571–580 of 1001 posts
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It's been 10+ years of a costly solution desperately looking for a problem.
Bitcoin was always this fun nerdy hobby money, right up until the speculators came in and exploited it. Now it's "investing" in the confidence of the future of a computing network that can only handle 7 transactions a second, but that still hasn't stopped it becoming the essential oils for tech bros either.
I'm not a luddite (on hacker news lol) and I can clearly see the revolutionary potential of blockchain. But, for the love of God, can we STOP the blind short-term speculation on the promise of extreme wealth. Moderate investment can support development without the kind of hype that ruins lives and sullies public perception of the technology.
> can we STOP the blind short-term speculation on the promise of extreme wealth I first played around with blockchain in 2011 or so and I still don't know what actual utility this technology is supposed to have. I have never -- never -- encountered a value-producing use case for cryptocurrency that can't be solved by either signed git commits or a SQL database. Around 2015 a lot of people I thought were smart enough…
Assuming you do believe that decentralization is nice to have, applications like decentralized banking (ie. lending, borrowing, exchange of assets) become valuable.
There are also emergent culture sources of "value" in the industry, such as medium native artforms in on-chain generative artworks, distributed multiplayer "runtime" systems artworks, on-chain gaming and metagaming, etc.
I understand that for many people, even if you grant that _some_ people might find the above legitimately valuable or useful you may still believe that it doesn't justify the energy costs. To that my response would be that all of the above are serviced by networks like ethereum and its various layer two solutions, none of which utilize proof of work, and the sum of which have a fairly modest carbon footprint, as with other computationally inexpensive digital technologies.
If you take issue with Bitcoin specifically I can't really offer an argument with conviction. BTC is what got me into the industry, and I think the BTC whitepaper is a brilliant example of human ingenuity, but more recent advancements in the technology leave me skeptical about the societal ROI on large scale PoW operations.
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A “universal” api for moving money between financial institutions that don’t have existing relationships would be extremely valuable and could unlock innovation in everything from payments to mortgages. But the blockchain space has an extreme bias against the existing finance world. Frequently products in the space want to tear it down as they view it as predatory. This leaves us with the current situation, the crypt…
I swear to god, half of the problem with cryptocurrency is Americans not understanding what a functional personal banking system looks like. The big American banks just never bothered to move beyond the 1970s, and so otherwise fairly well-informed Americans in tech assume you need some sort of completely mad system like "consume the power of Spain making a distributed merkel tree full of partial hash collisions" to m…
Also the name given during the transfer aside the IBAN won't make the transfer fail as far as I know if incorrect.
This has been a wonderful social experiment, enabling people who didn’t live in the 19th century to see what happens when banking and investing is treated like the wild west. Maybe something could have been different this time? In the end it wasn’t, and it proves the necessity of regulation and institutions. There aren’t very many other aspects of our society where we get to have that kind of experiment and find out…
The only difference is that the bank-analogs do not get to face era-appropriate "frontier justice", but instead get to hide under the skirts of 20th century bankruptcy laws.
Can anyone speculate what Bankman-Fried's exit plan was? Was this a fraud that got out of control, or premeditated? If it was premeditated, what was the exit plan? Did he expect to be able to gamble with customer funds indefinitely? Were the Effective Altruism intimations genuine? Why, if Alameda was a market maker, and they therefore presumably have some form of insight into the markets, did they then decide to take…
My particular views are: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/EKN9Nn89ixriwSXpP/...
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Perhaps you can share some of the many advantages?
I don't understand how anyone can be on HN talking about crypto without knowing any of crypto's use cases. I mean you don't see people here in Rust threads commenting "I can't think of a single use case of Rust".
Can anyone speculate what Bankman-Fried's exit plan was? Was this a fraud that got out of control, or premeditated? If it was premeditated, what was the exit plan? Did he expect to be able to gamble with customer funds indefinitely? Were the Effective Altruism intimations genuine? Why, if Alameda was a market maker, and they therefore presumably have some form of insight into the markets, did they then decide to take…
This explanation seems pretty plausible from a game theory angle. The selfish cost of losing 1 billion dollars and losing 10 billion dollars for fraud is the same. Either way he is ruined and probably goes to prison, so he keeps gambling even if the odds aren't in his favor, and problem grows exponentially.
Altruism is a lot easier when it's not your neck on the line.
Can anyone speculate what Bankman-Fried's exit plan was? Was this a fraud that got out of control, or premeditated? If it was premeditated, what was the exit plan? Did he expect to be able to gamble with customer funds indefinitely? Were the Effective Altruism intimations genuine? Why, if Alameda was a market maker, and they therefore presumably have some form of insight into the markets, did they then decide to take…
10 Billion dollar question: Who were the counter parties to these trades where customer funds were "lost".
The money that you spent to pay for the bitcoins exit the system during the purchase. Most likely paying the Ferrari of the seller.
This has been a wonderful social experiment, enabling people who didn’t live in the 19th century to see what happens when banking and investing is treated like the wild west. Maybe something could have been different this time? In the end it wasn’t, and it proves the necessity of regulation and institutions. There aren’t very many other aspects of our society where we get to have that kind of experiment and find out…
Just want to remind ppl to not put them in the same bucket.
I'm not a luddite (on hacker news lol) and I can clearly see the revolutionary potential of blockchain. But, for the love of God, can we STOP the blind short-term speculation on the promise of extreme wealth. Moderate investment can support development without the kind of hype that ruins lives and sullies public perception of the technology.
> and I can clearly see the revolutionary potential of blockchain. I can not. It's been 13 years and there's still nothing. It was never anything else but a scam and can not be anything else but a scam for all crypto"currencies" with a transaction fee are negative sum games .