Physical security primer for Bitcoin (2019), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUgPhPkS2yc
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
"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"
eru•6h ago
TheDong•6h ago
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.
arghwhat•6h ago
SOLAR_FIELDS•6h ago
geoffmunn•4h ago
Kbelicius•3h ago
eru•5h ago
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.
arghwhat•6h ago
danaos•6h ago
elevaet•5h ago
I wonder how much crypto is changing hands off-market in shadier corners.
aorloff•5h ago