> Given that cryptocurrencies don’t produce anything of material value<p>I've read this "crypto has no use-case" meme a lot recently, and it's always perplexed me. Crypto is clearly the easiest way to do international payments right now, particularly for countries with restrictive capital controls, like, for example, Argentina (<a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-08-13/argentina-tightens-capital-controls-ahead-of-midterm-elections" rel="nofollow">https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-08-13/argentina...</a>).<p>Sometimes this is qualified as "crypto has no use-case except crime", but what obligation do I, a US person, have to follow or respect corrupt Argentinian regulations?
And Dropbox was just a ftp, and the iPhone was just a lame mp3 player. And e-commerce just a fad, etc.<p>We're blinded by what was, and wrongfully infer what will be.<p>Also, we mix in our biases, Douglas Adams said it best:<p>"I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:<p>1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.<p>2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.<p>3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things."
Why is this flagged? The argument presented is very reasonable and requires a rebuttal. It is also an uncommon argument I haven't seen previously on the front page. The main argument is that Tether is acting like an unregulated central bank that holds all the power over the price of cryptocurrencies. Thus, crypto holders who are not in on the fraud are like a flock of Bison being driven off a cliff, if there is ever a run on Tether.<p>The other comments on this thread are worthless and just shilling crypto.
It still floors me to see such bearish opinions like this. It demonstrates how intelligent people can be completely wrong about the future, and it signals how early we are in the adoption curve for crypto.<p>The ability to print money and misrepresent the value of the dollar (i.e., CPI, GDP) combined with incentives for personal enrichment should be evidence enough that government-controlled currencies is not the scalable solution we thought it was.<p>We're about to experience inflation like we've not seen in the US in a long time and the resulting transfer of wealth and increase in inequality will be a catalyst for the adoption of crypto.<p>I hope to see you all there.
The proof that it's a ponzi scheme is that some blockchains use proof of work which requires electricity. It's left as an exercise to the reader to prove the claim that a distributed and decentralized database has no value (or better the reader should just take those unproven claims at face value). Lots of web3, NFT, DAO, decentralized gaming, metaverse, and DeFi projects are of dubious value but I find the lack of discussion about any of that in the article to be a pretty big red flag.<p>This reads like the writer had a conclusion in mind and couldn't be bothered to actually look at any of the existing or potential future use cases and wrote off the entire thing as a scam. It's possible the conclusion is true but too many of the actually important details are missing and too much of the focus is on completely irrelevant things (like the fact that some blockchains are proof of work so even proof of stake blockchains would be Ponzi schemes) for this to even be worth reading for most people.
The good news for the writer of the article about the ,,bad investment'' is that he can short it on regulated exchanges and he can be soon a billionaire if he's right.
I didn't like this post because author is too short sighted. Yes, it can become dust. And it also cannot. And if it becomes dust it can start all over again.<p>He's just making a prediction, as a novel Nostradamus, and not considering multiple scenarios.
I'm still skeptical of blockchain as a whole and hoping someone can help explain this to me.<p>Blockchains (and cryptocurrencies that ride atop them) keep track of all the transactions going back to its inception. Those blocks get passed around the chain. Some nodes archive them, but don't old blocks still circulate? How far back do blocks get circulated before they're no longer circulating (2, 3, 4, 5, 10 tranactions back, I'm sure it depends on the currency)?<p>I've heard right now BTC is running at like 3 transactions a second. Astronomically far from the same number of transactions in fiat currency. What happens <i>if</i> crypto was to ever reach parity with fiat transactions? Every pack of gum, every donut, every Starbucks transaction gets circulated through all nodes the same way that every hedge fund movement, real estate closure, or business acquisiton does? It seems like all the history blocks would gum up the network traffic of circulating current/real-time transactions. The amount of overhead to process 3 transactions per second isn't enough to delay those 3 transactions, but as more traffic enters the chain it seems like the amount of supporting chatter will grow even faster.<p>How do cryptocurrencies offload the administrative/archival overhead from the transactions in order to process transactions so you're not standing around waiting for your BTC to process payment before your coffee gets cold?<p>In network terms, we don't <i>all</i> rely on root DNS servers. Those are there for other DNS servers to pull from a trusted source. Hitting up the root DNS servers is still bad etiquette, right?
The local mirroring DNS servers are faster and provide lookups for the here-and-now. If it doesn't know, the DNS server will query the roots to locate the authoritative record keeper for the domain in question (and cache it for future reference).<p>I see blockchain like that DNS but it requires all DNS servers to agree with the resolution before providing the results to the user. That seems like it will be incredibly slow and at some point all that administrative chatter will outstrip the capacity to process a transaction or "query".<p>With fiat currency, we have localized transactions. Sometimes a credit card processor may go down, sometimes your bank cannot be reached. In those cases you can resort to paying with cash or <i>gasp</i> a check. Those transactions get processed at the lowest local level and there's no need to concern some bank in Pakistan or the US Federal Reserve that you just paid $3.50 for an overpriced soda at Jersey Mikes (which they are!) from your checking account.<p>I'm very keenly interested in how these problems are to be solved when/if the dream of crypto being a truly global alternative to "cash"/fiat.<p>Can someone fill me in?
What a bunch of words.<p>Saying they're a Ponzi Scheme over and over again doesn't make them one. Blaming the group for the individual is certainly in the zeitgeist, but it's still BS. There's so many ways it's not a Ponzi Scheme. Maybe Tether is? But Tether isn't all cryptocurrencies.<p>"... making unmediated online transactions securely in a trustless environment in this way is not without costs."<p>Yea, sure, but it doesn't support the thesis.<p>"Given that cryptocurrencies don’t produce anything of material value..."<p>How is that a given? What defines material value? Is the author a Gold cheerleader? Do they expect us to eat dollar bills?<p>"The 2008 financial crisis made clear why the financial sector must be brought under public control."<p>What does public control mean? They are, that's what the SEC is.