Before Bitcoin, there did not even exist the possibility of programmable money because no unit of account could ever be guaranteed to actually exist since there was no way to verify said existence. After Bitcoin, we now have a fundamental change where programmable money is now a possibility. So what if we have not found all the possible use cases of programmable money? That's going to be a work in progress for a long long time. You can assert that programmable money doesn't have any real use and you are welcome to have that opinion. Personally I think programmable money will have many uses and will allow for the creation of a more robust and more efficient financial system.
It looked like Gensler was trying to secure a monopoly for FTX in the US, so making sure Coinbase didn't have a competing product was a cornerstone of that game plan.
As a society, we are quite good at keeping people alive for a long time but not so good at addressing chronic illness. With the massive increase in autoimmune disease, obesity and other chronic illnesses, I would contend that overall we are less healthy on average than just a few decades ago and this trend will continue indefinitely until massive changes occur in the medical and food industries.
Kraken regularly publishes proof of reserves. I don't recommend keeping funds on exchanges as a rule, but I don't feel stressed out leaving a percentage of my holdings there for an extended duration.
I believe only Coinbase publishes total liabilities at the moment. In my opinion, Coinbase is the gold standard due to being a publicly traded company and Kraken carries more risk.
>Any client can independently verify that their balance was included in the Proof of Reserves audit by comparing select pieces of data with the Merkle root.
That's the thing with decentralization, since anyone can participate you will always get a bunch of gamblers because most people are not in it for ideology but rather to make a buck. That's just human nature. Is it possible to create incentives to keep the gamblers way? I haven't come across any great ideas so far.
It's actually worse than that. The entire selling point of crypto is that it's an ungoverned unregulated financial wild west. That makes this space very attractive for people who want to do things that would be more difficult in a regulated environment where actions have legal consequences; and the more such actors enter the space, the more people who do not want to be around such actors leave. So eventually you end up with a population of half a dozen confused normies and a gazillion scammers and gamblers.
It's exactly the same effect as evaporative cooling of online social groups: if you don't set boundaries, trolls kicked out of places that do gather in your space and people who don't like being in such a space leave, until your space is nearly all trolls and one morning you wake up to find you've made a *chan again.
Excess liver consumption is a risk factor for vitamin A toxicity though, and the B12 amount varies wildly. Red meat consumption also increases cancer risk. It’s safer to take supplements from a reputable source.
High dividend stocks have been a good bet and hedge in previous downturns. Individual stocks will have high variance, but a basket of high dividend stocks would be worth looking into.
At the end of day, this entire fiasco really drives home the point if its not your keys its not your coins. Shady exchanges/banks can always collapse and take your entire portfolio with it, but if you have a securely backed up wallet, then your coins will be untouchable no matter what kind of shady shenanigans goes down in the wider cryptocurrency landscape.
I think people are too hyper focused on the price aspect of cryptocurrencies. The experiment that is Bitcoin shows that people do not need to rely on a monetary system where a cabal of rich and powerful individuals can arbitrarily modify the money supply without any regard to all the participants in that monetary system.
The genie is already out of the bottle and there is no way to put it back. There will always be those especially in the younger generations that want something better than the current system. Bitcoin shows that you can have a completely transparent monetary system based on code that is available to be audited by anyone. Bitcoin may or may not survive, but the idea behind it will.
It is true that a cabal of rich people cannot arbitrarily modify the money supply. We instead get a permanently chosen system of money supply that was created by an ideologically driven software engineer who appears to have vanished into the ether. Is it not possible that Satoshi chose a less optimal system than the central banks would? The finite and logarithmic rewards make a huge huge huge difference in the eventual distribution of BTC worldwide, should it become a dominant system. In my opinion, a system where early adopters get unimaginably rich forever is simply unethical.
And if another system eventually wins... then isn't that simply an example of a cabal of people (though not necessarily rich at first in this case) modifying the rules for money supply? Doge produces a different outcome than BTC. That's important.
I don't think fair distribution of cryptocurrency in the bootstrap phase is a solved problem. We got a long way to go if we are to come up with a fair system. Satoshi went with the best that he could come up with which is a no premine solution.
A slightly better solution would be a no premine coin with a global announcement for 5 years before the mining begins so everybody gets a fair shot at participation. I am sure we can develop even more fair forms of distribution with sufficient research.
Coins don't return to the reward pool when somebody dies. A system of new aristocratic families based on who was an early adopter and held on to some BTC is not something I'm excited about.
I also don't think that going backwards is a good thing. Yes, BTC is more equitable than a system of divine right of kings where the monarchy literally owns everything. Hooray.
> The experiment that is Bitcoin shows that people do not need to rely on a monetary system where a cabal of rich and powerful individuals can arbitrarily modify the money supply without any regard to all the participants in that monetary system.
I don't get it. How does this description fail to encompass the likes of SBF, CZ, or Do Kwon? And while they didn't modify the money supply (although UDT kinda did), their actions had a strong impact on the value of money. So anyone holding coins in their own wallets still got screwed by their actions.
Bitcoin only solves the problem of manipulation of the underlying money supply. It does not solve the problem of fraud and scams. Maybe one day we can also solve that problem with exchanges existing only as smart contracts, but with exchanges that are not completely transparent you always run into the risk of getting defrauded because you don't really know what's going on under the hood.
What everyone is saying and you’re missing, is that those scams and frauds affect the inherent value of your bag, and reduces your purchasing power of services/products. You can take solace in having X/N possible BTCs, but you’ll need 100X when the price falls.
I always see advocates for crypto bashing central exchanges, but at the same time they bemoan the slow pace of adoption. I just don’t see it ever being even remotely main stream without central organizations. It is far too much work managing it all yourself even for tech savvy people. Just the process of downloading a wallet and downloading ledger is a huge pain in the ass. And then have to do it for every crypto if you’re not using a multi-wallet!
If you’re storing your own crypto you need a wallet, backups, and cold storage at the very least. Plus you need to remember your seed phrase. If I lose my bank account info or cards I have several ways of getting access to my money, crypto no so much.
It has been a while since I set up but last time I did I had to download the blockchain’s ledger aka the history of every single transaction. Is this no longer the case?
I'd rather not have my access to my net worth be behind a six word phrase. Might be tough to pay for shit after I get hit by a car or get old or something and have trouble remembering stuff.
> people do not need to rely on a monetary system where a cabal of rich and powerful individuals can arbitrarily modify the money supply without any regard to all the participants in that monetary system.
Is this satire?
Because crypto currencies are not the gleaming example of “free of manipulation” that you think they are. There’s endless cases of whales, exchanges, NFT groups and crypto-celebrities using their capital and power in order to manipulate markets and supply in exactly their favour. The NFT space was especially bad for this. In fact, a lot of those NFT groups are exactly what I’d describe as a “cabal”.
> The experiment that is Bitcoin shows that people do not need to rely on a monetary system where a cabal of rich and powerful individuals can arbitrarily modify the money supply without any regard to all the participants in that monetary system.
Is this really true, given that the largest currency pair of Bitcoin is with USDT, which is alleged to have been arbitrarily created at whim to pump up the price of Bitcoin?
Let’s not forget the frictionless enablement of spectacular ransomware enterprises, and the glorious enrichment of dangerous actors with stolen funds. It’s a small price to pay for all this… freedom?
It also enabled about $60+ million dollars to be donated to Ukraine and that's just one data point. Whether these other problems are a small price to pay will depend on who you are talking to. To the Ukrainians that benefited from these donations and to those that have food, weapons and shelter from these donations, it is most likely a small price to pay.
Perhaps a portion of these donations could have come from other sources if cryptocurrencies did not exist, but there isn't really a good way to quantify that, so I won't go into that discussion.
I was able to donate hundreds of dollars to Ukraine using the same credit card I use for everything else. What is special about crypto donations to Ukraine? I suspect that the fees of converting USD->BTC (or other crypto) and then the recipients converting back to UAH are higher than the <2% CC fee I paid. (I used a card with no foreign transaction fee.)
And with credit card, the donation recipient wouldn't be at risk of losing double digit percentages of the value donated if they didn't immediately cash out into fiat currency.
Maybe they finally realized they looked stupid after a decade of using Venezuela as an example of how crypto can help a country, even though crypto hasn't made anything better there.
>The experiment that is Bitcoin shows that people do not need to rely on a monetary system where a cabal of rich and powerful individuals can arbitrarily modify the money supply without any regard to all the participants in that monetary system.
if this is a stab at the federal reserve, my response would be "democracy" at least in the abstract. either way not much different from the whales that hold disproportionate amounts of influence in the system right?
Celsius = centralised, terra = centralised, FTX = centralised...
The point is stop trusting centralised wolf in sheeps clothing.. same goes for ethereum with Proof Of Stake.. ur just reinventing central banking (but private)..
and bitcoin has exorbitant transaction fees, slow transaction times, massive power usage for relatively little throughput, etc., etc.
time to end the crypto social experiment and go back to using the traditional banking system which has safeguards in place to prevent people from being continuously taken advantage of. oh wait, nobody was really using crypto for anything other than a FOMO investment anyways
Basic transaction cost at this time is est $0.05, or 54 cents for high priority.
> slow transaction times
If by slow you mean ~10 minutes, it turns out this is a strength (Solana is not scalable; Ethereum will also likely grow in an unbounded fashion making individual node-running infeasible); and layer 2 solutions such as Lightning Network enable sub-second Bitcoin transactions.
the transaction fees, the verification and throughput limitations are fundamental technical tradeoffs required for a truly decentralised store of value.
The people and technologies claiming to have "fixed" or "improved" upon bitcoin are often making different trade offs they lie about. This is why I like solana, they make no pretence of being decentralised.
btw fiat is 1000x worse. You don't see it on the news because you're forced through coercen to bail out & insure these bad actors. The current US bank reserve requirement is 10%.. the only reason there isn't a bank run is FDIC. The whole thing is an incestious mess that creates our current world of cantillionaires..
By taken advantage of, you mean like becoming a debt slave paying off mortgage on overvalued house because of a housing bubble they blew out of proportion yet nobody was held accountable for?
No- by taken advantage of I mean like putting your life savings into a 20% APR yield crypto savings account and getting rugpulled the next week. Funny how you reference being taken advantage of in standard financial institutions as having debt but it is just as easy if not easier to take out loans in the crypto space that people have no chance in hell of paying off. Regardless, that's unrelated to what I was talking about, which was about people getting conned day in and day out in the crypto space. At the very least, this is minimized in the regular financial market which has safeguards in place to protect consumers. Is this system perfect? No. Is it 100x better and safer than the current state of crypto because of lessons of the past and the laws put in place because of them? Yes.
If you believe that crypto is in any regard better than the traditional banking system (which it seems you do), please state those claims explicitly.
I definitely don't think crypto is in any way "better" as an investment (you can look at my other comments here), but I definitely think the destruction as misery caused by traditional finance was so much higher.
Crypto is extremely speculative and risky and everyone knows it.
Housing on the other hand, get extremely favorable regulation that's unjustified in my opinion. You got the Fed buying mortgage backed securities.
In my view, what is going on in traditional finance is morally wrong much more than in crypto. Unlike crypto were the bubble doesn't effect me, I need to work and pay higher rent and my freedom is restricted as a direct consequences of the evils of traditional finance wether I'm participating in their bubble directly or not.
Many of the things you call "safeguards" of traditional finance are greater evils than nothing at all. Especially safeguards of collateralization, like mortgage.
(And don't get me wrong - I'm very capitalistic in my world view. You can just hardly call capitalism the way the Fed and mortgage dealers acted, and central banking is the bane of modern capitalism).
Yeah but the collapse of those exchanges drove down the price of the coins. Even if its your keys and your coins those coins become worth less money than they were before.
If u look at the past decade, the real coins survive. Its the venture backed ponzis that die..
Basically no exchange should be holding enough to cause a collapse of the coin. With bitcoin this will never happen, there was multiple collapses at times where liquidity & ramps were non existent.. and bitcoin still survived to go up multiples.
I think it is the last item that motivates the rich folks desire for a store of value that doesn't rest on providing funds for the rest of society to borrow. The rich would keep their wealth out of circulation while the society withers due to lack of investment in the work and inventions of that society.
It's your keys, and your coins, and most importantly your initial and continuous due diligence... and not just on the asset itself, but on the possible motivations of any asset holder with a sufficient stake to meaningfully affect the price.
If you store your funds in a secure wallet, you will not be able to FOMO in recklessly on shitcoins hoping for a 10-bagger, the facilitation of which is the raison d'etre for most crypto exchanges.
People don't want to buy and hodl, they want to get rich. There's no Benjamin Graham for crypto because crypto has no fundamentals, no underlying value to go long on. The best any crypto advisor can do is to warn you when to hit the ejector seat button.
Coinbase, which happen to be a Y Combinator unicorn, is saying they're totally fine. Credit where it's due: Coinbase never ever dealt with Tether/USDT. They say the $42 billion of USDC they minted are all backed and that all the clients' assets on their site (USDC/coins/EUR/USD/etc.) are all backed 1:1.
I hope Coinbase is and stays an honest (and regulated) player in that crazy space:
creating 20,000 new currencies isnt really an economy, or rather its a purely entertainment based economy like Las Vegas or Macau. Those things I guess are valuable but is this the best use of our computing power and our Human Resources?
