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I think there are a very small number of people who were interested in crypto from the get-go for what I'd consider good, socially positive reasons. To the exte

I think there are a very small number of people who were interested in crypto from the get-go for what I'd consider good, socially positive reasons. To the extent that those people didn't cash in and are mad about how it turned out, I respect their pain. It's always hard to watch the beautiful dream get corrupted. It would have been a very interesting alternate timeline if those few pure souls were left to innovate quietly on their own for a couple of decades. But as far as I can tell, the rest of it is at best, IGMFY [1], and at worst just scams. And that's the great, great bulk of it. I get why crypto adherents are going through a there-must-be-a-pony-in-there-somewhere [2] stage. But I would like to suggest that there is in fact no pony. That 99+% of the "crypto community" is composed of suckers, people in on the grift, and people who are simultaneously both. And I'd also like to suggest that things like FTX are not outliers. They are the absolutely predictable outcome of people saying, "What if we make an end-run around the financial regulatory apparatus and ignore all of the history that drove its creation?" I understand that the anarchocapitalist fantasy is that if we just end government we'll all live in Shangri-La. But the reality of is the sort of warlord despotism you seen in failed states. (Which, as an aside, has given us another meaning for "techincal". [3]) Similarly, the real-world version of financial anarchocapitalism is bubbles, fraud, crime, and grift driving out actual development and investment. That's why every successful marketplace in the world above the size of a street market has significant regulation, be it internal or external. I used to write financial trading software. The people who I worked for were dispositionally cowboys. But every one of them knew that you did not fuck with the exchange and the clearing firm. And maybe the national regulator, but that was a distant concern compared with the people who were running the marketplace and would happily clip your wings if you looked at all like you were pulling something. [1] https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=IGMFY https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=IGMFY [2] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/12/13/pony-somewhere/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/12/13/pony-somewhere/ [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_(vehicle) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_(vehicle)

detrites 4y ago
Maybe because the fruits of those few well-intentioned founders labours aren't blasted on the news 24/7 like SBF was, doesn't mean they don't exist? I've seen people in parts of South America where the banking system can be completely unusable, using their phone to send and receive crypto payments cheaply and reliably, enabling them to safely transact with family. I've heard of this also happening in Africa. Others, workers from Mexico for example, working in the US, are able to remit their small incomes back home for pennies instead of a 15% western union bite out of it. It does have functions and utility that does work, and they are the same functions envisioned by the OG's.
- crispyambulance 4y ago
  > Others, workers from Mexico for example, working in the US, are able to remit their small incomes back home for pennies instead of a 15% western union bite out of it. ... and ALSO occasionally have the value of explode or implode drastically because it's so volatile and extremely dangerous to use as actual currency. And anyway, where are you getting that western union takes 15%? For fun, just looked up the fee on western union, to transfer $1000 cash from USA to Mexico as cash, is an $8 fee.
  - detrites 4y ago
    What is "it"? There are thousands of cryptocurrencies, many pegged to fiat. There's no shortage of price-stable options, but this isn't so relevant for this kind of remittance anyway as typically the crypto will only be held briefly each end. In these situations, someone gets a salary, they immediately send it to a hungry family, who then straightaway pays for essential items with it. Latency is important, sometimes more than cost, as having anything arrive is preferably to being completely without due to a lost transfer. Unfortunately WU fees of 15% or sometimes more are common in poor regions. It's costly because payment corridors in those regions (which is not as simple as country A - country B) are so unreliable - money literally disappears on the way - that the only way it can be done for small value transfers is to hike up the fees to subsidise the losses. You might get a reasonable seeming quote for major centres, but actually go through the process and fill in the details for more out of the way locations and you'll find very different prices. WU and banks all also silently charge another 1-3% on FX rates, this is well-known and uncontroversial - visit wise.com for an accurate overview. (Wise is actually a pretty good traditional-finance-backed solution to these problems for some regions. They did also trial transfers with a crypto back-end for a while, not sure if anything came of it.)
- wpietri 4y ago
  One, I never said a good side didn't exist. In fact, I was careful to not say that. So easy on the straw men. Two, I have been hearing vague, anecdotal claims like this for years. It reminds me of how back in the day I would get vague, anecdotal claims for why open mail relays were useful to people. But if you want to claim a meaningful fraction of crypto activity is valuable in ways for which there are no equivalent, you'll have to provide data. Three, I'm very skeptical that there aren't other good non-crypto ways to solve the nominal problems. Good or better, really. As an example, take M-Pesa. [1] It started around the same time as Bitcoin, but has done vastly more to bank the unbanked in Africa. If you'd like to demonstrate actual superiority for significant use cases, I'm all ears. But I'm coming up on a decade of dealing with vague, handwavey replies about how crypto is akshually good, so I'm really going to insist on specifics here. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-Pesa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-Pesa

detrites 4y ago

Maybe because the fruits of those few well-intentioned founders labours aren't blasted on the news 24/7 like SBF was, doesn't mean they don't exist? I've seen people in parts of South America where the banking system can be completely unusable, using their phone to send and receive crypto payments cheaply and reliably, enabling them to safely transact with family. I've heard of this also happening in Africa. Others, workers from Mexico for example, working in the US, are able to remit their small incomes back home for pennies instead of a 15% western union bite out of it. It does have functions and utility that does work, and they are the same functions envisioned by the OG's.

crispyambulance 4y ago
> Others, workers from Mexico for example, working in the US, are able to remit their small incomes back home for pennies instead of a 15% western union bite out of it. ... and ALSO occasionally have the value of explode or implode drastically because it's so volatile and extremely dangerous to use as actual currency. And anyway, where are you getting that western union takes 15%? For fun, just looked up the fee on western union, to transfer $1000 cash from USA to Mexico as cash, is an $8 fee.
- detrites 4y ago
  What is "it"? There are thousands of cryptocurrencies, many pegged to fiat. There's no shortage of price-stable options, but this isn't so relevant for this kind of remittance anyway as typically the crypto will only be held briefly each end. In these situations, someone gets a salary, they immediately send it to a hungry family, who then straightaway pays for essential items with it. Latency is important, sometimes more than cost, as having anything arrive is preferably to being completely without due to a lost transfer. Unfortunately WU fees of 15% or sometimes more are common in poor regions. It's costly because payment corridors in those regions (which is not as simple as country A - country B) are so unreliable - money literally disappears on the way - that the only way it can be done for small value transfers is to hike up the fees to subsidise the losses. You might get a reasonable seeming quote for major centres, but actually go through the process and fill in the details for more out of the way locations and you'll find very different prices. WU and banks all also silently charge another 1-3% on FX rates, this is well-known and uncontroversial - visit wise.com for an accurate overview. (Wise is actually a pretty good traditional-finance-backed solution to these problems for some regions. They did also trial transfers with a crypto back-end for a while, not sure if anything came of it.)
wpietri 4y ago
One, I never said a good side didn't exist. In fact, I was careful to not say that. So easy on the straw men. Two, I have been hearing vague, anecdotal claims like this for years. It reminds me of how back in the day I would get vague, anecdotal claims for why open mail relays were useful to people. But if you want to claim a meaningful fraction of crypto activity is valuable in ways for which there are no equivalent, you'll have to provide data. Three, I'm very skeptical that there aren't other good non-crypto ways to solve the nominal problems. Good or better, really. As an example, take M-Pesa. [1] It started around the same time as Bitcoin, but has done vastly more to bank the unbanked in Africa. If you'd like to demonstrate actual superiority for significant use cases, I'm all ears. But I'm coming up on a decade of dealing with vague, handwavey replies about how crypto is akshually good, so I'm really going to insist on specifics here. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-Pesa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-Pesa