It’s such a reasonable thing to expect any level of hacking. Consider the idea that w3 is the transition of assets into literal Internet money. We digitized wealth and w3 concentrated those supplies into readily available large quantity targets.
The idea that there would be anything but a massive acceleration of crime and fraud as a result of the digitization of actual money is actually hilarious.
It’s a fact that North Korea relies on hacking it for funding critical imports at this point…
The real question is who and how this massive financialization and tokenization exercise will benefit, because it’s increasingly clear that the old guard has designs on how to control it pretty effectively and it’s not actually as free or anonymous as many people think. Some exceptions apply.
Maybe a bespoke (mostly) decentralized implementation that requires more power than mid-sized countries isn't worth it; especially if it's throughput is 7 TPS.
You could also say "more power than 3 large US cities" (Los Angeles = 60 TWh/yr, Bitcoin = 180 TWh/yr) and your statement would be equally valid, yet much less impressive. Saying "mid-size country" is about as useful as "mid-size rocks" since mid-sized countries, like mid-sized rocks span 3-4 orders of magnitudes. Fist-sized? Regrigerator-sized? Bus-sized?
Did you know that China curtails more hydropower (200+ TWh/yr [1]) than the global electricity consumption of Bitcoin, than entire "mid-size countries"? China literally spills water through the dams without powering the turbines, because they have a hydropower surplus that they can't redistribute through their national grid. When you start learning things like that, you realize Bitcoin's electricity consumption is, fortunately, still a drop in the bucket compared to the immense waste from, well, everything else humans do on the planet.
Cybersecurity is a problem that affects all computer related industries not just cryptocurrency. North korea doesnt rely on hacking just crypto. Lazarus group has been around and targets many infrastructures. You cant blame crypto for the field of cybersecurity. Its been a problem long before crypto existed.
the fact that there's a whole crowd here that think the old guard actually got hacked by dastardly crypto punks instead of just their own incompetence with scheduling a tweet
Crypto is a scam (including Bitcoin) anybody treating it otherwise is overly credulous or in on the scam. Maybe it started out with better intentions but it is irredeemable.
Cryptocurrency, when used as intended, is pretty boring. Send funds from A to B. Done. yawn. You won't see headlines about it. The news that make it to your eyeballs are always sensational: fraud, crime, scams, etc. So if your exposure to crypto is only through the media, as opposed to actually using it yourself, it is logical for you to associate crypto with fraud.
1) that’s very rarely the most important feature to me and 2) no it isn’t. Moving crypto around is fast but I don’t want crypto, I want money I can spend. USD -> crypto -> USD is not fast. There are faster ways to send money you can’t spend.
I have a crypto debit card I can fund as needed and spend anywhere. In fact for me it’s faster and easier than any bank. It can be sent to anyone in the world and with a stack of a few different crypto debit cards can be spent immediately in pretty much any country in the world with their local currency. Yes currently the exchange fees are not great on those cards for exchanging to fiat, but the trend is down and improving.
If you’re using a crypto debit card than you’re layering the cost of a standard bank transaction on top of the cost of crypto. That just sounds like extra steps to do what I just did with my debit card at the convenience store 5min ago - which took seconds as well and required no steps to convert currency or load up from a wallet/exchange. I’m just not entirely sure what using your crypto debit card accomplished beside spending a currency that takes more work to utilize.
I have no counterparty risk, no confiscation risk. There are no extra steps, I don’t understand what you mean, moving funds to a bank or debit card at a convenience store is massively more complicated.
I open a wallet app and the paypal app, copy the deposit address from paypal to the clipboard, paste into the wallet, type the amount, hit send. 5 seconds later paypal receives it. With one button I swap any portion of it to USD on the paypal app. I do this in large enough amounts so the crypto TX fees are insignificant to get into paypal, and the conversion fees are also small.
Any extra fees are more than covered by the long term appreciation of the Bitcoin, which will obviously continue as governments worldwide are drunk of their own power to print.
one thing that's important to understand is that your experience is very different from someone that already has crypto, and earns crypto. for you, you have to go buy crypto first, and you won't do that. for someone that already has an inventory of crypto, its just get cash as needed.
for them its just crypto -> USD which is very fast. for me, in the US as a US citizen, that is 2 minutes up to $25,000. from a personal crypto wallet, to the exchange, to my bank or brokerage account. beyond $25,000 it is 15 minutes to 2 hours via domestic wire transfer.
so one likely unreported aspect of crypto is that it likely has reduced international wire transfers, and cross border transfers that are prone to error and erroneous reviews and holdups
for about a decade now I have paid people in other countries in crypto. and been paid in crypto from some revenue sources. and we both liquidated as domestic transfers in our local countries. specifically because we didn't want to bother with international bank issues and time delays.
even hedge fund and private equity fund administrators that are more competitive allow in-kind investment of new limited partners in crypto, for many years now
the other thing thats important to understand is that there is a growing group that doesn't want "money they can spend" because they are liquid. they can buy goods, services, invest, day trade, passive income all in crypto within the crypto ecosystem. and for other things they can get the cash when they need it, or simply use a debit card that is custodying their crypto and representing it as the local fiat currency
but truthfully, going from USD -> crypto is fast too. if you're a US citizen you just need to use wire transfers to the exchange. SEPA region can also do same day settlement.
your user story and assumptions are really antiquated and don't represent what's been happening for at least 10 years now. if it doesn't apply to you then thats fine and move on
I recently used Wise (formerly transferwise) to send money to someone in Pakistan. It was about $10 to send $1000USD. The exchange rates are competitive too. And the recipient is guaranteed to get the correct amount in their destination currency. It even has some degree of fraud protection and customer support baked in.
It’s more important to have an unstoppable digital store of value than to stop people getting scammed.
Sure would be nice to have fewer scammers, and we should try. I, too, detest many of the actors in the space, the whole number-go-up get-rich-quick culture, and much more.
But it’s a sideshow. The reality is I’m not giving up digital assets I completely control (preferably private ones) any more than I’m giving up strong encryption, e2e encrypted comms, or the right to run whatever software I like on my computers. I’m not the only one.
It’s really irrelevant if you or anyone else considers it irredeemable. What does that even mean? There’s not even a single coherent “it” to be irredeemable.
What makes you think that the kids of tomorrow are going to give a damn about today's notions of what's valuable? Using an unstoppable ledger doesn't make the underlying values any more legitimate than they were before.
I do think that creating a censorship resistant place for data is more important than preventing people from being scammed, but when I think about what ought to go there, I come up with nothing so status-quo-preserving as abstractions that ensure the continuity of asset ownership. It's like you hate banks so much that you went and built one just to show-em.
> What makes you think that the kids of tomorrow are going to give a damn about today's notions of what's valuable?
I mean, on a long enough time scale, they won't :) Same with USD, other currencies, or any given stock or bond. There are no guarantees. That applies doubly to crypto assets.
> What makes you think that the kids of tomorrow are going to give a damn about today's notions of what's valuable?
Why would this change my assertions?
In any case there are a myriad socio-political views and values represented in blockchain/“crypto” projects. It’s not all hypercapitalist libertarians…
Perhaps a greater percentage of the people, projects, and attention are part of the “parasite” as you put it, but that was my point: while it is bad, and something we should work to minimise, it’s may be a price we have to pay for something that at its core is very important.
For discussion purposed just a few historical fiat currencies, since your confidence in USD seems a bit overblown, especially for a currency whose issuer is now spending more on interest payments than their military, an indicator of possible future instability as a store of value.
1. German Weimar Republic (Germany) - The German Mark, introduced in 1924 after World War I, was originally intended to replace the hyperinflated German Papiermark. However, the Great Depression and military reparations led to massive deficit spending, resulting in hyperinflation starting around 1921. By 1923, one US dollar equaled approximately 4.2 trillion Reichsmarks.
2. French Revolutionary Franc (France) - After the French Revolution in the late 18th century, France's new revolutionary government issued the assignats, which were paper money used as part of a monetary reform program. Initially, these notes held value due to their being backed by goods such as grain; however, excessive printing eventually led to severe hyperinflation between 1796 and 1797, where prices rose exponentially.
3. Hungarian Pengő (Hungary) - Introduced in 1946, the Hungarian pengő suffered from rampant inflation due to economic mismanagement and Marshall Plan aid exchange rates. Between 1945 and 1946, the exchange rate for one US dollar was set at HUF 52, but due to various factors, including nationalization, hyperinflation reached an estimated 44 quadrillions to the US dollar by 1946.
4. Zimbabwean Dollar (Zimbabwe) - Succeeding the British colonial Rhodesian dollar, Zimbabwe adopted its own fiat currency, the Zimbabwean dollar, upon independence in 1980. Hyperinflation began in the mid-1970s, and by November 2004, it had become virtually worthless, forcing the country to abandon it.
5. Mexican Peso (Mexico) - Following the Mexican-American war, Mexico faced significant debt. To finance the national debt, a silver peso coin was minted. Despite its initial value, hyperinflation struck, and by the late 19th century, the Mexican peso became almost worthless. Numerous attempts at currency stabilization failed until the introduction of the "El Banco" gold standard in 1914.
Fiat currency is a scam (including the USD) anybody treating it otherwise is overly credulous or in on the scam. Maybe it started out with better intentions but it is irredeemable.
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Yes yes. I’m sure 15 years later you will be saying the same thing even when Bitcoin is showing up on reserve holdings of major central banks. I believe Bitcoin is around the 16th largest currency in the world today and it’s daily transaction volume indicates extensive real world use. But don’t worry you can keep ranting about how Bitcoin is a scam, you or others like you were 10 years ago, and will be in another 10 years. I have a hunch it’s a phenomenon somehow related to how socialists are still ranting about socialism 200 years now, the most failed ideas in human history, yet according to them never been done “correctly”, this is some collectivist mindset equivalent in reverse, ranting about how big a failure one of the most successful ideas in human history is.
It rather seems like the opposite; an altruistic gift to humanity. An anonymous programmer produced a decentralized currency that solved the double spend problem and didn't even sell his coins.
An irreversible permissionless way to send funds near-instantaneously to anyone anywhere in the world is pretty darn good at a lot of perfectly legal use cases. My personal favorite example is that I once used Bitcoin for an emergency so my (then-homeless) friend could receive cash in hands from a Bitcoin ATM, in a matter of less than 1 hour, on a Sunday, while I was vacationing remote. Nothing, and I truly mean it because we searched, nothing else would have worked that fast: try setting up a new Western Union/MoneyGram account online on a Sunday, and have it verified and activated... nope. Fun thing is my friend had never used Bitcoin before that day. Bitcoin ATMs are a very convenient gateway to "cash in hands", when needed.
Can do this for free in Canada with Interac as long as both parties have Canadian bank accounts. But for international transfer theres not a good solution AFAIK.
Bitcoin ATMs are an interesting example because they involve at least one trusted third party - the Bitcoin ATM operator.
Wise (previously Transferwise) can do international transfer within seconds. If you're in Europe then payments between any bank in Europe take seconds (SEPA payments).
Wise wouldn't have worked as my friend was among the 10M American adults who are unbanked. Also I doubt him and I would have been able to do account setup on a Sunday, within 1 hour, which is the time it took us to do the transfer, despite this situation being his first time ever using Bitcoin.
I opened my Wise account in 20 minutes. The ID verification is all automated so it's really quick. I haven't heard of anyone who is unbanked before though, what would be a reason for that?
Interac wouldn't have worked even if him and I had been Canadians. My friend was unbanked due to past financial issues (which is also the reason he was homeless at the time.)
This is one significant advantage of Bitcoin, that it works for the unbanked.
I have not used the online version but you could have just as easily walked into a western union and done the exact same thing for substantially less fees.
Nope. The closest Western Union/MoneyGram/similar services to me were hours away by car. Hence why we tried to do it online. We tried MoneyGram because my friend was banned from Western Union. But even MoneyGram wasn't possible quickly online.
I’m straining to see the relevance of that, especially since at one point in my life I was a member of that statistic.
One thing I definitely didn’t need any more of back then was glamorized systems of financial predation and exploitation targeting me because of it. There’s no version of the world where the cryptocurrency ecosystem as it actually is, rather than how it is idealized to be, would have made my plight better had it existed at the time.
In any case, it still seems like a non-sequitur.
I’m just laughing at the premise that the many, many, many billion dollar investments and valuations of cryptocurrency firms, and the unending deluge of fraud and scams they reliably leave in their wake is meaningfully offset by the total amount of money transacted in the niche of homeless friends who need fast cash from their wealthy friend who is half way around the world outside of normal business hours. I mean, if that’s the case, then it would really behoove Western Union and MoneyGram to keep a few locations open on the weekend.
pretty sure the only time I ever used Moneygram I managed to send funds from my UK bank account without any MoneyGram account. Was a really easy way to get cash in a city that definitely didn't have Bitcoin ATMs
That's much closer to being true now than it was when bitcoin started getting popular, in no small part because it scared financial institutions into competing on convenience. But really, who says legality is the arbiter of greatness anyway? Are you really prepared to say that every illegal use of blockchain should never happen? I'm not.
> nothing legal it can do that something else can't do better
Eh, Treasuries should probably be traded on a blockchain. Cryptocurrency is nonsense. But the tech has legs. It just needs to, ironically, clear its way of the crypto/web3 crowd first.
I tend to think highly of most of the comments I see from you man, but you are quite confused about how this stuff works if you believe that the pay-to-play aspect of a cryptocurrency can be divorced from the blockchain used to track it. They are no more separable from one another than front is from back or up is from down.
A blockchain without the economic carrot-stick power to protect its own integrity and internal rules, power that comes from aligning the behavior of otherwise unrelated and even mutually antagonistic custodial participants by incentivizing their common interest in getting rich (or at least not losing their existing wealth), is no more than a database with superfluous "decentralization theater" yak shaving bolted on.
If defecting from the game doesn't cost you a meaningful penalty (and such cost is defined by a fixed unit of measure, in order to distinguish in-game gains from losses) then you are not compelled to follow its rules except by your own conscience. This would be noble, but it would not be a blockchain.
Blockchain is not a technology in the sense of being a better "how" for some existing problem. blockchain is before anything else, a social contract based on the premise that everything humans care about ('value') really does boil down to "voting with money," and thus requiries enforcement of such economic consensus through technology. It is sufficiently removed from expectations people normally have about how they relate to one another that it would require quite a revolution indeed to be adopted in the capacity in which it is intended to function as intended, that is, to become the ultimate source of truth for every transaction on Earth.
It's a back door attempt to fundamentally rewire how value is routed through society, and in the abstract this _might_ be a good thing (perhaps too generous with that 'might') in practice it cannot possibly happen due to physical constraints on consensus formation at the global, realtime scale that it would have to happen. As a result shortcuts are taken (or appear organically, i.e. exchages) in the form of centralized nodes of consensus settlement (what the promoters like to call Layer 2, sharding, or similar), and it's the people controlling these centralized nodes who end up becoming the new kings of this "revolutionized" system, the trust-me-bro's of trustlessness. I've met some of them, and they are not people who I would ever want to have anyone I care about to be under the thumb of.
No disagreement here, not a fan.* but so many arguments miss this point. the problems with blockchain are rooted in the why; the how is mostly a sideshow but admittedly much more expedient to criticize in comparison.
* were not for HN's character limit my username would have started with the word 'block'
Its sad to think web 2.0 so long ago was a move towards more human centric websites, UI's, AJAXy sites, etc and now web3 is just a marketing term for fraudsters, exit scammers, shady VC's, and criminals. The late-stage capitalism of the internet is obvious to see.
Web3 never had anything to do with the web. It was always a vain attempt to cash in on the aura associated with web 2.0 by sounding like a legitimate heir to the heritage of the WWW. It is however, as you said, just a convenient marketing term for crypto bros and blockchain scamware.
Web 3.0 as Tim Berners-Lee envisions it might have some legs, but web3 was a always an empty marketing vessel.
Blockchains are a fun tools, i really like some ideas (ipfs, etherium and solidity), but i want to separate it from the cryptocurrency nonsense. Luckily, almost all grifters and zealots started talking about "web3", to re appropriate the term (like they did "crypto", which mean cryptography for old and cybersec people).
Hence i associate web3 with the grift, and blockchain with the technology. Probably gp does the same.
I can't speak for the other commenter, but I don't think they said that "web3 is responsible for all the crypto nonsense". My impression is that they're just hinting at a relationship between the two.
The 2023 Chicago mayoral candidate, Paul Vallas, did very similar. He was found to have liked a bunch of posts and claimed it was hacked. It was clear almost immediately that he was lying about it, since it kept happening on his other accounts.
It is a bit weird the tweet went out exactly a day before the approval is supposed to happen.
Let's assume it was the SEC's fault, either by accident or otherwise, could they be charged with market manipulation? Which agency would have authority to investigate? Quite a few people were tricked into buying right before the price dropped like a rock. Shorters have made a killing.
I’ll admit it has been deeply entertaining watching the crypto community speed-run 200 years of “finding out the hard way why modern financial regulations exist” and “how to recognize a blisteringly obvious ponzi scheme” in the span of 15 years.
I say this as someone who got his first 0.05 btc for signing up for a newsletter in 2009 or 2010.
0.05? You probably misremember the amount. For reference, in 2010 the Bitcoin faucet gave away 5 BTC just for visiting a web page. A decent incentive for subscribing to a newsletter, more involved than visiting a web page, would have to have been higher than 5 BTC.
I must be misremembering the year then! It was 0.05 because I thought it was 5 then found the old hard drive last year and managed to recover it from an ancient bitcoin client. I don’t remember the details but I had to let it sync (downloading data?) for days before I could make a transaction to an exchange and sell.
What "chants" are you referring to specifically re differences in markets? AFAIK it has always been pushed as a decentralized alternative to sending money, but that has little bearing on the way the traded price changes?
When was that the chant?
They said more financial inclusiveness and self sovereignty. There are some with code is law and more cypherpunk ideals that is true. The early internet and open source movement had similar movements and these people still exist trying to improve society. Once things become mainstream the majority of focus becomes business and what products/services it can provide. The same companies in this space focused on business want clear regulation not lack of it.
Tomorrow your bank could cut you off from your own money because you protested the government[1], and what could you possibly do?
Having the freedom to truly own your own money and investments is valuable in and of itself, no matter how much crypto "devolves" towards traditional finance in other regards.
If your government wants to cut you off from your money, they'll do it for crypto just as easily as they do it for traditional banks. With the exception of direct-crypto purchases from shady internet sites, at some point your payment rails must pass through an entity that your government has some degree of authority over—you're not going to buy your groceries using Bitcoin over an onion service.
Even if crypto becomes 100% ubiquitous, the end game isn't "now the government can't control finance" the end game is "now the government will find a new way to control the new finance". Eventually, the government will intervene because people will be begging them to, because they don't actually want to live in a world where theft and fraud are irreversible and their entire financial life is tied to a set of cryptographic keys that they barely understand.
You're trying to push a technological solution to authoritarianism, and it's not going to work for the masses. Canada doesn't need crypto, Canada needs voters to hold the government accountable for its abuses.
Apart from some edge cases, Western democracies have quite solid property rights upheld also by the judicial system. But yes if you’re in Russia or China then this argument is moot. They have much less property rights. However, Bitcoin is also not a solution because there is no point in owning Bitcoin if you fell trice out of a Russian window or are sentenced to a labour camp or to the death penalty in China for "fraudulus activities“. Difficult to spend your Bitcoin in both cases.
Not only Russian or Chinese, you should open the bracket for any individual, organization or country that the western democracies will deem bad in their view. Or even have the any doubt of association with them. For example we can talk to many Muslims in the UK where no banks will grant them accounts (close account without notice) and how safe they feel [1]
Not that I am a crypto supporter, but the current western based financial system hegemony is good until you are have wrong name, religion, country... etc.
Being a trucker in Canada is a edge case. Also being a human interacting with police in the US.
Did you mean intellectual property? You draw Mickey a year ago and a FBI helicopter would soon be overhead to kill your dog and take any cash they find in your wallet.
> People seem to forget part of civil disobedience is going to jail and paying a fine.
That's not even vaguely what happened here and it's well beyond arguing in bad faith to attempt to trivialize it to such.
The goal of freezing the accounts was to make the truckers unable to buy food or pay rent to force a near immediate end. If the civil disobedience starts being evictions and starving protests are going to become a thing of the past.
Yes, like you can lose your treasure by forgetting where you buried it. Or you can lose your silver when an accidental fire melts your palace into slag. Or you can lose your wheat harvest to mold! Self-storage is the default way of holding wealth, not a new one. And it's a tradeoff that people will always choose to make as long as personal wealth exists.
Among the innumerable problems with cryptocurrency, this is not one of them.
Honestly, the first thing I'd do is hope that they forgot that I make house and car payments though them and that they forgot how much damage they could do to my professional life just by intentionally sabotaging my credit. Crypto doesn't provide any realistic protection to me from their whims should they become bad actors.
