[HN Gopher] Starting a Crypto Project
___________________________________________________________________
Starting a Crypto Project
Author : grey-area
Score : 286 points
Date : 2021-05-06 11:33 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| onebot wrote:
| Having been part of launching Helium HNT token (which is honestly
| a real-world utility use case), here is my personal experience
| related to his points...
|
| Helium started as a traditional centralized IoT project, realized
| that centralization was a limiting factor, then joked about
| turning it into a blockchain application. Now it is over $1.5bn
| market cap and provides a real-world utility.
|
| Exchanges are pay-to-play. It feels bad to interact with them to
| get listed.
|
| Lots and lots of scammers.
|
| There is still so much untapped value in some possible use-cases,
| but honestly too many get-rich schemes.
|
| Launching a new layer 1 protocol is a tremendous amount of
| development effort and I think underestimated by most.
|
| Security is hard.
|
| Scammers/hackers go after all project members personally. You
| probably aren't prepared for any kind of success.
|
| 5 years ago crypto wasn't mainstream. Fast forward to today, and
| when you say you're in crypto, everyone thinks you're a
| billionaire.
|
| 1.) Decentralization will come for sure (DAO LLC), but no matter
| what, there is still a Foundation of some kind.
|
| 2.) Community depends on utility. There are some amazing strong
| communities, but is in direct proportoin to the utility the token
| really brings. Otherwise, just pump and dumpers.
|
| 3.) I don't think it is 100% possible to truly decentralize
| governance. But people are trying.
|
| 4.) I don't believe this is true for everything. There are pump
| and dumpers, but many of the decent tokens today need to focus on
| utility, the tokens for speculation only will always be
| manipulated.
|
| 5.) I think the VC landscape has changed and maybe a more piling
| on, but couple of years ago, VCs wouldn't touch crypto and the
| VCs focusing on crypto (Multicoin, Polychain, etc) are very good
| and extremely smart.
|
| 6.) Time makes no difference. Since it is decentralized it isn't
| like you have a support team fielding issues. You can't fix
| anything in a moment's notice. Releases take careful planning and
| careful testing.
|
| 7.) Again this assumes there is no utility in the token. But he
| is right you can't talk about token price or speculation. But
| underneath it all you hope the token price goes up.
|
| 8.) 100% true. You can't build it and they will just come. It
| requires real marketing and PR. Most importantly branding. People
| are looking for value and community around your token. But the
| early adopters are FOMO speculators.
|
| 9.) Yes, legal fees are very high. Could be 7 figures.
|
| 10.) Taxes are becoming more clear. Cost basis and capital gains.
| But a lot depends on how you acquired your token.
|
| 11.) Basically, people will constantly claim your are scammers.
| Literally day and night. And people will spam free bitcoin offers
| to all your telegram and discord users. Every day and every
| night.
|
| 12.) I think insider trading is unbounded in crypto currency, but
| that being said a.) its still illegal and not sure founders would
| be participating in this, b.) its still unclear what really
| motivates the market. Crypto is heavily retail and the chatter as
| always be trolls, scammers and naysayers. But also fomo'ers. So
| hard to say how much insider trading will capitalize on
| information versus exchanges that can manipulate the volume data.
| I think whales can manipulate far better than insider trading.
|
| 13.) hard to say are we talking a stock market bear market or a
| crypto bear market?
|
| 14.) There are several tokens that have real utility and likely
| you aren't questioning your lifes' decisions. But lots of
| sh*tcoin maybe you are. But blockchain (layer 1) developers are
| still incredibly hard to find--so think they can pick whatever
| they want to work on.
|
| 15.) Again, utility (real use case) or pure speculation play.
| There are tons of garbage uses of blockchain that are a super
| poor fit. Hopefully, you don't work for one of those (does
| supplychain really need to be on a blockchain?)
|
| 16.) Unsure if that is true. I think most projects get a halo
| effect from the success of bitcoin. Most new tokens should be
| real utility instead of trying to replace bitcoin.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > Helium started as a traditional centralized IoT project,
| realized that centralization was a limiting factor, then joked
| about turning it into a blockchain application. Now it is over
| $1.5bn market cap and provides a real-world utility.
|
| Why did you need to create a new, unique token anyway?
|
| How much of that market cap would you estimate is used for
| utility versus simply being held for speculation?
| samsonradu wrote:
| > Security is hard.
|
| I'm still wondering how no impactful hacking occured to this
| day at major exchanges or even the major blockchains. By now
| it's probably a top-level target worldwide.
| vmception wrote:
| I've advised many projects, allowing them to inherit my
| professional network in the crypto space, as well as launched
| my own tokens.
|
| And the exchanges really are a problem and are still a racket.
|
| It is so great that Uniswap and their style of autonomous
| liquidity pool creating has taken over, the market was tired of
| that other bullshit.
|
| Even the most reputable custodial exchanges are a total racket!
| See Coinbase's settlement with the CFTC a few weeks back for an
| example.
|
| The challenges to fixing it are very high, I agree with Gary
| Gensler's (SEC chair, former CFTC chair) comments to Congress
| today about a new regulatory framework for custodial crypto
| exchanges.
|
| For one: Projects cant talk about exchanges because one part of
| being considered an unregistered security is by providing an
| expectation of liquidity!
|
| But communities do have an expectation of liquidity and so does
| everyone. Otherwise they will attack the founders personally,
| forever!
|
| The exchanges know this and create extremely toxic
| relationships, that any complaint from a founder will cause the
| exchange to completely ruin and slander the project and also
| delist it, validating any detractors existing beliefs!
|
| Complete racket because the regulators are already taking an
| adversarial stance and cant even get any insider to talk to
| them because they'll go after the insider!
|
| If you arent aware, uniswap (AMMs) and yield fixes this, as
| communities are providing all of the liquidity and listing of
| the token for exchange. So honestly the impossible regulatory
| environment is really being a catalyst for innovation.
| tromp wrote:
| Sounds like he's talking about tokens, rather than an honest
| blockchain built from scratch with no rewards for the developers
| other than creating innovative technology. Without a
| premine/instamine/devtax, there's no need to shill the coins, or
| care much about the price.
| wmf wrote:
| I was about to say that Grin tried that and nobody has heard of
| it... then I saw the username.
| vmception wrote:
| These arbitrary distinctions don't help the asset class either.
|
| There is just as massive of a graveyard of dead chains because
| the dev teams could not exchange time for food and shelter.
| tromp wrote:
| can you provide an example of a dead coin that featured real
| innovation without rewarding its creators?
| vmception wrote:
| There is no way for this to be a productive conversation if
| 'real innovation' can always be a goal post to move. The
| other side of that is that I don't remember, none of this
| has been relevant since 2016 which is half a decade ago
| now. Just trudge bitcointalk for defunct chains and find
| one that you liked the roadmap of.
|
| There is a more quantifiable trend of market tolerance in
| this asset class for what founders can earn.
|
| You have an extremely antiquated view of what that can be,
| the impractical charity developer building a product that
| the communities adores and spawns into a very active
| network. That pretty much never happens as the dev needs to
| use their time to exchange for food and shelter and nobody
| else picks up the baton.
|
| Following that, devs attempted small dev taxes of 1-2%, the
| market barely tolerated that for some years, and it also
| wasn't good enough to fund development
|
| Following that the market tolerated larger preallocations
| of 30%.
|
| Then it tolerated fund raises where developers kept funds
| raised and large preallocations, similar to equities.
|
| Then it tolerated even more where low float assets are now
| commonplace, with developers keeping upwards of 99% of the
| asset created, keeping the funds collected, and have
| unlimited issuance capabilities.
|
| But there is no hard line in the sand, and not everyone has
| an uncomfortable relationship with money such that
| arbitrary thresholds determine what a founder "deserves".
| It is obvious that being able to actually pay a dev team
| has done much more for the speed of development in this
| space than harping on about some irrelevant ideology. You
| might find it surprising (okay now I am being facetious,
| but it still has to be said to highlight the inanity of
| your last decade view), but the entire industrial era has
| the same aspect based on paying workers closer to the value
| they provide at the time and thats the only model proven to
| work in an economy.
| literallyWTF wrote:
| He forgot the most important part, hope your revolutionary x-coin
| reaches a few cents and cash out in US dollars.
| FlyingSnake wrote:
| This is a brilliant thread and sums up neatly what's wrong with
| crypto space in general.
|
| > _90% of your telegram /discord are scammers and people asking
| why price is going down/accusations that you and your entire team
| should go to jail._
|
| So much this. The greed of get-rich-quick crowd is the biggest
| hurdle in the success of crypto. Remove the incentives from
| crypto projects and you'll see how the interest from general
| public decreases. After all no one cared about BTC until people
| figured out how to build a ponzi scheme out of it.
| intotheabyss wrote:
| It's also one of its biggest strengths. People with real value
| at stake in an ecosystem will do anything possible to increase
| the value of their holdings, which means making the overall
| ecosystem more valuable through individual and team
| contributions, all open source contributions I might add.
| jude- wrote:
| He forgot a point: exchanges are the house, and the house always
| wins.
|
| Want your token to be traded on an exchange? You'll pay a fee,
| you'll do all the integration legwork for them _pro bono_ , and
| then they'll skim money off of all the trades on your token in
| perpetuity.
| arberx wrote:
| Thankfully there are now DEXs which are super cool.
|
| uniswap.org
| jude- wrote:
| Thank you for reaffirming my point! If you want your token
| traded on uniswap, you'll write the integration code _pro
| bono_ , you'll pay a fee (a transaction fee to deploy it),
| and Ethereum miners (who run uniswap) skim transaction fees
| off of your token trades in perpetuity.
| wmf wrote:
| So clearly every token should have its own exchange.
| jude- wrote:
| I didn't say that. I'm saying that it's another
| unanticipated burden of building out a crypto project,
| which is what this twitter thread is going on about.
|
| EDIT: Also, sure, why not own the exchange too if you can
| swing it? Less middlemen taking a cut from your revenue.
| arberx wrote:
| There's no "integration" code-once your token is on the
| blockchain if can traded on uni once there's enough
| liquidity.
|
| Using the network is not "skimming" transactions.
| jude- wrote:
| My code must conform to whatever programmatic interfaces
| that the exchange provides, even if they are not a good
| fit for the token's intended purpose. So yes, there is
| integration legwork that _I the developer_ have to do.
|
| > Using the network is not "skimming" transactions.
|
| Sure it is. Users are paying a _different_ token to
| _miners_ (not me) to use _my_ app 's token. Tell me, if
| users are given the choice between transacting in both
| ETH and the ERC-20, or transacting only in an ERC-20,
| would they ever willingly do the former?
| arberx wrote:
| Your argument is: don't use the internet because electric
| utility providers are profiting off you.
| christiansakai wrote:
| So he is a Bitcoin shill? lol. Nothing to see here boys. You get
| all you know already.
|
| Ironically this post happens near top as well lol
| http://paulgraham.com/newideas.html
| dylkil wrote:
| yes hes a bitcoin maximalist. Everything but bitcoin is bad
| according to him.
| atweiden wrote:
| "Bitcoin maximalist" is a pejorative invented by Vitalik
| Buterin circa the Ethereum ICO. It's best understood as a
| laxative for one's disposable income, prescribed by the
| Ethereum doctors to be imbibed by would-be altcoin investors.
|
| Altcoin promoters quickly attached themselves to the term for
| financially motivated reasons, unsurprisingly. Notably it has
| little to no meme/entertainment value: its value is strictly
| limited to psychological warfare, and is rooted in sophistry.
| dylkil wrote:
| are you being serious
| idlewords wrote:
| It is hard being a tulip grower!
| [deleted]
| purple_ferret wrote:
| Is there a POS stablecoin blockchain with smart contracts in the
| works? Why couldn't it be done? Because founders wouldn't be able
| to hold 80% of coins so they can cash out like Vitalik, CZ, or
| Justin Sun?
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| Because every stablecoin is by definition centralized. It has
| an underlying bank account, which could at any moment be
| freezed or seized, all coins confiscated and all smart
| contracts voided (or some specific contracts voided). Not so
| with decentralized blockchains based on proof of work.
| rodiger wrote:
| Most, not all. E.g. DAI [0]
|
| [0] https://makerdao.com/en/whitepaper#abstract
| noxer wrote:
| We can make trust-less stablecoins backed by crypto but we cant
| run a blockchain on a stablecoin. Its only stable if its backed
| or pegged to something and that we dont know how to do
| decentral.
| RichardHeart wrote:
| Add to that: 16.5 You will be demonized by everyone except those
| that participate in what you build. 17. Every dollar spent on dev
| didn't 40x in ETH over the last year, or 400x in some other
| things. 18. Centralized gatekeeping of the "decentralized"
| projects both in coin ranking sites and exchanges. 19. Constant
| and never ending copycats and straight scams impersonating your
| brand. 20. People duct-taping coins onto what you build and
| stealing your users (ala sushi vampire attack on uniswap.) 21.
| Advertising is banned everywhere for you (reddit, facebook,
| youtube, google, etc) Caveat: Founder of #14 on nomics.)
| vmception wrote:
| > Every dollar spent on dev didn't 40x in ETH over the last
| year, or 400x in some other things.
|
| Yes, but thats why you collect a ton of other people's money in
| token sale revenue to begin with!
|
| You have larger than normal overhead costs, but still larger
| than normal earnings
| jcpham2 wrote:
| It would be super awesome if the personalities attracted to this
| would realize they are many many years too late to attract anyone
| else to their scheme.
|
| That's my personal opinion but ya'll seem to like that over here
| on the 'ol HN (aka the new slashdot)
| dylkil wrote:
| every cycle has a new "trick", e.g. in 2017 ICO's to tokenise
| everything, in 2020/2021 IDO's, yield farming and NFTs.
| maxqin1 wrote:
| Easier to read version than what's on Twitter:
| https://mythreadreader.com/jonsyu/1389635626698297344
| knorker wrote:
| > 9. The LAW. SO MUCH LAW. SO. MUCH. LAW.
|
| > 10. There's actually a good chance that there's not a single
| person in your entire state or country that knows how to do your
| taxes.
|
| And this is because your entire business model is to get around
| laws that were put in place ON PURPOSE.
| ypeterholmes wrote:
| Not really.. most of these companies aren't trying to evade the
| law- in fact the industry is mostly begging for regulatory
| clarity in order to be in compliance. Nobody wants to invest
| millions into something that may or may not end up being
| designated as illegal.
| knorker wrote:
| I actually think that this is at the core of most of these
| companies.
|
| Take anonymous money transfers for any amounts. This is why
| KYC/AML laws exist.
|
| If someone could show how a cryptocurrency with anonymous
| features can follow KYC/AML laws, I'm all ears.
|
| Begging for regulatory clarity makes it seems one-sided. It
| seems very clear to me that the dream the cryptocurrency
| companies are trying to sell is fundamentally incompatible
| with the intent of the regulation, even if not yet its text.
|
| What can they be left with afterwards? We'll see, but it
| won't be the vision they've sold.
|
| > Nobody wants to invest millions into something that may or
| may not end up being designated as illegal.
|
| The bitcoin blockchain has child porn on it. And BTC is
| explicitly designed to break KYC/AML laws. Yet people invest.
| wmf wrote:
| _If someone could show how a cryptocurrency with anonymous
| features can follow KYC /AML laws, I'm all ears._
|
| Zcash has done a lot of work on this.
| https://z.cash/compliance/
| vmception wrote:
| Nah.
|
| There are really dumb laws that you need a powerful defense or
| deterrent against.
|
| The biggest problem is that you cant talk about them, or even
| share the deterrents, because it makes you a target for the
| regulators if you do. Its actually better that the regulators
| simply know you have a lawyer, and that they have no idea what
| your legal strategy is. In finance, ignorance of the law _is_
| an excuse ("scienter"), they codified the law specifically that
| way for themselves, and so giving any knowledge about the law
| undermines the defense of your own actions, and being able to
| say "my lawyer made me do it" is an even better defense.
|
| This also means that each and every project has to recreate the
| legal guidance, until Congress explicitly makes a safe harbor
| route a default regulatory regime.
|
| Corporate Securities lawyers know it, exchanges and service
| providers know it, they carved out a niche for themselves to
| provide this legal service and it costs 6 figures easily. It is
| not a perfect defense.
|
| Many crypto project issuers are victims in this regard, with
| everyone onboard with this racket, they cant even talk to the
| SEC about what's wrong.
|
| Taxes aren't that hard but most providers overthink the word
| "crypto" when they hear it and confuse themselves.
| knorker wrote:
| You seem to be describing exactly what I said. They are
| trying to get around the law, and trying to get around the
| intent of the law.
|
| So the aim is to break the intent of the law. Laws that were
| put there on purpose.
|
| So I really don't understand what you mean by "nah". It's
| exactly that. Company sees the law, says "that's dumb, I'm
| going to break that but in a complicated way" and then does
| breaks it using what they consider a loophole.
|
| "Nah"? No, you exactly agree.
|
| > In finance, ignorance of the law is an excuse
|
| Yet you can also get convicted for tax fraud without having
| intent.
|
| And the flip side of what you said is also that (depending on
| jurisdiction) it can be _illegal_ to do something _legal_ ,
| if your motive was to get around the _intent_ of the law.
| Using loopholes can be illegal, even though the act is legal.
|
| > This also means that each and every project has to recreate
| the legal guidance, until Congress explicitly makes a safe
| harbor route a default regulatory regime.
|
| This is just delusional. I think you forgot who has the guns.
| vmception wrote:
| Lets focus on securities laws because as I said tax is
| solved and not that hard. I'm not talking about tax fraud
| so lets focus instead of being all over the place:
|
| So basically crypto projects dont mind securities laws,
| they do mind that the securities laws have lots of
| unnecessary contigencies added to them that makes it
| impossible to couple with utility.
|
| If a crypto token actually was a registered security, then
| nobody could list it because they arent broker dealers. All
| the partnership projects could not be because the partner
| would have to be a broker dealer. There would be zero
| framework to potentially add utility at all, if they
| complied with laws that didn't consider issued assets
| existing peer to peer outside of any walled garden.
| Alternatively, it can exist as a consumer product under the
| consumer framework, no different than the secondary market
| for Nike shoes, and thats what people do. Upon asking "how
| does Nike do it? People can walk in the shoes but many
| people buy their shoes with an expectation of profit" my
| securities attorney told me that Nike probably has
| securities legal opinions too.
|
| Congress and commissioners at the SEC are warm to helping
| this, you are going to have to retire your talking points
| to the last decade as the grownups are building and some
| are representatives.
| knorker wrote:
| Tax is not even remotely solved, thanks to anonymity on
| these currencies. How can tax be solved if tax fraud is
| not solved?
|
| > they do mind that the securities laws have lots of
| unnecessary contigencies added to them
|
| Specifically what? What laws have what aspects, and more
| importantly why were they put in place, and why should
| they not apply to cryptocurrencies (but to other
| things?).
|
| You're talking as if laws sprung from nature, somehow.
| vmception wrote:
| The paragraph about broker dealer requirements is about
| that
|
| A requirement which did not spring from nature but has no
| usefulness for fungible consumer products and simply
| hasn't been revisited
|
| Without clarity from regulators it is impossible to
| simultaneously comply with FTC consumer regulations and
| SEC investor regulations as they are incompatible
| regulatory regimes which alter how things are marketed,
| promoted, traded and accounted for.
|
| And actually complying with SEC regulations means there
| is no where to trade it. There is a joke amongst
| securities attorneys about the Howey Test which is the
| premier securities framework from the Supreme Court "if
| Howey wanted to comply and register properly as a
| security how would he? Well he couldn't because they're
| fucking oranges". And that reality exists for digital
| assets today, yet the market is there and the risk:reward
| is extremely favorable.
|
| But what you might be missing from trying to nitpick
| specific regulations: The SEC will never ever ever
| fulfill its mission from Congress of protecting investors
| by sanctioning issuers, it will only hurt them in the
| current reality. Whatever it does in the equities space
| is not applicable here. It understands that part too and
| its prudent that you do as well.
| yunusabd wrote:
| Most of the comments here seem to revolve around "traditional"
| crytocurrencies that are more or less copycats of Bitcoin with no
| real value-add.
|
| I think what most people don't realize is how much crypto has
| changed since 2017, mainly through Ethereum and the concept of
| smart contracts. The idea of running (immutable) functions on a
| decentralized network combined with transaction of value has so
| many interesting applications, that I believe we haven't even
| scratched the surface of what's possible.
|
| Shameless plug: We're in the middle of validating/refining an
| idea for a tokenized e-commerce platform. The main idea is that a
| tokenized platform can shift the incentives for all actors to
| produce drastically different outcomes. So we're more about
| embracing the game-theoretical side of crypto than the technical
| side.
|
| https://shopla.shop
|
| Curious what you guys think, any feedback is welcome.
| asdev wrote:
| unless your platform is better than shopify or your fees are
| 90% less, I don't see how you can compete
| yunusabd wrote:
| 90% is a lot, but we do plan on having lower fees.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| Can confirm. I'm friends with a group of very smart distributed
| systems engineers who were excited to launch an actually useful
| crypto project that gets talked about here from time to time.
|
| As much as they're excited about the technology itself, very few
| people are actually interested in using it. Instead, their
| business seems to revolve around the value of the utility tokens
| for their project.
|
| Few people are buying the utility tokens to pay for the service.
| They're buying them to horde so they can resell to other
| speculators when the price goes up. They have a lot of tokens in
| circulation, but only a small number of them get used to pay for
| the service. Many of them are sitting in the wallets of exchanges
| where they get traded back and forth but never come near the
| blockchain.
|
| Investors only care about getting more press releases out so they
| can pump up the price of their discounted tokens, which have a
| shortened lockup period relative to something like stocks. It's
| almost like a pump-and-dump scheme for investors.
|
| Maybe their underlying project will become popular in the future,
| but the volatility of the token price makes it increasingly
| unattractive for companies that want to actually use it.
| mkohlmyr wrote:
| > Investors only care about getting more press releases out so
| they can pump up the price of their discounted tokens, which
| have a shortened lockup period relative to something like
| stocks. It's almost like a pump-and-dump scheme for investors.
|
| "almost"
|
| If even useful services are being abused for speculation, it's
| time to realise the entire space is fundamentally broken. We've
| already seen massive fraud in the space, it's only a matter of
| time before people who fundamentally don't understand what they
| are "investing in" are left holding bags. It will necessarily
| collapse because of how it's being used. (imo)
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Is price speculation considered abuse?
| mkohlmyr wrote:
| The tokens issued in this case (on of the few) have a
| purpose which is not speculation. If large amounts of
| speculation is undermining the business itself then yes I
| think that might qualify as a form of abuse? Happy to use
| an alternative term of your choice, ESL etc.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| I'm not sure if the price speculation actually undermines
| the underlying businesses. For example, I participate in
| a blockchain wiki project. On the telegram there is a lot
| of people talking about the price but I don't feel like
| it diminishes the usefulness of the project. I asked
| questions about editing, the admins helped me out and I
| was able to use the platform.
| berkes wrote:
| How is this any different from the "web tech" space at large?
| Where investors will push towards "data-hoarding", privacy-
| invasion, dark patterns and/or addictiveness or other
| psychological "abuse", more often than not?
| aabhay wrote:
| It's not that different? That's why the dot com bust
| happened
| throwaway_kufu wrote:
| Because these crypto companies are generally deliberately
| marketing themselves as the democratic solution to the
| original problem through this new decentralized technology.
| Then when their private discord and telegram groups get
| exposed for pump and dump scams, their go to defense rings
| of your comment "so what, it's the way it's always been"
| grey-area wrote:
| It could not be more different, to pick one example from
| web tech with a similar name:
|
| Cryptocurrencies: Efforts to make useful tools are driven
| out, speculation and fraud are rife.
|
| Cryptography: Used to secure billions of web transactions
| every day on the web with very little fraud.
| jcbrand wrote:
| Cryptography is not web tech.
| grey-area wrote:
| This website is being served to you using cryptography
| right now (tls).
|
| I took web tech to mean the technology used to serve the
| web - the differences with cryptocurrencies are manifold,
| the principal one being that billions of people use the
| web every day to perform important functions, compared to
| cryptocurrencies where most users are simply speculating
| on prices.
| nwiswell wrote:
| I think GP's point is this:
|
| 1) You cannot have cryptocurrency without the web, so it
| is web tech.
|
| 2) Computational cryptography long predates the web. It
| would be more accurate to say "the web is cryptography
| tech", if anything.
| tnzm wrote:
| That's why it's the investment space that needs disruption
| - which is why crypto is met with so much pushback on HN. A
| year ago, crypto-related stories made front page much less
| often, if at all.
| verdverm wrote:
| 2017 was very different. Crypto type stories frequented
| the front page with technical marvels. Then a few things
| happened... 1) we evaluated 2) this scamconomy arose 3)
| the bubble burst.
|
| I was excited then, when it was new to me, but then I
| learnt the truth about blockchain
| tinyhouse wrote:
| Because people here try to understand the technology and
| its usage before riding the hype train. Most people
| investing in Ether for example have no idea what it even
| means. But when you ask them they would spit answers like
| "it's going to revolutionize finance..". When you ask
| them how, they have no answer. When you ask them for
| specific applications that they know of outside of the
| stupid NFT, they send you to Google. Yesterday someone on
| Youtube gave an example about a fridge that will order
| you eggs and milk when they run out, and everything will
| be done on the blockchain.
|
| Not a crypto hater. I even invest for fun and because you
| cannot deny the opportunity to make money rn. But don't
| expect people to ride the train blindly. I do think that
| crypto isn't going anywhere. But the current valuation of
| these coins is just absurd rn.
| intotheabyss wrote:
| There are plenty of useful applications on Ethereum.
| Maker, Compound, Aave, dYdX, Synthetix, UMA, Uniswap to
| name very few.
| tinyhouse wrote:
| Thanks. I will take a look.
| notJim wrote:
| IMO these things are basically driven by speculation as
| well. From what I can tell, they mainly provide liquidity
| for financial institutions. Financial institutions are
| interested in crypto so that they can make money trading
| it. IMO there is very little actual utility here.
| arberx wrote:
| Very actual utility here?
|
| What's utility to you? Is buying a in-game COD skin
| utility? Or how about roblox bucks? How about the
| trillion dollar derivatives market?
|
| All those things easily disrupted by DeFi.
| hanniabu wrote:
| Why don't you be transparent and tell us the service?
| ipaddr wrote:
| In many cases it is very useful. In this case does it really
| matter who? It could apply to almost all cryto projects.
| hanniabu wrote:
| Yes it does because he's saying "I swear guys this was
| definitely a good idea no need to confirm what I say" and
| then continues to bash crypto because it wasn't getting any
| traction. So his argument is just based on his opinion that
| it was a great idea, meanwhile most ideas are garbage.
| alephu5 wrote:
| This seems like it should be labeled as some kind of social
| law: Any blockchain will always converge towards a speculation
| vehicle.
|
| In much the same way, social networks almost always seem to
| become hookup platforms.
| fuzzybear3965 wrote:
| SkyNet/SiaSky?
| notJim wrote:
| > They're buying them to horde so they can resell to other
| speculators when the price goes up.
|
| It's almost like all interest in cryptocurrency is driven by
| greed and speculation. I've been learning more about it, and
| I'm pretty convinced this is the case. Go into any crypto
| space, and all people are talking about is yield, price action,
| how much their tokens have grown etc. I think the only thing
| I've seen that isn't purely about speculation is NFTs, oddly
| enough, which seem to be basically a fad.
| wmf wrote:
| _Few people are buying the utility tokens to pay for the
| service. They're buying them to hoard so they can resell to
| other speculators_
|
| That's not a utility token. If you want to create a true
| utility token, make it stable and you won't have to worry about
| speculation.
| zaphar wrote:
| This is impossible. If it can be traded it can be speculated.
| The value of any tradable asset is determined by how much
| someone is willing to trade for it and by nothing else. There
| is no way to make it stable other than to make it impossible
| to trade.
| [deleted]
| maxwell wrote:
| What if asset issuers ("crypto manufacturers") imposed
| contractual price ceilings/floors?
|
| Probably more realistic with exchanges ("authorized
| resellers") than individual traders.
|
| https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-
| guidance/guide-a...
| extr wrote:
| Sounds like Chainlink
| kayhi wrote:
| or filecoin
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| Like the OP Twitter thread said: It's universal across
| every crypto project that issues their own tokens.
|
| There's no reason to force customers to buy a brand new
| token invented out of thin air just to pay for a service
| that could be otherwise purchased with real money or
| Ethereum.
| monkeydust wrote:
| Perhaps their initial approach was not the right one i.e. was
| the public token the right method to maximize the value of
| their actual offering? Maybe they need to rethink given what
| you have said.
|
| I know of a very similar company (might even be the same one)
| the telegram forum they have setup is just full of people
| speculating what will / might happen ...will it go to the
| moon... etc.. They have now moderated that out but still main
| reason people join the group to start with.
| p4bl0 wrote:
| For those who thought this was n interesting link about starting
| to work on cryptology related project: it's not
|
| This has nothing to do with _crypto_ it is yet another thread
| about scam energy-wasting fake money.
| henvic wrote:
| Society is losing the opportunity to create a lot of wealth
| because people are investing in silly proof-of-work (or:
| energy/resource wasting) ideas. It's awful, and I guess we're
| only going to see this over once Bitcoin is surpassed by Dogecoin
| (I'm sure this will happen), and then Dogecoin gets surpassed by
| any other stupid shitcoin out there.
|
| The idea of cryptocurrency is interesting, but the idea of having
| no back at all makes no sense. Wasting energy is not creating
| wealth.
| jkepler wrote:
| Except that Proof-of-work isn't wasted energy: it secures the
| bitcoin network/system by making it prohibitively expensive to
| attack, as well as provides a means to confirm groups of
| transactions in a decentralized manner. Bitcoin provides a real
| final settlement layer alternative to fiat central banks, and
| that's globally significant.
|
| Plus there is the bisq project, a peer-to-peer bitcoin/fiat
| exchange that has decentralized their governance using a token
| that's colored bitcoin, rather than building on Ethereum.
|
| Regarding the energy consumption of monetary networks, what's
| the real cost of the petrodollar system? Don't forget to
| include the US military costs fighting wars to force oil-
| producing nations to sell oil denominated in dollars, as well
| as all the banking, financial advisors, and physical security
| (Brinks) that prop up the central banking/fiat monetary
| standards.
| pfisch wrote:
| You realize doge coin is still worth less than 10% of btc by
| marketcap?
|
| Not sure I would count on that prediction.
|
| I mean is gme going to surpass apple?
| henvic wrote:
| 10% over something that is pure speculation and has no value
| whatsoever seems like really high. If anything, this just
| makes me feel confident about my prediction.
| mikeodds wrote:
| You could reach out to the polymarket team on discord and
| they might be happy to setup a prediction market for this
|
| https://polymarket.com/
|
| They're crypto based but unfortunately (/s) no token
| spottybanana wrote:
| > It's awful, and I guess we're only going to see this over
| once Bitcoin is surpassed by Dogecoin (I'm sure this will
| happen), and then Dogecoin gets surpassed by any other stupid
| shitcoin out there.
|
| Just pointing out that both Doge and BTC are proof of work and
| consume energy in similar style with the mining process.
| henvic wrote:
| Yes, like most if not all current cryptos: it's either stupid
| energy waste or fraud.
| andxor wrote:
| Not true, most stuff launching these days is either PoS or
| migrating.
| timdaub wrote:
| This account is talking about how many things in Crypto are non-
| credible but at the same time they also just "blab" their opinion
| on Twitter without any factual backing.
| Luker88 wrote:
| As someone interested in all of cryptography, I cringe every
| single time when we call blockchain "crypto".
|
| Sure, there's cryptography in it. But you don't call a mail or
| http server "crypto". There's similar tech in git, we don't call
| it "crypto", we call it VCS.
|
| Calling this "crypto" is just trying to add a mystic aura for
| stuff people don't understand, to further muddy the waters.
|
| We have a word for this technology. It's not "crypto". It's
| blockchain.
|
| Sure, it's your shorthand for "cryptocoin" or "cryptovalue".
| Which are again newspeak for blockchain, and we could argue that
| given its limits and usage of the last years they should be
| called crypto-investment, at best.
|
| Which is still like ordering a pizza and forcefully referring to
| it only as "food". I want a pepperoni-food please.
|
| Sorry for the rant, but it really feels like it's just a way to
| further embellish something with dubious values like the post
| points out
| ccamrobertson wrote:
| Regardless of the "crypto" shorthand, blockchains are distinct
| from cryptocurrencies. A cryptocurrency can exist without using
| a blockchain to record balance changes, and likewise, a
| blockchain can exist which is not used for recording accounts
| or spendable outputs.
|
| The "crypto" shorthand emerged from the cryptocurrency side,
| which by and large, uses cryptographic primitives in order to
| spend and receive value. One further bit worth adding is that
| the market demand for cryptocurrencies broadly has directed
| massive amounts of resources towards the development of novel
| cryptographic primitives.
| steveEnix wrote:
| This is a very prescriptive approach to language, as in
| prescribing meaning to words. It's a philosophy of fixed
| meaning that does not allow language to evolve. The alternative
| camp would be descriptive, as in allow language to evolve and
| define its rules based on how people actually use it. At the
| end of the day it's not one or the other, but a balance... your
| objection seems rather attached to the usage you know.
|
| Recognizing this dichotomy is useful when thinking about shared
| values, such as programming styles, ethics, and money. DFW's
| Consider the Lobster has an essay called "Authority and
| American Usage" that covers it well, originally printed here:
| https://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/HarpersMagazine-2001-...
| avindroth wrote:
| Crypto sounds way cooler and can be prepended to things much
| more easily. It's a social market out there.
| [deleted]
| baby wrote:
| Heh, I think that ship has sailed and it's a waste of time to
| argue over the real meaning "crypto" should have
| sadfasf122 wrote:
| Cryptocurrency - therefore crypto for short.
|
| /thread.
| vmception wrote:
| Its called context.
|
| A new one was created to convey a shared concept (aka the
| purpose of language) and will always be more popular than the
| thing you invested way too much time into to change.
|
| It'll sting at first but time to accept that and update your
| lexicon.
| jyriand wrote:
| It's like people will create their own desired footpaths over
| fields when the sidewalks are not in the right place, so it
| seems the word "crypto" is just a shortcut because there aren't
| any shorter words to describe blockchain.
| munchbunny wrote:
| As someone who works on stuff that involves cryptography but
| not cryptocurrency, I agree, but at this point I consider it a
| lost cause. Cryptocurrencies have taken over so much of the
| popular imagination that even when I say "cryptography" I get
| responses like "oh you mean like Bitcoin?"
| eppsilon wrote:
| Kind of like when you use the word "hacker" (as in HN) with a
| non-technical person. They always assume you mean the black
| hat kind.
| pattusk wrote:
| > 16. And my personal pet peeve is that, by and large, most of
| crypto actually does want Bitcoin to die. Perhaps not in a "I
| want Bitcoin to go to zero", but in a, "Bitcoin doesn't do
| anything and so I want its value to be rightly distributed to my
| project, which has real utility".
|
| This is the most frustrating thing about crypto and has been
| since at least 2016. Most of the projects with the highest market
| cap in the space either don't do anything, don't plan on doing
| anything and don't have any purpose.
|
| And then you have a myriad of projects that are rewriting the
| traditional finance playbooks. Or blockchain infrastructure
| projects that are laying the foundations of what could be a fully
| decentralized and anonymous web. And they're worth a 100th of
| DOGE's market cap. Granted, they might still very well be grossly
| overvalued. Especially at this stage of the bull market. But the
| fact that there's such assymetry with projects that are at best
| vaporware and at worse outright scams is by far the most
| frustrating part of crypto.
| ignoramous wrote:
| > _Most of the projects with the highest market cap in the
| space either don 't do anything, don't plan on doing anything
| and don't have any purpose._
|
| The second most valued crypto-currency is Ethereum. And the
| entire ecosystem around it does plan on doing _a lot_ of
| things, starting with decentralised finance.
|
| There are also efforts to layer a network on top of Bitcoin in
| a bid to counter-act Ethereum. And competing networks like Diem
| (Facebook, Spotify, Uber...), CENTRE (Coinbase / Circle...),
| Stellar (Stripe...) that aim to replace the current payments
| infrastructure.
|
| Then there are cross-chains like Polkadot, Cosmos, Polygon et
| al that try to make all of these disparate blockchains inter-
| programmable.
|
| Agree that pump and dump schemes seem like the norm, but that's
| like saying Internet has no utility and is crap because there's
| porn, spam, and malware all around.
| pattusk wrote:
| I said most because indeed most of the innovation, both
| technical and cultural originates from Ethereum. But DOGE,
| XRP, ADA, LTC, BCH, TRON, ETC. EOS, NEO, BSV are all in the
| top 25 and have nothing to show for it despite being some of
| the oldest players in the space. The L2 projects on Bitcoin
| are not new and they've never brought anything revolutionary.
| And I think BTC is fine without L2, it's a very different
| philosophy from ETH and I can respect that. I just don't
| think it does or will ever deliver the typeof value that ETH
| and the projects hosted on it do.
|
| Polygon, Cosmos or other innovative L1 projects like
| Avalanche, Algorand or HBAR all sit at 9 digit mcap - which
| is certainly very high but still annoyingly low when you
| consider that DOGE is worth 77 billion dollars and BSC, whose
| sole purpose is to make scams out of ETH projects and run
| them on a centralized chain, sits close to 100 billion
| dollars.
| pjc50 wrote:
| > BSC, whose sole purpose is to make scams out of ETH
| projects and run them on a centralized chain, sits close to
| 100 billion dollars
|
| Scams are big business, but that just illustrates how
| delusional and bubbly these are; is BSC, a thing I'd never
| heard of before, really of equivalent value to .. Square?
| Lockheed Martin? Target? AirBnB? AMD? NTT? Uber?
|
| https://companiesmarketcap.com/page/2/
| ithinkinstereo wrote:
| BSC is a Eth competitor by Binance.
|
| Gas costs in ETH have been at historical highs, making it
| uneconomical for players under 5-6 figures of capital to
| do basic transactions, let alone yield-farm / manage
| positions, so various DeFi dApps have moved over to less
| congested chains like BSC and Solana.
|
| Sure, lots of scam projects due to cheaper deployment
| costs (again low gas fees vs Eth), but legitimate
| projects too: see PancakeSwap, which started out as a Uni
| clone, but has arguable expanded to offer more /
| different set of features.
|
| Speaking more broadly, yes, we're in a crazy bubble, but
| that's really the case across all asset classes at the
| moment due to rampant central bank printing. Scams are
| proliferating in equities too, see SPACS.
|
| Not to trot out the "this time is different" meme, but
| unlike the '17/'18 cycle, you have far fewer whitepaper
| copy-pasta scam ICOs and way more legitimate projects;
| with real teams, real users, real use-cases. Plus,
| institutions are actually ape-ing in, so take that for
| what you will.
|
| IMO pace of development and adoption will only accelerate
| from here on the back of an already "mature" internet and
| mobile ecosystem + generational familiarity/acceptance of
| digital value in the youth.
|
| As someone who grew up during the transition from analog-
| digital, crypto gives me mega 90s/00s internet vibes,
| especially the feeling of inevitability around the DeFi
| space.
| 1experience wrote:
| There is no rationale here to be found, You are comparing
| an insane bubble (Doge, etc.) to a regular bubble
| (Avalanche, etc.).
|
| People have completely lost the value of money, do you
| realize how much money is $4.5 billion?
|
| In 2007 Apple had a market cap of 80 billion and a P/E
| ratio of 26, it had revolutionary products on the market
| that were clearly going to change an entire industry while
| at the same time bringing in steady revenue, can you
| imagine how much it would be worth today in this bubble?
| teachingassist wrote:
| This is describing many of the same political problems as you get
| in any decentralised organisation, such as community volunteers.
|
| But, it must be worse to deal with when you have profit as a
| motivator rather than social benefit.
|
| Sounds like a recipe for burn-out and a risk to mental health.
| noxer wrote:
| Here is a free tip if you want to do it anyway. DON'T CREATE
| ANOTHER F**ING TOKEN!
|
| Build you product on an existing reliable fast and cheap
| blockchain that fits your needs. Focus on the product not the
| price of tokens on said DLT.
|
| You dont need a token. No, really you dont. Your tokens only use
| case is likely to transfer value and guess which token can do
| this better than yours? All of them! Simply because they already
| have adoption/liquidity/fiat on-ramps etc. etc. You also
| instantly gain a community simply by using a token that has a
| community already.
|
| And you avoid lots of legal problems.
|
| Here are some companies that did/do this:
|
| coil.com
|
| sologenic.org
|
| gatehub.net
|
| forte.io
|
| raisedinspace.com
|
| (Very biased (they all use XRPL.org) because I simply dont know
| other projects. But you get the point, every DLT that actually
| works in a useful way should have people building on top - if not
| its probably garbage tech)
| marton78 wrote:
| Not necessarily. For example, https://gains.farm has a valid
| and novel use case: decentralised (i.e. on chain) leverage
| trading. Tokens you win are minted, tokens you lose are burnt.
| anonymoushn wrote:
| Alright, so I make a two-sided market on chain, and the fees I
| charge accrue to... me? This seems like a similarly large legal
| headache to having them accrue to token holders! I am probably
| obligated to make sure that all users of my protocol are not
| Kim Jong Un, right?
| noxer wrote:
| Take a look at Sologenic. Sologenic is a fronted for the DEX.
| AFAIK they have no legal obligation to limit who is using it
| at all. The DEX as as its name says is decentral, they can
| not control it. They just make software that lets users use
| it. They can also not directly take fees because the DEX does
| not have fees (you make things decentral to remove the
| lurking middlemen who takes the fee) IDK how Sologenics
| business model looks like (they are pretty new) but I assume
| they will make certain features in their apps cost something.
| Possibly can be payed directly with crypto. KYC rules usually
| dont apply for such stuff. Fiat on-ramps have to deal with
| that. Hence using an existing system that already has the
| infrastructure is preferable.
| anonymoushn wrote:
| I'm not necessarily sold on the idea of making products
| without business models. My lawyers so far have told me
| somewhat different things from "if it's all crypto then you
| have no KYC obligations"
| noxer wrote:
| I'm sure they have one but these days you offer something
| for free first to gain users and make you product as
| premium as possible so you can actually expect someone to
| pay for it.
|
| >"if it's all crypto then you have no KYC obligations"
|
| Yes, its not that simple but this thread is not legal
| advice anyway
| ska wrote:
| > KYC rules usually dont apply for such stuff. Fiat on-
| ramps have to deal with that.
|
| I think it would be a very risky bet to assume this will
| remain the state long term. It's not even the state now,
| overall.
|
| Similarly:
|
| > The DEX as as its name says is decentral, they can not
| control it.
|
| It is possible to construct situations where a business is
| not technically capable of meeting its legal obligations.
| The usual solution to this is that the business changes,
| not the obligation.
| Far_Pig wrote:
| I suspect in the not-so-distant future, every company will have
| their own token, much like they have their own domain/website
| today.
| noxer wrote:
| That's exactly what we dont need. 99% would use the token to
| move value (pay for something) and we really dont need a
| bazillion different tokens for that. Also most tokens are not
| stable and thus not very desirably for payment.
| earnesti wrote:
| I don't have problem having gazillions of tokens, I just
| don't use them. There isnt need and in the long run
| companies will just write them off like many other hyped IT
| projects.
| noxer wrote:
| No one will, that's the point. Imagine you would have to
| pay Netflix with Netflix token and on eBay you would have
| to pay with eBay token. The current financial system is
| already annoying, we re dont have to make it worse.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| Companies already have loyalty points and gift cards and
| rewards programs long before blockchain.
|
| No consumers want to have to deal with tokens and blockchain
| to interact with a company.
|
| Consumers will always do what's easiest and cheapest.
| Blockchain solutions are inherently more difficult, more
| expensive, and more risky (for the consumer) than just
| breaking out your credit card and getting paid 2% cashback to
| spend your money.
| croshan wrote:
| And why would a company need to have a decentralized token?
| noxer wrote:
| No one said they should. But they can offer something and
| get payed with one that's usually the use case of the
| token. And it does not require a new token.
| pjc50 wrote:
| > You dont need a token. No, really you dont. Your tokens only
| use case is likely to transfer value
|
| Other way round: transferring value to yourself is _the only
| use case_.
|
| If you take a second to look in the mirror and see the wreckage
| of previous startups in this space, you'll see that - as
| pointed out in the OP thread - 99% of the community is there
| for the pump and dump. For all the practical purposes,
| distributed solutions end up worse than centralised ones.
| Except possibly for censorship resistance, which means you have
| the problem of attracting people who want to use it because
| they've been banned from other services.
| noxer wrote:
| Sounds to me as if you dont have any "blockchain project"
| ideas. That's fine do something else. If whatever you every
| wished to crate does not profit form this tech, it probably
| really just does not profit form it. Nothing wrong with that.
| It would be a shame to slap blockchain on a cool project that
| doesn't need it.
| arcticbull wrote:
| No it's not that, there's not a single blockchain based
| solution that achieves better results than a classical
| solution. Not a single one. Never has been. Not in 14
| years. I'm open to one showing up! But, well, it hasn't.
|
| And that's because there's a huge fundamental cost to
| trustlessness, decentralization and permissionlessness that
| substantially no project actually benefits from.
| swensel wrote:
| Bitcoin is a worldwide network storing $1 trillion in
| value without a central party or government. That has
| never happened before. Are you sure you're just not open
| to considering the technology at all?
|
| Ethereum is another one to look more into. Smart
| contracts are doing things that no classical solution has
| ever done. Have you done a deep dive on how the
| technology of Bitcoin or Ethereum actually work?
|
| FWIW, I think plenty of the altcoin tokens are garbage,
| but some of the top players, like Bitcoin and Ethereum,
| are doing things that classical solutions simply do not
| allow today.
| anonymouse008 wrote:
| > No it's not that, there's not a single blockchain based
| solution that achieves better results than a classical
| solution. Not a single one. Never has been. Not in 14
| years. I'm open to one showing up! But, well, it hasn't.
|
| Mind helping me with my assumptions??
|
| From what I see, the classical solutions assume the
| central authority will always exist and provide its
| services at reasonable prices, that the authority will be
| benevolent and just, and the central authority is usually
| single purpose.
|
| Regarding survival, crypto space has a similar assumption
| that at least some people will run nodes - but I like
| it's robustness to being 'killed off' because only a few
| people need to participate in mining or validating.
|
| Regarding benevolence, I think there are plenty of
| examples of hostility towards users in the payments space
| specifically.
|
| Regarding single purpose, blockchains are fairly
| interesting as they allow for any purpose that's signed
| with the participating parties. Which is a wildly open
| means of coordination amongst groups -- which is also why
| blockchains look a lot like currency at outset, because
| currencies have been the tool for eons to coordinate
| human efforts.
|
| But looking at it closer, a lot of the world runs on IFFT
| logic, which seems ripe for smart contracts - the only
| issue is the interoperability between traditional world
| and blockchain world to become like Daniel Suarez's
| Dameon.
| noxer wrote:
| ILP is (could be) the "interoperability between
| traditional world and blockchain" but only for
| payment/money/value We dont really know yet what else
| there might be. NFTs is the current hype but who knows
| what/if that will turn out to be in the future.
| [deleted]
| tjs8rj wrote:
| I'm jaded with the crypto-scammery too, but isn't lower
| fees with 24/7 instant transactions the selling point?
| (For low fees think Binance not Coinbase).
| noxer wrote:
| The post above has a list of companies who build on top
| of such a decentral permission-less system that
| apparently has no benefits.
|
| Start with coil.com what they do it not possible with the
| financial system. They enable users to stream money to
| content creator in real time with fractions of cents per
| second. A central system would not make any sense. It
| must be p2p and there must be a ledger to "settle the
| transactions"
|
| Its not impossible to make it central it just not
| lucrative in any way. But if the middlemen is removed it
| doesn't have to be lucrative for that middlemen anymore
| and it turns out to be almost free because you just need
| to send p2p data packages to stream money.
|
| Its called interledger protocol (ILP) its not a
| blockchain its a protocol but like I said above you need
| to settle somehow and which bank or financial system lets
| you settle fractions of cents? No one because there is no
| money to be made from this so a system that does not
| generate money for the owner (a decentral system) works
| best.
| mtnGoat wrote:
| Re: coil.com, what they do is entirely possible on a
| centralized system. cam sites have been using token based
| internal payment systems based on minutes viewed, tips,
| etc at sub $0.01 levels for 20+ years now. and until the
| tubes came along, all sides profited handsomely.
|
| source: i helped build some.
| noxer wrote:
| That not what coil does.
|
| Coils is just payment provider for web monetization. You
| can use another (probably none exist so far) and more
| importantly you can use web monetization outside of coil
| owned platforms.
|
| The cam site thing maybe look similar on the surface but
| its not. It only works in very limited full controlled
| closed system. It can not scale to the web. You would
| need 100+ subscriptions in the end that not the goal. Or
| you would need one overlord that has the monopoly on web
| monetization and everyone is forced to use g$$gle.
| Obviously bad for all kinds of reasons like privacy,
| competition, censorship etc etc.
|
| Web monetization puts a payment pointer into the HTML
| meta tag The browser reads this and streams money there.
| See https://webmonetization.org/docs/getting-started
| e12e wrote:
| > you can use web monetization outside of coil owned
| platforms.
|
| Like you can use PayPal to sell (access to) digital
| assets? Or patron?
|
| I'm not sure which part of the core value proposition of
| coil has anything to do with blockchain?
|
| And small wonder: crypto/chains allows us to transfer
| trust (eg, I trust i can buy milk for my dollar, I buy
| bitcoin for a dollar, I give you bitcoin, if you can sell
| bitcoin for a dollar, we trust that I have given you the
| opportunity to buy milk).
|
| This could also go via bank transfer, or hybrid systems
| like PayPal,stripe or vipps[1].
|
| I see some benefit to "magic crypto cash on the
| interwebz"- but untraceable tender is generally not what
| chains facilitate. Quite the opposite.
|
| When you realize crypto currency can go two ways: perfect
| taxation (billionaires and corporations will fight it, to
| the death), or: perfect money laundring/tax evasion
| (government will fight it, to the death) - the crypto
| future looks quite distant.
|
| [1] a Norwegian bank owned platform for instant digital
| settlement: https://vipps.no
| mtalantikite wrote:
| > Start with coil.com what they do it not possible with
| the financial system. They enable users to stream money
| to content creator in real time with fractions of cents
| per second. A central system would not make any sense.
|
| I'm sorry, what? Genuinely curious about what the use
| case is here, I've never heard of this before. I pay
| based on the amount of time I consume?
| noxer wrote:
| Currently Coil costs you 5 bucks a month and its
| distributed to the content creators that you consume on
| the basis of how long you consume them. The Creator must
| have a web monetization enabled website [1] to
| participate. And you need either an add-on or a browser
| that has it integrated. The creator can show/hide content
| based on whether you stream money or not (kinda like a
| paywall)
|
| Its obviously intentional very simplified ATM because its
| rather new. There is long way to go before we can
| actually pay for exactly what we consume.
|
| [1] https://webmonetization.org/
|
| Old (2018) but fun: A Raspberry Pi ILP power switch
| (Turns on a light if money is streamed)
| https://xrpcommunity.blog/raspberry-pi-interledger-xp-
| powers...
| arcticbull wrote:
| > The post above has a list of companies who build on top
| of such a decentral permission-less system that
| apparently has no benefits.
|
| Correct.
|
| > Start with coil.com what they do it not possible with
| the financial system. They enable users to stream money
| to content creator in real time with fractions of cents
| per second. A central system would not make any sense. It
| must be p2p and there must be a ledger to "settle the
| transactions"
|
| Any wallet could offer the same thing. PayPal could offer
| it. But they don't because nobody wants micropayments.
| Nobody's ever actually wanted micropayments, it's
| something they think they do, but in reality, they do
| not. This comes up from time to time. One of the crypto
| folks actually wrote a really good paper on it, I'll dig
| it up.
|
| You just build up the balance until it's over $1 and
| ACH/RTP it. Those transaction methods cost $0.0033 in
| bulk.
|
| Further, this is just revisiting whether people are
| willing to pay for content online. They are not. They
| would rather be subjected to ads and not pay anything.
| noxer wrote:
| >Any wallet could offer the same thing.
|
| No, its not a wallet at all its a protocol like TCP but
| for money. If you are interested go read about it first.
| There is no point in arguing about something you dont
| know what it is.
|
| >PayPal could offer it
|
| Yes, they could but its not lucrative and if it would be
| they would not be interested in using a public
| interoperable protocol where everyone can offer the same
| service and compete.
|
| So you have some sites that use PayPal and other sites
| use 15 other payment companies. You just recreated
| subscription hell. Its completely missing the point. If
| its decentral and standardized all systems work together.
| If I have the wrong token or currency the decentral
| system finds a way to swap them so I can use any services
| no matter what "wallet" or currency I use. I cold stream
| Netflix and Amazon Prime and only pay what I watch and
| when I watch.
|
| Also why would I want PayPal to know whom I stream money?
| If its central its impossible to hide such data. If its
| p2p no third party know what content I pay for. That's
| how it should be.
|
| >Nobody's ever actually wanted micropayments
|
| We already have it.... its called ads. Ever page load,
| every click, every interaction and every data collected
| about you is a form of inefficient micropayment. One that
| does not respect your privacy, tires to maximize the time
| you waste and tries to trick you into buying stuff you
| dont need. And the cost of that is slapped onto the
| product you may buy.
|
| Don't you think there are tons of people out there who
| would rather not annoy their visitors with ads? They
| would rather have them pay a few fraction of a cent
| directly to them without the ad-mafia taking a huge junk
| out of the revenue. And dont you think there are people
| who would rather pay a few fraction of a cent than see
| ads or block ads knowing that the content creator does
| not get paid then?
|
| >Further, this is just revisiting whether people are
| willing to pay for content online. They are not. They
| would rather be subjected to ads and not pay anything.
|
| That's your personal opinion. The facts are not on your
| side. People already pay to not see ads its just
| cumbersome because every service needs a subscription or
| pro app or whatever. It does not scale to the number or
| services the average user wants to use. And it hardly
| adjust to the actual use. Its objectively just so much
| worse than if you could stream for what you use in real
| time.
|
| You could go a long way without ads for a few bucks if
| you would replace them with the actual revenue they
| create. Only if your time is worthless you would rather
| watch a 15 second ad than pay 1/10 cent or whatever to
| not see it.
| reedjosh wrote:
| > People already pay to not see ads its just cumbersome
| because every service needs a subscription or pro app or
| whatever.
|
| People will pay if it's a frictionless payment of a small
| amount reflective of the value gained. Netflix did this
| with movies, Spotify with music, `crypto with
| everything?` if the tech and business models are worked
| out.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Spotify and Netflix do the exact opposite: fixed cost.
| People _hate_ having a taxi meter running.
| noxer wrote:
| You can still have fixed cost/flat rates whatever. The
| key point is that you can use any service you want and
| they have to actually compete with the price and content.
| This is not the case now. You are locked-in or you
| overpay if you have multiple subscriptions.
| noxer wrote:
| Imagine how awesome it would be if you could search for a
| movie choose the service that current has the best
| cost/byte ratio for your location (they can make this
| variable to manage load). Then you start streaming. No
| registering needed. Not even a login.
|
| After 10 min you notice the film sucks so you stop the
| stream. You only payed for the first 10 min.
|
| Totally friction-less ofc. You could watch on a random TV
| anywhere and stream the money from your phone.
|
| Sounds like sci-fi but we have all the key tech needed
| for this.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| this sound great. I'd cancel my Netflix sub and go for
| this in an instant.
|
| Now go pitch it to the 50+ copyright owners that you'd
| need to convince to make this happen.
|
| Strong hint: it's not going to happen. The people who own
| the content you want to stream like this have no
| incentive to make it work like this.
|
| If they could go back in time and say "no" to Spotify,
| they would.
| arcticbull wrote:
| It sounds not very compelling. Id rather give Netflix
| $50/mth and not worry about any of that.
|
| [edit] not to mention, content creators don't price their
| movies in dollars per byte haha, they price it based on
| what they think people will pay. This is part of the
| reason all you can eat is much more enjoyable.
| noxer wrote:
| I think you didn't get the bigger picture. Its not for
| streaming a movie is for everything on the web. Why would
| you pay 50 for Netflix if you can just consume content
| wherever you want for 50 bucks instead. They can still
| offer you a flat rate if they want. The option to pay
| what you use doesn't take the option to pay upfront or
| whatever away. There is no doubt they will lure you into
| using the same service somehow but that's kind
| irrelevant. The goal is to have the choice and that you
| can pay/support the small fishes too. The one you would
| never make a subscription for. Same with donation. You
| probably dont have Wikipedia or hacker news subscription.
| But leaving a few cents for free content ever month would
| probably be a good idea to keep it free.
|
| Its not "all you can eat" is "you can eat where you want"
| you never missed that because it was always like that you
| never needed a subscription for certain food or
| restaurant chains. You just go and eat wherever you want
| and they all expect you to pay what you ordered or
| whatever deal they offer. This system makes it far more
| likely you go eat somewhere new and far more likely that
| you eat spaghetti where you like it the most and pizza
| somewhere ease. Web content should work the same.
| zaphar wrote:
| This conversation is odd. Someone says there are no real
| world use cases. Someone else says yes there is and poses
| one. Former person points out that in fact that example
| just makes their point for them. The counter is well
| there _has_ to be some use case because there are
| theoretically an infinite number of them. We just have to
| find one from that set.
|
| This example right here. It presumes that content
| creators will happily just bypass distributors like
| Netflix. I find that unlikely because it ignores what
| Netflix actually provides for content creators.
|
| 1. Funding in some cases.
|
| 2. Discovery and a ready audience.
|
| 3. Availability of content to your audience.
|
| Content creators have little motivation to not use
| Netflix or Disney+ or whatever other service. Those
| services have little motivation to use crypto streaming
| payments. And frankly most consumers don't care enough to
| create an incentive for the creators by voting with their
| wallet.
| arcticbull wrote:
| Sorry for the confusion what I meant was this is
| achievable today, but instead people opt to avoid
| micropayments and instead want to watch ads + get the
| content free, or pay for an all you can eat model.
| Everyone's thought about micropayments. For decades.
| They've tried it many times. There's no technological
| reason today that micropayments couldn't be adopted
| overnight. They reason they aren't is because people
| don't _want_ them.
|
| There's a mass grave of micropayments startups, and I bet
| you anything it's not because they couldn't figure out
| how to debit and credit fractions of a unit.
|
| People don't want to continuously make judgements about
| whether they're getting good value for money in their
| content - especially their entertainment content.
| lottin wrote:
| "Streaming money" doesn't sound like sci-fi at all. It
| just sounds like something I absolutely would try to
| avoid at all costs.
| noxer wrote:
| Well there can still be option to pay full at once. Not
| quite sure what you gain from this but if you can stream
| you can also stream all once.
| arcticbull wrote:
| > Don't you think there are tons of people out there who
| would rather not annoy their visitors with ads?
|
| No, I don't. I mean I think they would if it didn't cost
| them anything but I firmly believe when given the
| decision between being vaguely annoyed by ads vs. ponying
| up the cash, they'll do the former substantially all the
| time.
|
| Nick Szabo has a great paper on it. [1] Trust me when I
| say this is almost certainly the _only_ thing Nick Szabo
| and I agree on.
|
| [1]
| https://nakamotoinstitute.org/static/docs/micropayments-
| and-...
| jaggs wrote:
| Cough...Patreon.
| e12e wrote:
| Patron kinda proves the point that no-one wants
| _micropayments_ (and that small /threshold payments work
| fine in a centralized system)?
| arcticbull wrote:
| Exactly my point :) that's not micropayments that's full
| on payments and you subscribe monthly!
| megameter wrote:
| Exactly - a good use of a decentralized ledger doesn't
| leave so much room for speculative profit motives.
|
| However, my own investment thesis is that the "crypto"
| market is ultimately destined to march towards that
| useful and unprofitable outcome, kicking and screaming
| the whole way, by dint of the long-term market survivors
| being the civically oriented perennials. But this is a
| long journey, maybe another decade or two in the making(a
| epochal shift in tech). It will continue to have ups and
| downs.
| noxer wrote:
| The goal was to remove the middlemen to make stuff
| cheaper/unbiased/fair/private. The token prices going up
| an down is indeed just a side effete of speculation. but
| will definitely go away over time its not solving any
| problem and it hides the tech because people just see the
| money.
| reedjosh wrote:
| > there's not a single blockchain based solution that
| achieves better results than a classical solution
|
| The following
|
| > trustlessness, decentralization and permissionlessness
|
| Are better results.
|
| But I do admit, that they come at _performance_ trade-
| offs.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| but they don't achieve any of those, either.
|
| All of them rely on a centralised authority, as can be
| seen with the bitcoin & ethereum forks - if something
| goes bad, the people in control will step in and make it
| better. That means there are people in control. This is
| not trustless, decentralised or permissionless.
| reedjosh wrote:
| There's degrees in everything.
|
| Permissionless--nobody can stop a transaction from taking
| place because of ideology.
|
| Decentralised--the miners and the software devs have to
| agree on something to make a hard change. This has
| happened so rarely as to be a non-issue. When it does
| happen, the currency forks and those that want to use it
| can do so as they please.
|
| BTC became LiteCoin, BCH, and BSV from hard protocol
| forks.
|
| Ethereum forked from Ethereum Classic.
|
| Hive forked from Steamit as Tron tried a hostile
| takeover.
|
| Trustless -- Here trustless really mean visibility. I can
| verify everything is correct in the chain myself. I don't
| have to believe there are gold bars in a vault somewhere,
| but to a degree it also means I can trust there's no
| central authority that may be ponzi-ing or ready to abuse
| the protocol.
| baby wrote:
| Honestly you don't know what you're talking about. What
| do you mean better results? What's your metric? In terms
| of security it does achieve better result.
| Kiro wrote:
| HN's hypocrisy: constantly complaining about centralisation
| but dismissing attempts of freeing people from said
| centralisation at the same time.
| wmf wrote:
| In practice, crypto does not free people from
| centralization. That's one of the problems highlighted by
| this thread.
| arberx wrote:
| Centralization is a spectrum.
| arberx wrote:
| What do you expect from Big Tech engineers? Honestly most
| peoples livelihoods are generated by working on extremely
| centralised, monopolistic services.
| pinkybanana wrote:
| > > You dont need a token. No, really you dont. Your tokens
| only use case is likely to transfer value
|
| > Other way round: transferring value to yourself is the only
| use case.
|
| Everyone needs money. These tho claims are contradictory. If
| by creating tokens you can transfer value to yourself, it is
| clear use case and thats why people will keep creating
| tokens.
| Fede_V wrote:
| That's exactly right. I've seen zero products where the
| blockchain is a compelling value ad, with the exception of:
|
| - it makes it easier to raise capital by claiming that what
| you are doing involves crypto, because then you get crypto-
| type valuations
|
| - you can get money from people who want to speculate
| eightysixfour wrote:
| I, personally, think Handshake is an interesting value add.
| Decentralized ICANN on a blockchain, mainly because I can't
| think of a better method to decentralize TLD management.
|
| The negative is a lot of the TLDs sold on Handshake were
| sold to early interested parties, many of which were
| speculators. Unfortunately, other than an ICANN run
| solution, I can't think of a way to solve this since you
| need critical mass to make it fair, but can't get critical
| mass without having everything running.
|
| Maybe they should have restricted the character length of
| the TLDs that were available to be auctioned at any given
| time based on the number of mined coins so more valuable
| TLDs wouldn't come available until, ideally, more people
| were onboarded to the service. Not sure there's a great
| solution there.
| dogecoinbase wrote:
| I've never been able to get over Handshake basing their
| domain-claiming system on DNSSEC -- and when they
| launched they couldn't even claim their _own domain_
| because .org was still signed with a RSASHA1-NSEC3-SHA1
| key: https://github.com/handshake-org/hsd/issues/399
|
| It, uh, didn't inspire a lot of confidence.
| ghayes wrote:
| Another good example would be a project like Uniswap on
| Ethereum that existed for a long time without a token. To your
| point precisely, Uniswap v1 was similar to the Bancor project
| but explicitly removed the token/tokenomics. The simplified
| launch made the protocol better for both them and their users.
| noxer wrote:
| Hmm whats the UNI token for then?
| anonymoushn wrote:
| It's a governance token, meaning you can use it to
| participate in non-binding votes about what the developers
| do.
| noxer wrote:
| Ah cool thx, BTW you can swap on the XRPL DEX too,
| however you can only swap "issued currencies" (IOUs) so
| you need to trust some counterpart (like gatehub or
| another exchange) to actually hold the asset behind it
| until you withdraw. The benefit is that is extremely fast
| and cheap even slow assets like BTC can be swapped just
| as fast as all others (in a few seconds).
| arcticbull wrote:
| So like a twitter poll?
| intotheabyss wrote:
| It's a governance token today, but it will likely become
| a capital asset earning revenue from the Uniswap protocol
| at some point.
| wmf wrote:
| Didn't Uniswap get eaten by others precisely because the
| others could use their tokens to create usage incentives?
| austin_king wrote:
| > Here are some companies that did/do this: coil.com
| gatehub.net forte.io
|
| ^ This is a bit silly of a counterexample given that these 3
| companies are all able to exist from the significant XRP
| investments from Ripple.
|
| > You dont need a token. No, really you dont. Your tokens only
| use case is likely to transfer value
|
| That's rather untrue. Token use cases have proliferated through
| the advent of DeFi (decentralized finance). This would be a
| more accurate take during the 2017 ICO bubble but the space has
| matured a great deal. There are valid use cases now such as
| governance, fee sharing, derivatives, etc.
|
| > But you get the point, every DLT that actually works in a
| useful way should have people building on top - if not its
| probably garbage tech)
|
| This communicates OP's lack of familiarity with the crypto
| space. A vast majority of the tokens launched today are
| launched on top of the Ethereum blockchain. They're not trying
| to create better tokens for the transfer of value, they're
| trying to create tokens to help manage decentralized financial
| services. They're not even DLTs, they're smart contract
| applications.
|
| It's rather easy to mock the crypto space and have an
| oversimplified perspective like this, most people will nod
| along. However, it's a bit sad to see people on a forum like
| this make such charged statements oversimplifying the work of
| others as "garbage tech."
| swiley wrote:
| Isn't XRP centralized?
| noxer wrote:
| XRP is the token Its called XRPL and its not centralized
| since years.
| vallas wrote:
| XRPL doesn't even have their landing page copyright updated
| reedjosh wrote:
| Only downside is you can't inflate the supply for unique
| purposes.
|
| For example PeakD.com inflates hive to give content creators
| tips based on likes.
|
| Edit: I thought this was legitimate reasoning behind having
| your own token. I don't mean it in an inflammatory way. Please
| explain why you disagree.
| noxer wrote:
| I dont think this is a downside at all. If you build on a
| existing blockchain you ofc need funding rather than
| "printing" you own funding. It may be harder but also less of
| a legal risk.
|
| BTW Coil.com pays content creators based on user interaction.
| Its however not self printed money its form actual user who
| want to support content creator rather than ad-companies. Ofc
| coil itself runs on funding money like any other startup
| nothing wrong with that.
|
| Also a project can ask the team behind the DLT they want to
| use and possibly get some of their reserves. Its in their
| interest that the DLT is used for something. Actual devs who
| build something are worth way more than the thousands of
| people who just buy something because Elon Musk tweets about
| it.
|
| And btw at the same time a dev can still bet on price gains
| or the token they use. I see no moral problem with that. If
| your product actually creates demand that moves the price up
| and you bet on that you own it.
| reedjosh wrote:
| The nice thing about "printing" vs funding for things like
| this is that you don't need users to sign up or transfer
| funds to be able to tip content providers.
|
| That said I do prefer the Coil.com model as I love crowd
| funded ad free media content, and I _do_ pay for it. : )
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > Edit: I thought this was legitimate reasoning behind having
| your own token. I don't mean it in an inflammatory way.
| Please explain why you disagree.
|
| Because you don't need to create a token _at all_ to tip
| creators, inflationary or otherwise.
|
| If you want to use crypto, just use an existing blockchain.
| Or don't use crypto and just create a centralized market that
| pays out at certain thresholds. Blockchain solutions aren't
| actually cheaper than centralized solutions, they just hide
| all of the costs elsewhere in transaction fees and mining
| payouts.
|
| The only reason to create an all-new token is to have
| something to sell to people under the guise of enabling
| value. It was a bad trick when car washes sold car wash
| tokens instead of letting you pay for car washes directly,
| and it's a bad trick when crypto companies make you buy their
| tokens instead of just buying the service directly.
| reedjosh wrote:
| > Because you don't need to create a token at all to tip
| creators, inflationary or otherwise.
|
| But if you don't do it through inflationary means, then
| consumers have to actually send tips and or have accounts.
| (for better or worse)
|
| Inflation is a nice way to build incentives into the
| currency's structure. Further, Hive has no transaction fees
| as that's funded via inflation as well.
|
| I do like the idea of a streaming value for value service
| wherein I have a wallet that I top up from time to time,
| but there are many models that are viable here.
| mosselman wrote:
| I see lots of people in the thread, including the author, that
| have avatars with glowing eyes. Can someone explain what this is
| about? Is this some sub cultural thing?
| koalala wrote:
| It's the 'laser eyes' meme.
| https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/laser-eyes-bitcoin-trend-lase...
| mosselman wrote:
| Ah thanks :)
| mrtksn wrote:
| How do you read the content of this website? Everything jumps
| around as you scroll.
|
| https://streamable.com/ymqe1c
| [deleted]
| minikomi wrote:
| https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.newsweek.com/bitcoin-laser-...
| chrisco255 wrote:
| Thread poster is a Bitcoin maximalist, and thinks all crypto
| projects that are not Bitcoin are scams.
| bearjaws wrote:
| "4. You realize that most of the "influencer" network of crypto
| is actually a cartel of individuals who all know each other and
| collude in pumping the same bags. They all cost around $20k-30k
| for a review, btw."
|
| This is the sad truth about all these people on Youtube / Twitch.
| I know two individuals who are sucked into their "shows" and use
| what they are saying as gospel. It drives me nuts because they
| spout off numbers like "BTC @ 100k" and theres no date given.. I
| just respond by saving an even more ridiculous number like "BTC @
| 100bn"
| emmap21 wrote:
| From user experience, I personally don't see a strong benefit of
| crypto. It always looks like a Ponzi Scheme to me. When early
| users are people driven by greed than productivity, it is a HUGE
| problem.
| hanniabu wrote:
| Starting about a year ago the token distributions have favored
| users.
| aabhay wrote:
| Exactly. Nassim Taleb calls it an "open ponzi" -- a ponzi that
| is openly known
| sendbitcoins wrote:
| Nassim could argue that its a "greater fool machine", but its
| literally not a ponzi.
| graeme wrote:
| What's the distinction, and do you have a source
| formalizing that?
|
| I had always understood a ponzi as being something paid out
| by later investors, and where you had a plausible reason to
| believe in increase in value.
|
| Here the plausible reason is "bitcoin will take over the
| financial system and everyone will need it" or "bitcoin
| will be the new store of value and everyone will want it".
| In either event payout necessarily comes from later
| investors.
| seibelj wrote:
| Taleb has never revealed the details of his investment
| portfolio. For someone who screams "I don't care - show me
| the returns!" it's interesting that he cannot prove that his
| "black swan" strategy has ever been actionable for his own or
| anyone's portfolio, how to use his theories to make
| significant money vs. normal strategies, and any proof that
| his hedge fund made any money during the dot-com crash which
| you would figure would be the prime time to make money given
| his public persona.
|
| Taleb got profiled in the New Yorker, his Black Swan book
| became popular, and he has rode that and Twitter ever since.
| I highly recommend people see him for what he is - a public
| figure that is a bullshitter like anyone else - at least
| until he shows proof that he is some sort of investor oracle.
| He has actively sued people who revealed how much money his
| prior fund lost, as those documents are floating around but
| he attacks anyone who publicly reveals them.
| pdog wrote:
| _> It 's interesting that he cannot prove that his "black
| swan" strategy has ever been actionable for his own or
| anyone's portfolio, how to use his theories to make
| significant money vs. normal strategies..._
|
| Mark Spitznagel, a cofounder of Empirica (Taleb's old
| fund), went on to start Universa which did pretty well with
| similar theories (tail-risk strategies and insurance via
| options against extreme market risk) in both the 2008-2009
| period and last year, when they booked a huge return. So
| there's some evidence that the theories work to produce
| uncorrelated (or negatively correlated) returns that
| outperform the market[1].
|
| [1]: Universa's flagship "Black Swan Protection Protocol"
| fund has produced a mean annual return on invested capital
| of 76% since the firm was created in 2008.
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/antoinegara/2020/04/13/how-a-
| go...
| jeffreyrogers wrote:
| Someone in the industry has a theory that he made his
| initial fortune by being unhedged during Black Monday[0]
| and benefiting from being on the "right" side and he's been
| coasting on that since then. Obviously hard/impossible to
| say, but he is definitely hypocritical when it comes to
| things like "skin in the game".
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Monday_(1987)
| chrisco255 wrote:
| I do. I can take out a 6 figure loan in 15 seconds and send it
| to anywhere in the world (https://aave.com/). I can deploy
| capital, I can participate in liquidity pooling on
| decentralized exchanges in a completely permissionless manner
| (https://uniswap.org/) (impossible unless you're a Wall Street
| insider in the current system), I can lend out currency at
| higher market rates to day traders participating in leverage
| trading (https://dydx.exchange/) (impossible unless I'm a Wall
| Street insider today), I can mint a derivative of a Tesla stock
| that follows the price action of Tesla from anywhere in the
| world (https://www.synthetix.io/). I can trade 24/7. I can play
| a game, earn in-game swag and trade that on an open marketplace
| (https://opensea.io/). I can take out crop insurance backed by
| a smart contract in an African country that lacks a stable
| legal system or currency (https://www.arbolmarket.com/). I can
| go on and on...
| vmception wrote:
| I'm glad you wrote this, my favorite part coming up is when
| they pretend a MySQL database would be better for cross chain
| yield farming
| jude- wrote:
| The unspoken truth here is that defi tokens all worthless
| until you cash out, and that leaves a paper trail. Hope you
| paid your taxes on those trades!
| chrisco255 wrote:
| I'm not cashing out, I'm staying in the Ethereum ecosystem
| for good. And no they're not worthless. USDC for example,
| is literally exchangeable for $1. I can literally take out
| a six figure loan against crypto holdings and buy a house
| with it. I can also pay off high interest credit card debt
| and earn yield at the same time. All the other tokens are
| liquid and exchangeable 24/7.
| jude- wrote:
| > USDC for example, is literally exchangeable for $1.
|
| Thank you for reaffirming my point! The purpose of defi
| is to re-distribute dollars from people buying in to
| people cashing out, while providing literally no other
| goods or services. It's not like people want these tokens
| for other purposes -- you buy them so you can sell them
| to subsequent participants.
|
| Despite the deceptive machinations of defi, the act of
| selling out leaves a paper trail that exposes you to
| liability for income taxes, capital gains taxes, and (if
| you wrote the token code) securities regulations. But I
| have some good news: if you live in the US, you at least
| have until May 17 to file your quarterly estimated taxes.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| > The purpose of defi is to re-distribute dollars from
| people buying in to people cashing out
|
| Not at all. You didn't read my post above did you? Let me
| ask you, if you want to be a market maker for the NASDAQ,
| can you do so with $1K in capital? Can you do it 24/7
| from any country in the world? No? Can you loan money to
| someone in Thailand in 15 seconds? Can you borrow money
| from a pool of lenders from 84 different countries? No?
| Can you build an app that plugs into your bank, NASDAQ,
| and a video game API without paying anyone any service or
| API fees? No??
|
| Well you don't get DeFi. So you should study both the
| traditional existing system as well as this new one so
| you can see quite clearly why this system exists and what
| problems it solves.
|
| Buddy, I'm not worried about taxes on profits vs. losses.
| It's no different than stock trading. No one has ever
| pretended there isn't a paper trail: of course there is!
| It's an open blockchain. But you're running with your pet
| theory for why it exists straight over a cliff.
| jude- wrote:
| Boy, did that touch a nerve!
|
| Hate to break it to you, buddy, but you can't do these
| things with defi tokens either.
|
| > Let me ask you, if you want to be a market maker for
| the NASDAQ, can you do so with $1K in capital? Can you do
| it 24/7 from any country in the world?
|
| If you're implying that NASDAQ won't let me be a market
| maker with $1k capital, then why should I believe that
| they'll do it if I offer $1k-equivalent of defi tokens
| instead?
|
| Also, I _can_ do this today. I 'd start a market maker
| company with my funds and with funds from other like-
| minded people.
|
| > Can you loan money to someone in Thailand in 15
| seconds?
|
| Show me a defi protocol that lends money, and I'll show
| you a protocol that only permits over-collaterialized
| loans, backed by other defi tokens that are just as
| limited.
|
| Also, yes -- I can lend money to people in Thailand in 15
| seconds. I simply invest my money in a local bank that
| will do it for me.
|
| > Can you borrow money from a pool of lenders from 84
| different countries?
|
| Absolutely. Do you understand how banking works?
|
| > Can you build an app that plugs into your bank, NASDAQ,
| and a video game API without paying anyone any service or
| API fees?
|
| I don't know if you've ever tried to actually write
| software before, but I can say with 100% confidence that
| defi isn't going to open up my bank's APIs, NASDAQ's
| APIs, and video games' APIs to me. That's because these
| entities make money by charging for API access, and the
| existence of defi isn't going to change this.
|
| Even if each of these entities were realized as defi
| contracts, the underlying blockchain miners _still_
| charge me a fee to mutate state within them.
|
| > Buddy, I'm not worried about taxes on profits vs.
| losses. It's no different than stock trading.
|
| Then you clearly do not understand how tax law or finance
| works. I humbly suggest you get familiar with it, and
| quickly, lest you end up with completely-avoidable
| penalty fees (or in a jail cell).
| chrisco255 wrote:
| Some research for you:
|
| https://en.cryptonomist.ch/2020/11/09/uniswap-liquidity-
| pool...
|
| https://docs.aave.com/faq/borrowing
|
| https://defirate.com/synthetix/
|
| https://defi.cx/makerdao-how-does-it-work/
|
| As for collateralized loans, they are the norm in
| traditional finance, too. When you take out a mortgage,
| it's collateralized by the house. When you borrow for a
| car, guess what happens if you don't pay? Unsecured,
| revolving loans are usually credit cards, with very high
| interest rates.
|
| If you're snarking about the $30B in lending activity on
| crypto (up from less than $1B a year ago, on pace to 10x
| over the next 12 months), because it's collateralized,
| you don't understand what percentage of lending is
| collateralized and how big that market is worldwide
| (hint: its hundreds of trillions).
|
| > That's because these entities make money by charging
| for API access, and the existence of defi isn't going to
| change this.
|
| The point, for your intentional ignorance, is that the
| DeFi system is completely open. Open source, open access,
| pluggable, and composable. In that sense DeFi follows the
| Unix philosophy. And that is just one reason why DeFi
| will take over ever greater portions of the existing
| system. It is going to eat traditional finance.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy
|
| > Then you clearly do not understand how tax law or
| finance works. I humbly suggest you get familiar with it,
| and quickly, lest you end up with completely-avoidable
| penalty fees (or in a jail cell).
|
| You clearly don't understand that Coinbase just went
| public as a company and that many more legal entities
| exist fully legally in the crypto ecosystem such as
| Gemini, Avanti, Greyscale, Galaxy, Kraken, etc not to
| mention overseas entities in Europe and Asia. There's
| nothing illegal about participating in crypto.
|
| I understand how to do addition and subtraction and how
| to do FIFO and LIFO. In fact, there's software programs
| to automate it. Who woulda thunk it.
| jude- wrote:
| Then I guess you don't really understand UNIX either.
| Software modularity is a necessary part of the UNIX
| philosophy, but it's far from the only part. If it was
| that simple, then Windows would be UNIX thanks to COM.
|
| But that's not really the topic at hand.
|
| > It is going to eat traditional finance.
|
| Why should I believe this? Even if high transaction fees,
| bad UX, and non-existent scalability _weren 't_
| significant barriers to adoption, why should I believe
| that traditional finance won't simply co-opt successful
| defi projects?
|
| The fact that traditional finance does not do some things
| that defi does has nothing to do with technical
| capabilities, and everything to do with legality and
| market sizes. There's no grand conspiracy afoot --
| traditional finance would let you do a lot more with your
| money than you can right now if it was profitable and
| legal.
|
| If you're telling me that defi is going to "eat
| traditional finance" because traditional finance won't
| touch unprofitable or illegal activities, then what are
| you really saying about defi's prospects?
|
| > There's nothing illegal about participating in crypto.
|
| No one said that crypto is illegal. Tax evasion, on the
| other hand...
| [deleted]
| golergka wrote:
| Reading that twitter thread, and HN discussion here, I am again
| reminded how the whole startup scene looked before dotcom crash:
| insane valuations, lots of scammers, and what little utility
| there is, it's mostly for illegal means. (If you're saying that
| there's no real utility in Bitcoin, you really should google
| Hydra).
|
| But don't you wish you bought Amazon stock right after IPO?
| mtnGoat wrote:
| its very similar.
|
| now, as was then, people are investing in tech they don't
| understand and in some cases tech that may not even be
| buildable. :x
| ww520 wrote:
| Good point. But for every Amazon back then there were hundreds
| of Pets.com.
| saalweachter wrote:
| Don't forget the corollary: when do you wish you sold the
| Amazon stock you purchased at IPO?
| dylkil wrote:
| wasnt it obvious to some people back then who the real
| companies were, and all it took was everyone else catching up
| to speed to understand who the real companies were?
| throwaway4good wrote:
| What if speculation was the use case? ... the only use case ...
| 1ark wrote:
| Wait until you learn about derivatives and the size of it.
| https://www.visualcapitalist.com/all-of-the-worlds-money-and...
| user-the-name wrote:
| Always treat every single crypto project as a scam. It is one of
| the safest bets you can make. Everyone involved is a scammer,
| every exchange is untrustworthy, and nobody can be trusted.
|
| If you're trying to start an honest project in this space, you
| really need to ask yourself why you would put yourself in a
| situation where you are the only honest person in a room full of
| scammers.
| berkes wrote:
| > If you're trying to start an honest project in this space,
| you really need to ask yourself why you would put yourself in a
| situation where you are the only honest person in a room full
| of scammers.
|
| This is one reason why I pulled the plug on my startup in the
| sphere. In the best case you're disadvantaged by all the
| scammers and liers: they can make promises, cut corners, rip
| investors where you are being careful, covering all bases, and
| trying to put a real case and working sofware out. In the worst
| case, your honesty is helping the scammers by adding
| credibility to their case.
| user-the-name wrote:
| Exactly.
|
| Plus, you run the risk of either getting exploited yourself
| by the scammers, or feeling the pressure to act more
| dishonestly to keep up.
| viraptor wrote:
| That's an emotional response going the other way. Why not just
| think of the project itself as if the blockchain side of it
| never existed? Is there a real product, is there a visible
| progress, is the time investment happening in the development
| rather than empty announcements?
| user-the-name wrote:
| "Why not blind yourself to relevant context" is not a really
| a great way to make good decisions.
| viraptor wrote:
| There has to be a better way to address this because "Why
| not blind yourself to relevant context" cuts both ways. You
| said "Always treat every single crypto project as a scam."
| - but if you ignore all blockchain ideas and still see a
| healthy and useful product, but ignore it as a scam -
| that's also blinding yourself to context.
| user-the-name wrote:
| Because a scam product will lie to you in order to look
| like a healthy and useful product. If you ignore the
| hints that it is a scam (that it is a cryptocurrency
| project, where 90% or more of all projects are, in fact,
| scams), you will be more likely to fall for the lies.
| viraptor wrote:
| I didn't mean looking at future promises - that's part of
| the crypto game. I mean if the project mostly does what
| you expect from it now and continues development towards
| the rest - why does it matter if people see it as a scam
| on the crypto front? You're getting the value you need
| out of it.
| rapsey wrote:
| So many of the smartest people in the world work in the areas of
| getting people to click on ads, mining personal information,
| finance and crypto. Areas that at best have no social value. It
| is quite depressing.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| Crypto has no social value? I'm not in the space, but I think
| crypto has immense social value.
| hanniabu wrote:
| Don't waste your breath dude, HN has become a safe haven for
| people that like to bury their head in the sand and shit talk
| crypto. Yeah, anybody that's actually knowledgeable in it
| know that what they're saying are the same old sad tropes
| that the news has been training people to repeat verbatim,
| but they've boxed themselves in and they'll die on this hill.
| samvher wrote:
| Where is a place to get a broader perspective on this? I've
| tried subreddits for some of the projects, the
| cryptocurrency subreddit, and google and youtube. I have a
| lot of difficulty cutting through the noise. (My sense is
| that projects like Ethereum could be extremely valuable but
| that its value is currently hurt by the speculation on
| Ether making transactions far too costly. I'd be very
| interested in getting exposed to the "quality" projects
| that are out there but it's hard to filter.)
| hanniabu wrote:
| I've found r/ethereum to be pretty level-headed.
|
| > Ethereum could be extremely valuable but that its value
| is currently hurt by the speculation on Ether making
| transactions far too costly
|
| FYI the price of ETH does not affect the transaction
| costs. The fee market is independent. There's solutions
| to this in place and more being worked on though. The 3
| biggest contributors will be EIP 1559 which is meant to
| level out the fees and make them more predictable, L2
| rollups which scale through sidechains that have the each
| of their blocks confirmed on Ethereum's L1 with proofs,
| and sharding of L1. Ethereum is currently in a growing
| pains phase as these L2 options gain more
| traction/adoption, UX for them improves, and all activity
| migrates there. The end goal is for a majority of
| interaction to occur on L2 with L1 being used mainly for
| a settlement layer.
| samvher wrote:
| Huh, I totally thought transaction fees were set in Ether
| and that's why the costs are so high (in fiat of course).
| If that's not it, what makes the transactions so
| expensive? Lot of competition for limited throughout?
| TigeriusKirk wrote:
| Yes, it's competition for limited throughput. Especially
| with the DeFi boom, fees have been bid higher and higher
| to be sure transactions are included in an immediate
| block.
|
| Incidentally, if you're looking to keep up with Ethereum
| in particular, the newsletter Week In Ethereum News is an
| excellent resource. It's a links-with-descriptve-blurbs
| kind of thing. It's still a bit of a firehose if you're
| catching up on the space, but just pick a few items that
| sound interesting every week.
| https://weekinethereum.substack.com/
| reedjosh wrote:
| I like https://talesfromthecrypt.libsyn.com/
|
| It's ostensibly a BTC podcast, but it's _really_ about
| much more including second tier networks, altcoin tech,
| and individual autonomy.
|
| Otherwise, getting involved in the code itself does seem
| to be the only avenue I've found for real learning.
|
| There's an O'Reilly book that has you build a blockchain
| from scratch if you're interested.
|
| I'd welcome other suggestions.
|
| Oh, also Tezos has most of Ethereum's features, but is
| already Proof of Stake.
| megameter wrote:
| It was easier eight years ago, I would just look at
| Bitcointalk threads and be able to make an evaluation
| pretty quickly. Small scale, relatively more clued in
| folks. Now the scale is a problem. There are so many
| projects I know nothing about.
|
| Nowadays I usually go to /r/cryptocurrency/new for the
| firehose. I do not aim to read everything, just check in
| and take some notes. What tends to happen on that
| subreddit is that some really great posts get made but
| never hit frontpage because they're crowded out by
| useless memetic content. But you can take individual
| great posts and turn those into leads by doing some
| additional legwork. I don't usually talk to those users(I
| do not want to read comment thread replies and will
| completely ignore my Reddit inbox, instead I will monitor
| the thread if it interests me) but I will sometimes
| browse their post history.
| jkepler wrote:
| I would add Andreas Antonopoulos's video, as well as the
| What Bitcoin Did podcast as good starting points. Also
| check out the book, Inventing Bitcoin.
| andxor wrote:
| What Bitcoin Did is run by a toxic Bitcoin maximalist who
| is totally clueless about the tech and is only in it for
| the money.
|
| Check out Bankless and The Daily Gwei.
| rapsey wrote:
| All the billions that went into it have what to show for? How
| has it improved anyones life besides making some early
| enthusiasts and lots of criminals rich? How is society better
| off?
|
| Lots of grand ideas that went nowhere because they are
| entirely unrealistic and divorced from reality.
| twox2 wrote:
| Tell that to the Venezuelans that have been able to move
| money safely in and out of their country, or the many
| artists that went from struggling to be able to make a few
| bucks by selling NFTs.
| reedjosh wrote:
| Indeed. Like a decentralized social network driven not by
| ads, but likes that gen coins.
|
| PeakD.com
|
| Or a digital currency with the privacy and fungibility of
| cash.
|
| GetMonero.org
|
| Or an ad free streaming platform.
|
| Odysee.com
| bradmcgo wrote:
| I would strongly argue that crypto does present genuine value
| to the world...
| AlexCoventry wrote:
| One perspective on money is that it's a resource-allocation
| system. I think more transparent, accountable, reliable
| resource allocation potentially has enormous social value.
| sktrdie wrote:
| Not if you create a system where it's literally impossible to
| redistribute wealth. If majority of tokens in a crypto system
| are controlled under priv-keys owned by a small % of the
| population we'll literally lock ourselves under the control
| of those people. Scary thing is that we won't even be able to
| vote ourselves out of the potential mess because the private
| keys are mathematically secured. Capitalism is going to have
| a blast!
| tartoran wrote:
| Yes, it literally becomes the invisible hand that controlls
| the freemarket but it no longer free and no longer a market
| if nobody can get in. Ultimately the value we all get is
| exchange with eachother at a fair and stable price. The
| cryptospace could potentially solve this problem when the
| initial gold rush does some damage. In a way the attention
| is not bad because more people understand what it is, study
| it, become savy, vote legislature and deepen the field
| towards the problems that trully need a solution.
|
| What we want is to basically transfer work/resource tokens
| and make it resistant against depreciation. Lets add a
| simplistic example I help someone build a house and receive
| a fair token for that work. When I need to build a house 20
| years later I pass that token, it retains the value such
| that someone accepts it to do the work I did 20 years
| prior. Because we're mentally stuck into an outdated
| economic model that served ok prior to the digital age our
| imaginations aren't creative enough move in the right
| direction. My thinking is that a direction will emerge,
| let's hope it's as far away from the possibility you talk
| about.
| throwaway_kufu wrote:
| I personally have experienced NFT cartels first hand and would
| love to expose it. From pay to play propositions by a "NFT
| artist" that's sold millions in NFTs for an invite to an invite
| only NFT marketplace, promises of $x/month in sales, to a
| prolific "NFT collector" on Twitter confirming being part of the
| whole scam by retweeting me upon request of the artist to verify
| the authenticity of it all.
|
| From what I gather no one gives a shit, and their attitude seems
| to be we can buy off anyone who challenges us. The irony is the
| same people shaking me down for Bitcoin in exchange for an
| invitation to the marketplace/inner circle successfully have
| collectively called for for banning/suspending of accounts from
| various NFT marketplaces openly on Twitter.
|
| Anyone here in media want to do a story?
| yunusabd wrote:
| I've been thinking about this, there are so many
| crazy/interesting stories in the crypto sphere that you could
| fill volumes upon volumes. I wish they were reported more, hope
| someone picks you up on your offer.
| fumblebee wrote:
| > 2. You aim to build a community, but in reality 90% of your
| telegram/discord are scammers and people asking why price is
| going down/accusations that you and your entire team should go to
| jail.
|
| I'm consistently repulsed by the lack of thoughtful discussion in
| crypto communities. For a space littered with intriguing
| technology it's endlessly frustrating that there's no HN-like
| forum. Instead, any community that started off that way is now
| filled with speculators and shillers.
|
| Take your pick for where to source your news: 1. crypto
| influencers on YouTube who are paid to shill, 2. forums likw
| Reddit filled with speculators and conmen, 3. pump and dump
| groups on Telegram.
|
| The greed and FOMO on display in the crypto gold-rush is deeply
| depressing, and for the majority who join the craze at the peak
| of the bull run, it'll surely end in tears.
| queuep wrote:
| I think this depends on the coin. The IOTA discord is quite
| interesting, and people using the tech. Not sure IOTA will be a
| thing though, but I still like reading the discussions in the
| Discord.
| baby wrote:
| I've been thinking about forking HN to have crypto discussions,
| I really wish there was a board like this which only talked
| about technical stuff of crypto
| vmception wrote:
| Its more so frustrating to me that they become tribal by
| necessity!
|
| You cant discuss flaws in the current design or future design
| because people think you are attacking their investment!
| [deleted]
| hanniabu wrote:
| > it's endlessly frustrating that there's no HN-like forum
|
| There are communities like this, such as the crypto dev
| discord, the daily gwei discord, ethereum cat herders discord,
| etc. You're just in the wrong communities. That's like spending
| time on 4chan and saying "the internet sucks, it's filled with
| horrible people and no thoughtful discussions."
| chrisco255 wrote:
| I do think it's scattered, but certainly there. There are
| many high-quality and thoughtful Twitter posters but you
| really have to filter. Meanwhile, I think there is room for a
| crypto HN since HN is actively hostile to anything positive
| towards crypto.
| Legogris wrote:
| > Take your pick for where to source your news [actual
| answers]:
|
| 1. Newsletters. One basic example is Bitcoin Optech. I've
| always been the kind of person who looks at any newsletter just
| about long enough to put it in Trash. But I've come to
| understand there are plenty of greatly curated and/or written
| ones out there.
|
| 2. Podcasts. I can recommend Unconfirmed and Zero Knowledge,
| for example.
|
| 3. Discord (I know I miss out by not going here but the noise-
| to-signal ration and complete lack of
| privacy/anonymity/anything like that are both too much. It
| makes me a bit sad that this is where the action is even for
| infrastructure and supposedly open/freedom-asserting projects.)
|
| Can be non-trivial to find the good ones for whatever
| angle/topic you are interested in, of course.
|
| > The greed and FOMO on display in the crypto gold-rush is
| deeply depressing
|
| Absolutely agree and I couldn't agree more with the comment
| you're replying to.
| chromatin wrote:
| For podcasts I recommend Uncommon Core (technical) and Up
| Only (which despite the name is not just "up only" shilling
| and has excellent guests lineups)
| steveEnix wrote:
| There's no discussion, but the Rekt News feed is consistently
| interesting content. Seems HN inspired:
| https://feed.rekt.news/day
| 55555 wrote:
| I started a crypto startup once (don't do it unless you're
| Vitalik-tier intelligent) and this is pretty damn accurate. lol
| lottin wrote:
| Vitalik Buterin, the guy who thinks you can do quantum
| computing by running a quantum computer emulator on an ordinary
| computer [1]. Doesn't strike me as the sharpest tool to be
| honest...
|
| [1]
| https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/127395790524347596...
| kybernetikos wrote:
| It's interesting that quantum inspired classical algorithms
| have been discovered that outperform the previously best
| known algorithms, and reduce the likelihood of useful quantum
| speedups in those areas.
| https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=3880
|
| I take this tweet as Vitalik saying that a similar thing
| could happen for mining (or general search), and while it
| would be surprising, it doesn't seem like it is impossible.
| lottin wrote:
| Considering his background, I don't think he was talking
| about algorithms. In the past he became involved in this
| project:
|
| "Quantum computing (QC) is a flexible model of computation
| and there are many physical means of implementing it. One
| obvious means of implementation is by classical simulation.
| In other words, performing QC by running 'quantum software'
| on conventional hardware."
|
| [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20131005014920/http://noosp
| heer....
| rodiger wrote:
| A random tweet about a concept not being "fundamentally
| ridiculous" is an awfully low bar to discredit intelligence.
| Have a look at his blog[0] and let me know if that reinforces
| your belief.
|
| Besides, if you read the whole thread you'd know he's
| acknowledging that _if_ we could simulate QC classically,
| then we 'd be able to have more efficient classical search
| algorithms. It's an _if_ that 's likely impossible at scale
| but not, by definition, impossible.
|
| [0] https://vitalik.ca/
| lottin wrote:
| It's not just a random tweet. He's had these ideas since
| 2013 at least. So here for more details:
| https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/buterins-quantum-
| quest/ But I'll take a look at his blog, thanks.
| proto-n wrote:
| > competent observers would likely consider even that on
| the high side for a mathematical impossibility
|
| If the statement made by Vitalik "There's no proof that
| efficient classical simulation of QC is impossible" is
| indeed the case, then it's the linked blogpost that has
| discredited itself mathematically by treating this as
| "breaking mathematics" or a "mathematical impossibility".
| More like groundbreaking surprise, but there's a big
| difference between "unlikely" and "proven to be
| impossible" mathematically speaking.
| lottin wrote:
| The element of controversy isn't whether efficient
| quantum simulation is possible, but the idea that by
| running such a simulation one would be able to break
| cryptography, as if they were using an actual quantum
| computer. This is a talk where he makes this claim
| https://youtu.be/DkUpZkeqhF4?t=3372 If this isn't
| crackpottery of the highest degree I don't what is.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| A talk from 8 years ago, when he was 18 years old? I
| mean, even having a semi-half-baked opinion on quantum
| cryptography at 18 is pretty damn impressive. Just
| because everything is forever on the internet does not
| mean that opinions are forever.
| space_rock wrote:
| He's a marketing genius for being able to sell garbage to
| fools. I'll give him that
| [deleted]
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