It's interesting because in startups, you learn from the first day that you should listen to customers and follow the demand. The demand is very high and some people were puzzled how other people where depositing money in "shady" exchanges. Yet, that's a perfect example of "demand" that needs instruments to be satisfied.
Reality check: Most of the world suffers from hyper-inflation at worst and inflation at best. Not everyone lives in the USA/Europe and has access to good banking and investment options. Not everyone cares about their governments like in a developed first-world country.
Crypto is here to stay and it is going to play a significant role in global finance. Somebody here should read what the bureaucrats at the IMF thinks, or look at the roads in New Delhi. Gov. blocking crypto, yeah, right.
I strongly suggest you look into why people would want "censorship resistant, decentralized, non-state, peer to peer currencies". The existing financial system doesn't make sense. Stores of value outside the reach of the state is highly desirable. The ability to transmit value, trustlessly, anywhere on the planet via a communication channel is a breakthrough technology.
Who wants inflating, dirty, war promoting, state based fiat, when they can have deflating, clean, peace promoting, non-state based cryptocurrency?
Of course inflation is bad you should see what $100 over 10 years at 2% inflation is.
Now try it for 6%+.
It’s the reverse compounding for savings people should strive for.
Who did you learn your basic economics from?
Market cap absolutely does. It's meaningful that of the 18.8mil btc out there, no one is willing to part with one for less than $56k.
Even the Tether concern is somewhat outdated. It now makes up only 4.5% of btc & eth's combined market cap. The mkt cap of btc and eth fluctuates about that much every few days, is it enough to really matter?
> like 99.9% of transactions are valueless gambling OR money laundering.
You need to prove that. GBTC and CME options volumes/open value are in the billions. I don't think people are laundering money through these instruments.
Real question - you mention earlier to "follow the demand". Is there evidence that demand for crypto is coming from countries with unstable banking?
https://think.ing.com/uploads/reports/IIS_New_Tech_Cryptocur...
The more unstable the country, or higher inflation - the higher penetration.
I'm surprised people still ask these questions. It this not painfully obvious?
Not sure if you meant "look at the roads in New Delhi" in a "derogatory" sense, but I'd just like to say that the roads in New Delhi are some of the best roads here.
I live in Bangalore(Roads here are darn horrible) not Delhi, but instead of looking at this in an "derogatory sense", in all honesty what the person is actually right.
In the overwhelming number of issues facing India- Literacy rates, hunger, infrastructure, social crises, is crypto the biggest issue facing India?
e.g. from this article: "India is also looking to make a framework for the official digital currency that will be issued by the Reserve Bank of India."
Seems to me that CDBCs are just the new topic for conspiracies about how cryptocurrencies are being held back by the Powers That Be.
That holds true of a lot of human innovations. People could not imagine automobiles or flying or computers, but that did not make them impossible.
Once you have some of your money in cryptocurrency there's no real way for anyone to stop you from moving your money around however you like. The only points that can be controlled are interfaces with banks.
> usefulness of cryptocurrency is going to be considerably constrained
Sure, but you are missing why 3rd worlds like China, India and Morocco are trying to restrict crypto. They are worried about capital outflows. It's not a surprise most of these countries already have rigid capital controls. People who have decided they want to "outflow" their capital are not really worried about government restrictions.
That's... A big deal?
That is a pretty big condition. Most of the people who buy crypto wants to buy from some trustworthy site, and if that is stopped there will be effectively zero new crypto being brought inside the country. Also no one knows how much hassle will it be to convert it into money in bank, this is likely to stop almost all trades.
At that point, you cannot move your money around however you like, you can only move the tokens around on the blockchain.
A ban would force the wallet's company to stop allowing its use on crypto exchanges.
- buy international prepaid cards for legal dervices (bitrefill)
- use p2p local crypto exchanges: localcrypto, localmonero (in some countries this can be 100% anonymous by using the "withdraw from atm with 1 time code" bank services)
- Exchange to alternate "tokens" that are legal (anyone remembers Linden dollars to BTC market around 2010?)
- Exchange locally via sneakernet.
This is one of the, if not the most, important levers it has to wield power. Governments have fought wars and enslaved entire continents to protect and increase the value of their means of account. Even recently, think of how hard the US works to maintain the dollar as the only currency that can be used international oil transactions aka the petrodollar.
Ultimately, cryptocurrency is a technological attempt to solve the problem of a fundamental lack of trust in our traditional institutions. After all, its powered by a set of de-centralized, trustless protocols. If you use crypto as an inflation hedge, that means you don't trust your government to not de-value your labor via printing tons of new currency. If you use it to carry out transactions, it means at least a small part of you has doubts that our that our current, centralized payment processing institutions won't unilaterally roll those transactions back or eliminate them outright in the future. Ditto for property rights and NFTs (and all the other use cases that guarantee a transaction is recorded by distributing it on chain).
Allowing crypto-currencies to supersede local currencies would not only put governments at the mercy of the mob (or perhaps a small number of whales and exchanges) for determining the value of their citizen's output, it would be an existential admission of their failure. Other than governments that have already failed at administering a currency like El Salvador, why would any self-respecting government with a functioning currency admit defeat like this?
It is going to be an interesting battle. I got my popcorn and enough fiat currency to survive whichever way this goes. In the worst case my plan is https://xkcd.com/538/
even bitcoin’s taproot amendment that just got passed and implemented does this to a limited extent
You can build untraceable anonymous cryptocurrencies using these algorithms.
The banks, even before the ban (which has yet to come), were keeping track of customers making payments to exchanges. In some cases, they customers a letter, erroneously citing an central bank order banning cryptocurrencies that had later been struck down by the Supreme Court. Despite no regulation, they've been denying services to exchange, preventing their cards or UPI payment addresses being used to transact either. Most mobile wallets followed suit.
The only option that remained then was P2P. I should caveat that I'm not sure I fully understand how that works in this case, though.
The issue is there's no real anonymous way to pay someone besides cash, unless you already had a crypto account with a wallet that had been filled. So an informal economy will need a safe way of turning physical cash into crypto and vice versa, in a regulatory environment where it may be banned to transact cryptocurrencies.
Crypto adoption is a gradual curve where people will only slowly start putting their savings or investment funds into a crypto account.
It's speculation, plain and simple. If not ban, government needs to regulate it like it regulates other speculative markets.
As for the libertarian goals of removing the central authority - that's not happening.
The fact is that blockchain solves a problem for almost nobody. The primary use seems to be to avoid real or threatened government intervention. These uses are largely illegal, by definition (eg bypassing capital controls in China). Now you can argue the morality of such laws but that's irrelevant.
Cyrptos have wildly failed as a "currency". Even so-called "stablecoins" just peg themselves directly or indirectly to fiat currencies so they're really just adding another point-of-failure. We should be calling them "cryptoassets" not "cryptocurrencies".
As for escaping government seizures and the like, try telling that to Ross Ulbricht [1]. This year, China started to crack down on crypto mining [2].
The "security" of crypto is a myth. They can and have forked and have well-known weaknesses (eg 51% attack). I can't help but think of this [3] wrt security.
Proof-of-work wastes a ton of energy for basically nothing and, just like China, countries will increasingly clamp down on this, especially as voters increasingly face rising energy costs.
Proof-of-stake is basically a fantasy of how we'll solve PoW problems with a lot of hand-waving. It having not happened yet is pretty good evidence of this being a fantasy.
All it really takes is for action by the US and/or EU to say something like "financial institutions who trade in cryptos lose access to the banking system" and the market implodes. Sure the government can't stop you adding more transactions to the blockchain but for what? If no one can take your "currency" what value does it have?
Weirdly, crypto has seen the resurgence of gold bugs who have long held an irrational hatred for fiat currencies, completely with false claims in some cases (eg the US dollar was never 100% backed by gold, ever).
Things like reversible transactions and the ability to print money are actually a feature not a negative as they're often portrayed.
And even if you get past all this, you want users to securely manage a wallet when failure to do so means they could be irreversibly be robbed of their balance?
Governments are slow to react and they tend to only react to things that become viewed as a threat. Crypto is so niche it's not a threat. But that doesn't mean the US government couldn't fatally wound the crypto market tomorrow if it chose to.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ross_Ulbricht
[2]: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/24/business/china-cryptocurr....
Defi, NFT, Crypto all have Ponzi features. The people who win are early investors and the ones who lose are those who are late to the game. So, we invent "new" schemes like NFT, Defi etc.
There is no product. Nobody uses Defi to "borrow". 99.999% of the people want to put their crypto in and magically get some crazy XY.ABC% APR on their crypto. Everything runs on greater fool theory.
When the bear market hits there will be a lot of bag holders wondering why the hell they paid $10k on a monkey pic with sunglasses and a cigar.
During the euphoria phase people act like they are misunderstood geniuses and people who rightly call this a ponzi scam are those who don't get "it"!
I mostly "use" crypto to keep USDC in DeFi sites like Aave for ~3-10% APY and some on Gemini for a FDIC insured 8% APY. This money primarily gets lent out for other people margin trading, but you don't really need to take on any of that risk for yourself.
I just want to respond to this:
>Proof-of-stake is basically a fantasy of how we'll solve PoW problems with a lot of hand-waving. It having not happened yet is pretty good evidence of this being a fantasy.
PoS is bog standard for new chains. Every "up and coming" chain is essentially a clone of Ethereum with some scalability improvements and proof-of-stake for consensus. See: Harmony, Luna, Avalanche, &c
This couldn't be further from reality. Blackcoin (2014), Peercoin, Decred, etc...
Eth 2.0 is running, right now, with billions in value. The whole of Eth is planned to move to 100% PoS quarter 1 of 2022.
I have heard this so so many times. ETH moving to PoS fully in X months. I'll believe it when it happens.
And I'm glad they plan on making it happen cause there way too many things harming the environment already. A major cryptocurrency reducing their environmental impact is welcomed.
I tried to find any company who was using blockchain in any meaningful way. I couldn't find any. All I could find was promotional pieces mentioning what COULD BE DONE with blockchain or a trial that some big name company was CONSIDERING. No updates on the results of those trials or if anyone actually carried out the trial.
Proof-of-worrk blockchain is such a terrible, wasteful and bad concept that anyone who has ever worked with any database would know it's not even close o being useful.
So if a country makes the possession of cryptocurrencies illegal, it makes their people digitally possessionless.
This would cut them off from the next version of the web. Similar to how North Korea cuts of their people from the current web.
So far it seems no country that cuts of their people from the internet has been able to flourish.
You can buy and own a domain name. If trust in DNS is violated, we'll have much bigger problems.
It's like owning a key to a door. It gives you the power to lock and unlock the door. No social contract needed.
You can not own a domain. You can only pay a registrar to have them talk to a registry. You then are at the mercy of both. Use the HN search tool to read an endless amount of horror stories of people who lost domains and sometimes decades of work because of this.
There's no reason why the ownership in digital space has to be on a decentralized blockchain, you can also record it centrally (as shown by trusted entities like VISA etc).
When you own property in real life the record of
ownership is maintained by the city/state/country.
Moreover, I can spend my conventional money in digital space and get further use from. A "digital possess" seems a thing that doesn't improve the world in a good way.
Crypto makes so many things so much more efficient that not having access to it will be like not having access to the internet today.
P.S: I'm someone important at LongShort.Finance
So I opened the site and it pretty much only asks me to connect to the wallet. No explanation of what it does, what it’s for etc. which are even standard in scam websites. They sure appears extremely scammy even though it might not be.
What a peculiar addition to your comment.
Everyone here is important.
Other coins will be considered exclusive pathways for money laundering and will be nerfed like bearer-bonds or precious metals are in the US.
There's no actual resource - violent or material - that backs any crypto. The only backing is it's novelty. Once the novelty is copied by the State, it will be rubbed out IMHO.