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Comment by streamofdigits | Hacker News Reader

There is no much point in arguing with a cult. This phenomenon will have to work its way through the susceptible demographic, meaning that the large majority of "speculators" will have transferred their disposable wealth to a minority of shrewd operators. The masses will subsequently be "seasoned", or immunized and will no longer participate, at best disappointed, disgusted and mildly embarrassed, at worst suffering serious financial setbacks.

It happened in all previous bubbles, it will happen again. "crypto" could have been literally anything. Its not pretty, it does not reflect well on society that it can be so abusive of its more gullible members. But I guess we didn't need this particular pathology to figure that out.

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better than the cult of USD. how's that doing this year? or last year? or the year before? or ever?

does it even have a THEORETICAL path to value?

I'll take my currently existing and computationally reinforced and yes bubbly increase of value.

If inflation makes the USD worthless, there will be significant social instability and most likely chaos at the GLOBAL level. This is why we can all be part of the cult of USD.

If Bitcoin falls to 0$ tomorrow, the vast majority of people would shrug and move on with their lives.

It doesnt take USD going to 0 to cause social instability.

i'm pretty sure we're already there in 2022.

If you take the 7% inflation of 2021 at face value, and apply it to the M1 money supply, the headline of this article (130B lost) played out for USD eleven times in 2021 without recovering.

The issues we're having in 2022 have nearly nothing to do with the value of the USD.

USD is an actual currency, and if everybody HODLs it we wind up in a recession (or worse). This comparison is wildly invalid.

What do you mean a "theoretical path to value"?

If I understand you correctly, I think you're implying that everything has to be speculative, like currencies too?

No.

I'm implying that a currency should make an effort to maintain its value to be considered a currency. The fundamentals of USD are not backed by a trade surplus or by a demand for foreign reserves, as has been the case for the majority of time since the end of the gold standard. In this context, indefinite QE unsupported by economic growth puts USD in an unprecedented position, and is exposed to runaway inflation.

I have no idea what future crypto prices will do, but you do realize that smart contracts allow people to bank, from their browser with nothing but a MetaMask extension, without a bank, right?

There's heavy dose of speculation present in any emerging market, but crypto, especially its smart contract sector, is not just speculation.

A digital wallet that can trade isn’t banking though. Can you direct deposit, pay rent, be fdic insured, etc with that solution?

What is banking anyway, in theory it is transferring x to x? Can be done through a digital wallet if both parties agree upon it. You just need a lot of parties to use that same system or easy bridges to send it through the old system.

Right now, no, but in principle, yes. You can effect transactions. Everything else is just a matter of adoption.

You would be surprised to find out there are literally insurance "companies" operating on the blockchain, which you can lend collateral to, buy shares in, and take out insurance policies from, which aim to reimburse their customers in case of a major system hack for example.

Wasn't there an article recently, that basically revealed that "from their browser/device" basically means just using the API to access the blockchain? So you're still using "a bank", just that the bank is the API provider. A bit more modern, but not a game changer.

That was perhaps about Ethereum, whose Blockchain seems to be so unwieldy that one very few companies manage to process it directly, and everybody else uses their API.

Ethereum's blockchain is not at all unwieldy - there are 5,000+ nodes.

Most companies rely on hosted nodes across the entire crypto space, not just within the Ethereum one. That has more to do with wanting a highly-reliable node provider with a low likelihood of experiencing down time, for business critical applications, than running a node being difficult.

It's just what had been said in those recent posts about HN on Ethereum, I think by Moxie or the reply to him be Mike Hearn. I've heard it before that the Ethereum Blockchain is difficult to process, so I assumed it is still the case.

MetaMask allows a user to use any Ethereum node as their API endpoint, and by default uses a professional node provider, Infura, since most users don't run their own node.

But there is no lock-in with or substantial dependence on Infura, because the private keys to your assets are stored on your own computer, or hardware wallet. The data Infura provides is public, and any node, including your own, can provide it.

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