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They're planning to swap intermediaries, because in doing so the VCs can capture enormous value from the old guard. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. Instead of Jamie Dimon, it'll just be the next Zuckerberg (and when you propose a contentious theory about an emergent pandemic, they'll merely censor your ability to pay your bills, buy things and feed your family).

It's worth noting though, that just because there are intermediaries, that obviously doesn't mean they're all the same. It doesn't mean their attributes are the same. One intermediary can be superior (or worse) than another. All successful, large scale approaches to crypto will always require intermediaries. DeFi is a fantasy, identical to the fantasy of decentralized Internet services in general from the past 10-20 years (real DeFi will languish for exactly the same reasons; the reasons for which the evangelists never seem to understand, because their emotional buy-in clouds their judgment).

Part of that script by A16Z is entirely fake of course. They're inserting rather comical wokeness into it (communities, collectively, economic redistribution, har har), because you have to do that with all corporate PR now. Their goal is merely to establish the next banking & finance kingpins and to mint as many billions of dollars as they can in the process.

Seriously, nobody would invest if that wasn’t 100% true.

> How can crypto "restore trust"?

Crypto can be held and transacted in a secure and trust less way. I can store my $ in the bank which is secure but requires trust, or I can store my $ under my bed which I trust but isn't secure.

> How can it enable "new kinds of governance"

New crypto has introduced the idea of a governance token, if you hold one of these governance tokens it gives you a vote on the policies of the token. This is similar to how you have a vote in the building society if you hold funds at that building society, much more democratic than more traditional banks.

> How can any economic benefits be distributed when by definition cryptocurrency holders are accountable to no one

Holders are accountable to the economics of the token in the same way that the government is accountable to the economics of the country. If token holders do dumb stuff that devalues their token no one will buy it and their token will be worthless in the same was as a government just printing money makes the money worth less.

They're likely making vague references to "CBDC's" or Central Bank Digital Currencies[0]. Networks like Chia that focus on less power consumption will likely be used to facilitate these networks, there's already been significant ESG movement since any new developments will be mandated to have a limited environmental impact.

[0] - https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/central-bank-digital-cu...

> How can crypto "restore trust"?

Finance is incredibly opaque with a lot of rent-seekers taking a cut of transactions, and firms doing semi-illegal things but realizing that the chance of them getting caught is slim and the fine is generally less than the profits they'll make.

Decentralized Finance (DeFi) is almost completely transparent - all major smart contracts are open source and all transactions are made in public. Which gives people a lot more trust in the system as they can see what is going on.

> How can it enable "new kinds of governance" - unless "new" means Plutocracy?

Have a look at Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAO's). People hold tokens in the protocol, and then anyone can suggest changes as a Git Diff. The token holders vote on the change and if it's approved it gets merged into the protocol. Pretty cool democratic way to make changes to decentralized software without anyone getting special privileges.

> How can any economic benefits be distributed when by definition cryptocurrency holders are accountable to no one?

I assume they're talking about DeFi not caring about your nationality / sex / skin color / power. Everyone is on an equal participation playing field, and nobody is locked out from participating.

> Finance is incredibly opaque with a lot of rent-seekers taking a cut of transactions, and firms doing semi-illegal things but realizing that the chance of them getting caught is slim and the fine is generally less than the profits they'll make.

> Decentralized Finance (DeFi) is almost completely transparent - all major smart contracts are open source and all transactions are made in public. Which gives people a lot more trust in the system as they can see what is going on.

You have yet to explain how crypto will prevent these semi-illegal things from occurring. Like you said "the fine is generally less than the profits they'll make." Also, cryptocurrencies are not inherently transparent, and said transparency can also be used for oppression.

In any case, code is not perfect and smart contracts cannot override reality. I see little to be gained. Ultimately you either need existing government to uphold the true intent of a smart contract or subject laypeople to understand highly complicated smart contract code to know whether what they're getting into is legit.

> Have a look at Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAO's). People hold tokens in the protocol, and then anyone can suggest changes as a Git Diff. The token holders vote on the change and if it's approved it gets merged into the protocol. Pretty cool democratic way to make changes to decentralized software without anyone getting special privileges.

This is not democratic - you're describing a plutocracy. Is that what you want?

> I assume they're talking about DeFi not caring about your nationality / sex / skin color / power. Everyone is on an equal participation playing field, and nobody is locked out from participating.

This is not true, those who held crypto earlier will have more weight.

> This is not democratic - you're describing a plutocracy.

You don't know what a plutocracy is. Anyone who holds a token can vote they don't need to be wealthy. Poor voters can pool their votes to get a majority bigger than wealthy voters if wanted, this type of governance is called a democracy.

> Ultimately you either need existing government to uphold the true intent of a smart contract or subject laypeople to understand highly complicated smart contract code to know whether what they're getting into is legit.

By this logic paper contracts are also worthless because they also require a government to uphold and a lawyer to know whether what you are getting into is legit.

Obviously having these paper contracts in a standardised way thats public is a gain to society, when we do that we call them smart contracts.

> This is not true, those who held crypto earlier will have more weight.

This is not true, early investors will have more crypto, this is the reward for investing early, the risk is that your millions of doge are worthless. This is just standard economics and investing.

I am sorry if you thought crypto currency was going to bring about the communist utopia but its just a better form of capitalism, which is a good thing if you live in a capitalist country.

> You don't know what a plutocracy is. Anyone who holds a token can vote they don't need to be wealthy. Poor voters can pool their votes to get a majority bigger than wealthy voters if wanted, this type of governance is called a democracy.

How do you receive tokens? One person, one token? No? Then it's not a democracy. Give me a break.

> By this logic paper contracts are also worthless because they also require a government to uphold and a lawyer to know whether what you are getting into is legit.

> Obviously having these paper contracts in a standardised way thats public is a gain to society, when we do that we call them smart contracts.

Oh god - smart contracts are not the same thing as "standardised paper contracts." Existing contracts are not worthless because it's the intent that matters, not what the actual contract says, unlike a smart contract.

> This is not true, early investors will have more crypto, this is the reward for investing early, the risk is that your millions of doge are worthless. This is just standard economics and investing.

There's no risk because you can simply mint more coins for free. The people who created the currency took no risk in holding.

> I am sorry if you thought crypto currency was going to bring about the communist utopia but its just a better form of capitalism, which is a good thing if you live in a capitalist country.

lol, ok.

> How do you receive tokens? One person, one token? No? Then it's not a democracy. Give me a break.

You can have more than one vote in a democracy look at the American electoral system as an example or any business.

> because it's the intent that matters, not what the actual contract says, unlike a smart contract.

If you sign a contract you are bound to it not some undecided interpretation of it thats why you need a lawyer to write it. You don't understand how our legal system works.

> There's no risk because you can simply mint more coins for free

There is no crypto currency where I can just print more coins. Can you please tell me how I can print create more bitcoin for free? VERY interested in this alchemy you speak of.

"This is not true, those who held crypto earlier will have more weight."

I think this is a really important and interesting point. The late majority and the laggards and the uneducated poor will be essentially shut out. They will likely never understand crypto on any meaningful level, and that might actually be a reason for them to cling to what they know for dear life.

> Decentralized Finance (DeFi) is almost completely transparent - all major smart contracts are open source and all transactions are made in public. Which gives people a lot more trust in the system as they can see what is going on.

Yet we have an almost endless list of people being cheated out of their money (countless stories of people/exchanges losing their private keys, pump and dump schemes left and right, not to mention the lawsuits against Tether)

> Decentralized Finance (DeFi) is almost completely transparent - all major smart contracts are open source and all transactions are made in public.

I think this is a very important point, but it's also missing some of the picture.

DeFi could potentially make instituting things like a wealth tax much easier. If the crypto network is set up for it, all transactions are seen by everyone.

However I think any individual coin with widespread adoption will soon move away from this sort of complete transparency. Lightning networks will decrease the visibility into the transaction stream. And these sorts of networks end up acting like banks on their own, as more centralized points of power and knowledge.

And though it seems like there's no shadowy governing board like the Fed in the crypto world, these governance structures are still there, just even less visible than the Fed. Who decides the conflicts between the miners and the holders of the Bitcoin software network? It was not long ago that there were big fights about this, and because the governance is not public, the entire debate was extremely paranoid and conspiratorial.

Strcturelessness of governance does not mean that there is no governance, that there is no hierarchy in who decides the basic rules of the crypto network, it's just means that fewer people understand how power flows when making decisions and changes to the networks.

Because (at least originially) the goal of cryptocurrencies were to combat the double spending problem, providing an alternative to fractional-reserve banking.

you need crypto because crypto even with intermediaries is different than traditional fiat with intermediaries

how so?

crypto provides more privacy even though as you can see with some of the latest ransomware attacks where they retrieve the ransom back not completely private, pseudo-anonymous. The wallet privacy is why FinCEN is trying to introduce new rules around unhosted wallets.

https://www.coindesk.com/fincens-wallet-rule-aimed-to-close-...

> How can crypto "restore trust"?

For people with very poor understandings of economics, and have drunk deep from the sacred texts of Zerohedge, that have been standing on a wooden box on the street corner for the past decade preaching about the evils of the coming wave of inflation, as the Fed struggles mightily to be able to even get inflation up to the 2% target, much less above it for any period of time, crypto is the savior to get us away from fiat money.

Please don't post in the bombastic flamewar style to HN. It just leads to predictable, shitty threads.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Thanks for the check, dang, it's part of what keeps this site on track.

ZH is largely critical of crypto

Maybe I just shouldn’t read Hacker News anymore.

At a minimum, it's good to skip comments with a header that starts with "epistasis X minutes ago..."

I would instead recommend something like this masterpiece from Yakov Feygin, The Delationary Bloc:

https://phenomenalworld.org/analysis/deflation-inflation

We should all ask ourself this question more often ;)

> the Fed struggles mightily to be able to even get inflation up to the 2% target, much less above it for any period of time

Congress solved their problem I guess.

Yes but so is any asset. Gold, property, etc.

Whenever this question comes up in crypto/blockchain enthusiast circles there are usually two answers.

- read this $blockchain_book - just wait, these things take time

I have never once heard specifics that are even close to convincing

> We believe that the next wave of computing innovation will be driven by crypto.

There’s actually another less obvious interpretation of this, which is that the creation of cryptocurrencies is funding the development and deployment of new technologies, some of which may be useful beyond cryptocurrencies.

There are a number of academic research labs that have been funded in part or in whole by cryptocurrencies, and which exist to pump out new cryptography, distributed systems architectures, etc.

For example, zk-SNARKS got a huge boost in use by cryptocurrencies the past decade, and there’s been an explosion of derivatives and advancements funded by the cryptocurrency industry since.

Beyond the hype and buzzwords, that’s at least one lasting and tangible benefit of this industry.

Except for the leveraged Binance futures "tokens" that basically didn't function properly and all tanked without any real legal repercussions for Binance[0].

Unfortunately all of the competent exchanges with assets similar to these (let's be honest here... only FTX) aren't available for use in the USA in their full capacity.

[0] - https://www.theblockcrypto.com/post/49898/how-a-misleading-t...

Did you respond to the right post? I don't see how anything you wrote is relevant to my post. You're talking about trading, I was talking about R&D.