17 ms·

You Can Forget About Crypto Now

• EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y ago
  Blaming crypto here is the same as to blame US dollar for Bernie Madoff shenanigans.
• themihai 4y ago
  >> Fried, after all, was supposed to be crypto’s good-guy wunderkind, the pro-regulation prophet who would finally lead crypto into the mainstream. That's rule number one in crypto and the very reason it motivates its existence: You shouldn't trust a 3rd party with your money. Let the "crypto investors" learn this lesson first hand.
  • otikik 4y ago
    Which is also what makes it impossible. Trust is a prerequisite to any commercial exchange, since it requires at least two different parties. Big centralized systems use a third party for “scam protection”. Math alone can’t replace trust.
    • popol12 4y ago
      DEX are working nicely and constantly improving. Today, CEX are only useful for on/off ramp of fiat.
      • ForHackernews 4y ago
        Cool. On the day when you can actually buy real products with cryptocurrency directly, maybe that will matter.
        • Scoundreller 4y ago
          I mean, people definitely have. Even the sketchy product marketplaces are moving toward inevitably decentralized “n of m” payments where the buyer and seller can approve the payment in case the marketplace disappears.
      • themihai 4y ago
        The high fees made DEX impractical
        • pas 4y ago
          there are cheap networks. Solana seems nice (except their developer documentation is so godfuckingly shitful, that I haven't seen anything this bad and I'm doing this shit for 10+ years, and even OpenStack, early Kubernetes and whatnot was easier to understand and better documented).
        • zeroclip 4y ago
          Not on L2.
    • jqpabc123 4y ago
      Who are you gonna trust? Government or a crypto exchange? As you point out, trusting no one is not an option if you want to transact. Right now, trusting government looks like the better option. And crypto has done nothing but provide proof.
      • gonzo41 4y ago
        Always trust a government for money related stuff. Take the USA. The US government doesn't tax much, protects the wealthy and is able to project it's sovereignty all over the world. Billionaires love living and banking in America and don't find the regulatory environment too tough to navigate. Crypto kids love to think that btc and other 'asset' classes are like some prepper version of money. When really nothing beats have a stack of cash in a good bank. Seriously, some generic S&P tracking ETF reinvesting dividends is a better store of wealth than most of the crypto assets. And that whole trustless banking shtick is totally overblown. If you;re going to do business or crime, people are going to want to establish trust first.
        • jqpabc123 4y ago
          The "trustless" aspect of crypto only covered the accounting. Naive people extrapolated this to include the actors exercising inluence over the marketplace without transparency or accountability. And therein lies the basic ingredients for a scam of epic proportions.
• slaw 4y ago
  > despite the ricketiness of the whole system, despite the constant feeling that everything might fall apart at any moment, there will come a time when crypto really arrives. For me crypto was always Ponzi scheme and nothing more, but it is because I don't laundry money or sell drugs, so I am not the target for crypto.
  • albertopv 4y ago
    Where's the value in crypto? What's the purpose? Decentralisation? Democratisation? And then you have to use wallets, exchanges... There's literally no value in crypto currency, but trust. Like plain old money, which is highly regulated, so much more stability to use it in real economy. So why should I use crypto currencies? And which one, given that everyone can create their crypto currency?
    • sho_hn 4y ago
      Crypto is a decade-long exercise in teaching programmers why the mechanism used to update numbers in databases is the boring part of a money system, and why governance, policy-making and physical territory control are relevant. What it really does is highlight inadequacies in education and discourse, and how intransparent "how things really work" (and by extension, what the tough problems are) can be even to intelligent people.
      • jqpabc123 4y ago
        Bottom line: Technology is just a tool and an ineffective substitute for the human aspects of "society". Those who tend to think otherwise may be highly trained but still rather naive, under-educated and operating outside their element --- ideal marks for a good con artist.
    • MangoCoffee 4y ago
      banking started 2000 BCE according to wikipeida https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_banking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_banking FDIC put people at ease about putting their money in bank. banking regulations created over years to protect people's money. crypto bros preach about decentralized. what can go wrong?
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• HebericNewt 4y ago
  I can't imagine this ageing well. It doesn't feel different. The evangelists will hurt and the whole crypto industry is set back, the cynics gloat and revel in the schadenfreude and claim for the 748th time that crypto is dead... Until 12 months later when we do it all over again. It's not the biggest, it's not the first, it won't be the last, it's nowhere near the most catastrophic. At least let the dust settle before making such bold declarations. Any such declaration at this point is more hope than expectation.
  • throwup 4y ago
    Let's add this one to the list. https://buybitcoinworldwide.com/bitcoin-is-dead/ https://buybitcoinworldwide.com/bitcoin-is-dead/
    • Exuma 4y ago
      Wow this is amazing, really goes to show how comical it all is. I could PROBABLY tolerate all these, if the headlines were something like "Bitcoin reaches all time low and new level of people are discouraged. Retail investors should be extra diligent." but... "You can <do some fucking stupid thing that I'm not going to do> now" Feels like its written for someone with the intelligence of a child who doesn't think on their own and needs to be spoon fed what to do. I have no idea how people can stand journalism like this. This goes along with "Why <really bad thing> is actually good." Makes me cringe to the depths of my soul that even a single solitary person would click something like that.
  • LeeroyWasHere 4y ago
    He writes for Coindesk and Decrypt, journalist are hard to take seriously when they're paid by both sides.
    • luciusdomitius 4y ago
      And I thought that journalists could only serve the readers. Apparently, there is a second side too.
    • 4y ago
• pibechorro 4y ago
  Crypto is fine. Its centralized exchanges which are not, its why crypto exists, remove the human element of corruption. Keep your coins off 3rd party exchanges and 99% of this drama disappears.
  • dwater 4y ago
    And 99% of the market and capital as well.
  • luciusdomitius 4y ago
    Well, if I use some altcoin as a savings account, how is keeping custody over it going to save me when the altcoin owner decides to pull the rug? And 2022 has shown that when it comes to Ponzi-schemes, raising interest rates means harvest-time.
    • irusensei 4y ago
      Don’t use altcoins.
      • deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
  • Proven 4y ago
  • TacticalCoder 4y ago
    I think there's room for what looks like legit player like Coinbase, a HN unicorn, in addition to decentralized exchanges. People who want to go into crypto need an on-ramp / off-ramp like Coinbase. Coinbase claims actual people really deposited at least $44 billion USD and that these USD are used to back the USDC stable coin emitted by Coinbase 1:1. But that doesn't tend to be mentioned here. Coinbase's stock rose 20%+ after FTX's scam was exposed. So there are actual people out there thinking that, no, this is not the end of crypto and that Coinbase will actually benefit from the FTX and BlockFi (and hopefully many other) scammers' downfall. I wish tether/iFinex/Bitfinex would die a quick and painful death and Coinbase were to completely replace them. To me there's room for legit centralized players and I sincerely hope Coinbase is one of them and I wish them the best.
• nr2x 4y ago
  I agree, the MtGox collapse is the death of Bitcoin.
• calvinmorrison 4y ago
  Crypto cannot exist in its useful form as a currency while being treated like a security. The regulation has killed the usefulness of bitcoin on purpose
• roenxi 4y ago
  Part of what makes Bitcoin decentralised is that it barely matters who declares it dead; it can keep on chugging away with a different group of miners. Even if the price has been knocked down to the before-times of 2020. Eventually the coin dies, but it isn't going to be because anyone declares it so.
• xch 4y ago
  Goodbye CEX meanwhile Chia Network has launched a new capability called Offers, a native peer-to-peer exchange capability. No counterparty risk. No middleman custodian. No additional fees. Offers allow “Makers” and “Takers” – buyers and sellers – to seamlessly create and accept trade offers all from the privacy of their Chia wallet. Offers allow two people who have never met to propose and complete a trade in a way that neither side can cheat and does not need escrow. This also empowers users to self-custody while making trades, meaning buyers and sellers retain control of their private keys and coins without counterparty risk, middleman custodians, and trading fees. By contrast, centralized exchanges require users to transfer digital assets to an exchange account, creating a potential security risk. https://www.chia.net/offers/ https://www.chia.net/offers/
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • UncleEntity 4y ago
    Which seems to only include trading for other coins and carbon credits. Not sure how it lets you get your cryptocoins into a form you can buy a hamburger without some sort of “an exchange account, creating a potential security risk.”.
• gsatic 4y ago
  > The collapse of SBF’s empire should be a wake-up call not just for the industry that enabled it, but for the millions of people who decided to take their chances on a couple dollars’ worth of crypto over the past couple of years How is wake up even possible? Info Asymmetry is rising exponentially and the attention economy relies fully on propping up people who exploit the gap.
• fullshark 4y ago
  Some sort of regulation gets passed, institutional investors get interested (some already were: https://decrypt.co/114235/ontario-teachers-95m-ftx-pension-fund-limited-impact https://decrypt.co/114235/ontario-teachers-95m-ftx-pension-f...) and the next time a crypto exchange like this goes bust they get bailed out due to financial contagion fears and crypto is totally legitimized with the downside risk publicized. That's the end goal of this and it doesn't seem far fetched to me. The great libertarian experiment.
  • thr0wawayf00 4y ago
    Maybe, but the regulation would inevitably come with changes that probably turn a lot of crypto folks away. An FDIC-style framework, for example, would require exchanges to submit regular audits. The key difference between this and the proof-of-reserve stuff that Binance has been putting out is that a government auditor determines the outstanding risk of the reserves, not the entity themselves. I'm a bit skeptical because crypto exchanges have largely been able to create these weird tokens that kind of act like corporate securities while not being actual corporate securities, and any regulatory intervention would put an end to that because that's where a ton of the risk was being laundered in the case of FTX. Coinbase is probably the best example of an established exchange that's playing by the rules, but crypto enthusiasts hate it for that exact reason.
    • pasttense01 4y ago
      Another issue concerns money laundering. There are all sorts of regulations to try to prevent this in the traditional financial system. If crypto gets regulated then money laundering regulations are going to be added to it--and there goes a major use case for crypto.
• jbverschoor 4y ago
  By that reasoning, you can forget about the USD, EUR, and basically anything out there. You can probably also forget about yourself.
• stephc_int13 4y ago
  Please do not forget about any of this. People are way too gullible and already forgot about the previous scams.
• borissk 4y ago
  It's business as usual. When the current crisis/recession ends (probably spring 2024) and there are again billions and billions of cheap dollars looking for investment opportunities the crypto will jump back up.
  • 300bps 4y ago
    I wish you were wrong. When interest rates are 0% and the Fed’s balance sheet is $9 trillion there will be so much money sloshing around in the economy they’ll buy anything. In the meantime… the fed is reversing all of it that led us to where we are.
• haasted 4y ago
  > “We’re so early,” goes one popular crypto mantra I'm tired of this mantra. To me, crypto is starting to look less like the early internet, and more like the file-sharing mania of the late 90s early 00s, ie Napster, Kazaa, Limewire etc. A very likely outcome is that crypto will continue to be around, like some of the file sharing services, but using them will be more and more irrelevant and frowned upon by most people, who prefer the ease of the legal media streaming platforms.
  • irusensei 4y ago
    > who prefer the ease of the legal media streaming platforms checks the need for different subscriptions for different shows and looks at my own library of purchased media for shows that disappeared for reasons Are you sure about that analogy?
  • exitb 4y ago
    Isn’t that actually a success story where the community eventually converged around a single protocol that really works?
  • msrenee 4y ago
    Weren't those three all sued out of existence due to copyright infringement? That's very much a different reason for failure than what's going on in crypto.
    • haasted 4y ago
      Regulation is likely to have a similar impact in crypto.
      • msrenee 4y ago
        I can't agree with that. Napster, Kazaa, and Limewire were determined to have been breaching copyright law and the business model was determined to be illegal. There's no parallel here.
  • fullshark 4y ago
• pfdietz 4y ago
  I enjoyed this explanation of the FTX situation. It's not at all snarky!! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zTFhnpf-IE0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zTFhnpf-IE0
• Brajeshwar 4y ago
  https://archive.ph/kLPTh https://archive.ph/kLPTh
• sek 4y ago
  If it is a medium of exchange, all the attention never made a lot of sense. The use cases are niche; that's the thing. Venezuelans who avoid inflation and ordering illegal drugs are not a trillion-dollar business. All the legal/regulated areas mean competing with existing financial infrastructure, which is low margin and incredibly competitive. So if you see the space as a whole, it never had the potential market to begin with to justify those valuations. It was fuelled by low-interest rates, speculators, and venture capital. It was, in retrospect, simply a bubble, and some people feared missing out after some became insanely rich with it. Historically speaking it was nothing special: Tulips, new economy, real estate and now it was crypo. When you are in it, invested people always tell you why it is different this time. The underlying economics stay the same; value creation is usually incremental and hard.
  • ahMath8 4y ago
  • automatic6131 4y ago
    >It was, in retrospect, simply a bubble It was clearly this since 2016, imho
    • hedora 4y ago
      Since day one, honestly. Otherwise most people here would have stuck $100 in to BTC at $10.
      • Melting_Harps 4y ago
        > Otherwise most people here would have stuck $100 in to BTC at $10. Bwahahaha! You guys really need some humility, you'd think the stock market and by extension your collective portfolios, but particularly tech growth stocks losing +60% (including FAANGS) would do it, but until you guys get rolled into the mass tech layoffs and get a taste of what living precariously due to extermal economic crisis' is like will you understand what a self-serving bubble you've all been living in. The level of self-delusion isn't just cringe, it's honestly the cruel self serving narcissism that explains the 'how and why' the Valley looks like the cesspool that it does: financial inequality, mass poverty, rampant substance abuse and poor mental health are all the costs of entry so we tech titans can make billions of go-no where apps like Doordash burning VC money. But we get to tell ourselves we're above everyone else because we're rewarded with foosball and free snacks in our workplace. With that said, a market correction was necessary and admittedly my timing was off (I felt a 50% correction was about right in early May, I felt it was the bottom), and we needed to clear out the mess just like the ICO craze; this is just next wave of mal-investment being cleared seen in a healthy market and if you want to know the truth: it's in bear markets that this is when the tech gets built--lots of exciting things are being built in layer 2, as well as continuing to reduce the network's energy use on fossil fuels. These yield farms were the biggest scams and we told people that NYKNYC for a reason. But, you wouldn't know that because you've apparently convinced yourself that your clairvoyance has imbued you with a divine vision of some sort... seriously, stop drinking the kool-aid guys, it's why the satire in Silicon Valley (series) hit so close to home.
• user3939382 4y ago
  I remember Warren Buffet explaining that his top two analysts that basically run BH struggle to beat the S&P 500. Then I read all these comments confidently predicting the movement one way or the other of this very volatile asset, whose behavior is inextricably related to the movement of the larger economy. I guess it’s a good thing to pretend you can predict since you have a 50% chance of being right.
  • FredPret 4y ago
    One thing to note about Warren Buffett: He has a massive pile of money. That makes getting a great return hard - every investment opportunity has a saturation limit. You can invest a million dollars in a local McDonalds, but not a billion or a trillion. This makes finding a good job for every one of his many dollars impossible. A theoretical super-investor who can buy the entire market will eventually get average returns, since they own everything. Warren Buffett also said that if his pot was only a million dollars, he'd be able to generate 50% + annual returns by following his value investment strategy, for the inverse of the reasons outlined above.
    • scotty79 4y ago
      I think Warren Buffett success of last few decades is mostly thanks to the market following him, not the other way around. Once he dies his business will tank because there's no secret sauce. Just the name of the man himself.
      • FredPret 4y ago
        I do regular value stock searches. Do you know what comes up frequently? BRK-A and BRK-B. Despite his decades-long track record; despite the monster profits regularly posted; despite book after book about him; his business is still undervalued. Perhaps it is because he invests in unsexy things like chewing gum, insurance, furniture, and candy. (he has lately taken a stake in Apple, but that's the flashiest thing he's ever bought.)
    • moistly 4y ago
• azangru 4y ago
  When they say "crypto", what do they mean. No, I understand that it's something to do with cryptocurrencies; but, confusingly, they must mean something more specific than that; because isn't bitcoin the OG of cryptocurrencies? And doesn't it still hold the promise of a parallel peer-to-peer non-inflationary currency, suitable for self-custody, which is totally orthogonal to the meltdown of a cryptoexchange? Does The Atlantic want us to forget about it as well? I am confused.
  • esperent 4y ago
    > doesn't it still hold the promise of a parallel peer-to-peer non-inflationary currency, suitable for self-custody, which is totally orthogonal to the meltdown of a cryptoexchange? In my experience whenever some poses a convoluted leading question like this, it's because they have already decided the answer. But let me try a simpler version: > doesn't it still hold the promise of a... currency Did it ever? Has any crypto ever actually been successfully used as a currency for something other than the black/grey market? That's my own convoluted leading question, and I'm fairly confident the answer is no. But if you feel I'm wrong please share a counterexample.
    • azangru 4y ago
      > In my experience whenever some poses a convoluted leading question like this, it's because they have already decided the answer. No; I am genuinely undecided. On the one hand, I hear the arguments of bitcoin advocates from 5-10 years ago (Andreas Antonopoulos; authors of college-level courses on cryptocurrencies and bitcoin; as well as random podcasters); and they still make sense to me — which I tried to inject into the question, and which, you say, made it convoluted. On the other hand, I don't yet have a dog in the fight; I am just observing the space with some curiosity. > Has any crypto ever actually been successfully used as a currency for something other than the black/grey market? Genuine question: why is the use on a black or a grey market a put-down for a currency? Isn't it, on the contrary, a true testament to the value of a currency, if it is sought after, as a means of exchange, on a black market?
      • 4y ago
• dragonelite 4y ago
  Crypto will stay but not in the form of wild wild west where everyone can become a coin minter as of right now. It will morph into central bank digital currency, hope it means i can transfer my money away from private sector banks and into a non speculative financial institution like the central bank.
  • starkd 4y ago
    CBDC is an entirely different beast. It is heavily centralized and makes the possibility of third party anonymous transactions impossible. Say hello to a level of state surveillance George Orwell never dreamed of.
  • walnutclosefarm 4y ago
    The thing is, a central bank digital currency isn't distributed finance, and doesn't even need to be "crypto" (the trust mechanism will be the central bank, and the ledger will almost certainly not be distributed, nor fully public). And a central bank digital currency will inevitably be pegged to the bank's underlying fiat currency, or at very least, explicitly supported by the central bank using the fiat currency - no central bank in any functioning county is going to sponsor speculative arbitrage opportunities of the sort that litter the Defi world. So, overall, a central bank digital currency is just not crypto in the sense we have been using the word. Note that in some respects, the Federal Reserve already operates a digital currency pegged to the dollar, but it's accessible only to chartered banks. Every US bank (depository institution) has accounts with the FRB that constitute those banks' reserves, and through which interbank transfers of "hard" dollars (base money - that is, dollars issued by the FRB, as compared to those created by bank lending - is ultimately effected. Those accounts are functionally digital dollars.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• scotty79 4y ago
  It's really funny how much people read into FTX collapse. As if it was the Bitcoin itself. While the first time I hear about the FTX is when it collapses. And the first time I'm hearing about this "future trillionaire" is when I'm reading this article. Collapse of mtgox was a big thing. Turned out to be at most just a blip in history of bitcoin. Same with any subsequent exchanges collapses. Next truly significant event in Bitcoin world will be nothing short of full collapse of tether.
  • headsoup 4y ago
    You should probably read up on FTX a bit and which pies it has its fingers in then.
    • scotty79 4y ago
      It's loud because some of wallstreet burnt their fingers for the first time on crypto. But there are already people on wallstreet who just laugh now becuse that's not their first rodeo.
• hericium 4y ago
  > But the problem is more fundamental than losing a bit of money. Crypto was built on the idea that you shouldn’t have to trust banks with your money, that people should be able to hold it themselves, hopefully somewhere a little more secure than a mattress. Yes, and some of these tokens, like BTC, allow this since "crypto was built". You can clone and build https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin and set up your own wallet. Noone will touch coins in it if you're careful. They can lose their value but they will still be there. If you trust someone else to hold your wallet, which is more or less a necessity when you trade/exchange your coins, that's whole other ball game. But having all your money in bunch of wallets kept by a single entity that is not you, is just plain stupidity.
  • prisoner655321 4y ago
    This isn’t about where you keep your coins, not really. That’s an implementation detail. This is about the entire system of wealth protection built up around fiat currency. The word of the week is “contagion”: even if you did no business with FTX at all, even if you have your coins on a hard drive locked in the doomsday seed vault, crypto is crashing because investors are learning that the old system that protects wealth is necessary after all.
    • thr0wawayf00 4y ago
      Exactly right, and this is crypto's fundamental problem. Say you have a small group of people who are all on the same page about what crypto is and how it should be integrated into society. Then another group comes along and recognizes it as an opportunity to pump and dump. The scammers create their markets and their tokens, driving the value up insanely until it all comes crashing down and innocent people lose everything. There's really nothing the original group can do to stop the scammers because the entire point of crypto is that you're assuming everyone is a criminal anyway. It just doesn't work.
    • hericium 4y ago
      In the US, Fed took the "old system" for a ride with no brakes. In the UK central bank went to battle with PM over the "old system" a few weeks back. Old, or new, people in power have their ideas on how to make things interesting.
• bitlax 4y ago
  strong buy signal
  • b0ner_t0ner 4y ago
    Gonna need a lot more articles added to Bitcoin Obituaries website.
• theknocker 4y ago
• Tao3300 4y ago
  Gottsegen seems a little on the young side to be parroting the ageist "where are the adults" mantra that media is trying to pin to this. Editor meddling or pandering to his audience maybe? As if grifters can only be young and only ancient, mega-wealthy white men are to be trusted. Don't get me wrong, SBF is clearly a fool or a turd-burglar, but the ageist take is scummy, suspicious, and poisonous to the mind.
• fortran77 4y ago
  I'm so glad I never listened to any of them; not even potential partners in my company who wanted us to get into "blockchain."
• schizo89 4y ago
  this guy is fraud
• fnordpiglet 4y ago
  Reading the LinkedIn profiles for the leadership and employees at Alameda I’m struck by the fact they all have about five or less years of experience in the world. They’re all effectively children. Not at all surprising.
• TacticalCoder 4y ago
  Once again, as usual, only negative things about crypto being talked about on HN, with only negative comments and nothing positive ever. Despite dang constantly asking people to not boast. Outside of the HN bubble, I see a lot of people into crypto who are all posting: "I told you so". As simple as: "Your keys, your coins". We're talking about Bloomberg, Sequoia Capital and oh so many others coming up with hit pieces up until a few days ago about how SBF was a "philantropic genius". The issue is not cryptocurrencies here. The issue is scammers and the financial world having, once again, turned a complete blind eye to people running scams. Cryptocurrencies are just an excuse here. Isn't the bigger story how, every single time scammers, be it people packaging synthetic CDOs and selling them to investors as AAA investments before the subprime crisis or the SBF of this world, there are big names lauding these products as creation from geniuses? There were people calling out SBF as a fraud. A trader pointed out, more than a month ago, that the only picture of the CTO, called "Wang" (most common family name in the world: 65 million people have that family name), was a picture taken from behind. That same person noticed that one of the person high up the chain in the SBF fraud was already linked to an only poker scandal where the poker site was defrauding users. Meanwhile Bloomberg was lauding SBF as the biggest genius of our time. Why isn't that the story? Why isn't the story about Gary Gensler being accused by a congressman of working hand in hand with FTX/Alameda to allow FTX to acquire a monopoly on crypto exchange by regulatory capture? All the while a colleague of Gary Gensler is the father of Alameda's 28 years-old CEO. Serious people: wake up. I'm not the one making these accusations. A US congressman is accusing Gary Gensler, the very chair of the SEC, of allegedly working with (for?) SBF. But, no, according to most of HN the culprits are... People who want something else than a currency of which the central banks can print trillions of at will? We're talking about officials and politicians receving $40 millions in donation from a fraudsters and "respected" magazines presenting that fraudster as one of the biggest genius of our times. That's the real story. But, no, let's focus instead on the angle: "Cryptocurrencies are dead now". I'm sure that the corrupt officials, politicians and the very dubious players who lauded SBF as a genius do love that angle.
  • boppo1 4y ago
    >Gary Gensler being accused by a congressman Congressman is a republican. I don't like republicans, but I recognize their words are disregarded by non-overtly-rightwing media. Admittedly some Rs spew lots of bullshit so I get that, but it would be nice if serious reporters would look into serious claims like this. The Gary Gensler angle on this is very interesting and thus far everyone but 4chan tinfoilers has been mum about it.
• peterweyand 4y ago
  The promise of crypto was that someone found a way to make a non-duplicable, tradeable token. First by proof of work and then by proof stake. The problem is that they forgot the 1 against all adversarial nature of internet security. A trillion dollar empire set against one way of securing assets is in essence a trillion dollar bounty on breaking your security regime. And what was found? That the system was complex enough that most security "hacks" were mostly social engineering with a sprinkling of insecure gateways and passwords. Neither the users of wallets or the engineers of exchanges put in enough time and effort to secure their holdings in relation to the dollar values they held. Wild swings in the stability of coin values created arbitrage opportunities which made some users exceedingly rich, prompting more dumb money to enter the system. That's a bug, not a feature. I still think there's value for crypto to evade censorship and manipulation of populations via legislation of the money supply. But that requires a whole slew of low level techs to maintain and verify transactions. At some level that may make it as onerous and bureaucratic as our current financial systems. I just hope that this doesn't cause financial contagion in the traditional sectors.
• walnutclosefarm 4y ago
  The degree to which crypto exchanges mimic wildcat banks of the nineteenth century is striking. They are basically unregulated "banks" issuing and manipulating proprietary currencies against real, central-bank regulated, national currencies. The biggest difference is that people used wildcat currencies due to scarcity of national currencies, and regulated banking institutions, whereas they participate in crypto exchanges purely to speculate, hoping to strike some great return on their money.
  • papito 4y ago
    This is not a new observation. The crypto market is basically the pre Great Depression banking sector. That's why this libertarian talk of "freedom" and "decentralization" is really just longing for chaos. Respek the fiat.
• Vampyre 4y ago
  A 2018 English graduate, who predominately writes music reviews and opinion pieces, published on The Atlanic which has cherry-picked publishing only their anti-crypto pieces, explains how crypto is actually dead now.
  • MisterSandman 4y ago
    What does the author's degree have to do with anything? He isn't talking about the deep intricacies of how blockchain works, he's talking talking about a financial scamster.
    • Vampyre 4y ago
      He's talking about this being a significant marker in the potential end of the institutional use of an entire technology.
• dchuk 4y ago
  My random thoughts on the value of crypto/blockchains: - decentralized, distributed consensus mechanisms are valuable, clever pieces of tech. (The fact that the first major invention of this tech was by an anonymous person who disappeared should be far more alarming than the world seems to think it is) - Using blockchains to create digital scarcity is a valuable, clever application of the tech. I expect these to become the default for things like event tickets within 10 years despite all the noise and bullshit around NFTs. That being said: NFTs do not in any way make shitty art valuable/not shitty. The bust of NFT art following the boom was so so so painfully obvious, I don’t understand how so many people got hoodwinked save for humanity’s propensity to be greedy. - I think the value of cryptocurrencies is way way higher to non-western countries (very much not America) because it’s a border-less/government-less means of transferring value. For places like South America and Africa where the local economies are weak/volatile, the ability to transact in a medium that exists globally should be a great idea. America has a trustworthy financial system, there’s no real need for alternatives (I get that banks and the fed are their own ball of fuckery frequently, but in general, we aren’t Venezuela for example. A dollar is a dollar, it works pretty well almost anywhere). The issues are: - for this cryptocurrency mechanism to work as a real currency, it needs to be non-volatile, which would kill the opportunity to speculate (and therefore kill western interests/greed). I need to wake up in my village with the same amount of money I went to sleep with. Basically no crypto projects can offer that guarantee right now (ignoring stable coins) - It’s highly adversarial to government interests, so they’ll stifle it however possible in general Projects like Algorand and Chia are super interesting because of the tech and decentralization goals of them. The vast majority of these projects are just utopian libertarian bullshit that gets absolutely rocked when applied to the real world. Also, humans are just very greedy most of the time, so an unregulated space with relatively low friction on-ramps and the promise of wild returns will of course be abused and lead to spectacular blowouts like the last few months have brought. The tech will continue, and things will rev back up over the next 3-5 years. Lastly: Crypto still has a terrible user experience across the board. Arcane address hashes, basically no recourse if you make a typo, all the projects selling their inner tech and economic concepts that are just gibberish unless you’re a PhD (translated: doesn’t matter, no one actually cares). Crypto desperately needs to be Uber-ified. I don’t mean what Uber has become, I mean what it was when it launched: an app with a button and a text field, you typed in where you wanted to go, and a clean slick car picked you up and got you there like magic. They weren’t advertising their routing and matching algorithms, the product was “feel like a rich guy at the push of a button”. Crypto needs a few of these.
• krono 4y ago
• known 4y ago