Is Crypto Dead?
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It is valued more than the vast majority of publicly traded companies.
From that measure alone, why should anyone think “it’s dead”?
Bitcoin ain’t tulips, ain’t the pets.com, etc, to think something that is 14 years old and valued at 440 billion is going to die anytime soon seems…so wrong
Especially when in the past 2 weeks, BlackRock (biggest asset manager) is continuing to dabble more in bitcoin https://financefeeds.com/blackrock-makes-bitcoin-eligible-in...
This is after having a 14 year history of people learning about it, not some scam coin like LUNA that went from zero to 40 billion and to zero in less than 1 year
It may never be, but that’s just to say that “it’s still valued” is not a good argument for “it’s correctly valued.”
If I open a bank account and someone else deposits 1 billion there and I have a contract that obliges me to return the money in a year and I am not allowed to move it or use it as a security, is my bank account or the bank creating it „worth“ 1 billion?
Whether bitcoin is worth something as a tool/currency cannot be measured well by the amount of money stored in it.
More regulation is needed
The same happened before FDIC insured banks, fake banks that would “hold your paper cash safely”
Because everyone is waiting to exhume it when it's worth something. Bitcoin has no utility, which is not a knock against it's implementation but it is an ill-omen for it's value. The concept of 'digital gold' only works if the gold is inherently worth something. Owning a piece of a blockchain that's too expensive to transact on is a detriment, not a positive.
Not to insinuate there's some 'better investment' though. Crypto is dead because the dream of democratized currency hit the mainstream and got rejected, big-time. Use it if you want, invest for however long you'd like, but you should make peace with the fact that a crypto future is nothing more than opportunistic ankle-biting.
I love the idea of a democratized currency, but Bitcoin's value is propped up by very little now. As I said before, you cannot run an economy on goodwill alone. Someone's getting fooled into holding the bag, and the longer you hold out for a payday, the greater the chance that fool is you.
That a whole decade more for people to learn about it, and especially since the main features has not changed. Yes, there are improvements to the protocol, but the main thing has changed little over the years
Edit: I'm coming right out and saying it; if we even have to talk about L2 chains, you might as well just admit that Bitcoin itself needs an update to be usable.
It is arguably easier to counterfeit than gold (there is fools gold too…)
The base layer is very secure. L2s will be faster, but have a trade off of being less secure.
Note: the L2 Lightning Network is different than L2s for ETH like POLY, POLY has its own market cap (garbage idea IMO). Lightning is just a tool to make BTC more efficient
Again - do whatever you want and invest wherever you please. But L2 chains are not catapulting crypto back into usability, and Lightning is living evidence that Bitcoin's bet failed. If you need auxiliary technology to transact the money you supposedly own, your protocol is broken to the core and needs replacement.
Does every layperson have to adopt stocks or commodities? Are these also dead if a layperson does not adopt it?
That's only good until enough people get burned so bad they never touch it again. Then it has completely no utility.
Gold has survived as a speculative vehicle because it's been relatively stable over a much longer time period. That, and unlike Bitcoin, gold is actually a physical asset that is not held together by (wasting) electricity.
1) markets aren't rational nor are the people in them
2) BTC is a currency but is being treated like a commodity
3) a lot of big orgs, investors, and even governments bought in and now either hold and pray for growth, or else pray it doesn't drop. They have every incentive to hype up its value even though its use for most things is essentially moot; your Mom isn't going to use BTC to buy catfood, and its utility on the dark web is now overshadowed by things like Monero. You HODL and hype cuz otherwise you lose billions.
It's too soon to say it won't fall further. The chart is still very weak. It won't take much for btc fall below 16k again. Another major failure like gemini or greyscale will do it.
Yes, it's worth a lot still, but for most btc investors long-term returns have been bad unless you bought pre-2017. BTC is only up 15% from its 2017 highs (from 19.5k to 22.5k). This lags almost all index funds.
The combined value of oil or copper is worth a lot too, but this does not make it a good investment either.
The mood feels similar to late 2018 when most people weren't paying attention at all, and the few who were paying attention were just disgusted by the whole thing.
When the conventional wisdom is that everything from art to sports to real estate will be imminently cryptoized, you know it's frothy, and near the top of the cycle.
When the conventional wisdom is revulsion and disgust then maybe we're another six to eight months away from not thinking about it at all, which is probably the bottom of the cycle.
> And about $120 billon of that is stable coins
Check any reputable source (like [1]) and you will find that BTC market cap is 438B today without any stable coins.
> unless you bought pre-2017
Get your facts straight. BTC was <4K in Q1-2019. Heck, it was <10K for the entire H1-2020. Today it is 22,762$.
If you have $10B worth of Bitcoin today, good luck trying to extract $10B in real dollars out of the crypto system.
No need to convert it to cash, unless you need to buy Twitter, or something.
I’m skeptical that, say, Morgan Stanley would do that. But I may be wrong.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ifiwonthelottery/comments/9qv4e1/po...
You can’t sell it without crashing the market, and you probably can’t borrow multiple billions of cash against it either because nobody in the crypto ecosystem has that kind of liquidity anymore. I’m open to be proven wrong by evidence.
My own experience says that there is a lot more money out there than anyone can ever hope of comprehending. A good portion of that money belongs to people who are never seen. Not everyone tries to be a public figure. Not everyone is in the US. I just saw a video of a G-Wagon in Saigon (~$650k)... Vietnam is a very poor country on the outside, but you'd be astonished how much money people have there.
The amount of money in crypto is staggering. I know of people who started mining ETH from day one... and didn't stop. I can only imagine their wealth. It would be easy for them to sell off chunks over the last 4 years without anyone noticing.
Needless to say, I'm sure that if someone wanted to get rid of it, they could. It might take some time and effort, but when you have god levels of money, all you have is time.
So who's left buying today? Retail frenzy brought the fresh dollars but it's dried up. Those crypto-millionaires don't need to convert their cash back to crypto. They own enough crypto already, and (as you describe) they went through an effort to build cash positions, so why revert that... So where does the $10 billion in cash come from?
I know that institutions and high net worth individuals (hnwi) are quietly buying. There are companies like attestant.io who are staking ETH for (hnwi).
> Retail frenzy brought the fresh dollars but it's dried up.
For now. Being in the industry myself, I've had a saying for years, like it or not... magic internet money always goes back up. I feel like you're just looking at one blip in 13 years of blips, throwing up your hands and saying game over. That's like saying after the dot-com bubble bursting, that tech would never go up again.
You can definitely bet that people are buying the dip. It is starting to show in the recent upward price movement too. 20%+ gains in a few weeks are not small.
But once that all shakes out -- I still think it's just getting started. The use cases aren't what a lot of people thought they would be -- but the ones that are actually useful are doing fine, and the world of "all the other money" is in such a bad state that I can't help but see some form of widespread adoption as completely inevitable.
Maybe things will shake out differently in the future, but there's not a chance in hell that a money API gets made without some form of regulation or profiteering. Goodwill alone is not enough to drive a bartering system, as proven by the disaster that is crypto's overall price instability and corresponding 'stablecoin' corruption.
Anyway, I think the real use case isn't "day to day transactions," it's better "money in a mattress." along with a staking/savings instrument.
On the tech side, it seems to be stagnating. Bitcoin is still the most popular one, and it's stopped improving. The capacity is fixed, the use for normal people is not really there, adoption has gone backwards.
Things like NFTs have been a temporary boon, but then didn't quite work.
For the big players, there seem to be daily scandals and bankruptcies. It's becoming clear that many of them were barely hanging by a thread, and many have complete morons in charge. They're also being targeted by law enforcement.
On the public side, I think it's peaked. Crypto got advertised more or less everywhere and nobody really cared. By now pretty much who was going to get into it already has, and there's not much more room to expand into.
It also solves problems people have. Crypto aims at a very narrow, very ideological set of problems that the vast majority of people doesn't really need solving. Its tradeoffs only make sense if those are real problems you have.
Eg, if you're a drug dealer the lack of customer service or law that can rescue you from your errors isn't a problem. The law is your enemy anyway, so you already made peace with that if somebody steals from you, going to the police isn't an option.
Having a normal person put all their life's savings into crypto on the other hand is an absolutely terrible idea. Anyone doing that is risking a single error or a single bug ruining their life with next to zero chance of recovery.
Moreover, what you're saying about crypto presumes that its competitors are all high-quality,and what I'm saying is there are likely enough low-quality competitors such that crypto becomes more attractive. Life-savings would be stupid. But part of an investment strategy on the other hand potentially makes a ton of sense, and that's all that's needed for survival/popularity.
There's a fair amount of that, actually:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Buttcoin/comments/yy37cy/i_lost_my_...
> Moreover, what you're saying about crypto presumes that its competitors are all high-quality,and what I'm saying is there are likely enough low-quality competitors such that crypto becomes more attractive.
What is lower quality out there than crypto? Crypto is appallingly low quality. Crypto-related businesses like exchanges go bust dramatically at an alarming rate. If your bank goes bust at least there's insurance for that.
> But part of an investment strategy on the other hand potentially makes a ton of sense, and that's all that's needed for survival/popularity.
But that comes back to the original problem: it's only a good investment if you can keep it safe, AND if it keeps on growing. Keeping safe in the space is an extremely difficult task as it is, as every wallet out there is a self-awarding bug bounty.
As to growth it comes back to what I was saying before. First, there has to be increased value for it to grow. That's actually decreasing as crypto becomes more trackable and less safe for illegal activity over time.
It's also at best a zero sum. Any money you get from such an investment can only come from the traditional economical system putting it in, and that just can't go on forever. And any gain you might make comes from somebody else's loss. You're just betting on that you won't be somebody else's gain.
Increased value. Again, no different from any other financial instrument in any fundamental way. Every criticism you can make of crypto, you can make of bonds, etc. The zero-sum argument is especially bad in this regard.
I don't where's the antifragility -- it's exactly the reverse, crypto systems are "superfragile". An online wallet is a juicy target for an attack every second it exists, and the moment defenses fail the result is catastrophic. It's even worse with modern crypto features like NFTs -- which require online wallets and have you actively advertise to everyone how much money there is.
> Increased value. Again, no different from any other financial instrument in any fundamental way. Every criticism you can make of crypto, you can make of bonds, etc. The zero-sum argument is especially bad in this regard.
For pretty much every crypto concept there exists a non-crypto analog that's far more user friendly and safer to work with. The question is why would crypto see increased adoption when to most people crypto doesn't have good tradeoffs.
So if I wanted to make money from bonds, I'd just buy bonds. I'd need to be nuts to opt into the crypto equivalent.
As for the second one, I mean, risk/return. Yes, other things will be more user-friendly and safer, which likely means lower return.
I agree, you'd be nuts to throw a lot in. I just also think you'd be nuts to not throw a little in as well.
What? That's not at all what I was talking about. I was talking about fragility for the user.
When I buy something online even at a new and kinda dubiously run place, I'm only risking the $50 or whatnot I put in, and even then I can do a chargeback. And all the site knows is that John Smith spent $50 on their stuff.
When I interact with crypto, I need an online wallet, which means everything and everyone knows what's the balance in it, and how much cash they'll get if they succeed in finding a bug, or an exploit, or to trick me into revealing my key, or they trick me into allowing more access to my wallet than I should. And then I'm not out of $50, I'm out of everything, and there's no recovery possible.
That's what I mean by "superfragile". Crypto needs you to do everything right, consistently, forever, or the results of a lapse in security that somebody succeeds in taking advantage of are catastrophic.
> I agree, you'd be nuts to throw a lot in. I just also think you'd be nuts to not throw a little in as well.
The era of crazy gains when somebody spent $5 on a lark and ended up with $500K is long over. Look at the stats. In modern times if you're really, really lucky you can double your money. But doubling $5 is insignificant. You need to risk a lot for the gain to actually be significant.
Crypto's raison d'etre is being a decentralized system without any central authority. That requires you to be your own bank.
For most people that's just not a good tradeoff. There's no good reason why buying a coffee should expose me to a risk of losing all my money with zero recourse. That's a tradeoff that only makes sense for a small segment of people, eg, drug dealers who can't get any help from the normal system anyway.
But if you fix those issues by delegating that work you're just using Coinbase or whoever as an alternative to Paypal. Yeah, technically that works but you get none of the perks crypto is supposed to provide and at that point even Paypal is a more stable place with less drama. This is because even if your interface resembles traditional systems a crypto exchange is still linked to all the instability, drama and chaos of the crypto space.
Bitcoin is 14 years old and unlike aviation isn't getting any safer because the difficulty of dealing with it is inherent to the space. The whole point of it is that there's no central party in control who can force your hand, which equally means the lack of a central party in control to rescue you from your mistakes.
edit: apparently I cannot read and this article is a rare exception.
There might be a killer application down the road but investing in AI is so much more useful to humanity
Crypto has huge externalities, even apart from people being scammed.
Might as well ban e2e encryption. Or any security-enhancing measure that can protect individuals.
She's never used BTC to buy anything. Outside of a few tech bros in SF or Austin no one is buying houses in BTC.
I don't know a single person on either coast or in any city that has used BTC to directly buy groceries; pretty much everyone I know has used e2e encryption to buy something off of Amazon.
So what's honest about claiming that it was or continues to be without any data?
Even if you decided to go out and attempt to gather this data (good luck), why does this matter? How much impact to the USD do you think there would be if all illegal drug trade stopped tomorrow?
>but thats just cash
I'm not sure what you mean by this, can you elaborate? Every estimate I've found is very poor quality data, and I'm happy to pick apart any. It's similar to the energy use estimates which are equally poor and often miss vital distinctions.
- Working with companies everywhere in the world, as the bureaucracy of setting up the monetary relationships for, say, a Ukrainian immigrant residing in Poland willing to work for a US-based entity, is prohibitive;
- Targeted high-impact donations for Ukraine;
- Basically everything where the official way of doing is too slow or where there is too much red tape.
Crypto donations to Ukraine were a rounding error, and done seemingly more for the purposes of mounting another crypto stunt than actually helping people.
The price of BTC tracks with MBS and Xi's moves, too. Also correlates with housing prices in Vancouver, BC.
Money laundering, basically.
1. Its only use case is bypassing laws;
2. Crypto thrives on desperation and hopelessness. I think more and more people are realizing that their circumstances (or "material conditions" if you prefer) are awful. So many people are bordering on food and housing insecurity. So many people feel like they'll never "get ahead". Everyone saw Bitcoin's meteoric rise and don't want to miss out on the next Bitcoin; and
3. Despite crypto having no use cases and being a giant Ponzi scheme, it's amazing how long something can persist when people want it to be true.
So is it dead? Not yet. It may never die. But it should. It's worth noting Weaver's Iron Law of Blockchain [2]
> When somebody says you can solve X with blockchain, they don’t understand X, and you can ignore them.
I'll also note that apparently the Bitcoin network used 200TWh in 2022. It came up in another thread the other day that Google in 2020 used 15TWh. Now compare the utility.
Think about that.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORdWE_ffirg
[2]: https://twitter.com/Kellblog/status/1532756678596124673
> 3. Despite crypto having no use cases
You're contradicting yourself here.
> According to VISA corporate responsibility and sustainability report in 2017, the company consumed a total amount of 680,560 GigaJoules of energy globally for all its operations (1). We also know VISA processed 111.2 billion transactions in 2017 (2). Rely on these numbers, VISA ECPT is 0.0017 kilowatt-hours and for simplification 100,000 VISA transactions consume 170 kWh.
680,000 GJ is roughly 190GWh (0.1%).
But it gets worse. In 2017 Visa executed ~111B transactions. Bitcoin peaks at about ~90M. So 1000x the energy for 1/1000 of the transaction volume. So each Bitcoin transaction uses ~1,000,000 times the energy of a Visa transaction.
[1]: https://medium.com/@a.abbaszadeh.s/measuring-iota-pow-s-ener...
I get that this is supposed to be one of those 'draw your own conclusions' articles, but it doesn't really work when there's such a sharp short-term loss at the end of the bubble.
Nevertheless, I feel the initial hype of making quick money from Crypto has definitely died, because many lost money in the Crypto bull market.
heck even paying 5 lawyers to work in shifts around the clock taking calls and updating a local excell sheet is cheaper with better uptime
The BNB Beacon Chain doesn't sync: https://datafinnovation.medium.com/bnb-beacon-chain-not-a-bl...
While we are very far way from this concept in the real world, I'd prefer my proof of identity documents to live on something that isn't controlled by any single entity other than myself. Sure makes them a lot more difficult to revoke or modify without my consent.
But I would still say that in your original example, the use of blockchain is particularly unnecessary.
Imagine 1000 years from now and people are on mars... you think that everyone is going to be carrying around a paper passport book? It is going to look vastly different than it does today. I personally feel that it is important that the technology for things like this are experimented with now.
It takes little imagination to see many use cases for a computing system that no single party can control. It is the difference in a dictatorship vs a democracy.
Bitcoin is by far the most secure and decentralized crypto to date.
If you have ideas on how to build an even more decentralized or secure money, then please do so. Regardless, there is definitely need for money outside of the control of centralized actors.
This is unlikely to happen, because it would be to no ones advantage. Even if they did most of the public would likely just ignore the decision.
https://www.crypto51.app/ covers this question in regards to cryptoassets.
It will cost something like $1m/hour to attack Bitcoin, but to even do that you would already need to actually convince 51% of miners to light their profits on fire for no reason.
Even under a very expensive and sustained attack the users of Bitcoin that wish it to have value would simply distribute a blocklist for the compromised nodes and carry on with the 49% that wish for the network to continue as well.
You don't understand how things work in the US. There are multiple checks and balances. And if push truly came to shove enough of those politicians would be assassinated to make it 49% (dear FBI: this is a hypothetical as to what a few members of the public would do, not what I, personally, would do). Good luck assassinating a Sybiled validation node.
> "This is unlikely to happen, because it would be to no ones advantage."
No one who has bought in to the protocol. But of advantage to an entity that wants a particular protocol to fail.
> "Even under a very expensive and sustained attack the users of Bitcoin that wish it to have value would simply distribute a blocklist for the compromised nodes and carry on with the 49% that wish for the network to continue as well."
Yes, you'd get a forced split. Can you guarantee that the 51% attacker couldn't gradually hop back on and attack again?
No need. We distribute it on an IP blocklist and carry on, just like we handle bad actors on other decentralized systems like email.
Remember that chain splits have happened before and the minority chain and those that agree with its rules and history continue on. Eth Classic is still a thing.
Modern Eth was literally an -intentional- 51% attack to erase a hack. The majority agreed to erase that and on the main ETH network, it became so.
> No one who has bought in to the protocol. But of advantage to an entity that wants a particular protocol to fail.
Once again, we can easily detect and block nodes that are repeatedly trying to lie. It would be annoying, but so is dealing with spam. This is inevitable but manageable and without violence I may add.
> Yes, you'd get a forced split. Can you guarantee that the 51% attacker couldn't gradually hop back on and attack again?
The community could ban all of their nodes and assign higher trust to nodes that did not participate. Any fullnodes that agree they are on a fraudulent chain could agree to go back to the minority chain.
If it happened often we would get better at doing this quickly.
In short, you can temporarily disrupt the Bitcoin network with enough money, but you will never be able to stop those that wish to continue maintaining an honest history.
If your goal is to make regular people want to avoid using it all you need are sufficient temporary disruptions.
There are plenty of people like me that actually use and rely on Bitcoin as a tool, so it will live on too.
My company literally does Remittance using Crypto and business is booming.
And I completely agree with the other uses.
Those downvoting, mind at least providing some arguments with those votes?
1. The internet you know today allowed people to connect and share information globally.
2. Over the years, we've found value in digital things and may, thus, call them assets: e.g., data, media, and information/knowledge.
3. We have no way to deal with digital assets, which has implications and inefficiencies. DRM was a symptom & soft way to deal with this problem.
4. While the internet connects globally, it is not made to reflect ownership on a global level. Real ownership either doesn't exist or is not transparent. And while privacy is important, ownership should at least be cryptographically provable.
5. Blockchains do not aim to replace the internet or your database; they are a layer on top of the internet, giving us a new foundation to rethink and rebuild how we deal with digital value creation.
In some way, it will bring humanity closer on a global level.
On top of that, there are many philosophic, societal, and idealistic ideas. A lot of them require or trigger a systemic change—many of them we might never see happening, at least not in our lifetime.
If you want to learn more, you need to dig in.
* If I resell my phone, transfering the remaining guarantee and/or insurance should be nothing else then a transaction. On the blockchain that's 10x more efficient than the status quo.
* If an artist sells his art the first time for $10, and the person resells it for 10000$, then the artist should be compensated too. Royalty mechanisms can solve for that and avoid secondary markets or at least create a more beneficial secondary.
There are an endless amount of examples which will make a lot of things more efficient, transparent and enforce standardization on a global level. Long way to go, but absolutely worth it.
* insurances: you still need somebody outside the smart contract that needs to connect it to what happens. You've just moved the trust from one place to another, and you're not better off.
* transferring money is faster in many countries than it is with (e.g.) BTC when you include the wait for the confirmation blocks. It's also bound to become faster and cheaper, while many blockchains (especially BTC) seem stuck with their processing time. Even countries with slow bank transfers now tend to have a fast solution, like Zelle in the US. Add problems like volatility of the cryptocurrency with the respect to the currency that actually matters, high (and volatile) fees, and transfers via cryptocurrencies is only attractive in a few countries and will only remain so as long as these countries do not improve.
* with art you again have the same boundary problem: the blockchain you use doesn't know what's happening, and only the law will resolve your conflicts.
> efficient, transparent and enforce standardization
So far the blockchain systems have been less efficient than non-blockchain ones they purported to replace, see the usual comparison with the Visa network for example.
Transparency and standardization are orthogonal to the use of a blockchain: using one doesn't mean you can't be opaque or follow any standard.
Standardization also plays a huge role, and yes, in many ways, it's a technological chicken-and-egg problem whereby systems have to work with each other and the chain in a way that makes intermediaries as obsolete as possible.
The transfer speed of money or the general transaction speed - well, that's something that is being solved as we speak. These systems (e.g. Ethereum) have to mature, and many ways are being explored, using known principles like separation of concerns, e.g., separating settlement, execution, and data layers - but in a decentralized manner.
The public and many entrepreneurs need to understand how early this tech is and rush use cases that don't add value as of now. You must go deep and understand that this has to grow from the bottom up.
No, these are fundamental problems that time can't solve. Businesses aren't built around this technology because it's not advantageous to use it in a legally compliant environment.
Companies in this field keep adding new layers of abstraction pretending they're solving a problem; they're just moving it to somewhere else, but the fundamentals remain the same. Basically running in circle.
We're not running in circles.
> Businesses aren't built around this technology because it's not advantageous to use it in a legally compliant environment.
This is just one of the reasons. The technology is also not scalable and abstracted enough yet. No one is pretending anything here.
idk, take your phone thing as an example. Blockchain doesn't solve anything, because nothing stops me from reselling the phone without transferring the insurance, or transferring the insurance and keeping the phone. The whole problem is that it's not linked to the phone itself.
instead of going on about benefits, what is an industry that currently suffers from an actual problem that a blockchain could solve? because right now I'm not aware of any problems in society where blockchain is the solution
All blockchain proves is that you have access to someone's insurance key. While it would be a bit more difficult or costly than faking a card, it's not impossible. And most places I've been to don't even care about the card or the insurance number, they just ask for my regular ID and insurance provider to verify with.
> resell my phone
Two things: 1) The status quo could be that the new owner has the serial number of the phone. The fact that it isn't this simple (if it really isn't this simple) is because the seller doesn't want to make it that simple. 2) Insurance is particular to a person and their activities. For things such as aftermarket phone insurance the price you pay for the insurance will be based in part on your individual risks. This is obviously not transferable.
> Art
Royalty mechanisms aren't controlled by the artist, and can be, and have been, eliminated by marketplaces. https://www.forbes.com/sites/leeorshimron/2022/10/24/nft-cre...
It's very early, as I stated in another answer on the same comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=philippz#34479955
Not all of them, of course. It's not a wonder child that aims to solve all of humanity's problems. It'll bring humanity closer, though and make it more efficient in many ways. People always try to look so narrow at it.
There are plenty of use cases and attributes (permissionlessness, immutability, zero-trust sources, etc.), and of course, not always all of these count all the time or are even desired. But it allows us to have and apply those as needed in an interoperable way.
This is far from axiomatic[1].
Also, presumably you can move up a level of abstraction and sell the identity that bought the artwork for $10000. The blockchain doesn't need to know that the keys have changed hands.
> We have no way to deal with digital assets
Are you writing an ad for a new crypto platform that is definitely not a scam?
There are literally people on the Internet who are able to deal with data, media, information and knowledge without ever touching crypto. Amazing, right?
"digital store of value" which is: not controlled by any centralized entity and thus immune to corruption of the said entity, easily transferable, fungible, easy to divide into sub-units. I have compiled various usage examples of such a technology here[1], but primarily it boils down to "shitty governments", which covers a vast portion of humanity.
Traditionally, this was Gold but BTC is better at transfers than Gold. Maintenance burden is lighter for BTC on the one hand because you just have to memorize 12 words, but it is also susceptible to hacks on the other hand compared to Gold.
Gold market cap is >12T$, which is nowhere close to its actual intrinsic value. A lot of that market cap is due to the collective myth we have bought into that Gold is a store of value.
If you don't see that, then probably you also won't be able to see the usecase of BTC. Moreover, if you do not see a need for a store of value in general (which is totally based on collective myths and less so on actual intrinsic values), then you are probably in a cute bubble somewhere.
So I can only express my sincere hope that it is true. I think crypto is a blight on our societies and has caused tremendous damage and suffering for those who were too trusting, desperate (or both) and lost.
I was somewhat surprised to see that bitcoin’s value has risen quite a bit recently. But then again, this is a space in which people do all that is normally forbidden (like wash trading) to try and get the number go up.
I personally believe crypto was never even alive to begin with in a legal/moral sense, but maybe that’s just me.
Basically all of crypto except the goldpan and pickaxe sellers, and some rare gold miners and gold traders, are as deeply in the red as Charlie Javice's startups.
Not mentioned in the article of graphs is that if this ever isn't the case it becomes more and more likely that a Sybil attack would become worthwhile. To protect against a Sybil attack you need to keep the value of the coins needed for a Sybil attack at greater than the total value of each protocol. I guess this is also the case for regular companies, with P/E greater than 1, and a marketcap greater than the liquidation value of the company.
But it also means that people can't all cash out at once, only at a trickle. For publicly held companies a larger company, or a billionaire, can buy out all shareholders at the current share price. But for crypto most of the value of the coins or tokens are that other people are willing to buy them at the current price. If someone buys out all of the tokens for a protocol it automatically loses its value. If crypto ever is used primarily as a currency maybe you don't need to cash out, but that's a big IF.
These charts showed me that publicly held crypto really is a ponzi-like scheme.
That's not accurate, most shareholders aren't selling at the current price (or this price would be lower), that's why buying another company means paying a premium over the current share price.
That's a shame because it contaminates everything around it. I'm pretty sure it would make sense for a tax authority to infrequently poll the head of a hash-chain of a businesses' bookkeeping process to avoid the (at least in Germany) stupid manual process that it is now. But the whole crypto bro smell around that makes me very reluctant even exploring this direction.
The exaflod of content and deep fakes, etc. that's coming towards everyone soon will require some sort of trust protocol, blockchain is great for that.
With regards to crypto specifically microscopic payments will be needed to allow for adding cost to a lot of the things that are currently "free" now that AI content creation is going to overwhelm all of us.
No it isn't. Blockchains have no solution to the oracle problem. A blockchain is useless for distinguishing AI-generated content from other content for the same reason a blockchain is useless for managing mortgages on real property.
But there is a solution to the trusted protocol problem by only trusting content created through transformers as you will be able to see the intent it was created with.
I don't see how this is the case. Any blockchain verification is one off, and limited to the chain it is on. I, and many other people, would probably more trust a variety of centralized claims to truth or trust, than a decentralized claim. You trust when multiple parties state how they verified, you don't trust when one party writes "this is true" to a decentralized service, without all of the evidence they used to verify as true.
Crypto, except transactions on centralized exchanges, is hideous for microscopic payments. It costs too much to verify even minimal transactions on chain (even more for contracts). It's a lot, lot cheaper to use a centralized service for minimal transactions.
AI creates all the content and the output gets put on the blockchain. I can now see what the intent was when it was created and if it wasn't created via an AI.
As a user that's the most secure way to interact with any content.
Also an AI (or a person hacking the AI or its data stream) could just as easily copy something that's non-AI generated and publish it to the chain as the AIs own creation. If this something came from a private source there might not be any way to verify the original creator.
So this really only works for full verification if literally every bit of information of a kind (or at least its hash) is placed into the blockchain in real time, and the calculations generating the information and data streams placing the information into the chain are transaction-secured along their entire route to the chain. This becomes a tax on everyone, for the benefit of a few.
It's not obvious I know, but once you accept the idea that LLMs will become the tool we create with (and tokenize) and that smart agents becomes the mediators then you realize that there is in fact a way to allow for this and that blockchain is going to be fundamental.
In fact if it's not created via an LLM on the blockchain we know we have to be much more careful.
There is no more issuance to miners, it all goes to stakers now and is tiny compared with what was going to miners.
The sudden graph change under #3 (Sept 15th), is actually a good thing.
A better visual of this is https://ultrasound.money/
If you believe that those who have the most should get more going forward. The new system concentrates the wealth more than the old system
Given the success of PoS so far (1), ETH was over paying for security when there was another alternative way to do things... and this is coming from an ex-large scale miner.
(1) We likely won't know for decades if the switch to PoS was indeed successful, but I do feel it is an interesting experiment
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...