561–570 of 736 posts
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> 1.14bn in revenue on 193bn in trading volume: thats 60bps on every dollar traded. These are insane fees ripe for disruption. They know really well, that best business during gold rush is to sell shovels.
Wouldn't that be more applicable to the GPU manufacturers? Coinbase is basically a bank.
Many have forgotten why we used cryptocurrencies in the first place. The original promise of cryptocurrency was to become independent from banks. In the end CoinBase (like every exchange) is a great product, but just a bank. It's centralized, hackable, has economies of scale, etc.
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Why are you so set on digital cash? I completely agree, Bitcoin is a bad replacement for cash, just like gold bullion is. 10 dollars is a steep confirmation price but if you have a life savings of, say, the equivalent of a few hundred or thousand USD that you hold in cash and your local currency is rapidly inflating making it worthless, btc is an amazing life raft that you could put your money into. If you are able t…
> I completely agree, Bitcoin is a bad replacement for cash, just like gold bullion is. It doesn't have to be a bad replacement for cash. It can actually be a fantastic replacement for cash if we continue building it as one. The fact is, the current BTC devs decided bitcoin can't scale before ever even trying. They were short-sighted, took VC money to pivot to "digital gold", and started spreading the false narrative…
Please keep the Bitcoin-the-protocol and Bitcoin-the-currency separate. The protocol obviously can't "scale" to even remotely close to everyday payment systems such as Visa or Mastercard.
That much should be evident, and was the subject of pretty much every discussion around the protocol about ten years ago or so. The basic idea has limits. 10x of a tiny number is still a tiny number.
Payments can still be viable in Bitcoin-the-currency however. This can be done in a number of ways, from Visa-like third parties to decentralized payment networks such as Lightning and a number of similar ideas. Settlements will always be necessary so there will always be need of something like blockchain in distributed systems.
No system where every actor needs to keep a permanent record of every transaction of every other actor forever can scale to the entire planet. Transactions must be an issue only for the parties involved in the transaction, and maybe for a third party.
Many have forgotten why we used cryptocurrencies in the first place. The original promise of cryptocurrency was to become independent from banks. In the end CoinBase (like every exchange) is a great product, but just a bank. It's centralized, hackable, has economies of scale, etc.
It's an exchange, as soon as you're done trading, you can and should withdraw your coins to your personal wallet.
Many have forgotten why we used cryptocurrencies in the first place. The original promise of cryptocurrency was to become independent from banks. In the end CoinBase (like every exchange) is a great product, but just a bank. It's centralized, hackable, has economies of scale, etc.
Don’t speak for everyone there, “we” don’t all have the same reason. I like Bitcoin as a diversification for being a “better version of gold” - it has the scarcity and you can physically own it but it is much easier to store and send anywhere in the world if needed. These properties also mean that in a pinch, if you live in an unstable society or one facing high inflation it can work as an alternative financial syste…
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My computers and network are powered by uninterruptible power supplies (UPS) which I highly recommend for every important system. I have a generator in case of extended outage, which I also highly recommend to everyone who is able to have one at home, regardless of whether you own a computer. I personally have fiber, cable, and LTE feeding my home gateway. This might seem like overkill to non-tech folks, but I recomm…
> This isn’t a claim that I have zero downtime at home. It’s only to say that if my Bitcoin node is offline then any hope of relying on fiat banking was abandoned much earlier. Even if I had a setup like yours, I'd give up on bitcoin before "fiat banking." You can't buy gas for your generator with bitcoin.
I don’t mean this flippantly.
One of the cryptocurrency is going to win out for day-to-day usage; the question is which.
As Andreas likes to say: “email used to be a multi-step series of memorized commands from a green terminal in a University.
Now my Mom can do it with a touch of her finger.”
I believe we’ll get that in the near-ish future.
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So just to recap the current Crypto situation. - Scaling solution: Visa. - Custody: BNY Mellon. - Trading: Centralized, trustful exchanges. - Unlimited money printer: Tether. - The same insane unregulated over-leveraged garbage derivatives products that triggered this whole horror show in 2008: DeFi. - Volatility: Unbelievable. What exactly has been achieved? This is the first IPO I plan to short on day one.
> What exactly has been achieved? A new asset class (like Gold) which everyone wants to invest in because they think everyone else values it (just like Gold). And with a few benefits over Gold like it can be transferred easily. That this has sustained for 12 years is amazing and the longer it stays, the longer it will further stay.
haha, I've never had trouble buying and selling GLD instantly. Gold futures too! My broker charges a few pennies.
On the other hand a BTC transaction uses 600kWh of power, yields 100g of e-waste, takes hours to confirm and $20 in fees. Yay! What a time to be alive. I'm sure glad we went through all this consternation.
> That this has sustained for 12 years is amazing and the longer it stays, the longer it will further stay.
Madoff lasted 17! :)
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That didn’t affect 99.9+% of people, and is a far cry from the USD being “unusable”.
Congratulations on not needing to send a wire transfer or ACH during the outage. For anyone who was expecting to do that, it was literally unusable. Your take is like claiming a major AWS outage didn’t happen because you personally didn’t get on the Internet that day.
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> This isn’t a claim that I have zero downtime at home. It’s only to say that if my Bitcoin node is offline then any hope of relying on fiat banking was abandoned much earlier. Even if I had a setup like yours, I'd give up on bitcoin before "fiat banking." You can't buy gas for your generator with bitcoin.
Yet. I don’t mean this flippantly. One of the cryptocurrency is going to win out for day-to-day usage; the question is which. As Andreas likes to say: “email used to be a multi-step series of memorized commands from a green terminal in a University. Now my Mom can do it with a touch of her finger.” I believe we’ll get that in the near-ish future.
I don't know why you're so confident about this? It's entirely feasible that none of them are ever usable for day-to-day transactions.
Personally, I haven't seen any evidence that Bitcoin (or any other cryptocurrency) is ever going to enter the mainstream. Even if it did, I don't see any benefit to using it over USD for the vast majority of people.
Many have forgotten why we used cryptocurrencies in the first place. The original promise of cryptocurrency was to become independent from banks. In the end CoinBase (like every exchange) is a great product, but just a bank. It's centralized, hackable, has economies of scale, etc.
Don’t speak for everyone there, “we” don’t all have the same reason. I like Bitcoin as a diversification for being a “better version of gold” - it has the scarcity and you can physically own it but it is much easier to store and send anywhere in the world if needed. These properties also mean that in a pinch, if you live in an unstable society or one facing high inflation it can work as an alternative financial syste…