The general populace was sold the idea that crypto is "investing", when in reality it is an overly complicated, asset-less, currency trading system, with questionable value and questionable stability.
You can't actually talk about the project, because once it gets too big it's just a farm for speculators. The devs don't give a shit because their project getting buzz boosts their coin's value, but it also means the project itself stops mattering.
Name some. Some that can't be better done with an sqlite database running on a Raspberry Pi.
In which case it doesn't matter if it's on a Blockchain or a raspberry pi because the consensus layer being trusted is secondary
With blockchains we have "a subset of the current compute power on the planet could start subverting it immediately".
Now, you may not care for law evasion, and that’s fine. But it’s asinine to pretend that crypto tech is not better for such purposes than “an SQLite database running on a raspberry pi.”
What cryptocurrency is? The answer is none, because there are several weak points to any cryptocurrency and if state agencies choose to take them seriously they can easily shut them down.
No, we don't. The thing is, every time a "good application of crypto" comes up the next question is "show these to us". And invariably those "good applications" have no idea what they are doing, require centralized trusted entities to function, and can be run from a Raspberry Pi.
But for the vast majority of businesses which interact with the real world, it doesn't matter whether the actual logic is on a bulletproof, uncensorable VM if the government can just go after the few input/output points where the system interacts with the real world.
Therefore, it's no better than just running SQLite and much worse because crypto makes significant tradeoffs (to be resistant to adversary interference) that aren't actually useful here.
They don't go down if you turn off your Raspberry Pi.
I also can be 99.9999% sure that they run correctly and Ethereum itself is pretty unhackable, as proven by the multi-billion bug-bounties.
The smart contracts running on Ethereum are open source, unlike your PHP script, can be audited, and if marked immutable, i'm sure no malicious person/business can hack or change it, and if they do it has an auditable backlog.
And equally sure that any bug in there (and there will be bugs in there) is unfixable and any funds stolen through it unretrievable.
"smart contracts" are neither.
This is tech. Not its applications.
> The smart contracts running on Ethereum are open source, unlike your PHP script, can be audited, and if marked immutable,
Ah, to once again have a child's wonder and belief in magic. Just add th incantation "blockchain ethereum smart contracts", and all is right with the world.
Meanwhile reality [1] just in the past ten days:
--- start quote ---
Insufficient validation on an OHM smart contract at Bond Protocol allowed an attacker to drain 30,437 OHM (~$300,000) from the Olympus DAO defi protocol.
Olympus DAO wrote in an announcement that "This bug was not found by 3 auditors, nor by our internal code review, nor reported via our Immunefi bug bounty."
---
On October 14, Ethereum reached a milestone that alarms many who have pushed for blockchains as "censorship-proof" technology. More than 51% of blocks produced in the preceding 24 hours were processed by relays that filtered out transactions involving Tornado Cash
---
The defi project Earning.Farm lost 748 ETH (~$971,000) to a hacker using a flash loan attack. The project contract was missing a check that a flash loan was initiated by the protocol, so the attacker was able to instruct the project to withdraw large amounts of funds
---
Rabby Swap, a feature of the Rabby crypto wallet, was exploited a month after it was first rolled out. An attacker discovered an apparent vulnerability in the Rabby Swap smart contract that enabled them to arbitrarily transfer other users' funds.
--- end quote ---
Words that precede every DeFi hack with a ridiculous nominal dollar value.
It often feels like it's just "number go higher" gambling, à la 1987 stock "investing".
1) digital signatures to enable transactions without exposing secrets like credit card or account numbers
2) block chains to ensure the integrity of the entire system
These are both critical for moving to a sound monetary system that does not rely on trusting institutions that operate in a legacy paradigm.
Bank ledgers generally provide better integrity for people than blockchains, because they allow fraud remediation.
The two primary advantage of cryptocurrencies in my view is semi-anonymous payments for grey/black market transactions, and international money transfers.
And yeah, we should not rely on exchanges because it does defeat the purpose.
It is, however, intrinsically valuable because of its many medical and electronic applications, which means its value can never theoretically reach zero (unlike a crypto token).
I mean like when the Europeans arrived in pre-Colombian America looking for gold, the people they encountered also had it as a major cultural attachment too, without any coordination whatsoever.
I’m not sure there’s a better definition of intrinsic value than that.
I agree it's not a coincidence that most societies valued gold, even without contact with each other. But that's also because of its elemental qualities.
Silver and most other shiny metals will tarnish. A lot of metals are difficult to shape into jewelry or stamped coins. And other metals are denser and heavier, making them hard to transport.
Gold is better than other metals for coins and jewelry for many reasons.
That doesn't mean its current price is 0% cultural or that that cultural element is permanent.
I agree it's likely going to last for as long as society does, but I don't think that's a guarantee inherent to gold as a metal.
Gold is the 8-th densest chemical element, and by far the densest element know to mankind until the discovery of platinum and tungsten (slightly less dense, but very close) in the 18th century. I don't have a source for this, but I suspect that part of its popularity was because being so dense made it impossible to counterfeit.
Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_chemical_elements (sort the list by density)
I leveraged $200 to $650 in BTC a couple of years back and quit to buy a Pixel 1. It felt like gambling. Never going back.
robber barons 2.0