banks generated massive liquidity and all assets jumped (because cash went to zero and pushed everyone out on the risk curve). That's direct cause and effect. Given the liquidity is being taken away, what is going to save the day for Crypto next? What would cause it to recover to previous hig…

Bitcoin's price action has always been related to the relative supply of Bitcoin and fiat, but the fed is not the primary driver of this supply disparity - Bitcoin itself is. Bitcoin's inflation rate is cut in half every four years and consistently marks a new market cycle. The fed obviously has power over those relative supplies as well, but lower liquidity has no preference for up or down when it comes to price.

Re: The Great Crypto Grift May Be Unwinding

#312

Post by guerrilla »

mw888 wrote: post #302
guerrilla wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Summary for other people who might not know what this is: Nicholas Weaver, Lecturer at UC Berkeley after 9 years of research in cryptocurrency, lectures on Cryptocurrency as part of CS161: Computer Security. He explains the history of the data structures, some implementation choices, then a bunch of obvious lies from Bitcoin hucksters debunked, security problems, more history/lies debunked, the fraud and bs, computat…

There’s a reason HN largely misses the innovation behind crypto, and it’s fairly simple. Bitcoin is not a technical innovation; Bitcoin’s value does not come from being an interesting data structure. Bitcoins value and genius is almost entirely economic in nature and hand waiving the (very simple) cryptography and computer science involved to analyze the economics is where the sophistication and avenue for critiques…

I can see that you didn't watch the video. More than half of it was about economics. No, the reason HN thinks shitcoins are a pyramid scheme is because it's trivially obvious that they are and people here aren't braindead.

"economic sophistication" This is just a baseless ad hominem and you have no knowledge about anyone's economic knowledge.

A bit hypocritical to complain about alleged hand-waving with hand-waving, no?

Re: The Great Crypto Grift May Be Unwinding

#313

Post by RestlessMind »

etaioinshrdlu wrote: post #23

Crypto cannot create wealth, only move it around. If too many people become crypto-rich and try to spend it on real-world assets, the assets will just inflate in price. What can happen is that crypto could replace other forms of money. Governments will likely fight this tooth and nail however, because crypto is currently an anti-government technology.

Bitcoin was created from scratch and is worth >500B today. And by worth, I mean you can literally sell your bitcoin on one of the crypto exchanges and get real dollars back. If that is not wealth creation, I don't know what your definition of wealth creation is.

When we look at all the crypto coins, the combines value creation is >1.2 Trillion USD as per https://coinmarketcap.com/.

Re: The Great Crypto Grift May Be Unwinding

#314

Post by thfuran »

nradov wrote: post #305
thfuran wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Crypto cannot create wealth, only move it around What's the difference? My employer doesn't create money, they just move it from clients to me. We're both still getting money out of it.

Employers other than banks don't create money, but they do create new value which never existed before. Most companies that extract natural resources or build things that people want increase the net wealth in our society. That wealth is denominated in currency, but in principle the wealth would still exist even if we eliminated money or switched to some other medium of exchange.

But moving money around has value as well. That's why middlemen like visa are able to charge transaction fees.

Re: The Great Crypto Grift May Be Unwinding

#315

Post by arcticbull »

mattwilsonn888 wrote: post #307
arcticbull wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fundamentally sound as what ? - As a currency, it's garbage. Currencies are inflationary to incentivize spending. A deflationary currency incentives hoarding, and harms the economy by dropping velocity. All the worst periods in history have been deflationary, not inflationary. Currencies benefit from being able to respond to changes in population, to shocks, to changing demographics. And they shouldn't cost a fully-r…

> Currencies are inflationary to incentivize spending Really? Doesn't seem like getting off the gold standard was so miraculous in preventing recessions. Spending is great for consumerist societies, but people who are allowed to save are allowed to make far better economic votes on what is valuable past short term pleasure. Inflation doesn't encourage spending, it kills saving and makes storing wealth something only…

> Really? Doesn't seem like getting off the gold standard was so miraculous in preventing recessions.

I'd look back at the graphs. The wild inflationary and deflationary swings were dramatically worse on the gold standard. Because inflation doesn't depend on supply of currency but instead it is calculated from the price of goods.

> Inflation doesn't encourage spending, it kills saving and makes storing wealth something only the sophisticated and wealthy can achieve.

Same thing bud. And no, thanks for roboadvisors, anyone can save any spare capital via investments. Or series I bonds.

> Pathetic cherry picking. How about I do the same thing and I start in 2013 and end anytime in the past 8 years?

Pathetic cherry picking. How about you do it based on the percentage of people underwater. 40% of all bitcoin investors are now underwater. Unless you have a time machine, my number is far more relevant than yours. The entire country of El Salvador is down 40% from their investments.

How many people are underwater on the Series I bonds - an actual hedge against inflation? Nobody.

> Lightning isn't the only layer-2, and it isn't killed by routing complexity, it simply requires more centralized routing hubs, users don't just connect to all their friends directly. This is fine for payments small enough to justify it.

So you solve scaling with centralization, fundamentally invalidating the core value proposition of Bitcoin as per the whitepaper. I can do that too, with my dollars.

> Fundamentally sound means what it says. It means the most basic function is the best in its class, and that once the market realizes it the world will build around it.

Cool, but their assertion was garbage, and Bitcoin is fundamentally worse than pretty much everything it competes against, in every measurable way.

Re: The Great Crypto Grift May Be Unwinding

#316

Post by joshstrange »

razemio wrote: post #222
vlovich123 wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's certainly not true. P2P file transfer systems have long provided cryptographic guarantees that the file you receive hasn't been modified by anyone, even though you're fetching it from multiple untrusted sources simultaneously. Merkle trees have made this more efficient and offered maybe more guarantees, but being able to have files be transferred in a distributed fashion but impervious to corruption is not a n…

That is different use case. How would I prove that a file existed without a middlemen? I would gladly switch since the method I am currently using isn't exactly cheap.

Could you share you use-case and current method? I have no advice for you I'm just interested in how this is being used and who is providing said services.

Re: The Great Crypto Grift May Be Unwinding

#317

Post by __del__ »

RestlessMind wrote: post #313
etaioinshrdlu wrote: post #23

Crypto cannot create wealth, only move it around. If too many people become crypto-rich and try to spend it on real-world assets, the assets will just inflate in price. What can happen is that crypto could replace other forms of money. Governments will likely fight this tooth and nail however, because crypto is currently an anti-government technology.

Bitcoin was created from scratch and is worth >500B today. And by worth, I mean you can literally sell your bitcoin on one of the crypto exchanges and get real dollars back. If that is not wealth creation, I don't know what your definition of wealth creation is. When we look at all the crypto coins, the combines value creation is >1.2 Trillion USD as per https://coinmarketcap.com/ .

wealth isn't the same as "i can get money for this"

Re: The Great Crypto Grift May Be Unwinding

#318

Post by RestlessMind »

__del__ wrote: post #317
RestlessMind wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin was created from scratch and is worth >500B today. And by worth, I mean you can literally sell your bitcoin on one of the crypto exchanges and get real dollars back. If that is not wealth creation, I don't know what your definition of wealth creation is. When we look at all the crypto coins, the combines value creation is >1.2 Trillion USD as per https://coinmarketcap.com/ .

wealth isn't the same as "i can get money for this"

Wealth is the stuff that people value. Money is one of the measures we use to measure that value, particularly when talking about "wealth creation". So if public stock market valuation is considered a good measure for wealth creation, why not crypto market cap?

Re: The Great Crypto Grift May Be Unwinding

#319

Post by throw123123123 »

dpweb wrote: post #68
etaioinshrdlu wrote: post #23

Crypto cannot create wealth, only move it around. If too many people become crypto-rich and try to spend it on real-world assets, the assets will just inflate in price. What can happen is that crypto could replace other forms of money. Governments will likely fight this tooth and nail however, because crypto is currently an anti-government technology.

Money is a creation of government, and frankly, the dollar ain’t so bad. If my bank goes under I’m protected by the FDIC. If Coinbase goes under they have the right to use my money to pay their creditors.

Until gov takes away your money and then what

Re: The Great Crypto Grift May Be Unwinding

#320

Post by Godel_unicode »

scyclow wrote: post #118
Godel_unicode wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm extremely skeptical that this silent majority exists because I don't see crypto being used for anything other than hodl-ing. Do you have indicators you can point to of cryptocurrency being used as a real currency?

Whether or not you think NFTs are stupid and totally worthless, there's a fairly extensive economy based around fine art NFTs where collectors (who view them more as consumption goods than investments) buy and sell in ETH. And despite wild fluctuations in ETH USD, people's mental accounting is generally denominated in ETH.

I'm unconvinced that most people who buy NFTs are doing it for non-gambling reasons. Where's the market in smart displays you can hook up to your wallet and show you your NFTs? Other than Twitter hexagons, are people doing anything with their NFTs?

I have seen very few people talking about the price of something in ETH without a parenthetical giving the current USD value.

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