9 ms·
The Way the Senate Melted Down over Crypto Is Revealing
- Waterluvian 5y ago> The technology is evolving to be much more than a digital currency, and Silicon Valley sees it as the digital infrastructure atop which the next internet will be built. What does this even mean? NFTs? Endless “coins”? I thought it was pretty much conclusively demonstrated that crypto is pretty much useless for anything other than speculation. Anyone have a single concrete example of crypto being used in a clearly useful, reliable, durable way?
- deskglass 5y agoAutomatic market making for prediction markets, eg Auger.
- heckingoodtimes 5y agoAMP token to collateralize payments. Flexa is the first and most well-known implementation of it and has made very significant partnerships.
- bawolff 5y agoHave you ever seen the movie nerve? (Tl;dr [spoilers]: fictional online video game coercing people into doing dares based on upvotes from the internet hive mind which can't be shutdown due to handwavey "distributed" reasons. The protagonists eventually get all their friends together to launch a 51% attack to shut it down) I think that sort of thing is the vision that these groups have when they talk about "the next" internet being built on "blockchain". Of course there are insurmountable technical problems between here and there...
- dgm885 5y agoHere’s a fundamental value…it’s not controlled by the fed. It is deflationary. It is property that is easily moved. If you move into transactional platforms (ETH/ADA) these and other will facilitate programmable transactions that won’t require intermediaries. It’s still early, who knows how digital money with lower gas fees will evolve.
- fieldcny 5y agoNone of this is really true. It’s not necessarily deflationary, forks mint new coins from nothing and bequeath current holders with new assets. Miners can agree to change implementation details, or even history (see etc vs eth). It can be controlled by groups far more insidious than the fed (like geo-political enemies) in proof of work scenarios. Proof of stake scenarios don’t look much different than the Fed (private bank owned by constituent financial institutions with oversight from the federal government). So there’s not really a step ahead there. There is a big difference between using code to manage and move money and using to actually be money. Code has two properties that make it wholly unsuitable to be money, first is it’s written be humans and we always make mistakes and second technology changes so quickly and abruptly that it’s bordering on insanity to believe that this is a good idea. It’s 68 trillion times worse than the trend in the 80s to build centrally controlled stereo systems in homes with tape decks and am/fm. radios. At least in the house it’s just one nice to have element and you can just ignore it in that one house, it’s not like you have an entire economy running on it…
- 1MachineElf 5y agoDNS alternatives like namecoin or ethereum.
- bitxbitxbitcoin 5y agoOr HNS.
- calciphus 5y agoWhy is it no one can talk about crypto without TLAs?
- 1MachineElf 5y agoOP asks for answers and legitimate ones get downvoted. Was the question in good-faith?
- Waterluvian 5y agoYes. But I don’t control what others do. I’m not allowed to downvote top level comments.
- epsylon 5y agoThe killer app of cryptocurrency is tax evasion
- jobigoud 5y agoUser ownership of virtual land in a persistent game-world that multiple studios can work with without having to explicitely interoperate or know about each other.
- z3ugma 5y agoHow about things like decentralized finance? Stablecoins like USDC that are pegged 1:1 with the USD enable “wire transfers” with tiny fees compared to what banks charge. I can picture this for other parts of banking that are so dated - escrow, checking accounts, collecting debit payments (lots of Internet companies won’t host sex workers because of puritanical terms from credit card processors for example)
- Shadonototro 5y agolot of insider trading, as usual