The crypto revolution is failing
unherd.com
unherd.com
That was always going to be necessary unless you wanted crypto to exist in a vacuum. Plus all that money fueling the current crypto success has to get onto the chain somehow
None of the cozy corporate firms want to go near privacy coins, to name one example. They know that those don't fit into the plan, so they're ignored. But so long as you can exit their exchange, there's a path towards trading them - and therefore a problem for regulators akin to digital media piracy.
Bitcoin never set out with the goal of being the currency that literally everyone uses - it had in mind the cypherpunk framing of being underground by default. So it's just totally unsurprising that upon its adoption by the existing power structure, alternatives would pop up. That's not a failing, just a step towards an arms race.
This is completely delusional. As if the Fed is going to hold Tether on its balance sheet to stabilize the price in some crisis event? The lack of correlation with the broader markets is because of all these crypto Three-card Monte games happening that make the space seem much larger than it is. "500 billion" gets shaved off the "market cap" and the broader markets don't even notice.
It's insane that a computerized transaction currently consumes 2-3% of amount. This is an unnecessary drag on the entire world economy.
Not only is Bitcoin no help, it actually makes the problem worse.
The perfect solution to this could be a virtual dollar --- which I suspect is where the Fed is headed.
A real working solution would obsolete existing crypto overnight for just about everything except maybe money laundering.
Cryptocurrencies undoubtedly do have a lot of problems though. PoW will be phased out from Etherium soon which is a good start.
Would you mind enumerating what these problems are, and how blockchain solves them?
Or, in crypto lingo, having a permissionless payment system.
Any other payment system is "permissioned". You need permission from some or many entities to make a bank account, a paypal account, or anything else.
You don't need permission to use cash. If you have a dollar bill in hand, you can go anywhere and spend it. You don't need an account at any financial corporation, you can just spend it.
And crypto can be like that. (currently most, but not all cryptocurrencies have exorbitant fees, so they are an imperfect solution for this problem, but they are indeed a solution)
Really? The one dollar bill you can go anywhere and spend has this ability due to legislation, or as you maye describe, permission from the government. It has the Seal of the Federal Reserve and The Treasury Department on it. In turn these institutions can withdraw at any point in time these dollar bills from circulation rendering them worthless.
With crypto, you need permission from the blockchain.
Indeed in many (but not all) cryptocurrencies, if the miners collude they can censor a given transaction they don't like[0]. This is pretty bad, but at least it can't happen in secret: if and when a transaction is censored, we can always point to a specific transaction in mempool that is getting ignored. Privacy coins like Zcash and Monero makes it infeasible to track who is transacting with who, and thus can only be completely shut down or not at all. At the moment, they are the best bet for people that want a permissionless digital currency.
A lot of work in the crypto space is being done to tackle this problem[1], and most people in this space reckons this as a real problem. It's not fully solved, but this wasn't claimed: as said before, cryptocurrencies are indeed incomplete solutions.
[0] In Bitcoin there's a group of miners that is attempting to censor transactions based on US law https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2021/05/07/marathon-miners-hav... - and they are willing to give up a lot of money in the process. So far they control less than 50% of the network so they can't really enforce their views. And all of this just means that Bitcoin is indeed censorable.
[1] Here's 6 yers old blog post about this on Ethereum https://blog.ethereum.org/2015/06/06/the-problem-of-censorsh... - with censorship, Bitcoin might ban some drug dealers from transacting; but Ethereum, being a smart contract platform, would be totally worthless to enforce contracts. So they have an incentive to solve this.
The US government has control of the monetary policy (and can thus tank the currency if they wish) but it has no control on how you spend a specific bill you carry.
People might not 'care' about the govenement when they use cash, but try and pay with something that doesnt have some backing - say for example small rocks. They too are fungible, you can buy bags of them at any good hardware store. They are decentralised, trustless, effectively untraceable and could in theory be exchanged for goods and services, if both parties were willing.
By paying in cash, you are complying with blanket permissions established in advance by government, the banking system and the shop owner. These permissions establish stability, value and standardization thus avoiding the need to barter and negotiate amount and form of payment prior to every purchase.
Establishing the US dollar "legal tender for all debits public and private" is what gives you permission to use cash conveniently and without hassle.
- Transaction cost and/or speed - Security - Anonymous/private payments - Avoiding censorship
Whether or not crypto/blockchain solves these is entirely dependant on the cryptocurrency we're talking about, but I will say no currency comes close to solving all of these at once.
> Anonymous/private payments - Avoiding censorship Yes of course there is a single crypto that has these features, the other 99.99% do not, and by the very design, can not.
If these were the features being designed for, crypto would have taken an entirely differnt design path. If these were the problems trying to be solved, they sure went about doing it the hard way.
Rather than assuming the motivations, I prefer just to take the motivations that were stated at the time; "A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution." I believe that is the problem they were solving for, not any of the others suggested.
This is really all one needs to understand in the current cycle. It's pretty much a foregone conclusion that Tether and ilk aren't a bunch of angels who can be trusted. But regulators are slow to act, and their gambit appears to grow so large, and have enough Average Joes sucked in, that they can't be brought down, due to populist pressure.