Bill to grant crypto firms access to Federal Reserve alarms experts

It seems you don't realize that ETH products like USDC are redeemed 1:1 with their fiat counterpart USD through regulated banks. Again, your view is demonstrably wrong, as products "inside" the system have value outside the system.

Unfortunately your view seems to be the majority in HN. Quite disappointing from a supposedly forward thinking community. I'll be hearing the lazy beanie babies or tulips comparison for the next decade.

You can absolutely blame crypto for creating the NFT bubble.

The banks flooded the economy with cash but they didn't tell everyone to start buying NFTs. All of these exchanges, stablecoins and crypto-derivative products were built solely on the self-propagating hype that needed the cheap cash flowing into the system. The banks didn't tell anyone to go buy crypto, the crypto companies did, which effectively tied the performance of the crypto market to the stock market because the average consumer saw crypto as a more enticing speculative investment, not a currency.

If the crypto community was as focused on the fundamentals as you argue, there would be a lot more conversations around not allowing these billion-dollar exchanges creating derivative products with unsustainable rates to capture the market. But they did and the crypto world is where it is today because of it.

The Fed may have cut the trees down, but the crypto community threw them in a pile, doused them in gas and set the whole thing on fire and it wound up burning out of control. How do you blame the Fed for the fire?

The digital cash use case is literally in the whitepaper title, “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System”

I have yet to receive a point by point rebuttal with any kind of real data or sourcing. It always ends up in deflection or something along the lines of a conspiracy theory (any debate of which is infamously unproductive).

I would like for blockchain technology to find its rightful place as a unique solution to a real problem with actual user adoption and meaningful real world impact but after 13 years, substantial investment, and several pivots/rebrands/etc it hasn't been successful at anything (relative to the total potential user base/"addressable market" of 5 billion internet users).

I like to look at it as if Bitcoin (and to a larger extent blockchain) were a single technology startup. Let's call it "Blockchain Inc". If it weren't for the religious fervor of true believers, speculators, "hodlers" doing anything and everything to pump it, etc no investor or group of investors in their right mind would keep pouring untold billions of dollars into Blockchain Inc after its pivoted over half a dozen times, still has essentially no real world use case, and no meaningful user adoption (when compared to other 13 years old startups, platforms, technologies, etc with or without equivalent investment).

It's a failed tech startup being propped up by speculation and its own engine of propaganda and constructed media narrative.

We might find out if that's true soon enough. https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/23/tax-return-backlog-is-crushi...

You really need to look into the history of currency of you truly believe any of this.

Currency is worth something because other people are willing to trade it for something useful at a stable exchange rate. Now, having a central bank that controls the currency, and a government that enforces that control, can help protect the stability that gives that currency value in times of economic instability, but that's only occasional interference.

We know this because, in the past when states were weaker and less able to do this, huge swaths of people ignored their state currency, more or less, and used other states' currencies, ones that were more trustworthy (counterfeiting used to be a serious concern) and stable.

Even today there are countries where people are in practice using the US dollar as their currency, ignoring local official currencies, simply because the dollar is recognizable and its price is extremely stable compared to their official legal tender. How does this square with your theory that the dollar would lose all value overnight if the US government stopped requiring it?

Yes, you're correct, if the United States (and every other major tax-collectiong country?) collapses, I guess BTC will have won?

Regardless of where you stand on the value of financial products, undeniably the technology was enabling. I'm not a luddite, so I put a nonzero value on all new enabling technology even if in practice the technology is currently not used productively.

> that doesn’t involve financial institutions (that give people at least some protection).

What protection? They take the wire. Charge fees. That’s pretty much it. Corp clients don’t have Reg E.

Yeah that's the point.

But this is sort of like saying Moderna has it easy because they punted the hard part of deploying an mRNA vaccine to global shipping and distribution chains that they did not build.

I disagree, there are not cheaper or more convenient ways. There is overwhelming evidence that building highly standardized financial infrastructure is much cheaper and easier with blockchains than doing it without blockchains.

You can argue that the result of that is mostly scams, because building scams is easy. But clearly crypto made building financial infrastructure cheaper and more convenient. There was absolutely nothing in the world like Uniswap for example, and we were not on a trajectory for something like that to ever be built in traditional finance. If you don't believe that, then I encourage you to look closer at Uniswap. Try to think about it from a purely technical perspective, without the understandable bias earned from its usage for scams, pump and dumps, etc.

Another good analogy is nuclear weapons. Purely as a weapons technology, they made warfare cheaper and easier. The end result of the existence of nuclear weapons may be the opposite (countries spending more to keep up with MAD). But as a technology, they clearly enable specific things that weren't possible before (blowing up cities). Crypto is like that.

This has already happened 3 times, and it will keep happening. The dynamic is more complicated than what you're describing.

Crypto isn't a big MLM. Crypto is a family of technologies that make it possible to easily build MLMs.

The analogous thing in traditional MLM is the internet or mail. The difference is that the internet is much more valuable as a technology than crypto. That doesn't mean crypto has 0 value though, it's just that the internet is one of the most valuable things humans have created.

What does that even mean? Plenty of people have profited off of bitcoin.

It doesn't have to be that way though. There's nothing inherent about the timescale of 2-5 days that prevents the same level of security and reversibility with shorter transactions. The problem is the lack of coherence, lack of information, and lack of fast technology. It's easy to build a reversible version of BTC with programmable timeouts for reversal, and the timeouts can then be tuned based on transaction size, risk tolerance of the sender, and willingness of a third party to underwrite the transaction risk.

Credit cards basically do this. Part of the reason they are able to is because they gather more data and rely on more sophisticated technology than the banking system. With blockchains, you have another small tool to improve the situation.