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Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

cointelegraph.com

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Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#381

Post by david_shi »

qualifiedai wrote: post #369
david_shi wrote: post #354

Bitcoin exists to solve the principal-agent problem that comes with delegating control of the money supply to singular institutions. If you look at the history of empires, from the Romans to the Han, it is littered with instances of societal decline as a direct result of inflation and overspending. This unilateral currency debasement is much harder if the collective (and global) definition of money is determined by d…

Millions are involved precisely because of the appeal of get rich fast and ponzi schemes. Tens of thousands are invoved because of its technological promise and appeal which you've described. This imbalance is the main problem crypto industry needs to solve before it truly reaches its potential.

This is definitely true in the West.

I said millions because of every day crypto usage in countries like Argentina and Turkey, where inflation makes it challenging to save money, and in countries where there are high remittance rates.

More builders are definitely needed to improve the crypto user experience across a range of categories.

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#382

Post by AlexandrB »

david_shi wrote: post #229
Octokiddie wrote: post #205

The strong anti-Bitcoin sentiment on HN is still amusing. It goes way back - 13 years or more. Having read many of these negative comments, I think part of this sentiment boils down to the commenter seeing no point to Bitcoin. Just this thread has examples. It must be more than a little annoying to feel very strongly that Bitcoin is pointless, but to also notice that it's still here. Year after year. If that shoe wer…

The OG hacker spirit is still alive in the crypto community

The cryptography community, yes. The cryptocurrency community is a bunch of Wall St. bros looking for a new pay day.

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#383

Post by 738292748 »

wlesieutre wrote: post #272
Octokiddie wrote: post #205

The strong anti-Bitcoin sentiment on HN is still amusing. It goes way back - 13 years or more. Having read many of these negative comments, I think part of this sentiment boils down to the commenter seeing no point to Bitcoin. Just this thread has examples. It must be more than a little annoying to feel very strongly that Bitcoin is pointless, but to also notice that it's still here. Year after year. If that shoe wer…

The whole premise of burning energy just for “proof of work” is what I hate. I work in architecture and year after year the industry is pushing to squeeze every last bit of energy efficiency out of everything. Meanwhile bitcoin is like “BURN SOME COAL TO ACCOMPLISH LITERALLY NOTHING USEFUL! AND KEEP DOING IT FOREVER!” And the crypto people will always bring up “Mining gold just to make gold bars is a waste of energy…

Its for keeping the descentralized network secure, which is of extreme value. So no, "literally nothing useful" is utter bullshit.

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#384

Post by kobalsky »

dpflan wrote: post #65

What other products that are as known-to-be-risky-and-associated-with-fraud are backed by an ETF? Genuinely curious what else is out there...

THCX the cannabis ETF went from $230 to $16. Maybe it was not known to be risky, but it was a massive rug pull. Does that qualify?

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#385

Post by jojobas »

wlesieutre wrote: post #330
jojobas wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That "nothing useful" bit is where you don't get it. Is Taylor Swift useful? Sex and the City? Options trading for Tesla stock? You could eliminate 80% of the US service sector for not being useful. "Somebody wants to pay for it" is the best criterion and bitcoin fits.

If people want to say “I’m a bitcoin fanboy” to justify it that’d be one thing, but there’s always this insinuation that any day it’s going to find its killer use case that isn’t already solved better by a centralized system instead of only existing to buy in hopes of the price goes up

For one, a bitcoin wallet can't be seized by fiat by any 3-letter agency of any country. A fair amount of it is speculative, but unlike a pure-speculative ponzi scheme it's rooted in some appreciation of intrinsic value.

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#386

Post by kibwen »

david_shi wrote: post #354

Bitcoin exists to solve the principal-agent problem that comes with delegating control of the money supply to singular institutions. If you look at the history of empires, from the Romans to the Han, it is littered with instances of societal decline as a direct result of inflation and overspending. This unilateral currency debasement is much harder if the collective (and global) definition of money is determined by d…

> If you look at the history of empires, from the Romans to the Han, it is littered with instances of societal decline as a direct result of inflation and overspending.

Not only was the decline of the Roman empire too slow and variegated to attribute to a single cause, "inflation and overspending" isn't even on the shortlist. If we're oversimplifying, it was more akin to the opposite of the sentiment that you're shooting for here: the decline of Rome was due to the erosion of centralized authority, which increased factionalism and caused the elites to at best become apathetic to the plight of the empire and at worst actively pursue its destruction for their own gain, leaving Rome ripe for disruption from without. A blockchain wouldn't have saved Rome.

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#387

Post by 738292748 »

wlesieutre wrote: post #330
jojobas wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That "nothing useful" bit is where you don't get it. Is Taylor Swift useful? Sex and the City? Options trading for Tesla stock? You could eliminate 80% of the US service sector for not being useful. "Somebody wants to pay for it" is the best criterion and bitcoin fits.

If people want to say “I’m a bitcoin fanboy” to justify it that’d be one thing, but there’s always this insinuation that any day it’s going to find its killer use case that isn’t already solved better by a centralized system instead of only existing to buy in hopes of the price goes up

The killer use case has existed from day 1: remove the middleman. That is banks, or goverments. That's it. There's literally nothing else to it. Speculating on its value, while possible, has nothing to do with its purpose.

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#388

Post by ijustlovemath »

jtwoodhouse wrote: post #357
david_shi wrote: post #354

Bitcoin exists to solve the principal-agent problem that comes with delegating control of the money supply to singular institutions. If you look at the history of empires, from the Romans to the Han, it is littered with instances of societal decline as a direct result of inflation and overspending. This unilateral currency debasement is much harder if the collective (and global) definition of money is determined by d…

"Maybe Bitcoin itself isn't the final form, but the fact that distributed systems and cryptography tech is out there means the cat is out of the bag." The bitcoiner argument would be that only bitcoin has reached a level of decentralization to survive, and the powers that be stand ready to crush any would-be stronger substitutes before they reach critical mass.

Bitcoin is far too slow and far too energy intensive to ever pose a real threat to a centralized system. I do think there is truth in that the future of currency is decentralized though!

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#389

Post by marenkay »

TimJRobinson wrote: post #378
dcolkitt wrote: post #301

I think it's easy to be cynical. But one major reason I'm a believer in decentralized consensus is because I think it can make the silo'd financial systems of the world as seamlessly interoperable as the Internet made the silo'd telecommunication systems of the world. It feels a lot like when AOL first started supporting email in 1993. It's easy to dismiss AOL and Nasdaq as highly centralized systems that don't align…

I think this is a large part of why many Americans in particular don't understand crypto. They already have access to the world's best financial system and all the protections of the state when using it. Living in Australia and trying to invest in financial markets overseas is like pulling teeth sometimes, because every country has their own incompatible systems and local rules and regulations. And this is a develope…

[flagged]

Re: Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC

#390

Post by lmm »

dcolkitt wrote: post #350
neilv wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think part of this sentiment boils down to the commenter seeing no point to Bitcoin. I thought cryptocurrency was an interesting and promising idea. But I got away from it around the time it became clear the entire space was overrun by wall-to-wall scamming . And it's safe to disregard anyone who doesn't acknowledge that. If someone says "Yeah, it's wall-to-wall scamming, and other than that, the main use of it i…

I guess what exactly do you define as scamming? In terms of outright fraud, I agree there's a lot. It shouldn't be super surprising that scammers tend to prefer decentralized permissionless financial rails, for the same reason that political extremists and pornographers were some of the biggest earliest users of the decentralized permissionless publishing rails of the early Internet. But I wouldn't characterize all,…

> Are memecoins a scam? I would say they're more like a massively multiplayer form of gambling.

They're practically indistinguishable from penny-stock scams, and they almost always involve a bunch of outright lies in their promotional materials; the only reason you can argue that many buyers aren't deceived is because lying is so rampant and expected in that space that people take it as given that the claims are going to be lies, which is hardly an argument that it's a healthy activity.

> Even beyond that, there's a lot happening in crypto that most certainly isn't scams. You have stablecoins and payment rails like USDC, stores of value like Bitcoin, smart contract chains like Ethereum, decentralized finance applications like permissionless exchanges and lending markets, social applications like farcaster, decentralized AI, and gaming.

All of which still fails to add up to anything actually working and useful, 15 years in. The best cases people can come up with are sympathetic criminals like people evading capital controls. What minimal practical use of cryptocurrency there was is already in a clear decline; fewer and fewer stores are accepting it for payment, the few efforts at interesting crypto games have already collapsed...

> Like most technological experiments most will fail. But if that was the criteria for "scam" then the entire startup sector is also wall-to-wall scams.

There's a big difference between "most" and "all". The startup sector as a whole has enough successes to balance out the failures and end up as positive ROI (and even then, a lot of startups really are scams - just not all of them).

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