7 ms·

This was a failure of traditional financial institutions and people who are ok with them, not of crypto. Satoshi wouldn't be encouraging people to put their co

This was a failure of traditional financial institutions and people who are ok with them, not of crypto. Satoshi wouldn't be encouraging people to put their coins on a trusted third party like that. All fundamental crypto values say this.

roflyear 4y ago
Then it proves that crypto is flawed for other reasons.
- WFHRenaissance 4y ago
  Literally a non-argument lol
  - roflyear 4y ago
    There's some flaw there if people are saying "YOU'RE USING CRYPTO WRONG" in response to these issues and in defense of the tech, but the "WRONG" way of doing it is so popular, and there aren't alternatives.
- disruptalot 4y ago
  Alternatives: - Crypto is being used and abused by people and purposes that don't need it. - Fundamental practices haven't matured yet.
anon291 4y ago
Unfortunately, absent the crypto exchanges, which let you easily convert crypto to fiat, there is no reason why crypto has any value. Given that bitcoin transaction times are nowhere near VISA or cash times, bitcoin is fairly useless to purchase things in person and few online vendors take bitcoin alone (most use an exchange to convert bitcoin to cash instantly). So without exchanges, there is literally no purpose or use of bitcoin. Currently it mainly serves as a way to record a store of fiat value. There is no conspiracy here. The reason exchanges came into being and were successful was that there was no other purpose to bitcoin. Few users successfully use bitcoin as it was intended.
- alangibson 4y ago
  I can't believe it's been 5 minutes and no one has said 'lightning network' yet.
  - m348e912 4y ago
    It's because the ones who would have said it now know.
  - anon291 4y ago
    I'm fully aware of the lightning network. I'm also aware of something called VISA and American express. Which number do I call to get concierge service with bitcoin? That's what I thought.
- raspberry1337 4y ago
  > there is no reason why crypto has any value. Given that bitcoin transaction times are nowhere near VISA or cash times, You interchanged crypto with bitcoin, but bitcoin is not all crypto. The value of crypto comes from them being decentralized and independent of a financial bank. This has the negative side effect of it being very valuable to illegal and fradulent activity, too.
  - this_user 4y ago
    > The value of crypto comes from them being decentralized and independent of a financial bank. The value of that is exactly zero when you live in a stable and developed country, and you are not engaged in criminal activity.
    - selectodude 4y ago
      Cryptocurrency has value because people are willing to trade for it, whether money or goods. I don't understand why people are willing to trade for it, but to say it has literally zero value isn't exactly accurate.
      - 4y ago
gjulianm 4y ago
Precisely the failure of crypto is thinking that people will follow "fundamental crypto values" and underestimating the power of convenience and ignorance. "Traditional financial institutions" are inevitable in crypto.
- zeroclip 4y ago
  A lot of day traders on FTX are learning first hand the value of DeFi and self custody.
  - Nursie 4y ago
    Yes, because DeFi never suffers from collapses or hacks. Nobody every drained a DAO with a flash-loan, or used one to cash-out illiquid assets with no intention of paying it back... DeFi is as much of a joke as the rest of the ecosystem.
    - zeroclip 4y ago
      Different category of risk. CEX and DEX can both have hacks. An open source DEX can be verified, formally tested, and made immutable and un-upgradable on chain, like Uniswap. Uniswap V2 contract is 2 years unchanged, $3.8B TVL and $1B daily volume, close to 10 year old Coinbase CEX. Not bad for being a joke.
      - Apocryphon 4y ago
        Those stories about smart contract programming errors leading to money getting permanently frozen are quite scary. Though admittedly in the grand scheme of things they seem to have “only” lost millions of USD, not billions.
        zeroclip 4y ago
        Yes, it's a risk. If a contract or protocol is several years old, processing billions per day, and the code is un-upgradeable, you might say the risk is lower. I'd rather gamble with Uniswap protocol risk than FTX human fraud and greed risk.
Tao3300 4y ago
I'll bet you use the word "fiat" a lot.
300bps 4y ago
Satoshi wouldn't be encouraging people to put their coins on a trusted third party like that. I find this sentiment of "not your coins, not your crypto" unsettling. The average person doesn't even back up the pictures on their computer or phone and they are one storage device failure away from losing all of their wedding pictures, baby pictures, etc. The big push now is for people to use hardware wallets. I guarantee that 50% of people over the span of a decade will lose access to 100% of their funds. 2023 will be about everyone learning how much of a joke cryptocurrency is.
- criddell 4y ago
  > will lose access to 100% of their funds Or, if you think like foreignpolicy.com thinks: > The crypto bag-holders all actually lost their money long before, when they bought the bitcoins. In the time since, they’d been telling themselves and everyone else that their magic beans were worth money and never mind the lack of buyers. But this was not the case. The beans were always worthless, and the only way to make money from them was to sell them off before other people caught on.
ethanbond 4y ago
But you realize that banks (and individuals) could have all the advantages of decentralization if they just chose to be decentralized too, right? This prompts the question: why are they so centralized? It turns out the advantages of centralization are more significant than the advantages of decentralization, and this is true even in a market with religious orientation toward decentralization. All you've gotta do to get people to keep their coins "correctly" is eliminate the benefits of agglomeration. Good luck!
- warinukraine 4y ago
  > But you realize that banks (and individuals) could have all the advantages of decentralization if they just chose to be decentralized too, right? What are the advantages of decentralization in this context? Be specific.
  - ethanbond 4y ago
    Namely no risk of you losing your assets due to technical glitch, fraud, or overextension. Of course this is not a substantial advantage, especially in the US, given the various non-technical (i.e. legal/cultural) guarantees against these failure modes. It doesn't overcome the disadvantages of e.g. having to physically protect your own assets - thus why people tend to use financial institutions.
    - warinukraine 4y ago
      Exactly, this isn't an advantage. If there's a technical glitch, there's insurance for that. What else?
      - ethanbond 4y ago
        You may be missing the point of my original post. It is that there are not substantial advantages to decentralization.
- yuvadam 4y ago
  Banks can't choose to be decentralized when the whole point of their existence is to custody centralized fiat money.
phailhaus 4y ago
> Satoshi wouldn't be encouraging people to put their coins on a trusted third party like that. All fundamental crypto values say this. You can literally say this about "regular" currency. Just don't put your money in banks! But people do, why? Once you answer that, you'll realize why people do it for crypto too. You can't complain that it's "against fundamental crypto values" when it doesn't have any mechanism for preventing it. It's convenient, it has benefits, therefore people do it.
- gruez 4y ago
  >But people do, why? 1. cash is bulky and risky to keep at home 2. inflation eats away at your savings Bitcoin is designed to solve both issues.
  - Nursie 4y ago
    Then it is an utter failure at both.
  - jmartin2683 4y ago
    except it doesn't solve either, because it's still risky to keep (whether with a 'trusted third party' or at home on some physical device... at the end of the day it can't be better than physical possession.. i.e. cash). volatility is a lot worse than stable inflation, and deflation (just HODL!) is much, much worse to the point of demonstrating the degree to which bitcoin is not useful as a monetary unit of exchange.
    - Victerius 4y ago
      Bank robberies are no longer a thing in the 21st century. No one loses their savings because of thieves.
      - megous 4y ago
        Of course it's still a thing, both regular robberies and digital ones. And people lose savings to online thieves and cheats who take control of their accounts, or manage to perform transfers on their behalf.
RC_ITR 4y ago
Yes, but that happening is a failure of crypto. If decentralized were actually better, then why would people flock to centralization?
- ushtaritk421 4y ago
  Crypto can't fail, it can only be failed.
anonymousab 4y ago
> All fundamental crypto values say this. This feels mighty similar to the old "communism didn't fail people, people failed to do real communism" rationalization.
dagmx 4y ago
I’d argue that your comment is a failure to understand human desire for convenience and trusted services however. Decentralization is at odds with that. It’s not convenient. It’s not easy. It’s not simple. Not for a lay person anyway. When an ecosystem comes along and can solve those for the masses, it’ll be revolutionary.
- andybak 4y ago
  I'm technically competent and (before I got out entirely) my coins were on Coinbase. Why? Because I decided the odds of Coinbase going down were less than the odds of losing the coins myself without their help. There were just too many ways I could have messed up my own wallet.
bmitc 4y ago
The only way for crypto to ever be a thing will be to integrate with traditional financial systems, to a degree. Continually beating the drum of “this isn’t crypto” has not worked and will never work aside from making crypto fundamentalists feel like they’re the only ones on the one true path.
skinnymuch 4y ago
We don’t even know if Satoshi is an intelligence agency or not. In any case. Satoshi was about using Bitcoin as a currency not a store of value, right? So either way this view is butchering what Satoshi wanted
GrabbinD33ze69 4y ago
Traditional institutions will always be dominant in some capacity, as many people are attracted to the convenience they offer. Unless something catastrophic occurs, crippling traditional financial systems or are truly compelling/easy to use platform releases, I can't imagine anything not owned by a "Traditional institution", let alone anything close to what Web 3 proponents preach regarding decentralization & where ownership lies.

roflyear 4y ago

Then it proves that crypto is flawed for other reasons.

WFHRenaissance 4y ago
Literally a non-argument lol
- roflyear 4y ago
  There's some flaw there if people are saying "YOU'RE USING CRYPTO WRONG" in response to these issues and in defense of the tech, but the "WRONG" way of doing it is so popular, and there aren't alternatives.
disruptalot 4y ago
Alternatives: - Crypto is being used and abused by people and purposes that don't need it. - Fundamental practices haven't matured yet.

anon291 4y ago

Unfortunately, absent the crypto exchanges, which let you easily convert crypto to fiat, there is no reason why crypto has any value. Given that bitcoin transaction times are nowhere near VISA or cash times, bitcoin is fairly useless to purchase things in person and few online vendors take bitcoin alone (most use an exchange to convert bitcoin to cash instantly). So without exchanges, there is literally no purpose or use of bitcoin. Currently it mainly serves as a way to record a store of fiat value. There is no conspiracy here. The reason exchanges came into being and were successful was that there was no other purpose to bitcoin. Few users successfully use bitcoin as it was intended.

alangibson 4y ago
I can't believe it's been 5 minutes and no one has said 'lightning network' yet.
- m348e912 4y ago
  It's because the ones who would have said it now know.
- anon291 4y ago
  I'm fully aware of the lightning network. I'm also aware of something called VISA and American express. Which number do I call to get concierge service with bitcoin? That's what I thought.
raspberry1337 4y ago
> there is no reason why crypto has any value. Given that bitcoin transaction times are nowhere near VISA or cash times, You interchanged crypto with bitcoin, but bitcoin is not all crypto. The value of crypto comes from them being decentralized and independent of a financial bank. This has the negative side effect of it being very valuable to illegal and fradulent activity, too.
- this_user 4y ago
  > The value of crypto comes from them being decentralized and independent of a financial bank. The value of that is exactly zero when you live in a stable and developed country, and you are not engaged in criminal activity.
  - selectodude 4y ago
    Cryptocurrency has value because people are willing to trade for it, whether money or goods. I don't understand why people are willing to trade for it, but to say it has literally zero value isn't exactly accurate.
    - 4y ago

gjulianm 4y ago

Precisely the failure of crypto is thinking that people will follow "fundamental crypto values" and underestimating the power of convenience and ignorance. "Traditional financial institutions" are inevitable in crypto.

zeroclip 4y ago
A lot of day traders on FTX are learning first hand the value of DeFi and self custody.
- Nursie 4y ago
  Yes, because DeFi never suffers from collapses or hacks. Nobody every drained a DAO with a flash-loan, or used one to cash-out illiquid assets with no intention of paying it back... DeFi is as much of a joke as the rest of the ecosystem.
  - zeroclip 4y ago
    Different category of risk. CEX and DEX can both have hacks. An open source DEX can be verified, formally tested, and made immutable and un-upgradable on chain, like Uniswap. Uniswap V2 contract is 2 years unchanged, $3.8B TVL and $1B daily volume, close to 10 year old Coinbase CEX. Not bad for being a joke.
    - Apocryphon 4y ago
      Those stories about smart contract programming errors leading to money getting permanently frozen are quite scary. Though admittedly in the grand scheme of things they seem to have “only” lost millions of USD, not billions.
      - zeroclip 4y ago
        Yes, it's a risk. If a contract or protocol is several years old, processing billions per day, and the code is un-upgradeable, you might say the risk is lower. I'd rather gamble with Uniswap protocol risk than FTX human fraud and greed risk.

Tao3300 4y ago

I'll bet you use the word "fiat" a lot.

300bps 4y ago

Satoshi wouldn't be encouraging people to put their coins on a trusted third party like that. I find this sentiment of "not your coins, not your crypto" unsettling. The average person doesn't even back up the pictures on their computer or phone and they are one storage device failure away from losing all of their wedding pictures, baby pictures, etc. The big push now is for people to use hardware wallets. I guarantee that 50% of people over the span of a decade will lose access to 100% of their funds. 2023 will be about everyone learning how much of a joke cryptocurrency is.

criddell 4y ago
> will lose access to 100% of their funds Or, if you think like foreignpolicy.com thinks: > The crypto bag-holders all actually lost their money long before, when they bought the bitcoins. In the time since, they’d been telling themselves and everyone else that their magic beans were worth money and never mind the lack of buyers. But this was not the case. The beans were always worthless, and the only way to make money from them was to sell them off before other people caught on.

ethanbond 4y ago

But you realize that banks (and individuals) could have all the advantages of decentralization if they just chose to be decentralized too, right? This prompts the question: why are they so centralized? It turns out the advantages of centralization are more significant than the advantages of decentralization, and this is true even in a market with religious orientation toward decentralization. All you've gotta do to get people to keep their coins "correctly" is eliminate the benefits of agglomeration. Good luck!

warinukraine 4y ago
> But you realize that banks (and individuals) could have all the advantages of decentralization if they just chose to be decentralized too, right? What are the advantages of decentralization in this context? Be specific.
- ethanbond 4y ago
  Namely no risk of you losing your assets due to technical glitch, fraud, or overextension. Of course this is not a substantial advantage, especially in the US, given the various non-technical (i.e. legal/cultural) guarantees against these failure modes. It doesn't overcome the disadvantages of e.g. having to physically protect your own assets - thus why people tend to use financial institutions.
  - warinukraine 4y ago
    Exactly, this isn't an advantage. If there's a technical glitch, there's insurance for that. What else?
    - ethanbond 4y ago
      You may be missing the point of my original post. It is that there are not substantial advantages to decentralization.
yuvadam 4y ago
Banks can't choose to be decentralized when the whole point of their existence is to custody centralized fiat money.

phailhaus 4y ago

> Satoshi wouldn't be encouraging people to put their coins on a trusted third party like that. All fundamental crypto values say this. You can literally say this about "regular" currency. Just don't put your money in banks! But people do, why? Once you answer that, you'll realize why people do it for crypto too. You can't complain that it's "against fundamental crypto values" when it doesn't have any mechanism for preventing it. It's convenient, it has benefits, therefore people do it.

gruez 4y ago
>But people do, why? 1. cash is bulky and risky to keep at home 2. inflation eats away at your savings Bitcoin is designed to solve both issues.
- Nursie 4y ago
  Then it is an utter failure at both.
- jmartin2683 4y ago
  except it doesn't solve either, because it's still risky to keep (whether with a 'trusted third party' or at home on some physical device... at the end of the day it can't be better than physical possession.. i.e. cash). volatility is a lot worse than stable inflation, and deflation (just HODL!) is much, much worse to the point of demonstrating the degree to which bitcoin is not useful as a monetary unit of exchange.
  - Victerius 4y ago
    Bank robberies are no longer a thing in the 21st century. No one loses their savings because of thieves.
    - megous 4y ago
      Of course it's still a thing, both regular robberies and digital ones. And people lose savings to online thieves and cheats who take control of their accounts, or manage to perform transfers on their behalf.

RC_ITR 4y ago

Yes, but that happening is a failure of crypto. If decentralized were actually better, then why would people flock to centralization?

ushtaritk421 4y ago
Crypto can't fail, it can only be failed.

anonymousab 4y ago

> All fundamental crypto values say this. This feels mighty similar to the old "communism didn't fail people, people failed to do real communism" rationalization.

dagmx 4y ago

I’d argue that your comment is a failure to understand human desire for convenience and trusted services however. Decentralization is at odds with that. It’s not convenient. It’s not easy. It’s not simple. Not for a lay person anyway. When an ecosystem comes along and can solve those for the masses, it’ll be revolutionary.

andybak 4y ago
I'm technically competent and (before I got out entirely) my coins were on Coinbase. Why? Because I decided the odds of Coinbase going down were less than the odds of losing the coins myself without their help. There were just too many ways I could have messed up my own wallet.

bmitc 4y ago

The only way for crypto to ever be a thing will be to integrate with traditional financial systems, to a degree. Continually beating the drum of “this isn’t crypto” has not worked and will never work aside from making crypto fundamentalists feel like they’re the only ones on the one true path.

skinnymuch 4y ago

We don’t even know if Satoshi is an intelligence agency or not. In any case. Satoshi was about using Bitcoin as a currency not a store of value, right? So either way this view is butchering what Satoshi wanted

GrabbinD33ze69 4y ago

Traditional institutions will always be dominant in some capacity, as many people are attracted to the convenience they offer. Unless something catastrophic occurs, crippling traditional financial systems or are truly compelling/easy to use platform releases, I can't imagine anything not owned by a "Traditional institution", let alone anything close to what Web 3 proponents preach regarding decentralization & where ownership lies.