Now, as to why the SEC hasn’t regulated crypto out of existence.. I refer you to dementia Don
> Trump Administration Likely to Un-ban Bitcoin Mixers, Dept. of Treasury Says They are “Not Unlawful”
It's not like I forgo a lock on my front door just because my windows are made of glass.
Blockchain with central authority is the worst of both worlds.
Of course n can be smaller and the specific people less trustworthy, but that's quite a different thing.
With decentralised money, you get the safety of a globally distributed attestation backed by cryptography without a single authority controlling the supply of money or your funds.
There is no halfway option. You either have a single authority that can exercise control or you do not; number of delegates for exercise of control is almost irrelevant since you can change banks.
At least when I report fraud to credit card or my bank, they can stop or undo/chargeback a transaction.
As long as you burn as much electricity as Andorra does in a week just to make a transaction, you're probably a cryptocurrency. And that's their sole benefit it seems.
Absolutely not. Cryptocurrently exclusively refers to permissionless, decentralized, cryptographically secured, irreversible, fungible monetary system with a disinflationary or non-inflationary supply, following a voluntary, collectivized governance model.
A vast majority of tokens colloquially referred to as "cryptocurrency" couldn't be further from these principles. There are no stablecoins that are cryptocurrency. Ethereum is not cryptocurrency. Any coin issued by a corporation (e.g. Ripple) is not a cryptocurrency.
It seems to me that their initial value is 1usd per token (or some other fiat I guess) and that's also the roof of their value: they kinda guarantee that they won't become more valuable than that.
They are less usable than fiat: more businesses accept fiat than crypto, especially weird and small coins like all stable coins are.
There isn't really a floor to their value, as demonstrated here.
I see plenty of downsides of owning one of these coins, but not a single upside?
Yet people apparently do buy them, so what is the upside? There must surely be something that's good about them?
The main use is just having something dollar-like that you can move around easily. That’s useful outside the US, but also for plenty of people inside the US depending on what they’re doing; especially businesses that have a hard time getting or keeping normal banking (cough gambling, porn, weed cough).
They’re handy inside crypto since you can move in/out of other assets without touching a bank. And sometimes you can earn yield on them, which is part of the appeal (with the usual “this can blow up” caveats).
Also, there’s a reason every company wants to launch one: if you control the stablecoin, you get the float and the rails. That’s a pretty nice business if people actually use it.
If you already have solid access to USD and don’t care about that flexibility, they’re less compelling.
But yeah, not risk-free at all (depegs, issuer risk, etc). And honestly there probably isn’t much real need for dozens of slightly different stables beyond the business incentives.
They also had a smart contract which didn't do some proper checks, but the hack was only possible with the stolen private key. Whoever held the private key was able to mint a lot of money, unchecked.
So there was a traditional hack at the core of this heist, not just a smart contract exploit.
dmitrygr•58m ago
KK7NIL•49m ago