Hacker News Reader

Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

That doesn't necessarily change how exciting the tech is. The exchanges are working in an asset with known, predictable and locked-in inflation. 3rd parties (cough the US cough) cannot weaponize that asset against the traders. Inter-exchange transfers of wealth are relatively quick and trustworthy, even across borders without trusting any other exchange.

That is a pretty substantial change from any existing asset. It isn't all sunshine and roses, but there are a combination of properties here that never existed before.

View on HN

there's no regulation, auditing or government backed guarantees / insurance on the exchanges.

so what happens when there is a run on an exchange, and it turns out that it does not hold the assets that it has on its books?

People losing all their money (in an entirely foreseeable way) is a tragedy. But it isn't new, that has been a show on repeat for millennia. This time, at least the losses will be in something new.

Much like how the first dot com bubble doesn't change the transformative nature of the internet, a massive crash in crypto isn't going to be the end of this story. We might outlive Bitcoin, but no-one alive today will outlive cryptocurrencies. The only real question is how much change they will cause.

It's better for society than our current banking system, because the government considers our current system "too big to fail," so banks know that the government will bail them out if things get too bad, and the banks engage in risky behavior accordingly.

That will always be true. Even with a 100% crypto world governments can use taxes/reserves/bonds/tariffs to prop up / bail out failing companies.

They just wouldn’t be able to use quantitative easing (easily - i.e. without global consensus) to do it.

Why not? Tether showed that quantative easing works just fine in cryptoland.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-10-07/crypto-my...

Tether is a counterfeiting operation.

Yes but banks are subject to a wide array of regulations, liquidity requirements and frequent third-party audits. And then, in crypto, you have Tether, whose reserves claims are dubious at best

Plenty of banks went bankrupt or were acquired, so it's not quite true that the government will just bail out failed actors.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_banks_acquired_or_bank...

And of course the financial system as a whole is "too big to fail", but that would be true regardless of the implementation. Are you saying that if we switch to crypto then suddenly the financial system failing is OK?

Depends which exchange - some are US regulated eg. Coinbase, Kraken.

> there's no regulation, auditing or government backed guarantees / insurance on the exchanges.

I consider this a feature, not a bug.

> an asset with known, predictable and locked-in inflation

What's your definition of inflation, because by my definition Bitcoin experienced more than 100% inflation during this year, since which time it has experienced roughly 30% deflation.

There's going to be about 300k Bitcoin created in the next 12 months, and someone more motivated to care than I am could put some tight boundaries on that estimate if they wanted to.

If a bank is about to send me Euros, how many Euros will they get to create out of nothing in the next 12 months? I could probably make some educated guesses based on past rates; but there is a lot more certainty in Bitcoin.

Ironically given the price swings, the actual asset involved here is more stable and predictable than any asset that has ever existed in human history. That is going to matter somehow, although I'm not going to guess how. In a very similar way to how the internet making communication effectively free had (or; is having) far reaching consequences that were difficult to predict. This sort of never-before-seen certainty is going to have consequences.

land is a fixed resource, and new property is pretty predicable when you factor in planning law.

speculation in property and asset price inflation in this asset class has pretty much universally been a disaster for any change of a coherent, developing and fair society.

It's contributed massively to generational inequality, which has intern massively effected our politics. It's contributed to falling birth rates. It's facilitated organised crime both domestically and caused instability internationally . Plus every 20 years of so it completely crashes the whole economy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com