4 ms·

Your mistake is thinking blockchains are a service. They aren't, they're protocols for building things on, like tcp/ip. It happens to be that a decentralized pu

Your mistake is thinking blockchains are a service. They aren't, they're protocols for building things on, like tcp/ip. It happens to be that a decentralized public ledger is the highest value use for it at the moment. What you're also missing out is on how the current monetary system and monetary base work, and why central banking is problematic. You've lost probably more than 10% of your own buying power over the last year at no fault of your own, and you never questioned it. The housing market is now impossible for average people to enter (especially in cities), as easy, low interest money has inflated home values and the house price to income ratio has gone steadily up and to the right. These are signals of broken money; this is what blockchains are looking to solve.

Centigonal 4y ago
> You've lost probably more than 10% of your own buying power over the last year at no fault of your own, and you never questioned it. The housing market is now impossible for average people to enter (especially in cities), as easy, low interest money has inflated home values and the house price to income ratio has gone steadily up and to the right. These are real pain points, and part of why I was very excited about crypto circa 2017-2018. It's been five years now, and the builders in the web3 community seem to have stagnated on this, taking a wide tangent into digital art, online clout, and ponzi schemes. The currencies themselves are limited on transaction throughput and trade like traditional risk assets, level 2 networks haven't lived up to their initial hype, and we have come to find that decentralized, immutable currencies are problematic to work with in many situations. From my viewpoint, it doesn't look like crypto's going to break us out of the local maximum that is central banking/MMT
- scottiebarnes 4y ago
  > the builders in the web3 community seem to have stagnated on this From my perspective, there is no "web3" community. The consequence of easy money is you get a lot of bad products that inevitably fail. This is not limited to crypto, this is the tech industry in general (social networking, big data, social commerce, location based social, etc.). Groupon, Google Wave, Foursquare, delivery service X, etc, they come and go. So I don't put much stock into the hype, there will always be fads and trends. > level 2 networks haven't lived up to their initial hype https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-capacity https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-capacity Lightning capacity is up and to the right: this is people running nodes, risking their money on beta software. Nodes are up, channels are up. Will this be it? Who knows. I'm a patient person, laying a railway cross country takes time.
- Comevius 4y ago
  This so much. Those are indeed massive pain points, but the solution to them turned out to be a lie.
- mattdesl 4y ago
  > level 2 networks haven't lived up to their initial hype Have you tried any recent ones? zkSync, Optimism, Aztec. Although they are still a work in progress; see EIP 4844 and zkEVM. Check back in a year or two if you want to avoid beta-testing and have something that meets the hype.
exelib 4y ago
> What you're also missing out is on how the current monetary system and monetary base work, and why central banking is problematic. And why central banking is problematic? > You've lost probably more than 10% of your own buying power over the last year at no fault of your own, and you never questioned it. And how the blockchain resolves this issue? > this is what blockchains are looking to solve. ... how?
- scottiebarnes 4y ago
  This is going to require some education about the history of money of which I'm not an expert, but here goes. The process of any "thing" organically becoming money looks like the following: 1) Collectable 2) Store of value 3) Medium of exchange 4) Unit of account Gold followed this path over 8000 years as it emerged as the strongest money through international trade. Societies in many places used different kinds of money at different points in times: feathers, gems, giant immovable boulders, etc. But those monies were always displaced by technology, when they could be collected or mined faster or more efficiently, resulting in debasement. Gold was the best store of value because it could not be rapidly debased; its scarcity allows it to only inflate by a few percent a year, and it maintains a pretty constant stock-to-flow ratio. And so being common enough to be popular, but rare enough to be difficult to obtain, gold became the world's "money". Ironically central banks still hoard gold, with the US having the largest storehold in the world. However the US and world powers would terminate the gold standard, unpegging dollars to redeemable gold, allowing for government control over the creation, distribution, and management of money. Historically, ancient fiats have failed, and I suspect with a long enough time horizon, 100% of all fiat currencies will fail. But we now run an experiment in which the ability to grow unlimited debt is a "feature", where central banks determine the cost of money for society, where the creation of new money or its policies is easy, and decided by a few. Bitcoin is a decentralized, censorship resistant, permissionless network. It acts a ledger, a way of keeping track of nominal value in a way where anyone can participate (send/receive, create addresses) from anywhere in the world. It is open source programmable money. Compared to gold, it is magnitudes cheaper to transmit, store, and secure. The protocols are defined and transparent which makes its creation rate predictable. The supply is finite, and so it cannot be easily debased, making it a powerful store of value.

Centigonal 4y ago

> You've lost probably more than 10% of your own buying power over the last year at no fault of your own, and you never questioned it. The housing market is now impossible for average people to enter (especially in cities), as easy, low interest money has inflated home values and the house price to income ratio has gone steadily up and to the right. These are real pain points, and part of why I was very excited about crypto circa 2017-2018. It's been five years now, and the builders in the web3 community seem to have stagnated on this, taking a wide tangent into digital art, online clout, and ponzi schemes. The currencies themselves are limited on transaction throughput and trade like traditional risk assets, level 2 networks haven't lived up to their initial hype, and we have come to find that decentralized, immutable currencies are problematic to work with in many situations. From my viewpoint, it doesn't look like crypto's going to break us out of the local maximum that is central banking/MMT

scottiebarnes 4y ago
> the builders in the web3 community seem to have stagnated on this From my perspective, there is no "web3" community. The consequence of easy money is you get a lot of bad products that inevitably fail. This is not limited to crypto, this is the tech industry in general (social networking, big data, social commerce, location based social, etc.). Groupon, Google Wave, Foursquare, delivery service X, etc, they come and go. So I don't put much stock into the hype, there will always be fads and trends. > level 2 networks haven't lived up to their initial hype https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-capacity https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-capacity Lightning capacity is up and to the right: this is people running nodes, risking their money on beta software. Nodes are up, channels are up. Will this be it? Who knows. I'm a patient person, laying a railway cross country takes time.
Comevius 4y ago
This so much. Those are indeed massive pain points, but the solution to them turned out to be a lie.
mattdesl 4y ago
> level 2 networks haven't lived up to their initial hype Have you tried any recent ones? zkSync, Optimism, Aztec. Although they are still a work in progress; see EIP 4844 and zkEVM. Check back in a year or two if you want to avoid beta-testing and have something that meets the hype.

exelib 4y ago

> What you're also missing out is on how the current monetary system and monetary base work, and why central banking is problematic. And why central banking is problematic? > You've lost probably more than 10% of your own buying power over the last year at no fault of your own, and you never questioned it. And how the blockchain resolves this issue? > this is what blockchains are looking to solve. ... how?

scottiebarnes 4y ago
This is going to require some education about the history of money of which I'm not an expert, but here goes. The process of any "thing" organically becoming money looks like the following: 1) Collectable 2) Store of value 3) Medium of exchange 4) Unit of account Gold followed this path over 8000 years as it emerged as the strongest money through international trade. Societies in many places used different kinds of money at different points in times: feathers, gems, giant immovable boulders, etc. But those monies were always displaced by technology, when they could be collected or mined faster or more efficiently, resulting in debasement. Gold was the best store of value because it could not be rapidly debased; its scarcity allows it to only inflate by a few percent a year, and it maintains a pretty constant stock-to-flow ratio. And so being common enough to be popular, but rare enough to be difficult to obtain, gold became the world's "money". Ironically central banks still hoard gold, with the US having the largest storehold in the world. However the US and world powers would terminate the gold standard, unpegging dollars to redeemable gold, allowing for government control over the creation, distribution, and management of money. Historically, ancient fiats have failed, and I suspect with a long enough time horizon, 100% of all fiat currencies will fail. But we now run an experiment in which the ability to grow unlimited debt is a "feature", where central banks determine the cost of money for society, where the creation of new money or its policies is easy, and decided by a few. Bitcoin is a decentralized, censorship resistant, permissionless network. It acts a ledger, a way of keeping track of nominal value in a way where anyone can participate (send/receive, create addresses) from anywhere in the world. It is open source programmable money. Compared to gold, it is magnitudes cheaper to transmit, store, and secure. The protocols are defined and transparent which makes its creation rate predictable. The supply is finite, and so it cannot be easily debased, making it a powerful store of value.