We have reached the "severed fingers and abductions" stage of crypto revolution
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/charts/transactions-per-... https://crypto.com/en/university/blockchain-scalability
On other hand efficiency for BTC mining does not matter. The energy expenditure always approaches the value of mined coins. When efficiency increase same energy is spend just to do more hashes, which are really not useful.
in total? or per transaction?
How many transaction BTC makes compared to Visa/Mastercard/bank transfers?
The flaw is that crypto was supposed to be better than fiat.
Any attempt to say they are on the same level is intellectual bankruptcy.
Like asking "What's the problem with restricting access to VX? Everyone's got a can of bug spray in their cabinet and they're both organophosphates, brah!"
The big narrative I keep hearing about bitcoin the past ~8 years is that it's no longer considered a currency even by the true believers.
There's certain medication that's cheaper for me to buy online from overseas than it is in the US (where I live) even with my insurance. Those from whom I've bought it only accept payment in Bitcoin. I'm going to admit that it seems kind of sketchy, but I'm grateful for the existence of BTC because of it, and I think it really does seem like a good decentralized currency in that situation.
Maybe skeptics would label this money laundering or criminal activity, but I'm using it to buy medication I have a prescription for; if this is illicit, it feels like it shouldn't be.
Hindsight is 20/20. In the early days of crypto the promise of decentralized finance outside of the scrutiny of governments and financial institutions was seen as far from pointless. It only went awry when speculators turned up trying to make a profit from an ostensibly useful idea, and they took it so far that the original idea lost all its meaning so the well-meaning folk left.
Fact is it became popular with speculators faster than it did with anybody else, but the hodlers weren't doing anything to stop people from using it to buy pizza.
Major issues, still existing, were never solved
Today the bitcoin network is still stuck at ~7 transactions a second.
This is not what the white paper promised.
Btw. Criss chain transaction is the major problem this strategy added.
To be fair, almost nothing that most techies work on benefits society.
Decentralization doesn't benefit society? umh...
Centralization is what enabled today's societies to thrive. So when talking about decentralization you have to get into the specifics to show the value.
Centralization could be good, sometimes (if it works idk). The problem is that the financial world has been monopolized by certain entities and the barrier of entry is enormous. It is never fair to not play by the same rules when regulation favors big institutions, etc... Access to credit is difficult sometimes and unfair. But that is just a reason you could give in the US.
Decentralization ensures that countries that condemn their citizens to raising inflation can access other types of income. Some argentinians get paid in USDC, because their currency is just worthless in other countries, and they would never be able to access USD in their banks.
Decentralization (I have in mind something like Hyperliquid or even BTC) ensures that everybody in the world have access to the same economy without intermediaries asking for a fee. Which means, a person in Indian can access to income the same way a person in the US would. Or you could do a transfer overseas with less fees or regulation problems.
And do they? In practice? The theory is always sweet, but in practice once you take away "crime" and "hold to sell high" you'll be hard pressed to see too many, or widespread instances of usefulness. You don't make society better by just building a taller peak for a few if at the same time you're digging even deeper troughs for the many.
> Or you could do a transfer overseas with less fees or regulation problems.
Every time someone gets swindled out of their "deregulated, decentralized" money, every time someone loses a finger for their million dollar wallet, you have one more voice asking a centralized organization for protection, maybe with some regulation.
You handwave away all the obvious problems, even though technology or time won't solve any of them. Without protection most people will be screwed out of their belongings. Ask that person in India if they're eager to "access to income the same way a person in the US would" (whatever that means) if this means there's no recourse when they lose the money.
Regulation is key, quality decentralized finance can only happen with quality regulation. Ditto for plain old centralized banking. My question is, why we don't have anything of reasonable quality?
That lack is the reason fraudsters can peddle their fraud-coins and bait people with bombastic arguments like "the value of decentralization". Crime is decentralized, does that make it good?
>>(by grr19) everybody in the world have access to the same economy without intermediaries asking for a fee.
There is a fee, quite high in fact, and energy cost.
Depends on the L1 that you use. If you think of BTC, yeah, fee could be high (not if you are sending 1M), if you think of a proof-of-stake L1 then not much. Also depends on the TPS. Again; thinking about Hyperliquid.
Yes, they have access to the same economy.
> you have one more voice asking a centralized organization for protection, maybe with some regulation
I don't want regulation, thanks. Just have backups or smth. Only looking for governments to not ban it in order to allow users to convert their BTCs to fiat currency. But that is already kinda in place, because old school investors are asking for it.
> Ask that person in India if they're eager to "access to income the same way a person in the US would" (whatever that means)
It means that they can also earn a 100K salary in USD, thus not being affected by inflation
No, you don't need to worship Amazon in a libertarian system, Amazon lives thanks to regulation (Amazon supports raising the min wage), and other import fees & tax exemptions that smaller businesses can't afford to bypass.
I personally don't to live in either possibility, neither in "nothing exist" libertarian dystopia, nor in the current normal society where i would need to pay for a bunch of selfish freeloaders who avoid taxes.
The only thing keeping the billionaire class from extruding you through a nozzle, drying out the paste, and then distributing what used to be you in powdered form as a daily ration to their indentured servants is the government.
A bad government can also enable this, but examples of bad governments are far outweighed by good or at least mediocre examples to the point of absurdity.
Whenever I talk to libertarians about this they respond "we'd just band together to make rules against this to protect ourselves" -- that's a fucking government.
(or they have some fetishistic fantasy about guns and shit)
I work in “traditional” (as in, non crypto) payment systems, and i can tell you that plenty of companies are looking into using cryto rails for complex remmitance routes.
The problem is swift network/correspondent/intermediary banking. When you want to send money abroad to badly connected banks of badly connected countries, you might have a big route chain (multiple times intermediaries), fees can be huge , and settlement can take a long time. For these “small” banks it can be extremely hard to get better banking partners for better network (as in banking not IT) connection (multiple reasons, from price to available business partner, and company bandwith to go with the project)
Stable coins are much simper by comparison, you just need a wallet, and you ate a n a global network with automated settlement. Now whats lacking is standardizing how to send a message “ your crypto X received money from our crypto wallet Y, from our customer with acct number yyy, intended to your customer with acct number xxx”
Still some guys send iso message via swift to semd those intents and then settle via crypto.
This is a non existing problem for intra-eu payments due to all eu members being part of TARGET settlement system, and there are pan-EU clearing systems, but as soon as you get to more “disconnected “ countries, or “smaller” banks cross continent, it’s a pain.
But why is this complicated? Isn't it mostly about regulations / KYC / AML, rather than anything technical?
Stablecoins are much simpler because they don't do anything with respect to regulations, they're just a dumb ledger. For those who don't want to bypass regulations and the legal system, stablecoins bring as much as yet another database / ledger, which are not the problem in the first place.
Payments basics: Simplest scenario (details overly simplified) When you send money from account A on bank X to account B on bank Y, what happens is that Bank X debits account A on its system and credits bank Y’s account on bank X (let’s say it’s Xy account) Then bank X sends message to Bank Y to credit account B, so Bank Y debits X’s bank account (Yx) and credits B.
As you can see this is an issue, it means that every bank has to have an account on every other bank in order to have funds moving around, and even keep liquidity there.
That’s where Clearing And Settlement system comes in, they act as a centralised force.
So instead of bank X having an account (with enough liquidity ) on bank Y so that its customers can transfer money to Bank Y customers, both of these banks have an account on some Clearing/Settlement third party (usually it’s a system by a Central Bank) and interact with that system instead, so instead of N*N bank accounts on outer banks, you have N accounts on central system.
EU has TARGET from ECB for settlement of euros across EU.
But there is no central bank of the whole world of every currency.
So what happens when too far away banks interact?
They have to search through the graph of all the world banks how they can get money to a particular bank. Add currency conversion as an extra complexity, because every connection is on a currency.
So it’s quite the graph search with many constraints, clearing and settling such stuff is hard because of that.
Regulation and AML is just one of the difficulties in linking nodes, but other exists, for example liquidity, a small bank can’t just spread multi currency accounts on many places.
The benefit of stablecoin on a blockchain, is that it kinda gives you “whole world central bank”, more correctly, it makes everybody share the same ledger, instead of each bank having its own that needs reconciliation with everybody else.
The only thing extra needed for stable coins, is space for encrypted messages is a transfer(so that a bank can tell other bank to credit customer B) and a public mapping from Bank Bic to crypto wallet id.
I don't see how a stablecoin solves this. You still need all the actors involved to agree on the stablecoin, just like you'd need them to agree on any non-blockchain-based system. You added an extra step, namely going through this new currency, which presumably is backed 1:1 to an existing one, but that adds some overhead on its own. Every country using USD (or equivalent stablecoin) would remove some friction, but it's not like this will happen.
> EU has TARGET from ECB for settlement of euros across EU. > But there is no central bank of the whole world of every currency.
So how come one exists and not the other yet? And why do you expect the whole world to agree on a stablecoin-based solution if they can't or don't want to agree on a TARGET-like one?
Besides, we usually don't even know how much it'd cost to just use a stablecoin for everything, since there are so few actual legit uses. I'm not sure you'd even end up being competitive with current solutions.
Right now as a consumer (meaning for lower amounts), I can trivially convert between most currencies using wise.com. The fees are not negligible but fine for one-offs, and I can get much lower going through IBKR and I guess others. I'm still to hear of a stablecoin-based solution beating that.
Another hint that the stablecoin solution you describe is not one is that it wouldn't require a public blockchain, since it'd be between actors knowing each other. Quoting https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2019/02/blockchain_an...:
> Private blockchains are completely uninteresting. (By this, I mean systems that use the blockchain data structure but don’t have the above three elements.) In general, they have some external limitation on who can interact with the blockchain and its features. These are not anything new; they’re distributed append-only data structures with a list of individuals authorized to add to it. Consensus protocols have been studied in distributed systems for more than 60 years. Append-only data structures have been similarly well covered. They’re blockchains in name only, and—as far as I can tell—the only reason to operate one is to ride on the blockchain hype.
In other words, the solution you seem to describe could have been implemented way before Bitcoin was even invented; the fact that it's not indicates that it's not actually the missing piece.
I didn't read anything about tm-guimaraes "expecting the whole world to agree on a stablecoin-based solution" and you didn't bother to quote him, if he did say it. In fact, multiple stable coins and quick arrangements between individual banks are a big part of the value provided by stable coins.
The point here is that stables do provide a lot of value and convenience for banking, two banks can agree and use a stable in no time at all, they are traded 24x7 on multiple exchanges where every bank has accounts.
I'm not sure what are you trying to argue, the convenience and speed of stables is there for all to see. They have one slight problem, namely they might not be properly regulated and introduce some risks. However, how much can you trust regulations themselves, given that unstable coins, being de facto criminal fraud, are not only legal but perpetrated at the highest level of government.
Why would that go faster than agreeing on existing currencies? If you want to go from, say, EUR to USD, going through more currencies just adds overhead. And again, why do you expect quicker arrangements when stablecoins are involved (and all the other elements still are)?
> two banks can agree and use a stable in no time at all
If they can (meaning they're also legally allowed to) agree to that, then they can agree to using their main currencies as well. Let's not pretend that EUR -> EUR-based stable currency -> USD-based stable currency -> USD is somehow simpler than EUR -> USD.
> the convenience and speed of stables is there for all to see
Where can we all see that? Which product has stablecoins as part of their implementation instead of as a marketing point? I gave examples above that seem to do what you both seem to argue stablecoins are good for, namely transferring money independently of currencies. AFAICT Wise does not use stablecoins, and I'm pretty sure they would if it could make things more efficient to reduce their fees while still increasing their margins. The fact that they don't and are still in business years after stablecoins have been out (and again, legal stablecoins traded by known actors could have existed before proof of work was created anyway) indicates that it's not the competitive advantage you think it is.
OP was talking about legal money and how banks could use stablecoins to improve their connectivity for legal money flows. Regulations are a given constraint for them, so the risk and lack of compliance you mention is actually a deal-breaker here.
I also fail to understand this notion of "unstable coin" to refer to currencies "stable coins" are pegged to.
I think more crucially though is that crypto people just have absolutely zero understanding of the concept of money in a political sense.
Money is not real - it’s a social experience - and the fact is monetary sovereignty is by far the most important thing for any state to maintain.
If bitcoin or any other of the cryptocurrencies were actually useful, they would be immediately outlawed because they would subvert the control the state has over economics
Even if they didn’t or couldn’t make it illegal, they would make it dollar parity, and then tax it such that it just gets absorbed into the local financial system
Fully realized cryptocurrency would destabilize the entire economic system of intermediaries and that’s entirely the purpose of it - per the white paper
So anybody who has an undergraduate or masters degree in economics (me) or rather somebody who had a holistic view of economics in the political and monetary sense - immediately understood that there was a limit to how far this could go before state intervention
The reality is, it never actually took off as a medium of exchange - and so never challenged the domination of the US dollar or any other reserve currency. That itself has proof that it doesn’t actually have the social momentum necessary to do what it intended to do.
So thinking crypto will be an outlier is wishful thinking since it will never be allowed to be more powerful than governments. At most, new world orders will be created, but they will settle and be like the old ones, with some new more crypto native rules. They will always know who you ar and who you’re transacting with and where either of you are.
Current crypto fanatics are assuming they will all be part of this club. This road will be filled with poor old men with fewer fingers and lots of regret.
I want crypto to succeed, but I don’t expect it will be unregulated. You’ll pay the same taxes, you’ll go to jail if you try to avoid them or if you send crypto to entities banned by governments. Eventually the things that make crypto so valuable will be hammered out so it’s more like fiat.
Maybe the value will crash or wealthy people of today will find a way to freeze it into reserve currencies (like the newly minted federal crypto reserve), but after some point it will stop being a source of wealth just by holding it at the right time. You will need to exchange it with value you create.
The math of crypto wealth by HODLing is unsustainable.
There is no reason to trust any bank implicitly. As a matter fact that have proven not to be deserving of it as recently as 2008.
It isn't implying that. It is implying that it will end up at the same place as the traditional finance.
> It says a lot about how bad the traditional finance
What is so bad about traditional finance that crypto fixes?
If you had a million in gold, would you leave it on your desk? Walk around with it on the street? Your odds of getting to where you're going with the gold are pretty good in most places, but it's still a big risk. Brag about or show that gold off to somebody, as many in this story did, and you rapidly become a target.
Physical security primer for Bitcoin (2019), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUgPhPkS2yc
With banking systems, each bank account has a unique address (private, but they'll cooperate with the government and police easily, and are experienced doing so), and that address is associated with a real person... and it operates slowly, which means the police can easily catch up to transactions. A transaction that crosses country boundaries has more scrutiny and takes longer, giving the police even more time and information.
Crypto has public unique addresses (public keys), but there's no requirement any of them have names associated with them, and most don't. It operates more quickly than large bank wires, and easily crosses international borders.
I'm not a fan of crypto, but even with public ledgers, it's less traceable and more anonymous than normal banks of most (all?) countries.
Not really. From the comfort of my home, I as a member of the general public can trace any, say, bitcoin transaction I feel like, and work on de-anonymising it. And not only today's transactions, but all bitcoin transactions ever.
To trace bank transfers, you need to be part of established law enforcement and have something like a warrant. (Or whatever the legal requirements are in your country.) The transfer might go via multiple countries with different rules and perhaps less enthusiastic authorities. And the data might get lost.
I wonder how much crypto is changing hands off-market in shadier corners.
People keep saying this, and yet it keeps happening. You seem to have far more faith in the police than is warranted. Exactly how many investigations have ended in an arrest and recovery of funds from these actions? I'm guessing somewhere near zero for anything not directly involving government or corporate interests.
And somehow they praise it as a solution to all world's problems.
cryptocurrencies solve real world problems but like any technology also have drawbacks.
With the right cryptocurrency also private and anonymous.
Bad people can do bad things with good technology but that doesn't mean good people shouldn't use and benefit from that technology. I would think someone on HACKERnews would agree.
And this has nothing to do whenever the tech is good or bad, this is literally about how "untraceable" tech will make it easier for criminals to turn the supporters into helpless victims.
Since the irony is with your absolutist argument that it goes the other way too, if we have a proper surveillance state for instance there would be clear and obvious benefits to this; however this doesn't mean that these benefits outweighs the negatives far from it, hence why a lot of the tech that are raising concerns is being discussed and tested out to see how far we can create a better world while not forsaking said tech.
The question about crypto isn't can it keep the feds from auditing it, it's whenever or not it's worth having an anonymous currency given all the implications, risks and general problematic aspect of it outweighs the benefits of it.
So far it seems that people have moved away from crypto due to that reason, and instead it's mostly seen as a speculative market.
>it's whenever or not it's worth having an anonymous currency given all the implications
And I think it is worth the same way privacy or autonomy is worth the "risk". Maybe you should ask people in less safe and stable countries if they trust there state with there money or people in unsafe environments auch as abuse victims, journalists, whistleblowers or activists.
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
>So far it seems that people have moved away from crypto due to that reason, and instead it's mostly seen as a speculative market.
I'm talking about crypto where the word currency means something not speculative assets like with btc. And those i can assure you are doing better than ever regardless what opinion you or anybody else has because they are, by design, censorship and tyranny resistant. the hacker spirit.
You created a strawman from a position I didn't imply or stated, since I was merely responding to your claim.
>And I think it is worth the same way privacy or autonomy is worth the "risk". Maybe you should ask people in less safe and stable countries if they trust there state with there money or people in unsafe environments auch as abuse victims, journalists, whistleblowers or activists.
What does "safe" and "stable" countries mean here? These aren't concrete words to be using if you're not going to back it up by examples.
This is because "safe" can mean either free from violent crime then for instance China would be a better contestant than USA, or "safe" as in not being worried about being persecuted by individuals/the state, then USA is considered much safer although that has slipped with the current admin.
Same thing goes with "stable".
And it's fine to advocate for privacy due safety but you cannot proclaim there's no consequences of this and implying then that it's "better" because of this is naïve at best.
>"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
Using that quote outside of the context it was meant to address is a bit cheesy.
>I'm talking about crypto where the word currency means something not speculative assets like with btc. And those i can assure you are doing better than ever regardless what opinion you or anybody else has because they are, by design, censorship and tyranny resistant. the hacker spirit.
And also extremely prone to support criminals/government seeking to destabilize/promote abuse and victims of said economic abuse/scams have far less protection.
I said privacy and anonymity is important to prevent bad people robbing people, you said that criminals can use it too, I said so can anything good too but is no argument against using them. You should look up what strawman actually means before using it as gotcha
>What does "safe" and "stable" countries mean here? These aren't concrete words to be using if you're not going to back it up by examples.
Needing an example for bad coutries or environments existing??? You know what you are right there does not exist such countries, my bad it was just a strawman because we live in heaven on earth.
>And it's fine to advocate for privacy due safety but you cannot proclaim there's no consequences of this and implying then that it's "better" because of this is naïve at best.
Never said there wasn't. literally anything has consequences, i just choose freedom with "risks" above controlling tyranny that tracks, surveils and controls every transactions that claim safety.
>Using that quote outside of the context it was meant to address is a bit cheesy
It is very fitting against anti freedom and privacy rhetoric fueled by fear.
>And also extremely prone to support criminals/government seeking to destabilize/promote abuse and victims of said economic abuse/scams have far less protection.
And also extremely prone to support good individuals against these very same things and a lot more. Your fear mongering works in the other direction too. And to quote yourself "these aren't concrete words to be using if you're not going to back it up by examples"
Not at all what I said, I said criminals can ABUSE the anonymity others enjoy to make it easier for them to ensure their victims are helpless.
Hence why I pointed out why it's a strawman, my position was never about "criminals use it to fuel/wash their crimes" but that due to the very nature of crypto being private it also means it's easier for criminals to get away with robbing people who own crypto (did you even read the article?).
>Needing an example for bad coutries or environments existing??? You know what you are right there does not exist such countries, my bad it was just a strawman because we live in heaven on earth.
Yes definitions are important.
>Never said there wasn't. literally anything has consequences, i just choose freedom with "risks" above controlling tyranny that tracks, surveils and controls every transactions that claim safety.
Good, then you should be more aware of my point than acting out as if I am proposing something radically different to your idea of freedom.
>It is very fitting against anti freedom and privacy rhetoric fueled by fear.
Except that the context has nothing to do with freedom or privacy but taxation, and most measure that goes against freedom with certain exceptions are rarely born out of fear but paid in blood.
>And also extremely prone to support good individuals against these very same things and a lot more. Your fear mongering works in the other direction too. And to quote yourself "these aren't concrete words to be using if you're not going to back it up by examples"
Which specific concerns would a good individual have about the traditional currency system that has plenty of laws (depending of course where you live, but let's assume in the west) protecting their assets both from illegal seizure and from theft, especially since they have a democratic right to vote in people to represent their interest in either weakening or strengthening laws that enhances privacy, protection and ownership of their assets?
What specific concern there does crypto solve?
If it is privacy to ensure the feds can't track that you bought a bad dragon dildo then absolute I 100% agree that is a valid point, but then you also need to owe up to that point and agree that any exploitation that comes from such anonymity will also be part of unfortunate reality of dealing with crypto.
Also please point out the so called "fear mongering" in my point? That I am arguing against your point? Quite bizarre Orwellian way of seeing a discussion.
Or again you are aware you're arguing in a discussion that is about an article detailing crimes being done mainly thanks weaponizing crypto's anonymity against the owner(s)?
>And to quote yourself "these aren't concrete words to be using if you're not going to back it up by examples"
Such as the various rug pulls done by various crypto coins (latest being Trump + his wife), before that the various influencers and their memecoins (hawk tuah coin being just the latest), to this very article pointing out people being robbed and there's not much to be done about stopping the transaction.
The whole system is rigged. Yes, crypto too.
"In contrast, Russian cryptobros that I know tend to act very, very lowkey. The fewer people know about your activities, the better. Posting about dealing with crypto in social media is absolutely unthinkable. Why? Because that makes you too easy and lucrative prey "
"Most likely explanation:
Russian federal prison officer built an underground prison as an exact copy of a real prison. There he persuaded kidnapped ppl they are in a real prison. They'd give him wants he wanted, then he'd kill & burn them. In 2018 he died, prison was abandoned"
Defense contractors associated with the U.S. military said they would sever fingers to make me "care more" here is a screenshot:
or
This was sent over a Department of Defense channel.
What’s with all the asterisks in the image?
Regarding all the asterisks, your guess is as good as mine. Perhaps it is to make the text look scarier and more menacing, or more serious, or to make it seem like it was written by a madman who will actually do what is described. It's hard to know why they did that.