rawtxapp

Combine it with a "Social Credit System" [1] and some Black Mirror episodes don't seem that far fetched all of a sudden.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System

Technically, our taxes are used for all kinds of stuff we don't directly benefit from and you can argue that the insurance premiums we pay are paying for someone else's treatment.

I think another argument is that it'll be less effective (ex: longer wait times, etc) and that people will abuse it, ex: in Canada, I used to see people show up to ER because they were sneezing and I've seen people wait forever to get a doctor, etc, you're much less likely to do that if it costs you something.

The alternatives aren't really all that better on the topics that he criticized. If you work at big tech, at that scale, it's inevitable there will be parts of the company you disagree with. From my experience there, as long as your criticism is legitimate and constructive, it'll be well received by Googlers/company, heck some of his criticism pales in comparison to the ones done with memes.

It's when they stopped the holiday gift tradition (which was a nexus 5 in the last year they actually gave them out iirc).

You should see the internal meme board, some of the criticism there is a lot stronger than these comics. If you fire everyone who's critical of the company, you'll only end up with yes-mans and the company will be ruined. As long as the criticism is constructive and legitimate, it's very welcome from my experience.

Wait until you hear about this company called Plaid (valued at ~13B$) which is used by a lot of FinTech companies to access your bank account. They take your username/password in cleartext and go ahead and scrape and do as they please with the data to prevent fraud (oh and if 2fa blocks them from scraping, they'll ask you to disable it).

How is this even remotely acceptable blows my mind. My alternatives to transfer money into these fintech companies are checks (are we in the 90s?) or wire transfer (20$ each).

To me, the Coinbase IPO was a major milestone in achieving critical mass, if you look through their numbers, it has already achieved pretty massive scale compared to it's age. Jury is still out, but I'm confident the cat is more or less out of the bag.

Who is "they"? Nobody universally and single handedly decides rules and regulations. For every person that will advocate for what you're suggesting, there will be even more fierce advocates for the reverse of that.

I think they haven't taken it seriously in the same way that newspapers didn't take internet seriously and by the time they did, it was way too late.

They can compel the bank directly, no one can "force" the blockchain do to anything that's not programmed to do.

Except by then the cat is out of the bag and significant % of the population/institutions holds it and you can't hurt your own population without swift opposition. It's pretty clever if it works out.

This is 2017 all over again, back then it was worthless ICOs, now it's fake defi projects or meme coins doing the same. It attracts the same kind of people too, quick money chasers and ends up with relatively same results, large losses for most.

Yeah, difficult to correlate number of addresses with users. Ethereum is probably a better approximation since users there tend to use a single address for everything.

Another way I estimate usage/adoption is looking at Google Trends and comparing it against something I can use as a baseline (in my case "reddit"), right now Bitcoin averages around ~30-40% of search query volume compared to reddit [1] (and even more if you look at worldwide queries) which is obviously not perfect comparison, but is an interesting datapoint.

1: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge...

People hold it because historically it appreciated greatly, so they expect that to continue. But it can't appreciate the average of 300% YoY forever, sooner or later, it will hit diminishing returns at which point people will be more willing to spend it.

It's essentially Gresham's law in action[1]. Also for those that want to spend it, there are lots of options now for crypto backed debit/credit cards.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham%27s_law

That's mostly what they are used for anyways amongst other purposes like hedging or leverage.

I'm not sure I would categorize it as "minor inconvenience". In terms of financial numbers, it's estimated to cost 180B$ [1]. You also have to consider all the opportunity costs of what we could achieve with a faster and smoother financial system. And you have to consider financial inclusion and all that, there are lots of really interesting financial instruments that I can't access because there's some retail that doesn't understand exactly how it works and because we lower regulations to lowest common denominator, let's just ban it. We are also cutoff from these exchanges like Binance which have much more liquidity, more interesting products, etc.

And I'm not sure that it's all that effective, especially after seeing HSBC launder money for cartels and get away with it [2]. Oh and none of these regulations obviously stopped 2008 or any of the previous crises.

To me a lot of these regulations seem like the TSA security theatre, seems useful, but at this point, pretty outdated and inefficient.

1: https://www.cpomagazine.com/cyber-security/global-cost-of-fi...

2: https://www.investopedia.com/stock-analysis/2013/investing-n...

It's not illegal for hedge funds.

It's a derivative, it also exists in traditional markets and it's size is gigantic compared to normal markets.

As far as I understand it, in this case, it's essentially cash settled.

Or arguably, it's burdening 99% of legitimate users to stop the 1% of bad actors.

Maker already has thousands of vaults, so clearly people do know what it is.

I've never had an online loan application work, always had to go to their branch or call them which is a lot more work than installing one browser extension called MetaMask.

A lot of these complaints remind me of the time when all the newspapers were writing about how internet is never gonna succeed because x, y, z[1].

There was a time where email was a "complex" thing, you can find out videos of news anchors trying to understand the "@" [2].

1: https://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-nirv...

2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlJku_CSyNg

> Of course there are indeed serious hackers doing game-changing work in the blockchain space and I believe blockchain does have a future, but right now it's almost impossible to hear the signal from the noise.

100%, seeing people who just learned the word blockchain explain to me how I can make 100x my money on crypto is pretty annoying.

My recommendation would be to stick to github, the technical parts of bitcointalk.org and whitepapers at most. Those tend to have better signal to noise ratios.

> - UX of interacting with/running code. This isn't users going to a website or downloading an app from an app store. Until it is, it's a non-starter.

I don't know which projects you've used, but in my experience, the DeFi projects I've used have much better UX than any bank I've ever had.

Most of them just have a simple "Connect wallet" button you click and you're in, no need for a password, whatsoever [1]. There are some easy to use wallets like MetaMask, just have to set it up once.

1: For example, https://oasis.app/borrow.

Like every engineering project, it boils down to pros and cons, it doesn't make sense to shoehorn blockchain into everything.

Do you need a decentralized, trustless, transparent and uncensorable system with adversarial participants and you can boil down your logic to a bunch of if/else conditions and some for-loops? Then blockchain probably makes sense and finance is the best use case so far.

But decentralization comes at a great cost, both in efficiency and actual costs. So do I want to train a ML model in a decentralized way? Probably not. Do I want to put my game on the blockchain where I relinquish any control? Probably not.

The hype means that people are trying to put blockchain into everything which in turn turns off a bunch of people because it doesn't make sense.

Just to point out, it seems like the author themselves submitted the story to HN. Still I agree with your reasoning, but I think slight clickbaity titles do get clicks which is why we keep seeing them.

There's a difference between a billionaire generating yield on their money by investing and taking risks vs the Fed just sending them x% of freshly printed money because they are already a billionnaire.

Bitcoin had by far the fairest distribution and the largest holder (Satoshi) hasn't touched his coins and for all practical purposes they are gone. You just can't replicate the same conditions which lead to it's existence today.

From what I've seen, the main purpose of like 90+% of altcoins is to benefit their developers and investors and they'll likely all die and disappear.

Satoshi mined it the same as anyone else and his stash is as good as gone for all practical purposes.

It's good news for current holders with large holdings, it's bad news for new people coming into the system which is why I said it makes it exclusionary over time.

A PoW miner has to spend to cover their costs, a staker doesn't have any cost to cover, providing a cryptographic signature requires no energy on an ongoing basis, just an initial investment.

PoW requires constant investment or you'll be left behind.

The profit margins of a miner is pretty slim. If the price increases, mining becomes profitable, competition increases bringing down the profitability, likewise in reverse.

So yes, you need money to mine, but whatever you mine, you pretty much have to turn around and sell it right away to cover your costs and keep a small profit.