It makes no sense to me how bitcoin is still number one cryptocurrency despite it's garbage fundamentals. Failed at everything it was supposed to do.
There's simply a real discovery problem, because of the aforementioned gold rush. Participants have too many incentives to bury accurate information that speaks against their investment, spread misinformation that embellishes it, suppress information about projects they want to invest in but didn't yet, ...
The argumentation of typical crypto fan is like the motte and bailey fallacy mounted on a helicopter rotor, constantly oscillating between some noble goals (decentralisation, freedom, privacy, anti-inflation, anti-fractional banking) and the "have fun staying poor" snark.
It doesn't matter that bitcoin failed in everything it set out to do (and more) because people don't "hodl" bitcoin for the things bitcoin set out to solve. They do so because the want to go "to the moon". If your only interest in crypto is speculative investment, then you aren't interested in the fact that bitcoin is broken beyond belief: The important thing is the market-recognition since that maximises the chance for high demand, which induces hyper-deflation, which sends you to the moon.
Nobody, or very few people, care about crypto for any of its features and the people that tell you they do probably "hodl" substantial amounts of crypto and hope to drag you into the pump.
There's not a single problem crypto solves without inducing a new party with equal amounts of leverage (i.e. you don't need VISA, but you do need exchanges) because at the end of the day, crypto is built to change the people that control the money rather than remove control structures entirely because that's impossible: there are always going to be people that facilitate the interaction of the blockchain with the real world and these interpreters/resolvers are the powers in crypto.
However, that doesn't matter: nobody buys crypto the currency, they buy crypto the investment and from that POV bitcoin is still the non-plus-ultra in speculative hyper-deflations.
Yep, crypto is a revolution being staged to replace the establishment (central banks and traditional finance) with a new one (crypto/defi founders and adopters). The goal is to use the new marketing to draw people to the new system and become the new rich. The earlier and more you buy into it, the more incentive you have to spread the word.
This is why it makes sense to rebuild everything in crypto despite it being less efficient. It needs to be done, so that the new system (that replaces all parts of the old) is ready for people to be drawn into it.
to me, its that even if what is happening is that some new ruling class is being established, the difference is that the new ruling class won't be able to fundamentally change the rules anymore. Currently our monetary system is managed by rooms of Very Smart People that can change things at a whim and the cracks are starting to show.
but yeah, things are interesting though.... there is a recent upswell of proof of stake, which is just central banking all over again. So the new system might end up looking the same as the old system if these PoS coins become more common. The difference is though is that bitcoin is unstoppable. Like, its price could be 40k, its price could be 400k. The protocol will still work. The old system has no choice but to adapt or whatever.
Automated exchanges like Uniswap have Monero.
edit: Uniswap has Wrapped Monero, not actual Monero.
Wrapped tokens are facilitated through a bridge. The bridge contract(s) lock the tokens on one blockchain, and re-issue wrapped tokens on a second blockchain. At a 1:1 peg.
That way the wrapped tokens can be used in Defi or Dapps on the second blockchain, and later (if desired) sent back through the bridge to be “unwrapped” into their original form, on the original blockchain.
Appreciate this thorough analysis of problems with cryptocurrency.
Disclosure: crypto owner
When I checked the numbers, it was 4% cheaper, but the convenience factor wasn't there.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/nanocurrency/comments/nuz7f8/nano_a...
To answer your question, what I've read about Lightning it sounded convoluted. The need to have a watcher keeping a channel open, invoices, just seems overly complex. I have tried receiving sats from online Lightning faucets and that part was impressive.
Ethereum's L1 growth and improvements seem more logical to me.
Is there a good place to go to track the adoption of Lightning?
"Block’s Cash App adopts Lightning Network for free bitcoin payments" https://techcrunch.com/2022/01/18/blocks-cash-app-adopts-lig...
Or, you know… gold
As BTC price increases, more mining is still afforded, but this does not result in an increased supply and stabilized price, only in unmitigated high price and more energy spending.
Oh, and NFTs as well. Another worthless crap just to create more Ethereum transactions. Why worthless? Because ... Ethereum is just one of multiple crypto currencies/block chains and tell me again why your particular NFT on top of Ethereum is worth more than the same object on another blockchain? And how many times can the same object be (re)sold on all other blockchains? Do you need to own all of them? Or Ethereum NFT is somehow better?
> pump and dump crypto currencies
Aztec has been in development since 2017, and has solved some real problems in cryptography in order to accomplish their goals. Besides, it doesn't have its own token, so there's nothing to pump.
> Solves nothing, serves no purpose
It allows Ethereum users to transact in private.
> but increases the demand for Ethereum transactions which ultimately drives the cost of Ethereum
It does the opposite, since it's a rollup - the transactions happen off-chain.
Peer-to-peer, permissionless, trustless (i.e. not controlled by any one entity), known issuance schedule, fixed maximum supply, and unyielding consensus parameters all still hold up today. Seems to be doing just fine at what it was "supposed to do".
It hasn't failed at not being controlled by people which fiat currencies have failed completely. Do you control the inflation rate? Do you control how much currency is being minted? And tons of other things.
Exchanges are essentially banks. They offer bitcoin loans, essentially creating new coins out of nowhere. Fixed money supply is utterly powerless before the inflationary power of debt.
If you let people manage your coins in their wallet, they can pretend there's more of them, but they can't actually trade that many
Bitcoin has proven to be a worthless dollar inflation hedge. It’s more correlated to the stock market than any real dollar.
Agree on the mechanics. Equities are a classic inflation hedge. But the reality is that if three people, in the last year, attempted an inflation hedge, one with TIPs or Series I bonds; one with equities; and one with Bitcoin, the last gained little over the middle. Both likely lost value relative to the first.
If your inflation hedge loses value during inflation because the Fed will raise interest rates because of inflation, yes, there were external factors at play, but no, they’re not to blame, you hedged badly.
You don't control any of that with bitcoin.
If you're living in a democracy, you do get a say in those things or at least in selecting the people who decide those things, along with all the other voters.
> A single actor would need to own huge amount of resources and then essentially burn the coins. To purchase such a dominant stake the price would rise very quickly... making it very unlikely to be feasible.
You are assuming here a single-sided market where the existing majority holders are not interested in realizing profits on their holdings. For many cryptocurrencies this is not the case, especially the hyped VC-funded ones.
Those avenues are not really available for PoW chains... if an attacker gets the necessary hardware, there's not much you can do. You can try changing protocol, changing algorithms, etc. but this has obvious consequences of its own (making all mining hardware so far near worthless)... it's a bit scary to be honest.
I'd love to learn more about this, does anyone have relevant links or info?
It's worse than this.
Coinbase, for example, will close your account if you use you Bitcoins for things they don't approve of AFTER you withdraw them.
I most certainly don't.
But the hordes of clueless users who continue to flock to the platform are blissfully ignorant of that fact.
Worse, the fact that coinbase is behaving in a way that's completely violating the spirit of Bitcoin while profiting from it doesn't solve the problem that what they are doing is possible because of a severe limitation of the platform.
I am a big and very long time fan of Bitcoin, but the traceability / fungibility issue has bugged me from day one.
I really wish the dev. community would focus on introducing a fork with an technical solution to this problem instead of polishing the turd with minor stuff no one really cares about like taproot.
First it was supposed to be digital cash, but then suddenly it's gold and now "digital property".
When it became apparent that it's very wasteful they said the only thing hard money can be backed by is pure entropy.
All the other cryptos are created after Bitcoin and learned from its shortcomings to build something better.
Your downvotes are invalid.
I don't own and never have owned any btc, or any other crypto, and at this point wouldn't touch btc in particular with a 10' pole for several different reasons.
But the very concept of a distributed ledger that may actually be trusted is both revolutionary and proved.
It's collossal despite all the current degenerate uses and wasteful implementations.
In the meantime, I'll leave it to the opinionated pissants on both sides to continue acting like they understand anything about what's to come from a system with so little precedence.
On the other hand bitcoin is shitcoin. That is a fact anybody shills bitcoin is possible scammer. Anybody says bitcoin is future is retarded.
Yeah it's not a good currency but many design goals were reached.