Ethereum set to become first blockchain to settle $1T in one year
cointelegraph.com
cointelegraph.com
Personally I think KYC is one of the most disgusting invasions of privacy that has ever been foisted upon us. As usual the "Terrorists, Paedos and Drug Dealers" [Ts, Ps & DDs] bogeymen have been trotted out to justify the state's self-proclaimed right to know exactly what money you have, where you keep it, who you give it to, what you spend it on and where and who you got it from in the first place [see also the increasing drive for us all to become cashless societies. A further erosion of the right to get and spend without 'The Man' knowing every detail].
The wider adoption of crypto promises to return financial privacy to the individual and this is why governments around the world are so aggressively opposed to it. Crypto allows the anonymity of cash but on a global scale. So, in order to discourage this, there's an increasingly impenetrable regulatory wall built around the entire crypto ecosystem. Government and big finance can't do much to prevent what happens inside the crypto bubble. But they're doing their damnedest to make sure that getting fiat into or out of that ecosystem is made as difficult as possible.
One slight aside: Many of you will remember when the Panama Papers [0] scandal broke, a few years back. There were supposedly amongst them documents that showed that the then UK Prime Minister David Cameron's family were involved in moving large amounts of money around undeclared offshore bank accounts.
David Cameron was asked about these allegations and, refusing to answer, he said "A family's finances are its own private affair".
I often bring that quote up when people counter any mention of cryptocurrencies with the tired argument about them being used by "Ts Ps & DDs". Why is it OK for the rich and the ruling classes to move their money around anonymously in offshore tax havens and numbered Swiss bank accounts, but the ordinary Joe Bloggs in the street is expected to conduct all his financial dealings under the scrutiny of the government? And, if he dares to believe that his finances are 'his own private affair', he is practically branded a supporter of "Ts, Ps & DDs".
It's one big ouroboros.
Now that there's tons of liquidity on Ethereum, people have been building applications ontop of this financial stack. In the programming analogy, these applications are higher up on the stack (like web browsers) and rely on the primitives to build out financial infrastructure.
Checkmate nOcOiNeRs. If you criticize my pyramid scheme network, you're actually criticizing the complex global financial system, because r/ethereum told me they're basically one in the same.
How many mortgages are settled at any level of the "financial stack" with DeFi? None.
How many bond payments have been paid out at any level of the "financial stack" with DeFi? None.
How many registered securities have been traded with DeFi handling any level of the "financial stack"? None.
If you want to use your "financial stack" metaphor, DeFi is like using a bluetooth smart dildo bootloader as the back end for a full stack web application. Sure, the stack you speak of exists, but there is nowhere that any programmer would ever seriously think to put that thing.
Stop arguing semantics and actually point to a legitimate use-case that someone outside the crypto space would have for DeFi (even if it is at a "lower level" of the fin stack).
The applications you're talking about require infrastructure first. That's like criticizing devs in the 90s that an app like Netflix doesn't exist yet. Hmm I wonder why Netflix wasn't viable in the 1990s.
As for a simple "primitive" use case, I have a lot of my cash savings in DAI and I get 4% interest on it. There are a multitude of other use cases, if you care to look.
But you don't care, because it's obvious you think it's all just a scam, so there's no point even discussing any of this with you.
I'm wondering how much of those coins that accrue "interest" you'll actually be able to offload into cold, hard cash that can be used to purchase goods.
And, of course, those DeFi systems in turn are used to settle transactions of other systems. It's tokens all the way down!
I do not know literally a single human being who uses BTC or ETH exclusively for exchanging legal goods and services.
I still dont get why hackernews always has a bad reaction to cryptocurrencies. Disruption and innovation is praised, unless it challenges money. Experiments with computing and code is praised, but only if its a toy language.
We're all on the same side :) just playing with different ways to do things.
Is this actually true? My mind immediately goes to credit card fraud as an example, which definitely isn't more costly than if a purely trustless system was introduced. The cost of fraud is baked into using a credit card, and credit card vendors have built ever-improving technology to cut down on fraud on their end.
How is that more expensive than a trustless system that would require everyone to move to?
This could be fraud (unlikely I think) or pathological behavior such as banning people or organizations from their networks for political reasons (this already happens).
Legislation can (and should be IMO) written to provide users of big software systems more rights, but completely removing authority creates conditions for limitless money laundering, no? How does a government govern a blockchain?
0: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.technologyreview.com/2019/1...
I'm talking about the integrity of the system itself, not actors within it. George Soros famously did the same thing with the British Pound but the issue with the British Pound is that it is a fiat currency that can be devalued at the whim of a handful of people controlling the system itself regardless of market forces (aka the participants in the system). When Soros or that bitcoin whale "manipulate the market" they are still acting within the system.
* The Bitcoin client software I downloaded (I didn't build from source, and even if I did, I wouldn't have read the entire source first, and even if I did, I could get Ken Thompson'd)
* A computer virus delivered in a game I install, or hardware drivers I update, that would be virtually undetectable until it's too late
* A fire that destroys my home / somebody compromising off-site backup of my private key (pick one or the other risk)
* An untrustworthy exchange or an exchange that is unfortunately compromised at the moment I choose to transform them into Real Money(tm) -- while I kept my coins in a wallet off an exchange, I would still need to turn them into USD someday since the dream of paying for ordinary things directly with Bitcoin is wheezing on life support
Some of those concerns can be mitigated with a hardware wallet, but not all, and you still must have faith in the people who designed the hardware wallet and the manufacturer who actually built it.
At least with traditional banking, if my trust is violated I usually have some recourse by which I can recover my money. E.g. if my PC is hacked and the hacker transfers money from my bank account, as long as I see that happen within a few days I can probably have the bank stop it and get my money back. With crypto one false move and you lose your stuff, do not pass go.
In short, the "trustlessness" protects me from a pretty low-risk problem -- I would say practically a hypothetical problem at least in the U.S. -- but exposes me to a high-risk problem.
But just the software-based ways that I could potentially be stolen from are too plausible to ignore. I have never felt that I could say with total certainty that my system is not compromised or vulnerable to compromise. Even a bug written with no malice could be my undoing. Working in the software industry has given me very little faith in the infallibility of software, both open and closed source.
Of course many people hold large quantities of crypto and are fine. But a few have it lost or stolen. Even super simple attacks sometimes work, like the malware that would poll the system clipboard waiting for it to contain for a BTC public key, and if found, swap it with one owned by the virus-writer -- so that you inadvertently paste the thief's key in as the destination for the transfer you're about to initiate. When I first heard about that attack, I thought it was clever and had to really think: hmm, would I have fallen for that? Usually I double check, but if they were smart enough to generate a large set of wallet public keys so they could replace the destination with one that starts with the same few characters, I probably could've been duped at some moment of carelessness.
>The energy consumption downsides of proof-of-work systems are pretty well known. And those particular downsides don't apply to the systems you listed.
What? I have no idea what you're talking about.
Proof of Work energy requirements are not necessarily proportional to usage of the chain, while almost every single complaint about it has made invalid extrapolations under that assumption. It can easily be incredibly more efficient than the existing financial system.
OK.
https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption
> Carbon footprint per transaction: 312.24 kg, estimated at 780,602 VISA transactions.
From here, you need to figure out if most of the mining is done on, say, coal or, say hydro. My experience with large-scale mining is that it is often paired with hydro. This (probably biased) report at https://www.hydropower.org/greenhouse-gas-emissions claims 18g/kwh of CO2 from hydro.
So, the best-case lower bound would be 375MW1000 (to get to kwh) 24 (hours) * 365 * 18g = 59130000000 grams per year of CO2, or 59,130 tons of CO2 per year. Big emitters measure in kilotons, so 59kt. Note this does not cover other datacenter energy costs, but they are minimal compared to the mining.
For a rough comparison, Cruise ships (notoriously bad): Carnival in 2017 reported 10,539kt of CO2 emitted across their ships only.
The average US household produces 7.5tons of CO2 per year, so another way to look at it is that it is roughly 8,200 households of emissions.
Wikipedia estimates 90mm global users of Ethereum, so on average each user of Ethereum is emitting 0.00065555555 tons or 655 grams of CO2 per year for their Ethereum use.
Note that older miners won't be as power efficient. A reasonable rule of thumb is that 80% of mining power is with the most recent hardware. Also, there may well be 'dirty' miners out there, but most of the projects I'm aware of are looking for cheap energy, and in most places scalable cheap energy is hydro or possibly nuclear.
This is a gross oversimplification. How many of those 90M users would consider Ethereum to their primary medium of economic activity? What percentage of their economic activity is in ETH - 100%, 1%, 0.01%?