I'd submit the root of the problem is finacializing things that are not economically productive. As cryptoasset supporters frequently point out, every market has some ponzenomic qualities, but pulling tokens from thin air amplifies them.

That’s the big hypothesis that’s being tested right now. So far it’s only the centralized entities that are collapsing, and crypto market values are down as a result, but that’s not the same thing as a collapse or failure of the protocols.

But this train wreck is still happening, so we’ll see if it causes some cryptocurrencies to fail too. Possibly some of the weaker ones will lose too much mining/validating power and get hacked or 51% attacked. If that happens to the bigger ones then it will expose a serious problem with the tech and economics of it all.

This is arguably the most valuable informational period in crypto’s history - the first high-interest environment stress test it’s ever had. Either it will cull the weak and leave standing only the ones robust enough to withstand such environment, or will cull the entire industry. Either way at least we’ll empirically know the truth of it all.

> Everything in "tradfi" is centralized, and there are frequent frauds and bad actors, but it remains much more robust than the cryptoasset ecosystem.

I think the GFC demonstrated “tradfi” is anything but robust. If not for the govt and Fed bailouts, the scale of the losses could have exceeded the banking system’s cumulative revenue of its entire modern history, going back to the 1800s. And that was with regulation (albeit steadily weakened since the 80s).

You could potentially make the argument that certain forms of tradfi are robust, for example under the Glass-Steagal regime that separated commercial banking, investment banking, and insurance into separate legal entities, among other restrictions (a form of decentralization).

Also Germany’s local community banking system, which until recent decades was the main financier of Germany’s industrial economy, and which has never had a financial crisis since its origins in the 1700s/1800s, is also quite a robust model (also a form of decentralization).

> I’d submit the root of the problem is financializing things that are not economically productive

I don’t disagree. Low-interest cheap money environments tend to have that effect, crypto or no-crypto.

I’m not sure having ubiquitous CBDCs with all that may entail would be better than having a few trusted centralised exchanges for fiat on/off-ramp though.

Permissioned decentralized global monetary system will simply keep evolving into a more permissionless decentralized global monetary system.

I think people need to know that no one is going to help them - caveat emptor. If the goal of crypto is to rebuild finance, eliminating taxpayer funded bailouts is a top priority.

I guess even someone with most hardcore anti-regulation views would most likely approve of (and quite likely, support) education, including being upfront about all the unsavvy bits and dangers.

Are you of the opinion that the government should have blocked the superbowl ads?

The information is freely available to anyone. Sadly, it's always hard to separate the signal from the noise, especially when the herd and the wolves arrive.

The wheat is being separated from the chaff, and I am absolutely here for it. I wish more innocent people would have listened to us and not trusted centralized exchanges or yolo'd huge money into shitcoins, but sometimes you have to watch a child touch a hot stove for their long term well-being.

Tick tock, next block.

It's too bad that (bitcoin, mostly) maxis are using the recent crypto embarassment as a way to justify their own vested crypto interests. To say "we're better than them" without really explaining how in a way that doesn't require incredible feats of mental gymnastics.

edit: here's an example:

https://www.cnbc.com/video/2022/11/16/theres-bitcoin-and-the...

  - "it's an abritrage on the trend" (multiple times)
  - "humanity really found it's stride in inventing bitcoin"
  - "we made and engineered the best version of <money>"
  - "there's bitcoin and there's everything else"
  - "a well engineered freedom fighting tool for our species"
  - "gives everyone in the world real property rights secured by mathematics"
  - "first monetary asset that we've been able to engineer with no natural issuer"
  - "is a guaranteed fixed protected monetary policy and instrument"
  - "accessible to everyone and equitable for everyone. no one has an advantage"

That could have been true if Bitcoin had a never changing block reward. The miners in the first 4 years (including Satoshi himself) had a huge advantage.

anyone could have decided to buy bitcoin when it was cheap. the advantage of bitcoin is that your enemies have to expend prohibitive amounts of energy to screw anyone over, and that protection is accessible to everyone

Wrong; the vast majority of people were unaware of bitcoin, and how its emission worked, in the first 4 years when half of all bitcoin was emitted and it was still relatively cheap.

Bad in the long run for who? What did these VCs invest in? A huge pile of scam alt coins / alt chains, centralized exchanges, stuff no one wants.

Bitcoin is digital gold. It’s boring and has operated mostly the same since the beginning. We don’t need FTX and I hope the tourists don’t come back.

The rest will at best be iterative technology that may eventually be integrated into the traditional securities and exchange systems governed by the local monopoly on violence, but is generally uninvestable in its current form.

None of it (including Bitcoin) generates any value. Nothing is created that benefits the human race. It's speculation all the way down - the only value that a bitcoin has is the likelihood of someone else paying more for it than you paid for it. It's not a turning point for human civilisation; it's a slot machine in a digital casino.

Not that the derivatives of "tradfi" are any better. But underneath all that speculation at least there is actual stocks in actual companies that are actually making real human value.

The distinction between cash and crypto boils down to if you have more trust in centralization or de-centralization.

With Bitcoin, we're talking about nothing less than the separation of money and state, like we obtained the separation of church and state. This is huge.

How is that better?

We're also rolling the Stratum v2 protocol, which will considerably improve the decentralization.

https://braiins.com/blog/stratum-v2-bitcoin-decentralization

You could say gold, silver or basically any store of value use PoW too: they require a considerable amount of time and energy to obtain. If you could just use dirt as money, it would be worthless as anyone could produce some effortlessly. It's the basis of sound money.

Bitcoin currently uses about 85TW/year of energy for its mining. Estimations for the traditional finance system seem to be around 2000TW/year. Factoring the amount of transactions, Bitcoin is about 50 more efficient per transaction (accounting transportation, paper and coin production, datacenters, energy used by banks). Its energy usage is also independent of the amount of transactions, so it becomes more efficient as the number of transactions grow.

It cannot function as a currency because it's too slow (you can't wait for ~10 minutes to see if your transaction for included in the block in order to pay for a coffee).

In order to separate State from Money, we need a currency. Until I can buy a coffee with my hypothetical FreeCoin, I need to rely on fiat currency supplied by someone both I and the barista trust (like a government).

This isn't huge, it's shit

Large amounts of transactions should be made off-chain through payment channels, with only the final balance between the parties written to the blockchain. This what layers 2, sitting above the blockchain, are about.

Common layers 2 are Lightning and Liquid, the former being the most widely used.

https://www.bitcoin.com/get-started/what-is-lightning-networ...

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/lightning-network.asp

It might interest you to note than clightning is written by Rusty Russel, mostly know for its work with the Linux kernel, and also author of iptables.

We're also seing some layer 3 like RGB for smart contracts, but I digress. Suffice to say, Bitcoin is more than its layer 1 and store of value.

Crypto has been put forth as the hedge against fiats, but in reality it seems to be more as a speculative instrument.

My bitcoin denominated net worth has gone up a lot this year. Most of my other money is in the S&P 500, which has almost tripled in value this year. https://www.pricedinbitcoin21.com/chart/index/GSPC.INDX

Unfortunately, the cost of goods and services denominated in bitcoin has also gone up a lot this year. The money supply is only one side of the equation when it comes to the price of goods and services.

Are you interpreting the PricedinBitcoin21 index correctly? I don't think the index going up 3X this year really means what you've thought it meant.

I suspect that 'denominated' doesn't mean what you think it means.

It's bad for bitcoins for the index to go up 3X. It's like the CPI gone up 3X. You want the index to go down if you're holding bitcoins.

From your previous comments it seems you believe your net worth has gone up because of this index going up. This index going up has the opposite effect on your bitcoin based net worth. I hope I'm mistaken.

I suspect you asked your initial question incorrectly and wanted to know if my dollar denominated crypto holdings have increased or decreased in value. They have obviously decreased when measured in dollars.

When it comes to value, there is no objective measuring stick. There is no SI standard of measure for value. Every way to measure value is subjective and must be compared relative to other measures. You can measure your net worth by the measuring stick of dollars, euros, Venezuelan bolívars, oil, gold, bitcoin, cartons of eggs, or McDonalds big macs. The Big Mac index is a popular example of this, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Mac_Index

When you ask what my "bitcoin denominated net worth" has done, what you asking is what my net worth number has done when measured in terms of bitcoin rather than in terms of dollars. In this value measurement context, if all of my net worth was directly in bitcoin, there would be zero change, just like if all of my net worth was directly in dollars there would never be any change to my dollar denominated net worth.

Whatever make you happy. Happy investing.

Tick tock, next block.

I don't need to worry about insurance, or picking the wrong insurance vendor!

Crypto - no way to know what, if any, company is legit. If I use a hardware wallet and lose it I'm screwed. FTX seemed pretty legit a few weeks ago, they even had an NBA arena named after them! There are dozens of ways an unsophisticated investor can lose everything.

If I understand you correctly, this is a terribly unethical take, lacking in any sort of empathy. But also lacks any historic understanding of scammers and psychological understanding of human behavior.

This plan won’t work, there will always be innocents to scam, and scammers will continue to exploit it until authorities put a stop to it. There is a reason why ponzi schemes were criminalized, if they wouldn’t have been, we would still see criminals exploit people from the same playbook today.

Here, as in other criminal areas, prevention is always preferable to punishment.

If you want this all to be an unregulated wild west of scams, eventually you won't have any normal users left as they all lose their shirts and eventually wise up. All you'll have left is crypto propeller heads (and the rubes too clueless to catch on to the risk associated with exchanges), and with such a small potential user base it'll never be useful for any practical application.