Barely makes an impression in the parade of crime that is web3isgoinggreat.com/
The idea that there would be anything but a massive acceleration of crime and fraud as a result of the digitization of actual money is actually hilarious.
It’s a fact that North Korea relies on hacking it for funding critical imports at this point…
The real question is who and how this massive financialization and tokenization exercise will benefit, because it’s increasingly clear that the old guard has designs on how to control it pretty effectively and it’s not actually as free or anonymous as many people think. Some exceptions apply.
Did you know that China curtails more hydropower (200+ TWh/yr [1]) than the global electricity consumption of Bitcoin, than entire "mid-size countries"? China literally spills water through the dams without powering the turbines, because they have a hydropower surplus that they can't redistribute through their national grid. When you start learning things like that, you realize Bitcoin's electricity consumption is, fortunately, still a drop in the bucket compared to the immense waste from, well, everything else humans do on the planet.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13640...
A fact? What are the #s that they are bringing in from hacking, versus the $4.8 billion/year they bring in from exports to China/Africa?
1. German Weimar Republic (Germany) - The German Mark, introduced in 1924 after World War I, was originally intended to replace the hyperinflated German Papiermark. However, the Great Depression and military reparations led to massive deficit spending, resulting in hyperinflation starting around 1921. By 1923, one US dollar equaled approximately 4.2 trillion Reichsmarks.
2. French Revolutionary Franc (France) - After the French Revolution in the late 18th century, France's new revolutionary government issued the assignats, which were paper money used as part of a monetary reform program. Initially, these notes held value due to their being backed by goods such as grain; however, excessive printing eventually led to severe hyperinflation between 1796 and 1797, where prices rose exponentially.
3. Hungarian Pengő (Hungary) - Introduced in 1946, the Hungarian pengő suffered from rampant inflation due to economic mismanagement and Marshall Plan aid exchange rates. Between 1945 and 1946, the exchange rate for one US dollar was set at HUF 52, but due to various factors, including nationalization, hyperinflation reached an estimated 44 quadrillions to the US dollar by 1946.
4. Zimbabwean Dollar (Zimbabwe) - Succeeding the British colonial Rhodesian dollar, Zimbabwe adopted its own fiat currency, the Zimbabwean dollar, upon independence in 1980. Hyperinflation began in the mid-1970s, and by November 2004, it had become virtually worthless, forcing the country to abandon it.
5. Mexican Peso (Mexico) - Following the Mexican-American war, Mexico faced significant debt. To finance the national debt, a silver peso coin was minted. Despite its initial value, hyperinflation struck, and by the late 19th century, the Mexican peso became almost worthless. Numerous attempts at currency stabilization failed until the introduction of the "El Banco" gold standard in 1914.
It rather seems like the opposite; an altruistic gift to humanity. An anonymous programmer produced a decentralized currency that solved the double spend problem and didn't even sell his coins.
Sure would be nice to have fewer scammers, and we should try. I, too, detest many of the actors in the space, the whole number-go-up get-rich-quick culture, and much more.
But it’s a sideshow. The reality is I’m not giving up digital assets I completely control (preferably private ones) any more than I’m giving up strong encryption, e2e encrypted comms, or the right to run whatever software I like on my computers. I’m not the only one.
It’s really irrelevant if you or anyone else considers it irredeemable. What does that even mean? There’s not even a single coherent “it” to be irredeemable.
Perhaps a greater percentage of the people, projects, and attention are part of the “parasite” as you put it, but that was my point: while it is bad, and something we should work to minimise, it’s may be a price we have to pay for something that at its core is very important.
I do think that creating a censorship resistant place for data is more important than preventing people from being scammed, but when I think about what ought to go there, I come up with nothing so status-quo-preserving as abstractions that ensure the continuity of asset ownership. It's like you hate banks so much that you went and built one just to show-em.
I mean, on a long enough time scale, they won't :) Same with USD, other currencies, or any given stock or bond. There are no guarantees. That applies doubly to crypto assets.
Why would this change my assertions?
In any case there are a myriad socio-political views and values represented in blockchain/“crypto” projects. It’s not all hypercapitalist libertarians…
I open a wallet app and the paypal app, copy the deposit address from paypal to the clipboard, paste into the wallet, type the amount, hit send. 5 seconds later paypal receives it. With one button I swap any portion of it to USD on the paypal app. I do this in large enough amounts so the crypto TX fees are insignificant to get into paypal, and the conversion fees are also small.
Any extra fees are more than covered by the long term appreciation of the Bitcoin, which will obviously continue as governments worldwide are drunk of their own power to print.
for them its just crypto -> USD which is very fast. for me, in the US as a US citizen, that is 2 minutes up to $25,000. from a personal crypto wallet, to the exchange, to my bank or brokerage account. beyond $25,000 it is 15 minutes to 2 hours via domestic wire transfer.
so one likely unreported aspect of crypto is that it likely has reduced international wire transfers, and cross border transfers that are prone to error and erroneous reviews and holdups
for about a decade now I have paid people in other countries in crypto. and been paid in crypto from some revenue sources. and we both liquidated as domestic transfers in our local countries. specifically because we didn't want to bother with international bank issues and time delays.
even hedge fund and private equity fund administrators that are more competitive allow in-kind investment of new limited partners in crypto, for many years now
the other thing thats important to understand is that there is a growing group that doesn't want "money they can spend" because they are liquid. they can buy goods, services, invest, day trade, passive income all in crypto within the crypto ecosystem. and for other things they can get the cash when they need it, or simply use a debit card that is custodying their crypto and representing it as the local fiat currency
but truthfully, going from USD -> crypto is fast too. if you're a US citizen you just need to use wire transfers to the exchange. SEPA region can also do same day settlement.
your user story and assumptions are really antiquated and don't represent what's been happening for at least 10 years now. if it doesn't apply to you then thats fine and move on
but I sincerely doubt the average western crypto hater has ever had to deal with western union or some remittance company taking 30%+ in fees.
What’s the crypto solution that beats that?
Bitcoin == Web5
It’s sad that blockchain went the way it did, because it’s probably a great technology when you don’t expect it to revolutionize the entire internet.
It really isn't. There's nothing legal it can do that something else can't do better. It's not even that good at the illegal stuff.
Eh, Treasuries should probably be traded on a blockchain. Cryptocurrency is nonsense. But the tech has legs. It just needs to, ironically, clear its way of the crypto/web3 crowd first.
A blockchain without the economic carrot-stick power to protect its own integrity and internal rules, power that comes from aligning the behavior of otherwise unrelated and even mutually antagonistic custodial participants by incentivizing their common interest in getting rich (or at least not losing their existing wealth), is no more than a database with superfluous "decentralization theater" yak shaving bolted on.
If defecting from the game doesn't cost you a meaningful penalty (and such cost is defined by a fixed unit of measure, in order to distinguish in-game gains from losses) then you are not compelled to follow its rules except by your own conscience. This would be noble, but it would not be a blockchain.
seems like it would work...
Bitcoin ATMs are an interesting example because they involve at least one trusted third party - the Bitcoin ATM operator.
This is one significant advantage of Bitcoin, that it works for the unbanked.
One thing I definitely didn’t need any more of back then was glamorized systems of financial predation and exploitation targeting me because of it. There’s no version of the world where the cryptocurrency ecosystem as it actually is, rather than how it is idealized to be, would have made my plight better had it existed at the time.
In any case, it still seems like a non-sequitur.
I’m just laughing at the premise that the many, many, many billion dollar investments and valuations of cryptocurrency firms, and the unending deluge of fraud and scams they reliably leave in their wake is meaningfully offset by the total amount of money transacted in the niche of homeless friends who need fast cash from their wealthy friend who is half way around the world outside of normal business hours. I mean, if that’s the case, then it would really behoove Western Union and MoneyGram to keep a few locations open on the weekend.
I don't know; who does? I said it was bad at all the things.
It's a back door attempt to fundamentally rewire how value is routed through society, and in the abstract this _might_ be a good thing (perhaps too generous with that 'might') in practice it cannot possibly happen due to physical constraints on consensus formation at the global, realtime scale that it would have to happen. As a result shortcuts are taken (or appear organically, i.e. exchages) in the form of centralized nodes of consensus settlement (what the promoters like to call Layer 2, sharding, or similar), and it's the people controlling these centralized nodes who end up becoming the new kings of this "revolutionized" system, the trust-me-bro's of trustlessness. I've met some of them, and they are not people who I would ever want to have anyone I care about to be under the thumb of.
That's fundamentally a bad thing. I want my social contracts enforced socially. The rot is at the heart.
* were not for HN's character limit my username would have started with the word 'block'
Web 3.0 as Tim Berners-Lee envisions it might have some legs, but web3 was a always an empty marketing vessel.
It secondarily has connotations of decentralization with stuff like Mastodon, but relatively few people care about that stuff.
Hence i associate web3 with the grift, and blockchain with the technology. Probably gp does the same.