That's a marketing line, it's not true. Nobody actually has any custody of anything in crypto. The value of the tokens is completely and totally dependent on a consensus of crypto miners doing their job within the parameters of the system, assuming you want them to maintain a price and trading volume that's favorable to the token holders. If the majority of miners suddenly go bust due to outside circumstances, or they decide to conspire together and attack the system, or conspire with some whales to perform a rug pull, or any number of other malicious actions, then it's extremely likely that your tokens aren't going to be worth anything anymore. This applies to every token, including bitcoin.
You obviously have no idea what you're talking about. Even if all miners right now colluded and tried to take bitcoin from my wallet - they couldn't. Miners can collude and try to double spend the transaction, hurting centralized exchange for example, but they can not ever take funds from a wallet. You own what's in your wallet.
Also, price doesn't depend on miners. Very often in these bear markets miners mine with huge loss. Many give up in those circumstances. If they had any impact on price we wouldn't see so many miners go out of the business.
>The value of the tokens is completely and totally dependent on a consensus of crypto miners doing their job within the parameters of the system, assuming you want them to maintain a price and trading volume that's favorable to the token holders.
Number of miners has absolutely nothing to do with trading volumes, not sure where you got that from. Miners don't maintain a price any more than a whale maintains a price.
>If the majority of miners suddenly go bust due to outside circumstances
The rest of the miners would step in and start making more money, actually.
>they decide to conspire together and attack the system, or conspire with some whales to perform a rug pull
Not much of a rug pull to sell the tokens you've legitimately acquired through mining or fiat buying. That's just selling. High volatility selling, yes, but still just selling.
>it's extremely likely that your tokens aren't going to be worth anything anymore. This applies to every token, including bitcoin.
Oh yes, Bitcoin has died thousands of times. Maybe you'll be right one day, but I doubt it.
>Miners don't maintain a price any more than a whale maintains a price.
Yes, my point is both of them have a means and incentive to manipulate the price in ways that may not be favorable to the trader.
>The rest of the miners would step in and start making more money, actually.
Yes, at the cost of removing some of the security of the system. They can only maintain security if they have immediate access to more hash power which they probably don't. In that moment because of the sudden drop in hash power, the network is vulnerable to an attack by other malicious miners coming in and taking over. Alternately, if the rest of the miners notice what's going on they could see this as increased opportunity for them to conspire and become malicious.
>Not much of a rug pull to sell the tokens you've legitimately acquired through mining or fiat buying. That's just selling. High volatility selling, yes, but still just selling.
This right here is the conversation I most dread having with crypto people. It's fraud. You can call it fraud. Manipulating the market so the price is artificially high and then dumping it off onto unsuspecting buyers is a fraud. It doesn't matter how you initially got the coins. Yes, we can group different types of selling into different categories, like ones that are fraudulent and ones that aren't.
>Oh yes, Bitcoin has died thousands of times.
The exception that proves the rule, huh? There are definitely thousands of shitcoins that have crashed and burned and won't ever recover because they were plain old ponzis. Bitcoin crashed a lot of times, not thousands, but enough to wipe lots of people out every time it happens, relative to the number of people using bitcoin at the time. It's still not clear that any of the money moving around in bitcoin is actually real money or assets. I'm certain it's a ponzi too.
>Maybe you'll be right one day, but I doubt it.
So you're saying bitcoin is too big to fail, is that right?
As others have pointed out, this is completely wrong in literally every way possible.
> Nobody actually has any custody of anything in crypto.
This is insanely wrong and it’s unreal things like this are being said in 2022.
DeFi Example: Take your self-custody bitcoin to Thorswap and exchange it for Ethereum. Pure defi. No trust needed. Total self-custody cross chain trading.
that is true, but the whole ethos of DeFi is to make the process of mining as decentralised as possible. Have many validators, separated across the globe etc. Obviously, there are still chances that all the miners conspire and kill the system, but the chances of that are decreased with increased decentralisation in the mining and validation process.
>but that kind of thing is hard to avoid in any system.
No it isn't, that's what limit orders are for. There's still the exact same counterparty risk there anyway, in the form of USDC. Circle is another big dodgy centralized provider. The major critical flaw with all this defi stuff is that it can only reliably trade cryptos for other cryptos. Once you actually try to get any of it out into real assets, the counterparty risk immediately comes back again. No crypto defi stuff can ever solve that. The idea is just bad, it's a scam from the very beginning.
It is absolutely a blockchain failure. Blockchains are intentionally designed to facilitate this. They have no possible way to stop this kind of fraud. Even if you built an elaborate set of smart contracts that could audit participants, they would still not stop anything. That activity can just be moved to another chain and avoid the audits. This kind of thing can just keep happening over and over again, as it already has for the last 12 years. Remember Mt Gox? Nothing fundamental has changed about blockchains that could ever prevent this from happening. It's viewed as a feature that everyone just loses their money sometimes. The designers of blockchains want this to happen. From speaking to them, they view any kind of fraud prevention as an affront to their definition of "economic freedom" and what it entails.
If you are the only person in the world with the private key to your coins, you are the only person who can move them. Period.
FTX is a centralized entity that custodies funds. It has nothing to do with a blockchain, which could have completely prevented this.
There are many examples of decentralized exchanges (DEXs) for which it is mathematically impossible to loan out depositor's funds without their consent, because the only person capable of signing a transaction to move the funds is the depositor themself.
> If you are the only person in the world with the private key to your coins, you are the only person who can move them. Period.
Right up to the moment you lose your laptop in a fire, forget the password to your wallet, accidentally run malware on your personal computer, etc. Or if you die and haven't gone through the complication of setting up a way for your heirs to gain control of your accounts.
Yes, you can take steps to mitigate these risks. Those steps are absolutely insane from the POV of everyday human beings.
But blaming blockchain for the failures of centralized finance, which we've seen time and time again throughout all of history, is literally intentional deception.
If a politician or lawmaker or business person blames blockchain for this, it is FRAUD. Full stop.
Well I'm not a politician or lawmaker and I have no problem blaming blockchain for this. I'm technically a "business person" because I have a job, but technically all crypto people who intend to use it to make money are also business people. The way bitcoin and all its friends are designed is intentionally done so in a way that allows centralized entities to run amok and cause havoc without any accountability until the entire thing collapses. It's blockchains that are the fraud. The designers of blockchains, including Satoshi, were aware of these problems and the risks of the system becoming unstable or getting targeted by scammers. They went forward with their designs anyway knowing the risks. Because they thought they were better than the central banks and they wanted to say they were sticking it to the man. How were they better though, when their inventions gave way to one giant fraud after another in a shockingly small amount of time? These Enron-level and WorldCom-level events are a weekly occurrence in crypto.
>Is someone paying you to say this? Did you lose a bunch of money?
No and no. Avoid asking these questions please, they're fallacious and kind of rude. I just see fraud and I call it out. I'm sick of seeing these crypto-Enrons keep happening. I hope the SEC finally cracks down and anyone still involved in crypto after any more of these tumbles goes straight to prison. The entire thing is a ponzi scheme and a fraud and the technology is useless beyond any kind of recovery. I'm dead serious. They should have cracked down on all of these crypto exchanges years ago when it became obvious they were a huge vehicle used to sell ICOs, aka illegal unregistered securities that were complete scams.
>It's an immutable public ledger. We know exactly what happened when someone commits fraud on it
No, you don't. You know almost nothing at all just from looking at one blockchain. If you see a bunch of blockchain transactions moving around, you have no idea what the transaction is actually for or whether that's a legitimate transfer or not. You don't know if a pizza was exchanged for those coins or if anything actually happened, or if the coins were actually stolen, or if some exchange was hacked, or if it was just a wash trade. It's extremely easy for people to commit fraud on blockchains this way so they just do. All you can know from this is that some tokens were transferred to some anonymous wallet address. Just from the blockchain you can never know what it's actually being spent on or who it's being sent to or if there's even any real assets anywhere in the system at all because that information only exists in the real world outside of the chain. There are places to get this information off chain and that's the only way to actually make any of this useful, it totally defeats the purpose of using that chain.
As an independent reporter the only way to figure any of this out is to take data from multiple chains, cross-reference it together, compare it to proprietary data coming from the exchanges, look at public data published by traders, and try to put it all together to paint a picture of where the real money and assets moved. You need a lot of other data sources besides that chain. And when you actually do that, you see things like how there's evidence that most bitcoin transactions are actually fake, fraudulent wash trades for the purpose of market manipulation, and nobody in bitcoin is doing anything about it because they either can't, or they're the ones profiting from it: https://www.forbes.com/sites/javierpaz/2022/08/26/more-than-...
The entire crypto market is awash with fraud. Nothing about blockchains can solve any of these problems. They're intentionally designed to create these problems. Blockchains can't prevent you from just taking that activity off chain and doing it outside of the view of everyone, and that's how you get another Alameda and FTX or Terra or Luna or 3AC or Celsius or Voyager or any of these. If you could force everyone to do all their transactions on one blockchain, then what you're saying would be true. But the technical design of blockchains intentionally makes it so you can't do that and anyone can just create another token out of thin air, or fork an existing token into a second chain, and then start trading it on some exchange and loaning it out with no regulations whatsoever. This is what the cryptobros wanted. It's a perfect recipe for fraud.
Now the only real way to force all these people to use a single blockchain and make them follow normal accounting procedures would be to pass a law making them do it. On that note I always found it funny that a certain segment of cryptobro was pushing for CBDCs. Most of them would probably cry foul if they were forced by law to use a single central bank chain, because then it wouldn't really be decentralized anymore and they couldn't get away with so much fraud.
I can see exactly what Alameda and FTX was doing on chain. I can see the exact amounts of each token they sent, where they sent it, what they swapped it for, etc. It's all publicly documented.
Well if I'm the one who's uninformed, you're not telling me anything I don't already know. Yes, I know you can see the transactions they made in that particular token on-chain. You have to get the information about who owns any of those wallet addresses from somewhere else. The chain doesn't tell you anything other than that they sent a token somewhere. Yes the other data is public but that isn't because of any feature of blockchains. The blockchain also won't tell you the actual details of the deals this guy was making or the favors he was calling in, you gotta look through his phone and emails to get that. As I said, it still doesn't paint the full picture because the real money is off-chain and can never be tracked on the chain. No, a USDT or a USDC isn't a real dollar, those movements may or may not represent actual money changing hands.
You wrote too many false sentences. Here's one: "the technology is useless beyond any kind of recovery."
The technology works. People use crypto for payments.
> Now the only real way to force all these people to use a single blockchain and make them follow normal accounting procedures would be to pass a law making them do it.
I wouldn't be surprised if someone put you up to coming here and writing all this, so you can go back and claim something like "I ran this by lots of smart people and they agree the only way is to pass a law", and then use this to back some legislation.
All these blockchain cryptocurrencies end up being traded on unregulated exchanges. These don't have same protection and requirements as banks. They are a wild west. And why do people use these exchanges so much versus blockchain? Because blockchain is highly inconvenient. I mean for starters how on earth is it user-friendly to require the entire thing on a device, requiring synchronization as well. It also requires a high quality always-on connection.
Pretty easy to download a wallet that’s stored in the Secure Enclave of your iPhone with an encrypted backup to your Apple ID account and all those problems go away.
Keys are still safe in your phone. It’s an encrypted backup. Random Apple employees can’t get to the private key.
I’m not interested in goalkeeping both sides of the convenience-security spectrum. Bury your keys in a tin can if you want, or custody at an insured exchange if that’s your preference. I think installing say Rainbow Wallet is a fine choice.
>If you are the only person in the world with the private key to your coins, you are the only person who can move them. Period.
This is completely and utterly irrelevant and has not stopped anyone from performing massive fraud. Just look at the long history of crypto scams. They still happened constantly despite blockchains having that feature. It's just impossible for a blockchain to prevent these frauds. It doesn't matter if you still have all your coins if the value of that coin drops to zero after it's revealed the whole market for that coin is fraudulent, which is exactly what happened this week! And multiple times earlier this year, and multiple times before that! It doesn't matter if it's stored on a DEX either, when you're still stuck with a worthless coin that no one will trade you for! How many shitcoins need to collapse before this is understood? Blockchains do not and will never solve this problem because they create the problem, by design, by allowing anyone to manipulate and dump tokens anywhere they want with no regard for what's fraudulent and what isn't. On a DEX you can't even know if the person on the other end is a real person or not without going outside the chain. I can't believe I'm still talking about this after the long, long string of fraud that's happened over the last 12 years. FTX is not the problem, they are the symptom. The problem is blockchains. They're intentionally built to enable fraud. They have no other purpose, and they aren't even particularly good at that because they stop working when everyone notices the fraud.
I should also mention, your statement isn't even correct! There's a very easy way to get someone else to move their coins for you: threaten them. That's the entire principle that ransomware is built on. It's real easy for criminals and the police and anyone else using the threat of force to get people to give up their coins, blockchains don't prevent that and it's impossible for them to do so because they can't affect anything that happens in the real world outside the chain. I really can't understate this. Blockchains are a fraud. Every claimed authority or security provided by a blockchain is trivially defeated by just routing around it or by gaming the market, which is ridiculously easy for anyone with some cash to throw around because there are no real rules or safeguards. They're probably the worst "invention" that's come out of the tech sector in the last 15 years. I really hope this crash is the end for crypto.
If I'm trying to arrange a trade on the exchange so I can get a pizza for my dogecoins, because the pizza guy says he only wants BCH and not dogecoins, and I would rather not pay double transaction fees just to buy a pizza, how do I know the other person is a real pizza chef and not a bot trying to scam me?
Your arguments are very misguided, long, rambly, and often digresses. It's hard to decipher your points and it is very exhausting to read. Would love to have discourse, but your points need to be shorter, concise, and clear.
I agree with that, but that's the reason you can't truly store value forever irreversibly. If you can't reverse transactions, you can just abandon the whole currency and start over, and eventually they'll do that.
Irreversible permanent value storage seems like a dubious aim. Gold seems like a good storage of value now but what if in the future there were an explosion in gold supply because humanity developed the capability to mine the asteroids? Same with crypto because people might just stop mining and move on to other “disrupters”. Ultimately people need to understand that value of something itself is a social decision and not inherent. In my opinion the entire crypto space has been propelled in the wrong direction by treating these tokens as assets which presumably “store value” rather than developing them into fast moving easily transactable currencies, cross chain swapping etc. This would have led to freer taxless societies and communes. Instead the greed of “number go up” took over and now people will reap what they sowed.
> That activity can just be moved to another chain and avoid the audits.
> Remember Mt Gox? [...] It's viewed as a feature that everyone just loses their money sometimes [...] From speaking to them, they view any kind of fraud prevention as an affront to their definition of "economic freedom"
I found these observations to be helpful reminders how things are (and used to be!). A blockchain isn't designed to indemnify you if you hop on/off the blockchain.
It's strange to attribute failure to the blockchain in this case. There was no visibility into how much leverage was taken on by Alameda because they aren't borrowing through DeFi means. This a traditional finance problem where a hedge fund takes on too much leverage and no one finds out until they explode.
No blockchain can ever guarantee there's any visibility or accountability. Defi means are only useful to trade cryptos for other cryptos, and you only have visibility if no one launders the money through crypto mixers. Once you want to cash out and trade your cryptos for any real assets, like buying a pizza, you instantly lose visibility again because all that has to happen off chain. Just because something is a tradfi problem doesn't mean it also can't be a defi problem. In this case, and in a lot of other cases, it's both. Blockchains cannot solve this problem in any meaningful way because you can never force everything to go through that chain. Fraudsters will just move it off the chain and lie about it, and that instantly puts you back into a spot where blockchains aren't doing anything for you.
I argue this is what they wanted out of blockchains. I remember all the rumblings in the days of Silk Road and Mt Gox. The enthusiasts that are responsible for propagating this system into today wanted it to be a wild west where anything goes. They said all the same things back then. I heard people saying it was good that Mt Gox got hacked because it meant all the scammers got what they deserved and they learned their lesson. Well, they didn't! It continued to be a wild west and more scammers just showed up. They'll keep scamming and they won't stop as long as they can make money from it. I don't know why crypto people are so reluctant to acknowledge this. Scammers seek out anywhere they can latch onto and they don't leave until forcibly removed. If a malicious person finds a risk-free way to get free money from unsuspecting victims, with no downsides, why would they ever want to stop?
"No blockchain can ever guarantee there's any visibility or accountability."
Ever? Any? Clearly this sentence is false. It takes only one counterexample to prove it.
Here's the counterexample. If someday all the world's money are on a single blockchain and there are no banks, the blockchain guarantees visibility and possibly accountability.
Do you see the meaning of ever now?
Please don't be gratuitously negative. It's to your benefit to be precise. You sell yourself short when you cut off possibilities.
>Here's the counterexample. If someday all the world's money are on a single blockchain and there are no banks, the blockchain guarantees visibility and possibly accountability.
Fine. Let's agree to two premises:
1. all the world's money are on a single blockchain
2. there are no banks
Your conclusion, doesn't necessarily follow!
The problem is I can still contract rights to the blockchain outside of the blockchain, e.g. where on the blockchain did it track FTX's cross collateralization? That's not visible unless I express my right somewhere in the public record.
This scenario (and others) underly the broad point made by the parent.
As far your ad hominem on negativity, I have no idea what you're referring to.
>Just because some stuff in crypto doesn't have regulations doesn't mean it is a free-for-all.
It pretty much does. The free-for-all disregarding of laws (including laws against fraud) is the stated purpose of crypto. They've been pitching this as Fight Club For Finance since the very beginning. The exchanges with a legitimate appearance are just fronts to get you to the back room with all the unregulated tokens offering insane interest rates. If you didn't come for a scam-or-be-scammed fight to the death, there isn't any reason to use crypto. The crypto bros just missed the part where Fight Club falls apart if you tell everyone about it. Or maybe they got too excited and forgot about that rule.
Are you actually comparing a billionaire CEO who's very obviously trying to use Twitter to pump and dump his investment, to a writer selling a book at a normal price for books? I'm not selling any books, and I'll tell you that all of crypto is a giant fraud. The technology is fundamentally useless and the economics are just ponzi scams on top of ponzi scams. There's no reason to try to "both sides" this. All crypto is a negative sum game by design, where the HODLers are expected to absorb all losses while the miners take a cut in fees. It's mathematically impossible for it to be a good investment. There's zero possibilities there. None. This isn't a new thing I'm saying either. We already tried the "print your own money" idea during the free banking era in the 1800s, we've known for that long it's a terrible idea that doesn't work.
> Are you actually comparing a billionaire CEO who's very obviously trying to use Twitter to pump and dump his investment, to a writer selling a book at a normal price for books?
There is no comparison. Both are totally extreme in their rhetoric and using that as engagement farming for their grift. Either publicly promoting a cryptocurrency or rushing a badly written book without disclosing a conflict of interest after the author's failed blockchain company shutdown which he has been hiding from everyone since the company was killed by blockchains like Ethereum, and Cardano.
> There's no reason to try to "both sides" this.
There is no point in you trying to be absolutist on any extreme side. Either way, both sides will compromise on their delusional ideas; both crypto maxis and skeptics. Only some blockchains are here to stay and the others won't be around.
> There's zero possibilities there. None. This isn't a new thing I'm saying either. We already tried the "print your own money" idea during the free banking era in the 1800s, we've known for that long it's a terrible idea that doesn't work.
The whole of crypto would already have been 100% and totally banned, everywhere a long time ago and the regulators already know that it is unrealistic and extremely difficult to ban and stop all of it. China has tried it, yet crypto is still there despite the 'ban'.
Crypto isn't going anywhere and you know it but refuse to admit it. Not all of them will survive and even the author of that book once admitted that.
The goal of ENS isn't to add new bells and whistles; it's to do the same things DNS does, just without the censorship (see Sci-Hub) or rent-seeking.
I don't see how Virgil's story implies some kind of reliance on centralized services? Yes, if a domain owner is unavailable, it will eventually expire; that applies to ENS and DNS equally.
