3 ms·
There's a lot talk about what blockchains could be but most of the time this is just people lying to themselves or others about getting rich. It's the FOMO from
by jmyeet 4y ago
There's a lot talk about what blockchains could be but most of the time this is just people lying to themselves or others about getting rich. It's the FOMO from Bitcoin. It's somehow picking the next Bitcoin from the 30,000 shitcoins.
Algorithmic stablecoins have shown their obvious weaknesses in recent times and is another application that doesn't deliver.
But here's the nail in the coffin for me when it comes to blockchains: the government could shut down any blockchain, including Bitcoin, tomorrow if it chose to.
The US could make mining Bitcoin illegal and make it illegal for any financial institution who wants access to the US financial system to transact with cryptocurrencies. Will that shut down the network? Not technically, no. But it will make any such network basically useless.
The US government exercises this power all the time. It's why most cannabis dispensaries and growers are forced to deal with cash because they're excluded from the banking system.
China shut down crypto mining and it basically disappeared the next day (mostly moving to Kazakhstan it seems). With rising energy costs in the developed world (including the disruption to natural gas supply in Europe thanks to Russia's invasion of Ukraine), at some point hte fact tha Bitcoin uses more power than Sweden is going to be an political issue.
The US dollar is maintained by the long dick of the US government. A currency is a projection of government power. And no crypto network is a match for the projection of power of nation states.
- RichEO 4y agoI think we need a word to replace FOMO for these purposes. Perhaps one already exists? It strikes me that it’s not so much the fear of a potential new missed opportunity driving the tulip mania, but the retroactive regret of having missed the (10,000x) opportunity that bitcoin specifically represented. I suspect labelling it might have some persuasive/deflating power. Bitcoin regret? ROMO?
- whatisweb3 4y agoI like how your comment points out cannabis. > The US government exercises this power all the time. It's why most cannabis dispensaries and growers are forced to deal with cash because they're excluded from the banking system. The US tried to ban the use of cannabis. The result was not that cannabis stopped being used or that it significantly reduced the levels of cannabis use - instead, recreational cannabis users and those with legitimate reasons for using it were forced into more dangerous black market activity, and often criminalized and put behind bars. Millions of dollars of state funding was spent exercising this drug war, which most people now see as a colossal failure, and finally some states are decriminalizing and legalizing cannabis use so long as it falls within government regulations. No single country can do much to take the network offline by banning mining. If all countries in unison decided to criminalize mining and enact a PoW-war, and were successful the blanket removal of PoW mining, then maybe the network would suffer to remain online, and users would be forced to migrate to more resilient consensus mechanisms like Proof of Stake.