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And now you wonder why wanted crypto to succeed. It was not because it was quick way to make money: It was so that banks had to compete with real technology and

And now you wonder why wanted crypto to succeed. It was not because it was quick way to make money: It was so that banks had to compete with real technology and so that no one ever had to have their lives savings stolen by bankers with no recurse.

timerol 3y ago
> so that no one ever had to have their lives savings stolen by bankers with no recurse. This is meant sarcastically, right? Crypto is extremely efficient at causing people's life savings to evaporate
- immibis 3y ago
  Not by bankers, so it's all good. I will say, PancakeSwap stole a trivial amount of my money, and probably more of other people's. Are they bankers?
- shakow 3y ago
  The Forex is equally extremely efficient at vaporising life savings, still you wouldn't say that's the fault of the dollar/euro/yen/yuan/dinar/...
- tomjen3 3y ago
  Sure but only by their actions, not by the actions of some stupid mainframe software.
ranger207 3y ago
The story of crypto is the story of recreating the existing financial system from scratch, particularly including all its regulations that make the current modern financial system so annoying. Yes, the current financial regulations suck, but each one was put into place because of failures like you see in crypto every day. In the long run cyrpto regulation will wind up looking much like modern financial regulation because it suffers from the same pressures, incentives, and attack surfaces as the modern financial system. This isn't to say that the current financial regulation regime is good in any sense of the word, just that it's effective at what it's explicitly designed to respond to. Crypto that lacks the regulation of modern finance will suffer from one set of problems; modern financial regulation suffers from another set of problems emergent from the system of regulation itself. That crypto doesn't suffer from problems caused by the system of regulations does not make it inherently better than modern finance
- abdullahkhalids 3y ago
  Cryptocurrencies had two main goals - Let individuals freely transact. Which as you rightly point out, has failed for good reasons. - Prevent state institutions from controlling monetary policy. This has not failed yet - mainly because crypto is not even remotely big enough that the state has tried to control how much cryptocurrency is printed. If cryptocurrency ever gets big enough, we will find out whether it can withstand the pressure. While cryptography to secure your communications has withstood state pressure for 30 years now to not allow backdoors, I think the pressure on cryptocurrency will be higher.
  - popol12 3y ago
    I disagree with your first point, Bitcoin let has let individual transact freely for a decade now. Sure, it has a hard time scaling but apart from that I think it's doing great on this point. Could you detail what you had in mind if you disagree ?
    - immibis 3y ago
      There are fraud prevention institutions out there who secretly colour your coins and won't let you deposit to an exchange (or trigger some very intensive verification and a police report) if you try to deposit certain coins.
      - popol12 3y ago
        That's true, but there's ongoing work about this to add some kind of plausible deniability to all transactions. There's also privacy coins like Monero where this problem has been solved already. Many institutions then banned Monero, but they won't be able to ban all cryptocurrencies if they get on par with Monero's privacy protecting techniques.
        immibis 3y ago
        Of course they'll be able to ban all cryptocurrencies. They already banned Monero, didn't they? Nothing stops them banning more.
immibis 3y ago
And yet cryptocurrency managed to recreate its own equally complicated messes! E.g. lightning network, bridge tokens, swap routers, parachains. It turns out that scalable distributed systems are really hard, and scalable secure distributed systems are even harder - who knew.

timerol 3y ago

> so that no one ever had to have their lives savings stolen by bankers with no recurse. This is meant sarcastically, right? Crypto is extremely efficient at causing people's life savings to evaporate

immibis 3y ago
Not by bankers, so it's all good. I will say, PancakeSwap stole a trivial amount of my money, and probably more of other people's. Are they bankers?
shakow 3y ago
The Forex is equally extremely efficient at vaporising life savings, still you wouldn't say that's the fault of the dollar/euro/yen/yuan/dinar/...
tomjen3 3y ago
Sure but only by their actions, not by the actions of some stupid mainframe software.

ranger207 3y ago

The story of crypto is the story of recreating the existing financial system from scratch, particularly including all its regulations that make the current modern financial system so annoying. Yes, the current financial regulations suck, but each one was put into place because of failures like you see in crypto every day. In the long run cyrpto regulation will wind up looking much like modern financial regulation because it suffers from the same pressures, incentives, and attack surfaces as the modern financial system. This isn't to say that the current financial regulation regime is good in any sense of the word, just that it's effective at what it's explicitly designed to respond to. Crypto that lacks the regulation of modern finance will suffer from one set of problems; modern financial regulation suffers from another set of problems emergent from the system of regulation itself. That crypto doesn't suffer from problems caused by the system of regulations does not make it inherently better than modern finance

abdullahkhalids 3y ago
Cryptocurrencies had two main goals - Let individuals freely transact. Which as you rightly point out, has failed for good reasons. - Prevent state institutions from controlling monetary policy. This has not failed yet - mainly because crypto is not even remotely big enough that the state has tried to control how much cryptocurrency is printed. If cryptocurrency ever gets big enough, we will find out whether it can withstand the pressure. While cryptography to secure your communications has withstood state pressure for 30 years now to not allow backdoors, I think the pressure on cryptocurrency will be higher.
- popol12 3y ago
  I disagree with your first point, Bitcoin let has let individual transact freely for a decade now. Sure, it has a hard time scaling but apart from that I think it's doing great on this point. Could you detail what you had in mind if you disagree ?
  - immibis 3y ago
    There are fraud prevention institutions out there who secretly colour your coins and won't let you deposit to an exchange (or trigger some very intensive verification and a police report) if you try to deposit certain coins.
    - popol12 3y ago
      That's true, but there's ongoing work about this to add some kind of plausible deniability to all transactions. There's also privacy coins like Monero where this problem has been solved already. Many institutions then banned Monero, but they won't be able to ban all cryptocurrencies if they get on par with Monero's privacy protecting techniques.
      - immibis 3y ago
        Of course they'll be able to ban all cryptocurrencies. They already banned Monero, didn't they? Nothing stops them banning more.

immibis 3y ago

And yet cryptocurrency managed to recreate its own equally complicated messes! E.g. lightning network, bridge tokens, swap routers, parachains. It turns out that scalable distributed systems are really hard, and scalable secure distributed systems are even harder - who knew.