Brad Feld: I Don't Hate Crypto
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I wanted crypto to be more than digital gold. I wanted to believe that it was the future of money but there were too many hustlers and wavy hand explanations for me.
They want me to invest my crypto to which they would pay me 7% interest. If you ask how it was it being invested you're told they were buying bitcoin in one part of the world and selling it in another.
How is that any different an explanation than Ponzi's who took dollars funds that would then be converted into Spanish pesetas to use to purchase International Postal Reply Coupons which would be sent to the U.S. to be redeemed in U.S. postage stamps which could then be sold for dollars?
Nigerian princes keep telling me they are in dire trouble and I need to pay them while they are in exile, I don't think this internet or email thing is going to work out.
For being a tech based, and entrepreneurial no less, forum I struggle to think the average age of most in this space isn't some 70 year old boomer most times given how many lazy conclusions get thrown around here.
If you really are foolish enough to give your money to scammers on the promise of 'guaranteed' returns regardless of market conditions, that says more about you ten the tech they are using to achieve said grift.
> How is that any different an explanation than Ponzi's
SBF, Do Kwon ELison et al... are all Ivy League educated, and just as reputable as Madoff or any other pump and dumper using an ICO or alt promising the same thing: something that cannot and will not exist, guaranteed returns.
In short, most alts are BS and don't need to exist, and anyone with a cursory understanding of fintech can see that; that doesn't mean the tech itself isn't valuable and doesn't have many use-cases that may not apply you specifically.
> And the bros...so many crypto bros. Is crypto an investment? sure. is it good smart financial sense? of course! can it deworm the dog and start my old Ford? buddy, its crypto and these nonsense peddling talking heads are about to waste your entire lunch reminding you that no matter how volatile the coin, no matter how hair-brained the leadership, and no matter how laughable the mascot, we'll all be rich by the end of the year and you have $wondercoin to thank for it. just dont ask them how blockchain actually works...it works and it aughta be used for everything...
Ive been around sine YC was ran by Sam Altman and thought to be the King maker of the valley startup scene, who then joined open AI and subsequently pitched WolrdCoin that required biometrics in return of some tokens 'to save the World' but is now the darling of SV because of ChatGPT.
I'd respect your arguments if they were at all cognizant of some basic premises, not least of which include being able to see the hypocrisy in these pointless analysis.
I'm not a crypto bro, I guess I'm a BTC maxi according to the jargon, but the truth is that it has been understood that a fool and their money are soon parted long before the computer ever came to existence and to attribute all of Society's ills to something most don't even comprehend, as in cant tell te difference between Bitcoin the network and bitcoin the token, let alone the underlying mechanics that solved something thought to be impossible in Computer Science (Byzantine General's problem) then what is their really left to be said?
A basic question is if you trust more in a zillion of unknown nodes were really few unknown ones run and decide on the protocol or will you trust more a few well known actors who at the end will be accountable by a legal system, assuming it is a good one. For example, was a cryptocurrency like Libra from FB where nodes were known actors less secure than a stable coin run by just one shady actor?
If a few Bitcoin miners want to stop the show they can. Also Bitcoin is not trustless in the sense there are very few people who can modify or incorporate new features to the node. The lie is in the trustless word as if it would be run by a God.
The spirit of a P2P financial infrastructure is fine, the question is if this one is the solution.
BTW, I work in the field. I think I will never see the number of frauds and shady people I found in this space. I talked with many of the people appearing in the news now, and more will appear. If you ask me a number of things that I find interesting about the field, one is the security analysis of code. There are many interesting things to learn in this space that can be extrapolated. Another is cryptography and fault tolerance areas that are moving forward thanks all of this, a third one is that I expect DeFi could bring more new financial ideas to play that frauds.
In summary, after a fair bit of research-from-home and talking to a couple of people deeply in the bitcoin space, I'm still not sure who really holds the reigns.
That's not how Bitcoin works: you and the party you are giving money to decide the protocol, not the miners. If these unknown miners are doing something different than what your clients allow then those miners aren't part of the same network as you.
No, it is not trivially hard forkable compared to say the dollar or pound where the supply (a key property) is constantly adjusted by an unaccountable cabal of unelected bureaucrats whenever they fancy it.
the issue is there actually wasn't a low-risk arbitrage opportunity at such ridiculous (7%) annual premiums and at such scale, and even if there were it's not what they were doing.
I'd go far as to say most the people gaining from these guaranteed high interest schemes probably knew they were fraud or part of nasty victim involved crime and then they got botthurt when they found out they weren't the smart ones and pulled out too late.
A lot of crypto is de-facto scammy and much of it is designed that way. Far less so in the rest of the system.
I don't hate cryptocurrencies as a concept and technology. I'm excited to see where it lead eventually, but it needs to shed all the baggage that it currently has.
He could just as legitimately state that due to his early investment at $100/BTC, it effectively would take only $7.50 to pay out $1500 - a cost saving of 99.5% - the positive side of the relevant speculative volatility.
Instead he chooses to complain of losing a trifling 1.3% of the $1500's value, due to what would be a latency involved in choosing to buy new BTC to make the transfer, instead of using what he already has.
It comes across as contrived. Is it really just to make that same point that's already been made ad nauseam?
Yes, it's quite volatile - we know - we've known for fourteen years. If you don't like that part but still want to use crypto for some reason: maybe a potential cost-saving in some case, or just to feel "cool" - use a stable coin.
AIUI, that's what they're for.
Because he’s an investor, and some speculation is part of his job. Exploring the space (and even making money in it) does not mean one can’t be a skeptic. He’s not making a moral argument; he’s making one about whether or not it has any actual value outside speculative investing.
You don’t have to agree with him to understand it is a valid view of the space.
Nobody objects to people buying stocks speculatively as evidenced by the constant marketing of brokerage accounts but there are rules which the cryptocurrency world has generally resisted, and there’s an inherent conflict between the two purposes of having a medium of exchange also be used for speculation.
What's humorously ironic is that the criticism of speculation is the criticism of exactly what 'the people' have chosen to do. As someone else said 'don't hate the sin, hate the sinners'.
Well... What do people in Venezuela know about why money has value? They just came out straight out of six years of hyper-inflation (that is: for six years they experienced 50% inflation per month). Turkey: 88% inflation in 2022. Iran: 52% inflation in 2022. Lebanon: even more than that.
People in these countries may know very little about why money has value but it looks like the elite governing them don't have that much clue either if you ask me.
Use it instead of Venmo next time you need to pay a friend. Use it to pay a contractor in a different country. Use it to buy a domain. It’s gotten so much better now. Still has a ways to go and there are many ways to burn yourself, but it saves me a lot of time each day. If you do a lot of financial transactions and pay a lot of people, you save so much time because you don’t have to deal with endless amounts of false positive security alerts and hours on hold with customer service, and you dont Have to create accounts for your accountant etc., just send them a list of wallet IDs and they can download all the transactions off the chain.
Its all-singing, all-dancing soulless cavalcade begat such horrorshows as the crypto.com sports arena, the FTX arena, and the desperate attempt by local government to disjoin itself from the nightmare of toxic branding or brace white-knuckled for a slow motion collapse to sweep their hastily cashed branding rights cheque into the dustbin of decisions that make the entire state look worse for existing.
It also spawned things like the absolutely enigmatic "bitcoin ATM" found at only the seediest smoke shops and derelict drug stores. does it vend Bitcoin? is that giant coin with a B on it festooned in bright advertisement on the side a bitcoin? Why does it look like the lovechild of an 80s ATM and an airport check-in kiosk? The only thing this machine reliably did was ensure the freezer next to it was harder to open if you wanted to get a choco-taco.
Dont get me started on the near dystopian comedy of KYC and so many hours spent snapping photos of yourself with a hand-written paper sign for Kraken to verify, or fiat conversions that for some reason cant involve your bank unless you will it to some third party swedish fintech nobody has heard of but will probably never remember once their founders yacht is found smouldering off the caymans.
And the bros...so many crypto bros. Is crypto an investment? sure. is it good smart financial sense? of course! can it deworm the dog and start my old Ford? buddy, its crypto and these nonsense peddling talking heads are about to waste your entire lunch reminding you that no matter how volatile the coin, no matter how hair-brained the leadership, and no matter how laughable the mascot, we'll all be rich by the end of the year and you have $wondercoin to thank for it. just dont ask them how blockchain actually works...it works and it aughta be used for everything
It's a solution for everything!
That's how you know little thought actually went into understanding any of the problems it purports to solve, or any of the people who have real problems that need to be addressed.
I love how crypto-bros keep referring to the "early days" of the internet to excuse crypto's lack of practical application. I'm like, dude, even ARPANET had an easy-to-understand use case: share data and compute resources across various laboratories. It knew who and what it was for. Who is crypto for, exactly?
Reliable money transfer in nations with under-developed banking systems is a clear use case for crypto.
I only ever remember really seedy operations using e-gold as a payment. Online drugs (street drugs) and things like that.
I think a real upside of crypto is in dealing with entities that you view as very low risk (APMEX and other trusted bullion vendors) who view you (random guy buying) as potentially high risk. Crypto allows you to provide irreversible payment, which seriously lowers the risk to the vendor that you can somehow claw the money back (as you may be able to with a chargeback, fraud protection, even possibly the bank somehow reverse the ACH transaction etc).
When you send crypto to the bullion vendor they certainly have risk the value of the crypto itself can go down, but basically zero risk you'll able to claw it back. I think this plays a big part in making it the cheapest quick clearing way to pay for online bullion. Credit/debit buyers are paying premiums that account for the risk associated with reversible nature of most of the fast clearing options.
Ideally there'd be a basically instantaneous wire transfer that is impossible to claw back for any reason if you wanted the lowest premium.
I routinely get tracked down because "you're in tech, so you must be into this", and lose a relaxing evening to trying to get rid of some guy who wants to help me understand that Global Warming was invented to make crypto look bad, how having a credit card in your wallet makes you a corporate bootlicker, and some sort of anti-Semitic argument about who controls banking. It's exhausting, I'd rather go to a restaurant on my own.
So, someone expects you to be techy: start a monologue on the Byzantine General's problem and how it relates to database design choices. Create your own geeky obsession on the topic of the mating habits of spiders (which is actually extremely interesting, so use with care).
Make it a fun game for yourself and your friends, to find the most effective one-sentence blockers?!
"Would you be interested in a business opportunity in Amway? (in excited tones)"
Use the opportunity to learn the soft art of getting people to leave you alone. Unwanted attention can come from any direction in your future too.
But I remember when I was a CS student and Bitcoin was a new thing. I thought it was a cool concept and I love the romantic idea of underground digital pirate math money. It's still a neat technology (though blockchains are still wrong for 99.9% of DB use cases). But now it's just one of the worst parts of the mainstream financial establishment.
Read up on how banks are creating money these days. Suddenly something like Bitcoin begins to seem like a completely reasonable way to do money. And all other crypto still seem like they are just chasing the creativity of normal banks.
And in the midst of an energy crisis?
Without price stability the price of the tokens become something that can be speculated on, which brings the problem of hoarding/speculating at the expense of exchanging.
(Stablecoins are a short-term answer, of course, but that seems to bring with it a whole host of other issues.)
I think what you mean is 'stable next to some other asset'. Like USD.
Ok, but if they are marked to USD, and you want them to be marked to USD, you have to do a lot of manipulation to keep them well marked ... it's basically an extension of USD! You are amplifying the power of fiat!
But if you don't want to be 'tied' to USD, well, who is going to sell their goods in USD, and then constantly be re-pricing in BTC? Nobody. The answer at the corner store is: "if you want to use BTC to buy milk then convert them to USD first and buy the dam milk".
Businesses in Canada used to keep USD on hand for USD visitors just as a matter of pragmatism, because cash is a pain, but if you can flip back and forth now without a lot of transaction cost, then we don't need that.
So there's no point really in using BTC as a 'currency' because everyone is going to rationally adopt the currency of the local economy for purposes of 'stability'.
If they don't want to hold dollars, then put their money in a choice of other assets.
When they need to interact with another economy, they need the currency for that economy and so they need to trade for those foreign dollars.
There's just no way around it and I don't think that BTC has any role to play in it.
If everyone in the world switched to BTC it would be a catastrophe worse than COVID. If you live outside of the US, your salary would fluctuate around like an elastic band.
My armchair guess is that disaster wouldn't necessarily be around price fluctuations of goods, but rather the perpetual deflationary nature of the currency.
Otherwise, the issue is the loss of regional monetary supply controls.
People do not like their salaries changing in nominal terms - that causes riots, but salaries are fluxuating vis-a-vis other national markets you just don't see it, because it's 'hidden' behind currency fluxuations.
Having everyone change their salaries and pricing all the time dramatically because of international issues is bad. It's easier to have regional economies have their own currencies, and to smooth out fluxuations between economies vis-a-vis central bank.
And of course, major actors would cause all sorts of problems.
The notion of a global currency is completely insane - neat thought experiment, but probably a total disaster.
The people who are behind most Crypto generally have utterly no understanding of what money is, and this is a primary problem with crypto.
"Oh, there is a dollar, I can make a digital thing and also call it a dollar!"
Yeah, no.
It's why most of the financial world is befuddled with crypto - because they are looking at tech people driving cars off of a cliff by burning 2% of the world's electricity supply. It's just economic populism.
Consider a darknet marketplace. We start some kind of DAO/smart contract, where people put in crypto to get shares, which are used to fund the creation of the marketplace. Let's assume it get's built, the DAO could transfer funds incrementally with votes on the progress or something.
The profit generated from the ads are then deposited back in to the DAO, with a portion going to the voted CEO and the rest to the shareholders.
But what hinders the "management" of the marketplace, who controls the servers, to just stop transferring funds back in? The CEO could be replaced in the contract, but as long as you control the servers, that doesn't matter, right?
Maybe a black-market "corporation" like a drug-smuggling ring could try something like that, but even they would have reservations.
consider maybe banding together for political action instead to serve the people abd bring prosperity and happiness to everyone, even the poor instead of trying to screw each other over in a hypercapitalist hellscape.