It is one giant fraud bankrolled by unlimited capital that can artificially increase prices at which point there becomes demand from people in fear of missing out, once the early capital has the suckers locked in the prices plateau at first as the capital stops buying and driving the price up, and then begins a steep crash as they cash out and lock in the gains, this only causes fear and panic among the late entries that made investments at the peak which they couldn't afford to lose...rinse and repeat.
The NFTs may be even more blatant and egregious than the ERC20 coins in terms of fake sales driving up interest, media and demand for shit no regular investor will ever flip. A lot of it is just transparent fraud and money laundering, with the people involved not even shying away from it but openly justifying it on the basis they feel the stock market and art collectors have always engaged in the same misconduct.
Take Elon Musk, openly pumping Doge...I'm not judging, I get the humor in it, but a lot of people have been crushed over the years in the crypto bubbles, yesterday was a prime example where Elon was likely the sole cause of Doge exploding in value (maybe 5x in a few days and 100x over a month) and as the big money way slowly cashing out these massive media campaigns were behind a marketing scam of "DogeDay" essentially making their killing on the backs of the poor uneducated late investors. One would hope his Tweets shined a bright light on the dystopia of it all, but it seems everyone is either so greedy or in such bad positions financially they would rather take part.
My guess is now that they have reaped their profits at the expense of the little guy, they will buy back in with the profits and we should see another pump following the -25% DogeDay scam.
Noone's lying to them, noone's defrauding them, noone's stealing anything or embezzling from them.
It's just greed, plain and simple. If you pile into a get-rich-quick scheme but end up holding the bag in, then more fool you.
I still think it should probably be regulated to prevent idiots from losing their life savings. But I won't pretend the losers are ethically any different from the winners. No matter whether you're early or late to the party, you're all just hucksters looking for a quick buck from a pump-and-dump.
That implies cryptocurrencies provide no value by themselves and is simply false. Ethereum is essentially a distributed virtual machine that anyone can pay to use. Monero offers complete financial privacy.
...that is unbelievably slow, limited, difficult to use, and makes it impossible to fix bugs.
It's absolutely fascinating in principle, yes. But in practice it's a solution in search of a problem.
I don't dispute that. The real innovation lies in the decentralization. Unfortunately, decentralization is threatened by centralized mining operations who resist changes to the network such as migration to proof of stake. Bitcoin also suffers from the same problem with miners effectively controlling the protocol and as a result the coin has remained static for a long time.
Monero seems to be having success avoiding the influence of miners. They adopted ASIC and GPU resistant algorithms which makes it viable to mine XMR on normal CPUs, allowing more people to participate and as a result making the coin more decentralized.
My country experienced runaway inflation in the 1990s. In a desperate attempt to stop it, the president just froze everyone's bank accounts. The government took away everyone's money out of nowhere. So I don't really care how much energy cryptocurrency consumes. If it puts an end to government stupidity it's worth it. The more they hate cryptocurrency the better -- it means they can't control it.
Although I am generally against cryptocurrencies, I cannot be against the idea of building a decentralized banking system (cryptocurrencies are merely cash). I mean, if we get to do it with fiat, they surely deserve to do it with their cryptocurrencies.
People created Chainlink to bring real world data inputs to Ethereum software. Data such as "package has arrived to its destination". It hasn't delivered on its promise yet unfortunately. If it ever does, all bets will be off.
This is what happens when inflation is low, yet people consider inflation the devil. If the Fed could actually hit inflation goals this whole farce would be over. We'd be at the end of the long term debt cycle and a whole lot of fake value would disappear into thin air and after all the bad debt and bad companies have been cleaned up, there would be enough room for productive companies.
Seeing someone pay off their student loans or their credit cards on an income similar or lower than yours by “investing” in a ICO at the right time and trying to find the next opportunity is greed to you?
I’d say the little guy is desperate to get out underneath whatever has them in dire straights to reasonably think a “gamble” as rational.
I get that position, but it is a lot more than greed...or maybe a lot less.
It is uneducated investors that see something they don't understand that is unregulated, easily accessible and being marketed to them in ways they should be considered lying and defrauding.
Again the fact that you have a CEO of a publicly traded company constantly Tweeting Doge to the Moon...its easy to say well you bought in thats just greed, fine, but its dystopian as hell.
Any analysis that does not start with this is either complicit, intentionally or merely because the author has enoyed incidental residual benefit; or ignorant.
There is no mystery why there is an aura of mingled desperation, FOMO, and nihilism; to focus on the "greed" is to ignore what is animating Hail Mary attempts to finding a short path to stability, is that every traditional long path has been quietly consistently dismantled.
Better crypto than Q. But it won't stop what's coming.
What's coming is dramatically increased domestic unrest driven by the attempt to use the technologies so many here are helping build, to keep a pressure lid on and further the devolution into a two-class society.
Enjoying the dregs of the 1%? Set the autopilot for Mars, just don't take your hands off the wheel.
Sometimes the gambling is aggressively dumb but the marks still walk away pretty much okay, like someone who had a fun time losing money on rigged carnival games.
As usual, the greediest have to ruin it all for the rest of us.
imho, NFTs have lots of potential to facilitate purchase and sell of real world items (buy a car with a USDC transaction to a smart contract). This is the NFT "killer app" to me
The city of Miami is putting together a investigating committee/task force to see how public services can incorporate blockchain.
I think it will be implemented, not at the City but the County level, for recording property Deeds. Though 1 year, 5 years, 10 years, its anyone's guess.
The NFT killer app, the writing is on the wall and it will be stocks/stock exchange.
Ethereum has always had demand (due to the growing ecosystem of DeFi, NFT, etc) but the supply was arbitrary.
What's coming with EIP-1559 fixes this by directly linking the supply (or rather burning of tokens) to the demand of the network.
People need ETH for:
* Paying transaction fees to use the network. For example, Visa is now settling payments with card issuers using USDC on Ethereum, so Visa needs to pay these fees with ETH.
* Collateral in financial applications: Over 11 million ETH (over $24 billion) have been locked as collateral in various financial protocols
* Staking & validating: In the same way that Bitcoin miners must purchase mining hardware to earn money, Eth2 validators must purchase ETH to earn staking rewards
What do you think people are using those transactions for? The average transaction value is of $5,000 USD.
https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/transactionvalue-eth.ht...
Do you think people are making these transactions for anything other than speculation? You said value, I said utility.
High fees means there's tons of demand to use the chain.
Yes, it sucks for small users who are priced-out, but scaling solutions such as rollups should be launching within the next few weeks.
Anything that does not allow more transaction throughput doesn't help.
The greatest motivation for Crypto success are hatred and fear.
BTC is succeeding because people hate/fear Central Banks printing money , so people love BTC and hate Central Banks.
Ethereum doesn't put itself up against the printing of money but against companies instead. Google, Apple, Spotify etc. People don't hate those companies and to the extent that they do....they manifest their hate by asking Government to tax them more, not migrating to a super hard to use and super costly decentralized platform to undercut their power. The consumer doesn't think in those terms.
When the internet came along, it wasn't to only replicate the Post-office or to just make mails faster. The internet enabled a lot of things you couldn't even predict at that time (or perhaps some could, if they truly understood the tech).
There are lots of things that the blockchain enables that you just cannot do in the traditional world even today. Couple of examples:
- You can use your tokens as collateral, borrow stablecoins and pay off your mortgage while the loan pays itself off from the interest being generated by the collateral - you do not have to pay back the loan => https://alchemix.fi/
- (Borrowed from another user in this thread) Flash loans provide the ability to atomicly borrow infinite money for the duration of a transaction, with no collateral or credit. This money can be used for arbitraging or just to provide working capital for a complex operation. If the loan isn't repaid by the end of the transaction, the whole transaction is cancelled. => https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCJUhnXQ76s
There's clearly going to be a lot more use-cases in the future. Finance is only the first field which is getting explored at the moment.
You are correct, but only in theory: this requires the precondition that people are rational economic actors.
In practice, people are weird, and the scarcity of supply creates a demand.
There is therefore a weird feedback loop between the supply and the demand, and scarcity alone is enough to create "value".
Examples:
- Beanie babies
- Magic the gathering cards
- Pokemon cards
- Baseball cards
- DaVinci paintings (where anyone can have an 8k x 8k exact reproduction, but the original is worth a fortune)
- etc...Yes. Temporarily. And a much less weird feedback loop is enough to annihilate all of this “value” at some later point in time (the “crash”).
Then, I can issue NFTs for my old stamps.
Each one of my paintings is completely unique and there are very few. Nobody cares and wouldn’t pay any premium for them.
And there's the demand -- money laundering and smuggling ill-gotten gains (nazis had a lot of paintings)
To add to this, the overall issuance of ETH yearly is going to reduce from about ~ 4+ Million ETH in the PoW model to about ~ 1.x Million ETH in the PoS model, because the PoS security does not require as much issuance.
1.)If you burn too much the whole pricing and ordering mechanism for operations does not work any more. Burning is only going to lead to big players in mining/staking and consumers making direct side arrangements.
2.) There is less incentive to stake since burning benefits all regardless if you stake or not. Its essentially a stock buyback. But sure you still have the inflationary block generation as rewards.
Demand is what creates value, not scarcity, although scarcity has an amplifying effect
I believe strongly that cryptocurrencies have a strong future, but what is really needed is a crypto that automatically manages its money supply.
In the same way a car engine uses an oil pump to automatically ensure engine oil pressure is consistent when the car is revving vs when it is idle.
I also think there are better ways to incentivize mining rather than fixed crypto rewards. A better way would be a multi-year bond instrument that would pay coin dividends well into the future so that miners are vested in the future success of the coin, and not just the immediate pump & dump.
that's an interesting question and premis - automatic monetary policy. I wonder if good monetary policy could be encoded as a set of rules that can be followed by a machine.
There's also some potential for a bond-market whereby miners BID for bonds, and thus the Blockchain can determine the community expected future inflation rate, and factor that into its calculation of money supply growth.
Yes, we mold the currency to our needs, that's why we have abandoned gold. This is one of the reasons the euro is completely flawed. Each eurozone country has different needs, yet there is only one currency that can only be controlled for the eurozone as a whole. Without further political integration it is not possible to actually give each country what it needs. Some countries need a weak currency, some need a strong currency. Paradoxically, the euro is both too strong and too weak at the same time.
That's a great idea. I'm not aware of any blockchain that does this, although some projects with seed funding do have long lockup periods
- And https://curve.fi/ allows for 4 years lockup of their token to earn more fees.
What we saw with the ICOs in 2017 and early 2018 is that there was a surge in demand for Ethereum to participate in the ICOs, which in turn sent the price shooting up. However, when new ICOs started to dry up in mid-2018 the demand also dried up, and when the companies that received all the Ethereum started to cash out the supply shot up, sending the prices right down. We could see something similar with NFTs.
You can't predict demand, nobody can. So all things being equal (demand being unpredictable) you are better off holding something which is in low supply.
People are absulutely scared to death about inflation. It's deeply rooted in our brain and rightfully so. The first governments would dilute their citizen by adding lead to coins and reduce the silver %.
The same thing has been going on for millennia.
This is the reason why people hate inflation and have a strong preference for deflation.
You can't predict demand perfectly, but you absolutely can predict demand. In fact that's exactly what everyone is doing when they speculate.
There are also processes that help you predict floors to demand - e.g. that you must pay US taxes in US dollars.
If you want to make money you have to be pretty accurate in your prediction.
Nobody knows what Bitcoin or the S&P will do tomorrow. It's all rooted in psychology and we don't understand anything about it.
We don't even know where ideas come from