Ethereum: A Store of Value with Cash Flow [pdf]
ethereumcashflow.com
ethereumcashflow.com
It is one giant fraud bankrolled by unlimited capital that can artificially increase prices at which point there becomes demand from people in fear of missing out, once the early capital has the suckers locked in the prices plateau at first as the capital stops buying and driving the price up, and then begins a steep crash as they cash out and lock in the gains, this only causes fear and panic among the late entries that made investments at the peak which they couldn't afford to lose...rinse and repeat.
The NFTs may be even more blatant and egregious than the ERC20 coins in terms of fake sales driving up interest, media and demand for shit no regular investor will ever flip. A lot of it is just transparent fraud and money laundering, with the people involved not even shying away from it but openly justifying it on the basis they feel the stock market and art collectors have always engaged in the same misconduct.
Take Elon Musk, openly pumping Doge...I'm not judging, I get the humor in it, but a lot of people have been crushed over the years in the crypto bubbles, yesterday was a prime example where Elon was likely the sole cause of Doge exploding in value (maybe 5x in a few days and 100x over a month) and as the big money way slowly cashing out these massive media campaigns were behind a marketing scam of "DogeDay" essentially making their killing on the backs of the poor uneducated late investors. One would hope his Tweets shined a bright light on the dystopia of it all, but it seems everyone is either so greedy or in such bad positions financially they would rather take part.
My guess is now that they have reaped their profits at the expense of the little guy, they will buy back in with the profits and we should see another pump following the -25% DogeDay scam.
Noone's lying to them, noone's defrauding them, noone's stealing anything or embezzling from them.
It's just greed, plain and simple. If you pile into a get-rich-quick scheme but end up holding the bag in, then more fool you.
I still think it should probably be regulated to prevent idiots from losing their life savings. But I won't pretend the losers are ethically any different from the winners. No matter whether you're early or late to the party, you're all just hucksters looking for a quick buck from a pump-and-dump.
That implies cryptocurrencies provide no value by themselves and is simply false. Ethereum is essentially a distributed virtual machine that anyone can pay to use. Monero offers complete financial privacy.
...that is unbelievably slow, limited, difficult to use, and makes it impossible to fix bugs.
It's absolutely fascinating in principle, yes. But in practice it's a solution in search of a problem.
I don't dispute that. The real innovation lies in the decentralization. Unfortunately, decentralization is threatened by centralized mining operations who resist changes to the network such as migration to proof of stake. Bitcoin also suffers from the same problem with miners effectively controlling the protocol and as a result the coin has remained static for a long time.
Monero seems to be having success avoiding the influence of miners. They adopted ASIC and GPU resistant algorithms which makes it viable to mine XMR on normal CPUs, allowing more people to participate and as a result making the coin more decentralized.
My country experienced runaway inflation in the 1990s. In a desperate attempt to stop it, the president just froze everyone's bank accounts. The government took away everyone's money out of nowhere. So I don't really care how much energy cryptocurrency consumes. If it puts an end to government stupidity it's worth it. The more they hate cryptocurrency the better -- it means they can't control it.
Although I am generally against cryptocurrencies, I cannot be against the idea of building a decentralized banking system (cryptocurrencies are merely cash). I mean, if we get to do it with fiat, they surely deserve to do it with their cryptocurrencies.
People created Chainlink to bring real world data inputs to Ethereum software. Data such as "package has arrived to its destination". It hasn't delivered on its promise yet unfortunately. If it ever does, all bets will be off.
This is what happens when inflation is low, yet people consider inflation the devil. If the Fed could actually hit inflation goals this whole farce would be over. We'd be at the end of the long term debt cycle and a whole lot of fake value would disappear into thin air and after all the bad debt and bad companies have been cleaned up, there would be enough room for productive companies.
Seeing someone pay off their student loans or their credit cards on an income similar or lower than yours by “investing” in a ICO at the right time and trying to find the next opportunity is greed to you?
I’d say the little guy is desperate to get out underneath whatever has them in dire straights to reasonably think a “gamble” as rational.
I get that position, but it is a lot more than greed...or maybe a lot less.
It is uneducated investors that see something they don't understand that is unregulated, easily accessible and being marketed to them in ways they should be considered lying and defrauding.
Again the fact that you have a CEO of a publicly traded company constantly Tweeting Doge to the Moon...its easy to say well you bought in thats just greed, fine, but its dystopian as hell.
Any analysis that does not start with this is either complicit, intentionally or merely because the author has enoyed incidental residual benefit; or ignorant.
There is no mystery why there is an aura of mingled desperation, FOMO, and nihilism; to focus on the "greed" is to ignore what is animating Hail Mary attempts to finding a short path to stability, is that every traditional long path has been quietly consistently dismantled.
Better crypto than Q. But it won't stop what's coming.
What's coming is dramatically increased domestic unrest driven by the attempt to use the technologies so many here are helping build, to keep a pressure lid on and further the devolution into a two-class society.
Enjoying the dregs of the 1%? Set the autopilot for Mars, just don't take your hands off the wheel.
Sometimes the gambling is aggressively dumb but the marks still walk away pretty much okay, like someone who had a fun time losing money on rigged carnival games.
As usual, the greediest have to ruin it all for the rest of us.
imho, NFTs have lots of potential to facilitate purchase and sell of real world items (buy a car with a USDC transaction to a smart contract). This is the NFT "killer app" to me
The city of Miami is putting together a investigating committee/task force to see how public services can incorporate blockchain.
I think it will be implemented, not at the City but the County level, for recording property Deeds. Though 1 year, 5 years, 10 years, its anyone's guess.
The NFT killer app, the writing is on the wall and it will be stocks/stock exchange.
Ethereum has always had demand (due to the growing ecosystem of DeFi, NFT, etc) but the supply was arbitrary.
What's coming with EIP-1559 fixes this by directly linking the supply (or rather burning of tokens) to the demand of the network.
People need ETH for:
* Paying transaction fees to use the network. For example, Visa is now settling payments with card issuers using USDC on Ethereum, so Visa needs to pay these fees with ETH.
* Collateral in financial applications: Over 11 million ETH (over $24 billion) have been locked as collateral in various financial protocols
* Staking & validating: In the same way that Bitcoin miners must purchase mining hardware to earn money, Eth2 validators must purchase ETH to earn staking rewards
What do you think people are using those transactions for? The average transaction value is of $5,000 USD.
https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/transactionvalue-eth.ht...
Do you think people are making these transactions for anything other than speculation? You said value, I said utility.
High fees means there's tons of demand to use the chain.
Yes, it sucks for small users who are priced-out, but scaling solutions such as rollups should be launching within the next few weeks.
Anything that does not allow more transaction throughput doesn't help.
The greatest motivation for Crypto success are hatred and fear.
BTC is succeeding because people hate/fear Central Banks printing money , so people love BTC and hate Central Banks.
Ethereum doesn't put itself up against the printing of money but against companies instead. Google, Apple, Spotify etc. People don't hate those companies and to the extent that they do....they manifest their hate by asking Government to tax them more, not migrating to a super hard to use and super costly decentralized platform to undercut their power. The consumer doesn't think in those terms.
When the internet came along, it wasn't to only replicate the Post-office or to just make mails faster. The internet enabled a lot of things you couldn't even predict at that time (or perhaps some could, if they truly understood the tech).
There are lots of things that the blockchain enables that you just cannot do in the traditional world even today. Couple of examples:
- You can use your tokens as collateral, borrow stablecoins and pay off your mortgage while the loan pays itself off from the interest being generated by the collateral - you do not have to pay back the loan => https://alchemix.fi/
- (Borrowed from another user in this thread) Flash loans provide the ability to atomicly borrow infinite money for the duration of a transaction, with no collateral or credit. This money can be used for arbitraging or just to provide working capital for a complex operation. If the loan isn't repaid by the end of the transaction, the whole transaction is cancelled. => https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCJUhnXQ76s
There's clearly going to be a lot more use-cases in the future. Finance is only the first field which is getting explored at the moment.
You are correct, but only in theory: this requires the precondition that people are rational economic actors.
In practice, people are weird, and the scarcity of supply creates a demand.
There is therefore a weird feedback loop between the supply and the demand, and scarcity alone is enough to create "value".
Examples:
- Beanie babies
- Magic the gathering cards
- Pokemon cards
- Baseball cards
- DaVinci paintings (where anyone can have an 8k x 8k exact reproduction, but the original is worth a fortune)
- etc...Yes. Temporarily. And a much less weird feedback loop is enough to annihilate all of this “value” at some later point in time (the “crash”).
Then, I can issue NFTs for my old stamps.
Each one of my paintings is completely unique and there are very few. Nobody cares and wouldn’t pay any premium for them.
And there's the demand -- money laundering and smuggling ill-gotten gains (nazis had a lot of paintings)
To add to this, the overall issuance of ETH yearly is going to reduce from about ~ 4+ Million ETH in the PoW model to about ~ 1.x Million ETH in the PoS model, because the PoS security does not require as much issuance.
1.)If you burn too much the whole pricing and ordering mechanism for operations does not work any more. Burning is only going to lead to big players in mining/staking and consumers making direct side arrangements.
2.) There is less incentive to stake since burning benefits all regardless if you stake or not. Its essentially a stock buyback. But sure you still have the inflationary block generation as rewards.
Demand is what creates value, not scarcity, although scarcity has an amplifying effect
I believe strongly that cryptocurrencies have a strong future, but what is really needed is a crypto that automatically manages its money supply.
In the same way a car engine uses an oil pump to automatically ensure engine oil pressure is consistent when the car is revving vs when it is idle.
I also think there are better ways to incentivize mining rather than fixed crypto rewards. A better way would be a multi-year bond instrument that would pay coin dividends well into the future so that miners are vested in the future success of the coin, and not just the immediate pump & dump.
that's an interesting question and premis - automatic monetary policy. I wonder if good monetary policy could be encoded as a set of rules that can be followed by a machine.
There's also some potential for a bond-market whereby miners BID for bonds, and thus the Blockchain can determine the community expected future inflation rate, and factor that into its calculation of money supply growth.
Yes, we mold the currency to our needs, that's why we have abandoned gold. This is one of the reasons the euro is completely flawed. Each eurozone country has different needs, yet there is only one currency that can only be controlled for the eurozone as a whole. Without further political integration it is not possible to actually give each country what it needs. Some countries need a weak currency, some need a strong currency. Paradoxically, the euro is both too strong and too weak at the same time.
That's a great idea. I'm not aware of any blockchain that does this, although some projects with seed funding do have long lockup periods
- And https://curve.fi/ allows for 4 years lockup of their token to earn more fees.
What we saw with the ICOs in 2017 and early 2018 is that there was a surge in demand for Ethereum to participate in the ICOs, which in turn sent the price shooting up. However, when new ICOs started to dry up in mid-2018 the demand also dried up, and when the companies that received all the Ethereum started to cash out the supply shot up, sending the prices right down. We could see something similar with NFTs.
You can't predict demand, nobody can. So all things being equal (demand being unpredictable) you are better off holding something which is in low supply.
People are absulutely scared to death about inflation. It's deeply rooted in our brain and rightfully so. The first governments would dilute their citizen by adding lead to coins and reduce the silver %.
The same thing has been going on for millennia.
This is the reason why people hate inflation and have a strong preference for deflation.
You can't predict demand perfectly, but you absolutely can predict demand. In fact that's exactly what everyone is doing when they speculate.
There are also processes that help you predict floors to demand - e.g. that you must pay US taxes in US dollars.
If you want to make money you have to be pretty accurate in your prediction.
Nobody knows what Bitcoin or the S&P will do tomorrow. It's all rooted in psychology and we don't understand anything about it.
We don't even know where ideas come from
My personal favorite is Sorare, which combines NFT collectibles with fantasy soccer. And sure, right now everything suffers from high gas prices but it looks like that might be solved over the next 12 months
The only crypto community who has shown any genuine effort in creating a "currency" is Dogecoin. And that is mainly because they are more aware that their coin has no value without real adoption. But sadly, even that has been infested with the pyramid scheme HODLers after the recent surge in value.
Another problem with Eth is that regular folk are thrown off when they hear things like "smart contracts", "NFT" etc.. So, in terms of a realistic crypto "currency" having widespread adoption, it seems hard to justify any of them at the moment.
I love using crypto for payments as it can be incredibly simple when done right. I really hope to see a crypto that works toward distributing wealth and opportunity though rather than the toxic crypto culture of HODlers we see today!
A cashflow producing venture is not a Ponzi since that cashflow is supposed to ensure the returns of all investors.
Recommended reading: Lying for Money: How Legendary Frauds Reveal the Workings of Our World
You are right. It is a ponzi.
Monero is closest to achieving the original cryptocurrency dream. Private and anonymous transactions, good speeds, low fees, ASIC and GPU resistance, committed developers that are actually improving the coin over time, open source wallets even on mobile.
> I think dogecoin is the only one in our current crypto eco-system that has even a fraction of a chance in filling that space.
Why do you say that?
Everything is a pyramid scheme these days including the entire stock market (especially big tech).
But the modern monetary system is designed to sustain such pyramid schemes. It can keep them going forever. No matter how much net value they destroy; it will offload the costs to fiat salary earners who accept fiat currencies.
TBH I'm confused how the world economy is able to keep running at all with all these extreme inefficiencies everywhere.
Smart people look at Bitcoin and Ethereum and think "wow that's inefficient, if the banks raise interest rates, they're going to get wiped out" but they don't realize that most corporations are just as capital inefficient and are in the same position. They are both unprofitable, therefore both worthless... Does it matter that one may be slightly less worthless than the other? The intrinsic market cap (if we had a free market) would be less than 0 in both cases.
Before the pandemic, the Fed tried to wipe out the crypto space by raising interest rates... Then when they realized that their policies were threatening to take out the entire stock market instead, they decided to suddenly drop interest rates back to 0.
It seems like the Fed was trying to find a sweet spot of interest rates which would wipe out all speculative investments but would allow non-speculative investments to stay afloat... They simply didn't anticipate that stocks might be more speculative than crypto.
Whenever I see someone say something like this for some blockchain, I wonder what exactly is exciting for them? Most dapps is about money and more money, I played with Ethereum before (like stress testing nodes), and would really like to know really innovating dapp these days -- I mean tech that solve existing real-world problems, not create new subjects to collect.
If you want an example of one innovation, look at flash loans. Flash loans provide the ability to atomicly borrow infinite money for the duration of a transaction, with no collateral or credit. This money can be used for arbitraging or just to provide working capital for a complex operation. If the loan isn't repaid by the end of the transaction, the whole transaction is cancelled.
Better explanation:
This is the problem currently. There's ten thousand teams building and building, but each one of them is building yet another library or yet another tool. Nobody has any idea how to connect the crypto economy to the real world economy.
The only applications possible are ones that you can do within the cryptospace itself, like lending one crypto against another, or creating some creative gambling game.
Unless somebody can figure out how to bridge the cryptospace to the real world economy, the whole castle of cards will eventually crumble.
There's many applications like DeFiSaver that use flash loans to allow users to migrate debt between lending protocols without needing additional capital.
How about stablecoins and exchanges? This already ties economies.
Have you looked into the Ethereum ecosystem of 2021 by any chance?
Some examples:
- You can use your tokens as collateral, borrow stablecoins and pay off your mortgage while the loan pays itself off from the interest being generated by the collateral - you do not have to pay back the loan => https://alchemix.fi/
- Borrow stablecoins at 0% interest on your collateral => https://liquity.org/
- Musicians managing royalties of their work through NFTs => https://eulerbeats.com/
And there's a lot more.
Or 2 weeks to send a SWIFT.
DeFi has a UX/UI, onboarding and fee problems, but the technology is about 2 years old and has tremendous momentum and already enabling uses cases that reqire jumping through hoops in tradFi.
People invented Chainlink to solve this problem: provide real world data such as "package has arrived to its destination" to smart contract software. I don't think it has delivered on its promise yet.
Look back at Ethereum's history and the vast vast majority of historical projects are dead. People who invested time or money into them have lost out.
What makes it different now?
Social networks, banking and cloud companies would love to hire for those skills.
Also central banks now want to do CBDC (Central Bank Digital Currencies), so skills acquired as dev/builders are and will stay in very high demand for the foreseeable future.
I can put stablecoins (crypto dollars) in a lending protocol like Aave and earn ~10% APY. Compare that to my savings account, which pays out 0.25% APY.
Or how about the stablecoins themselves? MakerDAO creates the Dai stablecoin, backed by crypto-native assets like ETH & BTC.
I have a number of friends in Argentina who are surviving hyper-inflation by keeping their wealth in stablecoins.
People who can make more than 10% trading?
Lending protocols aren't doing anything different than what banks do: allocating inactive capital to those who can make use of that capital and are willing to pay for it.
Interest rates are high because of A: market volatility, professional traders can easily make more than 10%, and B: information asymmetry, large capital pools haven't allocated to these pools.
Lookup what a ponzi scheme is.
I dunno. I mean:
* artificial intelligence -> genuine image search and speech recognition
* self-driving -> Waymo, Tesla
These other hyped technologies have produced real results that I interact with. I'm not really convinced the blockchain has... except decentralized finance. Maybe that's fine.
On the positive side I think there's something like creating wealth through the power of imagination.
I mean 20 years ago there were no crypto currencies. Now on paper they are worth $2trn ($260 a head for the world's population). And lots of people can feel wealthy because they have $100k in bitcoin of whatever. And it can retain actual value in the sense that you can swap it for US$ as long as everyone doesn't sell at the same time. And where has the value come from - basically human imagination thinking the 0s and 1s are worth something. Which may be more sustainable than it sounds. Where does the value of fiat currency come from or the value of a painting in excess of the cost of making a copy of it?
I foresee a future where everyone is a crypto millionaire through the power of imagination. (Which would imply a 10000x form here?!)
Actually wrong.
- David Chaum, 1982, eCash
- Adam Back, 1997, HashCash
- Wei Dai, 1998, b-money
- Nick Szabo, 1998, BitGold
From the taxman knocking at your door. They have prisons you know and some really well armed goons.
They also control the education system and pretty much everything else and are capable of stealing your children from you and send them to die in some far away shore.
They create all kinds of myths and bullshit and we take them for granted... like national identities and currencies.
Pretty powerful system.
Don't even need to pay any fees: https://opentimestamps.org/
It seems to me that with ETH set to be the backbone behind the entire crypto-ecosystem (especially with news like Visa), it will have guaranteed liquidity built into it due to that system.
With any other cryptocurrency, the value seems to only exist from constantly trying to convince people to buy more of it, like a global pump and dump scheme. Bitcoin has such a high price because of brand recognition in that regard.
But branding is the only thing really powering it long term.
Better question would be - "what is NFT". And the answer is JSON file with a hyperlink inside. That is all, literally nothing else is in NFT and no existing legal artifacts are any way related to selling/buying of NFTs.
High gas prices are solved, its just no one really seems to understand or care about the technology.
Just as example, it might cost somewhere between $50-$80 in gas to use OpenSea's "free" NFT minting smart contract. But instead you can already use an L2 solution like Polygon(Matic). I minted 1,000,000 NFTs on Polygon(Matic) just to experiment and the total gas for all 1,000,000 NFTs was less the $0.01 (I think it was $0.00018xxx) and this has the double benefit of buyers normally having to pay the same $50-80 gas fees for an NFT on Ethereum Mainnet to only pay fractions of a cent. OpenSea even has a Polygon(Matic) Beta Marketplace, but funny story maybe after 1hour after my 1,000,000 NFTs were minted I listed them for sale and OpenSea took down the Beta for maintenance for a few hours and when it went back up they removed my NFT and listing entirely from the Marketplace lol.
Enjin is another interesting platform, which I'll begin to experiment with as well because it has built in staking and burning features, but until they adopt a side chain I think it will suffer from the same high gas fees.
Point is the actual tech is there, but it really seems all about the money not the tech, and that's why people are paying high gas fees.
The common folk wants ease of use above anything else. It has to be as easy as sending money via paypal.
No doubt ETH can be the base of that technically, but the model which has ETH holders make money off the appreciation of the ETH token in the process is flawed.
Fortune500 and even startups who'd use the open source ETH blockchain technology to bring many services to the common folk won't ever accept to pay a huge cut to parasitic behavior such as to those hodling or staking.
Also nobody ever mentions how the ETH blockchain is opensource. If a startup of a fortune500 wants to do something about it they have a big chuck of the development cost eliminated just by forking off the ETH blockchain. This is great! But just like Android doesn't owe Linus anything, so those companies will owe nothing to the stakers and the ETH holders.
So to summarize, if you want to build something go to Zug, find Vitalik and give him a big kiss because he saved you a lot of money, at the same time show the middle finger to hodlers and stakers on your way out.
On the other hand...if you want to have a shot at getting rich without doing any work...buy deflationary crypto such as king BTC and watch it appreciate vs the dollar....and it will because people are scared as hell about inflation (regardless of the merit of such scare), and everybody is scared about it...from the common person at the supermarket to Stanley Druckenmiller
To be fair, when I was a 10 year old kid in the nineties, I'd never ever suspect that everyone and their grandma* would be so internet savvy as they are.
* Obviously not all grandparents ;-) But I've seen quite a few grandparents of whom I'd never suspect to use internet services like WhatsApp.
Just like normal folk will never use TCP/IP, know HTML etc?
Nobody needs to know that something runs on a blockchain or how NFTs work. Yes you need to know now but in 10 years my mum will use these things without having any idea what they are. Same as she's using an ipad now without knowing objective C or any underlying protocols and tech.
Sure but she will use the Spotify app or the Sotheby app to buy NFTs
Spotify and Sotheby on the other hand they will not even use a blockchain. Just like Coinbase doesn't use a blockchain
This whole decentralization mania solely work when people are are terribly scared of something: Government diluting their purchasing power via printing money and inflation.
That's a really deeply rooted thing in our brain as governments did that since the stone age. That's the only killer app of decentralization. As shown by the marketcap of king BTC and the success of exchanges like Coinbase and Binance.
NFTs, DeFi...all the other stuff...the user doesn't hate Spotify or Sotheby or the Google Store , but let's say for a moment that it does..well even if the ease of use and fees of DeFi were on par with legacy companies (they are not)...the consumer will always keep using the legacy company product and ask the government to tax them more. So they'd have the best of both worlds: a functioning product and a way to express their hatred
It also makes new things possible, for instance the original artist could get a cut of every resale of his art. People can own parts of art, music etc. Artists can go directly to their fans.
Another example is Defi which also cuts out the middleman. I want to send you 100 usd. I have euro, right now I need to go to my bank app and they will convert for a pretty big fee , they will also take 5 days to send it to you if it's international and god help me if there are holidays involved. With defi I send instantly and I will be able to choose what kind of value I send and you will be able to choose what kind of value you want to receive. I don't even need to know. I could send you euros and you receive in usd, it passes through a defi smart contract on the way without any of us knowing. If I'm a farmer and I have corn futures I could probably pay in that and you would still just get usd. Again cuts out the middleman.
Does it help that it's also censorship resistant and trustless? Yes. The ease of use is not on par with legacy for my mum.. yet. But that was also the case in 1995 with the internet.
Sotheby's was never about the actual transaction, there has historically been little technical barrier in this area - the real barrier has been grift, fakes, and limited market pools. Crypto doesn't solve any of these things, so they will remain the real barrier.
> for instance the original artist could get a cut of every resale of his art. People can own parts of art, music etc. Artists can go directly to their fans.
There is no technical barrier to any of these things now, other than the difficulty of setting up contracts. You can speculate that making the contracts easier to set up will result in lots more of it; but that is a pretty strong assumption that this is the "real" barrier. Like the fine art case, it may well not be. I suspect that in some areas it will result in some interesting things that are low enough value (at least per transaction) that nobody bothered to figure out an agreement on them, particularly across borders. But this has a huge risk of being shut down for being at minimum tax-evasion adjacent, even if useful.
> I could send you euros and you receive in usd, it passes through a defi smart contract on the way without any of us knowing.
This is easily done now by traditional financial transactions, the only problem is the FX risk and transaction fees may be a) higher than you want and b) unpredictable.
Neither of those things are "solved" by using defi, you are basically hoping that the fees are/remain smaller, and possibly handwaving about the FX risk on some future with the underlying is useful to both parties.
The middleman is a social necessity, not solely a technical one. Retail doesn't want the responsibility. Is that simple, so enter the middleman there to absorb risk.
A protocol can't be a middleman. A middleman should be capable of being sued and be the fall guy if something goes wrong. Mostly it should be there to give peace of mind to the customer.
A protocol can't give peace of mind to the customer given that such code can't be read by 99.99999999999% of the population.
The middleman needs to exist to give peace of mind to the customer, and as I said it can't be a protocol. So it can only be a company with a brand, spending millions in Ads to earn the trust of the consumer so that he'd feel confident to put his money in it and in turn can sleep tight at night, knowing that his money are with an institution which is somehow trustworthy.
Nobody in the crypto world ever makes a market study or a revenue projection, or even a survey among the population and users.
People go and build stuff. Projecting themselves into the retail user. The only problem is that the crypto founder is not representative of the retail user, not even one bit. The crypto founder wants the responsibility, wants to kick the the final penalty in the World Cup final or be with the ball in your hands and 2 mins to win the SuperBowl. That is not the mindset of the retail user.
"We ship the products we'd want to buy" as Steve Jobs said in a keynote...only he used it as catchphrase to get the applauses and sell Apple to the world and to Wall Street.
People in crytpo , they do it for real. You never do it for real. You end up with your butt on the ground and nothing to show for financially.
Binance did fork ETH and has built out the Binance Smart Chain. Problem is that is still centralized. The unresolved debate is whether its the code or the network effects that matter.
Oh by the way: Bitcoin is open sourced too. Here's the link! https://github.com/bitcoin
Private blockchain has never made any sense: you just give all your employees private keys and move on with your life.
EDIT: Which is to say, I'm sure a lot of people are saying they're doing it, and it is yet to be for anything more then to say "we're doing blockchain" to investors and the public.
EDIT 2: Reading through the Hyperledger case studies seems to bare this out as well - the implementations are comparatively small, and keep desperately asking the question "was blockchain vital to any of this, or was the actual innovation you just finally automated something into a database?"
Because companies don't really trust each other and have huge legal teams review 100+ pg contracts? Even internally trust is lacking at times?
It does have some efficiencies. They are likely tiny compared to separating money and state, like we managed to separate religion and state.
But I guess its all just buzzwords and speculation! All these people wasting their time on something so obviously useless. You should let them know!!
But that's not the real problem: the real problem is, how can blockchain contribute anything to this problem for them? The process of validating the origin of goods depends on remotely uploading certificates of authenticity - an artifact produced off-chain.
From that point on, nothing else matters - since it all depends on whether that certificate is legitimate, trust is external to the chain.
The rest does not require "blockchain" at all and is actively made more difficult by it - since every other step is just regular logistics tracking, something Walmart is very good at.
Again: what possible benefit is blockchain bringing here? The original artifact is off chain, the goods in question are offchain and the cited benefit is not "improved security" -- it's "quicker look ups". But...that would've been achieved by just scanning barcode numbers into a database at every location (which again: is trust, it's not a fact which is established on-chain).
So yes, I do believe people are wasting their time on something obviously useless - IBM was involved and their biggest contribution to my country was to call 25 million people logging on to do a census on one night a denial of service attack. Walmart executives aren't technical - they need to know "what the blockchain could do" and IBM sells them some snakeoil.
Bitcoin is open source, all right. But the first mover advantage and marketing campaign that it has...well it's insurmountable at this point.
> Problem is that is still centralized
The world doesn't give a damn about that. The only killer app of decentralization as of today is the ability to give people peace of mind that the unit of account they use to store their wealth cannot be tempered with by anybody.
Literally the only application of decentralization was the ability to avoid the ever present threat of money printing because people are scared of inflation and rightfully so. Ever since the stone age people have been diluted by the the central currency authority, it's a fear that is deeply rooted in our brains.
People aren't similarly scared about Paypal or Visa processing their transactions.
Fear is the greatest motivation and fear of inflation is the only thing giving the decentralization thing any market. Everybody , ranging from the supermarket employee to Stanley Druckenmiller...they are all scared as hell about inflation.
And it shows in the marketcap and price of king BTC
BTC gives those 7 billions people a way to express such fears in the market whereas they could only buy Gold, Silver, and Inflation indexed bonds before BTC came about.
Being able to use a tamper-proof currency in financial applications that are decentralized means one's holdings of that currency remain tamper-proof even when they are employing them in financial applications. That is the value that Ethereum's smart contract functionality provides.
Legacy financial applications are fine. People who are afraid of inflation just convert BTC>USD the sole amount they need to use the financial application and that's it.
Also DeFi apps are very illiquid and extremely complicated to use.
Finally let's not hide the truth: 99% of financial apps are based on loans. Crypto loans are doomed because people don't want to borrow crypto as they anticipate huge appreciation and such appreciation would leave them in a hole financially speaking.
Also without an identity system a borrower can just steal crypto, and never pay back interest or principal
Also the lender requires high interest to separate themselves from their crypto considering how novel is the system and how frequent hacks and as I said people outright fleeing are.
The most successful crypto loans are the ones denominated in USD and happening on centralized platforms (and those crypto never leave the platform as they are used to short)
They are not at all. Governments and financial institutions can lock funds, do 'hair cuts', as they did in the European financial crisis, and engage in other such shenanigans. They can debank or otherwise exclude people and companies from the payment system, or refuse them banking services at all.
But really, your statement says it all. This is what anti-Ethereum advocacy amounts to: advocating for the legacy financial system, and the one Satoshi Nakamoto specifically criticized, including in the Bitcoin white paper:
https://www.bitcoin.com/bitcoin.pdf
"Commerce on the Internet has come to rely almost exclusively on financial institutions serving as trusted third parties to process electronic payments. While the system works well enough for most transactions, it still suffers from the inherent weaknesses of the trust based model. Completely non-reversible transactions are not really possible, since financial institutions cannot avoid mediating disputes. The cost of mediation increases transaction costs, limiting the minimum practical transaction size and cutting off the possibility for small casual transactions, and there is a broader cost in the loss of ability to make non-reversible payments for nonreversible services. With the possibility of reversal, the need for trust spreads.
Merchants must be wary of their customers, hassling them for more information than they would otherwise need. A certain percentage of fraud is accepted as unavoidable. These costs and payment uncertainties can be avoided in person by using physical currency, but no mechanism exists to make payments over a communications channel without a trusted party. What is needed is an electronic payment system based on cryptographic proof instead of trust, allowing any two willing parties to transact directly with each other without the need for a trusted third party. "
>>Also DeFi apps are very illiquid and extremely complicated to use.
Uniswap had $10 billion in trading volume over the last week. That's in the same league as major exchanges like Bitfinex and Kraken. It's also extremely easy to use, with no sign-up/registration required, and a trade being possible with 3 clicks.
All that is signed off and approved by the popultion. In the beginning the nascent financial system which today is labled "legacy" was the wild west as well. Then it was an organic growth of scrutiny because it was demanded by the population. Every megasocial system such as US, EU, China...even North Korea organizes itself based on the population desires.
All those things aren't imposed from above by an omniscent and evil dictator or done in the dark, the Patriot Act is supported by the majority of the population, so it's all the rest.
People accept and embrace the government playing the role of policeman in the financial and capital markets.
You are the fringe minority, and frankly people in the cryptospace lack the pragmatism to understand that they are a fringe minority.
People who are the fringe minority should hide and find holes in the power of the controlling authority and USE THEM AND KEEP THEM TO THEMSELVES opposed to creating mega structures to invite and pursue those who sign off and approve the aforementioned authority. Such attempts will fail because the target demographics is totally onboard with the authority.
> Uniswap had $10 billion in trading volume over the last week. That's in the same league as major exchanges like Bitfinex and Kraken. It's also extremely easy to use, with no sign-up/registration required, and a trade being possible with 3 clicks.
Sure in the ETH ecosystem, tell me again where can I spend ETH or Stablecoins based on ETH? Nowhere.
Same with the central banks that inflate the currency. They are created by the government that the population approves of. You're making a selective argument against the principle of financial self-sovereignty that underlies the entire Bitcoin and cryptocurrency movement, that just happens to lead to a conclusion that decentralized finance is bad, whereas a decentralized currency - bitcoin - is good.
>>Then it was an organic growth of scrutiny because it was demanded by the population. Every megasocial system such as US, EU, China...even North Korea organizes itself based on the population desires.
There is nothing organic about massively complex political systems. They are as artificial/non-organic as anything else produced by modern human civilization. They are nascent forms of human organization susceptible to massive corruption and rent-seeking. Putting all that aside, majority approval does not justify violating people's basic liberties/human-rights, like the right to engage with other consenting adults in mutually voluntary economic interactions. That is true whether you are talking about the US, or North Korea.
>>Such attempts will fail because the target demographics is totally onboard with the authority.
What the majority approves of changes when technology changes. When the social costs of enforcing a particular type of law that limits voluntary interaction massively increases, for example as a result of the advent of widely accessible strong encryption, then the majority will become more opposed to enforcing such laws.
>>Sure in the ETH ecosystem
ETH-based assets will gain mass-adoption soon enough. And when they do, your final plausibly pro-crypto objection to DeFi will have disappeared. All you'll be left with is the argument that cryptocurrency, as a whole, is bad for society, by enabling non-compliance with politically enacted forms of centralized gatekeeping.
At that point, it will be even more obvious now that an argument against decentralized finance is an argument against the entire principle that Bitcoin is based on, and was created to advance.
The fed is non elected. there is a separation between Govt and the Fed
Public cannot vote on the Fed Fund Rate
In my experience the common folk want number go up above anything else.
You should google "NFT".
Nothing..they won't even have to pay because the project is opensource.
They can solely focus on ease of use and marketing which is what proper companies do best and just take the technical part without any compensation.
This is also the reason why Larry Page is among the richest men in the world and Linux' Linus is a nobody who is only known and relevant among nerds
It's as saying if Facebook released all of its code then suddenly it would get competition. It wouldn't.
There's the whole infrastructure behind it: thousands of nodes running the blockchain, thousands of applications running on it, developers in this sphere are very scarce because it's so complicated. If you wanted to try to create yet another "Ethereum killer", you would also need to convince developers to write apps on your chain, and people to run the nodes.
By the way, to say that Linus Torvalds is a nobody is a ridiculous thing. His net worth is humongous to begin with.
Are those things really needed to ...you know commercially sell the product to the public, give them ease of use and make money in the process?
Because if we must ride the blockchain thing for Venture Capital funding or to look hip among the public on twitter...well we can stick an ethereum logo on it and invite Vitalik to the company podcast.
It's much easier and accomplishes the goal in much more straightforward manner.
Currently, the argument for scarcity looks good with EIP1559 where the gas fee will consist of a burned base fee and a tip to the miner resulting in overall lower fees causing a potentially deflationary supply. But Ethereum's scarcity is to a larger extends a moving target than say Bitcoin or Monero.
The other reasons for investing OP mentioned were enough for me to go deep a year ago: cash flow, network effects and developer tooling/adoption like no other L1 chain. I looked at other smart contract chain's developer resources for dapp dev and no other's come close to Ethereum. I have been learning Solidity dapp development in my free time since and can recommend the experience.
I don't think scarcity is a realistic point in the investment thesis.
Yes agreed.
Both Bitcoins and ETH tokens can be "tainted" and that taint takes for ever to "diffuse" in the chain.
This makes some Bitcoins/ETH less valuable than others.
For example, most valuable Bitcoins are newly mined coins (they have no history), whereas a - say - Bifinex hacked Bitcoin carries a pungent smell.
Much easier said than done:
- it costs money
- most tumblers aren't safe at all (who's to say they aren't operated by the govt or that they don't keep logs)
- in some cases, you might not get your coins back at all
Shouldn't you expect that most people paying to use tumblers have a reason to do so, and thus the vast majority of coins from tumblers are tainted as well?
What does "individual financial sovereignty" mean though? Money is only useful as part of a social system and therefore requires some sort of social contract.
I'm all for privacy when it comes to storing and transferring amounts that are consistent with personal consumption. I'm not in favour of letting people move millions or billions anonymously unless they are willing to renounce all protections they enjoy under the law.
Ethereum doesn’t know what it is. The rules are always changing, running a full node is practically impossible, and issuance is always changing. It’s not even clear that the features claimed in this paper will be true one year from now.
Multiple consensus failures (most recently this last month) and constant design changes do not provide a secure foundation for sound money.
Can you elaborate?
I found it super easy to setup a full (non-mining) ETH1 node on an Intel NUC running Ubuntu. And on the same NUC I’m running two validator nodes on the ETH2 mainnet, which together have earned about 3 ETH in rewards so far. The NUC is hooked to a cable Internet connection at home, nothing fancy.
I mean Ethereum isn't perfect but not much else is either.
>The purpose of this memo is not to denounce Bitcoin. Bitcoin enjoys a growing institutional spotlight, a compelling narrative as digital gold, and a portfolio allocation as an inflation hedge. However, institutional allocation into the Ethereum ecosystem is currently low...
You can denounce bitcoin for the CO2 emissions though.
At least etherium is trying to go proof of stake. If institutions pile into bitcoin the price and emissions will 10x which I'm not sure is on. Governments can't control bitcoin but they can control institutions.
Useless uses of energy cannot be construed as good for the world.
ps. And I'm not buying the "environmentally friendly" argument until proof-of-stake is actually live and completely displaces PoW in mainline production.
And the financial motivation to do this is much greater for ETH since it's around 100 times more liquid than ALGO.
What's more concerning is that Proof of Wealth (which is what Stake really is), is just going to lead to those with biggest balances dictating rules to everyone else. Exactly what happened in EOS, Steem, etc...
It will become a plutocracy with cute emojis.
Three comments repeating the same point are not enough, you should spam this argument some more, maybe then it will make sense.
So if PoW and PoS both suffer the same problem of minority dictating rules to everyone else do you know of any consensus algorithm used in crypto that avoids that problem?
It's always a bad sign in the cryptocurrency world when withdrawals are delayed.
The paper is written as if the change to proof of stake has happened.
And that's assuming the ETH crowd doesn't change the supply formula (which no one currently understands) on a whim.
the best part, Vitalik freely admits this himself.
How is "minimal" and "viable" determined?
In fact, Ethereum's monetary policy did change in the past.
who determines what's minimum and what's viable?
The social contract is that the protocol & monetary policy will ossify after the transition to PoS & sharding is complete.
So really, if I'm going to hold any cryptocurrencies, that's where I want them
It is simply plutocracy, but with cute emojis.
We don’t have a plutocracy in PoW coins like BTC either right? Super cheap and easy to spin up a mining operation I heard.
Failure of the New York Agreement is certainly more reassuring than never-ending hard forks.
No, in Ethereum, Proof of Stake does not set protocol parameters, so no one rules over you.
Without the distorting action of governments printing money, interest rates might be set by market forces in "crypto land".
This might lead to a long term situation where artificially low interest rates are paid in government controlled currencies, but market prices are paid in crypto currencies.
Or will cheap interest rates in government controlled currencies somehow bring down the interest rates in crypto currencies?
The 10 year yield of bonds in Europe is at 0%. While US bonds are currently at 1.5%. This might be an indicator, that rates in one currency will not completely control rates in other currencies.
I don’t expect this will last forever
0: Holder has ETH
1: Holder borrows Tether, provieds ETH as collateral
2: Holder uses Tether to buy a house
3: Holder borrows Dollar, provides house as collateral
4: Holder buys Tether with Dollar
5: Holder pays back Tether, gets back ETH.
6: Holder now has ETH + House + Dollar Dept
If so, why couldn't they lend the dollars to buy the house in the first place? The bank which lends the dollars certainly could make a contract that the dollars only can be used to buy the house?
Is it a contract like "You borrow me 1 ETH and I will pay back 1.1 ETH in a year. Except when X happens, then I will pay back 2 ETH"?
If so, what is X?
- The lender gets their money back plus interest.
- The borrower makes a profit if the price of the borrowed currency goes up.
The same sort of flows balance exchange rates and interest rates among national currencies, though as you point out, sufficient risks and controls abound to prevent complete parity between the rates.
I’d challenge the notion that one side is paying market rates, and one isn’t, at least in nominal terms. Bond purchases and ETH stakes are both market transactions at the prevailing rate, just with different structural forces in play.
I also agree that the different between EUR and USD bond yields seems to indicate that there exists no reliable way to arbitrage the spread in bond yields between different currencies (or, at least, that there exists a certain spread beneath which it's not profitable).
Also real interest rates are set by the market not governments. Monetary policy has, at best, only small effects on real rates (in theory it should have none).
I don't think so. What is the "risky investment" here?
I compared lending of different currencies. In the case of Euros or Dollars, the lender is a government. In the case of crypto, the lender is a smart contract. Both are assumed to be reliable.
A more typical example I can envision:
Someone owns land in Decentraland. The land is an NFT on the Ethereum blockchain. To make profits from the land they need to put a hotel on top of it. But they don't have the means to buy/build the hotel. So they lend Decentracoins (some other asset on the Ethereum blockchain) and provide the land as collateral.
If all goes well, the borrower buys/builds a hotel with the decentracoins. Makes more decentracoins from visitors. Pays back their debt.
If it does not work out, the land goes to the lender.
It doesn't. And if the collateral is a different asset, there is no certainty that the value of the collateral exceeds the value of the principal. So there's a risk involved and that explains the premium over the risk-free rate. It's got nothing to do with the fact that the loan is denominated in some cryptocurrency.
Proof needed. I can in fact think of counter examples:
Say there is a DAO that gives more voting power if you own more ETH. In that situation, it might make sense to borrow 900 in ETH with 1000 ETH collateral. Then you make your vote on the DAO with a power of 1900. And pay back 910 in ETH to the lender. The vote on the DAO might trigger an action that is worth more than the 10 ETH you paid in interest. For example if you run a company and the vote on the DAO was to buy a service from your company.
No, you would vote on the DAO with a power of 900, because your original 1000 ETH collateral is being held by the lending protocol
Two examples:
The DAO could support the lending protocol. Counting your assets in the lending protocol towards your voting power.
The lending protocol could support the DAO. Not allowing you to withdraw you collateral but allowing you to signal something to the DAO.
Well, you tell me. Where do the profits come from?
> In the case of crypto, the lender is a smart contract.
That doesn't make sense. The smart contract is a contract, that is, an agreement between two or more parties. An agreement is not a lender. The lender is one of the parties.
The "parties" do not know each other. And it does not matter who put the contract up, who put assets in and who borrowed assets from the contract.
Because everything is in the smart contract. Even the assets. Are you aware that Ethereum contracts hold assets?
We should sort this out first. It does not make sense to discuss higher level concepts if we disagree on lower level concepts.
Full list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_debt_crises
They cannot print value, only paper.
Italy and some other European countries are basically broke. But they pay less interest than the USA.
But how? If you're an investor who is considering buying government bonds, how can the government dictate the interest rate that you are willing to accept in return for buying the bonds?
Basically: central bank has infinite money and buys all the debt at 0%, and outbids everyone else.
Simple.
Read what the european central bank (ECB) writes about it:
https://www.ecb.europa.eu/pub/pdf/scpwps/ecbwp1956.en.pdf
https://www.ecb.europa.eu/mopo/implement/pepp/html/index.en....
Search for "government bonds" in these papers.
- Proof of stake has serious flaws if done from scratch, as you are trying to secure a network using value created out of thin air. Ethereum is migrating to proof of stake from proof of work, and has already built up a security pool of over $200bn USD market cap and a significant amount of activity. ETH as the native asset required for proof of stake has enough security pool to allow the migration to make sense.
- "You have been talking about proof of stake for years, wake me up when it happens". We launched proof of stake on December 1st, 2020 https://www.coindesk.com/valid-points-ether-staked-eth-2-0-q.... This runs as a parallel chain that users deposit ETH into to participate in consensus via a bridge contract. The next step is to merge the current Ethereum chain to use this new chain's consensus, and we are working on this to happen late this year.
- "There is a vibrant developer community, but for what? All speculation?" Yes, speculation was and is ever present in this new technology given how permissionless it is. This means anyone around the world can interact with the blockchain without a gatekeeper. However, there is an incredible amount of financial innovation happening on Ethereum that didn't even exist back in 2017. Really well-thought out stablecoins, flash loans (which are a blockchain native concept), automated market makers such as Uniswap which had more trading volume than Coinbase https://www.theblockcrypto.com/linked/79775/uniswap-coinbase.... We have privacy technologies such as Aztec Protocol or Tornado Cash. We have zero-knowledge proof games such as DarkForest. What makes me personally excited is that Ethereum is like this global, shared computer where every application deployed immediately opens a composable API for others to interact with by design, creating infinite possibilities.
- Ethereum's development is far more decentralized today than it was years ago. Ethereum proof of stake was developed by 4 independent teams, unaffiliated with the Ethereum Foundation, and had a successful launch this past December 1st, 2020, and no, Vitalik cannot roll back the chain.
- "Some other blockchain already had proof of stake and have been running for years". What makes Ethereum proof of stake special is it takes no compromises between decentralization, security, and scalability. At the base layer of the blockchain, Ethereum uses really neat cryptography known as BLS signatures (https://medium.com/cryptoadvance/bls-signatures-better-than-...), which allow for signature aggregation at scale. This means there can hundreds of thousands or millions of consensus participants with minimal network overhead, compared to other chains which have a permissioned set of < 100 consensus participants. Moreover, Ethereum is fully permissionless at the consensus. Anyone can run a validator at home easily on a consumer laptop. You don't need to buy ASICs, live in a country where electricity is cheap, or anything of that nature.
I urge everyone here to look deeper into Ethereum for what it offers and look at the depth of innovation happening in this ecosystem. Happy to answer any questions, as there seems to be a lot of misinformation.
I am worried about price movement intruding into this scheme. How can the price of ethereum be stabilized so that staking or other forms of lending or collateralization can be done without the price drift wiping out the yield?
Ethereum's blockchain uses up over 1 terrabyte of space. Because Ethereum nodes do not provide any search feature natively, most third-party software integrations end up being implemented via the use of centralized services (which defeats the whole purpose of Ethereum).
As for Bitcoin using the same amount of electricity as an entire country to perform 2 transactions per second, that is also shocking.
But modern fiat money-printing allows all pyramid schemes to thrive. I'm convinced that if Bernie Madoff had managed to keep his ponzi scheme going just one more decade, he would never have been caught.
Presumably any currency that records all the world's transactions is going to have terabytes if not petabytes of data. Either you go with a tech that will support big data or you limit the transactions like bitcoin making it impractical as an everyday payment mechanism?
For me the important part of decentralized is it can be run in different places so governments can't shut it down, not that everyone can process the world's transactions on their laptop.
You could have multiple cryptocurrencies which support the exact same public API and clients could figure out their relative values automatically by crawling DEX markets (looking at current prices and daily trade volumes).
People who do business internationally are already used to the idea of accepting payment in multiple currencies - With the right set of tools, the friction involved in accepting different cryptocurrencies (e.g. within the same ecosystem) can be reduced to nothing, in fact, it might be a profitable competitive strategy for a business to accept more different cryptocurrencies (they can charge a big premium for accepting more exotic/low volume tokens).
Transmitting between ledgers is associated with a cost, due to the capital requirements that make inter-chain bridges possible.
Look at the current attempts at such bridges, like Connext: they require individuals to run 'routing' nodes that faciliate inter-chain transfers by locking collateral in multiple chains to act as liquidity. There is a cost to this, that doesn't exist when two parties are transacting on the same ledger.
If you somehow banned any new users from using Ethereum, existing users would continue to use Ethereum for the applications built on top of it.
You say that like it's a bad thing.
I'm just not sure there is any real innovation here, it all seems to be rather circular.
(sincere question from me, I am curious to know more)
Both have massive network effects. Marginal technology improvements aren't enough to convince developers to build on a platform that has no users, no application & no infrastructure.
Last week a marketing campaign started, maybe you will see an add somewhere in the near future. A lot is going on in adoption atm, here a few recent news:
banking https://xtz.news/adoption/french-banking-giant-societe-gener...
gaming https://xtz.news/adoption/ubisoft-become-a-tezos-corporate-b...
stablecoin https://xtz.news/adoption/groupe-casino-with-11000-stores-to...
digital identity https://xtz.news/adoption/spruce-systems-makes-it-into-y-com...
Imperative languages can also be formally verified. See the K framework for formal modeling and verification of EVM smart contracts.
Detailed list: https://github.com/leonardoalt/ethereum_formal_verification_...
> Gas price is extremely low.
Beware, the gas price might be low because there is no volume. Binance Smart Chain had a lot of difficulty the past 2 days because they underpriced gas cost and basically DOS-ed themselves:
- https://mobile.twitter.com/PancakeSwap/status/13845099723948...
- https://mobile.twitter.com/peter_szilagyi/status/13848238801...
You missed a very nice example of Tezos adoption, which was the French military police using it to pay sources
https://journalducoin.com/blockchain/actualites-blockchain/u...
Good to see that eth has the possibility too. It's a must have in my opinion.
> Beware, the gas price might be low because there is no volume. Binance Smart Chain had a lot of difficulty the past 2 days because they underpriced gas cost and basically DOS-ed themselves:
I don't know how tezos would react when DOS-ed. The next upgrade brings some further optimizations with it. Gas will then be calculated using saturated arithmetic.
You can now transfer value simply by having a public/private key pair. No need for banks and their multi-day wire transfers. No need for KYC. You can borrow and lend on a decentralized network within minutes. Invest in markets, make purchases. All without relying on a centralized entity, and without being bound by your government.
Crypto really is something beautiful to the cypherpunk in me.
The decentralised, utopian vision only works if the entire game is played there.
Also, a side note, KYC is a good thing for things like AML. The ability to dispute with centralised orgs like banks is a good thing; the major issue with decentralised solutions is that there's no accountability for issues like fraud.
"By solving the dishonesty and fungibility problems, bitcoin has radically dialed up the contagion factor for chain letter technology to a degree never experienced before. Bitcoin has become the first chain letter to go mainstream. It is the first chain letter to go global."
Crypto & DeFi is a new backend for finance
Bitcoin is replacing central banks.
Constant inflation will require the entire economy to always be active or they will slowly fall behind.
you acknowledge that "you basically worked a month for free" due to you savings being devalued.
If a dollar represents energy or labor, then every dollar really represents the current value of labor and a discounted, amortized accumulation of labor into the future. It's almost like inflation and the time-value of money are baked into every dollar, conceptually. Inflation forces everyone to work. Working for the sake of working isn't energy efficient either. It's probably why crypto exists at all, because people need to always be hustling to stay ahead.
...Not that you need crypto to remove inflation.