Remember that Bitcoin still has ~45% of market, Ethereum around 20%, and the rest of them share what's left over. For a "crypto apocalypse" to happen, something needs to happen with the majority of top 100 cryptocurrencies.
When did this "steal" you mention happened anyway? Seems the price of nano been stable since this year, hovering around $4, unless you go all the way back to 2017.
> On 9 February 2018, the Italian cryptocurrency exchange BitGrail announced its shutdown after being hacked.
Where is the reference pointing to that the they stole it? The exchange had poor security, which is what they got sued for.
The 2nd of January, the price of Nano was ~$33, by the 9th of February, the price had already dropped to ~$10. After that, the lowest price it went to was about ~$1.
The price of Nano started to increase again and is now ~$6.
I again fail to see how Nano is an example of being a "building block" (what is even built on Nano that is relatively popular?), how it is "outright fraud" or how this "collapse of Nano" (which again, seems to never have happened in the first place) caused a "crypto apocalypse".
> “It is not yet clear whether he participated actively in the theft or if he simply decided not to increase security measures after discovering it,” Ivano Gabrielli, director of the national centre for cyber crimes, said in Reuters' report.
How does that prove anything? What's happening with HN users making baseless accusations? What happened with providing hard evidence to what you're stating?
https://medium.com/@bitgrailvictims/the-bitgrail-exchange-ru...
Also, how would those tokens even affect anything today? The argument was that there will be a "crypto apocalypse" because there is so much "outright fraud and market manipulation" today, not "a few years ago".
Seemingly no one can point to a top 100 cryptocurrency that actually shows "outright fraud and market manipulation" so the argument feels a bit out of place for HN that usually tends to be accurate and precise.
I don't follow crypto a lot, but what would the other candidates even be - BTC (because it's like the USD of crypto), ETH (because of derived coins, and everything built on top of its contracts), and ...?
As to NFTs. It's wild West with wash trading and artificial (as in created by hired workers) hype again going to woe suckers with real cash.
It's all sad. No one is in for the tech as the tech has already proven itself to be useless, inefficient and dirty. It's just not very interesting either. It's rejected by about anyone competent in either tech or finance. It's just the number going up making them reconsider or more often just keep their mouth shout as there isn't much to win going against cult like crypto evangelists.
The whole thing has just one use case: going around financial regulations. That's it. For everything else centralized ledger would be much more efficient, faster, user friendly and better in all other aspects. It would also be a subject to regulations though and that's one thing the space can't afford to have.
Amazingly though one thing the regulators acted against is much better idea of a stablecoin backed by a big player. It wouldn't be deflationary by design. It would be fast and cheap to use. It wouldn't have a group of criminals printing billions of tokens and giving them to sister corporations, the headquarters would be under US jurisdiction and users would actually benefit from real competition to dinosaur banks and credit card companies. Needles to say there wouldn't be dirty mining either. This time though the regulators acted in advance issuing stern warnings and causing many members to drop out. Let's have million dollar links to jpegs in a database maintained by dirty energy in a dirty jurisdiction pumped up by dirty individuals instead.
I don't see this as a bad thing on its own. I want to be able to earn with my money the same kind of ways that banks earn with my money. The reason I can't is because I'm not an "accredited investor". DeFi has a perfectly valid use-case and it's not just to get around those regulations.
If you want to earn money the same way a bank does just buy stake in a bank. You don't want to do the business yourself as that means huge burden of complying with regulations unless it's crypto which goes around that.
"Buying stake in a bank" does not necessarily translate to sharing in the profits a bank is already making from holding my money with them.
ummm, no, not even close
We know tether has provided billions in loans to FTX and Cumberland [1] to continue the market manipulation that Bitfinex operators Phil Potter and Giancarlo Devasini publicly bragged about. [2]
We know newly printed USDT is used to manipulate BTC markets, with a full academic report published from market data.[3]
We know tether has been insolvent and continues to refuse an audit.[4] [5]
We know FTX and Alameda Research were among the top donors to the Biden campaign. [6]
[1] https://protos.com/tether-minted-usdt-stablecoin-crypto-two-...
[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/Tether/comments/7swyfb/a_collection...
[3] https://www.cftc.gov/PressRoom/PressReleases/8450-21
[4] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jofi.12903
[5] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-10-07/crypto-my...
[6] https://www.opensecrets.org/2020-presidential-race/joe-biden...
a quick search on tiktok for NFT wash trading will show you influencers teaching kids how to create the illusion of value by selling to yourself.
The reason you see NFTs "sold" for 200 ETH but there’s never any real commissions for art is because that would mean actually moving capital to spend on other people…