I've said it before, and I'll say it again. Blockchain and decentralization does not produce trust and integrity. In this article the author gives a statistic: that fewer than 1/3 of Americans trust the financial system. And yet 95% of American households have bank accounts, thereby relying on it and giving it trust their trust through their actions. The key advantage of the current financial system is that there is somebody to keep accountable: the government and banks can be pressured and sued if they renege on their promises, and insurance/regulation can minimize loss.
For a cryptocurrency, if a smart contract has a bug, a hacker steals your crypto, you forget your wallet key, or an ICO goes bust you have zero recourse. Millions can be lost. Therefore, zero trust. By not placing trust in any one actor or system of recourse, you lose all hopes of accountability and are forced to view every person you transact with suspiciously. It's a shitshow that has generated the very thing it hoped to avoid: centralization into exchanges and government regulation. Read more about crypto's issues here:
decentralized financial protocols are making more bitcoin available outside of centralized exchanges than ever before. Ren for instance is a major custodial backing protocol that wraps bitcoin for trade through decentralized smart contracts representing market makers, lending protocols, derivatives, options, and other products. and people can buy insurance to protect their staked holdings against smart contract attacks; these policies are both fiat- and crypto-backed insurance policies, on- and off-chain.
And who's to say crypto doesn't have 100 points of failure or insider founders that built the system before it went public? Just remember the hacking, scammy exchanges, founders selling off failing coins and the early whales who mined tons of BTC before it became big and use it to manipulate the price. The difference is that fiat currencies are accountable, and thereby more trustworthy than crypto which has no accountability and nowhere to go to if you want to recover your losses.
I touch on a lot of issues you mentioned in the last third of the article. I agree that decentralization removes accountability, protections, and the associated trust.
Moreover, with crypto, we are trusting the developers of the underlying software rather than government institutions for fiat. I would argue there isn't a compelling reason developers should be seen as more trustworthy.
To be honest, I went into researching for this article with a bias against cryptocurrency, but ended with a belief that there is possibly an opportunity for fiat + crypto to form a more trustworthy system where transactions + the creation of new currency was logged where everyone can see. However, to actually realize this would require a lot of changes in current crypto architecture (particularly around the consensus algorithm and its current computation cost).
bitcoin is almost to $50,000. Clearly lots of people have trust in bitcoin, I certainly dont to be clear.
Bitcoin shouldnt be compared to fiat currency but rather metals like silver and gold. It's an investment strategy if you expect the traditional investments to crash and burn.
How can the stock market be doing well when everyone is locked down or social distancing and not consuming. It's mandatory low consumer confidence.
So our government is hiding financial numbers. We do know our debt situation is now worse than Greece at it's worse. We have internment camps and our 2 week lockdown is effectively going on 1 year now. My city has effectively gone into lockdown and never reversed course in any appreciable way. We are all in our own internment camps.
At this point it doesn’t matter if the average person trusts bitcoin. It matters if the billionaires, banks, and clearing houses trust bitcoin. I think the compromise will be that there will be a wealth tax on bitcoin. Government taxes property, income. It taxes cash with inflation. And it taxes gold and silver with pumps and dumps.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 36.5 ms ] threadFor a cryptocurrency, if a smart contract has a bug, a hacker steals your crypto, you forget your wallet key, or an ICO goes bust you have zero recourse. Millions can be lost. Therefore, zero trust. By not placing trust in any one actor or system of recourse, you lose all hopes of accountability and are forced to view every person you transact with suspiciously. It's a shitshow that has generated the very thing it hoped to avoid: centralization into exchanges and government regulation. Read more about crypto's issues here:
https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/decentralized-and-trustle...
Moreover, with crypto, we are trusting the developers of the underlying software rather than government institutions for fiat. I would argue there isn't a compelling reason developers should be seen as more trustworthy.
To be honest, I went into researching for this article with a bias against cryptocurrency, but ended with a belief that there is possibly an opportunity for fiat + crypto to form a more trustworthy system where transactions + the creation of new currency was logged where everyone can see. However, to actually realize this would require a lot of changes in current crypto architecture (particularly around the consensus algorithm and its current computation cost).
Bitcoin shouldnt be compared to fiat currency but rather metals like silver and gold. It's an investment strategy if you expect the traditional investments to crash and burn.
How can the stock market be doing well when everyone is locked down or social distancing and not consuming. It's mandatory low consumer confidence.
We do know for a fact we have another global recession and high unemployment. My country's state news only a few months ago was saying that covid-19 internment camps are disinformation: https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/covid-19-internment-camps-d...
But then was forced to reveal the truth about the one in calgary but we know there are many others: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/calgary-hotel-quarant...
My country has stopped revealing how much money they are spending: https://tradingeconomics.com/canada/money-supply-m0
https://tradingeconomics.com/canada/central-bank-balance-she...
Our private debt to gdp is insanity: https://tradingeconomics.com/canada/private-debt-to-gdp
So our government is hiding financial numbers. We do know our debt situation is now worse than Greece at it's worse. We have internment camps and our 2 week lockdown is effectively going on 1 year now. My city has effectively gone into lockdown and never reversed course in any appreciable way. We are all in our own internment camps.
No wonder bitcoin is sky high.