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This is not crypto, it's parasitic centralised exchanges that want a bunch of institutional money in the ecosystem so that they can collect their cut of the fee

This is not crypto, it's parasitic centralised exchanges that want a bunch of institutional money in the ecosystem so that they can collect their cut of the fees.

acdha 4y ago
That is cryptocurrency, even if you find it inconvenient for marketing purposes. You can “no true coin” everything negative but at that point there’s almost nothing left — all of the billions in funding have had surprisingly little real-world impact because once you subtract the scams and the effort spent trying to work around problems created by the design there isn’t much left.
- jrm4 4y ago
  But "not much" is completely different from "nothing," and it would be a massive mistake to presume "little real world impact" because you haven't seen it now, or yet, e.g. Black Swans et al.
  - acdha 4y ago
    I said little real world impact because after many years and billions of dollars, the number of people outside of the industry who’d be inconvenienced if it disappeared is very small - perhaps a few people who can save a percentage over Western Union and some people in Venezuela who prefer laundering money that way. Contrast that with things like the web which despite much higher barriers to adoption had been incorporated into normal people’s lives within a couple of years. In less than the time bitcoin has been around, we went from the pre-iPod era to one where most people were connected everywhere and the way people worked, played, traveled, dated, etc. had changed notably.
jqpabc123 4y ago
And why do these "parasitic centralised exchanges" exist? Because the crypto market isn't really functional without them. Even people using so called "decentralized" exchanges turn to them to obtain a market rate for their transactions. In effect, "decentralization" is just a crypto marketing/selling point that has never been achieved. It takes more than accounting to build a functional market.
- mjburgess 4y ago
  The only thing decentralised was the ledger and it's consistency. There never has been any sense to "political decentralisation" having anything to do with crypto. A social network isn't decentralised because it's people use a centralised or decentralised proof-of-correctness. An economic network isnt centralised or decentralised if its ledger of promises is stored centrally or otherwise. This is a fairly obvious fallacy to anyone who understands that centralisation of power is a social-graph structure, and economic centralisation is transaction-graph-structure and crypto "decentralisation" concerns only the storage-and-computation of a ledger. Ironically, the crypto "economy" is radically more centralised in social-graph and transaction-graph terms. So much so that it's incredibly fragile to a handful of individual failures. The idea that these have anything to do with each other is such an obvious nonesense that the only reason its repeated is just people do not understand at least one of these issues. Ie., very few are both in the camp of technically, politically and economically competent. Money is already close to the maximally decentralised a ledger storage can be. It's already close to maximally decentralised proof-of-correctness. Having a bank-note in your hand is extremely good proof it's yours, and extremely hard for others to steal. Decentralisation, in the only relevant sense to crypto, already exists in a close to perfect form (ie., money).
- matthewdgreen 4y ago
  Decentralized exchanges are in their infancy. They're not as efficient as centralized exchanges yet, but that seems more like a temporary technological limitation rather than some sort of iron law. What can't be decentralized is the fiat currency interconnect.

This is not crypto, it's parasitic centralised exchanges that want a bunch of institutional money in the ecosystem so that they can collect their cut of the fees.

acdha 4y ago

That is cryptocurrency, even if you find it inconvenient for marketing purposes. You can “no true coin” everything negative but at that point there’s almost nothing left — all of the billions in funding have had surprisingly little real-world impact because once you subtract the scams and the effort spent trying to work around problems created by the design there isn’t much left.

jrm4 4y ago
But "not much" is completely different from "nothing," and it would be a massive mistake to presume "little real world impact" because you haven't seen it now, or yet, e.g. Black Swans et al.
- acdha 4y ago
  I said little real world impact because after many years and billions of dollars, the number of people outside of the industry who’d be inconvenienced if it disappeared is very small - perhaps a few people who can save a percentage over Western Union and some people in Venezuela who prefer laundering money that way. Contrast that with things like the web which despite much higher barriers to adoption had been incorporated into normal people’s lives within a couple of years. In less than the time bitcoin has been around, we went from the pre-iPod era to one where most people were connected everywhere and the way people worked, played, traveled, dated, etc. had changed notably.

jqpabc123 4y ago

And why do these "parasitic centralised exchanges" exist? Because the crypto market isn't really functional without them. Even people using so called "decentralized" exchanges turn to them to obtain a market rate for their transactions. In effect, "decentralization" is just a crypto marketing/selling point that has never been achieved. It takes more than accounting to build a functional market.

mjburgess 4y ago
The only thing decentralised was the ledger and it's consistency. There never has been any sense to "political decentralisation" having anything to do with crypto. A social network isn't decentralised because it's people use a centralised or decentralised proof-of-correctness. An economic network isnt centralised or decentralised if its ledger of promises is stored centrally or otherwise. This is a fairly obvious fallacy to anyone who understands that centralisation of power is a social-graph structure, and economic centralisation is transaction-graph-structure and crypto "decentralisation" concerns only the storage-and-computation of a ledger. Ironically, the crypto "economy" is radically more centralised in social-graph and transaction-graph terms. So much so that it's incredibly fragile to a handful of individual failures. The idea that these have anything to do with each other is such an obvious nonesense that the only reason its repeated is just people do not understand at least one of these issues. Ie., very few are both in the camp of technically, politically and economically competent. Money is already close to the maximally decentralised a ledger storage can be. It's already close to maximally decentralised proof-of-correctness. Having a bank-note in your hand is extremely good proof it's yours, and extremely hard for others to steal. Decentralisation, in the only relevant sense to crypto, already exists in a close to perfect form (ie., money).
matthewdgreen 4y ago
Decentralized exchanges are in their infancy. They're not as efficient as centralized exchanges yet, but that seems more like a temporary technological limitation rather than some sort of iron law. What can't be decentralized is the fiat currency interconnect.