How crypto goes to zero
economist.com
economist.com
Bitcoin is a new thing, sitting on the shoulders of the giant technologies we're otherwise so proud of - all us highly paid software industry folks.
But no, it's worthless, it shouldn't exist, it's not worth any further time or effort or research, fuck it off my fucking planet.
It's so weird this attitude so prevalent on HN.
I'm no Bitcoin maxi or "crypto will kill traditional finance in 5 years" type, or even really a get rich quick chaser (it'd be nice, but I've lived in reality for too long to expect anything like that) but I'm smart enough and humble enough to recognise it's a brand new thing (even 13 years later) that will grow and evolve to find its own niche or niches and then they will grow and evolve and fragment as all things do.
Cryptocurrency isn't going away, and Bitcoin has the 'original' going for it, the Veblen good association unrelated to any other pro or con argument. Ethereum is the 'original' smart contract version of Bitcoin, already an evolution of function, and has an ecosystem of vast proportions that any other smart contract platforms are a long way away from reaching (although getting closer faster than Ethereum is moving away).
It's interesting to watch and there are a lot of smart developers working on difficult problems in the space.
I'll also admit that I'm not smart enough to understand the intricacies of things like ZK proofs, but I somewhat understand their applicability in the space and look forward with interest to seeing whats possible when such technologies are applied to cryptocurrencies in practise.
I'm rambling, but I want you to feel comfortable sharing here. I want to harvest the down votes on behalf of all those chilled.
The idea is nice, but has no applications, esp. in Finance. Also the idea of replacing monetary systems built since the beginning of written history in a decade with cryptocurrencies is a bit naive.
I'm a bit tired from discussing same things over and over, but at the end, banks gonna bank.
OTOH, I'll not downvote/flag/harass/gatekeep for anyone sharing their views. Discussion is always good. This is how things move forward. So, go ahead, share on :)
The energy is being paid for though, so it's competing in the same energy market as everything else. "Waste" becomes entirely subjective at that point.
Also, Ethereum is now proof of stake, reducing it's power usage by something like 95%. PoS has its own pros and cons though.
> Also the idea of replacing monetary systems built since the beginning of written history in a decade with cryptocurrencies is a bit naive.
That's why I say it's still new despite being 13 years old. It's naive to think it's already failed when it's barely learnt to walk.
Happy to be either totally ignored or told where I'm wrong.
Actually, "I can do whatever do with electricity, because I pay for it", is a wrong perspective, esp. in today's energy climate.
Let's put the fact that Bitcoin and Proof of Work systems are very energy inefficient as of today, and paying for it doesn't make this inefficiencies right.
Today, supercomputer centers discuss about reducing capacity, or add downtimes. CERN is discussing about temporarily shutting down some experiments, incl. accelerator ring. Hotels in Europe is fixing (locking in fact) their rooms to 18 degrees Celcius, and turning off heating the second events/conferences end. Last, but not the least storefronts are turning off their extremely efficient LED lighting at nights, after stores close.
In this climate, running a very inefficient network which uses equivalent energy to a small-mid European country "just because we pay for it" is wrong on many levels.
I'm normally very lassiez-faire person, but in the face of this energy crisis, climate change and other existential threats looming, saying that "we can do that because we pay for it", really grinds my gears. It's just carelessness. I don't know when we have detached from ethics this far, and this is disturbing (AI has the same problem for different reasons, but let's not digress).
Ethereum's Proof of Stake migration is something I support. I still don't believe in cryptocurrencies and all utopia surrounding it, but at least one step in a right direction.
> It's naive to think it's already failed when it's barely learnt to walk.
I don't think it's failed, but it has not won any battles either (yet alone the war). It's just another instrument which will be normalized under banks at most. I'm saying that it won't arrive where people dream, but somewhere else, and that place will be boring, if it ever arrives.
Any people evangelizing cryptocurrencies are excited for small money (personal finance), any people evangelizing it for medium-sized money (hedge funds, etc.) are running Ponzi schemes. This is not a good outlook from my perspective.
Anything beyond that and you're literally picking winners and losers - which wouldn't necessarily be wrong either, but it's politically suicidal and so it will not happen.
Make non-renewable power prices higher. I'm for that, but Bitcoin and proof of work cryptocurrency mining will adapt to whatever new rules are put in place, and people will still complain that it's a waste because there's no direct benefit to them individually.
I agree, however, that the popular understanding of the end result of cryptocurrencies could be something incredibly boring and potential anathema to the core reason for existence of Bitcoin such as central bank digital currencies.
However, there will always be groups working against the interests of the establishment, creating new avenues of alternatives (here, direct proof of me being utopian).
I'm neither near to them, nor have the same perspective on climate change & the energy crisis, because of my vantage point, most probably.
Have a nice day.
I think the energy people spend on cryptocurrencies comes from a similar logic. If you want to stop people from externalizing the costs of energy waste you will have to increase the price of energy until the costs are covered, or else we will continue to run at a deficit at the expense of the planet.
On the flip side of this coin, energy expansion has driven all known human (and evolutionary) progress to date, so it's a delicate ecosystem to mess with.
Unless it’s prohibited by law, which is in effect in Germany and France (if I remember correctly).
Energy prices are on the rise in every form, at least in Europe, and people feel the pressure profoundly.
The problem here is, we don’t have unlimited energy as of now. So, we need to at least use it a bit more carefully until we clear this bottleneck.
Cryptocurrencies’ energy waste problem also still needs to be addressed, because if they can do this more efficiently, we can use the energy for more production.
However, this doesn’t mean that I believe cryptocurrencies are solving anything. I’m firm on that view.
Bless you. That made me laugh out loud.
Calling it "tech" misleadingly groups it with a category of things which largely tie into existing "tech" in every obvious and specific ways; most of which were created very recently.
This is the wrong way to think about "tech" as fundamental as one which gives every person 'the ability to transfer real world value over photons in the form of IP packets', which is the essence of Bitcoin (and cryptocurrency generally). A better comparison for Bitcoin is something like telecommunications.
Banking on regular use cases in the near term is probably a bad idea. But what is far worse is dismissing, much less prematurely regulating or banning, something fundamentally comparable to the advent of telecommunications.
Western Union started doing wire transfers in 1872.
By introducing the ability to transfer a scarce asset globally you resolve the requirement for credit, as no one ever needs to redeem.
Credit is a hack, Bitcoin is the fix.
But a trusted mail carrier and direct end-to-end encrypted video calls from/to anywhere on the planet are not even in the same ballpark. Trusted wire transfers and trustless peer-to-peer value settlement are potentially just as dissimilar.
I don't think it will take nearly 200 years for the scale of the difference to be as substantial as the difference pre-victorian mail and modern video calls. But it will take substantially longer than 13 years, that is pretty clear.
Even still, it is obvious to me (and many others) that this eventual future is inevitable-- and no amount of price fluctuation, scamming, or environmental concerns can shake that belief because these things simply don't even remotely address the core of what a foundational change this "tech" is in any way.
That is not what a wire transfer is.
> I don't think it will take nearly 200 years for the scale of the difference to be as substantial as the difference pre-victorian mail and modern video calls. But it will take substantially longer than 13 years, that is pretty clear.
The first electronic value transfer happened somewhere around 1872 so it is already at 150 years which is far nearer to 200 than to 13.
> Even still, it is obvious to me (and many others) that this eventual future is inevitable-- and no amount of price fluctuation, scamming, or environmental concerns can shake that belief because these things simply don't even remotely address the core of what a foundational change this "tech" is in any way.
It would be nice to hear arguments on this topic than proclamations of belief.
EDIT:
Just noticed that in your first post you said:
> It took nearly all of those 184 years to get to a point where a majority of people had a regular use for telecommunications.
At first I read it as it took 184 years for telecommunications to become widely available, which would be a reasonable comment. Your claim isn't reasonable since even far before 1832 majority of people had a regular use for telecommunications but the technology wasn't there. Bitcoin technology is here but majority of people have no use for it.
I didn't say it was a wire transfer. I said it was a mail carrier and made an analogy. You seem to have misread this part and misinterpreted my entire reply, as the rest of your comment makes little sense as a response.
> The first electronic value transfer happened somewhere around 1872
No, wire transfers are data, not value, transfers. The humans and institutions on either end of the data transfered "over the wire" are then entrusted to transfer yet more data to a central bank which eventually completes a physical value transfer of assets to perform settlement of the balance.
Central banks move around ships filled with gold and other precious assets-- that is the value transfer. Direct non-physical electronic value transfer, i.e. settlement, did not happen until 2013.
Over the last 13 years, every last use case with the arguable exception of Ponzi schemes and ransomware scams has turned to shit. Payments, store of value, distributed computing, NFTs, nope all across the board. You can't even buy drugs with Bitcoin anymore!
Distributed computing I don't know much about, but if you're talking smart contracts that seems to be pretty healthy and well, but if you're talking decentralized AWS then I think there's a ways to go before that's a realistic expectation.
Payments, can work well in certain scenarios and better / worse for different cryptocurrencies. Cross border large value transfers Bitcoin can still be a cheaper and faster option than some (countries) banks.
Store of value is an interesting one, more so because we're (maybe?) near a local bottom down 80-odd percent from all time highs, but on a single line from inception to now, it's outperformed much of the stock market (I have no direct citation for this, but have heard it from a number of not necessarily trustworthy sources).
The whole stock market being down a large percentage takes some of the stink off Bitcoin's store of value argument as well.
Gold seems fairly consistent; boring, but boring can be good as an investment or store of value.
NFTs, that's all just in fashion mode at the moment, the new application of cryptocurrency / blockchain. Better applications of NFTs will surely appear.
On HN the consensus is that every current usage is either worthless, utopic or scammy. Nobody denies the technology. A recent post on HN about AWS and blockchain ended with the following sentence : "the blockchain is a solution looking for a problem"
https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2022/11/19/AWS-Block...
Now High-Frequency Trading is technically impressive, the ridiculous lengths they go to to shave microseconds are awe-inspiring. Too bad it's for a purpose that is almost as devoid of redeeming value to society as cryptocurrencies.
It would be nice if any of them understood finance or just bank panics and financial contagion.
People then fall into the (equally?) well-signposted-by-history trap of thinking that any company is trustworthy.
If you want a quick rundown of what might be happening...
People have a very finely tuned sense of who is winning status games. It is clear that some people in crypto are winning by several billion dollars. Add to that a (fairly reasonable) argument that there is cheating afoot in this status game and you get people arcing up trying to do get something done about it. Very natural response - people don't like cheaters and do play status games.
I think they're mistaken though - I'm put in mind of Utopia, Limited (a classic 1893 production) lampooning the obvious stupidity of a limited liability corporation. Turned out limited liability corporations were a game changer and extremely beneficial to society.
I'm sure people are genuine in their beliefs, but the aggregate response is unusually ferocious.
It took 20 years to go from the car phone suitcase in Lethal Weapon to the first release iPhone.
What’s the crypto equivalent?
That's not really what people are "bagging" it for. Or at least, not why I'm "against" crypto.
> But no, it's worthless, it shouldn't exist, it's not worth any further time or effort or research, fuck it off my fucking planet.
I think the technology is super interesting as a technology (I'm talking of blockchains here). I think there is currently one solid, known use case for that technology - cryptocurrencies. I'm not sure how "beneficial" they are overall, but I'm not so sure how beneficial Facebook is either. They are for sure providing some value to some people.
My big problem is that for the last 8 years, I've been hearing about how the Blockchain technology will solve other problems, revolutionize other fields. And as of now, that just isn't the case. There are no other problems that blockchain solves that can't be solved better with other technologies.
I'm not saying that no further time or effort to research this should be done, not at all. I'm just saying that people claiming there currently are use cases for it are wrong, and pushing back against them.
If people don't even care about the privacy of their personal data, they're already two layers away from caring about decentralisation.
The media is trying _so hard_ to push the narrative that these exchanges matter. They just don't.
They only matter to people who are obsessed with making cryptocurrency into traditional regulated finance.
That would be cryptocurrency dying, because then it would simply be a very inefficient system for bank transfers. Just as a road legal Formula 1 car would be something else entirely.
Does Z library going under mean that book piracy is going to zero? Does it prove that buying books is the future?
Does Twitter going through struggles mean that online messaging is going to zero?
Does a tech hiring downturn mean that programmers are worthless and going to zero?
You don't say that sausages are worthless just because the dog ate a couple that were left on the kitchen counter.
The problem may be the dog, or the lack of discipline by the owner, or whoever left the sausages out on the counter, but the one thing free from any accusation of blame is the fucking sausages.
There is a confusing entanglement between the thoughts about the technology vs the thoughts about actually doing financial transactions with it. I have admiration for the developers and awe at the websites, games and services that were spawned, the technology. As a financial construct it's a perfect storm for exploitation; human nature + unregulated hyper-capitalism = bad.
Regulation is required, As much as for banking because consumer funds are being stored and / or transferred.
FTX was just grossly, fraudulently mismanaged and I'm not actually sure the exact machinations of regulation that could ensure that kind of thing doesn't happen - regular reporting of figures, independent audits, etc, but then with the money FTX had been throwing around it would have been easy to fake reports and pay for clean audits (in my layman view of a very complex landscape).
But that won't happen because money laundering is a religious belief. Instead we'll just get more stupid attempts to watch the watchmen.
No doubt the ponzi schemers will reboot the casino, and Bitcoin in some form will live forever, and ETH proof of stake holds real promise. But FTX signals the next leg down for Bitcoin, likely the collapse of Tether, and a return to 2016 valuations.
Over a million people lost billions of dollars in the FTX collapse/apparent fraud. This is the most important financial story in a generation, nothing "boring" about it!
No evidence is offered about this at all. But even so mining should be a pretty low-margin and relatively risky endeavor. You don't want mining to be profitable.
The worst part of fiat is that rent-seekers are chasing after the money spigot and devising ways to profit off how fiat is "mined." It's the Cantillon effect.
"Bitcoin has died 466 times"
This is an important data point about the nature of the emerging digital society - whether we like it or not. It would be swell if somebody competent (and not captured in any way) investigated and drew conclusions about what all this means and what kind of risks it is seeding for our collective future.
The arbitrary confiscation of concepts such as "value", "business", "asset", "investment" and "use", coupled with the unfairness and rent-seeking nature of the official system and the increasing ease of bootstraping alternative "financial systems" (FSaaS) suggests that the crypto phenomenon is not a one-of aberration but potentially a recurring malaise. If there was any chance that digital technology can lead to a better financial system it seems to be as remote as ever.
Btw the first name of the author is Satoshi...
You probably cannot imagine why permissionless currency that can't be controlled by government is a desirable thing. After all you've never lived under tyrannical governments. It's not like there are say 45 countries in this planet where woman are forbidden to manage money, have a company or even a bank account. Pff... preposterous right? Why should allow Mohamed to send money to his mother in Palest... I mean commit money laundering?
No, your interest is most likely the same as almost everyone else in crypto - seeing the line go up.
What you are proposing is eventually devolves to the social darwinism. You have a global aggressor - your government. You have a lot of citizens i nthe country, both rich and poor. All were hurt by aggressor (financially), rich less so, poor - a lot. Now you introduce a new system in the equation - tokens. It works like a private pipe from a shared pool. Now the individuals are are more proactive, smarter, and richer will utilise such pipes earlier and more thoroughly, funneling money to the offshores. And people not utilising such pipes/tokens are left "having fun staying poor". You personally is simply hoping to save your own money faster than aggressor takes them from you.
The problem is that you country will be in the worse position when such "money saving" system will be working at scale.
I hope you do realise that slang names like beta, soy, avocado eaters etc. is predominantly used by conspiracy theorists themselves. All those flatearthers, climate change deniers and so on.
I called your government aggressor, not yourself, based on your previous comment that said "very weak democratic values". I live in the similar country, so I made a common analogy.
Sure, in some utopian world it would be nice to have something resembling bittokens, only in a scalable and working state. But in reality such system break so many things that it's closed to dystopia than to utopia.
I haven't seen much evidence that crypto is actually heavily used for this. Its main use case remains mostly "tech casino" with huge costs.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/afghan-women-embracing-financ...
So 5000 girls set up the crypto wallet and used it at least once.
I haven't found a lot of specifics/numbers in relation to EndSARS.
Are these people getting value for money with crypto or is someone fleecing them an awful lot for the privilege or not using fiat? Always these third person anecdotes without any actual evidence.
The other thing is not being controlled by government seems to imply either not controlled, or controlled by 'good' people, of which neither seems to be turning out true in any case.
Is everyone using bitcoin good people? Definitely no. Is it used by criminals? Yes. Drug dealers are definitely criminals, just as the people protesting for fair elections in Belarus or the feminist coalition fighting to end police brutality in Nigeria. Those are all criminals.
But If you have any idea of how can these people participate in the economy without permission (stables fail here) that isn't volatile please let us hear about your idea.
Where that is illegal, crypto is/can be also illegal
There’s a big difference between illegal and physically seizable.
And you also haven't addressed how blockchain would improve women's lot, compared to, say, a stack of US$100 bills.
> And you also haven't addressed how blockchain would improve women's lot, compared to, say, a stack of US$100 bills
Good luck shipping a stack of $100 bills to Palestine.
And oh, Western Union is more than happy to send your stack of filthy fiat to Palestine:
1. Crypto wealth only translates into real wealth if there is either (a) vendors who accept native crypto as tender or (b) there are exchanges that convert from crypto to authorized legal tender in a country.
However, it seems (a) has not happened in a meaningful scale without (b), and (b) has been frustrated because of underlying price volatility, high fees, low transaction processing compared to traditional finance, etc. There's the problem of "too many cryptocurrencies" which frustrates user choice.
(I'm aware independent proposals to "fix" all of this have been proposed, but there don't seem to be any clear winners e.g. stablecoins should have "fix"ed price volatility, but the leading stablecoin - TerraCoin - collapsed.)
The net impact of this is that people are cut off from real-world markets they live in. Someone who has no access to traditional finance will not have an easier time purchasing goods and essentials with crypto wealth, and this their ability to participate is only marginally improved.
2. Crypto has higher barrier to entry than traditional finance because it requires higher than usual technical literacy, which people in these classes don't have. Wallets need protection, smart contracts need auditing, and so on. I would struggle getting people to use (say) hardware tokens.
3. There's nothing ultimately stopping governments from banning crypto exchanges or crypto vendors or more if they really want to prevent the disenfranchised from getting some. They might not eliminate the network, but they can certainly go after people for suspicion of participation in it (such as vendors). The crypto model requires governments to be foiled by technical limitations, but this is rarely the technique they need.
Based on all of this, it seems like basically you need to solve the problem of vendors really caring enough about crypto for regular folks to get an advantage when the advantage is not clear. Is this not the case? What have I missed?
The argument of whether governments and payment processors should have the power of prior restraint on all transactions (e.g. by going cashless) or not is older than cryptocurrency.
Theatre.
Second - you are quite right that cash is used for that and without it such activities will greatly diminish. Though I suspect that they will switch to barter economy.
Third - that will happen soon. Some governments are already restricting cash, though mostly the ones that are doing so are fighting not against wars or cartels, but against their local oligarchs funneling money from the country (the same problem I described in other comments). Many countries have already restricted moving cash across the border, so there it's not used for this a lot.
It seems like your concept of fiat might be wrong. Fiat isn't synonymous with physical tender. Fiat is just sovereign money in whatever form it takes, digital or otherwise.
Governments enforce fiat as money because it allows them to finance whatever war and other endeavor they want with an endless supply of money that they conjure out of thin air. Whereas taxes are at least paid by people, fiat is a way to steal money from ordinary people by debasing their money.
If this is the case, then I would like to propose the following:
Following the axiom that "It's worth less than nothing" & "crypto has negative value", that would mean that you'd be willing to pay other people to own crypto, since it's deemed to be negative value.
To prove this claim, a payment of $100 made out to me would suffice.
But if you manage to abolish cryptocurrency, or meth for that matter, then I will gladly pay you $100.
Privacy is the killer feature for crypto. Or is there another non-crypto solution to this problem?
On the contrary, I'd argue the true value of cryptocurrencies lies in the extremely transparent and publicly auditable nature of the blockchain.
Even a lot of the recent scams and rugpulls fall apart with some basic blockchain analysis.
In the current environment a lack of regulation leads to lots of scams and sketchy business, but these aren't fundamental problems with the technology.
The fundamental problem is that most of these cryptoassets are backed by sunk costs, dreams, and hype. Ethereum makes a good stab at solving this problem by supplying real-world utility to the underlying coin, but unfortunately most of this demand is still driven by scams and speculation.
I don't believe any cryptocurrency will be able to achieve real underlying value until one or more successful countries require it to pay taxes. (The dream of increasingly privatizing the world until the entire financial system is 100% backed by the word of random business owners is downright frightening to me so I hope the huddled masses keep some independent voice in the matter.)
There seems little reason why this eventual country should legitimize an existing cryptoasset, though, since spinning up their own will be just as easy.
As sovereign-backed crypto-currencies spread I expect KYC regulations to catch up fast so while it will still be possible to spin up your own coins and run your funds through shady mixers, eventually it will become harder and harder to operate without a clean wallet.
In this future world of government-managed crypto I expect the existing unbacked cryptoassets to eventually fall to zero or thereabouts. This is why I am not financially invested in bitcoin et al, but still very bullish on the technology.
Let's not ad-hominem the commenters and instead focus on the claims themselves rather than counter-hypotheticals.
People come to Bitcoin for their greed, but they stay for the revolution.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Denationalization_of_Money