Cryptocurrencies: They Will All Die
kowabit.de
kowabit.de
* Massive corporate debts
* Stock markets bubble fed by QE1-QE3 and now the "no-QE"
* Debt orgy circulated between pension funds, crap stocks, central banks, rating agencies, banks and governments
* Yet another housing market bubble
* and the list goes on...
Is it? Outside of the crypto bubble I still don't see a reason to hold cryptocurrency, and in fact, even as a tech guy I don't hold any.
I still can't use it anywhere, especially not in the physical world. The best I can do is sell it for fiat (with a hefty commission) using some of those Bitcoin ATMs and most of them have complicated ID verification procedures (so you need to carry a form of ID and it isn't as fast as a normal ATM) and then use that fiat to buy my morning coffee or breakfast. I could just use my normal payment card directly and bypass the whole process.
The community is plagued by fragmentation about minor technicalities (Bitcoin Cash being the "one true Bitcoin" and then Bitcoin Cash itself splitting into yet another variant called Bitcoin SV (Satoshi Vision) that again claims to be the One True Bitcoin) instead of solving the main blockers behind cryptocurrency adoption which is the user experience for the masses (the common arguments in favour of crypto like decentralisation, trust-less-ness, etc aren't actually compelling for the majority of people, so it has to be better than their day to day bank account for them to use it, and from a UX perspective it's definitely not).
I see this statement over and over and wonder what it's backed by. Anecdotally it feels like adoption at the "businesses that take Bitcoin" level has been dropping steadily for the past few years - announcements of "X will start taking Bitcoin" have all but dried up and many of the businesses that did take it seem to have given up, especially so at the local level in locations that I am familiar with. I have no insight into adoption at the person-to-person private transaction level. Is there some reasonably balanced source that has a good analysis of adoption or is transaction rate being used as a proxy for adoption in these claims of increase?
First, the author has not studied the field enough to make these bold claims. Stable coins do exist, there are many of them, some of them are clearly regulated in some jurisdictions (e.g. USDC) and many central banks are working on "digital money" that is not purely a cryptocurrency. Stable coins are not either since they are somehow centralized.
Returning to the general topic, I think they worst case is not that they will all die but they will be marginal and successful for some niches. In the same way BitTorrent is a successful protocol, but not as convenient as Netflix and other players.
The author also ignores Ethereum's scaling. ZK rollups on today's Ethereum can get it to several thousand transactions per second without usability compromises or centralization, and if the ETH2 plans work out then that'll be multiplied by the number of shards in a year or two.
The author thinks the technology is good. So do I.
The author wants to use it to pay for his coffee, his donut (if that exists in Germany) or his car. Or to fill up his car.
Unfortunately this is not possible because the Crypto Community is a subculture.
And I agree 100% on that.
Everyone wants to get rich on crypto currency. So gamble. But no instance wants to give it universal validity and distribution.
That's too bad, actually.
The last sentence of the article would have been a nice utopia.
For the last point, telling that bitcoin should avoided because it can't handle more than 5 tr/s is not understanding that blockchain is all about create A TRUSTED MEDIUM TO EXCHANGE. Dev will always prefer uncorruption of data over speed when their choose a database that should scale, it is the same for money...
Blockchain only adds trust in a situation where the government has failed, and when that happens, you can find your secret keys extracted by the well-known and currently unpatchable wetware exploit known as “rubber hose”.
Given all that as a precondition, the limited transaction rate is a meaningful limitation.
Binance is a dramatically better platform than Questrade, for instance. It just blows my mind how superior the former is than the latter, despite the former dealing in imaginary money.
Tried my hand at cryptocurrency trading for a bit -- had $300 USD worth of free stellar coins that I got for filling out a form years ago and had completely forgotten about until recently. So zero of my own dollars, might as well have some fun.
Did deep analysis, trading strategies, used a DNN to analyze every possible trading input.
But it's all bullshit. The crypto trading market has zero correlation with any logic or rational behavior. To the point that the bizarre fluctuations seem like nothing more than manipulation.
Lost those stellar freebies. Ah well.