The interesting idea behind crypto once was to have a totally different system.
Yet in reality, with greedy apes on a spacerock, it was an unreachable Utopia
the problem with this idea is that this idea of a "different" system is just merely going to evolve back into what we have today. The fundamental needs of a financial system doesn't change much, and what we have today is fit for purpose (mostly - there's efficiency to be had and red tape to cut).
When states and countries can just block your access to your bank accounts, because you're on the other side of interests, it gets...Interesting
With a decentralised approach, such actions would've needed to be implemented in the real world, not merely by the flick of a virtual lever.
And that’s before we get to stuff like Luna, where the decentralised authorities took the centralised action of halting the chain entirely
Like them or hate them, I'm intrigued where the centralized line in the sand was crossed
The validators of the Terra chain halted it. There's no switch that Kwon as an individual can flip.
There's no built-in way to verify that minted Tether can be verified to be backed. If there were, firstly there'd be no questions about the backing at all, it's all public on the blockchain, and second, it would revolutionary and actually useful to have a smart contract that can track real assets and not let them vanish from under it.
When we say Putin can press the red button obviously we don't mean a physical red button pressed by Putin himself. But he is the one coordinating.
Actually, the Putin analogy is basically exactly what happens. Putin pushed the "red button" and everything else is a direct consequence.
That's not how it works with validator based PoS chains. Absolutely Kwon can "suggest" to do something, but has no omnipotent influence or control unlike your Putin analogy.
Validators are absolutely free to discuss, debate, and agree to whatever they think is best. Additionally, the validators in the active set with this power are put there mostly by the community of token holders.
Say this is true, how amazing would that be for countries without existing banking infrastructure to easily access it?
> In fact, the requirement that you need good internet speed for crypto to run locally means it's even harder for a place without infrastructure to participate.
Internet costs less than $2 for monthly unlimited data.
You can find 300-500 Mbps broadband in small towns of country where you won't find roads or basic hospitals.
This access is fast and cheap enough for unbanked people to access it.
These unbanked people would also have access to things like smartphones and computers because crypto doesn't exist in real world.
And yet those countries would not have banking infrastructure.
Nice. Nice.
Any such countries exist?
But actually smart phones and internet access is surprisingly high in sub Saharan africa where they primarily still use SMS trading.
And yes, crypto is starting to catch on out there as an alternative.
Keyword: some.
Also, banking over SMS was a thing long before crypto.
> But actually smart phones and internet access is surprisingly high in sub Saharan africa where they primarily still use SMS trading.
Then it will be swallowed by something smilar to AliPay. Not by crypto.
SMS is less useful than a lot of things. It doesn't mean that crypto is the solution, or that it won't get replaced by something more useful.
As for "cash on-ramps", it just shows that there's nothing inherently useful in crypto that can't be solved by other means. These are centralised points that people explicitly trust to handle their money. It's nothing new, and once societies stabilise they inevitably re-discover/re-implement all the rules and regulations you're so dismissive of (such as KYC rules).
> If you look into this, such as the Gates Foundations research on payments and remittance in bankless societies, you’d see that crypto
Let's see what Bill Gates himself says about crypto: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/ut7yj0/im_bill_gates_...
Next it will be "but crypto will let you monetize your private data". Yeah no, it won't.
I think there's a lot of value in being slightly harder to oppress by the political classes or arse-covering and uncaring bank managers.
You can have some money in cash, some amount in real estate, gold, crypto...
Depends on how much you have etc. But it's not a "everything has to be crypto" or nothing may.
It's not just the rampantly emotional and repetivie crypto hate on HN that's absurd, it's also the sheer narrow follishness of so many of the arguments that's rather galling.
Apart from that, with a decentralised system it's way more complicated for others (!) to fuck up and lock your bank accounts.
But to be frank: I found the idea intriguing, never was invested at all. I am also not greedy and apart from taxes for my house I could sustain myself for a couple of months, maybe even 1-2 years without access to my bank accounts
But not so handy if you are an oligarch (or a dissident)
and Open Banking has been working on this steadily in many countries.
Ethereum IS ALREADY an ecosystem of programmable money APIs, and it works TODAY.
> Smart contracts should be considered self-funded bug-bounty platforms.
What do you think it true anti-fragility in a system? Something that is built form the ground-up in a regulatory too-big-to-fail environment, or something that starts from the wilderness, gets beaten down multiple times, yet grows back up stronger than before.
That is true antifragility.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/04/14/politics/fbi-north-korea-hack...
Yes, it's costly to build an anti-fragile system. This is not a surprise to anyone.
Our current monetary system is not anti-fragile. We saw it in 2008. Because of these regulation safeguards you mention, moral hazard appeared and true safety has never been achieved.
Now to be clear, I am not saying this is the only way to build a monetary system. It's just one way.
>often the money is gone to North Korea. another flavored, subjective take. You link to one such case.
You are using multiple logical fallacies in your comment, I would re-evaluate what you actually want to discuss/learn and then respond accordingly. Currently it just seems like you are angry at something.
Depends. In the USA, yes, your banking system is utterly shite, despite the supposedly numerous volume of different banks who are supposedly able to innovate and compete.
But.
that red tape is there to prevent a bank from collapsing. Its been imposed as a reaction to numerous financial crises.
There loads of rules that govern how much money a bank can loan, and how much they have to have on hand and in what classes they need to store deposits in.
A bank can be wildly profitable if it doesn't care too much who it lends to. Riskier debts yield much greater interest. The problem is, as soon as confidence takes a knock, the entire bank collapses because the value they claim they have is not backed by any kind of liquid asset.
This is the same with crypto. A stable coin is wildly profitable when people are pouring cash into it. but all it takes is a small wobble, people rushing to convert the "coin" into another asset class, and the whole thing crashes. This might be because they really don't have enough reserves to cover the withdrawl, or it was fraud. They aren't regulated, so we'll probably not know.
The killer app for decentralized finance so far is sidestepping laws. No wonder it's a den of snakes.
It's like converting your office paperwork to digital. Highly efficient, but you might get hacked or lose your keys and lose it all at once.
It’s totally possible the whole thing is unworkable and dies out. Another option is that it survives in some niche area that provides value or just becomes entrenched like HFT.
And it’s possible a world changing blockchain startup hasn’t been invented yet. Any tech breakthroughs with processing power or storage could have a huge effect on blockchain.
I am pretty sure they won't though.