Cryptos can't fix societal, political or economic problems
canolcer.com
canolcer.com
This reminds me of something Richard Feynman said, I can't remember exactly so I will have to paraphrase. Politicians and even the general public come to engineers and scientists for answers to the world's problems like world hunger.
But as he pointed out, we already have the technologies to feed, house and provide the other basics for every person on Earth. And we have for over a century. These aren't scientific or engineering problems. We're just not using solutions we already have because we don't like them. These are political problems and cannot and will not be solved with a magic technological bullet. (Though more technologies might make it easier to solve if and when we decide politically to do so.)
It’s not a technology problem, it’s a parenting problem.
The fact that I'm in complete control of things in that one little corner of the internet is enough for me to be excited about the future of things. Who cares if crypto doesn't literally uproot global democracies and cause every fiat currency worldwide to collapse?
- The rise of decentralized finance.
- Ownership through NFTs (I personally love ENS [1]).
- Truly decentralized proof-of-stake ready for prime time, pending only the merging of the PoW network into the PoS network that launched a year ago [2].
- Predictable gas fees with EIP-1559, including a variable block size.
- A bunch of layer-2 scaling solutions live, including optimistic rollups, zero-knowledge rollups, validium solutions, and plasma solutions [3].
- Private transactions on zero-knowledge L2 chains with shielded transactions [4].
[1] https://ens.domains/ [2] https://beaconcha.in/ [3] https://l2beat.com/ [4] https://zk.money/
There is a shocking lack of people with medium opinions on crypto.
I own bitcoin, but as an investment opportunity and solution to inflation and possible market crash. Next crash will have investors buying crypto instead swiss franks.
BTC will not be money, ever. It will not replace money as, inflation and fiat currency manipulation by central banks are features. And those features in right hands can be very useful to tip economy in the right way.
Countries inflate money to pay up foreign debt or stimulate their exports etc. If BTC or other similar crypto became global money those tools will become unavailable. No nation will willingly give up that control without any benefit in return.
I am also luke-warm on the environmental damage crypto is causing, its not black and white issue, but I fully support proof of stake. There are argument crypto mining stimulates and drives demand for renewable. But also I want to be able to buy new GPU for price lower than a price of 10yrs old car.
Crypto has a lot of gray area topics, sadly as with politics its mostly discussed only in black and white terms.
Well if you keep running into the same issues maybe you shouldn't be so sure of yourself.
Which one does it actually solve?
As a side rant, I get more and more tired of the fact that in US the establishment is compromised of REALLY old people and somehow they are in charge of technological landscape?
And it's just a rant about ignoring crypto. Which has no actual value and use-case in a real economy where people need to spend money to keep people earning ( and spending) money.
I actually agree with those "old folks" and I'm only 33.. you're comment only makes sense from a greedy standing concerning crypto, not any other tech.
Additionally, your comment "in jest" is just immoral to 99% of the people. Yuk.
Does that mean we should all be developing bioweapons?
Half of them wouldn't know how to change a font in a document and yet they want to decide the path technology takes?
It really is an extension of the dilemma presented by Douglas Adams:
"To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job"
Did I? You yourself said that your complaint about people's knowledge was a "side rant". I didn't care about your side rant, I responded on the actual topic.
In my head the two were connected even though it was more of an afterthought and not part of the original argument. I apologize for that.
Regarding bio-weapons, assuming we will not end this civilization some other way, I do think that knowledge is a dangerous thing, but how are bio-weapons different from cryptography, 3d printing or nuclear fission. In a more practical sense, do you not think households may end up having gene editing tech in their garage, the way some are mining crypto now?
More to the point, establishment is only scared of things that undermine its power. Does that make crypto inherently a bad thing?
Probably not, if that tech is ridiculously dangerous. We regulate a lot of dangerous things. It is a very good thing that we do.
> More to the point, establishment is only scared of things that undermine its power.
This is nonsense. This is a libertarian caricature of what "the establishment" is, and not reality.
What do you understand by establishment?
Regardless of the church you subscribe to (deflationary spiral of death VS austrian hard money libertopia), the fact remains that people:
- want to save value for later,
- want it to be liquid,
- want it to be secure
Govs' monopoly on money and ad-hoc issuance policy does not make fiat currencies a good fit. Physical gold is hard to secure, transport and partially liquidate. Gold certs and all sorts of funds are subject to counterparty risk that we begin with (see the history full of abuses in that realm). Real estate is expensive, comes with high taxes and is very far from being liquid.
Bitcoin solves all these issues because it's far more liquid and easier to secure than gold or real estate. That creates a leverage against how much gov could inflate their money supply or tax other assets: they more they do, the more value flows out into Bitcoin. Today Bitcoin is a tiny slice of the pie, but in the future it may be very visible and offer real competition and make all the people who do not even use Bitcoin find themselves in a more stable fiat environment as a result.
And personally, i didn't see any non-tech folk know the concept of an offline wallet.
"Save value for later" just abolishes everything that has been learned to increase consumption and drive economics from the last 100 years. It's a negative growth driver for the country, if you applaud that, i think that's insane.
Crypto may be higher on radar because there's lure of high returns because market is expanding rapidly, and, as in any bubble, some things will pop and some people will hold the bag. Just like with dotcom bubble or california gold rush.
PS. Even though California rush left most people without much direct profit, the indirect profit was that California was populated, infrastructure developed and it became an important part of the global economy, and as a free state was one more place where people could move to build a better future for themselves, even if they were not directly interested in the gold itself.
Crypto IS higher on the radar because it's easier to pull off a fraud and send it through a bitcoin mixer. That's simply proven by criminals preferring crypto.
Bank money mules are a lot harder to accomplish if you're not a criminal organisation. Additionally, the money is more easily recovered through banks and banks should return your money from fraud in many cases: Eg. https://www.citizensadvice.org.uk/debt-and-money/banking/ban...
Of course, freedom comes with responsibility. If no one can take your coins easily, you won't be able to recover them easily from someone else either. That's an alternative compared to super-centralized hierarchical finance. People often imply that one is strictly worse than another without considering both advantages and disadvantages.
We tried that. It was called company scrip and wildcat banking. It was a horrendous disaster that hurt huge numbers of people.
As for volatility, that's purely a function of holding distribution and market liquidity (and the market right now is far from saturated - hence 30% dips and huge potential upside in the future). As soon as the "whales" are thinly spread across the globe, you don't have a risk of your coins' value suddenly crash because of one guy selling his holdings.
The coins are yours, but their value is almost zero unless you exchange them for currency. (Very few places accept BTC directly) Exactly like with company scrips, company credit or such means.
First, we both agree that the market is far from saturated with BTC. When/if it is, then sure many more places will accept BTC.
Second, even with USD you are separating payment processors and issuers. Visa/MC being shut down does not make USD worthless. Just like if some major exchanges disappear, that would only make people seek some other ways to perform transactions they want to perform.
They don't have internet, so they have to travel far to get banking access and as such, they are unbanked.
Claiming crypto is the solution is a fake dogma of the core issue.
It seems useful for that, yes, but it turns out: It is not actually useful for that. The economics just do not work. Crypto can not support a one-way money flow, so it has to rely on middlemen for the reverse flow, and that ends up being at least as expensive as traditional ways of doing remittance.
Many companies have tried to make this work, and they have all folded.
How does crypto compare to this?
Those are typically risk factors concerning fraud. Which is a feature.
And in practice your converting 10 k $ -> btc -> yen would be a lot more expensive ;). Those crypto exchanges have enormous fees too.
You can't. That's a hard cap imposed by Wise for all transfers into Japan.
> And in practice your converting 10 k $ -> btc -> yen would be a lot more expensive ;). Those crypto exchanges have enormous fees too.
Nobody proposed using bitcoin.
Maybe you mean the worst fee tiers on US exchanges like Coinbase? I pay 1.5bps taker fees and receive maker rebates at my primary exchange. My primary exchange and one of my Japanese banks also provide extremely competitive OTC forex rates which I cannot currently use because my primary exchange does not have fiat withdrawals in Japan and because Wise is not willing to send dollars to my Japanese bank (I wonder why).
If you want to avoid those regulations, they propose sending multiple transfers.
Crypto exchanges are broader more than Bitcoin ofc.
I don't think sending larger transfers would save much on fees though. The fees paid to Wise are dominated by the percentage fees for forex conversion.
Larger transfers are cheaper... ( calculator: https://wise.com/gb/pricing/borderless-convert )
Forex conversion is not exactly how Wise works. They have balances in multiple currencies and trade between that mostly...
Ugh...
The calculator you linked says they'll charge 45bps on transfers of 1000 usd and 45bps on transfers of 100,000 usd. That's a lot. I don't want to pay 45bps. If they charge 45bps either way then paying additional fees to my Japanese bank for sending a SWIFT transfer instead of many small domestic wires won't save me anything.
Absolutely not, in any way.
If you want to claim this works, you will need to actually show what exact steps to take, and what fees that will cost, to transfer money into my hand.
Because there are a LOT of fees in that process.
As an aside, an upcoming update to the software that runs this particular slow database will greatly lower the cost per byte of permanent storage such as the USDC account discussed above.
If you want to obtain dollar bills in your hand, I guess you'd need to also go to a bank and a crypto exchange or something. But this is a really general-purpose gotcha, like if I told you Japanese yen were worth money and you asked me how to get dollars in hand, then you'd probably have to go to a third party to fix your problem of having Japanese yen instead of dollars, and you'll probably have to go to their branch with your ID and do a bunch of paperwork if you don't have an existing relationship with them. You'd be in even more trouble if I gave you a Japanese transit card with a stored balance of Japanese yen on it, because then the process for recovering the yen would involve showing up in person to a certain office in Japan, and the fee implicit in all this (buy card -> load yen on card -> redeem card for yen) would be a backbreaking couple dollars. But I think it would be silly to deny that you are in posession of yen if you have such a transit card, and silly to deny that you are in posession of USDC tokens that entitle you to dollars held by Circle (supposedly invested in US treasuries) if you control a keypair that controls the USDC.
Thanks.
[0]: https://docs.solana.com/cli/conventions
[1]: https://sollet.io/
[2]: https://phantom.app/
Of course you can charge less if you do less of the work. But that is meaningless. Tell us the actual fees from money in hand to money in hand.
Why? Do you pay for everything in cash? Most things I buy I cannot pay for in cash, so it seems silly to go out of my way to make my funds less useful temporarily.
For most people, the first step to getting dollars in hand from Wells Fargo is a decades-long immigration process. Should we count that?
I am enjoying imagining you telling your brokerage or your bank that you don't want entries in their databases, you want cash!!! It is less enjoyable to imagine you falling victim to civil asset forfeiture for self-custodying cash though.
Edit: Anyway, the additional steps for you as the recipient, after you have a checking account at a US bank and KYCed account at FTX, are that you would send the USDC to your FTX account, then you would request a wire transfer from FTX to your US bank, and you would pay less than a penny in fees for the first step and $0 for the second step. Then you would physically go to your bank or ATM, which probably costs like $50 worth of your time or something, and get the cash.
Edit again: The reverse process, I don't know much about it because I don't generally keep all my funds in physical dollars, but I think it also costs $0. It certainly could cost more depending on the details of banking and crypto exchange regulation in the countries involved though. For example, FSA-regulated crypto exchanges in Japan do not accept USDC deposits, and the one I am registered at but have not used yet will charge me 250 JPY for a domestic wire withdrawal.
What happens in the next crypto crash, with exchange risk being huge, and then you can't buy tomatoes because they're denominated in a stable currency not linked to your crypto?
In the event of a decline in the market price of cryptocurrencies, I sort of expect USDC to still be worth about 1 dollar.
> As a backend engineer, I would say yes, backend is easier. But also you'll be concerned with completely different things.
You're promoted extremely fast. Lol
> I am the CEO of an automated trading firm
Edit: After checking, I wouldn't put CEO of 'Lol Term Capital Management' on your resumee ( https://www.ltc ).
Seriously, what is this bs.
Some people would like to tell you "It's a temporary bug that you can pay for stuff with database entries at your bank or at PayPal but not database entries on this particular slow distributed database," but I don't have to tell you that to get the sum of the fees to be less than a penny here.
If you deposit to FTX via ACH that costs $0. If you send yourself SPL USDC from FTX that costs $0. If you send someone else SPL USDC that costs less than half a penny. If that person sends SPL USDC to FTX that costs less than half a penny. If that person withdraws USD from FTX via wire transfer that costs $0. The sum of these figures is less than a penny. As I've written upthread, this might not work out exactly the same way depending on your choice of exchange, country, and bank.
Not according to my grocery store.
The argument was, cryptocurrency is good for remittances. Remittance is mostly used to send money to people who actually need to use it to buy things. You need to get that money into a form that is actually usable.
Long-term, it should drop to fractions of a cent once sharding is implemented. But, that's years away and hardly relevant.
Go from actual money from the sender, to actual money for the receiver. Sum up the fees.
The situation for current L1 users is obviously different, but those people probably aren't the most fee-sensitive users anyway, since sending money with $5+ fees is hardly viable for so-called everyday use.
Remittances are when a person in one country sends money to another person in a different country. Usually, the first person works to earn wages, and sends them back home to their family, who use them to pay for living expenses.
To do this, you need to go from money in hand to money in hand. Anything else is useless. Again, the claim is that cryptocurrency is good at this. If you want to claim that it is, you have to actually show how to do that exact thing.
That, in any reasonable reading, would mean that the sum of all feels required to do "international remittance" would be less than a penny. This is clearly not true.
The claim that one small part of the fees is actually less than a penny is not really relevant to this.
February 2021
To me, that is the intrinsic value. Not it’s use as a bank-free currency, or it’s ability to run smart contracts (though I think those could permanently change copyright for the better), but because we can have an undeniable and uncorrupted chain of custody.
Such that a currency created and traded only on a blockchain is trustworthy because everything is traceable on the chain. A bit like software without IO being quite easy to reason about.
But the moment we get externally created data (sensor readings etc), we need to trust the source.
There is no such thing. The ledger number does not come with any other warranty than amount of PC time used to compute it. It does not guarantee value, it does bot guarantee your transaction has fully proceeded, only that a specific amount of other number has been transferred.
For the longest time I thought “when they crack the encryption, BTC will instantly turn to value-less dust” and so therefore thought it was limited to being of short-term use BUT the technology does not matter in a sense. Because the chain of ownership is clear and transparent, BTC (and other blockchains) could switch technology in an instant and still maintain the record of value.
Through this lens, I’m not at all concerned about bugs or forks because we’ve reached a point where the majority of the network is focused on the absolute correctness of the ledger. Everything else might as well be a mosquito on the highway.
So what good does it do to the farmer? Maybe he doesn't have to pay that much tax to the feudal lords, maybe he doesn't have to sell his plot to Bill and instead makes a DAO with his farmer friends to keep his land ... Maybe he can even vote for a party that would promote the use of crypto and run govermental transactions over a public ledger to reduce corruption, maybe one where a more direct digital democracy would be implemented with a multitude of different consensus types and protocols ...
- Sending money across borders.
- Decentralized exchanges that actually charge fair fees, unlike the centralized exchanges of today.
- Allowing more people to purchase goods online that previously had to no way to.
- Providing stable rates of return for your crypto based savings account (e.g. via staking).
- Lowering interest rates on loans by cutting out the middlemen.
Secondly, many of these articles seem not to mention that the major crytpocurrencies are a way out of government money printing. That's a huge plus for some of us. We now have a proper deflationary currency that is not affected by interest backed debt (which is a major sin in Islam, Judaism, and Christianity, that's over 50% of the world's population), and that the government is not able to devalue by printing more money at a whim.
To me, it feels like that might solve corruption almost overnight.