This particular source is extremely low quality and is motivated by the author's undisclosed competing product. I would like to see higher quality sources on the front page of hacker news one day.
Which is: http://adjoint.io
"Adjoint digitises cash and settlement processes for multinational corporates."
It's news to me he has other reasons to dislike crypto. I didn't know about adjoint, but that is very curious. I wonder which came first, the distaste or the financial company.
I suspect his opinion would be the same regardless of adjoint.
It's not like crypto is a thread for this business.
No idea if they pivoted away from blockchain or just stopped saying it on their website, but it makes me take this with several grains of salt.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20190502154457/https://www.adjoi...
e.g. https://www.txstate.edu/philosophy/resources/fallacy-definit...
If he were to talk about decentralization/distribution vs centralization along with who controls the fiat money supply & who benefits & who does not benefit from the fiat central bank policies, then he would at least begin to broach the subject of why crypto currencies are being adopted.
Is that why crypto is being adopted? Are you serious?
I bet nearly no one who buys crypto even knows what fiat money is nor have they have a clue as to the ideas of the Austrian school of economists. We live in an age of memes and discords.
Crypto and NFTs are primarily being adopted because they are speculative vehicles that generally go up and to the right. It is quite simple.
You're uninformed.
GS, BofA, Barclays, Citi, CS, DB, JPM, MS, UBS, WF and countless funds.
The current hype cycle would be nothing without the institutional support.
But even before institutional investors started jumping in, traders and other employees of the above institutions have long been a key part of crypto markets.
Again, they do not care about fiat or the Austrian school of economics. Of course they know what those things are but they do not care about them at all.
This is the repeated refrain of crypto believers. "You just don't get it." And yet when I ask someone to explain it to me (not the technology, the economics) I get hand-waving, self-contradicting promises (e.g. universal identity + resistance to censorship), and appeals to greed ("you must like being poor").
When faced with this, I'm often reminded of Richard Feynman's oft-cited belief that "if you can't explain it to an undergrad student, you don't really understand it". So my conclusion is that either nobody understands cryptocurrency economics and thus no one has been able to sufficiently explain it or the explanations I've heard are complete and accurate - i.e. I do understand it, and it's an emperor with no clothes.
https://open.spotify.com/episode/1SI7tFrzOXyeQ8NLVFgIRU?si=o...
Whatever you think about those two coins, they are not really similar, especially given that some nations have made Bitcoin legal tender at this point.
Yes, it's pretty unorthodox to consider Bitcoin a memecoin, but it is fundamentally nearly identical to doge, but with even less energy efficiency.
The fact that it's a more established asset class with wider adoption does make it more useful to most people, but this isn't due to anything intrinsic to bitcoin or dogecoin
Thank you for this, I have been wondering why Diehl has been spewing so much hate and disinformation about cryptos.
The least he could have done if he had even a shred of intellectual honesty would have been to disclose it indeed.
[EDIT]: It's even sadder when you go check the site.
The look is exactly that of a scamcoin site, all the way to the animated triangulation and the (two suits and a tech guy) pictures.
> A stablecoin bank would be subject to exactly the same FinCEN and OFAC money movement restrictions and compliance checks as banks; so know your customer gating, counter-terrorism financing, sanctions enforcement, and anti-money laundering enforcement. And these compliance requirements are the almost always the bottleneck consumers may encounter when doing cross-border transactions, and it’s not a technology issue.
I'm not sure what the fine author means by "A stablecoin bank," and he doesn't really tell us, but it seems like he means a stablecoin issuer who processes creations and redemptions, but doesn't control the use of stablecoins otherwise. In this case, an example of "a completely legal and above-board stablecoin (which doesn’t exist today)" might be GUSD. I'm also not sure why he thinks DAI is illegal, because again he just throws out a bunch of claims without substantiating them.
Anyway, he was actually talking about how stablecoins don't provide any benefit for international settlements. For whatever reason, I have bank accounts in the US and Japan, and I often have to move funds to Japan to pay bills. This takes about a week and costs about 50 basis points. The fine author would like us to know that the 1-week delay and 50 basis point charge are required by law. While this is not my area of expertise, my impression is that none of the regulations mentioned by the author require this process to take 1 week and cost 50 basis points when I am remitting funds *to myself*. I am under the impression, which may be wrong, that I am not breaking the law if I pay for goods in SPL USDC instead of waiting a week to move dollars from FTX to account at Shinsei bank via my US bank and Transferwise at the cost of taking a phone call at 2am and paying 50 basis points plus 20 dollars.
> Nothing about stablecoins is either necessary nor desirable, and any alleged improvement these systems may offer at the moment are purely illusory and derived only from the unstable situation that they temporarily inhabit a yet-unregulated shadow banking system that is either non-compliant or entirely scofflawing.
This seems like an unsubstantiated claim that it's a crime to pay for goods and services using SPL USDC in every country. I don't think that's true, but maybe if the fine author could elaborate I could learn more here.
> A regulated stablecoin bank is just a bank, but with a core ledger built on a terribly inefficient and bizarre piece of software not built for that purpose. All this while guzzling entire nation states worth of energy for no reason. Using inefficient blockchain as core banking software makes old legacy core banking solutions like Jack Henry look like a Ferrari by comparison. Our European allies all built extremely reliable real time payments like SEPA that work marvelously and they didn’t need any stablecoins.
The fine author seems unaware that there are currently deployed blockchains that can process the transaction volume of Visa and use less energy than Visa. That's discouraging, given that the fine author has chosen to write in such an authoritative tone about these technologies.
SEPA might be fine if you live in Europe and everyone you ever need to pay or accept payments from lives in Europe and has never lived anywhere else. It just doesn't do much for me personally when I have to move money from the US to Japan to pay living expenses, my lawyer is in Dubai and wants to get paid in Switzerland, and my developer in Japan wants to get paid in Hong Kong. So I just keep paying like $60 and taking phone calls at 2am to send wire transfers to my lawyer and dreaming of the day I can pay less than a penny and not take any phone calls at 2am if my lawyer adopts existing technology. The fine author would like me to know that this isn't actually a problem and I'm just delusional. That's not particularly helpful.
For the rest of the things the fine author has ever written, see here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law