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I'm well aware of all that has been done to explain the ideas behind crypto, NFTs, and the rest of the ecosystem. I know what the boosters say and can do a dec

by btilly 4y ago

I'm well aware of all that has been done to explain the ideas behind crypto, NFTs, and the rest of the ecosystem. I know what the boosters say and can do a decent job of explaining it in a pinch. I've been hearing about it here and elsewhere since 2009. I also believe that the entire crypto ecosystem is a wasteful solution in search of a problem. And the biggest players in the space, over and over again have been proven to be criminal frauds trying to generate the next hype wave. Often through wash trading to make it appear that there is more of a market than there is. The current wave of legal problems for Celsius, FTX, Binance and so on have started to reveal the lies that many expected all along. For example we've found out in court that the "attestations" long used by many were faked. (Not that this was a surprise given that, for example, Tether was revealed previously to have been faking its numbers.) To the extent that there actually was money, a lot of it was in now failed banks like Signature Bank. Or it is connected to money laundering, as happened with Tether. (See https://protos.com/did-tether-falsify-documents-to-fool-cautious-banksc/ https://protos.com/did-tether-falsify-documents-to-fool-caut... for one of many places where that is reported.) The sky-high valuations for cryptocurrencies these days are not believable. Yes, people trade that many tethers for a bitcoin, but good luck getting tethers redeemed. And most consumers had their money in fraudulent exchanges like FTX and Binance. They are learning the hard way the truth of, "Not your keys, not your crypto." You say that there is no excuse in 2023 for being so clueless and, yet, assertive. I say that there is no excuse in 2023 for you being so dismissive about a field filled with Ponzi schemes, some of which have collapsed and others of which are still able to pretend to a solvency that they clearly don't have.

xk_id 4y ago
> I also believe that the entire crypto ecosystem is a wasteful solution in search of a problem. It’s just embarrassing to write this when there are so many real world examples of solutions being solved right now by crypto, as well as many active users of crypto who couldn’t care less whether it solves a problem you, personally, have. The fact that you see Celsius, FTX and binance as a paragon of crypto and decentralised finance shows just how little you’ve been paying attention. They are centralised, crypto-adjacent companies. Please look at Yearn, Aave, Curve, Uniswap, GMX, Gearbox, NFTfi, Illuvium, countless NFT gated communities, and news reports of people in the third world using blockchains to make emergency, life saving transactions. And then afterwards maybe your beliefs about crypto might be worth posting in public forums.
- btilly 4y ago
  Good luck with your defi obsession, and we'll see which of the two of us is more embarrassed in a decade. You've offered no concrete evidence that there is any "there" there in crypto. But you can rattle off a bunch of projects. Yay, I guess? Since you offered no evidence to counter what I said, I'll give an argument as low quality. Namely an argument from authority. I have about 200x the reputation that you do. I also have a background as a mathematician, a quarter century as a programmer, and used to work on Wall St. Unless you provide actual EXAMPLES of real world examples of solutions ACTUALLY being solved by crypto, as well as reason to believe that the crypto ecosystem upon which those solutions rest is sustainable, I'm going to believe my knowledge, experience, and professional background over your fly by night content free crypto boosterism.
  - xk_id 4y ago
    why you got to ridicule me for actually knowing about the conversation topic, framing it as obsessive? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-O3r2YMWJ4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-O3r2YMWJ4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0uN46EsSBQw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0uN46EsSBQw https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32103472 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32103472 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35473327 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35473327 congrats on your qualifications, tho
    - btilly 4y ago
      I'm bored, so I'll respond. But where to begin? First, the most basic role of money is to be a medium of exchange. With reasonable overhead and in acceptable time, people need to be able to exchange money for goods and services. Crypto fails this in every practical way. If I want to buy pizza with bitcoin, my overhead exceeds the value of the pizza, the average time to make the purchase is longer than the average time to order, have it made, delivered, and get eaten by my family. (Have you ever SEEN hungry teenagers tear into pizza.) Also if people started trying to buy pizza with bitcoin, you'd quickly run into the problem that the maximum number of transactions per second on the bitcoin network is a fraction of the number of pizzas sold per second. Yes, yes. This is all improvable. I've heard that for years. But these issues are not new, and haven't gone away. OK, what next? You are making a big deal out of the fact that there are poor people in horrible third world countries who want to use crypto to escape authoritarian oversight. At best this is a red herring, I lean towards calling it disingenuous. A far more important use case for crypto is crooks trying to get paid for their ransomware attacks without themselves being caught by law enforcement. And the third world has benefitted far more from payment networks like M-PESA than all of crypto. Besides, the single best way to help the poor people in horrible third world countries is to continue the worldwide economic progress of the last couple of centuries. Few understand how astonishing the improvement in human life is. Watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbkSRLYSojo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbkSRLYSojo for a 5 minute video demonstrating how dramatic it is. Moving on, crypto is nowhere near as decentralized as boosters claim. A handful of central players are responsible for owning most crypto, doing most mining, and so on. Moxie, the lead developer behind Signal (great app, BTW), decided to experiment with NFTs. What he found was shocking. First, we are one website hack away from, say, all bored apes turning into pictures of shit. Second, his experiment verifying accidentally pissed off a couple of companies that everyone else uses to get their view of the blockchain. The result? The contents of the blockchain notwithstanding, his NFT disappeared! See https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html for more details of his experiments. Moving on, all of the defi platforms that you named have something big in common. They are riding on the back of a bubble inflated by fraudulent Ponzi schemes, controlled by a handful of people. They use all sorts of phrases like "arbitrage" and "yield farming". But all those are simply euphemisms that round to "Ponzi". Without the fraud, the whole ecosystem implodes. Because it rests on nothing real. Oh, sure. Defi offers automated trading protocols to allow you to do things like hedge risks. Automated trading strategies have an important role in our world. But they have limits. For example when everyone tries to hedge the same risks with the same trading strategy, it doesn't work. The traditional finance world learned that the hard way on Monday, October 19, 1987, and has had periodic reminders since. It won't work better in the defi world. Another limitation of automation is that if someone figures out how to exploit it, your money disappears arbitrarily fast. Crypto enthusiasts treat the regular heists of large amounts of crypto as teething pains. But actually they are an intrinsic part of the platform that can't be eliminated. Once you eliminate the Ponzi underpinning, crypto trading strategies do what you don't want it to, and don't do what you do want it to. You lose both ways. Moving on, every crypto enthusiast that I have met has an understanding of finance that pays attention to SOME of the stakeholders, and not others. There are a lot of hidden stakeholders in finance, and you ignore them at your peril. The excellent series https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/ https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/ says a lot about that topic. One of the big ones is government. Crypto enthusiasts think that they have taken government out of the equation, and that this is a good thing. They are wrong on both counts. First of all the things we actually need, like pizzas, are in the power of governments to control. The mediums of exchange that people actually use, like fiat currency, are also in the power of governments. And, failing all else, governments can send men with guns and lock you up. In fact they regularly do this to people. You aren't getting rid of governments, you have to figure out how to coexist with them. The result is that if you and the government disagree about where the government's jurisdiction ends, the government is usually right. For example https://twitter.com/AFTXcreditor/status/1653883349021106179 https://twitter.com/AFTXcreditor/status/1653883349021106179 shows FTX attempting to claw back $3.9 billion from Genesis that happened on "irreversible" blockchains. At this point, this is just redistributing the losses. But the people at the heart of crypto are admitting here that these "irreversible" transactions are actually reversible in practice. Oops. Going the other way, governments are at least somewhat responsive to the people (more so now than historically, and they vary widely). And those regulatory regimes that you don't like incorporate a lot of real world experience. Are they perfect? No! But they also work out better on average in real use cases than crypto does. And finally, about ridicule. You're the one who first went to saying that everyone who disagrees with you is "embarrassing themselves" with their ignorance. Which you did repeatedly and rudely. Until you have the common decency to apologize for your past behavior, it is sheer unmitigated gall for you to complain about anyone else's. Now I just demonstrated that I am far from ignorant. And that it is possible to be both educated on the topic and come to the opinion that this Kool-Aid is poisonous. Hopefully you learned something from the experience. And hopefully you improve your behavior.

by btilly 4y ago

xk_id 4y ago

> I also believe that the entire crypto ecosystem is a wasteful solution in search of a problem. It’s just embarrassing to write this when there are so many real world examples of solutions being solved right now by crypto, as well as many active users of crypto who couldn’t care less whether it solves a problem you, personally, have. The fact that you see Celsius, FTX and binance as a paragon of crypto and decentralised finance shows just how little you’ve been paying attention. They are centralised, crypto-adjacent companies. Please look at Yearn, Aave, Curve, Uniswap, GMX, Gearbox, NFTfi, Illuvium, countless NFT gated communities, and news reports of people in the third world using blockchains to make emergency, life saving transactions. And then afterwards maybe your beliefs about crypto might be worth posting in public forums.

btilly 4y ago
Good luck with your defi obsession, and we'll see which of the two of us is more embarrassed in a decade. You've offered no concrete evidence that there is any "there" there in crypto. But you can rattle off a bunch of projects. Yay, I guess? Since you offered no evidence to counter what I said, I'll give an argument as low quality. Namely an argument from authority. I have about 200x the reputation that you do. I also have a background as a mathematician, a quarter century as a programmer, and used to work on Wall St. Unless you provide actual EXAMPLES of real world examples of solutions ACTUALLY being solved by crypto, as well as reason to believe that the crypto ecosystem upon which those solutions rest is sustainable, I'm going to believe my knowledge, experience, and professional background over your fly by night content free crypto boosterism.
- xk_id 4y ago
  why you got to ridicule me for actually knowing about the conversation topic, framing it as obsessive? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-O3r2YMWJ4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-O3r2YMWJ4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0uN46EsSBQw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0uN46EsSBQw https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32103472 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32103472 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35473327 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35473327 congrats on your qualifications, tho
  - btilly 4y ago
    I'm bored, so I'll respond. But where to begin? First, the most basic role of money is to be a medium of exchange. With reasonable overhead and in acceptable time, people need to be able to exchange money for goods and services. Crypto fails this in every practical way. If I want to buy pizza with bitcoin, my overhead exceeds the value of the pizza, the average time to make the purchase is longer than the average time to order, have it made, delivered, and get eaten by my family. (Have you ever SEEN hungry teenagers tear into pizza.) Also if people started trying to buy pizza with bitcoin, you'd quickly run into the problem that the maximum number of transactions per second on the bitcoin network is a fraction of the number of pizzas sold per second. Yes, yes. This is all improvable. I've heard that for years. But these issues are not new, and haven't gone away. OK, what next? You are making a big deal out of the fact that there are poor people in horrible third world countries who want to use crypto to escape authoritarian oversight. At best this is a red herring, I lean towards calling it disingenuous. A far more important use case for crypto is crooks trying to get paid for their ransomware attacks without themselves being caught by law enforcement. And the third world has benefitted far more from payment networks like M-PESA than all of crypto. Besides, the single best way to help the poor people in horrible third world countries is to continue the worldwide economic progress of the last couple of centuries. Few understand how astonishing the improvement in human life is. Watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbkSRLYSojo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbkSRLYSojo for a 5 minute video demonstrating how dramatic it is. Moving on, crypto is nowhere near as decentralized as boosters claim. A handful of central players are responsible for owning most crypto, doing most mining, and so on. Moxie, the lead developer behind Signal (great app, BTW), decided to experiment with NFTs. What he found was shocking. First, we are one website hack away from, say, all bored apes turning into pictures of shit. Second, his experiment verifying accidentally pissed off a couple of companies that everyone else uses to get their view of the blockchain. The result? The contents of the blockchain notwithstanding, his NFT disappeared! See https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html for more details of his experiments. Moving on, all of the defi platforms that you named have something big in common. They are riding on the back of a bubble inflated by fraudulent Ponzi schemes, controlled by a handful of people. They use all sorts of phrases like "arbitrage" and "yield farming". But all those are simply euphemisms that round to "Ponzi". Without the fraud, the whole ecosystem implodes. Because it rests on nothing real. Oh, sure. Defi offers automated trading protocols to allow you to do things like hedge risks. Automated trading strategies have an important role in our world. But they have limits. For example when everyone tries to hedge the same risks with the same trading strategy, it doesn't work. The traditional finance world learned that the hard way on Monday, October 19, 1987, and has had periodic reminders since. It won't work better in the defi world. Another limitation of automation is that if someone figures out how to exploit it, your money disappears arbitrarily fast. Crypto enthusiasts treat the regular heists of large amounts of crypto as teething pains. But actually they are an intrinsic part of the platform that can't be eliminated. Once you eliminate the Ponzi underpinning, crypto trading strategies do what you don't want it to, and don't do what you do want it to. You lose both ways. Moving on, every crypto enthusiast that I have met has an understanding of finance that pays attention to SOME of the stakeholders, and not others. There are a lot of hidden stakeholders in finance, and you ignore them at your peril. The excellent series https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/ https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/ says a lot about that topic. One of the big ones is government. Crypto enthusiasts think that they have taken government out of the equation, and that this is a good thing. They are wrong on both counts. First of all the things we actually need, like pizzas, are in the power of governments to control. The mediums of exchange that people actually use, like fiat currency, are also in the power of governments. And, failing all else, governments can send men with guns and lock you up. In fact they regularly do this to people. You aren't getting rid of governments, you have to figure out how to coexist with them. The result is that if you and the government disagree about where the government's jurisdiction ends, the government is usually right. For example https://twitter.com/AFTXcreditor/status/1653883349021106179 https://twitter.com/AFTXcreditor/status/1653883349021106179 shows FTX attempting to claw back $3.9 billion from Genesis that happened on "irreversible" blockchains. At this point, this is just redistributing the losses. But the people at the heart of crypto are admitting here that these "irreversible" transactions are actually reversible in practice. Oops. Going the other way, governments are at least somewhat responsive to the people (more so now than historically, and they vary widely). And those regulatory regimes that you don't like incorporate a lot of real world experience. Are they perfect? No! But they also work out better on average in real use cases than crypto does. And finally, about ridicule. You're the one who first went to saying that everyone who disagrees with you is "embarrassing themselves" with their ignorance. Which you did repeatedly and rudely. Until you have the common decency to apologize for your past behavior, it is sheer unmitigated gall for you to complain about anyone else's. Now I just demonstrated that I am far from ignorant. And that it is possible to be both educated on the topic and come to the opinion that this Kool-Aid is poisonous. Hopefully you learned something from the experience. And hopefully you improve your behavior.