And this is what really ruins crypto to me. With no actual legal protection, no trust, "code is law", am I expected to keep up with every pull request? And of course these exchanges are completely opaque on top of that.
It's hard to name any crypto organization that was seen as more reputable than FTX before this happened.
If we can't even trust someone with SBF's track record, what's left?
The guy showed up out of nowhere... suddenly being promoted by throwaway reddit accounts, claiming to have made more than ten billion on trades where claiming a million dollar payoff would have been surprising and dubious.
Their exchange specialized in offering almost anonymous retail traders access to leveraged trading on the most dubious of cryptocurrencies stuff popular exchanges won't carry and they carry a lot of bullshit. They even had varrious weirdo products 'index funds' including one called 'shitcoin index'.
When FTX acquired a derivatives clearing house I used, I pulled 95% of my account value out right away. I also warned my friends to stay away from FTX or anything related when I had the chance-- which wasn't often because it wasn't something most bitcoiners I encountered were particularly aware of (as mentioned, their service was more of a casino than an exchange-- big leverage for the most volitile crap).
So while I get how people that might have been in the right media bubbles might have thought it was reputable... but generally? Not a chance, at least not from my perspective.
Was the media critical? No-- there are reports that negative stories about SBF and FTX were actively suppressed in some newsrooms and it's already the case that scamcoiners are actively suing people who criticize them, so that's a big incentive to say nothing when you see a fraud.
Countless charlatans have run confidence scams (cons) in the crypto space, accuring money and attention around a centralized platform, in a tech area predicated on decentralized technology.
Living through the MtGox era, watching the corners of the Internet refer to the incident for a decade and then the Shocked Pikachu faces now? I just can't.
I don't care about crypto and "the masses". I invest in things I understand, and it hasn't _burnt_ me yet. I understand crypto and it's unique value prop and it sure as hell doesn't involve investing in or putting my money into a centralized platform. And certainly not one run by the blessed-ilk of Wall Street.
Once again, ever so slight skepticism for the win. It's truly unbelievable the irrationality people engage in when they think they're in on something even when they don't actually understand it!
"The line goes up" is a cautionary tale, and yet I think some folks really missed the whole middle section talking about the psychology that the vultures (NFT, centralized exchanges, etc) are preying upon when chasing explosive growth (or riches, on the other side of the equation).
> and smart contracts don't replace the need for social trust.
idk, a (still relatively) fat stack of crypto sitting on my Ledger would disagree.
A bad actor can steal the voting tokens, and decide the vote. Even without that, I can't assume that the voters are aligned to my interests
Right, but all those attacks are harder to pull off and more visible than what the parent implied (ie. someone can unilaterally make changes without anyone finding out). Like I said in my previous comment, there are many issues with smart contracts, but the objection raised by OP is just really badly conceived.
>Even without that, I can't assume that the voters are aligned to my interests
This seems like an impossible demand to me. What type of system (democratic/non-democratic, crypto/non-crypto) ensures that the decision made will always align with everyone's interests?
Unfortunately what happened here is a fraudster latched on to a movement that decried centralized trust and said that he is trustworthy and, when asked, pointed to some code that no one could inspect or understand. Simpletons believed him because they believed in the 'trust the code' hype, and believed his money was real. They were wrong.
But at the end of the day, expecting code to replace the core human emotion of trust, the source of money, is ridiculous.
No, the point is for code to replace the institutions/people that people trust (ie. trusting the bitcoin network's consensus code, rather than a central bank), not "replace the core human emotion of trust".
Knowing how computing hardware and software works, I wouldn't put more trust in code either - in fact it would be less.
If you don't understand currency basics, I advise to stay away from crypto
By the same token, money is debt from the past.
The origins of debt are ultimately material. Alice has a bushel of apples today, but Bob won't have a bushel of oranges until next month. The function of money is to decouple the general function of debt from its material details. In other words, you can have debt without money, but you cannot have money without an underlying debt.
This type of synchronization requires a negative price signal on money though.
This is really sad. Especially the guy who 'advised' to stay away from crypto. I don't need advice to know it's for idiots
You are never borrowing from the future. In a 100% reserve system you borrow from other people in the present. If you fail to repay you don't disappoint your future self, you disappoint another person in the present.
In a fractional reserve system loans create both debt and new money and the debt is always an obligation to pay back present money on a fixed schedule.
I don't think the movement cares about centralized trust? Instead it's a movement of get rich quick schemes
There's some separate movement that cares about decentralization, but they're only tangentially affected because they didn't use FTX, and they don't value their crypto in terms of stuff it can buy, but how it makes them feel
Even expert programmers aren't able to check smart contracts for all possible issues.
It's actually sane when your contract is written in a non-turing-complete language with strong typing and the smart contract system has deterministic execution (i.e. you know the result when you submit the Tx and if the result would be different, the tx fails, preferably without charging you).
I'm convinced that one of the main issues with most smart contracts is that they have such weak guarantees and the guarantees they do have are brittle and hidden behind complex, opaque proofs & constraint systems.
What was the language and why did running it in a stack based VM lead to this? I'm curious about the intersection of the language and the type of VM it ran in.
They didn't. They made a hard fork and the community followed. The "hacked" chain still exists, go use it if you want.