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Comment by EGreg | Hacker News Reader

The problem, as usual, is centralization.

Not your keys - not your crypto. Stop keeping your money on exchanges. Use Dexes like Uniswap, lending marketplaces like Aave.

The main problem crypto has is lack of adoption (user friendly interfaces, and community adoption) and lack of scalability in layer1.

People are too distracted with zero-sum games to focus resources on innovating out of them.

Similarly in the Web2 tech world.. advertising is a zero-sum game and Big Tech companies like Google and Facebook have been adding more and more ads obnoxiously over the years to compensate for the diminishing returns. This year they crashed whereas Apple and Verizon are going strong.

The point is — innovate and build more usedul business models that aren’t zero sum!

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> Use Dexes like Uniswap, lending marketplaces like Aave.

Shameless plug: Bisq is fully P2P and decentralized, it doesn't even require a website. Robosats is another contender.

https://bisq.network

> Stop keeping your money on exchanges. Use Dexes like Uniswap, lending marketplaces like Aave.

Surely it's the people's fault that crypto can't offer a better rate than $50 fee per swap.

If that's the lowest fee you can find, you are probably sending some money to a few Nigerian princes on the side and investing in SBF's next venture.

> $50 fee per swap

That was five years ago; it's no longer like that. Blockchain software design has progressed past its dial-up era. If you haven't noticed that, you just haven't been paying attention.

> > $50 fee per swap

> That was five years ago; it's no longer like that.

Straight up misinformation, see here [0] that Ethereum gas fees were almost 10x just one year ago. If the prices have fallen, it is because 1. no one is using ethereum anymore, not like in its hayday, and 2. Ethereum price itself has fallen. It's not because of "technological innovation" as you'd like to pretend.

[0] https://ycharts.com/indicators/ethereum_average_gas_price

No, you're the one perpetuating straight up misinformation. You said that "crypto can't offer a better rate than $50 fee per swap," and I'm telling you that that's completely inaccurate, no matter how you slice it.

You can do cheap swaps and borrows on Optimism, Arbitrum, Loopring, Polygon, Solana, etc. - none of those networks were mature in 2017. The cheap swaps are enabled in part by technological innovation that changes the blockchain execution model from an N-of-N model (where every node is required to re-execute a transaction to verify its validity) to a 1-of-N model reliant on proofs - notably optimistic rollups with fraud proofs (Optimism/Arbitrum) and zk-rollups with zero knowledge proofs (Loopring, with novel ZK-STARKs).

> It's not because of "technological innovation" as you'd like to pretend.

If you aren't actually following the innovation, don't pretend that there is no innovation. Either educate yourself, or don't make false claims about what the tech can or cannot do. Even Uniswap itself is multi-chain now, running on Polygon, Optimism and Arbitrum. But if you weren't following the tech, then you wouldn't necessarily know that.

Nobody mentioned Ethereum until you did. If Ethereum is the only project you're following, that explains why you have such a large knowledge gap.

”The main problem crypto has is … lack of scalability in layer1.”

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