6 ms·
Well put. Following that line of thought I’d say that by now crypto has shown that you can never trust a system, in the end you have to trust the people behind
by smodo 3y ago
Well put. Following that line of thought I’d say that by now crypto has shown that you can never trust a system, in the end you have to trust the people behind it. I find people to be more trustworthy when they go to jail if they do wrong.
- matheusmoreira 3y agoCryptocurrency was meant to reduce the number of people you need to trust to an absolute minimum. Ideally, the only people you'd have to trust would be world class cryptographers. The whole problem here is people reinvented the entire financial system on top of it. Exchanges are really just banks in disguise. They do fractional reserve banking, they offer cryptocurrency loans, they even have savings accounts.
- roland35 3y agoThe thing is... I honestly am not smart enough to trust the cryptography! I guess at a high level I could make some sense of it but there is no way I could fully evaluate any crypto as safe or not.
- cezart 3y agoI think there is great irony in the fact that probably 90% of the people involved in crypto don't understand the math behind the systems they trust so much. They could swear these systems are more trustworthy than traditional banks cause decentralization, smart contracts, cryptography, etc. But all of these are just abstract concepts for them in which they just chose to place their trust, because of vibes or smth.
- hanniabu 3y agoThere are permissionless and trustless exchanges like uniswap
- matheusmoreira 3y agoI apologize, in my post I meant to say centralized exchanges.
- pjc50 3y agoHow do I get real money out of uniswap? Ultimately there has to be an off-ramp, or it's no different from an ingame currency.
- matheusmoreira 3y ago> Ultimately there has to be an off-ramp Not if people start using the cryptocurrency to actually pay for stuff. That's the point of money, after all.
- pavlov 3y agoIt’s been 15 years and nobody still uses cryptocurrency to pay for stuff. And as you say, that’s the point of money. So maybe, just maybe crypto is actually not very good as money, which is why people have been increasingly desperate to invent new stories to keep someone paying real money for crypto (digital gold, NFTs, etc.)
- ben_w 3y agoMost people don't use cryptocurrency to pay for stuff, but back when I lived in Cambridge there was a nice pub where you could buy your pizza with it, and last week here in Berlin I passed a Subway[0] that let you pay for your sandwich in BTC. Or at least it said it did, BTC by itself is a terrible idea[1]. [0] And a subway. Except the subway was elevated and the "proper" railway was submerged (but not covered): https://www.google.com/maps/search/S%2BU+Schönhauser+Allee+(Berlin)/@52.5493205,13.4111448,758m/data=!3m2!1e3!4b1?entry=ttu https://www.google.com/maps/search/S%2BU+Schönhauser+Allee+(... [1] And to shortcut the conversation: Alice: *something about payment layers*, Bob: *how payment layers destroy the one thing BTC actually does provide*
- vidarh 3y ago
- Qwertious 3y ago>The whole problem here is people reinvented the entire financial system on top of it The whole problem is that some of what they do adds value, because it turns out the banking industry as a whole has some valuable functions that people need.
- derefr 3y agoYeah, but ideally all of those features should be "native" features of the cryptosystem, such that they're all just as zero-trust as the core stuff the cryptosystem does with its gas currency. The problem is that developers see "this cryptosystem supports smart contracts" and interpret it as "this is a Turing-machine substrate which I can use to deploy effectively centralized / trust-us infrastructure, but then turn around and market it as being decentralized and zero-trust." If a cryptosystem supports "smart contracts", ideally they should be restricted to only to serve as an interface for extending the deployed cryptosystem with additional decentralized / zero-trust features. Sadly, it's impossible to have a compiler determine whether your code is decentralized / zero-trust.
- jowea 3y agoWell, the financial system exists because it provides services that are desired. From what I understand there's really no way to offer those same services purely in the blockchain, except for some imitations that have their own equally big problems.
- treprinum 3y agoIn essence, all a financial system functionally provides is a set of buffers/caches so that individual or company lives can overcome some bumps quickly at the expense of promise to refill the buffer + some extra later.
- NovemberWhiskey 3y agoNot really. The complexity can’t simply be reduced to a computer science metaphor.
- tnel77 3y agoOther the to exchange fiat for crypto, I’m not quite sure why people keep their cryptocurrencies on these exchanges. They proven time and time again that they’re usually a scam.
- moomin 3y agoI mean, this article suggests that Binance isn’t a scam, rather it has a perfectly sound business model that is illegal and immoral.
- to11mtm 3y agoOften it's a desire to be able to quickly run a trade or arb play.
- WalterSear 3y agoBecause you can't gamble if your money isn't in the casino.
- tadfisher 3y agoBecause, as it turns out, using cryptocurrency as currency is too expensive. The exchanges let you "trade" and then settle themselves in way fewer transactions, so you don't have to pay nearly as much in fees. It's the same reason we keep our money in banks instead of everyone owning a Fed terminal and requesting ACH pulls.
- newyankee 3y agoAlso because some of the code was supposed to be open source I guess ? Trust the code ?
- pixl97 3y agoThe code is not the system, the code is not the network, the code (and the coins) themselves have zero value. Much like money itself is valueless. You can't eat the money, you can't build anything with money. It's the interface between money and real objects that gives money said value. The digital coins wanted to cheat that connection to fungibility with real life objects.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]