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As someone interested in all of cryptography, I cringe every single time when we call blockchain "crypto". Sure, there's cryptography in it. But you don't call a mail or http server "crypto". There's similar tech in git, we don't call it "crypto", we call it VCS. Calling this "crypto" is just trying to add a mystic aura for stuff people don't understand, to further muddy the waters. We have a word for this technology…
I see lots of people in the thread, including the author, that have avatars with glowing eyes. Can someone explain what this is about? Is this some sub cultural thing?
Having been part of launching Helium HNT token (which is honestly a real-world utility use case), here is my personal experience related to his points... Helium started as a traditional centralized IoT project, realized that centralization was a limiting factor, then joked about turning it into a blockchain application. Now it is over $1.5bn market cap and provides a real-world utility. Exchanges are pay-to-play. It…
> Security is hard. I'm still wondering how no impactful hacking occured to this day at major exchanges or even the major blockchains. By now it's probably a top-level target worldwide.
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IMO these things are basically driven by speculation as well. From what I can tell, they mainly provide liquidity for financial institutions. Financial institutions are interested in crypto so that they can make money trading it. IMO there is very little actual utility here.
Very actual real utility here? What's utility to you? Is buying a in-game COD skin utility? Or how about roblox bucks? How about the trillion dollar derivatives market? All those things easily disrupted by DeFi.
>Is buying a in-game COD skin utility? Or how about roblox bucks? How about the trillion dollar derivatives market?
No.
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Not if you create a system where it's literally impossible to redistribute wealth. If majority of tokens in a crypto system are controlled under priv-keys owned by a small % of the population we'll literally lock ourselves under the control of those people. Scary thing is that we won't even be able to vote ourselves out of the potential mess because the private keys are mathematically secured. Capitalism is going to…
Yes, it literally becomes the invisible hand that controlls the freemarket but it no longer free and no longer a market if nobody can get in. Ultimately the value we all get is exchange with eachother at a fair and stable price. The cryptospace could potentially solve this problem when the initial gold rush does some damage. In a way the attention is not bad because more people understand what it is, study it, become…
Yes, I think you have the right idea. This is a credit based system, which, I think is fairer because anyone can issue credit denominated in some numeraire and it holds its value over time as long as the issuer can be trusted to “redeem” the credit. The issue with this system is that bootstrapping it is difficult and it’s quite complicated because everyone now needs to become a credit risk/reputation expert!
As someone interested in all of cryptography, I cringe every single time when we call blockchain "crypto". Sure, there's cryptography in it. But you don't call a mail or http server "crypto". There's similar tech in git, we don't call it "crypto", we call it VCS. Calling this "crypto" is just trying to add a mystic aura for stuff people don't understand, to further muddy the waters. We have a word for this technology…
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This website is being served to you using cryptography right now (tls). I took web tech to mean the technology used to serve the web - the differences with cryptocurrencies are manifold, the principal one being that billions of people use the web every day to perform important functions, compared to cryptocurrencies where most users are simply speculating on prices.
I think GP's point is this: 1) You cannot have cryptocurrency without the web, so it is web tech. 2) Computational cryptography long predates the web. It would be more accurate to say "the web is cryptography tech", if anything.
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Not true, most stuff launching these days is either PoS or migrating.
You don't see that most proof-of-stake still requires a tremendous amount of energy and resources wasted at the very least for the stupid mining process?
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Because a scam product will lie to you in order to look like a healthy and useful product. If you ignore the hints that it is a scam (that it is a cryptocurrency project, where 90% or more of all projects are, in fact, scams), you will be more likely to fall for the lies.
I didn't mean looking at future promises - that's part of the crypto game. I mean if the project mostly does what you expect from it now and continues development towards the rest - why does it matter if people see it as a scam on the crypto front? You're getting the value you need out of it.