Naturally the first thing that happened was that all the scammers and get rich idiots moved in like with any powerful new technology.
It will surely take some time to get the real world usage up and the portion of moon boys/scammers down but it will happen nevertheless.
Except it's not. "Open" and "decentralized" are the false promises of crypto. The entire crypto market is dominated by centralized exchanges, criminal enterprises like Tether and Binance.
None of the exchanges influencing crypto is actually open about their business. Eg. They even try to fake audits as much as possible. Ponzi schemes, pump and dumps, fake code-audits that reveal 0day exploits at launch and other (sometimes insider) hacks everywhere! It really is a daily wild wild west show - https://rekt.news
I will never trust a currency, where malicious insiders can walk away anonymously with my money and blame it on a hack.
Sound stupid? That's how your statement looks to people who understand the space.
Linux and open source software started slow but every year run more of the world because they are a better way of building things
Crypto and decentralized finance is doing the same for the finance industry. There are already $250B in DeFi protocols (see http://defillama.com) all of which are open source, transparent and decentralized.
Crypto no doubt harbors shady characters, ponzi schemes, scams. You also can't deny that there are ideas which threaten state control, monetary policy, nationalistic ideals, religion its self. Just look at the magnitude of the conversation.
Its easy to dismiss me as the ramblings of somebody caught up in the scam. But when has it been a good idea to completely dismiss ideas which can shake the bedrock of society? I'm sure dinosaurs never thought an asteroid would cause them to go extinct either.
I ask the skeptics to take a Bayesian approach to skepticism. If you think in absolutes you can never accept new information. Move your skept-o-meter from 100% to 99% and allow yourself a fraction of a sliver of consideration. It might just be one of the most important things you have done.
You know, a decade ago, I actually thought that cryptocurrency and blockchain were interesting ideas that might be well worth pursuing. But it has increasingly felt like a solution in search of a problem--it's hard to find any use cases that aren't already better solved with other solutions. And in these kinds of discussions, the cryptocurrency adherents themselves struggle to proffer any such problem that doesn't boil down to--as someone else put it--wanting to live in Galt's Gulch. Which isn't exactly a compelling problem for most of the world's population. And comments like yours aren't helping to move the needle in the direction you want it to move.
Phew. Yeah, we all felt that. In 2010.
Now while we're reminiscing the past, I know another one! Lets provocatively ask: Isn't the colossal energy wasting worth freedom and all? - So exciting, wasn't it? And don't get me started on Wikileaks donations!
Reality has moved on, and nothing screams ponzi scheme more, than followers repeating decade old talking points, aged like milk, into dogma. Lol, I am pretty sure the vast majority of people doesn't even want that idea of ancap freedom, unregulated markets and tax evasion.
(In the spirit of DRY, I think it is time we collectively write all an adversarial collaboration about crypto on some wiki page. Then I can at least just respond with a link to the rebuttal of the same tired and lazy arguments that crypto-skeptics make)
Sure. Theoretically. Are you suggesting "crypto" isn't almost entirely proof-of-work - de facto? You think those invested care for proof-of-stake? Lol.
> same tired and lazy arguments that crypto-skeptics make
HyDrOpOweR!1! (Deprecated in 2021)
But hey, I am all for the wiki. Actually, I wonder why that hasn't happened yet...
Anyway, I don't want to make the impression all innovation in crypto fanfiction in the last decade has been lost on me! For example, I do recognize, that Bitcoin isn't promoted as currency anymore - because it utterly sucks for transactions. It's "like Gold!" now, or something. Very progressive.
Enough to stake more than 8 Million ETH (about ~35 Billion dollars) [0]
> because it utterly sucks for transactions.
Again taking Bitcoin as a whole of crypto?
Yes, Bitcoin has failed as a currency. Yes, the "digital gold" narrative is bogus. Yes, there will be a lot of Bitcoin maxis who will have to deal with the terrible realization that their "sound money" is worthless. Can we move on now?
[0]: https://etherscan.io/address/0x00000000219ab540356cbb839cbe0...
Bitcoin is now used by El Salvador to avoid borrowing money from IMF. Is that also a ponzi scheme?
I don't know.
What would you pick? Sketchy native currency with a near guaranteed loss of 80%+ or a volatile crypto asset?
Skepticism considers the ways in which you assumptions could have plausible positive or negative outcomes.
I see the entirety of the DeFi "industry" being regulated to death considering how many of these protocols and DAOs behave exactly like securities or replicate existing legal structures; I see no reason that governments will not seek to regulate them the same way.
We can look at the claims of crypt enthusiasts as stores of value, which is coherent, for sure, but if we're willing to give it the benefit of doubt then we should consider other equally shaky technologies and tech scenes, which doesn't give me much hope by itself.
The place where crypto has, and will likely continue to show value, is in money laundering and tax and currency control evasion. There are all things that, while illegal, _definitely_ have value, so my lower bound here is the value of a digital instrument to bypass these controls, especially in countries in which such things are tightly regulated.
That's not an insignificant lower bound; it is at least as large as a big fraction of the remittance industry + shadow banking. It's just that it's really, really difficult to make an honest living in this industry.
Stephen Diehl is the most eloquent skeptic I've found (stephendiehl.com/blog.html). Much of the complaints point to unregistered securities fleecing retail (absolutely happening) or just overall complaints that humans are irrational (man yells at clouds). In light of his arguments, I still side on the perspective that this is genuinely new technology capable of giving the entire globe digital property rights. It's going to be a rocky road.
Never? Sounds a mite like absolute thinking.
But... if you can build a datacenter in China with RMB, and pay chinese workers with RMB, and buy equipment and electricity with RMB, and get *bitcoin* out, then you've evaded the trap and liquified[1] your Chinese holdings.
It's not at all clear to me how much this hole has been closed, honestly. But it's possible this is still going on at a level high enough to explain crypto's continued expansion.
That said: duh, it's a bubble and it's coming down at some point. But there's real economics happening too.
[1] Or laundered, depending on how you swing.
Celsius is not decentralized finance and does not represent crypto, it is a centralized opaque company which is literally the opposite.
Decentralized Finance is all open source and transparent, everything is written to a public blockchain and almost every piece of infrastructure you can go and look at the source code yourself.
It's a far better system than anything we've built so far because it's available for all to see the inner workings.
I'm surprised hacker news, a place that's supposed to be about intellectual curiosity, has been so ignorant and dismissive of this revolution underfoot for so long.
EDIT: PS. I don't know much about celsius, and it might in fact be a ponzi. I'm referring to brushing off crypto as ponzi.
[0] https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/former-google-ceo-e...
edit: removed my comment about Schmidt not really joining, I see it announced on his Twitter.
Crypto is probably the most brilliant scam in the history of mankind, because it combines plausible deniability with techno-obfuscation and meme-driven popularity to a degree that makes it nearly impossible for democratic governments to regulate (good on China for banning it!), and this state of affairs may continue for quite a while. But even if it doesn't all come crashing down in my lifetime, I still won't touch it with a ten-foot pole as a matter of principle, no matter the potential gains. There are some things I won't get involved with as a matter of principle, such as certain illegal drugs, even if they were legal.