ZeroStableCoin is out from stealth mode
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I've gone from being unengaged bystander on crypto to feeling pretty strongly that almost everything crypto is going to zero.
I think if it survives, the crypto community is in for a reckoning much like 2000. Bitcoin will be the Yahoo (a brand that survives, but does not create new value, and stagnates) and all the alt-coins are the Pets.com etc of the era. Poof, gone, vanished.
People have been saying the same thing for over 10 years. So far that hasn't been a good bet.
Even as a crypto enthusiast, I agree with this general sentiment. (My 2¢ is Ethereum will emerge as the Amazon.)
So a good qualifier for this space is to explicitly say "My gut tells me that..." While I don't know what my gut tells me about BTC yet, it does tell me that the compromise elemental to all non-BTC coins, including ETH will eventually damage or even destroy them. The one exception might be ZeroStableCoin.
What is this elemental compromise you are referring to?
You very well may be right. But the most memorable headline for me from that era is this Barron's article:
https://twitter.com/JeffBezos/status/1447403828505088011
If Bitcoin is the equivalent of Yahoo, what are the equivalents of Amazon and Google?
People love to use Pets.com as a symbol of excess for that era, but it might not be a great example to use to make that point.
At its highest point, Pets.com had a valuation of approximately $300 million (of which ~30% was owned by Amazon). Compare that to the ~$3 billion that PetSmart paid for Chewey.com five years ago, and Chewy.com's current market cap of $12 billion (down ~75% from its high).
It's a bit ironic that the pets.com domain redirects to petsmart.com, given that the PetSmart LBO eight years ago, and its acquisition of Chewy five years ago, and the Chewy IPO three years ago—PetSmart sold a minority interest Chewy to protect it from PetSmart's creditors and to pay down debt—were all motivated in large part by the fact that online retail has massively supplanted in-person retail throughout the economy.
Was Pets.com overvalued? Or did it just run out of runway before it could displace the incumbents? Is Crypto going to zero? Or is it simply that new technologies take time to find their footing?
There is so much garbage, but then there are projects like Avalanche. People love to hate on crypto and the stupid puppy coins, but meanwhile, projects like Avalanche are actually running the efficient, performant networks that everyone is shouting will never exist. It takes years to ignore fud and hype and quietly follow the fundamentals.
When I first paid for dial-up Internet in 1993, it was pre-web, just clunky text-mode telnet, but the apps were obviously attractive: IRC, email, Usenet, ftp. Talk to anyone in the world, download latest stuff for free!
Same with www a few years later. The dot-com business schemes may have been harebrained but the underlying protocol’s usage was growing exponentially because people couldn’t get enough of the things you could find on the web.
What’s the thing on Avalanche that would keep me coming back every day, like dial-up Internet and web did?
The thing is, we now exist in a post-internet environment where people are well aware of the transformative ability of technology. They're all looking for the Next Big Thing in a way that people just weren't in the 70s and 80s. The population of the world has doubled, and the share of those people who are trying to keep up with the cutting edge is _vastly_ higher. On top of that we're talking about a network of value, i.e. money, and so there's inherently money to be made--and it's accessible to the average Joe. All together, you've got the recipe for a blizzard of hype and excitement that obscures the real innovations that underlie it all. And that's unavoidable. Any exciting new technology with the potential to have a serious impact on society is inevitably going to trigger a blizzard of hype--and an equivalent blizzard of skepticism.
That makes the whole process exhausting. Par for the course in 2022.
None of the companies that invested heavily in CD-ROM were winners. We’re not enjoying our multimedia entertainment on platforms provided by Philips and Sega and Sierra On-Line. There were no Googles or Amazons arising from that massive tech hype cycle.
In twenty years, the notion of “I’ll store value using my cryptocurrency wallet” may sound as anachronistic and outdated as “I’ll enjoy a night home browsing hot multimedia content on a Philips CDi disc.”
I do agree "I'll store value using my cryptocurrency wallet" will sound anachronistic, in the same way "I'm going to dial in and log on to my service provider so I can surf the internet superhighway!" sounds quaint today. It'll just be: duh, how else would you do it? With a visa card?
Multimedia-enabled applications have been a huge success: it's just that the cost/value curve didn't become a winner until we had the Internet.
Bitcoin is in year 14, and emits enough pollution to be a top 20 nation.
How many years will you wait?
If you think everybody was on board with the idea of a unified global network that everyday people would use for just about everything in 1970...I don't know what to tell you. That's still an era when the simple idea of a computer in every home seemed ridiculous.
If you're measuring from 1993 or something, see, that's the problem: you'd be measuring from a point when there'd already been plenty of experimentation, thought, and iterations, and it was mature enough for mainstream adoption. It had taken decades to develop IP, TCP, email protocols, HTTP & HTML, etc. You were seeing something like a finished (albeit first-gen) product. And even then there were a bunch of years when it was written off by most people as a gimmicky toy for college kids to waste their time playing MUDs. Most major companies didn't start launching websites until some time after 1996.
I think we're closer to 1980 than 1993 in the cryptocurrency world. But now, like I said, there are millions upon millions of people watching for the Next Big Thing. The audience for the development of the internet in the 70s and 80s was extremely limited: academics and government types, some companies in specific areas, and geeks reading tech magazines in which there might occasionally be a feature article. Now you have people in Kenya and Siberia and Uzbekistan spending their days reading or watching videos endlessly about the newest trends and trying to pick the winners. It's an entirely different environment for tech to develop.
So the hype around cryptocurrency is kind of preposterous relative to the everyday utility. I firmly believe it'll live up to the hype in the end, but we're a long way from that yet.
Or, I dunno, maybe it's all a flash in the pan, and the future really is Visa, Western Union, and SWIFT. We'll see.
Not even some Rick Astley?
They're more than ripe for replacement by a standalone EVM-compatible chain that takes the only thing that's genuinely innovative about Avalanche, the consensus algorithms, and leaves the rest to the community (ie an actually decentralized project).
https://tweakers.net/geek/196920/terug-in-de-tijd-9-dot-comb...
WorldCom was a company that was going to buy Sprint for 129 billion dollars. A few years later it was struck from the corporate history books.
In capitalism things can just evaporate.
Amazon and Google.
This has been my biggest issue with cultocurrency since it’s inception.
The market cap of the whole lot is made up of maybe 0.04% innovative signing and 99.96% magic beans.
Useful use cases of the smidge of innovation can be exploited by the megacaps to extract whatever actual value there is - this current cesspit of Ponzi schemes will not be required.
The ability to do distributed trusted transactions will change how business is done. How and when is another question.
https://seclists.org/interesting-people/1994/Aug/57
The arguments against the Internet were not because people thought the technology was useless, but just push-back against grandiose claims that the Internet would solve war, or famine, or education. John Sculley's job was to sell Apple Macs to classrooms, and often said stuff like this:
> Imagine a classroom with a window on all the world's knowledge. Imagine a teacher with the capability to bring to life any image, any sound, any event. Imagine a student with the power to visit any place on earth at any time in history. Imagine a screen that can display in vivid color the inner workings of a cell, the births and deaths of stars, the clashed of aries, and the triumphs of art. And then imagine that you have access to all of this and more by exerting little more effort than simply asking that it appear. It seems like magic even today. Yet the ability to provide this kind of learning environment is within our grasp.
The famous Clifford Stoll article was pushing against rhetoric like that, not against the Internet as a whole.
There will be equivalent crypto disrupters that will make incumbents go south.
You don't know that.
They could easily have been the dominant e-commerce retailer instead of Amazon, if only they had strategic vision and good management.
Now they've produced the world's most successful mainframe computing business by using those massive revenues to build it around the world. A service, that's useful to people.
Is there honestly a single thing any of the current batch of crypto startups actually do that is both useful and better than the status quo? (And I mean useful other than to other magic token gamblers).
Everyone involved is so blinded by moooning gainz that they don't see the emperor has no clothes. It's a Ponzi. The whole market. Ponzi.
If it helps, I'd think that Bitcoin and a couple of others will stick around as smashing good Ponzi schemes for a good long while.
There isn't "disruption" happening "in the space". De-Fi is not novel, it's already been done long before Bitcoin. Many of those companies went to the wall because the counter-party risk is still present even without institutional underwriting. Turns out there's a reason you charge higher interest to less reliable borrowers, even with collateral. Shocker.
And the tragedy of all of it is that this relentless bullshit train, that would have been illegal under the system it's trying to replace, is going to claim another few million victims when Celsius goes tits up later this week and takes every other lender with it.
This is a literal description of the Internet we take for granted in 2022. If anything it undersells the reality of what we have today, since it misses so many new communication and learning technologies that we couldn't even imagine back then.
> The ability to do distributed trusted transactions will change how business is done.
Trusted transactions are already done. The distributed part doesn’t solve a realistic problem in 99.99999% of use-cases. That’s why I think cryptocurrency feels like a solution looking for a problem.
Good quality film stock, even from the 40's, is an incredible artefact owing to it being essentially infinite resolution. Sure, there are artifacts and degradation, but if you get a chance to check out a 4K transfer of something like Casablanca it's really quite mind-blowing. It looks like it was shot this year, albeit in monochrome.
If you compare the Amazon or Google of 1999 vs today, they're practically different businesses. Most well-funded, centralized businesses have a hard time evolving at all, let alone to that degree.
Seems like the challenges facing a decentralized organization wanting to evolve would be even larger.
I’ve been thinking in a similar direction recently. I think it was Doctorow that pointed out the decentralization->centralization progression of the web due to the time lag for big players to understanding the value prop and gradually iterate on their offerings (eg Google taking over email with Gmail).
My guess here is that the centralized systems to learn the lessons from crypto will be the Visa, Mastercard, NACHA, and the Fed. Perhaps we’ll see a smart contract platform built into existing exchanges like NASDAQ.
The blockchain bit will fall away for the most part because the big guys will not actually let the “trustless” system become the seat of power in the economy. And you can build all of the business-facing features without a distributed ledger. (Trivial existence proof - just run a private ETH blockchain and expose a public API for it. This is kind of the Ripple approach here, cutting big deals with existing players.) Reversability and “right to deletion” will trump trustless because most of the actual market participants want the former and not the latter.
Note, I think there is a different analysis for the US, EU etc (with functioning, stable economies with huge financial service industries resisting power shifts) and basket-case economies like Argentina and Zimbabwe. Perhaps the people in Argentina will continue to use blockchain as an alternative financial system in the absence of a long-term stable economy. But I don’t think this will be the outcome in the US.
its not the big guys who forced crypto to adopt a centralised scam coin like Tether. the vast majority of "crypto" transactions happen on centralised exchanges. the "blockchain bit" didnt matter to begin with.
Does reversibility actually matter anywhere outside of consumer merchant payments?
If you send a wire transfer, it can't be reversed. If you write a check, you can't reverse it once it's been cashed or deposited. You can ask for a stop payment before a check has cleared, but you can also be accused of check fraud if you ask for a stop payment under the wrong circumstances. Outside of the payments domain: if you buy stock on the stock market, you can't reverse a filled order. You can sell your stock, but you need to sell to a new buyer at a new market price.
Even in the modern fintech space, not all transactions are reversible. A Zelle transaction can't be reversed, for instance:
https://money.stackexchange.com/questions/86920/can-a-zelle-...
All this is to say that true reversibility is only available in certain cases. It is something that financial institutions offer when they know that the funds recipient is a merchant in a captive relationship with a financial institution, where the merchant will most likely be able to fund the reversal by offsetting future unsettled payments that are yet to be reimbursed to the merchant. It works only because merchants are dependent on financial institutions, and do not have the negotiating power to demand instantaneous, final settlement.
I very much doubt that financial institutions will want to (or will even be able to) extend reversibility to other transaction types just so as to deploy it as a strategy to prevent open blockchains from becoming predominant.
Yes. For example, the stock markets can reverse a day's trading when it's decreed that there was a flash crash. And in contrast to smart contracts, all business contracts are in some sense reversible in extremis, in that you can go to court and consider the agreed upon intent if there was a typo in the paper, and resolve ambiguities after the fact based on precedent, instead of contract bugs resulting in all of your money getting stolen.
I think we probably agree in that reversibility isn't important in _most cases_ (the mainline happy path), but I think it's really important when you do need it.
> extend reversibility to other transaction types just so as to deploy it as a strategy to prevent open blockchains from becoming predominant
That's not quite the claim I was getting at. Perhaps if I'd said "tighter control, for example being able to implement reversibility and right to deletion” it would be more precise. The core of my claim is not that those two are the killer features; the feature that will cause decentralized options to lose in the end is more generally the control that a centralized entity has over the end-to-end experience. Those two are just prominent examples of the kind of feature that are difficult or impossible to implement on the blockchain, which are actually strongly desirable for the market makers. Another example would be KYC, which is hard to solve at the protocol level.
My overall prognostication here was really that the existing big players will pick and choose the bits of the blockchain systems that are actually innovative and useful (I'd highlight smart-contract execution engines and true API-based transaction instructions for example) while dropping the "distributed" bit to maintain tighter control and enable broader consumer adoption. Analogously to how Google et. al. have transitioned the internet from a distributed/federated "everyone hosts their own server and communicates over protocols" world to a centralized "everyone uses hosted services for everything" world. And consumers seem to prefer the latter, if the FAANG valuations are anything to measure this by!
There is 0 need for non-rollback transactions. Think as a Database, which businesses really want a append-only database? Its so much more work to get it right…
Can just any transaction be rolled back, or are there restrictions? Do both parties need to agree to the rollback, or can a rollback be involuntarily imposed on one party by another party?
I imagine there are some circumstances where after a disadvantageous trade one party might claim to have fat-fingered the order, just to try to avoid the repercussions of a mistake that was made with full consent and awareness. I imagine there are cases where if a counter-party were to agree to a such a reversal, it would represent a loss for that counter-party.
How often are trades like this reversed, where one party clearly benefits from the reversal at the expense of the other party, and where the other party would not agree to the reversal if it were in their power to do so? How are these situations arbitrated, if only one of the two parties wants to reverse the trade, and the other party objects?
This assumes that there is a Yahoo or Google.
We, in contrast, are committed to a store of value that does not change, no matter what.
Can’t steal anything if there’s nothing to steal. Brilliant.
> ZeroStableCoin is the first multi-peg stablecoin:
> 1 ZERC = 1$ = 1£ = 1€ = 1 BTC
(a) If not, there should be, (b) if there were a way to pre-buy ZeroStableCoins, this would have already attracted >$0, and (c) those investors would already be spreading the gospel and shouting down naysayers.
Edit: I spoke too soon. They anticipated this issue and prevented it by setting the total supply to 0. Brilliant.
> ZeroNFT, an NFT that not only has zero value (as most NFTs), but a guaranteed price of zero
I actually laughed out loud at these two.
...
Proof: Left as an exercise
Can someone explain?
We do not just hope that our coin has a stable value. We constantly check contours of complex functions to ensure your investment remains at zero at all times.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjHSPyFjZpc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZoIP4aoM0g
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwoWBrT-FyU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-nI7t2IJSY
https://arxiv.org/abs/1708.04748
>When the cookie meets the blockchain: Privacy risks of web payments via cryptocurrencies
>Steven Goldfeder, Harry Kalodner, Dillon Reisman, Arvind Narayanan
>We show how third-party web trackers can deanonymize users of cryptocurrencies. We present two distinct but complementary attacks. On most shopping websites, third party trackers receive information about user purchases for purposes of advertising and analytics. We show that, if the user pays using a cryptocurrency, trackers typically possess enough information about the purchase to uniquely identify the transaction on the blockchain, link it to the user's cookie, and further to the user's real identity. Our second attack shows that if the tracker is able to link two purchases of the same user to the blockchain in this manner, it can identify the user's entire cluster of addresses and transactions on the blockchain, even if the user employs blockchain anonymity techniques such as CoinJoin. The attacks are passive and hence can be retroactively applied to past purchases. We discuss several mitigations, but none are perfect.
>stablecoin technical university for personal inclusive development
Is this a joke?
Edit, yes it apparently is: Initials spell "STUPID"
However, I give it at least a 30% chance someone spins up a ZeroStableCoin chain in the next 7 days.
They're quoting the Backstreet Boys. Brilliant
Whereas we use zero to solve humanity’s problems, other researchers have only used zero to attack crypto graphic protocols [Qua21a; Qua21b] (ZeroStableCoin is provably immune to such attacks)."
ZeroStableCoin is not safe. We can create 1 and hence arbitrary number from 0 :) To reproduce: type 0^0 in https://sagecell.sagemath.org or 0**0 in python, the result will be 1.
> - Provably rug-pool proof, MEV-proof, run-proof
> - Post-quantum & post-P=NP
> - Multi-chain & multi-layer
> - Currency-inclusive
> - Fully collateralized
> - Inflation-proof
Sigh... Another crypto projects claiming outlandish thing...
> ZeroStableCoin is the first multi-peg stablecoin. This is possible thanks to properties of ( e^{i π} + 1 ).
Took me this far to realized this is satire, which sadly reflects the current state of crypto industry.
[0]: https://www.worldofcrypto.io/blog/we-should-let-luna-die
>1 ZERC = 1$ = 1£ = 1€ = 1 BTC
The white paper made no effort to explain how I can trade $1 for 1 BTC. This is an unrealistic peg.
Burn another type of token by swapping it for ZESC?
lol