5 ms·

"A very crucial technology" to whom? For what purpose?

seibelj 6y ago
To build a financial system completely separate from the state. To avoid fiat currency, if you desire. To conduct commerce without government interference whatsoever. This is not a pipe dream. This happens every day in increasing numbers. I’m sorry if you don’t like this.
- CharlesW 6y ago
  > This happens every day in increasing numbers. Nope. Bitcoin trading volume (for example) has plummeted to a miniscule fraction of its late-2016 hype height.
  - seibelj 6y ago
    It doesn’t seem you are familiar with this space, given that Ethereum transaction gas fees have hit sustained all time highs. Bitcoin and Monero transaction counts are extremely high despite the price of the assets being well beneath their height, signaling organic adoption and utility beyond speculation. It’s difficult for people outside of this space to see, as you only notice when news hits the front page. I work at a major crypto exchange (Poloniex) and all of our metrics are very bullish. I don’t think your 2017 opinion is relevant anymore.
    - roland-s 6y ago
      Does high tx count and low price really mean utility? Seems it could also mean market is unsure of the asset's intrinsic worth and speculations are constantly in flux. Or could mean lots of speculative alts being built on top of main chain, things like Omni?
  - jonnydubowsky 6y ago
    Bitcoin sees highest trading volume in 118 days’ Yesterday’s volume of $54,406,443,211 was the highest in one hundred and eighteen days, 138 percent above last year’s average, and 26 percent below last year’s high. That means that yesterday, the Bitcoin network shifted the equivalent of 871 tons of gold. https://thenextweb.com/hardfork/2020/09/11/satoshi-nakaboto-bitcoin-sees-highest-trading-volume-in-118-days/ https://thenextweb.com/hardfork/2020/09/11/satoshi-nakaboto-...
    - mulmen 6y ago
      I don't doubt your claim but how does this compare to 2016? E: I quacked for myself. This seems to show trade volumes in terms of BTC and trades/min have indeed plummeted since late 2016. https://data.bitcoinity.org/markets/volume/5y?c=e&t=b https://data.bitcoinity.org/markets/volume/5y?c=e&t=b https://data.bitcoinity.org/markets/tradespm/5y?c=e&t=a https://data.bitcoinity.org/markets/tradespm/5y?c=e&t=a You can draw your own conclusions as to what that means but the specific claim that trading volume has decreased does seem to be true.
      - noch 6y ago
        > You can draw your own conclusions as to what that means but the specific claim that trading volume has decreased does seem to be true. A cursory glance: - bitcoinity doesn't include Binance in its list of exchanges which is a strange omission. https://coinmarketcap.com/rankings/exchanges/ https://coinmarketcap.com/rankings/exchanges/ These might be a bit more accurate: - Exchange traded volume: https://www.blockchain.com/charts/trade-volume https://www.blockchain.com/charts/trade-volume - Transactions per day : https://www.blockchain.com/charts/n-transactions https://www.blockchain.com/charts/n-transactions 7 day averages are down from 2018, but up compared to 2016.
  - tuesdayrain 6y ago
    What motivates you to lie about something that is both trivial and easily falsifiable? A quick glance at coinmarketcap shows BTC daily volume in 2016 peaked around 360 million USD. Today the 24h volume is at 70 billion.
    - CharlesW 6y ago
      > What motivates you to lie about something that is both trivial and easily falsifiable? My "lie" is so trivially and easily confirmed: https://data.bitcoinity.org/markets/volume/all?c=e&t=b https://data.bitcoinity.org/markets/volume/all?c=e&t=b
- atty 6y ago
  Nothing about bitcoin, ethereum or any other blockchain enabled financial object lives outside of regulation. The regulation just has not have caught up yet. The implementation of the laws and regulations will change because of the nature of the technology, but in no future where cryptocurrencies have any importance, are they magically left unregulated. Effectively what you’re advocating for is criminality, which is ironically the only major industry that’s thriving in crypto right now, as far as I can tell.
  - seibelj 6y ago
    Laws are only enforced if we all believe they are just. The government can say whatever it wants, but throughout history citizens have ignored / disagreed with laws and they have changed as a result. I don’t even have to mention current protests for a recent example. If you don’t understand this technology then it’s easy to be naïve. Check out https://tornado.cash/ https://tornado.cash/ It is an unstoppable contract to facilitate monetary anonymity! Good luck
    - XMPPwocky 6y ago
      So which is it? Are the laws unenforceable in the face of this 13-year-old technology, or are they enforceable but unpopular (and if so, why deal with all this cryptocurrency stuff instead of just lobbying hard to change unpopular anti-money-laundering laws directly?) There was a reason Poloniex pulled out of the US last year, right? What was that reason? And remember- if your paycheck depends on this technology- or, particularly, if you hold lots of cryptocurrency- it's easy to be willfully naive about its potential.
      - seibelj 6y ago
        People have used crypto to sidestep laws for 13 years. The laws don’t matter.
        XMPPwocky 6y ago
        If not for legal reasons, why is Poloniex no longer operating in the United States?
- XMPPwocky 6y ago
  Interesting- why are those good things? Or are they bad (sounds like you're saying I don't/shouldn't like them?)? Also- are there defenses against physical seizure/confiscation under duress of e.g. the bit-coins used for Ethereum, built into the protocol? If not, how can it be free from government interference? Unless you're paying entirely for digital goods which can be delivered anonymously, wouldn't you still have to interact with the physical world at some point? Is the idea just that it makes it harder for the government to stop money laundering and so they'll hopefully give up? I mean, look at your examples, Uber and AirBNB. They moved fast and made lots of money for themselves... And, what, changed the world? Eh, not really. As they matured, governments caught up with them, and now they're collaborating more and more. Uber and AirBNB aren't subversive anymore- they've done their disruption, had their fun, made their money, and now they're just another app. And looking at the bitcoin space, I see similar movements- miners are big conglomerates now, major exchanges roll out more and more invasive KYC protocols, the IRS releases guidelines describing how to declare these on your taxes... You think AML enforcement won't be coming? "Hey, where'd you get that Ferarri?" "Uhh, well, somebody must have just accidentally sent the money to my Monero address, and it's untraceable so I can't send it back, so..."- you're not going to have a great time fighting that! Sorry if you can't handle the facts- but if you actually want to fight a government (whether or not that's a good thing for society) you should really think about what you're dealing with! In terms of enforcement, even a perfect privacy coin doesn't seem much harder for a government to handle than cash or precious metals. The big exceptions are those working in areas where their local governments turn a blind eye- e.g. ransomware gangs. So, if you don't have to fear the government asking questions, but the people paying you might (or if you want the people paying you to not be able to find you), there could be a reasonable use case.
  - seibelj 6y ago
    If you create a piece of art, then sell it for an anonymous currency, can anyone prove you didn’t buy it from yourself?
    - XMPPwocky 6y ago
      This same argument would work with cash, wouldn't it? If this is an effective way to launder money with any currency that doesn't have traceable records, do you think it's commonly done with cash? If it's not, why not, and why don't those reasons apply to crypto? At least thinking about it myself, it seems like the conversation with an investigator might go something like this- "Where did you get this money" "I made this art, and then bought it from myself." "Why?" "No comment." "...okay, where'd you get the money to buy it from yourself?" ...and now you're in the exact place you were before you tried the art thing, except you now look extra suspicious. There may, however, be some emotional benefit from letting your creative juices flow and expressing yourself, so I guess it's not all bad. Or did I misunderstand what you were asking? Sorry- getting a bit late here.
CharlesW 6y ago
So far, the most significant enterprise use case for blockchain has been to pay ransoms to black hat hackers.
- seibelj 6y ago
  You sound like someone who gets all their news about crypto from the WSJ and NYT. There are many use cases beyond paying hackers. And believe it or not, hacking was profitable before crypto! As was drug dealing! But HN commenters act like Bitcoin created the industries.
  - ChrisKnott 6y ago
    As a law abiding person (in the UK if that matters), in what use case would bitcoin help me? I don't have any particular hate for it, I would use it if it benefitted me, but I can't see any situation on the horizon where that would be the case.
    - seibelj 6y ago
      If brexit tanks the value of the pound, then BTC can protect your wealth (along with equities, bonds, gold, etc.).
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
__MatrixMan__ 6y ago
It will be very crucial for the companies in the future that outperform existing ones by refusing to pay the cost of doing business in fiat currency, which is rather high. This applies to pretty much any company that pays both accountants and developers, or that pays developers to communicate with accountants through an API. The savings comes from the fact that a network of organizations, each with it's own private ledger, engaging each other via a set of tailor-made ad-hoc protocols is far far worse at reaching consensus about anything than a single protocol with a shared ledger is.
- XMPPwocky 6y ago
  Hm, there's an argument I haven't seen before- what costs are those? At first I thought you meant transaction costs- but it seems like you also mean the cost of accountants? Why aren't accountants required if a company uses crypto instead of, say, USD? I've tried to think of examples but can't figure it out- mind explaining a bit more about what you mean? Sorry if I'm missing something obvious.
  - __MatrixMan__ 6y ago
    My last job was on the billing team at a payments company, so my perspective is colored almost entirely by that (somewhat traumatic) experience. To be fair, it may not be as representative of business in general as I think. We had an app store, so maybe a merchant would pay $5 monthly for an app that made their cash register double as a time clock. It was my team's job to slice that pie. We keep $1, the bank that sold them the cash register gets $1, and the app developer gets $3. Or something. But the merchants and the developers all live in various countries, so the "billing solutions" that we had to partner with in order to ensure that everybody gets their slice of the pie couldn't just accept "Give Joe $1" they had to know what the money was for so that they could justify the fees they were extracting from this pipe of money. The smart way to do this would be to get all stakeholders to agree on a few hundred lines of code that would handle whatever regulatory needs they were on the hook for. That code would go in a smart contract and then we could use a blockchain as a single source of truth for the data. Instead we had four companies all with their own separate, private databases, all attempting to reach consensus about what was owed to whom and why--usually based on out of date information from various channels. What we needed were distributed systems engineers, and what we got was four stacks of middlemen and a directive to multiplex money between them. If they add a fifth stack of middlemen, the codebase will explode. At least for me, once I saw one egregious inefficiency that would be solved by financial consensus algorithms I started seeing them everywhere. Take wireless service for example. Why do we have several separate overlapping cell networks? Wouldn't it be better to have one big network and just pay the nearest network operator per-kilobyte? The only reason that doesn't work is that such a volume of USD payments would constitute more in fees than it did in payments. ---- Sorry for the rant. The point is that the way we do accounting in USD is so saturated by middlemen that it takes weeks for them to agree and allow money to move anywhere. During those weeks, the accounting complexity continues to increase. Since our money moves so slowly, each company has to build at least two billing systems--one to handle the debts as they occur and another to move the money (usually monthly) to resolve the debts. But if the money can move as fast as the debts accrue, then you only need to build one billing system, and you don't have to pay an army of middlemen to badly approximate consensus. It's not about the token itself, it's about the practices in place around that token. The people who occupy privileged positions in the ebb and flow of USD haven't had reason to change their ways for a very long time. The alternatives, on the other hand, are evolving rapidly.
austhrow743 6y ago
To people who want to move money around without their governments approval. For moving money around without their governments approval.
fsewe20 6y ago
I get paid in $DAI. So for me my ethereum wallet it my main back account. I cash some to my fiat bank account for day to day purchases, but mostly I stay in crypto which allows me a decent savings account via things like makerdao.com yearn.finance or providing liquidity for decentralised exchanges. Why? because last year my bank sent me a letter saying my interest would be reduced to 0.01% and then this year they reduced it to 0.00%. It might seem high risk to some people, but I have no pension and massive student loans and I don't see how what my bank offers is going to help me change that in any meaningful way, I really have nothing to lose at this point. And from what I can see (as someone in their late 20s) a lot of people my age are in the same situation and can't find a way out. So why not try something different? Why not be inventive? I feel like when you are young you are told to be bold and dream big and invent new ways of doing things, be idealistic and try improve the world. But for some reason if its to do with money then we should accept that everything is fine and smarter people know what they are doing. I've met millionaire traders in charge of the savings of thousands of people, and can say I would much rather be in the ethereum community, and much rather have financial systems be opensource, borderless, and free.

To build a financial system completely separate from the state. To avoid fiat currency, if you desire. To conduct commerce without government interference whatsoever. This is not a pipe dream. This happens every day in increasing numbers. I’m sorry if you don’t like this.

CharlesW 6y ago
> This happens every day in increasing numbers. Nope. Bitcoin trading volume (for example) has plummeted to a miniscule fraction of its late-2016 hype height.
- seibelj 6y ago
  It doesn’t seem you are familiar with this space, given that Ethereum transaction gas fees have hit sustained all time highs. Bitcoin and Monero transaction counts are extremely high despite the price of the assets being well beneath their height, signaling organic adoption and utility beyond speculation. It’s difficult for people outside of this space to see, as you only notice when news hits the front page. I work at a major crypto exchange (Poloniex) and all of our metrics are very bullish. I don’t think your 2017 opinion is relevant anymore.
  - roland-s 6y ago
    Does high tx count and low price really mean utility? Seems it could also mean market is unsure of the asset's intrinsic worth and speculations are constantly in flux. Or could mean lots of speculative alts being built on top of main chain, things like Omni?
- jonnydubowsky 6y ago
  Bitcoin sees highest trading volume in 118 days’ Yesterday’s volume of $54,406,443,211 was the highest in one hundred and eighteen days, 138 percent above last year’s average, and 26 percent below last year’s high. That means that yesterday, the Bitcoin network shifted the equivalent of 871 tons of gold. https://thenextweb.com/hardfork/2020/09/11/satoshi-nakaboto-bitcoin-sees-highest-trading-volume-in-118-days/ https://thenextweb.com/hardfork/2020/09/11/satoshi-nakaboto-...
  - mulmen 6y ago
    I don't doubt your claim but how does this compare to 2016? E: I quacked for myself. This seems to show trade volumes in terms of BTC and trades/min have indeed plummeted since late 2016. https://data.bitcoinity.org/markets/volume/5y?c=e&t=b https://data.bitcoinity.org/markets/volume/5y?c=e&t=b https://data.bitcoinity.org/markets/tradespm/5y?c=e&t=a https://data.bitcoinity.org/markets/tradespm/5y?c=e&t=a You can draw your own conclusions as to what that means but the specific claim that trading volume has decreased does seem to be true.
    - noch 6y ago
      > You can draw your own conclusions as to what that means but the specific claim that trading volume has decreased does seem to be true. A cursory glance: - bitcoinity doesn't include Binance in its list of exchanges which is a strange omission. https://coinmarketcap.com/rankings/exchanges/ https://coinmarketcap.com/rankings/exchanges/ These might be a bit more accurate: - Exchange traded volume: https://www.blockchain.com/charts/trade-volume https://www.blockchain.com/charts/trade-volume - Transactions per day : https://www.blockchain.com/charts/n-transactions https://www.blockchain.com/charts/n-transactions 7 day averages are down from 2018, but up compared to 2016.
- tuesdayrain 6y ago
  What motivates you to lie about something that is both trivial and easily falsifiable? A quick glance at coinmarketcap shows BTC daily volume in 2016 peaked around 360 million USD. Today the 24h volume is at 70 billion.
  - CharlesW 6y ago
    > What motivates you to lie about something that is both trivial and easily falsifiable? My "lie" is so trivially and easily confirmed: https://data.bitcoinity.org/markets/volume/all?c=e&t=b https://data.bitcoinity.org/markets/volume/all?c=e&t=b
atty 6y ago
Nothing about bitcoin, ethereum or any other blockchain enabled financial object lives outside of regulation. The regulation just has not have caught up yet. The implementation of the laws and regulations will change because of the nature of the technology, but in no future where cryptocurrencies have any importance, are they magically left unregulated. Effectively what you’re advocating for is criminality, which is ironically the only major industry that’s thriving in crypto right now, as far as I can tell.
- seibelj 6y ago
  Laws are only enforced if we all believe they are just. The government can say whatever it wants, but throughout history citizens have ignored / disagreed with laws and they have changed as a result. I don’t even have to mention current protests for a recent example. If you don’t understand this technology then it’s easy to be naïve. Check out https://tornado.cash/ https://tornado.cash/ It is an unstoppable contract to facilitate monetary anonymity! Good luck
  - XMPPwocky 6y ago
    So which is it? Are the laws unenforceable in the face of this 13-year-old technology, or are they enforceable but unpopular (and if so, why deal with all this cryptocurrency stuff instead of just lobbying hard to change unpopular anti-money-laundering laws directly?) There was a reason Poloniex pulled out of the US last year, right? What was that reason? And remember- if your paycheck depends on this technology- or, particularly, if you hold lots of cryptocurrency- it's easy to be willfully naive about its potential.
    - seibelj 6y ago
      People have used crypto to sidestep laws for 13 years. The laws don’t matter.
      - XMPPwocky 6y ago
        If not for legal reasons, why is Poloniex no longer operating in the United States?
XMPPwocky 6y ago
Interesting- why are those good things? Or are they bad (sounds like you're saying I don't/shouldn't like them?)? Also- are there defenses against physical seizure/confiscation under duress of e.g. the bit-coins used for Ethereum, built into the protocol? If not, how can it be free from government interference? Unless you're paying entirely for digital goods which can be delivered anonymously, wouldn't you still have to interact with the physical world at some point? Is the idea just that it makes it harder for the government to stop money laundering and so they'll hopefully give up? I mean, look at your examples, Uber and AirBNB. They moved fast and made lots of money for themselves... And, what, changed the world? Eh, not really. As they matured, governments caught up with them, and now they're collaborating more and more. Uber and AirBNB aren't subversive anymore- they've done their disruption, had their fun, made their money, and now they're just another app. And looking at the bitcoin space, I see similar movements- miners are big conglomerates now, major exchanges roll out more and more invasive KYC protocols, the IRS releases guidelines describing how to declare these on your taxes... You think AML enforcement won't be coming? "Hey, where'd you get that Ferarri?" "Uhh, well, somebody must have just accidentally sent the money to my Monero address, and it's untraceable so I can't send it back, so..."- you're not going to have a great time fighting that! Sorry if you can't handle the facts- but if you actually want to fight a government (whether or not that's a good thing for society) you should really think about what you're dealing with! In terms of enforcement, even a perfect privacy coin doesn't seem much harder for a government to handle than cash or precious metals. The big exceptions are those working in areas where their local governments turn a blind eye- e.g. ransomware gangs. So, if you don't have to fear the government asking questions, but the people paying you might (or if you want the people paying you to not be able to find you), there could be a reasonable use case.
- seibelj 6y ago
  If you create a piece of art, then sell it for an anonymous currency, can anyone prove you didn’t buy it from yourself?
  - XMPPwocky 6y ago
    This same argument would work with cash, wouldn't it? If this is an effective way to launder money with any currency that doesn't have traceable records, do you think it's commonly done with cash? If it's not, why not, and why don't those reasons apply to crypto? At least thinking about it myself, it seems like the conversation with an investigator might go something like this- "Where did you get this money" "I made this art, and then bought it from myself." "Why?" "No comment." "...okay, where'd you get the money to buy it from yourself?" ...and now you're in the exact place you were before you tried the art thing, except you now look extra suspicious. There may, however, be some emotional benefit from letting your creative juices flow and expressing yourself, so I guess it's not all bad. Or did I misunderstand what you were asking? Sorry- getting a bit late here.

CharlesW 6y ago

So far, the most significant enterprise use case for blockchain has been to pay ransoms to black hat hackers.

seibelj 6y ago
You sound like someone who gets all their news about crypto from the WSJ and NYT. There are many use cases beyond paying hackers. And believe it or not, hacking was profitable before crypto! As was drug dealing! But HN commenters act like Bitcoin created the industries.
- ChrisKnott 6y ago
  As a law abiding person (in the UK if that matters), in what use case would bitcoin help me? I don't have any particular hate for it, I would use it if it benefitted me, but I can't see any situation on the horizon where that would be the case.
  - seibelj 6y ago
    If brexit tanks the value of the pound, then BTC can protect your wealth (along with equities, bonds, gold, etc.).
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]

__MatrixMan__ 6y ago

It will be very crucial for the companies in the future that outperform existing ones by refusing to pay the cost of doing business in fiat currency, which is rather high. This applies to pretty much any company that pays both accountants and developers, or that pays developers to communicate with accountants through an API. The savings comes from the fact that a network of organizations, each with it's own private ledger, engaging each other via a set of tailor-made ad-hoc protocols is far far worse at reaching consensus about anything than a single protocol with a shared ledger is.

XMPPwocky 6y ago
Hm, there's an argument I haven't seen before- what costs are those? At first I thought you meant transaction costs- but it seems like you also mean the cost of accountants? Why aren't accountants required if a company uses crypto instead of, say, USD? I've tried to think of examples but can't figure it out- mind explaining a bit more about what you mean? Sorry if I'm missing something obvious.
- __MatrixMan__ 6y ago
  My last job was on the billing team at a payments company, so my perspective is colored almost entirely by that (somewhat traumatic) experience. To be fair, it may not be as representative of business in general as I think. We had an app store, so maybe a merchant would pay $5 monthly for an app that made their cash register double as a time clock. It was my team's job to slice that pie. We keep $1, the bank that sold them the cash register gets $1, and the app developer gets $3. Or something. But the merchants and the developers all live in various countries, so the "billing solutions" that we had to partner with in order to ensure that everybody gets their slice of the pie couldn't just accept "Give Joe $1" they had to know what the money was for so that they could justify the fees they were extracting from this pipe of money. The smart way to do this would be to get all stakeholders to agree on a few hundred lines of code that would handle whatever regulatory needs they were on the hook for. That code would go in a smart contract and then we could use a blockchain as a single source of truth for the data. Instead we had four companies all with their own separate, private databases, all attempting to reach consensus about what was owed to whom and why--usually based on out of date information from various channels. What we needed were distributed systems engineers, and what we got was four stacks of middlemen and a directive to multiplex money between them. If they add a fifth stack of middlemen, the codebase will explode. At least for me, once I saw one egregious inefficiency that would be solved by financial consensus algorithms I started seeing them everywhere. Take wireless service for example. Why do we have several separate overlapping cell networks? Wouldn't it be better to have one big network and just pay the nearest network operator per-kilobyte? The only reason that doesn't work is that such a volume of USD payments would constitute more in fees than it did in payments. ---- Sorry for the rant. The point is that the way we do accounting in USD is so saturated by middlemen that it takes weeks for them to agree and allow money to move anywhere. During those weeks, the accounting complexity continues to increase. Since our money moves so slowly, each company has to build at least two billing systems--one to handle the debts as they occur and another to move the money (usually monthly) to resolve the debts. But if the money can move as fast as the debts accrue, then you only need to build one billing system, and you don't have to pay an army of middlemen to badly approximate consensus. It's not about the token itself, it's about the practices in place around that token. The people who occupy privileged positions in the ebb and flow of USD haven't had reason to change their ways for a very long time. The alternatives, on the other hand, are evolving rapidly.

austhrow743 6y ago

To people who want to move money around without their governments approval. For moving money around without their governments approval.

fsewe20 6y ago

I get paid in $DAI. So for me my ethereum wallet it my main back account. I cash some to my fiat bank account for day to day purchases, but mostly I stay in crypto which allows me a decent savings account via things like makerdao.com yearn.finance or providing liquidity for decentralised exchanges. Why? because last year my bank sent me a letter saying my interest would be reduced to 0.01% and then this year they reduced it to 0.00%. It might seem high risk to some people, but I have no pension and massive student loans and I don't see how what my bank offers is going to help me change that in any meaningful way, I really have nothing to lose at this point. And from what I can see (as someone in their late 20s) a lot of people my age are in the same situation and can't find a way out. So why not try something different? Why not be inventive? I feel like when you are young you are told to be bold and dream big and invent new ways of doing things, be idealistic and try improve the world. But for some reason if its to do with money then we should accept that everything is fine and smarter people know what they are doing. I've met millionaire traders in charge of the savings of thousands of people, and can say I would much rather be in the ethereum community, and much rather have financial systems be opensource, borderless, and free.