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The most powerful people in crypto
- fumblebee 5y agohttps://outline.com/rSHaFm https://outline.com/rSHaFm
- formerly_proven 5y agodjb?
- alasdair_ 5y agoI'd hoped to see Phil Zimmerman on the list, but apparently they are talking about cryptocurrency, not cryptography. Get off my lawn!
- timdaub 5y ago"crypto means cryptography" is reactionary.
- selfhoster11 5y agoSo? Overloading the term "crypto" with another, closely related meaning is wrong, and there is nothing wrong with resisting that change.
- zarzavat 5y agoYou might as well be shouting at the sky. "Crypto" only means cryptography in technical circles. The average person speaking colloquial English does not know or need that abbreviation. Whereas the average person buying cryptocurrency does need an abbreviation for cryptocurrency and since "crypto" is vacant for them the abbreviation is made.
- Karellen 5y ago> "Crypto" only means cryptography in technical circles. Where do you think you are, dude?
- xboxnolifes 5y agoA link aggregating site featuring an article not from a technical circle.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- formerly_proven 5y agoSays the cryptocurrency advocate.
- timdaub 5y agoAm I? Anyways, the definition of "reactionary" is to hold onto an outdated believe or assumption. Crypto means cryptocurrencies these days. I was just stating the obvious.
- asimpletune 5y agoOk, but I think it was well stated above that really context just matters.
- timdaub 5y agoThe context is that the economist wrote a piece on "most powerful people in crypto", so isn't it a bit weird that people assume these people to be cryptographers? Economist, crypto?
- asimpletune 5y agoYeah you're right, that was the original context, but then in this thread people also changed the context and were talking about the word crypto in general. It's not super controversial, and as was mentioned somewhere above no one really gets confused when we're talking about cryptography or when we're talking about cryptocurrency - or for that matter when we're talking about the golang crypto package. So, let me just say, I'm not trying to weirdly argue with by saying you're right, and still the word can be overloaded. Idk language is weird. Haha in 20 years maybe crypto will be abject failure and it'll become synonymous with pumping and dumping, like "pyramid" scheme, or maybe it'll be a huge success the likes of which no one has ever seen and will be used in that way in certain contexts.
- formerly_proven 5y agoReactionary is a political label first and foremost and using it in this context tries to equate not-cryptocurrency-advocates to political reactionaries at large. Also, you've contributed to various cryptocurrency repositories, so trying to claim you're not some kind of cryptocurrency advocate/shill/memer or invested in it (pick whichever you like best) might take some convincing.
- Andrew_nenakhov 5y agoThis war was fought and cryptocurrencies decisively won the "crypto" moniker.
- kriops 5y agoNot really? Context matters and all that. I have yet to encounter someone mistaking crypto[graphy] for crypto[currency] or the other way around. It’s just that finance is more relevant than encryption in most conversations where the participants are mostly unfamiliar both fields.
- Andrew_nenakhov 5y agoI mean, just enter 'crypto' in your search engine of choice, and check the cryptocurrency/cryptography ratio in the results. This ratio closely resembles what I hear about whenever I hear the term, and I actually have a cryptography function in my company's product. For regular people the ratio will be even more extreme.
- junon 5y agoErr, not really, no.
- Andrew_nenakhov 5y agoYou are denying the reality. I would prefer for it to mean cryptography, but this ship has sailed, and we have to accept it.
- junon 5y agoNo we don't, why do we "have to" accept it?
- raesene9 5y agoThey're missing some names there. An article about the most powerful people in crypto(currency) and they don't mention Bitfinex/Tether at all?
- sillysaurusx 5y agoIsn't tether going to implode pretty much any year now? I'm relatively uninformed, but people keep saying they're playing with fire. Animats did a nice breakdown of this within the last several months. (Boy, corona time is weird.)
- asimpletune 5y agoBased on the amount of downvotes that you received, I would say, yes, you're right.
- emteycz 5y agoI am hearing that for years now. Do people really still believe it?
- paulgb 5y agoYes. Tether skeptics have already been right a few times: the Bitfinex connection (which was denied until it came out in the paradise papers), not being directly dollar-backed, being under-collatoralized for at least a period of time (per the NYAG investigation). Do people suddenly believe they’ve gotten honest, even though nobody in the commercial paper market they are supposedly a big player in have heard of them?
- cblconfederate 5y agoThe article is right that as of now , exchanges are casinos. You can easily pump up coins with a few orders and watch if the rest of the herd will bite. There's not much use of them otherwise. Ironically, Coinbase is basically a child of US protectionism that keeps other exchanges away. At some point we must realize that exchanges are the problem, because they centralize activity and become a target for hacking, regulation and centralization. The article is right, that these exchanges have the power, since they are the gatekeepers. But i somehow think that that tech will be over time embedded in desktops and phones, we won't need exchanges.
- WJW 5y ago> we must realize that exchanges are the problem The problem for whom though? Clearly not the problem for the exchanges themselves, owning a busy exchange brings huge amounts of money and power (just look at the coinbase IPO). It's also not a problem for their users, who clearly indicate by their behavior that they prefer to store their coins in exchanges over having to store everything themselves. It's not a problem for the miners and protocol devs either, they don't care either way. And finally any governments are more likely to prefer exchanges over individual holders because it gives them a single point of contact. So, everyone with any power prefers exchanges. The only people who don't are those with no means to move users away from the exchanges.
- cblconfederate 5y agoProblem for the users. Exchanges are convenient in the same sense that FB or twitter is convenient. The point of decentralized finance is not to re-centralize finance or else it will have reinvented a slower wheel. As always with tech , you get what you incentivize. If we are incentivizing users to lock themselves inside new walled gardens called "exchange" then we actively promoting evil.
- WJW 5y agoWell you phrase it as "we are incentivizing" but I'm certainly not on the dev team for any crypto (or exchange for that matter). How could you incentivize those dev teams to make exchanges undesirable for the average user? I think it would be very hard, because a dev would benefit most from mass adoption of "their" coin and mass adoption is currently only possible through exchanges. Self-hosting is either too difficult or too dangerous for most would-be users. In any case you state it as a fact that users should want to give up convenience for independence, but simply by observing their behavior we can conclude that most users don't give a shit about anything except convenience (perhaps because they are already so wrapped up in whatever society they live in that independence is not really possible anyway). Until you manage to change that, persuading users to give up convenience for a higher cost and higher complexity solution is always going to be an extremely uphill battle.
- magma1983 5y agoSatoshi Vitalik Winklevoss CZ
- instakill 5y agoAnyone have the list in TLDR bulletpoint form?
- ryanmercer 5y ago- Sam Bankman-Fried of FTX - Changpeng Zhao of Binance - Arthur Hayes of Bit mex - Brian Armstrong of Coinbase
- 1cvmask 5y agoAnd Balaji is missing.
- rwmj 5y ago> CZ predicts 80% of people will accept crypto payments within five to ten years. That's a very specific prediction. I'm going to predict that this will not happen. In fact if it's 1% I would be surprised. The reasons are that the systems simply couldn't support such a transaction rate, and it's far too volatile to be used a currency. (And anyway how many businesses accept gold as payment? Approximately none)
- anonymoushn 5y agoWe have public blockchains deployed today that can do tens of thousands of transactions per second, and those transactions can be for tokenized fiat currency.
- emteycz 5y agoOne would assume that Visa (yes they already announced support of crypto) etc transactions would be off-chain, so network transaction rate isn't that important.
- ciupicri 5y agoThen they wouldn't be quite cryptocurrency transactions.
- charbuff 5y agoYou'll be surprised to know that a cryptocurrency transaction is a record on a ledger of a transfer of some value. Whether it happens "off-chain" or not does not discount it being a crypto-currency transaction. What the poster above is referring to are "level 2" solutions, for example [1] the Lightning Network for Bitcoin. In short, the crypto is being transacted on one network, then that record is finalized along with others on the Bitcoin ledger. [1]: https://cointelegraph.com/bitcoin-for-beginners/what-is-the-lightning-network-in-bitcoin-and-how-does-it-work https://cointelegraph.com/bitcoin-for-beginners/what-is-the-...
- emteycz 5y agoDid I pay with crypto? Did someone receive crypto? Then it's a crypto transaction.
- junon 5y ago
- fumblebee 5y agoThe relentless march of language. Back in my day, TikTok was just the sound a clock made. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_change https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_change
- Jleagle 5y agoWords can be associated with multiple topics. The most popular of them no longer being cryptography unfortunately.
- moffkalast 5y agoCryptocurrency is cryptography based currency though, so the term does make sense.
- dav_Oz 5y agoA lot of energy and effort is put in playing the game of "guessing" how much a given "currency" is worth to others who are also guessing ... etc. Strategies range from ... fancy analytical methods finding intricate patterns in order to try to capitalize from inevitable regularities by magnifiying fluctuations on a short time scale and maximizing frequency ... to mining, staking ... to simply HODL. Not to mention the f*ery on top and in between trying to profit from common "strageties" by pumping, hyping, dumping, inducing FUD ... finally knighted by tweets of centibillionaires. Every "currency" afaik (which is transparent of course) is a disaster in terms of wealth distribution. It is not a trivial issue to solve and some inequality is healthy and desirable but for me it still remains the big elephant in the room nearly everybody invested in the "crypto space" - understandbly so - glosses over some to the point of simply equating technologically decentralized = sociologically decentralized eg DeFi. Another example to better illustrate my point: The game "monopoly" was meant to be educative and enlighting on the destructive centralizations at the beginning of the 20th century but the board game was enjoyed so much that its "purpose" is now a long forgotten remnant. I kind of feel the same when looking back at the original paper "A peer to peer electronic cash system" published in the wake of the "banking crisis". The game of betting on the right coin to attain "LAMBO" (the "Hotel" in Monopoly-Lingo) is enjoyed so much that it ends to be ironically - beside all honorable intentions - the driving force.
- neonate 5y agohttps://archive.md/Z5Tkp https://archive.md/Z5Tkp