Days Since a Cryptocurrency Exchange Has Lost More Than $100M

When you want to be personally responsible for your money, you have to accept that you're personally responsible for its security as well. Banks and financial regulators literally exist to push that responsibility onto someone else in the traditional systems, with the well-known tradeoffs.

The internet isn’t going to work for you any more. Get past it.

But please note it's not a complete fix either. You still have third parties you must trust (presuming others decentralized exchanges are built like stellar's one). Instead of having one third party for all markets, you have one third party per asset.

When you buy xrp for xlm, for example, you don't actually own xrp, you own credits for the xrp anchor, with the promise you can withdraw them. So it's exactly like current exchanges, except if one anchor gets hacked, it does not affects all assets, just the one it manages. That's still better than current situation, and decentralized markets have many other advantages.

Liquidity is the number one reason traders love the Forex markets, and the reason so many Forex traders will trade only in the major currency pairs. Hell, I've even known a couple of traders who will only trade GBPUSD or EURUSD for that precise reason: If the market is sufficiently liquid, there is pretty-much ALWAYS someone who wants to trade at your price.

On the flipside, where liquidity is too thin there's no market, no matter how many bells and whistles the "exchange" has, and no matter how attractive the notion of pure p2p exchange might be.

While cryptocurrency might look like it's a big deal, it's still pretty much peanuts for many existing players.

The counter updates to 12 after the script runs, for myself. It is using a Twitter API at the back, so far as I can tell.

If we called it "code currency" and touted the ability to use open source to buy and sell things then I think people WOULD compare it to preexisting currencies. Instead, open source code is touted as a replacement for proprietary code, and we often hear people making comparisons such as "Gimp vs Photoshop" or "Linux vs MacOS".

The dollar-value for cryptocurrencies is because they are CURRENCIES.

The value of a cryptocurrency is just how much money people are paying for it.

Air travel had immediate, obvious advantages. There were many technical challenges but getting somewhere fast no matter the terrain was an obvious win. In contrast, the first decade of crypto currency hype has basically been “you should use your money to make me rich and in return you’ll get to do what you could already do except it’ll cost more and won’t have fraud protection”. A hype cycle like that always gets mockery and the way to deal with it is to drop it, be honest about what went wrong, and do something which useful.

IoT is a good example of both outcomes: bad products get mocked but millions of useful devices are selling because they do something ordinary people want.

There is a huge gap between “we genuinely don’t understand the full mechanics of heavier-than-air flight” and “we got an intern to write the front-end and there were no server side checks to verify your balance”. I won’t feel foolish because I do believe cryptocurrencies and blockchain can work, but I’ll happily ridicule those doing it poorly for a quick buck off the nonethewiser general consumer.

What's new here is people with little experience handling billions of dollars in transactions, and their cavalier attitude towards other people's money.

What's also new is the absolutely incredible acceptance of these "hacks"... 150M here 500M there, who cares - the perps will never be found. Nobody is going to jail.

The current state of crypto businesses is quite horrible, too many sell "Get 10000% returns in 1y" crap to naive people. Will be interesting how the this crypto craze will look when looking back at it after it has cooled down.