MrMan

I think algorand is by far the best crypto platform out there, but the sad part is that it's the economic / behavioral issues that hold crypto back. if you could earn Algo and it was widely adopted, it would be an attractive alternative currency and smart contract platform.

but for me tech and adoption are like two out of four things needed to make crypto non-evil (literally) - the third is democratic governance. the fourth is environmental impact which Algorand checks off. But it's not democratically organized or run, which is a complete non-starter.

the foundation that runs it is probably the least corrupt org I can think of in crypto (I am not an expert) but its still a group that hold a giant percentage of the existing coins, which is a huge non-starter as well, and there is no concept of citizen ship or personhood that maps to the real world.

I dont believe in the decentralization nonsense and this pseudo anonymous thing over crypto is not good. to really run a DAO you need real people interacting in something like a co-op. kind of like the internet, actually.

what some people call decentralization I call by an old fashioned name - distributed. there is another concept which is more to the point than the term centralization and it is concentration. The Gini index of a logical dimension of a system is more important to me than whether it is centralized per se.

So voting power should not be too concentrated, wealth should not be too concentrated.

We are a long way from a workable model for crypto that fulfills these criteria. Buterin who is a frontman for libertarians (and worse) who are actually evil is the closest thing we have besides the Algo founder to a non-greedy figurehead, but we need no figurehead.

what has proven good enough for countries will prove good enough for crypto. democracy.

also its not that much actual cash that went into the crypto hole as the M2M valuation

any risk assets losing a ton of value would minimize the wealth effect but a lot of crypto holders were hoarding their coins and not spending so maybe not that much

I just bought a shipping container so I am doing my part

this is no ad hominem - I am attacking your statements here not you as a person. you are flaunting your ignorance and using some weird appeal to authority by posting a vague quote from V. B. which itself is like, not even wrong.

I am not defensive, I am embarrassed for you and all of the people poisoned by this antisocial propaganda, and it makes me despair for humanity.

HN is one of the worst place on the internet but it pretends the opposite and watching the insanity here is addictive, I have to admit I cant help yelling at them when they say really stupid and/or antisocial things.

tech guys hate journalists with a passion these days.

I think he made a couple hundred million on this trade and half a billion moe in alameda when things were going well then took investment funds denominated in either coins or USD and invested those into FTX expansion and more levered long crypto pump and dumps and then took those proceeds and did more pump and dumps and direct investments in things like robin hood and other shitcoins.

I think most of their "market making" was probably using connections to do pump and dumps of various coins.

activities like this made huge gains but since the BTC peak a lot of the same activities have been burning a lot of capital and then you end up needing recapitalization

there is no difference between archaic and non-archaic methods of finance really. just structures that emerge from the prevalent economic, regulatory, religious, and cultural context.

islamic banking may seem weird to you if you are even aware of it, but its a timeless archetype of a certain pattern of relationships and rules that arose in response to a certain envrionment at the time ( which persists into modern day ). this system has probably more in common superficially with crypto than some other ways of organizing economic activity.

using words like archaic shows ignorance of the subject and of humanity. maybe when AI is doing everything and new underlying dynamics exists for the way machines relate, we can have this discussion but even then scarcity and physics exist and some methods of resource allocation have to be negotiated or emerge organically.

institutions dont lose at the same rate that even smart retail traders do, its a cold fact.

the idea that crypto exists for reasons significantly other than speculation seems hopeful in the extreme given all the overwhelming evidence. maybe someday!

I think charitable giving has mostly secondary or tertiary benefits and those are mostly "trickle down" or just velocity of money effects. it gets some hoarded wealth into circulation which was a big issue the last 20 years with lower rates and quantitative easing etc, creating so much hoarded cash (look at corporate cash balances and hedge fund / VC / PE assets the last 10 years as a clue)

like the covid vaccines weren't possible because charity, but because science, the two are in no way equivalent. and there is evidence (not proof) from the last 150 years that capitalism enables science at a much higher multiple than charitable giving.

this is going in the right direction, in my opinion.

most of the good done in the world thee days is paradoxically perhaps achieved through commerce, not charity per se. and even charities are mostly effective in the sense that they get money flowing into the economy, where people can trade value for value and attend to their material needs, etc etc. most charity is not as effective as simply achieving some equity in income distribution, or barring that just overall higher levels of income and lower costs for the inputs that go into the economy.

dont get fooled by people who think they can put good-ness into a box labelled "giving", I dont believe its that simple.

sometimes worse is better, people are perverse

take away retail and these coins will have much much less demand which deflates the whole bubble. so you keys-coins people need all the clueless civilians, it seems to me. it's their desperate speculating that make you wealthy.

"bizarre concepts like clearing-houses"

what planet do you come from? you ask questions that seem like you have an interest in finance but cant accept the emergent capital markets structures that follow from the practice of finance?

tether is a mind blowingly large amount of money to siphon to just 13 people, a massive scam. its amazing.

crypto is famous only because of speculation, speculators drive all the value

almost surely an insider.

I think the other poster is saying that if Alameda or FTX were losing money on trades, someone smarter was on the other side of those trades, but I dont think that is necessarily true.

hear hear curiously

as SBF himself allowed in the Bloomberg interview, this system only works if humans, driven by FOMO and greed, bid up the tokens. that, more than the technology underpinning the system, is a necessary condition for defi or centralized crypto to "work."

defi is rife with hacks theft and rug pulls. but a form of fraud that is built into the entire ecosystem are tokenomics that carve out allocations of tokens to early holders, so they front run every one else.

this cannot be escaped - there is no refuge from the grift built in to the entire ecosystem. decentralized is a lie propagated to support a scam on everyone who got in later than early holders.

market making in a volatile instrument is not easy. when all instruments are .96 correlated it makes it harder to balance your book. the good thing is that its retail flow but just because its retail doesnt mean you won't lose money when the market jumps in one direction or another.

you cannot opt out, there is no escape, its a closed system. misanthropy is harmful. decentralization is a fantasy

its actuarial science which is basically stats

top comment thanks

yes its been my opinion for years that they are all crooks, the whole thing was made possible basically by quantitative easing. but I still find a lot of ridiculous foolishness posted here so I keep getting lured back.

fucking frightening

or just spent it?

wow so SBF and buddies get their money out