Elizabeth Warren is Building an “Anti-Crypto Army” | Hacker News Reader

Elizabeth Warren is Building an “Anti-Crypto Army”

forbes.com

4 pointsdownandout3 comments

In defense of crypto, decentralized currency is the way to go IMO. BTC is super expensive but it does mirror Gold reserves.

Does this mean the US is no longer the "most powerful"? Maybe so, since countries are moving off the USD, however the US could have at any time started mining BTC. I actually don't understand why the US government didn't do this already. It was so fundamentally clear (since at least 2011) that we were moving towards digital currency. And, this would most likely be a global currency that was not USD. Even in 2017, there was undeniable proof that this was the necessary path. Since that time, the crypto community met with US government on numerous occasions to help develop a strategy. It's hard to fathom why there was no "just-in-case" plan implemented in this regard.

The push by banking institutions to use XRP is suspect IMO, as other forms of digital assets have proven quite valuable (e.g., Monero, ZCash, Dash), and they've held up YoY. Beyond money transfer, we see cryptocurrencies such as FileCoin that will transform the supply chain by providing immutable record and transfer of goods. This can help solve the issue of proliferation of fake goods. I recall Amazon even talking about product verification w/o barcodes. IMO, this is long overdue.

Is it that people just don't like change? Or is it the very real and irrevocable disruption to US economy that seems to be rapidly approaching?

I might be a crypto noob, but as per my limited knowledge I don't see how BTC can become a usable large scale currency. The transaction rate on chain is too low for real world use cases. Off chain you can use things like lightning, but lighting either requires you to open separate channel (which needs to be on the blockchain, thus will run into the same transaction rate issue), or keep one channel open with some entity, and make all your transactions flow via that entity (kind of a bank, but with no real world protections whatsoever). Not to mention the total irreversibility which makes it much harder for normal people to use.

There are several other issues as well with crypto, and I don't see how is it going to become an "irrevocable disruption".

IMO the transaction rate is too low because the gas fees are crazy high. This is why we need actual proof-of-stake (not ETH 2.0). EOS is the first project to try an tackle this. From what I can tell, it scaled. Transactions remained fractions of a cent. EOS got caught in morality of consensus (e.g., under what conditions to reverse, how to handle disputes). However, it looks like AI can improve on this which is both terrifying and exciting.

Irrevocable disruption to the US could simply be enough countries move off the US dollar. To do that a new currency would be created/adopted. BTC serves as proof-of-concept that value is driven by sustained adoption and trade. Further, the level of sustained attacks crypto has undergone from countries such as US and China reflect the disruption crypto, as a decentralized security, has on the world economy. All this to say, it's quite possible.

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