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A BlockChain is like giving people ACH access. It’s insane to think that people are ever going to be competent and experienced enough to run their own bank. Soc
by dcow 5y ago
A BlockChain is like giving people ACH access. It’s insane to think that people are ever going to be competent and experienced enough to run their own bank. Society needs banks and regulations. This can all happen at layer-2 on top of an auditable and objective root chain. There’s a very clear analogy where everyday people interface with Eltoo “banks” existing (and regulated) on-chain providing convenient “traditional” banking services. That’s where this is all going. Crypto anarchy is a farce; don’t fall for it.
- colechristensen 5y agoACH is reversible for 30 days IIRC, though technically forever through court orders. Checks are essentially giving everyday people ACH access. You’re right and I’ve said it before, the only place crypto is going is going to be boring and indistinguishable besides minor details from traditional services.
- dcow 5y agoThere is a lot between a check and an entry in the Fed’s FTP server, notably a bank. You do not have credentials to drop your own transactions there, I think anyway XD
- papito 5y agoIt's almost like in the past the world did not have anyone who had the capability to print their own money, until the world said "this is madness, we need to put structure to this".
- dcow 5y agoYou can’t print gold. …
- lottin 5y agoDuring the gold standard central banks would engage in sterilising operations to prevent large fluctuations in the money supply, which was the equivalent of open market operations in modern central banking (what some people call "printing money")
- dragontamer 5y agoBut you can go to 'India', conquer the Aztecs, steal all their gold and silver, and depress the European gold economy for the next century. ----- You can also subtly alter the composition of your gold and silver coins to leverage your reputation and squeeze more money out of your gold reserves. Turns out that most people don't have a habit of checking the density of gold coins. As long as they weigh the same, you can trick the scales. 500 years ago, they'd mix cheaper metals into their coins. Today, we'd just use tungsten, which has very similar density to gold.
- dcow 5y agoYou can do the first thing with a chain coin but I don’t think you can do the second.
- dragontamer 5y agoFor Blockchain, you just invent a new coin (DOGE, Shibu, whatever). Every new Blockchain is a new group of people printing a trillion / quadrillion crypto tokens and throwing into the market. As long as cryptofans buy up new coins or NFTs, you can keep printing new tokens.
- lowkey 5y ago“A fool and his money are soon parted” Fool’s gold has always been a thing. Similarly, there will always be some who cannot distinguish between Bitcoin and the latest dog coin. Few Bitcoiners are selling Bitcoin to buy NFTs or altcoins.
- joering2 5y agoWell, technically you can. You can "print" gold by using other elements with simply changing number of protons to match 79. I believe this has been done already, if my memory serves me right reading some article years ago. Its just that the cost of doing so even on small scale overweight the cost of the resulting gold, even if the price would be of a 10-fold what it is today. tldr: its possible, just not worth it.
- dcow 5y agoHa, yeah technically you can grind the chain too, but it requires unreasonable amounts of resources.
- hutrdvnj 5y agoBut it's interesting, because it sets an upper limit for the gold price.
- reginold 5y agoYes very interesting. Gold was originally formed within supernovae, which is a sure sign that our planet is formed from molecules that have been through at least one or two supernovae already. Another fund gold fact, the reason gold appears in "veins" is that it's actually big blobs, but over time water runs through the blob, dragging along little bits of dust with it down the same channel. Those little bits of dust build up and become veins of gold.
- bradwood 5y agoYou can't print bitcoin, but you can mine more gold.
- jernejzen 5y agoHello world from the first world
- hartator 5y agoThe main issue in third world countries is always corruption.
- jernejzen 5y agoso 95% people in 3rd world countries are corrupted?
- hartator 5y ago100% lives in a corrupt state, mafia, or militia.
- voakbasda 5y agoCorruption is a huge first world issue too.
- Ensorceled 5y agoIn the first world, it's always called a "lapse in judgment" ...
- Tarsul 5y agoin UK politics it's called "sleaze" but that's a fair bit better than "lobbyism" in the US.
- duxup 5y agoBitcoin is a great lesson on why things are the way they are. It’s not just evil banker man rules, there’s reasons.
- azth 5y agoIt's both. You need some regulation, but only moral ones.
- dcow 5y agoYes but there’s also real value in developing better technology and encoding transparency and accountability into our financial and social systems. Evil banker men and corrupt authorities do exist and people rightfully want to rebalance the power distribution to mitigate the damage manipulative people can do.
- acdha 5y agoThe question is whether any of the cryptocurrency companies are actually able to deliver that. Traditional MLMs always claimed to be doing something noble like being healthier or democratizing real-estate, too, and the cryptocurrency pitches notably revolve around people selling things which they know cannot solve the stated problem but promise that they’ll figure out how to built a viable system after you buy in and make them rich first.
- throwaway248329 5y ago99% of all crypto companies are scams looking pump the price and sell their premine. Bitcoin is the only crypto that matters.
- wmf 5y agoThe banks are the ones getting hacked.
- dcow 5y agoYeah I’m including crypto banks in the set of things that need regulating. People rob banks, for sure. There should probably be op-sec regulations and e.g. on-chain multi-sig requirements for transactions out of the bank accounts and ability to revoke etc. Bank rolls up its L2 day-to-day into a smart contract address type of stuff.
- dvt 5y ago> It’s insane to think that people are ever going to be competent and experienced enough to run their own bank. It's also insane to think people are competent enough to vote (this was a real argument in the 1700s), and yet here we are. Also insane to think they're competent enough to use guns, or drive cars, or whatever. I think that, throughout human history, the pattern here is that we'd rather prefer the tyranny of the masses as opposed to the tyranny of the aristocracy. That's why I think crypto is here to stay. It will be pseudo-regulated, but if DraftKings and Eaze/WeedMaps is any indication (who would've thought, just 15 years ago, that sports betting or marijuana would be legal in most US states?), people will have access to these risky financial instruments.
- echelon 5y agoThis libertarian argument is somewhat disingenuous. It hides the fact that the whales stand to benefit tremendously. The peons will still be peons. You're asking for us to vote you into power, and so far all of the evidence says this is a bad thing. Power consumption, no restitution for hacks, pump and dump driving insane swings and pyramid scheme behavior, the emergence of ransomware, NFT artificial scarcity. KYC and AML are good. Regulations are good. The cowboy wild west without these protections is a nightmare that will lead to increased lawlessness, hacks, and thefts that will harm the poorest among us. I don't want the thought leaders in crypto being in charge. They've already shown what bad stewards they are by downplaying all of these points and continuing to ignore the problems. They're focusing on what they can gain rather than what others are losing.
- dvt 5y ago> This libertarian argument is somewhat disingenuous. I'm not really making any argument; in fact, I'm probably leaning towards the "philosopher king" ideal rather than the masses running the show (I mean, just look at how much of a societal disaster social media has been), but it seems to be where we're headed.
- cultofmetatron 5y ago> It's also insane to think people are competent enough to vote The last five years have made me seriously start reconsidering this premise
- rglullis 5y ago> It’s insane to think that people are ever going to be competent and experienced enough to run their own bank. Not what happened here. A centralized exchange is the exact opposite of "running your own bank". > Society needs banks and regulations. Agreed about the principle, but I can bet we disagree about the scale. A lot of the problems in the past financial crisis are due to banks being "too big to fail" and regulatory capture that makes it basically impossible for small-scale banks to be sustainable. Open Banking and the fintechs that are cropping up are all based on the same idea of "winner-takes-all" dynamics that has been the bane of Big Tech. > Crypto anarchy is a farce; don’t fall for it. You are absolutely right. Just like goldbugs, there is this special type of crypto enthusiast that believes that their "money" will be of any use in an apocalyptic world, and simply forget that a world with failed institutions they will probably not even have internet, and even if they did they will lose pretty quickly to rubber-hose "hackers" than anything. But crypto can be used as a hedge for the many dysfunctional institutions that we have today, and it can be a response to this hyper-globalized world that we live in. It's barely a paragraph on my description of Hub20 [0], but one of the reasons that I am working on it is that I hope that it can be used as a community-oriented bank, where each group of people can define how to operate it and how to manage the funds. I hope to make it something that can be a middle ground between the "welcome to the jungle" and the "resistance is futile" mindsets that seem to polarize the crypto-debate. [0] https://hub20.io/about https://hub20.io/about
- birdyrooster 5y agoMore than a hedge against dysfunctional institutions, it hastens the downfall of those institutions by removing their leverage. Imagine if the US government had to collect more taxes and police the blockchains to enforce it instead of just printing money, it would push them to the brink. Grab your popcorn. Crypto is a self fulfilling prophecy of government failure.
- reginold 5y agoHmm curious to hear more about this, do you have any examples?
- pictur 5y agoAbsolutely I agree. People will always be stupid and stupid.
- p2p_astroturf 5y agoUh no, this is (one reason) why you want to use a (well written) decentralized exchange. >is like giving people ACH access I use ACH, I know nothing about it, and I'm sure I can lose all my money from using it wrong, as banks love systems that are impossible to operate securely. I don't have this problem with bitcoin, and never will. As for the tech side, you know nothing. The bugs are simply because of the demographics behind decentralized tech: - Before snowden: script kiddies, slightly educated hobbyists - After snowden: all kinds of idiots > Crypto Anarchy is a farce Your post is a farce. Wanting basic control over your own money (and removing horrible bank insecurity and UX as a side effect) is not anarchy or anything remotely resembling it. Your post only sounds reasonable from the perspective of $current_world which is basically hyperstatist, people are literally afraid to have sex and cross the street without government approval.
- ben_jones 5y agoWhat are some examples of well-written decentralized exchanges?
- rglullis 5y agoUniswap (v2) has simple contracts, has been audited multiple times, holds billions of USD and it has not faced any kind of systemic attack. The only issue that I can think of is that pools with low liquidity can suffer from front-running. Even the fees are not a "problem", if you consider that there are already roll ups (loopring, zkswap) that run pretty much the same version of those contracts and cost fractions of a penny.
- reginold 5y agoCurious to hear more about this as well. How is Uniswap?
- diveanon 5y agoUniswap, pancakeswap, 1inch, apeswap, sushiswap, traderjoes, Crono, quickswap, paraswap and those are just off the top of my head. All of these projects have hundreds of million to billions in tvl and have been running fine for years. Dexes are the backbone of the defi community and share very little in common with centralized exchanges.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- controlweather 5y agoThis guys butt hurt because he’s a bank retail employee with no ability to see where the world is heading next. You’re an idiot!
- anonnyj 5y agoI like the option to be my own bank. It's a little insane for everyone to just hand all power over to The Citadel just because it's easier.
- dcow 5y agoAnd that’s what’s cool. You can participate at L1 if you want, but transactions will be expensive and you’ll be responsible for your own security guards. If you want to handle others’ money though, then there should be some standards.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]