One Tether Trader Didn't Cause the Bitcoin Bubble
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Now, Ethereum is a novel innovation on blockchain tech. The smart contract hype was very real at the time. (For the record, I still think smart contracts have tremendous potential) ETH had navigated a fork, secured corporate alliances, setup several foundations to promote work and was starting to generate a lot excitement around projects like Augur, Ox, etc. Then on top of that, the ICO boom happened when several projects raised tens of millions of dollars. That caused a run on ETH.
ETH boomed and then BTC followed, at least for the 2017 boom. And then the speculators danced between altcoins, Tether, Bitcoin and ETH, trying to maximize their returns while paying little attention to fundamental adoption.
I think we've seen certain technologies take over markets very quickly in the past couple decades, like desktops and wifi and mobile and then smart phones and social media...that we've gotten used to rapid disruption in tech. However, with financial tech like blockchain and crypto, it necessitates slow adoption. Why is this? Because it's real money on the line. It's cool to move fast and break things when it's an app or a fitness tracker, but when it's significant amounts of money on the line, maturity, trust, and security are tantamount.
I still think blockchain will win in the long run against legacy tech. But it will be a slow disruption.
Why the downvoting? Apparently a number of people haven't heard of Bitcoin Script, or are upset I pointed out this very factual item about Bitcoin? Seems somewhat odd.
To say Bitcoin smart contracts are equal to Ethereum smart contracts would be akin to comparing Myspace to Facebook.
Bitcoin does have enough flexibility to do trustless cross-chain trading though, so it's possible to do dapp logic in Eth and manipulate BTC funds indirectly. (IIRC)
Facebook better optimized for the fact that most people are too stupid to avoid using full-page background images and auto-playing music.
The internet in general is probably "better designed" now, but also way more homogenized and boring.
thats usually how it works
Blockchain is just a database, a slow and expensive one at that. “Legacy” tech (like a RDBMS) is much more efficient, reliable, and cutting-edge than blockchain. The only benefit of a blockchain is censorship-resistance—not needing to rely on government or centralized third-parties because a swarm maintains consensus (the longest Merkle tree). Financial markets operate in broad daylight with real identities enforced by judges and men with guns. There is absolutely no use case for censorship-resistance in that space. It is a lose/lose. How is it even supposed to work? Bankers pay miners to secure a log of their transactions? Ok, say someone robs a bank. A banker calls in to report the loss; a block gets mined showing that money is lost. Why did you need a blockchain? Why not just trust the banker to update a RDBMS cluster since you're trusting the banker's word anyway? Blockchain only works for purely digital things...like Bitcoin.
Smart contracts also do not need censorship resistance. People get along fine with the current legal system at least for civil lawsuits.
You need a blockchain iff:
- The data you are representing are other data in the same tree, not entities outside the data structure (much less entities irl).
- You need censorship-resistance because you're Silk Road or Wikileaks or trying to overthrow your government.
- The data is publicly/www world accessible by parties who do not trust each other.
TL;DR A blockchain is a domain-specific data structure internal to the Bitcoin project circa 2009.
Really? How can a financially censored person access financial services? If you aren't allowed a bank account then you are immediately cut off from services which smart contracts could substitute for.
A coinbase account can be closed but an exchange built out of smart contracts like UniSwap can't censor its users.
You may not be able to access credit without a bank but you can get a loan on a smart contract money market like compound. You can even use a smart contract to lend money to yourself (Maker).
You may not have a bank account but you can use a smart contract wallet to give yourself bank-like protections such as withdrawal limits.
And so on.
You're too focused on the trees, you can't see the forest.
https://thedefiant.substack.com/p/ether-is-the-best-model-fo...
Honored. Thank you.
I read the article. It seems Ethereum 2.0 will double down on its wildly successful model of collecting rent from all the ponzis that live on it. Good strategy. It's still not useful though.
The litany of already-existing financial services the Ethereum community aims to replicate just proves my point--these use cases for crypto are already solved problems. It would be one thing if it's 10x better than the incumbent, but it's not even 1x better. A version of something that already exists "but with crypto" is actually a worse, slower, more expensive version of that thing. There has to be some hurdle uniquely overcome by decentralization that would justify the increased costs of this horrible implementation…like censorship by armed thugs. Who is censoring your ability to open a CD? A retirement account is the most boring thing in the world.
I feel for the people in Iran and Venezuela who cannot (easily) access foreign banks, but these people are better served by using cryptography in other ways (e.g. TOR; E2E encryption/DHKE) to access back channels to funnel money overseas to a free country's financial services. People living under totalitarian states sanctioned by the U.S. will always be a superminority (let alone of the population with real money to invest). The answer to their problems isn't to blanket adopt a new currency with performance characteristics so poor they would only be feasible if we in fact lived under a totalitarian state also.
Product-market-fit for Ethereum is designed for a dystopia where banking services are illegal; lending is illegal (and borrowers are required to over-collateralize their loans (?!!)); financial markets are inaccessible (stocks and businesses do not exist in this world, only lone wandering merchants with Trezors); every other currency is defunct or so volatile that somehow ETHEREUM is the best choice as a stable settlement layer; and you can't move because every country in the world is like this (yet somehow Ethereum coexists with global totalitarianism).
Reimplementing financial services "but with ETH" is also very certainly not innovation.
> You're too focused on the trees, you can't see the forest.
Don't get me wrong--buy Ethereum. It is completely useless, but the price has nothing to do with its usefulness or anything I said above. It could be worth $100k without any use case because humans.
There is no global, trans-national solution for financial services better suited for solving these issues than crypto. Your position of privilege in a first world country blinds you to the disruption available to bringing financial services to the 2nd/3rd worlds, though you are right -- it is the slowest moving gold rush we've seen from tech.
You also drastically underestimate the utility the global economy associates with tax avoidance -- disregarding the moral and legal implications, because that's what rich people do.
We had this back in the 70s, FWIW. It failed as a miserable hunk of garbage then, it's failing as a miserable hunk of garbage now by all metrics except how efficiently it parts fools from their money.
Sorry, what?
What's old is new again. I'm old enough to have used one of these in the early 80s, learned about from a BBS I was frequenting.
That's the problem though - blockchains aren't garbage. They're useful.
The actual problem is that currency speculation is garbage. If people were using BTC for its intended purpose (transferring money to and from people they don't trust) it'd be brilliant and it'd have a much more minimal environmental impact.
If they were useful, all these corporate pilot programs would be raging successes by now. Instead they quietly fizzle.
I personally haven't seen an application that isn't better implemented with pre-existing technologies.
We figured this out in the 70s. That some idiot resurrected the idea in the '00s and got a bunch of people to buy into it tells much about the state of "technology enthusiasts" on the internet.
Also, I think instead of "solved problem" you mean "solved for white people in rich countries"
Wow that's all? Seems so much easier than just having a crypto wallet and sending anything to anyone at any time.
Making BTC transactions is the very thing that costs electricity in the BTC network. If no one made any BTC transactions today, then no blocks would be added and every miner and node would be idle.
Maybe the scamming is the problem - and you're not going to solve that with technology.
These are transparent because they're running as programs on top of of a blockchain (Ethereum). Each and every state change is recorded and the systems can be audited in real-time.
The Maker DAI stablecoin currency is backed by collateral (Ether), and it's currently overcollateralized by about 350%. The system has been remarkably stable, even in the face of the bear market, which resulted on some crazy swings in the price of Ether.
DAI also has a few fiat on-ramps, including Coinbase and Kraken. You can also mint DAI yourself - there's a tutorial on Coinbase where they give you $20 DAI for free, https://www.coinbase.com/earn
What's more is that since these systems are essentially programs (they can be used and called by other programs as "library" ) which means that they can be used as lego bricks to build new things. Some examples are "Pool Together - https://www.pooltogether.us", which is a no-loss lottery system. It combines MakerDao's DAI coin and a decentralized lending system called "Compound".
Please be mindful that all the above projects are still considered experiments and cutting-edge stuff. It will probably still take a few years to mature - however, a lot of new opportunities seem to be opening up in this area.
The SEC crypto tsar recently had quite negative comments about MakerDAO at SWSX, as in they may be in breach of securities law. Something to note.
The decentralized nature still makes it far less riskier to the end consumer.
As for Maker, I really don't know how the SEC would begin to shut it down if it wanted to. It's entirely smart contract driven and it's live on the Ethereum blockchain, which is truly decentralized. Surely we need to update securities law for the 21st century as I'm not sure the Howey test had blockchain era in mind.
RE: Maker, certainly agree, just stating the situation. There's no chance of laws being able to keep up, it's a game of asking for forgiveness later for most. If something blew up quick enough and got mainstream adaption the law would bend for it (ie. Uber, AirBnb).
https://decrypt.co/5940/secs-crypto-czar-stablecoins-might-b...
https://www.coindesk.com/the-race-is-on-to-replace-ethereums...
But if you keep creating these arbitrarily created measures, you can just as easily say "Bitcoin is centralized because bitcoin domain names and subreddits are owned by a single entity" (and this single entity managed to dominate the block size debate).
If Chinese firewall goes up tomorrow, bitcoin would suffer a big damage. If Congress passes FATCA/FBAR reporting regulations for crypto, sanctions on China, bitcoin would suffer a big damage. But the idea is that none of these things would kill Bitcoin, and that's the main thing.
You're calling Ethereum a 'centralized blockchain' because you're trying to cognitively justify against the vastly superior feature set of a competing blockchain.
Ethereum fanboys do the same when they've to argue against scalability of TRON/EOS etc or other chains.
Ethereum's engineering decisions have absolutely led to this, as well. Arbitrary "dapps" do not need a blockchain. Having all of this unnecessary data "on the blockchain" makes it bloated and impossible to validate, leading to entities like Infura.
I wouldn't underestimate the amount of retail investors that speculated on Bitcoin during that time. It was on major news networks in America, but also on national networks outside the U.S. My uncles and aunts were calling me asking how to buy Bitcoin outside the USA. The FOMO was real back then. Did Tether play a part in the grand pump? I'm sure it did, but I imagine it was more of a catalyst, and not the primary driver as the original study suggested.
My uber driver, a middle aged black women cheering about her Christmas plans and whole family coming to visit, suddenly breaks off track and excitedly brings up bitcoin. Her and her husband got their account set up and were putting "all their money" into it. "I don't even know what the hell it is but people are making money left and right!" I told her that it was probably a terrible idea.
The next day I liquidated all my holdings.
I did miss the final run up, but I came out a lot better than most.
I remembered after breakfast I had some old stock options that were never worth much and some stock I had been buying via an employee stock plan.
I knew the company stock was doing well so I log in and find that day the stock had jumped a fair amount.
It occurred to me that "I'm never going to see a return like this any other time and I almost forgot this was even here"... so I sold it all.
The stock sold at a penny or two less than the all-time high that it would ever reach.
That was a few months before everything hit the fan with the mortgage crisis.
I like to tell that story about how calling a high or bottom in the market is pretty hard and the only time I ever did it it was because I took the day off on the right day.
Wish I had had the presence of mind to realize it was time to get out.
I can also remember it going to $700 thinkin it was nuts.
Now it's over $9000.
So when was there really a reason to get out?
I was pretty wrong, both about it being a stable and a currency.
As another commenter mentioned, I'm also excited to have been here for it all and stille excited to see where it leads. Ultimately, whether you love it or hate it, Bitcoin has made its mark on history and has kind of become the giant shoulders that the next generation can stand on.
"Well that shit is gonna crash tomorrow"
Really? Even in 2018? It wasn't, it started at $17K (when I sold) and ended at $3k.
> So when bitcoin going to be all 21 millions mined, there will be not enough for all millionaires to buy one. Let that sink.
And? There's not enough millionaires in the world to buy more than 1 Transamerica Pyramid, either. That means absolutely nothing. There's not enough millionaires on earth to buy 1 BTC each today and it means nothing.
You have hindsight in the past but you are still lacking foresight into the future.
Look at Charlie Lee for example. Everyone blames him for dumping his LTC at $200 or whatever it was but frankly it was extremely obvious that it was a bubble and a smart decision.
Xrp, centralized money. Just as unreliable as government money.
To this day, alt coins seem utterly useless. (Save privacy coins)
It's possible that the very first initial bump was manipulated (and crypto is definitely manipulated each and every day...), but the crazy increase afterwards probably wasn't due to a single entity.
1: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=...
(don't invest more than you're willing to lose entirely it's very risky, but having skin in the game during a bubble is very fun in my experience and will quickly educate you in the emotionality of trading. Dollar cost averaging weekly seems like the best strategy: easy to feel dread at best entry points and greed at best sell points.)
It could go up or down, but either way, it will be interesting to watch.
A lot of people have this assumption that it will always go up after a halving, it very well might, but at the current price point, the average person can't even afford a single Bitcoin whereas at previous halving (in 2016) that was still doable (it was on the order of a few hundreds of dollars). At this stage, you would need big investors and probably that's what companies like Bakkt will allow.
Like Berkshire Hathaway:
Investors appear to like Berkshire Hathaway stock in the $60s and even the $70s more than they liked it at roughly $3500 a share.
Berkshire shareholders approved a 50-for-1 stock split of Berkshire's Class B shares yesterday. Trading began today.
The lower price is seen as an opening for small investors who couldn't afford the old four-figure price tag.
At yesterday's meeting, Warren Buffett told shareholders that the increased trading volume and liquidity for the Class B shares after the split could make it the key driver of Berkshire's market value. "The B may be the tail that wags the dog now."
https://www.cnbc.com/id/34973846
On the other hand:
https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/021615/why-doesnt-w...
You can't win.
> opening for small investors who couldn't afford the old four-figure price tag.
That's an issue that doesn't exist for Bitcoin though-- you can purchase FAR less than one bitcoin at a time.
It’d probably go up, as a result, too. :-)
By making a 'dumb' plan, you remove the enticement to try and time the market.
Perhaps even more than wall street markets, it's hard to day trade Bitcoin successfully: most of the advice you'll read is by people who are either lying, exaggerating or got lucky. The major issue is that there is a TON of non-public information that is much more relevant to price levels than publicly available information. Many smart players who are using 'insider info' will be able to eat your lunch.
I fully expect that someone has a very accurate model of the quantity of deposits at some exchanges via address linking, and is watching inflows and outflows carefully. I also expect employees of Bitcoin exchanges are passing data to trader friends. Knowing when a big chunk of Bitcoin is about to be tradable on an exchange is a great sell indicator, and USD a great buy indicator.
// parameters: $520 to invest over 1 year
for(i=1; i<=52; i++) {
buy(10 usd);
sleep(1 week);
}So if you think it will go up over time, then if you have $x for it right now, put it all in. Don't DCA it because if you believe it will go up over time, then you're just missing out on the gains you believe will be there. If you're convincing yourself that it'll go down in the next 2 months before it goes up the 4 after that, you're just being too clever trying to predict the future.
DCA is just about what you do with additional money you get in the future, that you don't have yet. Like, if your DCA money is 0.5% of your yearly revenue, then after each paycheck, put that 0.5% of your paycheck into your investment. That's all it is. The idea is that it is to keep you from forgetting about the market and only investing when everyone's talking about it during the highs.
Given Crypto markets' propensity to scam, I'd be shocked if finex & co didn't engage in manipulation. Maybe not to the extent that the paper's authors claim - China, S. Korea, India all banned / tried to ban crypto and I think Chinese volume drying up was a major cause for the bubble popping.
It was a societal thing more so than an individual person. People were speculating like crazy to the point where you had grandmas giving investment advice on this new thing called 'bitcoin' for their grandkids to get rich from.
Tether's in the spotlight right now and journos will have a nice round of clickbait articles to keep the interest going. Reason will prevail!
Well, the allegation is, because they were printing it.
People love to imagine that odd phenomenon have simple solutions. This whole "tether was the sole cause of the bitcoin bubble" theory is completely ridiculous.
Go into a random bar in December of 2017 and you would hear people talking about btc and altcoins...
This is when everyone finally heard about Bitcoin after the runup. And continued it until the overexuberance ran out of steam. Not like it’s the first time that happened.
This is a point not many seem to understand.
I think Libra is an improvement. They use open source software. But it is still a permissioned money system. There's room for error. Who would be responsible for the damage? I think every participants need to share the responsibility. I've advocated for a new category: decentralized and digital native crypto with constant inflation. Permissionless is a key feature. It provides many advantages over permissioned.
https://bitflate.org/post/2019/11/05/tether-problem-highligh...
yesterday had people saying “Aha! I knew it” alongside anecdotes that completely neglected the role of a crowd and media to support their fictional higher standard for a bitcoin pump over how literally any rally works
today has different people saying “yeah this makes way more sense” because of the role of actual distinct buyers. this article is just using its platform to surface that explanation higher