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Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

Stock market trading is actually super efficient energy wise, comparatively, due to its centralized nature in a trusted environment. No need for proof of work or proof of stake, so no need to spin cycles for crypto trust theater (because you can still be prosecuted and sued if you steal crypto and it’s worth someone’s time to obtain justice; code as law until the cuffs are on or wallets are blacklisted at exchanges).

In this example, Ethereum is this enormous, slow distributed runtime moving image receipts and tokens around.

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You can expand and contract the 'stock market' to whatever shape and energy density your argument requires. Does it include all the energy required to keep alive the people who work to sustain it? Does it include investors, the wealth it generates and all the super yachts bought with it? Or on the othet side, is it just the near energy free idea of what the stock market is?

If ethereum ever achieved adoption even close to a fraction of what stock trading has, then you'd have the same problems and overhead.

As it stands, the apples to apples comparison has any centralized, trusted network being more efficient than [attempted] trustless, proof of work like ethereum.

There are already a hundred different crypto exchanges (more than regular ones, possibly)

We do not count the people working on these exchanges as a part of crypto energy cost. So your argument is wrong, actually.

That's because you don't need the same scale of people to run a cryptocoin. It does it itself, more or less, with some maintainers. You can trade value with anyone anywhere in the world without all those banks and people. So in this case, it's an extremely important point.

etherium solves 0 of those problems so it’s a moot point

>> No need for proof of work or proof of stake

Yeah, I mean naked shorts and all.

1. Naked shorts are illegal except in very special circumstances for a market maker.

2. You don't need naked shorts for a stock to be >100% shorted.

We'd all have been better off if people took the GME frenzy as an opportunity to better understand how stock trades work, as opposed to an opportunity to reinforce their pre-existing misunderstanding.

Naked shorts are not possible with crypto unless I'm very mistaken. You could do it in some secondary market, but the blockchain AFAICT only works on "real" assets.

Which is irrelevant, we should judge things as they are and not as they "should be". Exchanges are part and parcel of the crypto ecosystem. We cannot ignore them in this discussion.

Naked shorts do exist in the crypto market and they do affect the prices of those currencies.

But of course why would anyone do that when there are a hundred easier ways to manipulate the crypto market? Buy a few influencers and UFC athletes to shill your crypto and you get a much better return on investment.

Naked shorts can and do exist on crypto exchanges

On an exchange, but not on a blockchain.

Exchanges are a convenience, and go against the entire concept of a distributed ledger. That part of what makes the whole thing a joke.

>.. a trusted environment ..

There is a term called circuit-breaker. How would it possible to trust a system if it has a "feature" called circuit-breaker ?

Crypto proponents and libertarians taking issue with the rules of the capital markets is different than the system having no trust. The US capital markets are some of the most regulated, trusted markets in the world; it’s why capital flows into it (versus say, Russia, China, LATAM, etc). Some poorly written smart contract isn’t going to nuke their (potentially hundreds of millions of dollars) capital on a whim, and if there is an issue, there is a resolution path through industry, government, and the courts. That is “revealed trust” if you will.

Importantly, the belief of an individual can be drastically different than the consensus of market participants. Based on the capital allocation in US capital markets (tens of trillions of dollars), what does that signal regarding trust?

https://www.sifma.org/resources/research/fact-book/

You could instead lose $625M to poorly written code [0]. Crypto is just rediscovering the reason we have financial regulations, at a higher speed.

https://crypto.news/axie-infinity-ronin-network-hack-625m-us...

Knight lost $400m due to a code bug in traffic.

what's wrong with having a circuit-breaker? My house has many and they come in handy. Same with the stock market, it helps slow down emotional trading and limit certain attacks.

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