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I was agreeing with you until you said fantastic technology. Crypto has always involved outrageous fraudulent claims about the technology in its sales pitches.

I was agreeing with you until you said fantastic technology. Crypto has always involved outrageous fraudulent claims about the technology in its sales pitches. The technology they sell does not exist. Decentralised trading is still incomplete research. It's vaporware

zachmx 5y ago
Just curious, why do you say decentralized trading is incomplete research/vaporware? There are dozens of decentralized exchanges that are up and operating, including sites like Dydx and uniswap. Obviously these are still experimental, but they do work.
- space_rock 5y ago
  They are pseudo decentralised. They have a point of failure. Take down the operator and the exchange is gone. Happened before with an ethereum exchange. Ethereum delegated some control to miners which isn't decentralised
yokem55 5y ago
Care to explain why you think uniswap isn't decentralized trading? The contracts are immutable, 100% on chain, and can be interacted with without any help from the uniswap web site.
- space_rock 5y ago
  Ethereum delegated some control to miners for within block trading which isn't decentralised. Between block trading is possible but you'd have to wait 10mins for a trade
vineyardmike 5y ago
While i vaguely agree, crypto/blockchain/whatever has one unique aspect that is "valuable": It creates a scarcity in an internet full of abundance. You can copy/paste a JPEG or MP3 a million times (hello piracy), but you can't own an NFT or coin you don't actually own. Sure, you can copy/paste the underlying JPEG, but thats not the same. There will only be 1 blockchain owner. This unique property of scarcity is a valuable property for financial products, in an obvious way. The issue is that an abundance of a scarce product is ripe for fraud. Oh, and of course there is no answer for the on-chain to in-IRL conversion for things like ownership.
- space_rock 5y ago
  Blockchain does not equal bitcoin which created scarce money that can't be inflated which has value Outside of money you don't need scarcity
  - vineyardmike 5y ago
    > Blockchain does not equal bitcoin which created scarce money that can't be inflated which has value Blockchains created scarcity. Not bitcoin. Bitcoin uses a blockchain to enforce its particular scarcity. Blockchains enable auditable history, meaning that we can have "only one" true owner (per chain) and one true chain - that's good for money, yes. > Outside of money you don't need scarcity Yet people seem to love it. I personally have no interest in NFTs but I understand that people like collecting, and its a way to collect that's verifiably true (presumably, it'd be humorous to find the exchanges were just CRUD app with sql ledgers).
    - space_rock 5y ago
      Blockchain is not the same as a blockchain. Blockchain is a hashed data structure from bitcoin. While "blockchain technology" is used in completely different context. The two and not related technically
      - aforwardslash 5y ago
        But in the end, they are the same. The major difference between a merkle tree (or patricia trie or whatever is implemented in x or y) and "blockchain technology" is the distributed consensus algorithm. Blockchain - by your own definition, is "blockchain", because its a hashed data structure with a distributed consensus algorithm. Now, of course I'm splitting hairs; and the reason for it is that merkle trees (or hashed variants) aren't groundbreaking or new - they've been around for decades. What is somewhat interesting is the proposition of a distributed structure with the same properties. The groundbreaking innovation from "blockchain technology" stops there.
mekkkkkk 5y ago
Admittedly hyperbolic, though the tech I was referring to was blockchains in general. Maybe you know something I don't, but I always thought the idea and core of blockchains to be pretty rad.

zachmx 5y ago

Just curious, why do you say decentralized trading is incomplete research/vaporware? There are dozens of decentralized exchanges that are up and operating, including sites like Dydx and uniswap. Obviously these are still experimental, but they do work.

space_rock 5y ago
They are pseudo decentralised. They have a point of failure. Take down the operator and the exchange is gone. Happened before with an ethereum exchange. Ethereum delegated some control to miners which isn't decentralised

yokem55 5y ago

Care to explain why you think uniswap isn't decentralized trading? The contracts are immutable, 100% on chain, and can be interacted with without any help from the uniswap web site.

space_rock 5y ago
Ethereum delegated some control to miners for within block trading which isn't decentralised. Between block trading is possible but you'd have to wait 10mins for a trade

vineyardmike 5y ago

While i vaguely agree, crypto/blockchain/whatever has one unique aspect that is "valuable": It creates a scarcity in an internet full of abundance. You can copy/paste a JPEG or MP3 a million times (hello piracy), but you can't own an NFT or coin you don't actually own. Sure, you can copy/paste the underlying JPEG, but thats not the same. There will only be 1 blockchain owner. This unique property of scarcity is a valuable property for financial products, in an obvious way. The issue is that an abundance of a scarce product is ripe for fraud. Oh, and of course there is no answer for the on-chain to in-IRL conversion for things like ownership.

space_rock 5y ago
Blockchain does not equal bitcoin which created scarce money that can't be inflated which has value Outside of money you don't need scarcity
- vineyardmike 5y ago
  > Blockchain does not equal bitcoin which created scarce money that can't be inflated which has value Blockchains created scarcity. Not bitcoin. Bitcoin uses a blockchain to enforce its particular scarcity. Blockchains enable auditable history, meaning that we can have "only one" true owner (per chain) and one true chain - that's good for money, yes. > Outside of money you don't need scarcity Yet people seem to love it. I personally have no interest in NFTs but I understand that people like collecting, and its a way to collect that's verifiably true (presumably, it'd be humorous to find the exchanges were just CRUD app with sql ledgers).
  - space_rock 5y ago
    Blockchain is not the same as a blockchain. Blockchain is a hashed data structure from bitcoin. While "blockchain technology" is used in completely different context. The two and not related technically
    - aforwardslash 5y ago
      But in the end, they are the same. The major difference between a merkle tree (or patricia trie or whatever is implemented in x or y) and "blockchain technology" is the distributed consensus algorithm. Blockchain - by your own definition, is "blockchain", because its a hashed data structure with a distributed consensus algorithm. Now, of course I'm splitting hairs; and the reason for it is that merkle trees (or hashed variants) aren't groundbreaking or new - they've been around for decades. What is somewhat interesting is the proposition of a distributed structure with the same properties. The groundbreaking innovation from "blockchain technology" stops there.

mekkkkkk 5y ago

Admittedly hyperbolic, though the tech I was referring to was blockchains in general. Maybe you know something I don't, but I always thought the idea and core of blockchains to be pretty rad.