But blaming blockchain for the failures of centralized finance, which we've seen time and time again throughout all of history, is literally intentional deception.
If a politician or lawmaker or business person blames blockchain for this, it is FRAUD. Full stop.
All the facts go against you. You are wrong about the fundamental ideas, the first principles and the big picture.
It's an immutable public ledger. We know exactly what happened when someone commits fraud on it, whereas we could know next to nothing about what happened to $10 billion when someone commits fraud in the fiat world — exactly what has just happened with Alameda and FTX.
It's as if you don't understand the basic, fundamental concepts of a blockchain.
No and no. Avoid asking these questions please, they're fallacious and kind of rude. I just see fraud and I call it out. I'm sick of seeing these crypto-Enrons keep happening. I hope the SEC finally cracks down and anyone still involved in crypto after any more of these tumbles goes straight to prison. The entire thing is a ponzi scheme and a fraud and the technology is useless beyond any kind of recovery. I'm dead serious. They should have cracked down on all of these crypto exchanges years ago when it became obvious they were a huge vehicle used to sell ICOs, aka illegal unregistered securities that were complete scams.
>It's an immutable public ledger. We know exactly what happened when someone commits fraud on it
No, you don't. You know almost nothing at all just from looking at one blockchain. If you see a bunch of blockchain transactions moving around, you have no idea what the transaction is actually for or whether that's a legitimate transfer or not. You don't know if a pizza was exchanged for those coins or if anything actually happened, or if the coins were actually stolen, or if some exchange was hacked, or if it was just a wash trade. It's extremely easy for people to commit fraud on blockchains this way so they just do. All you can know from this is that some tokens were transferred to some anonymous wallet address. Just from the blockchain you can never know what it's actually being spent on or who it's being sent to or if there's even any real assets anywhere in the system at all because that information only exists in the real world outside of the chain. There are places to get this information off chain and that's the only way to actually make any of this useful, it totally defeats the purpose of using that chain.
As an independent reporter the only way to figure any of this out is to take data from multiple chains, cross-reference it together, compare it to proprietary data coming from the exchanges, look at public data published by traders, and try to put it all together to paint a picture of where the real money and assets moved. You need a lot of other data sources besides that chain. And when you actually do that, you see things like how there's evidence that most bitcoin transactions are actually fake, fraudulent wash trades for the purpose of market manipulation, and nobody in bitcoin is doing anything about it because they either can't, or they're the ones profiting from it: https://www.forbes.com/sites/javierpaz/2022/08/26/more-than-...
The entire crypto market is awash with fraud. Nothing about blockchains can solve any of these problems. They're intentionally designed to create these problems. Blockchains can't prevent you from just taking that activity off chain and doing it outside of the view of everyone, and that's how you get another Alameda and FTX or Terra or Luna or 3AC or Celsius or Voyager or any of these. If you could force everyone to do all their transactions on one blockchain, then what you're saying would be true. But the technical design of blockchains intentionally makes it so you can't do that and anyone can just create another token out of thin air, or fork an existing token into a second chain, and then start trading it on some exchange and loaning it out with no regulations whatsoever. This is what the cryptobros wanted. It's a perfect recipe for fraud.
Now the only real way to force all these people to use a single blockchain and make them follow normal accounting procedures would be to pass a law making them do it. On that note I always found it funny that a certain segment of cryptobro was pushing for CBDCs. Most of them would probably cry foul if they were forced by law to use a single central bank chain, because then it wouldn't really be decentralized anymore and they couldn't get away with so much fraud.
I can see exactly what Alameda and FTX was doing on chain. I can see the exact amounts of each token they sent, where they sent it, what they swapped it for, etc. It's all publicly documented.
Why should it?
Does your bank tell the world the details of what you shopped from the grocery store today?
Financial privacy either is or should be a human right. Banks fail to protect this right. Blockchains can protect this right.
The technology works. People use crypto for payments.
> Now the only real way to force all these people to use a single blockchain and make them follow normal accounting procedures would be to pass a law making them do it.
I wouldn't be surprised if someone put you up to coming here and writing all this, so you can go back and claim something like "I ran this by lots of smart people and they agree the only way is to pass a law", and then use this to back some legislation.
Not guaranteed compared to putting the account and phone passwords in a will.
Who has this policy? The blockchain??
I’m not interested in goalkeeping both sides of the convenience-security spectrum. Keep your keys in a buried tin can if you want, or custody at an insured exchange if that’s your preference. I think installing say Rainbow Wallet is a fine choice.
Right up to the moment you lose your laptop in a fire, forget the password to your wallet, accidentally run malware on your personal computer, etc. Or if you die and haven't gone through the complication of setting up a way for your heirs to gain control of your accounts.
Yes, you can take steps to mitigate these risks. Those steps are absolutely insane from the POV of everyday human beings.