8 ms·

> We are entering a new age, the current iteration will become the badlands, where unknown wallets lurk in the shadows, we will see the rise of a new blockchain

• Dzugaru 5y ago
  I bought some crypto for the first time recently. Because Mastercard and Visa don't work for me anymore - I can't pay for services outside my country of residence, and maybe there is some obscure way to do it not touching crypto, but I chose to get some Bitcoin because that was relatively easy.
  • neoromantique 5y ago
    So, illegally overcoming sanctions. That's literally the problem
    • jrsj 5y ago
      Only a problem if you’re a fan of U.S. imperialism.
      • neoromantique 5y ago
        Нет, но я понимаю что сейчас есть большее зло. I'd much rather have some regulation than no regulation at all. It doesn't have to be one of the extremes.
    • CTDOCodebases 5y ago
      It's not overcoming sanctions if you are not a sanctioned individual.
      • aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA 5y ago
        Or the counterparty.
    • twirlock 5y ago
• edem 5y ago
  You obviously have no idea what blockchain tech is about.
• nodemaker 5y ago
  What do people do with their money when central banks only offers 0.03 percent interest while inflation is 9 percent. They can convert their money to a crypto stablecoin and get upto 20 percent yield.
  • dd36 5y ago
    How are they getting a 20% yield and at what risk?
    • nicoburns 5y ago
      Because it's a pyramid scheme
    • the_snooze 5y ago
      Those are literally Bernie Madoff returns.
    • CTDOCodebases 5y ago
      My guess would be they are staking UST (stable coin) on Anchor Protocol. The staked funds are lent to traders. Thats how they can promise such high returns since 20% a year is only 0.055% per day. Traders will typically trade positions with a risk to reward ration of 1:1.5 or higher. These fees are negligible at this point for a position that will take a few hours or days to close. This is how you can trade with leverage on exchanges. Risks are protocol exploit or depegging of the staked coin.
      • dd36 5y ago
        Trading what? IB lends leverage at like 2%. 20% implies a ton of risk compared to what’s available.
      • nodemaker 5y ago
        Right answer. (There are some other new interesting protocols on the horizon too MARS, PRISM)
• ogogmad 5y ago
  Agreed. I think whatever small value crypto provides is outweighed by how slow and expensive it is. It's a nice technology, but I think it left the lab too soon. Its multitrillion dollar valuation is pure speculation (sometimes called HODLing by its acolytes). It's virtually impossible that it will maintain this valuation, and most investors will make a loss.
• DebtDeflation 5y ago
  >(Public, permissionless) blockchain will never be a mainstream technology. Right, but neither will private permissioned blockchain. For every single use case I've seen thus far, there is no good response to the "why not just use a database instead?" question.
  • atq2119 5y ago
    If you squint hard enough, Git is kind of a permissioned blockchain. So, I wouldn't dismiss the possibility completely. But yeah, it's difficult to see it becoming mainstream. Git certainly isn't mainstream.
    • ogogmad 5y ago
      This stretches the meaning of the word blockchain past breaking point.
  • seaourfreed 5y ago
    The Establishment / Wall Street abuse is what caused the massive effort behind Crypto (open source, open ledger, etc.) * Why not use a database. Because that means the Establishment/WallStreet are the only ones with full control. * Banks / WallStreet / Establishment long-term abuse is what created the mandate. The crypto industry is the equivalent to people taking to the streets to fix the problems. * Open ledger fixes Bank / Wall Street / Establishment long-term above. * Open source code prevents rigged economy theft by wall street. High Frequency, Front running, Data centers for front running, distance between exchanges for front running purposes. * The article author is saying "Give the few establishment players full control. Data base. Ledger. Code. Block innovation. Block competition." * Competition is the fix. 1inch.io takes in trades. It routes to the best exchanges with the smallest: Fees, margin spreads, order book fraud, etc. The fix is many 1inch.io to send trades to, that finds the lowest fee, most ethical set of exchanges. So orders are carried out ideally. Free market, competiton, not blocking new competitors, transparency (ledger + code + order book + etc.) is the fix
• mritchie712 5y ago
  How would you send someone in China (or Nigeria, Peru, ...) money? If they had an ethereum address and you already had a wallet yourself, it's crazy easy. Setting up and funding a wallet is currently a little tricky, but not as hard as some like to make it seem.
  • cool_dude85 5y ago
    You've described how to send someone in China, Nigeria, or Peru etheriums, but not how to send them money. It turns out when there are capital controls, taxes, laws against crypto, etc., the two are not quite the same.
  • Ekaros 5y ago
    Three steps, first you buying intermediate currency, then transfering that, and then them selling it for their own. First and second are mostly solved, but is there sufficient for third? And what are the conversion costs or fees in each of these? And what are the market fluctuations?
    • mritchie712 5y ago
      Sure, there are issues, but the question remains, how would you send money to someone in China? I'm seriously asking. I don't know a simpler way then crypto.
      • mminer237 5y ago
        I believe Alipay would be the easiest for that.
  • atq2119 5y ago
    Other countries do have banks, and international money transfers are a solved problem. I have personal experience with sending money from Europe to Latin American countries. It generally works just fine. I assume Venezuela and at times Argentina may be exceptions due to their political situation, and yeah, for those cryptocurrency may be useful, as an instance of the general rule that cryptocurrency is mostly useful to route around laws and regulations. In principle, cryptocurrency could act as competition to drive the price of transfers down (which would be awesome), but in practice and at the scale I was looking at, there was no price advantage, and the convenience advantage was clearly with the traditional banking system.
• darioush 5y ago
  What is insisting that Blockchain does nothing useful? It provides the following features which everyday financial institutions do not: - 24/7 operation. Did you ever try to start a transfer on the weekend? - Near instant results. No more waiting several business days to get your own money. - Transactions will not trigger "account reviews", potentially locking you out from accessing your funds for an indefinite time, since you were traveling or otherwise spending your money in a way you usually don't. - Transparency on what data is retained about you and who it is sold to. - Authentication with cryptographic signature not SMS All modern Blockchains will do the above without sending you paper mail or requiring you to update your income and address all the time.
  • 01100011 5y ago
    None of that requires a blockchain. Blockchain provides no advantage for any of those features over a centralized authority.
    • datadata 5y ago
      Can you provide an example of a centralized authority providing a service with these features that is widely adopted? Because there are blockchains that provide these features currently, and central authority finance has had a lot more time to figure things out.
  • danbulant 5y ago
    yes. And then you copy paste the wrong account number or amount, and you're screwed as transactions are irreversible, and there's no central authority which can revert that. Oh and money laundering
    • KomradeKeeks 5y ago
      Tell me you've never used Zelle in the US or a bank wire without telling me you've never used Zelle in the US or a bank wire.
    • darioush 5y ago
• y3sh 5y ago
  ^^^ for your user class, probably true. But for others, it is deeply needed. The two mainstream use cases I see are transferring money where a fiat bank was too problematic (fees, limits, audits, etc) and purchasing items with the perception of anonymity (e.g. an incognito subscription with a coingate payment option alongside Visa). It is nice to know there is a way to digitally pay for things without major payment processors running analytics on my spending. And in providing foreign aid, crypto has helped us reliably transfer funds without corrupt intervention. Culture ebs and flows, but in this case core user needs are being met by the tech.
  • shafyy 5y ago
    Re transferring money: Do you think transferring money abroad is expensive because of technology? It's not, it's because of regulation, international agreements etc. What do you think will happen when crypto should go maintstream? Do you think it will just stay unregulated? No, we're already seeing countries starting to regulate crypto. And then you'll just end up at square one. Re anonymity: Your every crypto transaction is publicly viewable under your pseudonym. Once somebody connects your pseudodynm, all your anonimity is gone. If you purchase something with Visa, only you, Visa, and the company your purchasing from sees your info. I'd take that each time over a public trail of my purchases.
    • matthewdgreen 5y ago
      > Re transferring money: Do you think transferring money abroad is expensive because of technology? It's not, it's because of regulation, international agreements etc. Yes! And this is artificial and problematic, and cryptocurrency is an inevitable symptom of such an artificial regime. There are a handful of communication functions that people in every society want to avail themselves of: to talk to each other, to read/write and find information, and to transact value for commerce. For the first two applications the Internet has made those functions possible in increasingly powerful and useful ways: we went from 300-baud modems and BBSes to broadband and Twitter. Search and unlimited music catalogs and electronic bookstores are all available in virtually unlimited amounts at 1/100,000th of the 1990 cost on amazing portable devices we carry in our pockets. So you’d expect that the ability to transact value on a computer would also have followed a similar trajectory. But weirdly (and crucially: artificially) it hasn’t. Sending an international wire is better than it was in 1990, but not orders-of-magnitude easier or cheaper like the functions I listed above. Similarly, buying products on retail websites has improved in many ways, but it still involves typing in a 16-digit number off a plastic card (and then insuring that card expensively to guard against fraud.) Sending money to a friend is just barely possible in small amounts recently (thanks to a few services like Venmo etc.) ACH will go from 3-day to 1-day settlement “soon” (has it already happened?) There’s nothing like the visible improvement and IT cost reduction you see in every other electronic product. And the reason you don’t see that improvement is not because the technology makes it impossible, or that sending money cheaply and easily is technically infeasible. The reason you don’t see those improvements is entirely artificial. The technology can exist but has been deliberately held back by cozy business arrangements and government regulation. I will even grant that much of this regulation is well-intentioned. But the thing is, nature abhors a vacuum. The result of trying to artificially stop technical progress is that the technical progress happens anyway (when PCs and p2p gets cheap enough) and then it happens in weird ways that are outside of society’s control. That’s where we are now, and it’s our fault for letting things get here.
• user3939382 5y ago
  The best example I have is the stock exchange. Here's a DTCC discussion from 5 years ago before the whole GME-AMC fiasco https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXy0qbwaqhY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXy0qbwaqhY There's an issue with unaccounted-for shares that is solved perfectly by the blockchain.
• jrsj 5y ago
  Walmart any other major retailers are about to start taking payments via Lightning Network this year. Will be able to pay from cash app or others without explicitly converting from USD. Cheaper and faster than Visa etc.
  • shafyy 5y ago
    I'll believe that when I see it.