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I know this is rather obvious and has been repeated to death but: There's just absolutely no point to crypto if you end up having to trust institutions that ar

I know this is rather obvious and has been repeated to death but: There's just absolutely no point to crypto if you end up having to trust institutions that are fundamentally less trustworthy than mainstream financial institutions and regulators, even if they have plenty of issues too.

npoc 2y ago
Absolutely correct regarding cRypTo. But there's also bitcoin, which people wrongly group with it. They are two completely different things, once you dig a bit deeper. One is going to improve the world immeasurably - in fact one of mankind's most important (maybe greatest) inventions, and the other is a snake pit. If what I say sounds crazy, it won't after you've studied the topic for 5000 hours.
netsharc 2y ago
It's so funny when crypto banks get robbed and they turn to the FBI to ask them to get the robbers...
- kybernetikos 2y ago
  I see no problem with this. Crime doesn't stop being crime just because its happening to virtual assets. Maybe some crypto folks want to disconnect from the rest of society, but I don't think that's very many of them.
  - FireBeyond 2y ago
    Many folks said the Silk Road had made drug dealing "harmless". What they really meant was "harmless to me". Because it does nothing for anyone else in the chain to make it safer. There's also a non-zero sum of crypto proponents that think a large swathe of things that are illegal "IRL", should be non-criminal because ... "online".
    - jenadine 2y ago
      There are people who think some things that are illegal shouldn't be illegal. (Online or IRL doesn't matter)
  - Suppafly 2y ago
    >Crime doesn't stop being crime just because its happening to virtual assets. Sure, but there is a reason that real banks have tons of laws and regulations. It's more or less not a crime to steal crypto because it's not a thing that's protected by law. And crypto bros are doing everything they can to keep it from being protected by law while whining that the law isn't able to help them.
    - 15155 2y ago
      > because it's not a thing that's protected by law Unequivocally false in the United States. Despite what computer professionals may sometimes think, judicial opinions and most of our legal system are based on what a "reasonable person" would believe. Judges don't agree with the "Neener neener neener! The terms are exactly X!" methodology, typically. A reasonable, everyday person (and therefore a judge) would consider a party being deprived their valuable assets as theft, absent some form of agreement. Invariably, the reply incoming is "codeislaw," but that's absolutely not the case in every circumstance.
- yieldcrv 2y ago
  I don’t really get the amusement. Just because some crypto users were allergic to “centralized institutions” what does that have to do with anyone else? In this meme, why isn’t the permissionless aspect seen as not gatekeeping who is involved?
bboygravity 2y ago
The entire point of crypto is there's no need to trust institutions. The only person you need to trust is your counterparty. Any "service" that goes against this is basically normal money except way worse. That doesn't mean crypto is broken or useless. It just means scammers gonna scam. Nice example: Bitcoin ETFs completely miss this point. Is a Bitcoin ETF actually backed by real Bitcoin? Nobody really knows, but judging by Wallstreet's track record and who's behind it (Blackrock and Coinbase) the answer is almost certainly: no, your ETF order is not hitting a lit exchange and no it's not backed by anything and no, the SEC doesn't care.
- NoboruWataya 2y ago
  Bitcoin ETFs are not trying to replace money or leverage the benefits of bitcoin themselves, they are just providing a way for investors to speculate on interest in bitcoin. Same way that you would not buy an auto industry focused ETF and expect to be able to get into it and drive off.
  - ryandrake 2y ago
    Gold ETFs[1] are backed by physical bars of gold sitting in a vault somewhere. I would expect a "bitcoin ETF" to be backed by actual bitcoins on the blockchain, proportional to the investor's stake. 1: https://etfdb.com/themes/physically-backed-gold-etfs/ https://etfdb.com/themes/physically-backed-gold-etfs/
    - bboygravity 2y ago
      "ETFs are backed by actual real underlying" is quite a statement for anybody who understands how Wallstreet actually works. Literally every US financial crisis can be summarized as "it turned out not to be backed by anything". More info: https://www.amazon.com/Decade-Armageddon-New-Geography-Essays/dp/1910151580 https://www.amazon.com/Decade-Armageddon-New-Geography-Essay... VW squeeze: short positions that cannot be closed, because more stocks where sold than where supposed to exist. Same thing for Gamestop (except worse, 220% shorted at some point). 2008 crash: packages of high quality mortgages / credit that turned out to be backed by 0 high quality mortgages. FTX scandal: sold tons of "Bitcoin" that turned out to never have existed + traded "tokenized stocks, backed 1-by-1 with real stock by some shady broker in Germany" that turned out to be a complete lie.
robxorb 2y ago
You don't have to trust those institutions. You can custody your own crypto without them, pay for services, etc. What's holding the safety level back ironically is the overbearing regulations making individual financial sovereignty a pain.
- nl 2y ago
  You missed the point here. They were pointing out that crypto users rely on these worse-than-worthless audits and as an example how it wasn't until threatened with traditional law enforcement certik gave tokens back. > What's holding the safety level back ironically is the overbearing regulations making individual financial sovereignty a pain. There is absolutely no evidence of this.
  - robxorb 2y ago
    I don't get what you're saying. The reality is, that because of KYC/AML laws it's difficult for ordinary people to replace cash with crypto, which - if it were easy - would be a superior form of money and transacting as any amount from tenths of a cent to billions, moves frictionlessly.
    - pxx 2y ago
      lol
    - oersted 2y ago
      You do have a point there, KYC/AML does tend to make a few large exchanges a trust bottleneck. But still, would you bet a billion dollars that whatever crypto system you are using has no bugs, vulnerabilities or backdoors? Are you going to audit the whole codebase yourself and trust your technical assessment? Do you even have access to the code that is deployed?
      - robxorb 2y ago
        This is a very important issue you raise. In terms of the blockchains themselves, they all have a kind of built-in bounty, in that if on-chain funds have inherent risk of being lost or taken due to faults in the system, this will have happened - as the biggest / most popular systems are valued in the multi-billions. Ie, a huge bounty if an exploit exists. To my knowledge, this has not occurred to date with any of the major systems themselves. It's important not to mistake the above with a different issue of trusting applications development built on blockchain projects. Almost all blockchains have kind of two layers of functionality. The base layer allows self-custody and transfer. Above that, people can build other things using smart contract languages, or hardware solutions, or software that interacts with the chain. Those can have huge bugs or be outright scams. It's a bit like HTTPS could be provably secure, but that doesn't mean if you visit https://dodgy-website.com-dodgy.tk https://dodgy-website.com-dodgy.tk you're protected against it doing something dodgy. The different is while HTTPS is limited in its user-facing application, the base layer of say Bitcoin or Ethereum isn't so much. People can securely store and transact any amount with anyone worldwide, sometimes in seconds, with complete finality and determinism, without needing to trust anyone in between. In almost all cases, you also have access to the code, and can build it yourself. But as mentioned, the built-in bounty acts as your best security. Eg, if there was a hole in the base layer of Bitcoin right now, there's hundreds of billions up for grabs.
karaterobot 2y ago
Please please please please please don't make this the 10,000th identical thread about is crypto bad or extra bad. Oh rats, too late.
- Suppafly 2y ago
  >Please please please please please don't make this the 10,000th identical thread about is crypto bad or extra bad. Oh rats, too late. To be fair, it's a little hard not to when crypto is so bad.
  - karaterobot 2y ago
    It is easy. There's only debate if there's uncertainty. If there's no question about it, it's not necessary to go through the same material in literally every single thread where the topic comes up, even tangentially.
yieldcrv 2y ago
the point is the choice, and there is a flaw in your discussion A) the smart contract audit is a choice, certik is one player providing them, there are many players and its a choice that consumer and investors misuse the point of those audits to even make the make. certik provides disclosure of vulnerabilities, consumers chose to see that as a greenlight instead of an objective decision to participate or not B) your ensuing conversation about exchanges has nothing to do with what certik does or has made a meme for. so thats the conversation you actually wanted to have the whole time, a copy pasted “look! Crypto mentioned, my time to generically complain about it” discussion, but not one really relevant here. certik and others are just providing cybersecurity, its a sector that needs it, there is demand for it and thats as deep as it goes. if your crusade is to reduce demand for it, its an ineffective and redundant use of energy at this point.
TechDebtDevin 2y ago
Im not into crypto either but this is a gross generalization. There are zero trust protocols within some crypto ecosystems and some of the world's top crypto PhDs work on these projects. There are just so a lot of amateur devs and uneducated users trying to make a buck, of which get exploited by a much more sophisticated party who also wants to make a buck, sounds like pretty much any other capital market just much more blatant.
- simfree 2y ago
  Rather than relying on the idea that you're more sophisticated than everyone else who could steal from you, you could just leave your money with a mainstream financial institution that's regulated.
  - xtracto 2y ago
    That's a problem where I live. If I want to buy USD to protect me from my country's currency inflationary trend, I have to fill up cases of green bills , and risk going to banks with stashes of pesos to change for usd. Or, I can buy USDT and move it to my cold wallet and call it a day.
- mschuster91 2y ago
  > There are just so a lot of amateur devs and uneducated users trying to make a buck, of which get exploited by a much more sophisticated party who also wants to make a buck, sounds like pretty much any other capital market just much more blatant. Yeah, but if you get wronged on normal capital markets you can complain at the authorities and get your money back. Your bank goes bust? FDIC covers up to 250k per account. Your credit card company doesn't side with you in a dispute or your bank's customer "service" department acts up? Call the CFPB, and you'll get a call from somewhere very high up the bank's chain who actually has the power to make things happen to make sure you withdraw your complaint. A public traded company does bullshit to mislead investors? The SEC will tear them a new hole. And so on. In the crypto world, you're left to deal with all of that on your own. Maybe the police will file a fraud complaint that won't lead anywhere.

npoc 2y ago

Absolutely correct regarding cRypTo. But there's also bitcoin, which people wrongly group with it. They are two completely different things, once you dig a bit deeper. One is going to improve the world immeasurably - in fact one of mankind's most important (maybe greatest) inventions, and the other is a snake pit. If what I say sounds crazy, it won't after you've studied the topic for 5000 hours.

netsharc 2y ago

It's so funny when crypto banks get robbed and they turn to the FBI to ask them to get the robbers...

kybernetikos 2y ago
I see no problem with this. Crime doesn't stop being crime just because its happening to virtual assets. Maybe some crypto folks want to disconnect from the rest of society, but I don't think that's very many of them.
- FireBeyond 2y ago
  Many folks said the Silk Road had made drug dealing "harmless". What they really meant was "harmless to me". Because it does nothing for anyone else in the chain to make it safer. There's also a non-zero sum of crypto proponents that think a large swathe of things that are illegal "IRL", should be non-criminal because ... "online".
  - jenadine 2y ago
    There are people who think some things that are illegal shouldn't be illegal. (Online or IRL doesn't matter)
- Suppafly 2y ago
  >Crime doesn't stop being crime just because its happening to virtual assets. Sure, but there is a reason that real banks have tons of laws and regulations. It's more or less not a crime to steal crypto because it's not a thing that's protected by law. And crypto bros are doing everything they can to keep it from being protected by law while whining that the law isn't able to help them.
  - 15155 2y ago
    > because it's not a thing that's protected by law Unequivocally false in the United States. Despite what computer professionals may sometimes think, judicial opinions and most of our legal system are based on what a "reasonable person" would believe. Judges don't agree with the "Neener neener neener! The terms are exactly X!" methodology, typically. A reasonable, everyday person (and therefore a judge) would consider a party being deprived their valuable assets as theft, absent some form of agreement. Invariably, the reply incoming is "codeislaw," but that's absolutely not the case in every circumstance.
yieldcrv 2y ago
I don’t really get the amusement. Just because some crypto users were allergic to “centralized institutions” what does that have to do with anyone else? In this meme, why isn’t the permissionless aspect seen as not gatekeeping who is involved?

bboygravity 2y ago

The entire point of crypto is there's no need to trust institutions. The only person you need to trust is your counterparty. Any "service" that goes against this is basically normal money except way worse. That doesn't mean crypto is broken or useless. It just means scammers gonna scam. Nice example: Bitcoin ETFs completely miss this point. Is a Bitcoin ETF actually backed by real Bitcoin? Nobody really knows, but judging by Wallstreet's track record and who's behind it (Blackrock and Coinbase) the answer is almost certainly: no, your ETF order is not hitting a lit exchange and no it's not backed by anything and no, the SEC doesn't care.

NoboruWataya 2y ago
Bitcoin ETFs are not trying to replace money or leverage the benefits of bitcoin themselves, they are just providing a way for investors to speculate on interest in bitcoin. Same way that you would not buy an auto industry focused ETF and expect to be able to get into it and drive off.
- ryandrake 2y ago
  Gold ETFs[1] are backed by physical bars of gold sitting in a vault somewhere. I would expect a "bitcoin ETF" to be backed by actual bitcoins on the blockchain, proportional to the investor's stake. 1: https://etfdb.com/themes/physically-backed-gold-etfs/ https://etfdb.com/themes/physically-backed-gold-etfs/
  - bboygravity 2y ago
    "ETFs are backed by actual real underlying" is quite a statement for anybody who understands how Wallstreet actually works. Literally every US financial crisis can be summarized as "it turned out not to be backed by anything". More info: https://www.amazon.com/Decade-Armageddon-New-Geography-Essays/dp/1910151580 https://www.amazon.com/Decade-Armageddon-New-Geography-Essay... VW squeeze: short positions that cannot be closed, because more stocks where sold than where supposed to exist. Same thing for Gamestop (except worse, 220% shorted at some point). 2008 crash: packages of high quality mortgages / credit that turned out to be backed by 0 high quality mortgages. FTX scandal: sold tons of "Bitcoin" that turned out to never have existed + traded "tokenized stocks, backed 1-by-1 with real stock by some shady broker in Germany" that turned out to be a complete lie.

robxorb 2y ago

You don't have to trust those institutions. You can custody your own crypto without them, pay for services, etc. What's holding the safety level back ironically is the overbearing regulations making individual financial sovereignty a pain.

nl 2y ago
You missed the point here. They were pointing out that crypto users rely on these worse-than-worthless audits and as an example how it wasn't until threatened with traditional law enforcement certik gave tokens back. > What's holding the safety level back ironically is the overbearing regulations making individual financial sovereignty a pain. There is absolutely no evidence of this.
- robxorb 2y ago
  I don't get what you're saying. The reality is, that because of KYC/AML laws it's difficult for ordinary people to replace cash with crypto, which - if it were easy - would be a superior form of money and transacting as any amount from tenths of a cent to billions, moves frictionlessly.
  - pxx 2y ago
    lol
  - oersted 2y ago
    You do have a point there, KYC/AML does tend to make a few large exchanges a trust bottleneck. But still, would you bet a billion dollars that whatever crypto system you are using has no bugs, vulnerabilities or backdoors? Are you going to audit the whole codebase yourself and trust your technical assessment? Do you even have access to the code that is deployed?
    - robxorb 2y ago
      This is a very important issue you raise. In terms of the blockchains themselves, they all have a kind of built-in bounty, in that if on-chain funds have inherent risk of being lost or taken due to faults in the system, this will have happened - as the biggest / most popular systems are valued in the multi-billions. Ie, a huge bounty if an exploit exists. To my knowledge, this has not occurred to date with any of the major systems themselves. It's important not to mistake the above with a different issue of trusting applications development built on blockchain projects. Almost all blockchains have kind of two layers of functionality. The base layer allows self-custody and transfer. Above that, people can build other things using smart contract languages, or hardware solutions, or software that interacts with the chain. Those can have huge bugs or be outright scams. It's a bit like HTTPS could be provably secure, but that doesn't mean if you visit https://dodgy-website.com-dodgy.tk https://dodgy-website.com-dodgy.tk you're protected against it doing something dodgy. The different is while HTTPS is limited in its user-facing application, the base layer of say Bitcoin or Ethereum isn't so much. People can securely store and transact any amount with anyone worldwide, sometimes in seconds, with complete finality and determinism, without needing to trust anyone in between. In almost all cases, you also have access to the code, and can build it yourself. But as mentioned, the built-in bounty acts as your best security. Eg, if there was a hole in the base layer of Bitcoin right now, there's hundreds of billions up for grabs.

karaterobot 2y ago

Please please please please please don't make this the 10,000th identical thread about is crypto bad or extra bad. Oh rats, too late.

Suppafly 2y ago
>Please please please please please don't make this the 10,000th identical thread about is crypto bad or extra bad. Oh rats, too late. To be fair, it's a little hard not to when crypto is so bad.
- karaterobot 2y ago
  It is easy. There's only debate if there's uncertainty. If there's no question about it, it's not necessary to go through the same material in literally every single thread where the topic comes up, even tangentially.

yieldcrv 2y ago

the point is the choice, and there is a flaw in your discussion A) the smart contract audit is a choice, certik is one player providing them, there are many players and its a choice that consumer and investors misuse the point of those audits to even make the make. certik provides disclosure of vulnerabilities, consumers chose to see that as a greenlight instead of an objective decision to participate or not B) your ensuing conversation about exchanges has nothing to do with what certik does or has made a meme for. so thats the conversation you actually wanted to have the whole time, a copy pasted “look! Crypto mentioned, my time to generically complain about it” discussion, but not one really relevant here. certik and others are just providing cybersecurity, its a sector that needs it, there is demand for it and thats as deep as it goes. if your crusade is to reduce demand for it, its an ineffective and redundant use of energy at this point.

TechDebtDevin 2y ago

Im not into crypto either but this is a gross generalization. There are zero trust protocols within some crypto ecosystems and some of the world's top crypto PhDs work on these projects. There are just so a lot of amateur devs and uneducated users trying to make a buck, of which get exploited by a much more sophisticated party who also wants to make a buck, sounds like pretty much any other capital market just much more blatant.

simfree 2y ago
Rather than relying on the idea that you're more sophisticated than everyone else who could steal from you, you could just leave your money with a mainstream financial institution that's regulated.
- xtracto 2y ago
  That's a problem where I live. If I want to buy USD to protect me from my country's currency inflationary trend, I have to fill up cases of green bills , and risk going to banks with stashes of pesos to change for usd. Or, I can buy USDT and move it to my cold wallet and call it a day.
mschuster91 2y ago
> There are just so a lot of amateur devs and uneducated users trying to make a buck, of which get exploited by a much more sophisticated party who also wants to make a buck, sounds like pretty much any other capital market just much more blatant. Yeah, but if you get wronged on normal capital markets you can complain at the authorities and get your money back. Your bank goes bust? FDIC covers up to 250k per account. Your credit card company doesn't side with you in a dispute or your bank's customer "service" department acts up? Call the CFPB, and you'll get a call from somewhere very high up the bank's chain who actually has the power to make things happen to make sure you withdraw your complaint. A public traded company does bullshit to mislead investors? The SEC will tear them a new hole. And so on. In the crypto world, you're left to deal with all of that on your own. Maybe the police will file a fraud complaint that won't lead anywhere.