>He poured money into several digital currencies—some $90,000 in all, pulled together from his savings, the proceeds from selling his house, and a business loan. “I took out some leverage, and I just kind of went gung-ho,” Mr. Johnson said. His timing was disastrous, as one currency he invested in, ether, plummeted in price and a pair of coins, TerraUSD and Luna, collapsed. He lost most of his investment[...]
This is just nihilism. Tone throughout the article largely paints a picture of disenfranchised people who see no path for career advancement and resort to casino capitalism. Immediately brings to mind the 1920s which we seem keen to be repeating on several fronts. That a non-trivial amount of people resort to what is effectively gambling as a means to build wealth should create some attention. And I think it's time to hold the predominantly very affluent people accountable who peddle these financial instruments to the masses.
It certainly fits some folks I know who made (for a while) some money and lost some money in crypto. In many ways their attachment seems to be about what they think the ethos of crypto currency is. But their own distaste for the existing financial system is quickly having the worst of it ... reflected in crypto currency.
In the end everything is just people so yeah similar things come up.
- Blur airdrop? Lots of people farmed that pretty late and still cashing in.
- New issuances still doing good, oversubscribed.
- Non-token based products making good revenue.
I dabble in many markets around the world, alongside various parts of crypto.
One thing I find interesting about crypto is that you can make these whole revenue generating businesses without incorporating anything, and not incur personal liability. There's insatiable demand from people used to spending to access random projects. That's usually the hardest part of any business model.
You will have personal liability. Crypto does not protect you from that and it is not a substitute for corporate organization. Don't fool yourself.If you think obscurity is giving you protection that's incorrect. And if you think the blockchain gives you obscurity that is also incorrect. It is usually the easiest to track. You are only one court order or sometimes less away from discovery and liability whether civil or criminal.
> One thing I find interesting about crypto is that you can make these whole revenue generating businesses without incorporating anything, and not incur personal liability.
Depending on your jurisdiction, you could have some serious criminal liability though.
There’s also the possibility of eventually being doxxed and being personally sued.
It depends on what you do. It depends on what you're imagining to do, in order to write that.
Regarding personal lawsuits:
In the normal economy, the risk is quite low for being personally sued and being like "whoops, if only I made an LLC in some fool proof way". But its still pretty good advice anyway. In the crypto economy the risk is lower and everything is faster.
If your product or service isn't doing anything criminal then private citizens aren't going to be able to subpoena exchanges for your KYC information to move forward with their civil lawsuit against any specific person
exchanges don't reliably have your KYC information to begin with
and you also don't need to launch your product using a crypto address linked to exchanges
for those reasons the risk is lower because the barrier to being served is so high
if you really want to, of course you can still place all of this activity behind a LLCs and other entities to raise the bar even higher.
but individuals also already understand that so many developers would already be doing this kind of thing that they would already feel discouraged in trying to create consequences in this way
Oh and we’re supposed to trust Wallstreet, where the companies are laying folks off left and right? I’m not saying that crypto is a good space right now but this smells like signaling rather than journalism
You don't really have to trust Wall Street (or even the WSJ) to come to the (not novel!) conclusion that cryptocurrencies had a massive downturn in stated value over the past year. Their overwhelming irrelevancy is frankly a blessing; losing a trillion dollars in most market segments would be a nation-state-destabilizing event.
We've been through several boom's and busts for Bitcoin before (and let's be honest, all the rest of crypto rises and falls with Bitcoin).
I see no reason to assume this current bust is permanent.
The last major bust, I lost confidence after a long while and sold off at considerable loss. That turned out to be a massive, life-changing mistake. Oh well, you can't live life regretting missed investments.
I decided not to bet my life savings on the Chiefs winning the superbowl this year. That too was a life changing mistake.
Not “betting” on crypto really isn’t any different. It isn’t like investing in Apple or some solid company with a track record. It’s much closer to just gambling, and people don’t beat themselves up about not gambling.
> It isn’t like investing in Apple or some solid company with a track record. It’s much closer to just gambling, and people don’t beat themselves up about not gambling.
Yeah, like buying Apple at $180, Meta at $300, or Google stock at $140 last year. /s I don't see anyone here screaming that they are glad that they bought at those prices.
The clever strategy was to just wait for the market to crash [0] after the giant run up to 'All time highs' in a short space of time.
Oh it’s quite rational, just asymmetrically so, just like any other penny stock. Such markets consist of manipulators and the manipulated, and the manipulators are the rational ones.
And, apart from price, the crypto markets are just like penny stocks: opaque, obscure, thinly traded, and ripe with manipulation and other fraud.
How do large owners of an asset, whales as you call them, pump the price of that asset? And what evidence do you have of this? The evidence I’ve seen points a traditional ponzi actor, who corrupted regulators and governments, publishing fake inflated prices to generate a bull market and attract more deposits to steal. Where are the Bitcoin whales you mention?
As usual this is nonsense and irrelevant. Satoshi himself had over 1M coins but the vast majority of early coins are lost. According to that analysis many old lost wallets are these supposed whales.
The observation that is also unjustified is this idea that whales can prop up the price, how does that work exactly? if they hold the asset then selling it would lower the price, so hold on did they sell earlier and are using USD to buy now, but that would generate tax liabilities they would have to pay now and also lose transaction fees, yet supposedly they are propping up Bitcoin price. It’s a nonsensical theory.
You're trying to simplify the study, but it isn't that simple - they use pretty complex analysis to present their findings, so replying to what you said here is a little off subject.
> The observation that is also unjustified is this idea that whales can prop up the price, how does that work exactly?
I’ve read portions and skimmed all of the paper. Then using PDF version I used keyword searching to make sure I’m not crazy, I can’t find any portion of the complex analysis that handles Satoshi’s coins, or lost coins at all.
This paper is now one of many examples where intelligent and sophisticated authors produce complex analysis but omit very basic and obvious factors, likely because they negate their conclusions.
If the BTC price is set artificially, it means it is not a rational price, IMO, for a security/investment/currency/market. Rational as in "people will be people" and "can be explained" aye.
My argument for why it is irrational is that bitcoin as an asset has nothing backing it. It does not produce anything, it is not a liability on anyone else's balance sheet, and it can't be used for anything other than hoping that a greater fool than you will pay you more for it in the future.
Yes, you could say some similar things about government currency, but in that case there is a large organization that is motivated to keep the buying power of the currency relatively stable. Traditional currency also has the benefit of being much easier to transfer between people, unlike bitcoin which cannot scale to serve the needs of the population due to inherent limitations of the technology.
Bitcoin has the largest decentralized distributed computer network on the planet backing it. Along with numerous technical advancements in the functionality of money. Many serious students on the anthropological history of currency in human history recognize it’s certainly a significant technological innovation in money.
What I meant by nothing backing it is that it cannot be redeemed for any other thing of value, in the same way that at one point we used gold certificates as currency, which were "backed by" gold. At that time you could literally exchange the gold certificate for gold coins at a bank. A share of stock is backed by the value of the company since the stock grants you partial ownership of the company. Bitcoin may have a lot of computers that are burning electricity attempting to mine bitcoin and powering the bitcoin network, but as a bitcoin holder I don't have any ownership of those computers. They just continue to consume resources that we somehow have to pay for by pouring more money into the bitcoin system.
Sure, there are some people that think it is a significant innovation. There are also many people who recognize that it is not solving any real world problem, and that up to this point it has just operated as a giant speculative bubble.
> There are also many people who recognize that it is not solving any real world problem, and that up to this point it has just operated as a giant speculative bubble.
Both parts of this statement are completely false. I’m unaware of any system which allows secure pseudonymous online global exchange between two parties without any trusted centralized third party. That seems to be a massive real world problem. Additionally Bitcoin is not a speculative bubble by any stretch, that accusation has been repeatedly been made since early days and with each cycle adoption and value increases, it’s a false accusation.
I don't see that problem as being massive. Our society depends on some amount of trust. In order to view this webpage, your browser put some trust in the certificate authority that verified the certificate of the hacker news servers. Sure, in some sense the idea of cryptocurrency is an interesting one, but the downsides are too massive to make it practical. By not trusting anyone, we end up in a situation of constantly trying to resolve a byzantine generals problem, which it turns out is massively inefficient and wasteful.
The fact that the price of bitcoin has gone up and down and up again doesn't disprove that it is a bubble. Bubbles don't have to follow a single boom and bust cycle. For example, I think that shares of GME stock are still much higher than the business fundamentals would suggest, due to the stock gaining a cult like following, so now the share price is driven by memes and dreams. In fact, as I argued before, I would say that there is no inherent value to bitcoin so that really only leaves speculation as the driver of the price.
BTC is rational like tulip-bulbs are rational, it isn't rational like USD is rational (you can argue USD is irrational too, of course).
When I said irrational I just meant in the context of things we can relate BTC to (from tulip bulbs to fairly stable fiat to securities).
Like you can call penny stocks "rational" and a ponzi scheme "rational" (I don't think BTC goes this far btw so this is for illustrative purposes don't yell at me) you can call BTC "rational" but compared to the SPY or Vanguard target-date funds etc.. these things look pretty "crazy"
tulip-bulbs do not have actual utility. they can't feed my family.
i can guess what you'll say next... the volatility of bitcoin won't either!
my response to that is that bitcoin isn't a currency. it is a store of value in that i can borrow against its value. with that borrowing, i can use it to generate value for my family. i can borrow against it (without having to go to a bank or get permission or even a credit check!) and open up a grocery market, sell bananas, generate revenue and pay down the loan. there is value in that and it has nothing to do with volatility as long as my loan-to-value ratio is maintained.
few understand or even consider those aspects of bitcoin and crypto in general.
The volatility of any cryptocurrency "investment" makes it more like a gamble pure and simple than any other investment.
It's irrational to take 10% of your savings, walk into Caesar's Palace, and put it on red.
People are injecting much larger percentages of their savings into cryptocurrency.
No matter how many wins, no matter how high the cryptocurrency market has climbed between crashes, the volatility of it makes it irrational for anything above 1% of your savings... If even that.
It sounds like you think it's unwise, but that's not quite the same thing as irrational. People make different decisions using different sets of information.
I have a significant portion of my savings as Bitcoin (much more than 1%). That decision was made through lots of close observation of the ecosystem, careful reading and thought. I'm very confident in the long-term growth of it, but I don't keep any month to month expense money as Bitcoin because of short-term volatility.
You may disagree, but you can't characterize that as irrational.
This isn’t really true. Even picking the most extreme moves of Bitcoin it has lower volatility than many major tech stocks and many developing country fiat currencies.
Now factor in the variable that the most recent bull rally and crash was mostly instigated, in both directions, by a traditional ponzi bad actor as the FTX scam simply used crypto as a mechanism for an age old financial scam, not really caused by crypto, but instead enabled by outright corruption of regulators and governments, then … are you really sure long term natural Bitcoin downward volatility is actually high?
Lot of cherry picking in that analysis and also you are comparing index whereas I meant individual tech stocks. Let’s not forget in speculative bubbles everything has downside volatility but lots of real and important assets undergo manias, real estate, railroads, even 1999 nasdaq then crashing 90%, left out of the analysis conveniently.
I’d go as far as the argue that given the grandiose goal of competing with sovereign fiat as modern private currency, the volatility of Bitcoin is likely lower than one could reasonably expect. If we add in the reality that recent mania and crash was overwhelming instigated by perhaps the largest conventional or legacy financial fraud in modern history, FTX, then Bitcoin looks almost sleepy.
Even funnier in the cherry picked analysis was they included Turkish Lira and it was 8.83, it’s now 18.89 per dollar. It along with numerous other fiat currencies have much higher volatility than Bitcoin.
I'm glad you acknowledge that Bitcoin is vulnerable to having its value cut in half by the collapse of a single company.
People should probably continue to invest long term in index funds, advice that hasn't changed in decades.
Yes, I agree that it's a horrible situation that Americans depend on the stock market whims to retire, but that's more due to America's allergies to socialism than an indictment of the market itself. It's still a demonstrably better investment instrument.
Yes that’s certainly true that index funds are a much safer investment than Bitcoin. I wouldn’t dispute that.
It’s absolutely expected that risk assets will have high uncertainty around their prices. +/- 50% changes is absolutely normal in free markets for many risk assets.
Socialism provides no solutions but in this case there isn’t even a problem. Statism and socialism in my opinion are scourges of human civilization that bring nothing but misery and war. Viable modern private currency like Bitcoin provides great hope for humanity that the war machines funded by fiat currencies might have an end in sight, maybe in next 100 years. most people don’t realize that the type of money we use, fiat sovereign currency, was specifically invented to help wage war and specifically serves this purpose today as well.
I mentioned that Americans depend on the whims of the market for their retirement, rather than most developed nations which have pensions and government sponsored retirement. This is generally what people mean when they say "socialism" as described in the current capitalist system we all live under. In America, you call your politicians that advocate for this sort of thing, "democratic socialists." Bernie Sanders is an example.
Did you think I meant a socialist revolution seeking communism? Is that what you think Germans, Fins, Taiwanese, or Norwegians living on government pensions are doing lol? Well, that demonstrates my point re: americans are allergic to the word "socialism." I mentioned better ways for people to have a guaranteed retirement, such as a socialist policy of government pensions, and you immediately thought I was calling for a Stalinist regime?
Out of curiosity, are you an anarchocapitalist? It sounds like you believe a free market of bitcoin will grant people more freedom than socialistically regulated capitalism. That'd be nice, but the evidence doesn't seem to be in favor of this argument.
Confining socialism to government pension programs I would consider to be deceptive rebranding. I have no problem with government pension or insurance programs as long as governments don’t use monopoly power to ban private competition with such programs and the programs originate via democratic process. Socialism should be reserved as a label for direct government participation and control over economic activity. Of course there is a subtle nuance when redistribution programs are funded by unsustainable fiat money printing.
You asked if I identify with the label anarchocapitalist I don’t personally however I can seen why the need to label might result in that being applied to me when I try to explain my primary thesis. I will attempt it briefly.
However, first let me explain that local and small scale governments that advocate democratic socialism can be excellent healthy communities. The issue is with scale and comes to the fundamental issue of money. Money is a social construction is an often touted liberal arts viewpoint. I will counter that money is actually organic and natural and not purely a human social construct. There are many examples in animal world where organisms use a medium of exchange to collaborate. Experiments in primates show they will intrinsically create a currency framework if provided with an appropriate medium. Females of numerous animals regularly will exchange sexual behavior for food, often in desperation like humans, in situations of abundance they will stop this pattern.
Money and it’s characteristics have a profound impact on human social activity. Our current form of money, sovereign fiat, has only existed since 1000 AD in the east and not until early 1700s in the west. This money form enables war. Period. It was invented in all cases to enable states to wage war without actually having the resources to do so. Much like financial commentators discuss leverage, fiat currency, is the original leverage. Kings borrowing from the future, from their own population, using threat of force and sovereign power.
This fundamental dynamic has driven the last 300+ years of human history and conflict. Private currencies when previously flourished have promoted peace and rapid economic development, of course those period can also have manias and crashes but in comparison to world war are insignificant on the scale of human suffering.
Bitcoin represents the first viable attempt to challenge fiat currency as a form on money. It’s a very exciting development in human progress. Local and state governments promoting what you call socialism can potentially benefit as the enormous tax on human productivity extracted by large federal governments using fiat to fund their militaries and other forms of oppression and violence will be freed up.
I'm curious if you've read David Graeber's "Debt" and if so what were your thoughts? If not, I think you'd find his analysis interesting. It's an analysis that draws a very clear line between the idea of money and things that are valuable. For example, a primate trading sex for food wouldn't be an instance of using money in this framework. I also think you'd enjoy his exploration into the usage of currency as the means to, as you say, pay soldiers.
I think he references much older examples of doing so than the 1700s, such as Roman soldiers being paid in coin, but you might be talking about indications of credit (the early American dollar as an example). This also though has apparently been used for millennia, there's evidence of such in ancient sumeria.
> Local and state governments promoting what you call socialism can potentially benefit as the enormous tax on human productivity extracted by large federal governments using fiat to fund their militaries and other forms of oppression and violence will be freed up.
I'd like to understand better what you mean by this. Are you saying that a reduced usage of usd because people are buying good with Bitcoin (or "paper" issues of credit backed by Bitcoin and tracked by whatever cryptocurrency people call bank ledgers, considering the slow Bitcoin block write speed), will result in a real devaluation in the USD and thus a lesser ability for the USA to do imperialism and police brutality? This is a fascinating and unique argument and I'd like to hear more.
> I'm curious if you've read David Graeber's "Debt" and if so what were your thoughts? If not, I think you'd find his analysis interesting.
I haven’t. You’re correct. I really need to read his book even if I know there will be some conclusions I strongly disagree with. The anthropological analysis will be insightful.
> It's an analysis that draws a very clear line between the idea of money and things that are valuable. For example, a primate trading sex for food wouldn't be an instance of using money in this framework. I also think you'd enjoy his exploration into the usage of currency as the means to, as you say, pay soldiers.
My understanding is a currency medium can often be chosen which are dual use. Cigarettes in jails and we have many example of seeds being used. I’d also point out primates (and possibly other mammals) will adopt non-intrinsic value currency once humans introduce them to it in experiments. If they are taught an item is exchangeable for anything of value they will adopt it and start a micro-economy.
> I think he references much older examples of doing so than the 1700s, such as Roman soldiers being paid in coin, but you might be talking about indications of credit (the early American dollar as an example). This also though has apparently been used for millennia, there's evidence of such in ancient sumeria.
That is certainly true but subtly and critically different. Those coinages were not fiat, they were based on precious metals, and actually the attempt by the Romans to debase their metal backed currency to raise funds beyond their contributed to uncontrollable inflation which factored into to the collapse of Rome. The most important distinction of pure fiat is that the currency is not redeemable and is fundamentally backed by the violence of the state from collection of tax revenue and war and colonization. Western fiat started with Bank of England founding in 1694, explicitly to wage a war of revenge against France without the hard currency funds.
> I'd like to understand better what you mean by this. Are you saying that a reduced usage of usd because people are buying good with Bitcoin (or "paper" issues of credit backed by Bitcoin and tracked by whatever cryptocurrency people call bank ledgers, considering the slow Bitcoin block write speed), will result in a real devaluation in the USD and thus a lesser ability for the USA to do imperialism and police brutality? This is a fascinating and unique argument and I'd like to hear more.
Yes I absolutely. I’m saying that but even further. USD is global reserve and great financial benefits have always been given to the empire whom’s currency is the global reserve, gilder, sterling, this isn’t a new phenomenon.
If Bitcoin can challenge even a small portion of this status it can have an enormous effect. This effect will not be limited to only USD but all major fiat currencies and it can put significant pressure on the expansion of sovereign debt and central bank money creation. Critics of government debt love to focus on the social programs, and yes they can create massive economic inefficiency, extensive socialism is proven to be organically toxic in some sense, it’s simply unnatural when made extreme, however black white thinking can’t capture an important nuance of the balance between competition and collaboration, or socialist structures and capitalist, a healthy system needs a balance because social policies act like insurance systems, which we can prove enable increased risk taking, which enables faster innovation.
But let’s get back to the specifics. Military budgets are distinct in function from social redistribution programs. They purely expend resources not redistribute. Citizens are taxed across each layer of their society but the largest percentage is always the federal entity. This tax collection is only part of it, another huge tax is inflation along with issuance of huge amounts of federal government debt. Significant adoption of Bitcoin and other hard PoW cryptocurrency’s will upend this as reserves are moved to hard PoW private currencies and taxation via inflation and debt will be ineffective. However because local government taxes and budgets don’t utilize these monetary techniques they will not be effected in the same way. On the contrary because you can view society has having a certain optimal tax burden and redistribution framework, then federal burden is squeezing out local governments. The end of fiat currency could give rise to more city state, Renaissance like, structure.
Lastly, remember that industrialization is directly linked to increased government size and also war, this is because factories are large concentrated physical locations of economic production, they can be seized very easily with soldiers. My personal belief is that since crypto currencies are a form of private currency which are resistant to state violence and economic production is becoming so global and nimble, all these variables combined are pointing to the coming end of fiat and large federal governments world wide. Perhaps it will take around 100 years is my guess.
ps. sorry for delay in reply I was traveling with family and didn’t have any spare time.
Bitcoin being 45% up in two months is not flat, neither is the total crypto market cap up 40%.
The news really has taken a toll on HNers, just like it did when everyone here thought Meta stock was going to zero and doubled in three months from $88.
That it sucks that the entire cryptocurrency trading game requires people to be losing money and holding bags, that the cryptocurrency scene will continue to cannibalize itself, that cryptocurrency is a bad investment, and that cryptocurrency is basically useless.
Why do you care if it sucks or not when you think it's a bad investment and useless? Don't invest in them or trade them if you don't think they are good. It's a great thing about the world we have. You don't have to like everything and things you don't like aren't forced on you so you can ignore them and do the things you like.
A lot of people like trading them because there's so much alpha in them. They know the risks because they are adults and can handle themselves.
If we grant that we like a society that legislates that we wear seatbelts and can't be sold meat and with human feces in it, can't we apply that same logic to the financial arena?
This "they're adults and can choose for themselves" could be said of any Ponzi scheme. Sounds less like an argument for libertarianism and more an argument for the freedom to exploit unmolested a pool of victims.
My ideal is everyone receives the education necessary to make sound financial decisions and be able to avoid getting preyed upon by malcontents. As it stands, when I graduated highschool in the USA, some of my classmates were functionality illiterate. We see boomers get financially scammed regularly through phone calls. Plus there's scams due to straight up lying that no matter your level of education you can't really guard against, like with ftx. Our society should protect against this.
So what? So I want other people to not be scammed or hurt or exploited. If you want a libertarian paradise where people are free to exploit each other I heard there's gonna be some Bitcoin islands, you can try one, meanwhile I don't really see the point of society or government if we don't use it to protect people from exploitation and harm.
Ponzi schemes are illegal. FTX is facing punishment for running the joint like they did. There’s also unlimited corruption and crime and fraud in the regulated vanilla financial markets. Get off your high horse and get real and please try and get a slightly convincing argument. If I wanted the sermon I’d go to church or join a HS debate club.
In context of the discussion of this thread, which is about trading, NASDAQ is all about gambling funds too. Doesn't matter whether it is regulated or not.
If stocks go down and you hold long-term, ultimately selling for a profit, would you describe that as “investor ‘still’ thinks he can make money on stocks”?
I respect that most of crypto is a scam, but it’s upsetting that a place like HackerNews can’t even acknowledge the good ones.
No. Let me phrase this in a sensible way: if a trillion dollars in stated stock market value evaporated over a year, I would not be remotely surprised at the WSJ putting out an article with "still" in the title.
What do you consider to be the good ones? I think it is likely that whatever argument you would give for most of crypto being a scam probably also applies to the ones you think are good. Crypto has caused us all as a society to waste a huge amount of electricity for very little tangible benefit.
Personally, Bitcoin and Ethereum are the only two that I truly trust, but I’m always willing to learn about new projects.
Edit: I look forward to seeing where we are in the crypto space in 15-30 years. Looking back, I expect it to be funny hearing over and over “look at all the energy we wasted” as people shook their fists at the sky.
Well, I would disagree that Bitcoin or Ethereum are doing anything useful for us. Bitcoin fails as a currency due to being impractically expensive and slow to perform transactions with. In addition, since there is no central organization to help with fraud protection you end up with a very difficult interface to use, and many ways to accidentally lose your money with no recourse. The code is easy to copy, so you end up with a mess of competing forks with no incentive to converge.
I guess we'll just have to wait and see how it goes. I expect it to be funny looking back in the sense that we wonder why people ever thought that bitcoin had value.
Gold has very little practical value outside of the small % used for manufacturing. Most precious stones have lab-created near equivalents. There is still a multi billion $ market for the real deal. BTC is just a bunch of code so it's not even pretty, but a lot of things have value despite not being very useful, and if people have "faith" that BTC has a certain value, then it has that value.
Anecdotally, I considered BTC to be worth ~20-25k USD back when it was at < 3,000 USD, and including when it was well over 50000 USD. Turns out that seems to be the resting point currently.
A stock is considered overvalued when its price is not justified by its earning outlook. Bitcoin does not have earnings, so if we tried to value it the same way we value stocks, the intrinsic value would be zero. People often use the word value to mean the market value though, in which case, yes I would agree that bitcoin has a nonzero market price.
What sort of factors were you considering when you determined a valuation of 20-25k as the true worth of bitcoin?
No factors that could be considered useful analysis. Something like: since most BTC has been mined + its general popularity + its usefulness, it seemed to me to be undervalued by some 10-20x (when it was 1-3k). Similarly, when it was 50k+, it felt over valued relative to popularity + usefulness.
If it becomes more useful, such as if it becomes the main currency of countries with terrible currencies, then its value can skyrocket since it will be sought after like crazy.
> if it becomes the main currency of countries with terrible currencies
Yeah I guess we would just disagree about the probability of that happening. There are inherent technical limitations preventing bitcoin from ever reaching a high transaction volume, and I think the lightning network has its own problems, so I don't see that as a solution either. Also, since it is so extremely energy intensive, for the good of our planet's environment I hope that this misguided experiment in cryptocurrencies dies out sooner rather than later.
I feel like the Lightning network addresses the ease of use and transaction cost issues, but I agree that there is still work to be done.
Regardless, this is the part where I’d tell one of my friends that I’ll buy them a beer if they’re right. Time flies so I’m sure we’ll get our answer soon enough.
The main problem in my mind with the Lightning network is that in order increase transaction speed, it is reducing the decentralization by requiring participants to trust the other network operators that they create channels with. For the lightning network to really scale to a global payment system, we would need large central hubs for the payments to route through and you would end up with a poor imitation of the centralized banking system that bitcoin is attempting to avoid.
So less than the 2008 stock market crash, yet people still think they can get rich on the stock market. You're making the mistake of being wowed by a huge number without knowing what its size actually means.
When I typed my original comment, that wasn’t there yet. I will have to read the article now that the archive link is posted. Thank you for pointing that out.
The whole financial system is a scam and a pyramid scheme of unprecedented gargantuan proportions. That's why crypto thrives in that environment. It doesn't make sense to say that crypto is a scam any more than it makes sense to say that stocks are a scam. They are both systems of allocation and accounting; nothing more. It always depends on which specific cryptos and which specific shares you're talking about.
If cryptocurrency, as a concept, is a scam, then you might as well say that accounting, as a concept, is also a scam.
A cryptocurrency is just a ledger of accounts which is extremely reliable and which is open for public auditing. What's bad about that?
It sounds like an amazing product, why not use it?
The whole thing just turned into a dumb religious war.
How is Apple stock a scam? You own a small part of a business which makes lots of money, they give some of it back to investors every year. What about Coke? Google?
Handing money back to stockholders isn't a scam. Every stock buyback either a) gives me money if I sell and I get to keep the same % of the company I owned before, or b) makes me own more of the same company. And the tax treatment is better than a dividend.
Which rule exactly? There are a number of rules interacting which make buybacks in the US better right now, it's not just a rule that says "buybacks will have better tax treatment than dividends". The dividend tax rate could be changed to zero tomorrow (or the tax treatment on dividends could become like other countries who don't double tax) and buybacks would be less favorable. Taxes are complicated, there will always be one choice which is better than another from a tax perspective.
At that scale, everything is a scam in almost every way. They arbitrage unfavorable laws, monopolize supply chains, monopolize consumer attention, monopolize financial interests, engage in regulatory capture, benefit from international monetary expansion, government contracts, engage in coercive sales tactics (how many times a company has forced me to use a Mac for work in spite of it being less efficient for me), etc...
If it is just a big scam, why don't more companies do it? Apple is generating about $100 bill a year in net income. No one else is. Tim Cook is just the worlds greatest scam artist by orders of magnitude?
You don't have to be a scammer to benefit from scams. E.g. if your dad is a mafia boss and buys you a house for free, you're not a scammer yourself, yet you certainly benefited from scams. Or in some cases, you might think that you're merely toeing the line between good and bad, but behind the scenes, your employees are secretly stepping over the line constantly without your knowledge.
The reason why not every company is like this is because not every company has enough money and political power to be able to call up any politician whenever they want, lobby for beneficial regulations, hire the best (most well connected) lawyers in the world, etc... All these factors create an unfair playing field.
