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That's the underlying payment network, but a whole "industry" of institutions have grown on top of it. Those can be regulated.

lazide 4y ago
Sure. The problem I’ve seen is there is zero value add (and significant costs and value loss) when that happens over a normal bank.
- iskander 4y ago
  Like, theoretical value add? Composable open source finance seems like a cool idea. Practical value add? Less clear. On-chain comes with "contract risk", off-chain is more or less unregulated and comes with these FTX-like collapse risks.
  - lazide 4y ago
    IMO, Cool is ‘value add’ in that it makes it easier to part naive investors or customers from their cash, not in value add in the way that actually makes something hard easier and more efficient, or enables some new high value thing that was previously impossible.
    - iskander 4y ago
      I mean it obviously enables things previously not possible: open experimentation with financial primitives which results in new ideas like automatic market makers. Nothing within the traditional financial world allows you, as a random tinkerer, to create algorithms for exchanging between pairs of assets along a curve defined by the relative amounts of reserves for each asset. However, whether this freedom to tinker and invent new primitives is worth all the extra risk from people trying to "invest" in this stuff, way less clear. Especially when the freedom is most often used to recreate traditional flavors of financial fraud dressed up as new technology. There needs to be some conceptual separation between the actual on-chain technology (used by a very smaller minority of people with some kind of financial stake in crypto) vs. buying tokens/coins off-chain. At the very least marketing and promotion of buying made-up crypto tokens should be illegal and probably every off-chain entity related to crypto should be heavily regulated to avoid using the cover of "new technology" to perpetuate scams.

lazide 4y ago

Sure. The problem I’ve seen is there is zero value add (and significant costs and value loss) when that happens over a normal bank.

iskander 4y ago
Like, theoretical value add? Composable open source finance seems like a cool idea. Practical value add? Less clear. On-chain comes with "contract risk", off-chain is more or less unregulated and comes with these FTX-like collapse risks.
- lazide 4y ago
  IMO, Cool is ‘value add’ in that it makes it easier to part naive investors or customers from their cash, not in value add in the way that actually makes something hard easier and more efficient, or enables some new high value thing that was previously impossible.
  - iskander 4y ago
    I mean it obviously enables things previously not possible: open experimentation with financial primitives which results in new ideas like automatic market makers. Nothing within the traditional financial world allows you, as a random tinkerer, to create algorithms for exchanging between pairs of assets along a curve defined by the relative amounts of reserves for each asset. However, whether this freedom to tinker and invent new primitives is worth all the extra risk from people trying to "invest" in this stuff, way less clear. Especially when the freedom is most often used to recreate traditional flavors of financial fraud dressed up as new technology. There needs to be some conceptual separation between the actual on-chain technology (used by a very smaller minority of people with some kind of financial stake in crypto) vs. buying tokens/coins off-chain. At the very least marketing and promotion of buying made-up crypto tokens should be illegal and probably every off-chain entity related to crypto should be heavily regulated to avoid using the cover of "new technology" to perpetuate scams.