While racism is definitely a thing today, it seem to be dying. Slowly, but the trend is certain: modern society is way less racist than it was, say, a century ago (or worse, a few centuries ago). People stop caring about ethnic origins. The care about cultures and nationalities those days (notice how even the meaning of "racism" had shifted to account for this), and those are rapidly becoming less and less correlated with genetics.
While people won't stop being xenophobic (unless, idk, some miracle or catastrophe happens), in the modern world, when it comes to identity, genes are rapidly losing battle to memes.
* People rarely deal with large amounts physical cash. They deal with abstractions built upon cash (checks, credit cards, ACH, other electronic transfers).
* I think it's the same for banks. I think banks also mainly operate on abstractions built upon cash.
* An attacker who wants to steal physical cash needs to be physically present. That means there's a more limited set of people who could attempt the attack. With hacking, people across the entire world can attempt the attack. With physical attacks, you're at risk of being physically apprehended and caught through physical investigations. With hacking you can be behind proxies and avoid getting caught. Additional, with hacking you can do the hack from a jurisdiction that won't care, so even if the victim and the victim's government know you did it, you won't face any consequences. You might even be on your own government's payroll.
What OP is referring to is that you don't need to trust people if the dex is on-chain and verifiable. FTX was a non-transparent and insolvent centralized exchange which wouldn't be possible if it was on-chain because anyone can see the funds that are available and the protocol would not allow leverage backed by non-existing collateral.
> Is there an undo button to reverse the transaction?
No there isn't. This is a double edge sword.
> All financial systems involve humans
To a degree, but centralized exchanges have more knobs controlled by humans while an on-chain dex and just be deployed once and require no human intervention. A dex can be audited fully on-chain and anyone can see if the contract has any master holder keys. The FTX fiasco is because they own all your crypto because they have the master keys. The future of finance is people being in charge of their own money and where no unexpected entity can arbitrarily inflate the supply, which is only possible with crypto.
What foogazi was perhaps suggesting is that no financial system can work if it doesn't account for fundamental human behavior - we make mistakes and we are greedy if not held accountable "off chain".
The blockchain is perfect when everyone acts in good faith and makes no mistakes.
In the real world, that's not the case. Unfortunately, you need centralized institutions to regulate financial transactions, control the supply of money and enforce laws when they're broken, reverse mistakes when they happen.
> The future of finance is people being in charge of their own money and where no unexpected entity can arbitrarily inflate the supply, which is only possible with crypto.
This is not the future, and it'll almost certainly never happen with crypto.
Then what is the future? Certainly not the government going haywire with the printer. It’s impossible to trustlessly verify the exact number of US dollars in circulation, but it’s trivial to do with cryptocurrencies.
Removing the possibility for human intervention doesn't make things more resilient quite the contrary. Removing human control of public policies, such as those involving the management of public resources, is downright anti-democratic and dumb. If you people intend to build a monetary system, you need to educate yourselves about monetary systems. The money supply must be managed (i.e. inflated and deflated in your unconventional parlance) in order to keep prices stable. An currency in which prices are not stable will never be used as currency by businesses because it would put them in danger of going out business due to price swings. Restricting the issuance of currency doesn't make the supply of such currency fixed. Look up how money is created by the banking system. Only a small part of the money supply is money created by central banks.
The money supply managed by an on-chain protocol where it’s fully open, trustless, and predictable is 100% times better then a small group of people at the treasury deciding to print money and inflate peoples savings always.
For something that millions of people across the world rely on, with million+ transactions daily, it's definitely worth celebrating. It's using a magnitude less energy now than YouTube or Netflix [1] If YouTube had a similar decrease in energy, Hacker News would be all over it.
> For something that millions of people across the world rely on
People keep claiming that millions of people rely on it is such a bullshit claim
> with million+ transactions daily
Which is a paltry 11 transactions per second. I think a Raspberry Pi is now capable of the same amazing feat.
> It's using a magnitude less energy now than YouTube or Netflix
And doing orders of magnitudes less while consuming insane amounts of energy.
Had Ethereum tried to move around as much video as Youtube and Netflix are doing, heat death of the universe would happen the next day after the attempt.
Can nodes in Etherium? Or is there a central governing body there which has the power to revert legitimate transactions, just like in traditional systems?
But hey, at least it's an unregulated, informal, ad-hoc process in Etherium with no justice system or oversight to enforce the rights of the little guy.
The DAO hard fork was an exceptional event that occurred in 2015, under very unique circumstances inherent to the world's first smart contract platform experiencing the world's first major smart contract hack, and has not been repeated since.
Ethereum at this point - with seven years of autonomous operation and no repeats of DAO-like hard forks - has proven to be an immutable and credibly neutral settlement layer.
You're pretending that tech is more important than the uses of that tech or the outcomes. Which is doubly ironic because the comment above compared Ethereum to Youtube and Netflix.
The 99.999999999% of use cases for Ethereum (or for Blockchains in general) can be easily handled if not by a single Raspberry Pi, but at least by a modern laptop. Because those use cases are currency speculation, buying useless shit, and asset hoarding.
The remaining arguably useful usecases are an exchange of IOUs.
You underestimate the utility of a global financial system which can be participated in by anyone.
This makes many tools and processes (leveraged financial instruments and automated market makers) available without an intermediate third party that most humans would never know existed, let alone how to use.
They are still in their infancy, the investment in knowledge that is required to use them well remains quite substantial. How many years before a regular person can ditch the bank for their own personal hedge DAO?
I'm afraid you are the one who must be kidding, if you think that internet TV is more important than leveling the financial playing field.
> You underestimate the utility of a global financial system which can be participated in by anyone.
Ah yes. By anyone. Especially those who got in early before the prices skyrocketed and can now enjoy the global financial system of... currency manipulation and hoarding.
> I'm afraid you are the one who must be kidding, if you think that internet TV is more important than leveling the financial playing field.
You must be kidding when you call scams, currency manipulation, hoarding and zero customer protections a "level playing field for a global financial system".
> They are still in their infancy, the investment in knowledge that is required to use them well remains quite substantial.
The only investment in knowledge there was (and there was very little of that) is discovering why existing systems are the way they are and keeping busy reinventing them.
> discovering why existing systems are the way they are and keeping busy reinventing them
You may have had access to those existing systems (the global financial market) before Ethereum, but many of us did not. Being able to take a risky asset, and hedge it against itself, is not a strategy that I was aware of two years ago.
I was a 12 year old investor and E-trade told Grandma and Auntie that they would have to sell their Red-Hat stock, back in 2003 or 4, because it had gone down so much in value that it was no longer worth the monthly trade commission to maintain the position open. We bought some stock after IPO, and had bad timing by a few months. If they had known then what we know now, well...
I'd not be here wasting my time talking about re-inventing the global financial system on the internet, believe you me. That was a good investment, bad system and bad timing.
Do you have any idea how exploitative the global financial system is for people who are not "in the know"? It's well over time we reinvent it all. This is awful.
> You may have had access to those existing systems (the global financial market) before Ethereum, but many of us did not.
Many you... who?
> Being able to take a risky asset, and hedge it against itself, is not a strategy that I was aware of two years ago.
That's not "leveling the playing field". It's either "financial education" (because it's something you could always do in "traditional finance"), or "let the suckers come, the more the better" (most of crypto).
> I'd not be here wasting my time talking about re-inventing the global financial system on the internet, believe you me.
Oh, I do believe you. Crypto maximalists never talk about it. They only speak vague trivialities and then disappear.
> Do you have any idea how exploitative the global financial system is for people who are not "in the know"?
Ah yes. Unlike the cryptoscams.
> It's well over time we reinvent it all. This is awful.
> That's not "leveling the playing field". It's either "financial education" (because it's something you could always do in "traditional finance")
OK. Now we are really splitting hairs, because "education" actually doesn't count as "leveling the playing field." I'm totally done here, you just played yourself.
You go ahead and educate yourself in the traditional exploitative financial system, and I'll continue my education here in the exploitative crypto-financial system. And we shall never talk again. That would be a positive outcome, right?
We're not. I'v directly responding to what you write, and not to hat you think you write.
You started with "leveling the playing field" and continued with "Being able to take a risky asset, and hedge it against itself, is not a strategy that I was aware of two years ago".
> You go ahead and educate yourself in the traditional exploitative financial system
Ah yes, you continue to use the words you don't fully understand, but since they are emotionally charged, this makes them the right arguments in your mind.
> And we shall never talk again.
As I already said, "Crypto maximalists ... only speak vague trivialities and then disappear."
If you antagonize someone in a discussion, they're going to disappear. I don't need a degree in crypto-finance to tell you that. I'm not here for any of this.
If you want to engage me in a proper discussion, you can look me up. I've been on the internet using this name since I was 12 years old (and yes educating people, and also getting educated myself.) I'm not going anywhere.
Why don't you explain more about how easily accessible those traditional financial instruments are for normies? I'm interested in that information, can you provide links?
You haven't disappeared as you promised, you keep replying. Please keep your promises when you make good ones with positive outcomes like disappearing. It makes you seem insincere when you keep promising to disappear, but don't. There's a huge difference between disappearing because somebody actually antagonized you, and disappearing because you couldn't prove your point and decided to act antagonized because people wouldn't believe your wild claims without proof.
I haven't made any claims. I said I learned something, and your buddy disappeared without explaining how to do the same thing I said I learned how to do as he said was "something you could always do," while shouting insults at me on his way like I'm somehow the one responsible for the Crypto-calypse. I'm not, and you people need to get over yourselves.
I did try to engage in the discussion. "I'd not be here wasting my time talking", "You go ahead and educate yourself", "we shall never talk again." are hardly a proper response.
> Why don't you explain more about how easily accessible those traditional financial instruments are for normies?
Define "normies" first. Or better still, drop this condescending pejorative.
> I'm interested in that information, can you provide links?
I have no links, as it's a service often provided directly by your bank. Right now I have some money invested in risky assets that in the past two months sank 10% due to the way the world is right now.
There are multiple lists of "best books about investment", so you could start there. You know why? The absolute vast majority of "innovation" and "knowledge" in crypto space falls roughly into:
- scams
- currency speculation which is indistinguishable from Forex trading except that it's running on "smart contracts". Forex trading was huge in some countries (Moldova and Turkey among those I know about) in early-to-mid 2000s. I had friends at university heavily invested in it. It probably still is quite popular (and it's very popular in "defi" which is rarely anything but currency speculation and unsecured loans).
- asset hoarding + speculation. "Buy cheap, hype, hope for the price to go up, sell". Indistinguishable from anything traditional (from stocks to bonds to Ponzi schemes): you buy an asset, wait for the price to go up, sell.
What crypto is busy discovering is why "traditional finance" has all these things in place: KYOC, fraud protection and prevention, reversibility of transactions, deposit insurance, functional courts and laws etc. And is just as busy re-inventing all those, poorly.
Go back and read it. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt now, but you did not. You threw barbs and used the word "scam" as often as you could, and told me I'd be likely disappearing in a few minutes. Then someone showed up to comment on how disappointed they are I didn't really disappear like I promised. Can't win for losing. This is exactly like every crypto discussion on the internet today, it's very frustrating. I hope you know how difficult it is for me to be this patient. (It actually reminds me a whole lot of doing Ruby evangelism in almost the same circles...)
> how easily accessible those traditional financial instruments are
> I have some money invested in risky assets that in the past two months sank 10% due to the way the world is right now
I'm talking about deliverable perpetual futures. If you had seen this coming, you could have done some short-selling to hedge your risks. Price goes up, you deliver and sell for a profit. Price goes down, you still have your asset and can cash out for a profit. Is that a service offered by your bank? Not mine...
But maybe your bank offers it ...maybe only to qualified/accredited investors? How do I get that?
Now perhaps you see what I am getting at? It's not accessible, no matter how many books you read. Go out and get a million dollars today, through some act of God, and you still won't be a qualified investor next week or next year. Or you can wait for SEC approval, and then you can go get them through your broker I guess.
Some people read books, others are not well-served by book learning. I looked for a book that could explain it to me, but ultimately I only learned by getting hosed using these instruments flatly incorrectly until I figured out what I was doing wrong, by using them, and observing the outcomes, then also asking for help. Lovely people answering questions to help others learn. (It was the friends we made along the way!)
Is there some reason the system is the way it is? Yes, I'm sure there is. Does it protect people how it was really intended, or does it actually mean it just remains inaccessible to most people? This is how crypto levels the playing field.
Does that mean you cannot cut yourself when working with the sharp object? No, it definitely is not safe to go alone here. There are a million and one ways to lose all your money, plus a million new ones that weren't possible before. And soon a new technology will come, and everyone who understands the current landscape will know immediately what to do with it, (and everyone who has had their head in the sand will wait for the SEC for guidance, and eventually begrudgingly accept the improvement, maybe, once all the life has been sucked out of it by bureaucrats.)
> I'm talking about deliverable perpetual futures.
It's a nonsensical term (like many other nonsensical terms) that only exists in the crypto space. And only works in the highly volatile market like crypto. This is short-to-medium term currency speculation, and I'm sure there are plenty of services that allow you to do that in "traditional finance". As I'm not interested in currency speculation, I couldn't tell you what they are.
> Now perhaps you see what I am getting at? It's not accessible
You've selected a single service revolving around currency speculation and you call "traditional finance" inaccessible because of that. That... is not what accessibility to financial services means. Or what "levelling the playing field" is.
> Is there some reason the system is the way it is? Yes, I'm sure there is.
You're sure, but at the same time you are completely uninterested to learn why it is that way, and you dismiss anyone telling you why it is the way it is because, let me quote, "it's an awful exploitative global financial system".
> There are a million and one ways to lose all your money, plus a million new ones that weren't possible before.
Indeed. And that makes this "accessible and a level playing field" unlike traditional finance which offers fraud protection, deposit insurance, etc. etc.
> And soon a new technology will come, and everyone who understands the current landscape will know immediately what to do with it
So, the "accessible system" will be accessible to those who understand current landscape, who have already lost money a million ways and cut themselves on sharp corners.
That is neither accessible nor a level playing field.
If you claim that it is "global financial system which can be participated in by anyone", where are the protections for those who "did not have access to existing systems" (I keep quoting you).
I'm a programmer, I earn quite a lot. And I still cannot afford to just go ahead and "lose my money in a million ways" and "cut myself when working with a sharp object". Where's your accessibility, huh?
> and everyone who has had their head in the sand will wait for the SEC for guidance
Ah yes. Instead we can just not wait and lose the money a million and one ways for the sake of.... something.
There's a reason for SEC guidances, but, again, you're entirely unwilling to learn why they exist. Perhaps, you will learn it the hard way.
I literally just came here today to tell everyone that I learned something, and you ruined it. You raised the bar, it's no longer enough that I learned something, I have to make it accessible for everyone else too, or I am a bad person. Thanks.
I absolutely love overdraft fees. I've never used a bank that didn't have some ridiculous scheme of their own which you had to internalize or pay a monthly fee. Banks offer some guarantees, but they're not really helping most people.
Neither is Ethereum, maybe you'll say, but I didn't come here to argue about that. This is a day to celebrate because the #1 top complaint of all crypto detractors has been addressed by Crypto's second largest collective. Now that is finished we can move onto #2 top complaint, whatever that will be.
I certainly do not imagine, foresee, or desire to live in a world in which people must protect their private keys or forfeit their house to a hacker. But can you really say we aren't headed there now? Is the alternative better, (that you have to trust the bank's security? Are you in the US? Oh god, I have some bad news...)
Acting like scams began in 2008 when Bitcoin was first invented is the ultimate scam. I grew up in NY, we've all been getting scammed our entire lives, by the government too.
> I still cannot find any legitimate use cases for blockchain
Blockchains solve the double-spend problem. Allows for scarcity in the digital realm. Ethereum is a platform for decentralized finance, anyone can borderlessly lend and borrow in seconds. Endless possibilities.
> anyone can borderlessly lend and borrow in seconds.
You can only do _secured_ lending and borrowing, and only where the security is, itself, a highly liquid digital token.
Person A lending USDC to person B, taking ETH for security, isn't doing much for the world at large except allowing B to defer his capital gains tax.
Unsecured lending, backed only by the faith or expectations we have around future cash flows, is how the world creates opportunity for true investment and growth... and impossible in a trustless and anonymous system like crypto.
I never use stable coins for payment, and I don't know anybody who does despite being in crypto since btc was at $8. I do pay stuff in BTc and get paid in BTC once in a while and see people in my bubble do the same. We use stable coins to limit taxe exposure, mainly.
It's true eth has never been a mean of exchange for any of us and more a platform for smart contract (my friends at kryll.io use it for that).
The majority who trade crypto use stablecoins for payment all the time. It's the default on most exchanges, and for a lot of the biggest pairs on DEXs.
If you are talking about payments of non-crypto products, I was exploring the hiring for small jobs subs on reddit yesterday and the two main accepted means of payment I saw seemed to be PayPal and stablecoins.
Why do you use a pseudonym on here instead of your real name? Oh right because you care about privacy. Same reason tornado cash exists. Playing the ML card is like saying Tim Berners-Lee invented the internet to facilitate digital crime.
This is an interesting experiment that I'm excited about. The fact that a financial flash mob is possible is incredible. Anybody from anywhere can participate and have voting power by joining the DAO. Regardless of the outcome, it's good to see the convergence of DAOs into meatspace.
except of course there is literally zero voting power from participating in this project because the "power" bit is always assigned by a source of authority and nothing about this project tells you how can this power be realized or enforced.
Well, I think they've been saying that the tokens guarantee voting power to advise the LLC which actually owns the physical document, not to actually own the document, because, as someone else mentioned, that may run afoul of US securities laws.
I say all this being excited about iterating on the future of governance, I also worry that such quick financial flash mobs could really screw people really fast.
If something is hard in theory, it's 10x harder in implementation. Complex systems have a lot of 'unknown unknowns' that can't be forecasted. Ethereum is $300B+ live network so every small change takes time to research, test, and implement. Migrating from PoW to PoS is like swapping out the engine of an airplane in mid-air.
If you ask the cryptocurrency subreddit, the best thing to do with any money you have[1] is to buy ETH at any price and stake it (i.e. lock it in and receive interest until ETH 2.0 is released). I find that absolutely mindblowing given all the complexity you're pointing out + the fact that there is no date and no clear explanation of what happens to the funds in the event of failure. And on top of this the fact that most people are doing the staking through exchanges because they don't have the required 32 ETH to do it themselves, it looks like a giant disaster waiting to happen.
And somehow Ethereum is one of the most positively viewed cryptocurrencies out there. I don't get it.
ETH2 is going to happen sooner or later… The beacon chain already works in production so it seems inevitable the devs will merge mainnet onto it. Not completely convinced about their 2021/2022 timeframe.
All the validator deposits are public data; how would they be destroyed? The funds will have to be unlocked at some point, people will demand it.
