Crypto Had Its Chance
joanwestenberg.com
joanwestenberg.com
https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/charts/n-transactions
https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-capacity
Edit: another very concrete metric showing Bitcoin adoption is the daily global transactions fees paid to miners (in USD). This isn't the block reward, it is just the real costs (fees) that users are willing to pay to transact on the blockchain. The fact they are increasing implies increasing adoption/utility of Bitcoin: https://ibb.co/PgBm0t8 (note the log scale!) I like this metric as it's a 100% market-based valuation of Bitcoin's utility that is independent of the value of 1 BTC.
Not sure how long until this effects what users pay.
The "gas fee" for handing a banknote to a vendor is ... nil.
The "gas fee" for tapping a card/phone on an NFC payment pad is ... nil (you're probably tracked, ho-hum).
Crypto won't unseat classical until its "gas fees" go zero. At the very least to the payer.
Ask the vendors what their bank fees for handling cash deposits are and revise that statement.
There's no sales tax where you live? (which is entirely possible)
> The "gas fee" for tapping a card/phone on an NFC payment pad is ... nil
Merchants pay a credit card processing fee (2.9% + 30c per transaction) for each transaction. Looks and smells like a "gas fee" to me. It's much less than the ridiculous ETH gas fees, but credit cards cost money to operate. The fee is hidden so the naive consumer thinks they're not paying anything to use the credit card, but that's very much due to the actions of the credit card cartel, Visa/Mastercard.
https://ycharts.com/indicators/ethereum_average_transaction_... https://ycharts.com/indicators/ethereum_average_gas_price
That's the thing about a powerful idea, implemented in code, supported by a large global community, connected by the network -- nobody can kill it.
It's like arguing about whether the world would be a better place without strong cryptography. There are many arguments for and against, people will never agree, and it's a waste of time arguing about it.
It exists, whether you approve of how it's used or not.
And a thing that is unkillable, that will exist in some form for our lifetimes, that a large global community finds useful for whatever reason, will always be valuable.
Then to complain about how exhausting it is to explain nothing and make random claims genuinely sums up most people’s experience with the bitcoin crowd (and their praying on its downfall)
There is still too much money to pull from fresh people.
It's probably still companies which stole money from early adopters and still reinvest.
Printing fiat money causes speculation.
Easy fiat money is also literally the reason for launching bitcoin (just search for the Genesis block).
So I see your comment as blaming the solution for the problem.
Why buy a Tesla today for a bitcoin if you can buy it for 0.6 bitcoins in an year or something?
Whereas with fiat you have incentives to either invest or spend, but not sit on cash.
Money has no value, none of it, not dollars not bitcoins. Unless you like staring at images of Benjamin Franklin or the Queen of UK, it's worthless.
The entire proposition of imaginary money that is deflative because there will always be less in circulation is ridiculous, and Bitcoin clearly shows that it doesn't work.
Every single time one of my clients added crypto as a mean of payments very few people were interested and we had seen only few transactions till they dropped to 0. And my experience isn't unique, even huge players reported the same happening.
People hoard bitcoin to sell it to the next fool at higher price, there is no convenience or point into using it as a payment tool if you have alternatives, it's just gonna cost you more in fees and transactions and be more inconvenient than credit card/apple-google pay.
There is currently $1.91B worth of wrapped bitcoin (~27k) loaned out on AAVE [0].
So the answer to your question is... a lot of people.
[0] https://app.aave.com/reserve-overview/?underlyingAsset=0x226...
The only "default" is against yourself and you're in control of that at all times.
https://docs.aave.com/faq/depositing-and-earning
https://docs.aave.com/faq/borrowing
This innovation, along with AMM's, are what first brought actual utility to crypto beyond just buy and hold "number go up".
So, what is your point?
So you cannot now take loan for house in bitcoin. At least not using the system you linked. Thus it is entirely useless to even post it in the discussion.
I really don't understand the aggressive response that sounds like you're attacking me personally. Let me remind you of the guidelines here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Define "rich". Anyone can use AAVE, with any amount of tokens and without asking anyone for permission. If anything, AAVE is more accessible than anything else out there. Especially traditional banking which requires a bank account, something that can be difficult or impossible, to obtain on a global scale.
Finally, one can absolutely use AAVE to take a loan for a house. Supply/lend Bitcoin and borrow USDC, take the USDC out as fiat through an offramp such as coinbase.
So take scenario I just started working. I have no money. Where do I get bitcoin worth a house, so I can lock it up and loan likely in future bitcoin against it so I can slowly pay it back?
Just please explain how does the AAVE work in this specific scenario. I even give you 10% of house worth in bitcoin to start with.
You're mixing up your terms and that makes it very difficult to understand what you're saying... "to loan" != "taking loan".
Try to think and speak in terms like: lending and borrowing.
When you go to a bank, you use your credit score (and possibly your bank balance) as collateral to borrow funds.
With AAVE, you lend what tokens you have and you can then borrow against what you've lent.
The only difference is that with AAVE, you don't need a credit score or ask for permission from the bank. Anyone can do it globally 24/7. It is pretty clear from your previous comments in other threads, that you had no idea that this was even a thing because you stopped looking into it in 2017. Times have changed and things have progressed.
> I have no money. Where do I get bitcoin worth a house
You have no money, so you're not going to get a house, sorry. Your example doesn't work at all and I don't think it is going to be worth responding to.
You obviously have a beef with crypto. It isn't for you. That's ok. My point is to clarify the things you are blindly getting wrong.
To me it seems from your explanation that with Bitcoin loans you can only basically turn a collateral amount into the same value in Bitcoin, but not leverage the collateral. Hence, it's only useful if you already have money.
Very much US centric and that's essentially because of Fanny/Freddy and credit reports. That's part of what helped fuel 2008.
There are DeFi sites that enable leveraged borrowing, DeltaPrime [0] is one of them. They are just very small today as that is a relatively new technology.
Is saving "ok" according to your principles?
If so, then when does something stop being "saving" and become "hoarding"?
> Why buy a Tesla today for a bitcoin if you can buy it for 0.6 bitcoins in an year or something?
Because you value a Tesla more, I suppose?
Have you considered that artificially driving people to spend has a great cost in terms of ecology? What if we repaired an old car instead of "being induced by the central bank to buy a new one"? Same about houses, have you ever considered that housing is just so expensive because it's safer than dollars in terms of purchasing power? It's not that the demand suddenly increases by 10% yoy, it's the measuring unit that's being devalued (and there is, indeed, speculation on the further devaluation of the currency)
BTC will never be 100% payment, it's first of all "flight from devaluation". And since it's a free choice, it's much less morally problematic than "forced devaluation" (of other other people's money through central bank policy).
It will have a commonly used payment layer but I agree were not there yet. And even then, countries will not give up their local currency, so you will have BTC as a digital alternative to Gold and "money stored outside the local currency system", with the added advantage that you can hide and transport it very well, even in unsafe spots.
You're better off investing in various ways or just spend it. No rich person in this planet is rich because they have lots of cash. Most billionaires have very little amounts of it.
All that gives money value is the fact that other people want it. It has a constant demand.
Virtually nobody uses Bitcoins for payments, because it's model and self fulfilling prophecy is that price goes up as interest in the coin increases but the amount is stable (if not even decreases by burning or losing access to wallets). Everybody buys to see price go up further and sell.
I've been in crypto a long time before in 2017 I just concluded it was all speculation and green with no real world use.
You're free to do what you want with your money including speculating in Bitcoin, so far it has been a self fulfilling prophecy of more $ in the long run, I'm also free to see it as nothing else but greed.
The very fact that more advanced crypto currencies get no traction even though they really solve Bitcoin pain points is a clear indication that nobody gives two damns about the technology or uses it.
At the base of existence, all "true" value is utility value. Before cash and gold coins, people iron stakes and bronze kettles for currency, but even a bronze kettle is useless if you don't use it for cooking soup for your family and village, and instead use it for decorating your home.
Back then, you're right, it didn't have use cases. That said, the technology has advanced and the use cases do exist today. Decentralized finance is a giant one that continues to grow.
So in the end it seems there is just lack of political willpower to force global standard for bank transfers.
And regarding instant, feeless transactions - do you believe that electrons carrying current bank transfer messages are slower or more expensive than the ones carrying tokens (physicists, please forgive me)? The only reason token systems are temporary cheaper or faster is if they operate outside of law. Hardly a compliment in my opinion.
The fees on crypto are absurd. I thought credit cards were looting in daylight but crypto is on a whole new level.
Is creating a ~$1T (and that's just BTC) asset class which went from obscure mailing lists to ETFs not innovation? Of this asset class, only 21M (divisible) units will ever exist[0] and to this date the original asset (again, BTC) has had no compromising (security) incidents deviating from its original mission (P2P ledger).
This doomsaying "doesn't deserve to survive" just seems mean-spirited without any actual arguments as to why it's not deserved for an asset class to exist which is truly deflationary (as in money supply) and shoving everything under "crypto" hoping for some outright ban because it's not regulated. It being unregulatable is a feature, not a bug.
[0] even with forks, the original whitepaper-protocol as we know it today will probably always be "BTC"
(CEO of OceanGate, complaining about regulations for submarines, but also a good summary of the attitude in at least 90% of crypto-space.)
Remember, the British State once fought China over Opium. Not, as "these days" one might think, to stop production there or imports/smuggling to Britain - but to force China to drop the legal ban on the stuff they had introduced. Imagine a drug cartel with a superpower's army. And welcome to history lessons.
What are the main drivers of the crypto hate here on HN?
There is so much amazing technology being developed at the moment, which one would think is a main topic on a site for hackers.
As a random example, take arweave. Which is a really clever tweak to make a bitcoinlike blockchain store huge amounts of data. The top post about it here on HN has 8 comments, which do ot even touch on the tech.
While the current top post on the frontpage is "Radios, how do they work?".
Expertise and excellence.
There is so much interesting stiff going on in crypto, but the HN crowd seems to be more interested in retro-computing than in how the world will work tomorrow.
Can you give some broad examples?
The massive quantities of shallow fraud and bankrupt integrity that is either at the core of or openly embraced by the industry does it for me. But I suspect the frequent, confident inaccuracies in respect of the financial system parroted by many crypto enthusiasts particularly grates this community.
I haven’t written it off yet. But it’s never going to be long for this world, outside the low-FICO subset of the three generations that have gone whole hog on it [1], if it continues as anything resembling its current form.
[1] https://www.stilt.com/blog/2021/03/vast-majority-crypto-buye...
Cash is more dominant than crypto, and while lower incomes are also over represented among its most-frequent users, it doesn’t show as much of a spike among specific generations [1].
People advocating cash use aren’t preying on anyone to get rich. There is no inherent gambling feature built into it. And it’s obviously used in a lot of legitimate circumstances for legitimate reasons.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/10/05/more-amer...
2) cash has a multi-century head start from the entire cryptocurrency milieu, which has barely stepped out of the cradle.
3) Central banks and nations extract Seignorage from fiat currencies which has a recurring history of preying on the population of entire nations to keep incompetent and/or corrupt administrations and their adjacent buddies (the 0,01%) afloat, or in practice in say the USA, major corporate banks that control most of the day to day flows.
Jealousy, obviously.
I think crypto is failed experiment but there are plenty of new technologies that are way more interesting than the latest React competitor or UI framework that tend to get the most positive attention from the HN crowd. Shallow, risk-free innovation is where it's at.
The massive CO2 production is real. There is a company in NYC who restarted a gas power plant for crypto...
Putting the worlds biggest military into operation a quarter of a globe away isn't exactly energy or GHG-cheap.
Our current fiat system is a highly tuned PoS system with a ton of mechanism in place like you said.
Us military, printing technology, money laundering, international agreements etc.
Bitcoin and crypto is not solving any of those things in real life for real people.
Bitcoin already fails hard at simple but critical tasks like getting your money back when you loose your key.
And as soon as you want to exchange anything in the real world you need the real world PoS system anyway like contracts or a law system.
Isn't that mostly because the implementation has, for the most part, been terrible at best or dangerous at worst?
People saying things like Bitcoin is inflation save and ignore that Deflation is also a problem.
Or saying people should just use their own wallet but ignoring how many people lost access to their crypto due to this.
Or how it can't be censored but ignoring how countries make laws against it.
Just to tell us that they do crypto basically for the 3th world people who need a stable currency instead of just saying how it is: they like to get rich fast and actually don't care about anything.
Lucky enough Bitcoin is not hard but to complicated for the masses otherwise this virus would have eaten us by now (paperclip )
And lucky again: instead of having to read all the crypto bro shit every day we have ai which actually does things. It's much more interesting than reading the same green washing and other lies left and right
Or in a way we're the money thing is more for overhead or play money without a chance for pump'n'dump/get rich fast and similar shit.
And than introducing it later when things are actually stable and reasonable.
Personally, my skepticism on crypto has not been based on technical merits but on practical ones. Basically, there is no technical solution to a legislative problem. It's hard to trust any crypto enthusiast who focuses on dethroning fiat when fiat (i.e. governments) can just... make crypto illegal or heavily impractical. There's no technical solution to that.
From the moment you have to go through rigorous KYC to onramp to crypto (as most will do these days), and EU slowly making "anonymous" crypto difficult/illegal, I feel it really loses merit as anything other than what BTC is mostly used for - an alternative asset class. That's not very interesting IMO, because then the only innovation of (the most popular) crypto is artificial, technologically enforced scarcity.
Of course, there are many flavours of enthusiast and skeptic, who each prefer or dislike crypto for different reasons, so my argument might not even apply for many.
With crypto, nothing? Just this one is better than others, because it was first? And it is valuable because more people think it will be more valuable in future? Sounds like collectibles which have crashed time after time.
I think that (math and tech behind) crypto is pretty.
$2,100 per oz of pretty? Gold has a history longer than the US dollar and there's a lot more than goes into its price than people think it's pretty. If it were just about being pretty, the market for gold would have bottomed out on the invention of gold colored paint and pyrite would be worth way more than tens of dollars an ounce.
Although it's definitely true, the alternative (pseudo-)solutions additionally push the legislation to improve.
As a long-term crypto watcher, this place actually used to be definitely on the credulous end of the spectrum, but it gave up eventually.
HN readers are, as a rule, technologically literate - many of them programmers/engineers themselves. They have the skills to distinguish genuine innovation from marketing BS.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39813679 is a straight up technical post about a field that is, verily, one among the remaining instances of black magic. You can say things like 'superheterodyne' and it's not even made up - people have been making antennas for a century+. You just have to get past the ICP meme reference title.
The arweave HN post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21461631) I see is 5 years old and is a generic company/investor brochure puff piece vaguely promising something 'forever', a thing with a far poorer track record.
These are hardly in the same category of HN post and the comparison doesn't seem to do your argument any favours.
> There is so much amazing technology being developed at the moment, which one would think is a main topic on a site for hackers.
The subject of cryptocurrencies transcend technology. It leaks into the realms to finance, economics, and politics - all of these being heavily subjective.
Beyond this, I think there's an exhaustion surrounding the topic. A lot of people have their ideas solidified, and this poison the well for discussion, which becomes stale and uninteresting.
> While the current top post on the frontpage is "Radios, how do they work?".
Eh, I can see how this may sparkle the interest of people here. I have only a vague idea of how a radio works in term of hardware, and a more in depth article explaining its inner workings may make for an interesting read. A lot more than cryptocurrency, for reasons mentioned before.
Second: What is the point of this article being on HN? It doesn't really bring anything to the discussion. In fact, this is just an invitation for everyone to repeat the same talking points in the comments.
Because of this I won't share my (repeated at nauseaum on HN before) opinion here, in hope this and the future posts like this are removed.
Haters going to hate.
Ledgers got the "blockchain" name, and cryptography got back to "cryptography".
Blockchains might be useful for verification of things, but today's "crypto" is not that technology. It's the name of the "GPU Accelerated Pump and Dump Engine" for today.
The obvious real world use case of using blockchain to track shipping containers across modes of transport(and companies) failed late 2022 when the tradelens project was terminated(https://www.maersk.com/news/articles/2022/11/29/maersk-and-i...) after at least 4 years of work by the shipping industry's largest players. And that's essentially the case everywhere people are trying to get real value from blockchain based solutions.
“Currency” use-cases for blockchain actually work. It’s just that adoption has plateaued because most people don’t actually have the problems that cryptocurrencies solve and are perfectly happy with fiat.
On the other hand, all the other use-cases of crypto/blockchain are outright scams/frauds because of the oracle problem.