The Way the Senate Melted Down over Crypto Is Revealing | Hacker News Reader

The Way the Senate Melted Down over Crypto Is Revealing

nytimes.com

24 pointsdolphenstein19 comments

> The technology is evolving to be much more than a digital currency, and Silicon Valley sees it as the digital infrastructure atop which the next internet will be built.

What does this even mean? NFTs? Endless “coins”? I thought it was pretty much conclusively demonstrated that crypto is pretty much useless for anything other than speculation.

Anyone have a single concrete example of crypto being used in a clearly useful, reliable, durable way?

Automatic market making for prediction markets, eg Auger.

Looking at their website, Auger seems to be unregulated gambling? Some people might want that, but it doesn't really strike me as a killer app commensurate with the hype around cryptocurrency

Isn’t it all at this point ?

AMP token to collateralize payments. Flexa is the first and most well-known implementation of it and has made very significant partnerships.

Have you ever seen the movie nerve? (Tl;dr [spoilers]: fictional online video game coercing people into doing dares based on upvotes from the internet hive mind which can't be shutdown due to handwavey "distributed" reasons. The protagonists eventually get all their friends together to launch a 51% attack to shut it down)

I think that sort of thing is the vision that these groups have when they talk about "the next" internet being built on "blockchain". Of course there are insurmountable technical problems between here and there...

Here’s a fundamental value…it’s not controlled by the fed. It is deflationary. It is property that is easily moved. If you move into transactional platforms (ETH/ADA) these and other will facilitate programmable transactions that won’t require intermediaries. It’s still early, who knows how digital money with lower gas fees will evolve.

None of this is really true.

It’s not necessarily deflationary, forks mint new coins from nothing and bequeath current holders with new assets.

Miners can agree to change implementation details, or even history (see etc vs eth).

It can be controlled by groups far more insidious than the fed (like geo-political enemies) in proof of work scenarios. Proof of stake scenarios don’t look much different than the Fed (private bank owned by constituent financial institutions with oversight from the federal government). So there’s not really a step ahead there.

There is a big difference between using code to manage and move money and using to actually be money.

Code has two properties that make it wholly unsuitable to be money, first is it’s written be humans and we always make mistakes and second technology changes so quickly and abruptly that it’s bordering on insanity to believe that this is a good idea.

It’s 68 trillion times worse than the trend in the 80s to build centrally controlled stereo systems in homes with tape decks and am/fm. radios. At least in the house it’s just one nice to have element and you can just ignore it in that one house, it’s not like you have an entire economy running on it…

DNS alternatives like namecoin or ethereum.

Or HNS.

Why is it no one can talk about crypto without TLAs?

OP asks for answers and legitimate ones get downvoted. Was the question in good-faith?

Yes. But I don’t control what others do. I’m not allowed to downvote top level comments.

The killer app of cryptocurrency is tax evasion

And evasion of capital controls.

... for them. Not us.

User ownership of virtual land in a persistent game-world that multiple studios can work with without having to explicitely interoperate or know about each other.

How about things like decentralized finance?

Stablecoins like USDC that are pegged 1:1 with the USD enable “wire transfers” with tiny fees compared to what banks charge.

I can picture this for other parts of banking that are so dated - escrow, checking accounts, collecting debit payments (lots of Internet companies won’t host sex workers because of puritanical terms from credit card processors for example)

lot of insider trading, as usual

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