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"We do have a lot of interest in blockchain, the technology behind cryptocurrencies. We believe its application to a number of other uses besides crypto will ma

"We do have a lot of interest in blockchain, the technology behind cryptocurrencies. We believe its application to a number of other uses besides crypto will make capital markets more efficient, and we’ve been actively involved in research to use blockchain technology." The exact opposite is true. Blockchain "technology" is useless beyond its ability to enable Bitcoin - a monetary innovation. Using it for anything other than that is simply trying to find a problem for a solution. Crypto beyond Bitcoin is also largely useless beyond serving as a democratized casino.

MuffinFlavored 2y ago
What about ETH/SOL stablecoin USDC and the whole "the blockchain validators/stakers can run programs/smart contracts/instructions"?
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- leishman 2y ago
  stablecoins are useful but you don't really need a blockchain. you just need enough of a rube-goldberg machine to claim it's "decentralized". The most popular "blockchain" for stablecoins is Tron, if that tells you anything about why the technology itself doesn't matter
- tyre 2y ago
  None of the smart contracts have done anything materially useful without huge risk of scams, rug pulls, or enabling criminal activity (e.g. mixers for money laundering.) After a decade, there are no examples of widely used smart contracts or even long-running projects that haven't been fueled by boom and bust speculation cycles (e.g. NFTs.) Every time there is a "code is law" gone wrong with large $ at stake, people immediately fall back to real life police. Because "code is law" is either a bad idea or immediately has to compromise to meet real human uses (for example, people forget their passwords all the time and not supporting password resets—which right now requires a centralized key store—is a non-starter.) There is both a ton of money in crypto and it has completely failed to reach its promised potential. The largest uses in the next half decade will continue to be scams, pump-and-dumps, speculative frenzies, and money laundering. We'll see shockingly open corruption with the president of the United States having a coin for on-chain bribery.
  - everfree 2y ago
    > After a decade, there are no examples of widely used smart contracts or even long-running projects that haven't been fueled by boom and bust speculation cycles MakerDAO, Aave, Uniswap, Ethereum Name Service, and OpenSea are all long-running smart contract projects that have weathered multiple speculation cycles chugging along all the same. > Every time there is a "code is law" gone wrong with large $ at stake, people immediately fall back to real life police. It's one potential recourse. As opposed to legal contracts, where falling back to real life police is the only recourse. Code is not law, but it does solve the "possession is 9/10 of the law" issue by aligning possession with legal ownership more closely than legal contracts do, so that the law has to get involved a lower percentage of the time. This is especially helpful for low-value contracts in the hundreds of dollars or less where it's not economical to involve a lawyer. Same for cross-border contracts where international litigation is infeasible. > There is both a ton of money in crypto and it has completely failed to reach its promised potential. Smart contract tooling has only been mature since about 2018 or so. Blockchains have only started scaling since about 2021. Coinbase, the largest cryptocurrency-related company, didn't launch their chain until 2023. Sharded data availability won't even be in production on a major blockchain until next year, with Ethereum's PeerDAS. Zero knowledge proof technology is both in its infancy and developing extremely rapidly. In other words a text-based browser isn't going to host a video stream over a dial-up connection. These roadmaps are long, and it takes time for new breakthroughs in math and computer science to mature, standardize and reach production. > The largest uses in the next half decade will continue to be scams, pump-and-dumps, speculative frenzies, and money laundering. The "largest" uses aren't really relevant unless you're trying to make an overarching moral judgement and say "blockchains are bad", which whether true or not, I think is an observation about as useless as "knives can be used to hurt people". If you're trying to determine whether a tool has any legitimate helpful uses, look for an increase in its legitimate helpful uses.
- Jasper_ 2y ago
  The blockchain can't do anything with stablecoins, because that's interfacing with a financial system that's out of the reach of smart contracts. Even if we assume that a stablecoin is backed by real USD sitting in a bank account, there's nothing stopping anyone from just taking money out of the bank account, and the smart contract is none the wiser. You still have to trust someone at the end of the day.
- Ekaros 2y ago
  Problem with stablecoins is that in reality they are just extremely fancy IOUs or namely debt. Issuer promises to give money back. And if they don't well best you can do is to sue them.
robjeiter 2y ago
Fully disagree. Tokenization enables better financial markets. Bitcoin is the useless asset since it's proven that productive assets (think stocks) are better store of values than unproductive ones (think gold). Ethereum in that sense is productive because you can stake it for a yield and collaterize it natively to borrow against it and you can tokenize anything on top of it.
- hocuspocus 2y ago
  Why would you need a blockchain for tokenization?
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- leishman 2y ago
  If tokenization requires a trusted party to issue the tokens (think stocks) then no blockchain is needed
  - kinakomochidayo 2y ago
    Then that means stablecoins aren’t needed. And yet, reality disagrees with your logic and stablecoins are on track to be used even more. Tokenization on Ethereum will end up being way more important and useful than pet rock Bitcoin.
    - hocuspocus 2y ago
      The most popular stablecoins aren't trustless, proving the parent's point.
      - kinakomochidayo 2y ago
        Parent's point is weak - it's not possible right now for people around the world to hold fiat/stocks in their own centralized, custodial wallets due to stringent KYC/AML, and blockchains currently fill that need for stablecoins, and will fill that need for tokenized stocks, treasuries, etc.
oellegaard 2y ago
While I personally don’t believe in Bitcoin or any other crypto currency, I couldn’t stop laughing about your comment on the blockchain. I have met so many people obsessed with building things on top of the blockchain and when you ask them what it is they need it is essentially a database and they don’t want it to be public. Fortunately the recent years this has been a decreasing trend. Only now a days the requests are to replace developers with 10x AI agents.
- matwood 2y ago
  Yeah. The reality is that we enter into very few zero trust transactions. I don’t need a blockchain to guarantee things when the law and contracts have handled that fine for a very long time.
  - cryptoegorophy 2y ago
    No, the idea is anonymity. How can you trust the contract between you and some user across the world? Yes, crypto solves it. Law won’t help when someone tries to scam you across the world, at least in majority of cases.
    - 2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago
      A friend who in cybercrime talks weekly about scammers using Bitcoin ATMs and there being no way to get it back compared to traditional banking where he regularly gets victims their money back.
    - matwood 2y ago
      > Yes, crypto solves it. The vast majority of scams are run through crypto now. In fact, crypto is a step backwards and makes it easier to scam people.
      - everfree 2y ago
        Crypto lets you engage in any contract you and your counterparty can codify. The reason that so many scams are run through crypto is because the vast majority of people either don't use smart contracts (in which case you're just sending your money to someone and praying), or if they do, they don't read or understand the smart contracts they're using. The solution to this is maturity. The endgame is to be able to create smart contracts that are as readable to a layperson, if not more readable, than legal contracts. And to come up with a set of standard smart contract templates vetted by programmers, just as today we have a set of standard legal contract templates vetted by lawyers. That, and encouraging people to actually read what they sign, whether it's a pen-and-paper signature or a cryptographic signature.
SteveNuts 2y ago
I’ve always wondered why there isn’t a general purpose blockchain ledger for businesses. It seems like it would make auditing simple since all of the entries would be cryptographically guaranteed to not be manipulated.
- Almondsetat 2y ago
  Guaranteed by what mechanism? This is the fundamental problem.
- zdw 2y ago
  This assumes ideal, perfect data entry before reaching the ledger, and having immutable history doesn't prevent historical errors.
  - greggyb 2y ago
    It really doesn't traditional accounting is built around the use of an immutable ledger. Historical errors are fixed with correction entries. There is also a multidimensional conception of time to support this. We capture both the date the entry is made in the ledger and also the real world date it is meant to apply to. So if you overstate something in December 2024, you can enter a correcting transaction today for that. The first, erroneous entry has both it's accounting and business dates in December 2024. The second entry, correcting the first is made today and so has an accounting date of today and a business date of December 2024.
- leishman 2y ago
  There is a general purpose ledger for business. It's called a SQL database
  - dragontamer 2y ago
    And legally backed by WORM media: write once read many.
  - andirk 2y ago
    SQL database is mutable, right? One of the biggest features of blockchain tech is that it's almost completely immutable. Something happens and it happens forever and ever.
dboreham 2y ago
Thought experiment: if you were tasked with creating an eventually consistent distributed database where the nodes were to be run by different organizations that didn't trust each other, with predefined validity constraints on the data of some sort, and a scheme for incentivizing the operators of said database to keep operating it long term, how would you propose doing that? Hint: if you look at similar systems such as those used for certificate transparency logs, they look quite like...a blockchain.
- axlee 2y ago
  Thus, a problem in search of a solution. Who has asked for that exactly ?`It's been more than a decade and still no one has found an actually useful real-world application for blockchain besides gambling and money laundering.
  - oellegaard 2y ago
    Now that’s the 1m dollar question. Virtually no one
  - agumonkey 2y ago
    I'm just a newb passing, but a self sustained decentralized 24/7 logic+network layer could be nice for stupid computational tasks like tracking physical items or updating multi-source (different services, different companies) data easily, which are often done at the human level today (even if 99% of the time it's not necessary and very wasteful). Again i'm not knowledgeable but when thinking of blockchains, I always have this in mind.
    - Jasper_ 2y ago
      It can't track physical items, because you can always just lie about the data. Company A says "I put the jewels in box 1352", and Company B opens the box to receive a bunch of dish towels. Just because it's cryptographically verified, doesn't mean it has any semantic value. If Company A and B already trust each other not to put bad data on the chain, then they also trust each other to just send emails back and forth, and you don't need a cryptographically verified blockchain. It secures the least important part of the process.
ghoshbishakh 2y ago
I would not say useless. But blockchain has very limited use outside cryptocurrencies. Although, some of the innovations that happened around blockchains are useful in many other scenarios. P.S. I do have a Ph.D. in trying to fit blockchain for other use cases.
- Calavar 2y ago
  What are some good noncrypto uses of blockchains that you've seen?
  - latchkey 2y ago
    Timestamping (which is actually what bitcoin is). For better or worse, this is one commercial application of it: https://guardtime.com/platform https://guardtime.com/platform
    - cypherpunks01 2y ago
      Guatemalan dev Rafael Cordon made a project called Simple Proof that leverages OpenTimestamps for election security. It was used in the Guatemalan 2023 elections to timestamp tally sheets in different election districts around the country, so they can't be manipulated at a later time.
      - latchkey 2y ago
        Timestamp.com is owned by a buddy of mine. Long before blockchain, we tried to build a company around being an SMTP relay and a special HP PCIe card that took the GPS signal as its source. The card was special because it was encased in glass and an inert gas, which could sense if it was tampered with. Ahh... the good old days.
      - delfinom 2y ago
        ....or, you just use the same timestamp mechanism available for code signing. Aka you ask a CA to issue a signed timestamp against a content hash and while you are at it, you can get multiple CAs in it.
unboxingelf 2y ago
The rare, correct Bitcoin take on HN.
irln 2y ago
So interesting how your conclusion (which I strongly agree) is a bit of knowledge that can be obtained with diligence and research, however, it's a limitation of Bitcoin that it requires that level of diligence and research to understand.
- npoc 2y ago
  Not really. I just means that it doesn't grow too fast for itself and gives people chance to accumulate it - its kind of poetic. Ultimately it will just keep going up in price relative to everything else and people will invest simply based on that without understanding why - similar to the real estate investment market.
losteric 2y ago
This comment is peculiar - among technologists, for years the common refrain I’ve heard is “Bitcoin makes no sense but the underlying block chain ideas are very useful”. Of course the combination of signed transactions, common visible ledgers, introducing computational challenges to forgery, resiliency through consensus (kinda)… all the bits and pieces can be remixed into really interesting ideas. Bitcoin, I still don’t get. More public, slower, more expensive, no fundamental utility, and still subject to nation-state interference?
- leishman 2y ago
  > This comment is peculiar - among technologists, for years the common refrain I’ve heard is “Bitcoin makes no sense but the underlying block chain ideas are very useful”. That's because they have no idea what they're talking about. At a certain point you have to ask yourself why Bitcoin is worth $2T and no enterprise blockchain has ever taken off. How many years more of this trend is required to prove the "technologists" are wrong? It's already been 16 years. And while I don't believe in appeal to authority, it's worth mentioning that I have been working in this field for pretty much my entire career and TA'd the first Stanford CS course on blockchains and crypto currencies in 2015. I very much know what I'm talking about and the people at Vanguard are blindly parroting what Deloitte and McKinsey are telling them about "blockchain".
- npoc 2y ago
  It's all down to how money is issued. The tokens we have to work for are created effortless by bankers from nothing whenever they issue a loan, and then they charge interest on them. This value of the new tokens they create is sucked out of the ones in your bank account, pension etc. It's theft and it's about 7% year. Gold didn't have this problem because it's issued through proof of work - you have to put in N kgs of gold worth of work to mine N kgs of gold. But it's a rock and in today's world we need a digital form.
lawn 2y ago
Typical Bitcoin maximalistic bullshit that pretends that the only worthwhile cryptocurrency will ever be Bitcoin, ignoring the fact that for example Monero is a superior currency (being actually fungible, a requirement for a currency). I do agree that cryptocurrencies are the killer feature of the blockchain but other use cases do exist (like trustless timestamping).

MuffinFlavored 2y ago

What about ETH/SOL stablecoin USDC and the whole "the blockchain validators/stakers can run programs/smart contracts/instructions"?

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
leishman 2y ago
stablecoins are useful but you don't really need a blockchain. you just need enough of a rube-goldberg machine to claim it's "decentralized". The most popular "blockchain" for stablecoins is Tron, if that tells you anything about why the technology itself doesn't matter
tyre 2y ago
None of the smart contracts have done anything materially useful without huge risk of scams, rug pulls, or enabling criminal activity (e.g. mixers for money laundering.) After a decade, there are no examples of widely used smart contracts or even long-running projects that haven't been fueled by boom and bust speculation cycles (e.g. NFTs.) Every time there is a "code is law" gone wrong with large $ at stake, people immediately fall back to real life police. Because "code is law" is either a bad idea or immediately has to compromise to meet real human uses (for example, people forget their passwords all the time and not supporting password resets—which right now requires a centralized key store—is a non-starter.) There is both a ton of money in crypto and it has completely failed to reach its promised potential. The largest uses in the next half decade will continue to be scams, pump-and-dumps, speculative frenzies, and money laundering. We'll see shockingly open corruption with the president of the United States having a coin for on-chain bribery.
- everfree 2y ago
  > After a decade, there are no examples of widely used smart contracts or even long-running projects that haven't been fueled by boom and bust speculation cycles MakerDAO, Aave, Uniswap, Ethereum Name Service, and OpenSea are all long-running smart contract projects that have weathered multiple speculation cycles chugging along all the same. > Every time there is a "code is law" gone wrong with large $ at stake, people immediately fall back to real life police. It's one potential recourse. As opposed to legal contracts, where falling back to real life police is the only recourse. Code is not law, but it does solve the "possession is 9/10 of the law" issue by aligning possession with legal ownership more closely than legal contracts do, so that the law has to get involved a lower percentage of the time. This is especially helpful for low-value contracts in the hundreds of dollars or less where it's not economical to involve a lawyer. Same for cross-border contracts where international litigation is infeasible. > There is both a ton of money in crypto and it has completely failed to reach its promised potential. Smart contract tooling has only been mature since about 2018 or so. Blockchains have only started scaling since about 2021. Coinbase, the largest cryptocurrency-related company, didn't launch their chain until 2023. Sharded data availability won't even be in production on a major blockchain until next year, with Ethereum's PeerDAS. Zero knowledge proof technology is both in its infancy and developing extremely rapidly. In other words a text-based browser isn't going to host a video stream over a dial-up connection. These roadmaps are long, and it takes time for new breakthroughs in math and computer science to mature, standardize and reach production. > The largest uses in the next half decade will continue to be scams, pump-and-dumps, speculative frenzies, and money laundering. The "largest" uses aren't really relevant unless you're trying to make an overarching moral judgement and say "blockchains are bad", which whether true or not, I think is an observation about as useless as "knives can be used to hurt people". If you're trying to determine whether a tool has any legitimate helpful uses, look for an increase in its legitimate helpful uses.
Jasper_ 2y ago
The blockchain can't do anything with stablecoins, because that's interfacing with a financial system that's out of the reach of smart contracts. Even if we assume that a stablecoin is backed by real USD sitting in a bank account, there's nothing stopping anyone from just taking money out of the bank account, and the smart contract is none the wiser. You still have to trust someone at the end of the day.
Ekaros 2y ago
Problem with stablecoins is that in reality they are just extremely fancy IOUs or namely debt. Issuer promises to give money back. And if they don't well best you can do is to sue them.

robjeiter 2y ago

Fully disagree. Tokenization enables better financial markets. Bitcoin is the useless asset since it's proven that productive assets (think stocks) are better store of values than unproductive ones (think gold). Ethereum in that sense is productive because you can stake it for a yield and collaterize it natively to borrow against it and you can tokenize anything on top of it.

hocuspocus 2y ago
Why would you need a blockchain for tokenization?
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
leishman 2y ago
If tokenization requires a trusted party to issue the tokens (think stocks) then no blockchain is needed
- kinakomochidayo 2y ago
  Then that means stablecoins aren’t needed. And yet, reality disagrees with your logic and stablecoins are on track to be used even more. Tokenization on Ethereum will end up being way more important and useful than pet rock Bitcoin.
  - hocuspocus 2y ago
    The most popular stablecoins aren't trustless, proving the parent's point.
    - kinakomochidayo 2y ago
      Parent's point is weak - it's not possible right now for people around the world to hold fiat/stocks in their own centralized, custodial wallets due to stringent KYC/AML, and blockchains currently fill that need for stablecoins, and will fill that need for tokenized stocks, treasuries, etc.

oellegaard 2y ago

While I personally don’t believe in Bitcoin or any other crypto currency, I couldn’t stop laughing about your comment on the blockchain. I have met so many people obsessed with building things on top of the blockchain and when you ask them what it is they need it is essentially a database and they don’t want it to be public. Fortunately the recent years this has been a decreasing trend. Only now a days the requests are to replace developers with 10x AI agents.

matwood 2y ago
Yeah. The reality is that we enter into very few zero trust transactions. I don’t need a blockchain to guarantee things when the law and contracts have handled that fine for a very long time.
- cryptoegorophy 2y ago
  No, the idea is anonymity. How can you trust the contract between you and some user across the world? Yes, crypto solves it. Law won’t help when someone tries to scam you across the world, at least in majority of cases.
  - 2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago
    A friend who in cybercrime talks weekly about scammers using Bitcoin ATMs and there being no way to get it back compared to traditional banking where he regularly gets victims their money back.
  - matwood 2y ago
    > Yes, crypto solves it. The vast majority of scams are run through crypto now. In fact, crypto is a step backwards and makes it easier to scam people.
    - everfree 2y ago
      Crypto lets you engage in any contract you and your counterparty can codify. The reason that so many scams are run through crypto is because the vast majority of people either don't use smart contracts (in which case you're just sending your money to someone and praying), or if they do, they don't read or understand the smart contracts they're using. The solution to this is maturity. The endgame is to be able to create smart contracts that are as readable to a layperson, if not more readable, than legal contracts. And to come up with a set of standard smart contract templates vetted by programmers, just as today we have a set of standard legal contract templates vetted by lawyers. That, and encouraging people to actually read what they sign, whether it's a pen-and-paper signature or a cryptographic signature.

SteveNuts 2y ago

I’ve always wondered why there isn’t a general purpose blockchain ledger for businesses. It seems like it would make auditing simple since all of the entries would be cryptographically guaranteed to not be manipulated.

Almondsetat 2y ago
Guaranteed by what mechanism? This is the fundamental problem.
zdw 2y ago
This assumes ideal, perfect data entry before reaching the ledger, and having immutable history doesn't prevent historical errors.
- greggyb 2y ago
  It really doesn't traditional accounting is built around the use of an immutable ledger. Historical errors are fixed with correction entries. There is also a multidimensional conception of time to support this. We capture both the date the entry is made in the ledger and also the real world date it is meant to apply to. So if you overstate something in December 2024, you can enter a correcting transaction today for that. The first, erroneous entry has both it's accounting and business dates in December 2024. The second entry, correcting the first is made today and so has an accounting date of today and a business date of December 2024.
leishman 2y ago
There is a general purpose ledger for business. It's called a SQL database
- dragontamer 2y ago
  And legally backed by WORM media: write once read many.
- andirk 2y ago
  SQL database is mutable, right? One of the biggest features of blockchain tech is that it's almost completely immutable. Something happens and it happens forever and ever.

dboreham 2y ago

Thought experiment: if you were tasked with creating an eventually consistent distributed database where the nodes were to be run by different organizations that didn't trust each other, with predefined validity constraints on the data of some sort, and a scheme for incentivizing the operators of said database to keep operating it long term, how would you propose doing that? Hint: if you look at similar systems such as those used for certificate transparency logs, they look quite like...a blockchain.

axlee 2y ago
Thus, a problem in search of a solution. Who has asked for that exactly ?`It's been more than a decade and still no one has found an actually useful real-world application for blockchain besides gambling and money laundering.
- oellegaard 2y ago
  Now that’s the 1m dollar question. Virtually no one
- agumonkey 2y ago
  I'm just a newb passing, but a self sustained decentralized 24/7 logic+network layer could be nice for stupid computational tasks like tracking physical items or updating multi-source (different services, different companies) data easily, which are often done at the human level today (even if 99% of the time it's not necessary and very wasteful). Again i'm not knowledgeable but when thinking of blockchains, I always have this in mind.
  - Jasper_ 2y ago
    It can't track physical items, because you can always just lie about the data. Company A says "I put the jewels in box 1352", and Company B opens the box to receive a bunch of dish towels. Just because it's cryptographically verified, doesn't mean it has any semantic value. If Company A and B already trust each other not to put bad data on the chain, then they also trust each other to just send emails back and forth, and you don't need a cryptographically verified blockchain. It secures the least important part of the process.

ghoshbishakh 2y ago

I would not say useless. But blockchain has very limited use outside cryptocurrencies. Although, some of the innovations that happened around blockchains are useful in many other scenarios. P.S. I do have a Ph.D. in trying to fit blockchain for other use cases.

Calavar 2y ago
What are some good noncrypto uses of blockchains that you've seen?
- latchkey 2y ago
  Timestamping (which is actually what bitcoin is). For better or worse, this is one commercial application of it: https://guardtime.com/platform https://guardtime.com/platform
  - cypherpunks01 2y ago
    Guatemalan dev Rafael Cordon made a project called Simple Proof that leverages OpenTimestamps for election security. It was used in the Guatemalan 2023 elections to timestamp tally sheets in different election districts around the country, so they can't be manipulated at a later time.
    - latchkey 2y ago
      Timestamp.com is owned by a buddy of mine. Long before blockchain, we tried to build a company around being an SMTP relay and a special HP PCIe card that took the GPS signal as its source. The card was special because it was encased in glass and an inert gas, which could sense if it was tampered with. Ahh... the good old days.
    - delfinom 2y ago
      ....or, you just use the same timestamp mechanism available for code signing. Aka you ask a CA to issue a signed timestamp against a content hash and while you are at it, you can get multiple CAs in it.

unboxingelf 2y ago

The rare, correct Bitcoin take on HN.

irln 2y ago

So interesting how your conclusion (which I strongly agree) is a bit of knowledge that can be obtained with diligence and research, however, it's a limitation of Bitcoin that it requires that level of diligence and research to understand.

npoc 2y ago
Not really. I just means that it doesn't grow too fast for itself and gives people chance to accumulate it - its kind of poetic. Ultimately it will just keep going up in price relative to everything else and people will invest simply based on that without understanding why - similar to the real estate investment market.

losteric 2y ago

This comment is peculiar - among technologists, for years the common refrain I’ve heard is “Bitcoin makes no sense but the underlying block chain ideas are very useful”. Of course the combination of signed transactions, common visible ledgers, introducing computational challenges to forgery, resiliency through consensus (kinda)… all the bits and pieces can be remixed into really interesting ideas. Bitcoin, I still don’t get. More public, slower, more expensive, no fundamental utility, and still subject to nation-state interference?

leishman 2y ago
> This comment is peculiar - among technologists, for years the common refrain I’ve heard is “Bitcoin makes no sense but the underlying block chain ideas are very useful”. That's because they have no idea what they're talking about. At a certain point you have to ask yourself why Bitcoin is worth $2T and no enterprise blockchain has ever taken off. How many years more of this trend is required to prove the "technologists" are wrong? It's already been 16 years. And while I don't believe in appeal to authority, it's worth mentioning that I have been working in this field for pretty much my entire career and TA'd the first Stanford CS course on blockchains and crypto currencies in 2015. I very much know what I'm talking about and the people at Vanguard are blindly parroting what Deloitte and McKinsey are telling them about "blockchain".
npoc 2y ago
It's all down to how money is issued. The tokens we have to work for are created effortless by bankers from nothing whenever they issue a loan, and then they charge interest on them. This value of the new tokens they create is sucked out of the ones in your bank account, pension etc. It's theft and it's about 7% year. Gold didn't have this problem because it's issued through proof of work - you have to put in N kgs of gold worth of work to mine N kgs of gold. But it's a rock and in today's world we need a digital form.

lawn 2y ago

Typical Bitcoin maximalistic bullshit that pretends that the only worthwhile cryptocurrency will ever be Bitcoin, ignoring the fact that for example Monero is a superior currency (being actually fungible, a requirement for a currency). I do agree that cryptocurrencies are the killer feature of the blockchain but other use cases do exist (like trustless timestamping).