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Re:The biggest crypto lending company is a ponzi scheme by arcticbull on Thursday December 09, 2021 @10:42AM (#29498612)
Stablecoins will turn into CBDCs and CBDCs will serve that purpose. Bitcoin is down from 68K to 48K in the last what 3 weeks? Stores of value don't flail wildly and incoherently at the whims of a few whales, and given it supports 2-3 tx/sec using the energy of an entire country, it's a crap medium of exchange too.

The future of crypto for anyone other than an anacap libertarian is CBDCs.

Re:The biggest crypto lending company is a ponzi scheme by hansvm on Thursday December 09, 2021 @10:54AM (#29498839)
Even with its downsides, crypto serves as a useful medium of exchange for fringe goods. Digital (gaming) goods, guns and accessories, adult materials, and all kinds of things are flat-out banned at many payment middlemen (PayPal, Stripe, ...), and it causes problems from time to time even for large players.

CBDC's _might_ fill that void, but governments would need to treat it as infrastructure and not exercise some of the power that companies like Visa enjoy (blocking otherwise legal transactions).

To be fair, crypto hasn't really stepped up as being fantastic even for those fringe goods (insufficient adoption, painful user experience), but some utility still exists.

Re:The biggest crypto lending company is a ponzi scheme by arcticbull on Thursday December 09, 2021 @10:57AM (#29498881)
> Even with its downsides, crypto serves as a useful medium of exchange for fringe goods.

Yep, I agree.

> CBDC's _might_ fill that void, but governments would need to treat it as infrastructure and not exercise some of the power that companies like Visa enjoy (blocking otherwise legal transactions).

I'll be the first to say that the current legacy financial system is no panacea. Visa and Mastercard should be infrastructure just as you say. In my opinion, they should be required by law not to discriminate against any legal transactions and have safe harbor.

That said ACH carries all legal transactions without discrimination. I don't know why CBDCs wouldn't do the same.

What we need isn't crypto, it's payment network neutrality. The legacy financial system needs a refactor, but crypto ain't it. It's strictly worse in every way.

Re:The biggest crypto lending company is a ponzi scheme by pjc50 on Thursday December 09, 2021 @10:46AM (#29498680)
CBDCs aren't really cryptocurrency though, for good and ill, they're just a database with extra steps.
Re:The biggest crypto lending company is a ponzi scheme by arcticbull on Thursday December 09, 2021 @10:48AM (#29498732)
Blockchains are just databases with extra steps. Very slow, inefficient steps most people don't care about.
Re:The biggest crypto lending company is a ponzi scheme by throwaway405769 on Thursday December 09, 2021 @11:12AM (#29499103)
CBDCs have nothing to do with crypto. It's just PR by politicians.
Re:The biggest crypto lending company is a ponzi scheme by arcticbull on Thursday December 09, 2021 @01:18PM (#29500931)
Totally, but it solves the problem we're discussing. A stable store of value open to anyone. Blockchain is literally just a distributed database. An implementation detail.