zeroclip

Bit higher than expected but not that surprising. Deploying a new token costs almost nothing, but may lead to outsized rewards for scammer. It can be easily automated.

Reminder that 85%+ of all email sent is spam.

See social recovery wallets, paper wallet isn’t only solution. Masses might prefer a custody on exchange but with that comes risk like in Celsius, FTX. Regulation needed to curb this risk so that those services feel just like the other “safe” CeFi services you are used to.

> In all my years of interacting with private companies they have always protected my money, even when it was taken from me fraudulently.

I was talking about data. On a long enough timeline, all financial services holding user data will be vulnerable to a breach. Money maybe also vulnerable but less so if regulated, I guess you are lucky to be interacting with regulated exchanges.

> If we require legal protections for blockchains what value does that prove over a centralised regulated system?

Regulate the companies, like Celsius and FTX. Users can use these on and off ramps into blockchain with more regulatory oversight and assurances their assets won’t be leveraged without their consent.

Your last point seems like misunderstanding. I say we haven’t yet seen FTX user data and privacy be breached.

Restating my comment from Celsius unwinding one month ago:

Three clear and obvious outcomes of this unwinding:

1. The crypto mantra "not your keys, not your coins" rings true.

2. Entrusting your personal financial data with a private company is sure to end in disaster, either by hack or court order. Privacy should be a basic and legally protected feature of blockchains.

3. Centralized Finance or CeFi is mostly a sham and deserves to be heavily regulated. Not to be confused with on-chain and transparent Decentralized Finance or DeFi platforms like Aave that have behaved predictably through this downturn, and have never required KYC.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33153865

We haven’t seen privacy and KYC be an issue yet with FTX but data breach could be next after the money goes.

Hopeful thinking: people realize that FTX is a CEX and the true value of crypto is in DeFi and DEXes.

Reality: contagion will spread next week and everything will probably crash, even if DeFi remains unaffected.

The wallets are speaking clearly, DeFi volume is through the roof right now.

https://defillama.com/dexs

A lot of people put money on CEX because they are ignorant, or willing to take on some risk for slightly cheaper and faster trades. Those people probably regret their decision now. If they used Uniswap and Aave they could not have withdrawals paused because of one company’s insolvency.

Crypto is about a lot of things. A new asset class appears and people will assign different stories to it. Totally possible that blockchain tech is used for payment infra in future.

Ethereum and PoS is no longer energy intensive.

Lazy and shallow take. But at least those using the “scam” DeFi protocols still have custody of their assets, which is not the case with FTX depositors.

These things already exist. Uniswap, Aave. Both pretty easy to use and can not just go insolvent on you.

What? FTX is a centralized custodian. It is in competition with DeFi protocols.

It doesn’t take a genius to understand how CEX and DEX handle your coins and withdrawals differently. It might take some years to educate the masses, even much of tech crowd on HN is not well informed on these differences.

And trusting experts who distill and educate us on these things is fine, it’s how math, science, physics works. But we can verify the claims in these fields, instead of blindly trusting a single mathematician. That’s the idea of crypto too: don’t trust, verify. FTX was a case of trusting one entity with no verifiable proof of their actions. Uniswap is the case of trusting the code and protocol, and many people coming to consensus to verify it.

Under load it might take a few minutes to execute a trade, which is better than just losing your asset because the exchange went insolvent.

This is why L2 is actively being developed on Ethereum, and already processing a lot of volume. Same trustless withdrawals, but higher bandwidth and lower fees.

See Uniswap. Working fine.

> Would you mind sharing positive events occurring thanks to crypto?

DeFi continuing to issue user withdrawals regardless of market conditions and the greed of centralized financial custodians? This is the whole reason why Satoshi created Bitcoin and the blockchain in 2008.

Phishing is a different issue than a fraudulent custodian going insolvent and pausing all withdrawals, though.

How does a centralized custodian like FTX or BlockFi failing change the fundamentals of Ethereum and DeFi? The promise of these systems is decentralization and removing counterparty risk. Everything is still going pretty smoothly in Uniswap and Aave protocols.

Decentralized exchanges exist that process about the same volume as centralized exchanges, without centralizing trust to a single entity.

Remember the whole reason Bitcoin and blockchain was made was to remove the need to trust a centralized counterparty who could succumb to greed, like a bank. Crypto banks are no different than regular banks, but with less regulations and insurance.

Learn to self-custody your coins, "not your keys not your coins." DeFi platforms like Aave and Compound are still working fine and will not just pause your withdrawals.

Aave withdrawals of DAI stablecoin has been unaffected by the greed of SBF, and unaffected by the speculative price swings of Eth or Bitcoin. You personally may not consider these assets, but many do.

Indeed, ironic. But this also laid the path for DeFi, which processes similar volumes per day as centralized exchanges, without the single counterparty risk.

Did the blockchain fail here? Blockchain and DeFi was created to solve these very problems of centralized trust and human financial fraud. Uniswap and Aave withdrawals are working just fine.

Leaving your coins on a centralized exchange kills the reason for a blockchain and DeFi. It’s crypto by name only.

The lack of transparency in financial services - banks - was the whole reason Satoshi created Bitcoin. The people who choose to use FTX over a blockchain are either ignorant, not understanding their coins are insecure, or willing to take on additional risk to save a few dollars and trade a little faster. They are probably regretting it now that FTX is blowing up.

And speed and costs are already a solved problem - see L2 rollups.

The birth of the stock market also created new avenues for fraud that did not exist prior. This is a new asset class, poorly understood and poorly regulated, and still ripe for abuse.

DeFi would solve some of these problems by shifting the counterparty risk from a man named Sam to an immutable protocol that we can all audit and verify. Look at aave, compound, Uniswap.

Very informative and clearly written, kudos to Molly!

The irony is that DeFi and blockchain protocols fixes this.

Monero, zcash, aztec, tornado cash all work pretty well. Could you link to Monero's current vulnerabilities? There have been some known and theoretical issues with the privacy of Monero and Tornado Cash but it isn't a monthly occurrence. How are any of these protocols less secure than sending dollar bills in an envelope?

Sending money with a UK bank or PayPal is the opposite of privacy preserving. The convenience of it is fine for UK to UK and EU banks, not great for private, secure, instant and international payments.

I can't tell at this point whether you are trolling, or one of the HN hivemind that actually believes sending cash in an envelope is somehow faster and more secure than using a blockchain and cryptography for payments.

Have you tried sending money across the world in 10 seconds, to somebody outside of the EU? Most answers to this are PayPal, Wise, or another multibillion dollar private enterprise.

OpenSea already does tag NFTs as having "Centralized" or "Frozen" metadata, verifying the URI as you say. ERC721 spec only deals with EVM and Solidity, where it would not make sense to try and force the token contract URI state to match a specific hosting protocol.

In most countries, banks can freeze your funds or kick you out for any reason, unlike crypto where you can’t have assets frozen if you are holding Bitcoin or DAI non custodially. Many banks have monthly fees, charge for international transfers, invest and loan your capital and give you back almost no interest, and there have been a few high profile data breaches that would not be possible in a private chain like Monero.

“Better” is relative, depends on your frame of reference. Anything crypto will be better in some ways, and worse in others.

Like self custody: the idea of owning a valuable and transferable asset by only holding a private key was not possible prior to Bitcoin. The closest comparison might be a domain name: people feel like they own those, but they are just renting them from a registrar who leases you the account and ability to edit your domain records.

This applies all over Ethereum, DeFi, ENS, NFTs. Look at Aave, that allows lending and borrowing without a custodial service provider.

ERC721 is not designed to solve permanent media storage or force usage toward a certain storage network. Better the ERC721 spec does not try to solve for this.

totally disagree with your assessment and would hate to be forced to rely on oracles to deploy a mintable ERC721. I like the broadness and simplicity of ERC721 and would attribute that to its success.

The chain is open and public, just publish your own ERC with oracles and see if it takes off?