But that's a feature, not a bug, at least according to the crypto people. But, so far, all they have managed to do is rediscover lessons about the need for regulation, oversight and accountability that the financial industry has learnt decades or even centuries ago.
> But that's a feature, not a bug, at least according to the crypto people. But, so far, all they have managed to do is rediscover lessons about the need for regulation, oversight and accountability that the financial industry has learnt decades or even centuries ago.
I feel this is only true for people who have not truly embraced the decentralized aspect of cryptocurrency. For example, many people leave all of their money in one wallet. Centralization. Many people use only one exchange for converting fiat to crypto. Centralization. The harder you look, the more you will find that the only people upset about the state of cryptocurrencies are those that did not diversify and instead reverted to a concept squarely against the cryptocurrency ethos.
Thus is human nature. Who wants to manage 30,000 wallets each containing only a few dollars? The supporting tooling is not there (or is not easy enough to use) and thus we see this recurrent user pattern.
If 99.9% of people are using a technology "wrong", then I would suggest it's bad technology. If we aren't making a technology with actual users in mind, then we're just doing some sort of high-concept performance art.
It can be done but there is a meeting in the middle from many sides.
I believe it centers around the simple laws of thermodynamics, the path of least resistance will be taken.
Tools are coming out to make development easier, tools are coming out to make consumption easier.
Think about computing and how much has changed, been misunderstood, and misstated, and flipped on its head in the past thirty years. The ease and accessibility is still being pushed.
This will too.
I hope people who do this have either a great memory or a great filing system.
The spreadsheets, math tables, the manual toil...you aren't looking at it realistically. Things don't just pop into existence perfectly but iterate into a local and idealistically global minimum from the reality of what people want and need, not what devs and larger organizations think they want and need.
Confined to only three dimensions? Pfft.
Get on my level kid...
Have you met any of those people? Do they actually exist or are you imagining them?
That sort of system will collapse, but not necessarily the banks.
There is no law of nature that says we have to use free to fuck anybody capitalism run rampant over all. It is a choice.
I think it is time we made a different choice!
https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/13/the-case-for-hi...
> even in the long run, it’s really, really hard to cut nominal wages. Yet when you have very low inflation, getting relative wages right would require that a significant number of workers take wage cuts. So having a somewhat higher inflation rate would lead to lower unemployment, not just temporarily, but on a sustained basis.
Shorter: we create an economic policy to cheat workers out of the take home value of their earnings to make management easier and post favorable employment metrics for political leaders.
That "growth at all costs" policy, which, by the way is not inherently a free market policy, exists to short shrift the labor class by means of a compounding treadmill that most will fall off.
High inflation does not imply that real wages shrink on average.
Certainly not! Inflation is great for the privileged, because it forces the hoi polloi into investment schemes to protect their assets from inflation, which disproportionately help finance the business adventures of the privileged (e.g. stocks, bonds).
Thus the average real wage will get higher as a few select individuals get huge astronomical wages.
//edit - looks like they were by the UK and NL governments.
I think Enron actually had more transparency, and did more good in the world than the failed cryptocurrency companies. I've worked on two pieces of software that originated in Enron, which I believe are still used in production today. I think Enron participated in the invention of weather derivatives.
(No, I have never worked for Enron.)
I think the most important societal issue is that it damages investor and consumer confidence.
As a parallel, consider food regulation. When I go into a store or restaurant, the food I buy is very likely to be safe, because there are a lot of regulators making sure it happens. If they weren't operating, then I'd have to exert a lot more effort to make sure that each thing I eat is safe. Not only would this be a giant waste of effort, but it would significantly reduce the opportunity for innovation and cost reduction, because people would be reluctant to try new products and new restaurants.
Market confidence is even more important for finance, because it's much harder for individuals to know if a given company is really working. It would be a huge problem for society if everybody went back to keeping their money in mattresses and physically moving it everywhere.
You shouldn't have to pay a penny, the industry should be taxed so that the regulation is self-funded.
We can't legislate about "rational actors," but we CAN and SHOULD legislate about "perfect information." Any information hiding is essentially fraud or theft from the rest of the market, because it creates an information asymmetry distortion.
We could for example say that registered companies don't get company benefits (protection of owners from bankruptcy and protection of board from personal liability and such) unless they continually and regularly publish the full (even unaudited) books, not just the occasional brief filings we require now. That would benefit everybody in the market, except those who thrive on fraud and information asymmetry.
The risks of not using your own cold storage is real. The ability to store your own is outlined by numerous tutorials, explanations.
Nobody is crying for those who sent money to the nigerian prince, I don't think we should cry for anyone here either.
These player are smart enough to know most folks are uneducated on the topic and can be readily swindled by players looking and talking the part.
This happens every day in so many realms outside of blockchain; the opportunity for transparency, the lack of sympathy or control to help those with a lack of understanding, there are certain elements here that can change an environment that is so aggressively finance driven. This is the hope, something different.
The regulation, the trickery, etc it all gets sorted in time to a level we choose to accept. The question is if the potential for change is worth putting up with it until then.
USA: https://www.federalreserve.gov/aboutthefed/audited-annual-fi...
Canada: https://www.bankofcanada.ca/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/annua...
Yeah, these institutions are antithetical to the whole cryptocurrency model. Regulation isn't necessary, education would suffice. The public is not yet ready for this paradigm, and perhaps never will be, but I'm hopeful.
If EY (or anyone else serious about this) 'follows the money' then that would be a very interesting report to read.